● 07.24.18

● Links 24/7/2018: Slax 9.5, ReactOS 0.4.9, and ‘Fake’ LibreOffice

Posted in News Roundup at 2:07 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Ah, so many file formats—especially audio and video ones—can make for fun times if you get a file with an extension you don’t recognize, if your media player doesn’t play a file in that format, or if you want to use an open format.

• So, what can a Linux user do? Turn to one of the many open source media conversion tools for the Linux desktop, of course. Let’s take a look at four of them.

• Ever since Linux has taken a huge leap in the computing field, questions have arisen as to which is the better option for our computers. Is it Windows or Linux? Though this is a never-ending debate and there are a ton of users on both sides of the scale here, we try to make it a little easier for you to differentiate between the two.

• Here, we try to pull out a few of the features of both the Operating Systems to figure out the better of the two masterpieces:

• There is a computer in the home, but it’s a laptop assigned to Tanya from the hospital and the kids are not allowed access. There was a home computer for a while, one that was given to them, but during a Windows 8 update, it blue screened and they were never able to get it to work again. A neighbor takes the girls to the library to use the computers there but there is often a line and only 1 hour’s use per individual. The neighbor that shuttles the girls to and from the library contacted me to see if Reglue could help.

• It’s nothing fancy. A dual core i5 HP with 8 gigs of RAM and a 23 inch Asus monitor. It was 9:30 on the evening of the 4th and the family gathered around for me to introduce them to their new computer. We could hear the local city fireworks show begin with a salvo of booms and fizzle pops. As I opened the menu, Tanya explained that the computer they had was not supposed to do any updates, and that was the update that ruined their computer. The lady that gave them the machine told her that she had to do those updates herself and that it was safer that way. Tanya could not understand why the computer chose the middle of the night to update itself on it’s own and then kill itself.

• This class explains the program’s history, where it is right now, and how to download and install. Register online or in the Restore.

• For those who have heard of Linux, they tend to see it as something that needs a great deal of know how. However, in reality Linux is now more polished and user friendly. This class will explain Linux’s history, where it is right now, and how you can download and install it yourself. Register online or in the ReStore at the Customer Service Desk.

Kernel Space

• Linux users can now evaluate the sixth weekly test release of the Linux 4.18 kernel, titled Linux 4.18-rc6. This release brings a lot of networking fixes and resolves some other issues with previous releases, as the team focuses on bringing us closer to a stable kernel release.

• Most of the changes in Linux 4.18-rc6 revolve around networking fixes, but also driver and architecture updates, and a handful of other improvements. This includes fixes to GPU drivers, SCSI, NVMA, PCI, PinCTRL, arch updates to Arc, x86, NDS32, PowerPC, and also miscellaneous fixes for header files, VM and FS noise.

• The changelog is pretty massive with a lot of commits from various testers and developers, so read through the changelog on the kernel mailing list if you want a complete overview of what has been updated.

• In terms of other features: it has a single USB port on the back, a few function key shortcuts like volume, play, pause and so on, anti-ghosting and naturally you can customize how the lights work really easily on Linux thanks to the open source ckb-next [GitHub] driver and UI.

• Right now if using the Cougar 500k gaming keyboard on Linux, when pressing any of the special function keys the keyboard will stop responding. With Linux 4.19 that will be fixed thanks to a new “HID_COUGAR” driver.

• A Cougar gaming keyboard end-user has written the few hundred lines of code implementing this custom Cougar HID driver that initially supports the 500K gaming keyboard. This driver implements the custom vendor interface for the keyboard with it not being fully complaint against the HID standard.

• RDMA (remote direct memory access) is a well-established technology that is used in environments requiring both maximum throughputs and minimum latencies. For a long time, this technology was used primary in high-performance computing, high frequency trading, and supercomputing. For example, the three most powerful computers are based on Linux and RDMA (in the guise of Infiniband).

• The real problem was that someone used one flavor in one part of their RCU algorithm, and another flavor in another part. This has roughly the same effect on your kernel’s health and well-being as does acquiring the wrong lock. And, as luck would have it, the resulting bug proved to be exploitable. To his credit, Linus Torvalds noted that having multiple RCU flavors was a root cause, and so he asked that I do something to prevent future similar security-exploitable confusion. After some discussion, it was decided that I try to merge the three flavors of RCU into “one flavor to rule them all”.

• The open-source upbringing of Intel’s Tremont micro-architecture is continuing with some new Linux kernel patches outed today.

• Tremont is the successor to Intel’s Goldmont / Goldmont Plus micro-architecture utilized in the Geminilake platform with the Atom / Celeron / Pentium Silver processors. Details are still light on these ultra low-voltage Intel Tremont processors, but at least the open-source/Linux support is getting squared away in time for their launch.

Graphics Stack

• If there is one part of the Radeon/AMDGPU open-source graphics driver stack that feels like it’s been somewhat neglected over time has been the HDMI/DP audio support. Fortunately, another improvement is on the way for bettering it.

• The AMDGPU audio issues have ranged from having to wait a long time on some GPUs for having HDMI/DP audio support that works due to being held up by the AMDGPU Display Code (DC / formerly DAL) to be merged into the kernel, various audio formats not being supported, and bugs seeming more prevalent than other areas of the driver stack. Fortunately, SUSE’s Takashi Iwai who is also the maintainer of the sound subsystem in the mainline kernel has volleyed a set of new Radeon/AMDGPU DRM patches today.

• Vulkan 1.1.81 is now available as the latest minor update for this graphics/compute API.

• Vulkan 1.1.81 doesn’t change much but mostly boils down to small documentation clarifications and corrections. There are a few fixes in the specification and some minor adjustments but nothing really notable nor very different from recent revisions.

• The latest company joining The Khronos Group to promote cross-platform industry APIs is Magic Leap.

• Magic Leap is the company that has already raised more than $1.4 billion USD from the likes of Google, AT&T, and Alibaba for their head-mounted virtual retinal display. Their technology is really slick and has been in development now for eight years.

• Another Vulkan extension that Mesa RADV developers can cross off their TODO list is VK_KHR_16bit_storage.

• VK_KHR_16bit_storage is the extension for supporting 16-bit types within shader input and output interfaces as well as push constant blocks. Intel’s ANV driver had already been plumbing the 16-bit storage support into their driver while now the RADV driver is exposing the extension too.

Benchmarks

• Recently there have been several Linux distribution benchmark comparisons on Phoronix to test the latest Linux OS releases, including several comparing to the current Microsoft Windows 10 performance. Those recent tests have all be done with various Intel CPUs, but for those curious about the AMD Windows vs. Linux performance, here are some fresh benchmarks as we approach the end of July.

• While GCC 9 has just been under development for a relatively short period of time, here are our initial benchmarks of GCC 9.0 SVN on and AMD EPYC server compared to the GCC 8.2 stable release candidate when tested at various optimization levels as well as PGO (Profile Guided Optimizations).

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

• The previous tutorial demonstrated the simplicity of ​booting from floppy images and creating other images using the tools provided by Linux. This guide continues on from that as it goes through step by step how to properly create a hard disk image, hook it up to DOSBox, and install whichever DOS you want, be it MS-DOS, PC-DOS, or DR-DOS.

• This month saw the release of a fascinating oral history, in which 76-year-old Brian Kernighan remembers the origins of the Unix command grep.

• Kernighan is already a legend in the world of Unix — recognized as the man who coined the term Unix back in 1970. His last initial also became the “k” in awk — and the “K” when people cite the iconic 1978 “K&R book” about C programming. The original Unix Programmer’s Manual calls Kernighan an “expositor par excellence,” and since 2000 he’s been a computer science professor at Princeton University — after 30 years at the historic Computing Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories.

• Put on your tux! You can get my book, Perl One-Liners, together with other great books for just $1 in the Linux Geek Humble Book Bundle by my publisher No Starch Press.

Games

• Sometimes all you need is a tall ship and a star to steer her by. The Caribbean Sail is a quirky take on the height of the Age of Sail. I spent my time reliving some of that bygone era and have some thoughts to share about the experience.

• The rather interesting crowdfunded RPG Pathfinder: Kingmaker is no longer releasing next month, instead they’ve set a date of September 25th.

• Voxel Turf, the urban block-based sandbox game was updated recently, giving you even more options to have a fun time.

• It’s no secret that I’m quite a fan of this one, since I love city builders and sandbox building games. It blends the two together, along with giving you vehicles, faction warfare, weapon mods and more. So it ends up feeling like a modern-day Minecraft blended with a city builder with elements of GTA. Honestly, it’s a hard game to properly describe, but that gives you a basic overview of what it’s like.

• Polygod, the difficult FPS from Krafted Games is officially leaving Early Access on August 17th and it sure does look fun.

• Currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter, No Longer Home is a strange magical realist point and click game that’s coming to Linux.

• As always, there’s sales going on. We’re here to keep track of them all each week and highlight anything of interest for Linux fans.

• For those who have some time to spare, Noclip have done an interesting documentary on how game store GOG came to be.

• While not specifically Linux gaming related, this sort of behind the scenes information is always really quite interesting to watch, especially for those who haven’t really followed it too closely.

• Star Ruler 2 from Blind Mind Studios has officially become open source and not just the game engine, it seems it’s the whole thing.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The image above is the new KDE Plasma 5.14 wallpaper, which has just been revealed on designer Ken Vermette’s blog.

• Ken has designed all of the Plasma 5 series wallpapers to date but his latest background is something of a dramatic departure.

• Qmmp is a Qt-based multimedia player for Linux systems and a new release is introduced v1.2.3.

• Qmmp , the slick and lightweight MP3 player for Linux systems and it is available for all distributions.

• KDE Applications 18.08 has begun beta testing with version 18.07.80, and the release is scheduled for August 16, 2018. The software suite is adding two new libraries: KPkPass (for reading Apple Wallet pass files) and KItinerary (which consists of “itinerary extraction code and itinerary data model used for data model, data extraction, and data augmentation”). See the announcement and the KDE Community Wiki for more information.

