• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Dell XPS 13 Skylake (2016) review: A lot for a Linux user to like

In the end I decided to put openSUSE on the laptop as it worked the best for me. I installed Arch Linux and couple of other distros in VirtualBox so I can play with them. I can run two VMs at the same time without any compromise on speed.

As far as the laptop goes, I love it. And I’ll give it serious consideration when it comes time to replace my MacBook. The only issue that may hold me back is the lack of HiDPI support by many apps. But that will change with time.

Linux operating system

Linux has grown in popularity due to its more flexible and customisable nature compared to its more popular counterparts Windows and Mac.

Desktop

• Remix OS Creators Announce New Android PCs, Partnership with Android-x86 Founder

  Today, June 16, 2016, Jide Technology, the creators of the well-known Android-x86-based Remix OS, have announced an official partnership with Android-x86′s founder as well as the availability of multiple new Android PCs powered by Remix OS.

  Jide Technology has grown a lot in the last couple of years, and today they are proud to announce that the company is already capable of making partnerships with various hardware manufacturers to ship Android PCs and 2-in-1 tablets with Remix OS pre-installed. What this means is that they will thus allow users to run Google’s Android operating system on more devices as their primary desktop environment.

Server

• Open Source CoreOS Linux Now Available in China, Delivering Secure, Automatic Software Updates

  With the availability of CoreOS Linux in a new region, the distributed systems community as well as small and large organizations across continents will benefit from running their applications in software containers on a consistent platform globally. Current CoreOS Linux users can take advantage of a cloud-native platform to reach one of the world’s largest markets.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Mesa 12.0 3D Graphics Library to No Longer Provide a Single VAAPI Driver Backend

    Collabora’s Emil Velikov has announced the release and general availability of the third and likely the last RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Mesa 12.0.0 3D Graphics Library.

    Mesa 3D Graphics Library 12.0.0 Release Candidate 3 arrives more than a week after the second RC version, bringing a total of 111 changes to most of the included graphics drivers and components. The full changelog has been attached at the end of the article just in case you’re wondering what’s new in this update.

  • Here’s my own Linux OpenGL vs Vulkan test for Dota 2, not much difference for me

    I would love to run some Windows 10 tests in comparison, but Windows wanted to update which slowed everything down, Steam kept going to a 0b/s download for Dota 2 and it’s just…so slow. I will hopefully do a Windows 10 comparison when Windows actually plays nicely. I was on it for half an hour and it only got to 40% done on updates, so it would probably take all night to do that + the tests.

Applications

• 3 ways to use open source alternatives to Acrobat

  I can’t be the only person who imagined the office of the future, free from the confines of the eight and a half by eleven sheet (or A4, for my international friends), would have long since arrived. Instead, we’ve managed to land in an intermediate state of not paperless, but less paper.

• Wine 1.8.3 Stable Release Adds Support for Many Nvidia GPUs, Fixes Over 50 Bugs

  Just a few moments ago, June 16, 2016, the Wine developers have announced the release of the third maintenance update in the stable Wine 1.8 series of the open-source software used for running Windows apps and games on Linux.

  Wine 1.8.3 comes as an unexpected released, after less than a week from the announcement of Wine 1.9.12, the most advanced development snapshot of the project, to fix a total of 54 issues that have been reported by users since Wine 1.8.2 released in back in April 2016.

• Are Linux repositories a bad idea?

  Repositories have long been an important tool for most Linux users. But what happens when a repository is no longer available to support your system? A writer at Network World examined this issue and wondered if repositories were ultimately a very bad idea.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to get started with 3D printing in Blender

  • This morning I came in to find that my root partition on my workstation was full…

  • So I should document the purple server a little more

  • Verifying gpg keys

  • Custom Overcloud Deploys

  • Learning about the Overcloud Deploy Process

  • How to keep your Boot EFI partition clean of old Linux bootloader folders

  • RHCSA module 2 – Log management, disk partition and LVM management

  • Translation parameters in angular-gettext

• Games

  • Want to benchmark Dota 2 on Linux? Here’s how to do it

    For those of you who aren’t sure how to benchmark Dota 2 on Linux, here’s a small guide. It frustrated me there wasn’t one, so after getting help I’m sharing it with you all. One thing a lot of websites miss when doing benchmarks, is easily detailing how others can do their own.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Qt 5.7 released

    I’m very happy to announce that Qt 5.7 is now available. It’s been only 3 months since we released Qt 5.6, so one might expect a rather small release with Qt 5.7. But apart from the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, we have managed to add a whole bunch of new things to this release.