• I just checked and it looks like I started using Krita in 2013. I’m not exactly sure how it happened but I remember that I was frustrated about all the other tools I tried by then, PaintShop, Corel, Photoshop, SAI, you name it. I already was almost completely transitioned to Linux, except for the painting part and then I remembered that my computer science teacher once mentioned a tool for Linux that was not gimp. Unfortunately I couldn’t remember the name so I typed “good painting tool for Linux -gimp” into a search engine and BAM! Krita.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Your favourite GNOME applications will soon have dramatically different icons.

• GNOME devs are redesigning the default icons for all GNOME core apps as part a wider overhaul of GNOME design guidelines.

• The move hope to make it easier (and less effort) for app developers to provide high-quality and useful icons for their software on the GNOME desktop.

• Not that this redesign is much a surprise, as the Adwaita folder icons we highlighted a few weeks back suggested a new tack was being taken on design.

• With the GNOME desktop environment shipping on the Purism Librem 5 smartphone, the timing of this revamp couldn’t be better.

• Linux Mint plans to make more performance improvements to the Cinnamon desktop ahead of its next release.

• Similar work featured as part of Cinnamon 3.8, released as part of Linux Mint 19, and improved the responsiveness of launching apps on the desktop.

• For the next major release of the Cinnamon desktop environment, the team want to tackle another performance-related bugbear: screen tearing.

• “On modern NVIDIA GPUs we’re able to get rid of screen tearing by using “Force Composition Pipeline” in NVIDIA-Settings. With Vsync disabled in Cinnamon we then enjoy a faster desktop environments with no screen tearing,“, writes Cinnamon’s lead developer Clement Lefebvre in a recent blog post.

• But more important than food, for me GUADEC is always about the people, meeting new people, people you always respected (still can not believe I meet the legendary JH) or putting a face to an irc nickname or email (albfan, never expected you to be so tall!) and of course catching up with old friends because being able to continue talking with someone like if it was yesterday when in fact it was a year, is priceless.

• Fractal is a Matrix client for GNOME and is written in Rust. Matrix is an open network for secure, decentralized communication.

• This week, I’ve been working on the introduction of a multiline message input. Previously, there was the area where the user wrote their messages is a GtkEntry so there could be only one line on it. The user could insert a new line Unicode character with a keyboard shortcut but it wasn’t practical at all. And it was not represented in the GtkEntry. Here is the link to the initial issue.

• We first thought about using a GtkTextView instead of the GtkEntry but some people proposed to use a GtkSourceView (it’s also a GtkTextView anyway) in order to have syntax highlight when writing messages with Markdown.

Distributions

New Releases

• I have made a new version of ExTiX – The Ultimate Linux System. I call it ExTiX 18.7 LXQt Live DVD. (The previous version was 18.4 from 180419).

• ABOUT ExTiX 18.7 LXQt DVD 64 bit is based on Debian 9 Stretch and Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver. The original system includes the Desktop Environment Gnome. After removing Gnome I have installed LXQt 0.12.0. LXQt is the Qt port and the upcoming version of LXDE, the Lightweight Desktop Environment. It is the product of the merge between the LXDE-Qt and the Razor-qt projects: A lightweight, modular, blazing-fast and user-friendly desktop environment.

Red Hat Family

• After nearly four years as Managing Director of Red Hat India, Rajesh Rege started on a new role with Microsoft effective July 12 as Country General Manager & Leader – Solutions & Cloud Technologies Group.

• He will report to Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India, and will be part of the senior leadership team. In his new role, Rege will lead a team of sales specialists, subject matter experts and technical staff to enable the digital transformation of businesses and government bodies in India.

• This blog post will serve as an introduction to the new Python dynamic Kubernetes client implementation that backs the Kubernetes modules that are shipping in Ansible 2.6, as well as the modules themselves.

• Three years ago the community celebrated the first production-ready release of Kubernetes, what is now a de facto standard system for container orchestration, at the 1.0 launch day at OSCON. Today we celebrate Kubernetes to not only acknowledge it on the project’s birthday but to also thank the community for the extensive work and collaboration to drive the project forward.

• Let’s look back at what has made this one of the fastest moving modern open source projects, how we arrived at production maturity, and look forward to what’s to come.

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

Derivatives

• I am happy to announce that a next version of Slax Linux has been released. Slax is a minimalistic, fully modular operating system. As usual, this version incorporates all upstream improvements from Debian stable, and fixes few small known bugs.

• I am also happy to announce that it is now possible to purchase Slax preinstalled on an USB flash drive with hardware-based AES encryption. This device is universally usable because the encryption is performed directly by the drive itself, there is no software to install needed. Once disconnected, the USB drive automatically locks itself again. Payment is possible only with Bitcoin, because I truly wish to see PayPal and credit card companies to cease to exist soon.

• Another open-source operating system doing a stable update this morning is Slax, the revived Linux distribution focused on delivering a lightweight desktop that when the project was restarted last year shifted off its Slackware origin and onto a Debian stable base.

• Slax developer Tomas Matejicek announced today the release and immediate availability of the Slax 9.5.0 release with the latest updates and security patches.

• Since it’s been rebased on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, Slax saw two releases, versions 9.3.0 and 9.4.0, which introduced numerous enhancements and new features, including one-click-to-install launchers, support for various Wi-Fi devices, EXT4 and NTFS support, and persistent support enabled by default when booting from USB flash drives.

• Slax is an operating system designed to be run from a USB flash drive, allowing you to carry all your software in your pocket. Just plug it into a computer to boot into Slax, then shut down the PC and remove the flash drive when you’re done.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• About two weeks ago, Canonical patched a regression that would lead to boot failures on some AMD machines using the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system series, which was caused by a microcode firmware update for AMD processors that was supposed to mitigate the well-known Spectre microprocessor side-channel security vulnerability.

• Earlier this month, on July 2, Canonical released a Linux kernel security update for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) users, addressing a total of six security vulnerabilities, one of which introduced a regression also causing boot failures, though it doesn’t appear to be limited to AMD processors only, but also to Intel machines.

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 537 for the week of July 15 – 21, 2018

• This year’s GUADEC [https://2018.guadec.org/] (GNOME Users And Developers Conference) took place in Almeria, Spain. The main conference was from 6th to 11th July, and for a few days prior to that where the GNOME Advisory Board met for an in-person catch up, and a few days afterwards for BOF days where developers met to discuss and work on specific topics which were interesting to them.

• Canonical are proud to have sponsored the conference and to send seven members of the Ubuntu Desktop team. We had a great conference and are already looking forward to next year.

• Those who are still using Ubuntu 17.10 “Artful Aardvark” should now update to the version 18.04 (nicknamed “Bionic Beaver”) of this popular Linux distribution. Ubuntu 17.10 arrived on October 19, 2017, and it only received 9 months of support — as it happens with all non-LTS Ubuntu Linux releases.

Flavours and Variants

• While I have to admit that I am not the target audience for a distribution focused on web-based applications, I found Peppermint 9 to be a solid distribution. Despite pulling components from multiple desktop environments, Peppermint 9′s desktop is well integrated and easy to use. It was also easy to add both web-based and traditional applications to the system, so the distribution can be adjusted for users who prefer either.

• Peppermint 9 is not for everyone, but users who do most their work in Google Docs or Microsoft Office Online should give Peppermint a try. However, users accustomed to using traditional desktop applications might want to stick to one of the many alternatives out there. Yes, Peppermint 9 can be easily adjusted to use traditional desktop applications, but many of the other distribution options out there come with those kinds of applications pre-installed.

Devices/Embedded

• Ibase unveiled Pico-ITX (IBR115) and 3.5-inch (IBR117) SBCs that run Linux or Android on dual-core, Cortex-A9 i.MX6 SoCs with 4GB eMMC, GbE, HDMI, LVDS, USB, M.2, and optional -40 to 85°C support.

• In the past, Ibase has limited its SBC offerings to Intel-based 3.5-inch form factor boards such as the recent, Apollo Lake driven IB818. Ibase is now expanding to Arm with its fanless, NXP i.MX6 powered IBR115 and IBR117 SBCs, and the IBR115 is its first SBC to adopt the smaller (100 x 72mm) Pico-ITX form factor, which Ibase refers to as “2.5-inch.”

• Aetina has launched Nvidia’s Linux-driven Jetson TX2i module — a rugged, version of Nvidia’s Jetson TX2 with -40 to 85°C and 10-year support that’s also available from CTI. Both vendors support the TX2i with existing TX2 carrier boards.

• Seco opened pre-orders on its Linux-friendly SBC-B68-eNUC board with an Apollo Lake SoC, dual M.2 and GbE, triple or 4K displays, 4x USB ports, SATA, and optional -40 to 85°C support.

Android

• According to a report by Bloomberg, Google hopes to make Fuchsia a single, unified operating system that can run on any hardware or on any Google hardware at least. If true, that sounds like Fuchsia will replace Android and Chrome OS altogether. It’s ambitious enough as it is, but even more so considering that Google apparently wants to achieve this in just three years from now. In 2021, it’ll allegedly release a Fuchsia-powered connected device before moving on to more mainstream hardware like smartphones and laptops.

• As part of the Android Jetpack announcement at I/O in May, Google unveiled a redesign for the Android Support Library, called AndroidX. Like its predecessor, AndroidX is designed to help developers maintain backward compatibility with old versions of Android. As announced on Reddit, these libraries are now open source, as part of AOSP.

Free Software/Open Source

• At a time when tech giants are ploughing millions of dollars in quantum computing and are striving ahead with breakthroughs, Google, Microsoft and IBM seem to be locked in an intense battle of quantum supremacy. Mountain View search giant announced Cirq — an open-source framework for NISQ computers. Cirq is an open-source initiative that allows developers to create algorithms that can run on a number of machines without having a full background in quantum physics.

• The Google blog notes that once installed — Cirq enables researchers to write quantum algorithms for specific quantum processors. “Cirq gives users fine-tuned control over quantum circuits, specifying gate behaviour using native gates, placing these gates appropriately on the device, and scheduling the timing of these gates within the constraints of the quantum hardware,” the blog notes. Cirq supports running these algorithms locally on a simulator and is designed to easily integrate with future quantum hardware or larger simulators via the cloud.

• The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.9, the latest in our accelerated cadence targeting a release every three months.

• While a consequence of this faster cycle might mean fewer headliner changes, much of the visible effort nowadays comes in the form of quality-of-life improvements in how ReactOS functions. At the same time work continues on the underlying systems which provide more subtle improvements such as greater system stability and general consistency.

• The latest effort to result from the switch to a faster release cadence, ReactOS 0.4.9 comes packing a stack of smaller changes than previous versions, with focus firmly on improving the overall system stability, usability, and UI consistency.

• We’ll take a closer look at the key improvements and features of ReactOS 0.4.9 in a second.

• When MyRepublic launched its 1Gbit per second broadband plan in Singapore in January 2014, it gave the nation a new world’s first achievement as the first country to offer such a plan at mass pricing rates.

• The telecommunications company headquartered in the city-state now operates in three other markets — New Zealand, Indonesia, and Australia.

• In an exclusive interview with Eugene Yeo, Group CIO at MyRepublic in Enterprise Innovation in October 2017, he said the company was looking for four more potential areas of investment, possibly Cambodia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand.

• Someone linked me to this blog by a boutique proprietary software company complaining about porting to GNU/Linux systems, in which David Power, co-founder of Hiri…

• [...]

• If you make a product to which a large part of the potential customer population has a moral objection, you should expect that objection, and it’s reasonable for that to happen. To admonish those people because they don’t want to promote your product really is akin to a butcher annoyed that vegans won’t promote their prime cuts of meat.

• A big part of our daily lives is interacting with our electronic devices and using them for different purposes. In offices, we use them to get our work done and communicate; In homes, such devices are used for entertainment and other purposes. We have a wide range of devices at our disposal and it’s a tough task to find a suitable solution that fulfills all your entertainment needs. In the past, we have tried to answer this question by preparing the list of best media players for Windows and Linux. In this article, I’ll be telling you about one of most versatile media solutions, Kodi, in detail. You will get to know in detail what is Kodi and how does Kodi work.

• Thanks to increased adoption by telcos and enterprises, total container software units shipments will grow at a 30% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) by 2022.

• That 30% increase quadruples the container software units shipped last year, according to the “Data Center Multi-Tenant Server Software” report from IHS Markit. Hyperscale cloud service providers such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook pioneered the initial adoption of container software in their data centers (DCs), and already run container operating systems in virtual machines in a third of their multi-tenant servers. By comparison, telcos and enterprises run container software in only 5% of their multi-tenant servers today, according to the report.

• “Drivers behind the growth of container software include the need to evolve application architectures and provide increased agility and portability for software development practices. Container software allows developers to hand off applications from the coding table to the enterprise data center for testing and finally move a fully tested application to the cloud,” said IHS Markit’s Vladimir Galabov, senior analyst, in a prepared statement. “A properly containerized application is easy to scale and maintain, makes efficient use of available system resources and is portable.”

• System administrators have many choices for data backup software, ranging from standalone applications to storage vendors’ own systems to all manner of cloud storage and data appliances—but what about the open-source options?

• [...]

• “Although we do not have specific data based on research, our guess is that Amanda and BackupPC are the most downloaded and that Rsync has the biggest installed base,” Bertrand noted. “This being said, there are a couple of points to bear in mind: When you get to the enterprise, you need automation, repeatability, reliability, and a good support organization.” And also, “Even industries that have embraced open-source comput[ing] still want enterprise data protection. No one wants to not be able to recover mission critical data when they really need it.”

• However the open-source applications are indeed working for some name-brand organizations—Bacula cites NASA along with European entertainment giant Sky PLC.

Events

• The Call for Participation (CFP) for All Systems Go! 2018 will close in one week, on 30th of July! We’d like to invite you to submit your proposals for consideration to the CFP submission site quickly!

Web Browsers

• Recently the question of whether browsers should have a View Source function has reared its head again. Chris Coyier says no, as do Tom Dale and Christian Heilmann. Jonathan Snook says yes they should.

• The argument against essentially boils down to this: the browser devtools are better. This is undeniably, absolutely the truth. You can not just see the original HTML source of a page but manipulate it, drill down into it, see it beside the page itself and see which parts correspond. Everyone who develops for the web spends most of their day in the devtools, and rightly so. They are enormously powerful. View Source… isn’t. It’s a throwback, a historical legacy back from the days when you couldn’t introspect a page, couldn’t fiddle with things at runtime. If something was wrong with the page you were building, you went back to your editor and tentatively changed a thing, and then went back again to the browser and hit Refresh to see if you’d fixed it. Debugging blind, like finding your way through a cave with no lights on. You were quite likely to be eaten by a grue. Things are better now.

Chrome

• Google is trying out a new Chrome interface that for the first time in a decade presents a very different look for the tabs and address bar at the top of the widely used web browser.

• Since its public debut in 2008, Chrome has featured a trapezoidal tab for each website you have open. But tabs now look very different on Chrome Canary — a very rough-around-the-edges version used to test changes before they reach a broader audience. The active tab has a slope-shouldered look with curved corners. The grayed-out inactive tabs merge with the the browser itself and are separated only by thin vertical lines. In addition, the address bar’s text box is a gray oval against a white backdrop, instead of a round-cornered white rectangle with a hairline border.

• Chrome users have long complained about the browser’s dull interface and slow performance. But that is going to change soon. As mentioned by CNET, Google is testing out a new interface in the Chrome Canary channel.

• Google Chrome is undoubtedly the most popular web browser right now. With a 58% market share worldwide, Chrome has defeated every other option out there. But that doesn’t mean it is perfect in every way. Google has received more than enough complaints about leaving its browser unattended for years now.

• Since the browser made public debut in 2008, the browser has never seen a massive update. But this time, it looks like Google has finally set eyes on its best project. The Alphabet-owned Google is reportedly working on new features for Chrome that will solve most of the issues users face with the browser.

Mozilla

• After being on hiatus since the end of April, Mozilla’s Servo Blog has finally put out a status update concerning their web engine improvements made over the past three months.

• What really stands out in their additions to Servo over the past three months include many WebGL additions. Servo now has a number of WebGL API corrections, support for more getParameter values, several more WebGL extensions are now supported, instanced drawing calls support, better support for the uniform API calls, and other improvements. EXT_blend_minmax and EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic are among the extensions newly added to Servo.

• Our roadmap is available online, including the overall plans for 2018. It has been updated to account for Servo’s new role in Mozilla’s mixed reality team.

• Yesterday I was working on creating the slides and accompanying demos for my upcoming Web Directions Code talk next week. One of the demos I’m creating is a basic proof of concept for a simple switch that is used to switch the theme of a UI from light to dark and vice versa. I liked, and was inspired, by the theme switch in the Medium app, shown below.

• I have used a variety of profiling tools over the years, including several I wrote myself.

• But there is one profiling tool I have used more than any other. It is capable of providing invaluable, domain-specific profiling data of a kind not obtainable by any general-purpose profiler.

• It’s a simple text processor implemented in a few dozen lines of code. I use it in combination with logging print statements in the programs I am profiling. No joke.

• [...]

• I use counts to do ad hoc profiling all the time. It’s the first tool I reach for any time I have a question about code execution patterns. I have used it extensively for every bout of major performance work I have done in the past few years, as well as in plenty of other circumstances. I even built direct support for it into rustc-perf, the Rust compiler’s benchmark suite, via the profile eprintln subcommand. Give it a try!

Databases

• When it comes to building extreme scale computing platforms, there are plenty of system design options but in supercomputing, the only practical choice for an OS is Linux.

• A team from MIT and Sandia took note of this imbalance, noting that while traditionally it was the job of an OS to manage the hardware, now the controlling processor and the compute engines are far more separated. In other words, the OS is more like a resource tracker that manages usage of the hardware resources. They draw parallels between this and a database management system and have thus turned a database into an OS of sorts.

• On the surface this may not sound logical—or more accurately, like it would be functional. But simulations of the database system (called TabulaROSA) on a 32k core supercomputer yield some impressive early results with a measured 20X performance boost over Linux while managing 2000X more processes in fully searchable tables.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• It appears that this version of LibreOffice is indeed from a third-party and The Document Foundation is currently determining “if the distribution terms are compliant with our license”. We’ll keep you updated as this story develops.

• LibreOffice is one of many free alternatives to Microsoft Office, and the open source office suite has now arrived in the Microsoft Store.

• While many people will be pleased by the appearance of a Store version of the software, some will be disappointed to find that the app is not free. At least not at first glance. There’s a $2.99 price tag attached to Libre Office, but this is not necessarily a reason to let this put you off.

• AN ENTERPRISING DEVELOPER has brought popular open source Office alternative, LibreOffice to the Windows Store. But buyer beware – it’s important to know what you’re getting into.

• The developer, known only as ‘.net’, has released a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) version on a strictly unofficial basis and added in a fee for his/her trouble.

• The enormously popular open source office suite LibreOffice has appeared in the Microsoft Store – with an alarming surprise. LibreOffice is an open source project and has always been free to download, even for commercial use, but the app in the Microsoft Store carries a price tag of $2.99/£2.49.

• The app description suggests this is just a way for the software’s creators to solicit donations, and selecting ‘Free trial’ rather than ‘Buy’ will download the full suite with no strings attached.

• However, Italo Vignoli of The Document Foundation informed Bleeping Computer that the non-profit organization had no connection to the third party ‘.net’ that published the software.

Healthcare

• Through our previous Open Science articles, we have focused on various fields about the significance of adopting an Open Source Approach in Science and Technology. Let’s now dive deeper into the spectrum by looking into some important aspects of Neuroscience.

• In this new article on open science, we are going to start with Neuroscience with an Open Source perspective of course, and look into its Medical Implications in terms of medicine and beyond. We talk about modern neuroscience in particular and look into some of its branches as well, where Open Source proves to be a great advantage. Along the way through this reading, we’ll also explore some FOSS developments in Neuroscience.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft have joined an open source initiative designed to help users transfer data across multiple online platforms services without facing privacy issues.