  • Qt 5.7.0 Officially Is Out

  • KDE e.V. Joins Advisory Board of The Document Foundation

    Today we are delighted to announce that KDE e.V. is joining the advisory board of The Document Foundation, the foundation backing LibreOffice and the Document Liberation Project. The Document Foundation also joins KDE e.V.’s group of advising community partners as an affiliate.

    The KDE Community has been creating Free Software since 1996 and shares a lot of values around Free Software and open document formats with The Document Foundation, and brings the experience of running a Free Software organization for almost two decades to their advisory board. Both organizations are working in the OASIS technical committee for the OpenDocument Format. We also collaborate on common aspects of development of office software, such as usability and visual design. The affiliation of KDE e.V. and The Document Foundation on an organizational level will help to move forward with the shared goal of giving end users control of their computing needs through Free Software.

  • KDE Doing a Survey for Input on our Mission

  • KDAB, Qt 3D and the Release of Qt 5.7

    Some of you may know that Qt 3D is going strong almost entirely due to the work of the KDAB team, led by Dr. Sean Harmer and Paul Lemire. You can read all about its near demise and ultimate rescue here – it’s quite a story, and started with the release of Qt 4.

    Now we are approaching another major chapter in the Qt 3D story, as Qt 5.7.0 is released along with a fully supported stable Qt 3D module. Qt 3D offers a high-level facility for 3D graphics, paving the way for making 3D content a first class citizen in Qt applications. This is big news!

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Gtk+ Versioning

    New thoughts are being expressed about Gtk+ versioning.

    There is something about numbering. Whatever. The numbering of Gtk+ versions is a problem I do not have. A problem I do not expect to have. Hence “whatever”.

    But there is also a message about stability and it is a scary one.

  • Long term support for GTK+

    The record (in terms of commit history) seems to not support your position — as much as you think everyone else is “delusional” about it, the commit log does not really lie.

    The 2.24.0 release was cut in January, 2011 — five and half years ago. No new features, no new API. Precisely what would happen with the new release plan, except that the new plan would also give a much better cadence to this behaviour.

  • Batch Renaming – Call for design ideas

  • Learning about scenario tasks

    For the internship, we have been following a schedule where we research topics about usability testing. After that “research” phase, we’ll start building our usability tests. And we are almost finished with that “research” phase.

  • GUADEC 2016

    In case you use GNOME, the GUADEC conference is also for users. In case you’re wondering if you’ll fit in: Everyone is usually super friendly. First year you go you go to see talks and maybe a few drinks (alcohol is optional). Second year you talk more with the people you met from last year. Third year onward the talks are an excuse to go and the only talks you see are the ones where the speakers asked you to please attend

  • Are you planning to attend LAS GNOME?

    I loved attending the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference (GUADEC). I want to go back, but travel to Europe is a bit expensive. And it’s hard to get away for such a long trip. So I’m not to make it for this year’s GUADEC.

Distributions

• News about Pisi Linux

  For example, Pisi 2.0 is said to bring two features that I’ve always appreciated: a live disk (it was about time!) and an iso image writer to USB.

• New Releases

  • Salix Xfce 14.2 Now in Beta, Will Be Based on Slackware Linux 14.2 and Xfce 4.12

    The Salix Xfce 14.2 GNU/Linux operating system is in development, and it looks like a public Beta version has just been released into the wild, allowing the community to see what’s coming in the Slackware-based OS.

    Salix Xfce 14.2 Beta 1 arrives on June 15, 2016, three months after the Alpha milestone, bringing many enhancements and new features, among which we can mention an improved boot menu that lets users choose in which language to install Salix, and a boot prompt is no longer available on the ISO image.

  • Dix changements apportés par HandyLinux 2.5. Le septième va vous étonner !