BSD

• NetBSD has a new major release in its 25th year. NetBSD 8.0 release brings several new features and improvements.

• For those relying upon BSD in security-critical environments, a new HardenedBSD 11-STABLE update is now available for this security-enhanced fork of FreeBSD.

• HardenedBSD continues to be a “fork” of FreeBSD focused on shipping the maximum security potential. HardenedBSD adds in extra security technologies, exploit mitigations, and other tweaks compared to what is shipped by default in FreeBSD stable. HardenedBSD 11-STABLE v1100056.1 is available today as a minor update compared to their previous stable update from several weeks back.

Licensing/Legal

• I’ve worked really hard on django-todo over the years, so was very dismayed to receive email recently from a CompSci student at the University of Western Australia informing me that the department had taken the django-todo source code, removed the license file and all attribution, and included its code in one of their assignments.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Oasis says the modelling system has been made more accessible in an effort to increase the resources available to strengthen resilience to natural disasters.

• Robert Bentley, President, Global Strategic Advisory at Guy Carpenter & Company, that deploys Oasis’ framework in its business, said, “We welcome this milestone for Oasis and the business impact it will deliver for Guy Carpenter and our clients.”

• “It is important that we lower the barriers to entry and increase flexibility in understanding and managing risk. This achievement advances the industry’s capabilities on both fronts.”

Open Access/Content

• Unfortunately, even a major project like the Horizon 2020 open research publishing platform — whichever company wins the contract — will not be able to change that culture on its own, however welcome it might be in itself. Core changes must come from within the academic world. Sadly, there are still precious few signs that those in positions of power are willing to embrace not just open access and even open science, but also a radical openness that extends to every aspect of the academic world, including evaluation and recognition.

Programming/Development

• Newcomers to Python often are surprised by how little code is required to accomplish quite a bit. Between powerful built-in data structures that can do much of what you need, comprehensions to take care of many tasks involving iterables, and the lack of getter and setter methods in class definitions, it’s no wonder that Python programs tend to be shorter than those in static, compiled languages.

• Nearly 30 years after his Christmas invention, Mr Van Rossum resembles a technological version of the Monty Python character who accidentally became the Messiah in the film “Life of Brian”. “I certainly didn’t set out to create a language that was intended for mass consumption,” he explains. But in the past 12 months Google users in America have searched for Python more often than for Kim Kardashian, a reality-TV star. The rate of queries has trebled since 2010, while inquiries after other programming languages have been flat or declining (see chart).

• An age-old debate among programmers is whether to use a plain text editor, such as Emacs, or a more fully-featured integrated development environment (IDE), such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio.

• [...]

• Stallman highlights how text editors can be plugged into other developer tools, addressing the criticism that such editors lack much of the functionality of IDEs.

• “Emacs has an interface to GDB [GNU Debugger] (and some other debuggers) which has more or less the effect of an IDE. GDB displays its interaction through Emacs, and it displays the source code of the debugged program via Emacs as well.”

• Stallman is not the only well-known developer to favor the simplicity of a text editor.

• Ken Thompson, who co-created the Go programming language is on record as saying he used the Sam text editor, which he also co-created, and Linus Torvalds, developer of Linux kernel, has said he favors MicroEMACS.

• Another bi-monthly update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp landed on CRAN early this morning following less than two weekend in the incoming/ directory of CRAN. As always, thanks to CRAN for all the work they do so well.

Leftovers

• One of the downsides of film that led to the triumph of digital cinema is that, no matter how careful you are, everything you do with a film print will ever-so-slightly damage it. Every time you project a film, it gets a teensy-bit more scratched. Every time you make a new release print of a film, your source print gets damaged, too. Every time you think about a film, a version of it preserved in a vault somewhere decays just a little bit.

Science

• But who is driving the regulatory agenda and what do they stand to gain? Cui Bono? Who benefits?

• This question needs to be answered because letting industry needs drive the AI agenda presents real risks. With so many digital giants like Amazon and Facebook housed in the US, one particular concern regarding AI is its potential to mirror societies in the image of US culture and to the preferences of large US companies, even more than is currently the case.

• Millennials don’t read. They don’t think as critically as they could. And they’re not interested in learning for learning’s sake. They want the Dream. They will go into debt to get that degree they believe will help them pursue it, but they have lost respect for knowledge, rigour and hard intellectual work. Working among such entitled puppies makes me feel like an academic platypus out of water.

• The xkcd comic gets a laugh because it seems absurd to suggest microfilm as the most reliable way to store archives, even though it will remain reliable for 500 years. Its lasting power keeps it a mainstay in research libraries and archives. But as recent cutting-edge technologies approach ever more rapid obsolescence, past (and passed-over) technologies like the microfilm machine won’t go away. They’ll remain, steadily doing the same work they have done for the last century for another five more at least—provided the libraries they are stored in stay open, and the humans that would read and interpret their contents survive.

• The phrase “rewriting the textbooks” is more than a cliché to me, because that’s what I do. I revise each of my books every three years, updating the science.

• I love to explain biology through cases and stories, and am disturbed when something changes – that is, when new evidence indicates that facts aren’t as they seemed.

• Sometimes it’s hard for me to give up favorite stories. Worst was the case of Phineas Gage.

Security

• Josh and Kurt talk about Cory Doctorow’s piece on Facebook data privacy. It’s common to call data the new oil but it’s more like nuclear waste. How we fix the data problem in the future is going to require solutions we can’t yet imagine as well as new ways of thinking about the problems.

• Talking specifically about the flaws, the first one is CVE-2018-3627. Described as a logic bug, this easily exploitable bug allows code execution. CVE-2018-3628 is the more dangerous sibling which enables comprehensive remote code execution in the AMT process; it’s also identified as a “Buffer overflow in HTTP handler.”

• In early July, Intel issued security advisories SA-00112 and SA-00118 regarding fixes for vulnerabilities in Intel Management Engine. Both advisories describe vulnerabilities with which an attacker could execute arbitrary code on the Minute IA PCH microcontroller.

• The vulnerabilities are similar to ones previously discovered by Positive Technologies security experts last November (SA-00086). But that was not the end of the story, as Intel has now released fixes for additional vulnerabilities in ME.

• Intel/AMD will never allow machine owners to control the code executing on the ME/PSP because they have decided to build a business on preventing you from doing so. In particular, it’s likely that they’re actually contractually obligated not to let you control these processors.

• The reason is that Intel literally decided to collude with Hollywood to integrate DRM into their CPUs; they conspired with media companies to lock you out of certain parts of your machine. After all, this is the company that created HDCP.

• This DRM functionality is implemented on the ME/PSP. Its ability to implement DRM depends on you not having control over it, and not having control over the code that runs on it. Allowing you to control the code running on the ME would directly compromise an initiative which Intel has been advancing for over a decade.

• When SSL support for Apache was first released the standard practice was to have the SSL private key encrypted and require the sysadmin enter a password to start the daemon. This practice has mostly gone away, I would hope that would be due to people realising that it offers little value but it’s more likely that it’s just because it’s really annoying and doesn’t scale for cloud deployments.

Defence/Aggression

• The author of nine books, Erdem worked as a journalist before being elected as a CHP member of parliament for Istanbul in 2015. He appears to be the bravest MP who has exposed ISIS activities across Turkey during his tenure and has often urged the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government to stop these activities and bring the perpetrators to account.

• While WhatsApp gives wheels to rumours, falsehoods spread faster when there is polarisation of beliefs, when there is an us-versus-them climate. Today, even as faith in general institutions like the mass media or the justice system is breaking down, people trust their tribes intensely, and are primed to ignore any challenges to their worldview.

• Two men showed fake messages on WhatsApp to others in the Old City area and soon, a mob of 300 cornered and lynched the beggar.

• Debate has raged for months over various internet giants’ forays into providing next-generation technology for war.

• For example, in March, dissenters at Google went to the press about the web goliath’s contract with the US military’s Project Maven, which aims to fit drones with object-detecting AI among other things.

• This US Department of Defense project apparently began a year before, in April 2017. Google has always maintained that its computer vision TensorFlow APIs are for “non-offensive” purposes only and repeatedly denied the malicious use of its technology in its Maven contract with the Pentagon.

• Over 3,000 staff signed an open letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, stating that “Google should not be in the business of war”.

• Academics across the world also urged Google to stop working on the project.

• A furor has erupted over leaked documents showing that British officials are not requiring their U.S. counterparts to provide assurances that two alleged British jihadis loyal to the Islamic State group will not be executed if they are eventually put on trial in the United States.

• The UK will not block use of the death penalty by the US in the case of two men who are accused of being Islamic State members, the home secretary says.

• In a letter to the US attorney general, leaked to the Telegraph, Sajid Javid said the UK will seek no assurances that the pair will not be executed.

• Preparations for the trial of two arrested members of an ISIS terrorist cell in the United States are under way, with reports suggesting that Britain could provide intelligence to the prosecution even if the accused face the death penalty.

• Leaked documents obtained by The Daily Telegraph newspaper include a letter written by Britain’s Home Secretary Sajid Javid that said the UK would share information with US authorities on Alexanda Kotey and Shafee El Sheikh, two of the four foreign fighters that made up the “Beatles” terrorist group in Syria.

• As one who has never visited Iran, I am still sure of one thing: Iranians, even those who have never left Iran, know more about what is happening outside Iran than Americans do about what’s really happening, and why, outside the US. There are a number of good American and foreign journalists who tell the truth and inform well, but they are not a part of the mainstream media any longer, which is almost totally a corporate, corruption influenced media now. So most Americans, who don’t read much anyway, are ill informed, and if they do read, it’s a local paper somewhere with canned news, especially regarding other countries. What seems impressive about the Iranian media is that, at least, there is more truth and Iranian writers and leaders opine correctly about the dangers of US foreign policies.

• White House national security adviser John Bolton — who has long held an adversarial stance toward Iran — later weighed in on the tweet.

• “I spoke to the President over the last several days, and President Trump told me that if Iran does anything at all to the negative, they will pay a price like few countries have ever paid before,” Bolton said in a statement Monday morning.

• The tirade signaled an immediate escalation of tensions between Washington and Tehran, and capped a weekend of angry tweets by the President on the Russia investigation and the legal problems facing his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen.

• As FAIR has noted before (1/8/18, 3/20/18), to MSNBC, the carnage and destruction the US and its Gulf Monarchy allies are leveling against the poorest country in the Arab world is simply a non-issue.

• On July 2, a year had passed since the cable network’s last segment mentioning US participation in the war on Yemen, which has killed in excess of 15,000 people and resulted in over a million cases of cholera. The US is backing a Saudi-led bombing campaign with intelligence, refueling, political cover, military hardware and, as of March, ground troops. None of this matters at all to what Adweek (4/3/18) calls “the network of the Resistance,” which has since its last mention of the US’s role in the destruction of Yemen found time to run over a dozen segments highlighting war crimes committed by the Syrian and Russian governments in Syria.

• Roughly around their sixteenth birthday, the youth of Jerusalem are eager to obtain their Israeli Identification card. They would wait in an inhumane line outside the Israeli Ministry of Interior in East Jerusalem for hours, and when they reach the officer, they will submit an extensive set of documents to prove that their centre of life is Jerusalem. Eventually, and if they were fortunate enough, and have fulfilled a particular set of requirements, they would receive an Israeli ID stating they were “permanent residents” in the place they call home. The word “permanent” is used loosely here because Israel considers Palestinian Jerusalemites as “foreign immigrants” who reside in Jerusalem not as per their right of birth, but more so as a favour granted to them by the state.

• Israel considers Palestinian Jerusalemites as “foreign immigrants”

• Within the pile of papers, these teenagers have to present their school transcripts of the past three years. If they have attended schools outside of Jerusalem, they risk their residency being revoked. According to Israeli rights group B’Tselem, Israel has revoked the status of 14,500 Palestinians since 1967.

• Most of the Jerusalemite youngsters, who speak Arabic and identify themselves as Palestinians in contradiction to the identification card they hold, would be enrolled at Arabic schools in East Jerusalem. The total number of students in Arab education in East Jerusalem, as per data acquired from the Jerusalem Education Authority (JEA) is 110,496. Whereas the number of Arab children in Jerusalem (ages 3-18) is 127,198, which means that 16,702 Palestinian children, who constitute 13% of East Jerusalemite children of compulsory education age are Vanished Children. They are not registered in a known educational institution and are therefore unmonitored by authorities in the education system.

• Here’s the thing about public profiles on social media services: they’re public. If you don’t want to be immediately arrested for committing criminal acts, maybe steer clear of social media. A multitude of examples can be found here at Techdirt, many of them covered caustically by Tim Geigner.

• But it’s not just bragging about bad behavior getting people caught. It’s not being more selective about who you let into your online inner circle. It’s not a new thing but it’s only going to become more prevalent. “Friending” people you don’t know is pretty much letting cops take a look around your place without a warrant.

• A recent Delaware Supreme Court ruling said there’s no Fourth Amendment violation contained in government surveillance of a public Facebook account, even if a cop hid behind a pseudonym to get invited into the suspect’s social circle. While it does seem like months of lurking to produce only a weapons possession charge is sort of low on the ROI, scale, lurking is a passive effort that only requires the periodic checking of notifications from surveilled accounts.

• There’s no expectation of privacy to stuff published to social media accounts others can view. Setting it to “Friends Only” may prevent the general public from accessing the contents of your page, but when the passive surveillance is already coming from inside the house (so to speak), there’s really little you can argue when seeking to have this evidence suppressed. It’s sort of like inviting in vampires and then complaining about the holes in your neck.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• I won’t reiterate the many tortures Assange has had to endure due to his unique position as the greatest truth-teller of modern times. Suffice to say that his long – six years! – imprisonment in London’s Ecuadorian embassy is a sentence that was neither deserved nor was it legal. As far as we know, Assange has not been charged with any crime: contra journalistic malfeasance, he was never actually charged by the Swedish authorities for supposedly engaging in bad behavior with two women. He sought asylum in the embassy because the Swedes, always subservient to Washington, would have shipped him to the United States to stand trial for “espionage” – despite the fact that we don’t know if a grand jury has proffered charges.

• Assange was granted sanctuary due to Rafael Correa, then the President of Ecuador: unfortunately, Correa’s successor – one Lenin Moreno – has caved to pressure from the US and Britain, and it looks like Assange is going to be handed over to the British imminently.

• An agreement over the Wikileaks founder is ‘imminent’ and could be finalised when Ecuador’s president Lenín Moreno visits Britain this week, sources say.

• Mr Moreno is set to meet international development secretary Penny Mordaunt in London tomorrow, and insiders say he is close to agreeing a deal under which Ecuador could withdraw its asylum protection of Mr Assange.

• The 47-year-old has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge, west London, since June 2012. He is fearful that if he leaves, he could be extradited to the US, where he is wanted for leaking Iraq War documents

• News he could be turned over to UK authorities comes after The Sunday Times reported foreign office minister Sir Alan Duncan has been in talks with Ecuador over its protection of the Australian. Mr Moreno has previously called Mr Assange a ‘hacker’ and a ‘stone in the shoe’.

• The whistleblower was given political asylum under Mr Moreno’s predecessor Rafael Correa. But in March Mr Assange’s internet was cut off and restrictions were placed on who could visit him.

• Credible reports indicate that Ecuador’s government is about to renege on the political asylum it granted to WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange and hand him over to British police, possibly within days.

• The reports also indicate that Assange would be subjected to lengthy imprisonment by the British authorities, perhaps for two years or more, pending extradition to the US, where he could face the death penalty on espionage and conspiracy charges.

• These developments underscore the necessity to deepen the fight for a powerful international working-class movement for his freedom and for the defence of all basic democratic rights.

• [...]

• Even before removal to the US, Assange would thus end up having spent more than a decade in prison or effective detention despite never having been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime.

• Ecuador’s moves to terminate Assange’s political asylum are the result of intensive pressure on the Moreno government by the Trump administration, which has escalated the Obama White House’s machinations to get its hands on Assange. US Vice President Mike Pence visited Ecuador earlier this month to ramp up Washington’s demands on Moreno, who has shifted the country’s government sharply to the right to try to win favour from the US and the financial markets.

• Leading figures in the Trump administration, including Attorney-General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have publicly declared their intent to see Assange arrested and imprisoned. Sessions last year said putting Assange on trial was a US “priority” and Pompeo, who was then the CIA director, branded WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.

• The diplomatic impasse over Julian Assange’s six-year stay in Ecuador’s London embassy is coming to a head, a source close to the WikiLeaks founder said on Monday, after media reports the South American country would rescind his political asylum.

• [...]

• Speculation about the Australian-born Assange’s future has grown this month after the Sunday Times newspaper said senior officials from Ecuador and Britain were now in discussions about how to remove him from the embassy after revocation of his asylum.

• “The situation is very serious. Things are coming to a head,” the source, who spoke on condition on anonymity, told Reuters. He said the latest information from inside the embassy was, “It’s not looking good”.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, could soon see his stay in the Ecuardorian embassy in London brought to an abrupt end.

• There is speculation that the country’s president is planning to withdraw asylum protection which has been in place since 2012, and hand him over to British authorities.

• President Lenin Moreno is in London ostensibly to speak at the 2018 Global Disabilities Summit – he has been in a wheelchair since being shot in a 1998 robbery attempt.

• But presidential sources say he is close to finalising a deal.

• Almost three months ago, Spanish anger over his tweets about Catalonia stirred Ecuador into blocking Assange from accessing the internet.

• Furniture was seen being packed-up into a van outside the Ecuadorian embassy, coinciding with reports that Assange’s asylum is being withdrawn.

• Mr Moreno, who has used a wheelchair since being shot in a robbery in 1998, will speak at the Global Disability Summit, which is being organised by the British government.

• Ecuador’s president has cleared the way for his government to withdraw asylum protection for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and to hand him over to British authorities. That’s according to The Intercept, which reports Assange could soon face a prison term of up to two years if he’s convicted of contempt of court for missing a bail hearing, after he holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London more than five years ago, seeking to avoid a Swedish sexual assault investigation. He was later cleared of any of those charges by Sweden. This comes as the Trump administration is reportedly planning to seek Assange’s extradition to the U.S., where he could face espionage charges.

• But they want him out, and his communication with the outside world was cut off three months ago when he was accused of interfering with other states.

• Now Mr Assange’s supporters and intelligence experts say matters are “coming to a head” and Ministers believe his health is rapidly deteriorating.

• Leading critic Bob Seely said he had been told Mr Assange time “maybe about to run out” before he is turned over to the Metropolitan Police.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could be soon forced out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and handed over to the UK authorities by the government of Lenin Moreno, according to The Intercept. Speaking to Radio Sputnik, Joe Lauria, an independent journalist and former Wall Street Journal correspondent, shed light on what could happen to Assange.

• Since Julian Assange is now an Ecuadorian citizen, President Moreno must protest his rights, says Alfred de Zayas, former UN independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order

• Julian Assange reportedly will be evicted from his cramped refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London that’s been his home for past six years, after Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno met with U.K. officials last week allegedly to discuss the details of removing the WikiLeaks founder.

• Moreno, who has referred to Assange as a “hacker” and an “inherited problem” encamped in the embassy for the last six years to avoid prosecution in Sweden and the U.S., visited the U.K. ostensibly to attend the 2018 Global Disabilities Summit, but the Intercept, citing RT, reported that the purpose of the Ecuadorian president’s trip was to meet with U.K. diplomats to finalize an agreement for handing over Assange to U.K. authorities.

• Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2012 after being accused of sexual assault. According to Assange, the charges could have served as an excuse to extradite him to the US, where he has been accused of espionage and leaking thousands of classified documents related to military operations.

• A group of people supporting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gathered near the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on Sunday, following reports that he might be stripped of his asylum.

• Tensions surrounding Assange rose amid reports that Quito and London have allegedly been negotiating an eviction of the WikiLeaks founder from the embassy.

• Ecuador is close to evicting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from its UK embassy, according to reports.

• Lenin Moreno, the country’s president, is in London for a disabilities summit, but is allegedly in discussions with British officials over a deal to hand the Australian over to police.

• Mr Assange, who has been described as an “inherited problem” by Mr Moreno, could lose his diplomatic protection in a matter of days, The Intercept reported.

• [...]

• “At the moment, due to the complexity of the topic, a short or long-term solution is not in sight.”

• A British government source also said there was no sign of immediate progress. Last month, Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan told parliament that they were increasingly concerned about Mr Assange’s health.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Swimming with pigs in beautiful, crystal clear Caribbean waters, under glorious blue skies, seems like a dream come true for many people.

• And for the inquisitive animals, it doesn’t seem like a terrible life either – with plenty of room to run around in the glistening sunshine.

• The pigs have some famous neighbours in the luxurious Exumas – a stretch of 365 cays and islands in the Bahamas, where A-listers own private islands.

Finance

• Originally created for individuals wanting to host smaller events and private parties, but who faced few few options aside creating Excel spreadsheets — remember, the ticketing world formerly revolved around stadiums and major sporting events — Eventbrite has grown steadily over the years into a corporate giant. It now powers ticketing for millions of events in more than 180 countries, and it has rung up more than $10 billion in cumulative tickets sales since its founding.

• According to Forbes, in 2017, Eventbrite processed more than three million tickets per week to events, including conferences and festivals.

• Part of the company’s growth has come through acquisitions. [...]

• Disaster capitalism: Perhaps you’ve heard of it. You’ve certainly lived with it. Well described by author and activist Naomi Klein, it’s the scenario in which big banks and corporate businesses profit off crises like earthquakes, bankruptcies, and war, taking advantage of people and places in trouble to enact policies that allow them to amass more power and wealth. What’s gotten far less press, at least until now, is what I’m calling “survival socialism”: the plethora of alternatives that emerge as people under pressure conjure solutions to their own troubles in ways that aim to deliver not profit as much as social value—better services, cheaper prices, more social cohesion, a greater ownership share in production, a more vibrant democracy, a healthier environment.

• Across the world, such practices and policies vary, from land trusts and community gardens to local-first contracting and public takeovers of private utilities. The Transnational Institute, a progressive Amsterdam-based think tank, reports that more than 800 cities in 42 countries have recently taken over crucial utilities: water in Grenoble, France; energy in Boulder, Colorado; community health clinics in Delhi, India. Big cities and small towns are doing it, but some of the most exciting efforts are happening in some of the most obscure places, where the need and the neglect have been the greatest.

• Until now, most of these experiments have been small-scale and local, bubbling up from the grass roots in solitary bursts, with little coordination and few high-profile champions. But some of them might soon go mainstream, if a pair of Labour Party politicians—themselves fairly obscure until recently—form the next government in the United Kingdom. While the ruling prime minister, Theresa May, has until May 2022 to call an election, the recent series of high-level resignations from her Conservative-led government could well hasten its collapse.

• The first is that both sides want an agreement.

• The second is that it is in the respective interests of both parties that there is an agreement.

• The third is that the two sides are still negotiating.

• The fourth pointer is that there is a text which is 80% agreed.

• The fifth is that there is plenty of time before next March (and even before October which is preferred deadline of the EU).

• And sixth, the current difficulties about the Irish “backstop” arrangements if there is not a future relationship agreement are a disagreement about means rather than ends. Both sides accept that this is an issue to be addressed and a risk to be managed.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A new report from the Institute For the Future on “state-sponsored trolling” documents the rise and rise of government-backed troll [sic] armies who terrorize journalists and opposition figures with seemingly endless waves of individuals who bombard their targets with vile vitriol, from racial slurs to rape threats.

• Butina met with Donald Trump Jr. and lived with a Republican consultant. Where will this investigation lead?

• Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said on Sunday he doesn’t believe the FBI “spied” on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, as Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed.

• Rubio disputed Trump’s characterization during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, saying that FBI investigators were justified in their October 2016 wiretapping of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser. The agents, it has been learned, had reason to believe Russia had sought to recruit Page as part of the scheme to subvert the presidential election.

• “I don’t think they did anything wrong,” Rubio said of the FBI efforts. “I think they went to the court. They got the judges to approve it. They laid out all the information ― and there was a lot of reasons… for why they wanted to look at Carter Page.”

• Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said he supports President Donald Trump interacting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but that Trump should be aware of Putin’s human rights record and zero-sum approach to the US-Russia relationship.

• Do Democrats and Republicans quarrel with each other in front of TV cameras? Obviously yes – but it’s merely a mock lovers’ spat crafted for public consumption.

• Additionally, I’ve been getting tired of seeing things spill over on various social networks about how the current President of the United States (my 11th-line supervisor) is the embodiment of evil walking this planet. It is bad enough spending eight hours per day being paid by the federal government to hear that garbage while protecting the nation’s financial interests. Coming home to hear that too is just a step too far. There just comes a point where I can’t handle it anymore & have to cut something back.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Disney has fired writer-director James Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 after a right-wing media personality resurfaced a series of offensive tweets Gunn made, in many cases from 2009 and 2010.

• [...]

• Cernovich also has a history of using old Twitter posts to target outspoken progressive voices.

• Mark Zuckerberg made several newsworthy choices this week. One — to invoke Holocaust denial as an example of content that Facebook should keep up because “there are different things that different people get wrong” and “it’s hard to impugn [their] intent” — was ill advised.

• But another — to keep Facebook from diving deeper into the business of censorship — was the right call. On July 18, Facebook announced a policy it put in place last month to remove misinformation that contributes to violence, following criticism that content published on the platform has led to attacks against minorities overseas. When pushed to go further and censor all offensive speech, Facebook refused.

• [...]

• If Facebook gives itself broader censorship powers, it will inevitably take down important speech and silence already marginalized voices. We’ve seen this before. Last year, when activists of color and white people posted the exact same content, Facebook moderators censored only the activists of color. When black women posted screenshots and descriptions of racist abuse, Facebook moderators suspended their accounts or deleted their posts. And when people used Facebook as a tool to document their experiences of police violence, Facebook chose to shut down their livestreams. The ACLU’s own Facebook post about censorship of a public statue was also inappropriately censored by Facebook.

• This week we learned that if you give that guy a platform for his voice, he’ll out himself real fast. Right now, headlines blare Zuckerberg in Holocaust denial row and Fortune 500 C.E.O. Says Holocaust Deniers Must Be Given “a Voice”.

• Facebook is rolling out software changes to make it harder for WhatsApp messages to be forwarded following complaints that spreading of rumours led to deaths in India.

• The difference is that now this censorship is organized around a partisan political ideology since 2014. Essentially it is meant to consolidate a notion that Hindus here have suffered at the hands of minorities and ‘self-hating Hindus’. The rot has gone deep when you see something like this happening in Kerala.

• One of the city’s annual literary highlights, the Hong Kong Book Fair, hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons over the weekend when the latest work by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami was banned from the event after being deemed “indecent” by the Obscene Articles Tribunal.

• The novel, titled Kishidancho Goroshi, or Killing Commendatore, was temporarily classified as “Class II – indecent materials,” according to a notice issued by the tribunal last week. The classification means the book had to be removed from all the fair’s booths, and can now only be sold in city bookstores with its cover wrapped and a warning about its content.

• When thinking of censorship in the Middle East, many people, especially Americans, tend to think that most, if not all, Arab countries impose some form of censorship on foreign and domestic media. Many countries in the region do impose restrictions on the press but typically those affect domestic media.

• Where foreign correspondents are concerned, the rules, when broken, are rarely enforced. Why? Because arresting foreign journalists is really bad for business.

• Interestingly, the country the United States likes to identify as “the only democratic country in the Middle East region,” is the one with some of the strictest rules. That country is Israel. Despite its “democratic” labels, Israel’s military censors have been the busiest in the region.

• Writers and leaders of political parties rallied behind noted Malayalam author S Hareesh, who withdrew his novel being serialised in a weekly after alleged threats from right-wing groups, with the Kerala government asking the publishers to go ahead with the work.

• An array of eminent Malayalam writers, including M Mukundan, K Satchidanandan, Anita Nair, Unni R and KR Meera, expressed anguish over the development and said it was a threat to freedom of expression.

• The thugs policing our cultural fraternity have struck again. In response to the violent threats against his family, Malayalam writer S Hareesh has now withdrawn his novel Meesa (Moustache) being serialised by Mathrubhumi, stating that he will publish it when “the climate is congenial”.

• Meesa is the first novel written by Hareesh, winner of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award for short fiction​. The first three chapters of this novel were published in serial form by Mathrubhumi weekly, raising great expectations among readers. Then right​-wing groups began a campaign of intimidation that has become only too familiar in recent years.

• Hareesh was accused of “hurting religious sentiments” and “maligning Hindus”. He was threatened that his hand would be chopped off ​to “teach him a lesson”. He was abused and threatened on social media, forcing him to deactivate his accounts. Members of his family were viciously trolled. Copies of the weekly were burnt, prompting the editor to tweet that literature is being mob lynched. ​

• Just over a week remains for applications to close for the Ranga Shankara Theatre Festival. This year marks the 14th edition of the Bengaluru-based cultural venue’s annual fiesta, and its theme is particularly prickly given the times. They have mooted the idea of a ‘Festival of Plays that Almost Weren’t’, inviting applications for works based on material that may have faced censure, censorship or muzzling by both state or ‘extra-state’ players. The festival both curates existing productions and commissions new ventures, so a fresh bunch of plays based on previously banned works could emerge from just one season.

• [...]

• Citing the ‘hurt sentiments’ of Warkaris, the Samiti shut down Khade’s play and railed against Mokashi’s film, less successfully.

• In 1485, an acclaimed German portrait painter named Hans Memling unveiled his supposed masterpiece. A carefully-detailed triptych, it depicts three figures; the one on the left, a hideous skeleton sporting a gaping wound; the one on the right, a demonic, black-taloned horror, his midriff the snarling fanged face of an ogre. But it’s the central image that is the most concerning. There, completely naked, stands a woman, a small dog behind her, and a long, thin mirror in her hand. The central image’s title? Vanity.

• In a lot of ways, this one assuming image – the height of a thoroughly ordinary fifteenth century painter’s entire career – sums up the entire rotten core of classical art. Acclaimed critic John Berger put it best in Ways Of Seeing, a book released to tie into his BBC television series of the same name. “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her,” wrote Berger. “Then you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• EFF, joined by ACLU, filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit arguing that border agents need a probable cause warrant before searching personal electronic devices like cell phones and laptops.

• We filed our brief in a criminal case involving Donald Wanjiku, who, in June 2015, landed at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport after returning from a trip to the Philippines. Without getting a warrant from a judge that was based on probable cause of criminality, border agents searched Wanjiku’s cell phone manually—using their hands to navigate the phone’s interface; and forensically—using external software to search the phone’s files. Border agents also forensically searched Wanjiku’s laptop and external hard drive. He was ultimately charged with transporting child pornography.

• Wanjiku asked the district court in U.S. v. Wanjiku to suppress evidence obtained from the warrantless border searches of his electronic devices, but the judge denied his motion. He then appealed to the Seventh Circuit.

• This law is named after Kelsey Smith, who was murdered more than a decade ago. Police approached Verizon asking for her cellphone’s current location, only to be told they needed to get a subpoena. By the time police had obtained that, Smith was already dead — killed the same day she was kidnapped. As Ruiz points out, Kansas lawmakers immediately carved out an emergency exception for cell location ping orders, stripping away subpoena requirements. This bill would extend that to all 50 states.

• The problem is the bill’s wording, which would eliminate privacy protections granted to Americans under the nebulous heading of “emergency.” The bill’s language contains an expansive definition for the new subpoena/warrant exception, which would definitely cover no one idea of an emergency.

• Democratic lawmakers has introduced a bill that would make clear that personal social media pages and messages are public records.

• A Canadian appeals court has decided in favor of greater privacy protections for Canadians. The case involves the discovery of child porn by a computer technician who was repairing the appellant’s computer. This info was handed over to the police who obtained a “general warrant” to image the hard drive to scour it for incriminating evidence.

• Yes, “general warrants” are still a thing in the Crown provinces. The same thing we fought against with the institution of the Fourth Amendment exists in Canada. These days, it has more in common with All Writs orders than the general warrants of the pre-Revolution days, but there’s still a hint of tyrannical intent to them.

• Directions for the collection of bulk communications data issued to the Government’s GCHQ snooping agency over a period of more than a decade were unlawful, a tribunal has found.

• Under security arrangements introduced after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, successive foreign secretaries have had the power to direct GCHQ to obtain data from communications companies.

• Directions for the collection of bulk communications data issued to the Government’s GCHQ snooping agency over a period of more than a decade were unlawful, a tribunal has found.

• Under security arrangements introduced after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, successive foreign secretaries have had the power to direct GCHQ to obtain data from communications companies.

• But the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) found that in practice, this power was unlawfully delegated to the Cheltenham-based agency, allowing spies unfettered discretion on what data to demand.

• The ruling came after a legal challenge by the charity Privacy International, which said it amounted to “proof positive” of the inadequacy of the oversight system formerly in place to safeguard personal privacy.

• The Investigatory Powers Tribunal has re-ruled that GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 engaged in indiscriminate and illegal bulk cable-tapping surveillance for 15 years – and has once again refused to do anything about it.

• In a 113-paragraph judgment handed down today filled with assurances that he was “anxious to assist in achieving improvements” in spying practices, Sir Michael Burton, president of the IPT, found that for a decade and a half, the spy agencies were operating outside section 94 of the Telecommunications Act 1984.

• Privacy International (PI) claimed victory today after a tenacious legal investigation which had forced GCHQ to make “substantial corrections” to evidence it originally gave to the court mid-case.

• The Trump Administration can claim a historic first, even though it would probably rather not do so. As the result of multiple FOIA lawsuits — whose arguments were strengthened by Trump’s tweets and statements from the House Intelligence community — the DOJ has released a stack of FISA warrant applications. This has never happened in the 30-year existence of the FISA court.

• The 412-page document [PDF] (which is actually four warrant applications and their accompanying court orders) detail the FBI’s surveillance of Carter Page, alleged agent of a foreign power. The affidavits detail Page’s connections to Russia, as well as the FBI’s reliance on contested Steele dossier to build its case.

• There are a lot of redactions that obscure Page’s ties to Russian government officials, intelligence officers, and business owners, but there’s enough left out in the open to draw some inferences. What’s most interesting about the warrant applications is how often they rebut assertions made by Devin Nunes and his supposedly-damning memo.

• Nunes portrayed this investigation as an abuse of surveillance powers to spy on the Trump campaign. Unfortunately for this member of the Intelligence Oversight Committee, the documents make it clear surveillance of Page didn’t begin until after he had left his position as an adviser to Trump.

• That doesn’t mean Trump is off the hook in terms of collusion. The documents also refer to other members of Trump’s campaign team “perhaps” being involved with Russian officials and intelligence services during the campaign.

• The affidavits also undercut Nunes’ and Trump’s claims the FBI misled the FISA court about the origins of the Steele Dossier. Both claimed the FBI did not disclose the fact this dossier had been funded by Trump’s political opponents. Footnotes attached to the very first warrant request expressly state Steele (“Source #1″) had been hired by to dig up dirt on Trump’s Russian connections by an outside law firm.

• A St. Louis Uber and Lyft driver has been kicked off both companies’ platforms after the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Friday night that he had been livestreaming his passengers for months without their consent.

Civil Rights/Policing

• On Saturday, 2600 and HOPE Conference organizers refused to remove fascist and white nationalist disruptors from HOPE 2018…

• Freedom not Fear is an annual meeting for civil rights activists from all across Europe. Representatives from non-governmental organisations meet in Brussels for four days to work for freedom in the digitised world.

• If Uber wants to further contest the Board’s findings, it will have to do so in state court.

• Under the alias Cynthia Murphy, Russian spy Lydia Guryeva attended Columbia Business School, and ingratiated herself with a key fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Guryeva’s instructions from Moscow, according to a 2010 FBI complaint, were to “strengthen…ties w. classmates on daily basis incl. professors who can help in job search and who will have (or already have) access to secret info” and to report “on their detailed personal data and character traits w. preliminary conclusions about their potential (vulnerability) to be recruited by Service.”

• Now another graduate student at an urban East Coast university, who similarly cultivated powerbrokers and political operatives, is accused of being a Russian spy and taking orders from high-ranking officials in her homeland. Maria Butina, who received a master’s degree in international relations this past spring from American University in Washington, D.C., courted the National Rifle Association’s top guns and sought access to Republican presidential candidates Scott Walker and Donald Trump. She pleaded innocent last week to charges of conspiring to act as a foreign agent.

• Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination has sparked a great deal of discussion about his views on reproductive rights and executive authority. But the Supreme Court tackles a broad range of issues, including the present and future of digital rights and innovation. As Congress plays its crucial constitutional role in scrutinizing judicial nominees, Senators should take care to press the nominee for his views on how the law should address new technologies and the Internet.

• We hope that the Court will ensure that constitutional protections extend to our digital landscape. To better understand whether Kavanaugh is likely to help or hinder, here are a few questions Senators should ask.

• As an initial matter, any nominee to the Supreme Court must appreciate how the Court’s rulings may impact digital rights now and far into the future. In a 1979 case called Smith v. Maryland, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled that people do not have a privacy interest in information they hand over to third parties (like the numbers you dial on a telephone). That case—where police had reasonable suspicion that a single individual was committing a specific crime—has shaped police practice in the digital age, and provided a contorted legal defense for mass domestic surveillance programs like the NSA’s call-records program, even though they subject millions of people to continuous monitoring based on no suspicion of any particular crime.

• But the Court is starting to understand how much the Internet and the ubiquity of mobile devices have changed daily life in the United States. In Packingham, the Court acknowledged that social media has become the “modern public square,” and in Riley the Court ruled that law enforcement cannot search cell phones at the time of arrest because of the vast quantities of personal data they store. And just a few weeks ago, in Carpenter the Supreme Court ruled that the 4th Amendment applies to cell-phone-based location tracking—so if law enforcement wants historical customer location information from cell-phone providers, they will now have to get a warrant.

• I was an addict and I needed help. The prosecutor in my case couldn’t have cared less.

• Have you ever watched an episode of “Law & Order”? The creators do an amazing job of dramatizing the court process. The characters playing the prosecutors are always eloquent and passionate as they go toe-to-toe with an indignant defense attorney who is quick to counter every point. We see this version of the trial process all the time in mainstream media. The real life, everyday version is much different. My real-life experience was much different.

• Like millions of others in this country, my experience didn’t involve expensive defense lawyers, just overworked and underpaid public defenders. There were no passionate arguments from the prosecutors because over 90 percent of all cases end in a plea agreement, as mine did. I was convicted in 2015 for two felonies and a few subsequent misdemeanors. My felonies were fraud-based charges for cashing checks that weren’t mine. My misdemeanors included things like attempted retail theft, trespassing, and a couple other minor things.

• I did not walk into that courtroom a hardened criminal, and I had never been to jail. My real crime was addiction. Like many others, I was a heroin addict and committed these low-level crimes to support my daily use. My addiction, as that of many women, spurred from serious trauma, including sexual and domestic violence.

• On July 23, the Trump administration told the court that it had reunited or ‘appropriately discharged’ 1,187 of the 2,551 children ages five and older who were forcibly separated from their parents. The government has also reunited 58 out of 103 children who are under the age of five and whose reunions were required by the first deadline, July 10.

• The government identified 1,634 class members who are eligible for reunification and are in various stages of the process. However, in the same federal court filing, the government has claimed that the separated children of 917 parents are either not eligible, or “not yet known to be eligible,” for reunification.

• So I’m a bit late to this, as Stephen Fry released a podcast “documentary” entitle Great Leap Years a few months back. I’ve just started listening to it recently, and it hits on so many of the points and ideas that I’ve tried to address here on Techdirt over the course of the past 20 years, but does so much more brilliantly than anything I’ve done in those ~70,000 posts. That is, in short, if you like what we write about here concerning the nature of innovation and technology, I highly recommend the podcast, after having just listened to the first two episodes.

• And just to give you a sense of this, I’m going to quote a bit from near the end of the 2nd podcast. This isn’t revealing any spoilers, and the storytelling is so wonderful that you really ought to listen to the whole thing. But this so perfectly encapsulates many of my thoughts about why people freaking out about “bad stuff” happening on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more are in the midst of a a moral panic not unlike those we’ve seen before. None of this is to say that we should ignore the “bad stuff” that is happening, or try to minimize it. But it does suggest that we take a broader perspective and recognize that, maybe, this is the way humans are, and it’s not “this new technology” that’s to blame.

• A Maryland judge is allowing a class action lawsuit against Jared Kushner’s family real estate company to proceed, in a ruling that denies most of the company’s arguments to dismiss the case over its treatment of tenants at large apartment complexes in the Baltimore area.

• The lawsuit, filed last September in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, alleges that the Kushner Companies’ real estate management arm, Westminster Management, has been improperly inflating payments owed by tenants by charging them late fees that are often baseless and in excess of state laws limiting them to 5 percent of rent. The suit also claims that Westminster was making some tenants pay so-called court fees that are not actually approved by any court. The suit alleges that the late fees and court fees set in motion a vicious churning cycle in which rent payments are partly put toward the fees instead of the actual rent owed, thus deeming the tenant once again “late” on his or her rent payment, leading to yet more late fees and court fees. Tenants are pressured to pay the snowballing bills with immediate threat of eviction, the suit alleges.

• The lawsuit followed a May 2017 article co-published by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine that described the highly aggressive legal tactics used by Kushner Companies to pursue tenants and former tenants at 15 apartment complexes in the Baltimore area.

• During a pat-down, a DC police officer put his fingers into our client’s anus and grabbed his genitals.

• Late one September afternoon in 2017, on an ordinary residential street in a predominantly African-African neighborhood of the nation’s capital, M.B. Cottingham and his friends had gathered to discuss how to celebrate his birthday that evening. Someone popped a bottle of champagne.

• And then everything changed.

• In what D.C. residents (and even a federal appeals court judge) recognize as common practice in the city, police cars rolled up and the officers jumped out to confront this group of African-African men congregating peacefully on the streets of their own neighborhood. Though the officers had no reason for suspicion, they demanded to know if the men had guns. The men all said no.

• One officer approached Mr. Cottingham, a lifelong D.C. resident who works as an ice-cream vendor, selling frozen treats out of a truck. The officer, Sean Lojacono, asked Mr. Cottingham about a bulge in his sock. Mr. Cottingham pulled out a legal amount of marijuana and — having been stopped and frisked countless times by D.C. police since he was 14 and hoping to keep the situation from escalating — volunteered to let the officer frisk him.

• What happened next was shocking both to Mr. Cottingham and the thousands of viewers who would later watch the video of the incident online.

• Ranging far beyond what should have been a limited pat-down for weapons, Officer Lojacono jammed his fingers between Mr. Cottingham’s buttocks and grabbed his genitals. Mr. Cottingham physically flinched and verbally protested, making clear that this highly intrusive search was not within the scope of the frisk to which he had consented. Officer Lojacono responded by handcuffing Mr. Cottingham and returning to probe the most sensitive areas of his person — two more excruciating times.

• No warrant, probable cause, reasonable suspicion, or consent justified the scope of these probes, which were conducted in broad daylight in public and with no other discernible reason than to humiliate and degrade Mr. Cottingham and to display the officer’s power over him.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The rise of cord cutting shows no sign of slowing down. As cable providers continue to raise prices yet refuse to seriously address their dismal customer service, nasty billing fraud problems and skyrocketing prices, more users than ever are flocking to a new variety of cheaper, more flexible streaming alternatives. Some cablecos have attempted to get out ahead of this trend by offering their own competing services (AT&T’s DirecTV Now, Dish Network’s Sling TV), but most traditional cable providers seem intent on just doubling down on the same bad ideas that started the cord cutting trend in the first place.

Intellectual Monopolies

• ZTE, the Chinese telecommunications manufacturer, has been found to be wilfully infringing seven of Maxell’s US patents. ZTE has been ordered to pay Maxell $43 million for the infringement of the patents, which relate to wireless flash drives, multimedia devices, and storage and memory devices in mobile phones and tablets.

• Maxell, a Japanese consumer electronics company, had been trying to negotiate a licence agreement with ZTE for its patents since 2013, which it believed would be mutually beneficial to the companies. However, ZTE resisted signing a deal with Maxell and incorporated Maxell’s patented technology in 105 of its products. ZTE were thus found to have wilfully infringed Maxell’s patents.

• There are many studies of patent litigation, including the reasons that firms litigate – I have worked on some myself. Much of it is really helpful information, but all of the studies lack one key component: the patents that get litigated are highly selected. They are selected for a) the firms that litigate (practicing v. non-practicing), b) the patents that are litigated (individual, portfolio, lead), and c) the cases that are litigated to judgment (default, settlement, summary judgment, trial).

• In the realm of which firms and patents litigate, most of the studies have looked at the litigation level, comparing characteristics of patents and technology with samples of those patents and technologies that were not litigated. This is helpful information, but it certainly doesn’t tell the whole story. So, Dirk Czarnitzki and Kristof Van Criekingen (KU Leuven Managerial Economics) have used survey data of Belgian firms to be better understand which firms litigate. A draft of their paper New Evidence on Determinants of IP Litigation: A Market-Based Approach is posted on SSRN.

• NEXTracker announced a technology agreement with French solar tracker company, Optimum Tracker, to acquire key intellectual property elated to mechanical, electrical and software systems that will allow further differentiation of NEXTracker’s solar tracker portfolio of products and services. NEXTracker says the acquired IP is especially relevant for its TrueCapture control system, which increases typical PV power plant energy harvest by 2 to 6 percent. The strategic partnership will also enable the two companies to expand their market presence in the burgeoning Middle East, Southern Europe, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa regions.

Trademarks

• There has been much progress in recent times with the negotiations between the UK and European Union in relation to registered IP rights. However, the European Commission has recently given notice that .eu domain names will no longer be open to UK businesses post-Brexit.

• In a recent notice to stakeholders, including EURid, the .eu register operator, the Commission has stated:

• “As of the withdrawal date, undertakings and organisations that are established in the United Kingdom but not in the EU and natural persons who reside in the United Kingdom will no longer be eligible to register .eu domain names or, if they are .eu registrants, to renew .eu domain names registered before the withdrawal date.”

• The consequence of the above statement is that the estimate 300,000 .eu domain names owned by UK-based registrants may need to be deleted on 30 March 2019, or at least when they next become due for renewal.

Copyrights

• Back in February we wrote about an absolutely horrible ruling out of a New York court by Judge Katherine Forrest that argued embedding an infringing tweet could be an act of infringement on its own. As we pointed out, if this ruling holds, it would undermine some of the basis of how the internet itself works. The issue here gets a bit into the weeds of both how the internet and how copyright law works. Embedding something on the internet, at a technical level, is really no different than how linking on the internet works. And it’s long been established that if you link to infringing content, that alone should not be considered a separate act of infringement.

• [...]

• Depending on where you stand this may or may not be a good thing. The case now moves back to the lower court (though, potentially with a different judge as Forrest just announced she’s leaving the bench at some point “later this year.”). It may go to trial, or the remaining defendants may decide to just settle the case and not have to deal with it. If the case does move forward, there are other potential reasons why Goldman may have difficulty winning, including the lack of actual knowledge of infringement by the publishers embedding the tweets.

• In either of those situations, Forrest’s odd decision is then rendered less impactful. Since it’s in the district court, it has no direct precedential value on other cases (though can be cited). And that’s at least preferable to the 2nd Circuit blessing Forrest’s dismissal of the server test… though not as good as if the 2nd Circuit decides to bless the server test. It’s also possible that the issue could come up on appeal later (i.e., not as an interlocutory appeal, but after the case reaches a conclusion in the lower court). Either way, this case is still a bit of a mess, and is yet another example of how bad the law is at dealing with technology.

• Matt Furie had no idea a stoned frog he posted on Myspace would be co-opted by Nazis. Now he’s on a mission to reclaim his infamous work.

• Matt Furie drew the alt-right’s favorite cartoon frog. Now he is leading one of the most successful legal campaigns against the racist right.

• [...]

• “We basically mixed Pepe in with Nazi propaganda, etc. We built that association,” a white supremacist Twitter user told The Daily Beast in 2016 of the campaign to make Pepe a gateway meme to the alt-right.

• Furie was initially casual about the frog’s incorporation into meme culture.

• [...]

• Furie’s first copyright claim came last August against the author of The Adventures of Pepe and Pede, a children’s book with a thinly veiled anti-Muslim message. The kid’s book followed Pepe the frog and Pede the centipede (Redditors on the r/the_donald refer to each other as “Pedes,” short for centipedes) as they took on an evil bearded alligator named “Alkah.”

• Site-blocking is the in-vogue anti-piracy mechanism and in this respect, Russia is taking matters to extremes. According to an announcement from the authority tasked with managing Internet restrictions, more than 3,400 online resources are now subject to permanent blocking after being sanctioned by either the Moscow City Court or Ministry of Communications.

• This week UK telecoms regulator Ofcom announced that streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon are now more popular than traditional pay-TV. It’s a sign that the Internet plays a crucial role in today’s distribution of video entertainment. However, according to research and analytics firm MUSO, pirate audiences remain a great untapped pool of wealth.

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