• Slackware Family

  • Slack Live 1.1.0, Licensing History, Reviving PCs

    The top story in Linux news today was the release of Slackware Linux 1.1.0 featuring the latest Slackware-current and Plasma 5.6.5. Elsewhere, Christopher Tozzi penned a history of Open Source licenses and the Free Software Foundation published their first in a series of licensing resource guides. Douglas DeMaio blogged some of the latest news from Tumbleweed and Swapnil Bhartiya rounded up the best lightweight distros for your older PC.

  • KDE 5_16.06 for Slackware -current

    It’s that time of the month again, where the three main software collections of the KDE community have had new releases. Time to package and release for Slackware!

  • Slackware Live Edition 1.1.0 comes with the latest Plasma5 on ISO

    ISO images for Slackware Live Edition based on the liveslak 1.1.0 scripts and using Slackware-current dated “Wed Jun 15 06:13:17 UTC 2016” are available as of now (I missed the 3rd update Pat made to slackware-current today but I think that’s acceptible). The Plasma5 variant contains the latest packages which I made publicly available earlier today.

• Red Hat Family

  • NethServer 6.8 Officially Released, Based on the CentOS 6.8 Operating System

    Softpedia has been informed today, June 16, 2016, by Alessio Fattorini, that the final release of the NethServer 6.8 server-oriented, open-source, and free GNU/Linux operating system is now available for download.

  • 4 lessons about open organizations I learned offline

    I’m a member of two non-profits in my city. One of them is a sporting league, the other a community initiative to save a bit of land from commercial development. Both organizations are member-run. No one is paid to participate and external funding is minimal; in fact volunteers pay membership dues each year. Neither has a “CEO” or “board chair” position (other than those members arbitrarily give). These small non-profits barely have web presences—let alone a connection to the open movement.

    Traditional business models function through rigid hierarchies, while open organizations use flexible teams to ensure maximum efficiency. We often associate “open” with “online” because certain technologies seem integral to remaining flexible in diverse communities. My offline communities have taught me four lessons about the ways open organizational principles don’t necessarily rely on the digital technologies we tend to associate with them.

  • Voice of the Masses: Have you changed your mind about Systemd?

    Systemd, the “bag of bits” that originally started as an init system but has since taken over a lot of the lower-level plumbing of GNU/Linux, has a controversial history. Some distributions were quick to take it up, whereas others were more hesitant, arguing that it was subject to feature-creep and violated some long-standing Unix principles.

  • Migrate to Systemd Without a Reboot

    Yesterday I was fixing an issue with one of the servers behind kallithea-scm.org: the hook intended to propagage pushes from Our Own Kallithea to Bitbucket stopped working. Until yesterday, that server was using Debian’s flavour of System V init and djb’s dæmontools to keep things running. To make the hook asynchronous, I wrote a service to be managed to dæmontools, so that concurrency issued would be solved by it. However, I didn’t implement any timeouts, so when last week wget froze while pulling Weblate’s hook, there was nothing to interrupt it, so the hook stopped working since dæmontools thought it’s already running and wouldn’t re-trigger it. Killing wget helped, but I decided I need to do something with it to prevent the situation from happening in the future.

  • Why Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst says “office gossip” is not such a bad thing in your business

    Backstabbing banter, unconfirmed fact swaps and low blows are all fair definitions of the word “gossip”.

    So workplace gossip is a HR nightmare, right?

    Not necessarily, says Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst.

    “Rule of thumb when it comes to office gossip: If you have more truth telling at the water cooler than in meetings, you’ve got a problem,” Whitehurst told Business Insider.

    “You want to get to a place where people feel safe to share their thoughts, feelings, and opinions about a situation, beyond the water cooler.”

  • Finance

    • Red Hat Inc (RHT) to Post Solid 1Q Earnings next Week: Pacific Crest

      In a research note issued today, Pacific Crest Securities opined that Red Hat Inc. (NYSE:RHT) will report solid first quarter of fiscal 2017 (1QFY17) results, although seasonality is likely to bring in fewer large deals. The sell-side firm reaffirmed its Overweight rating on RHT stock, with an $88 price target.

    • Analyst Target Price and Rating Check on Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Broker Roundup For Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Large Outflow of Money Witnessed in Red Hat

    • Stock Trending Up: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Latest Broker Coverage

    • Barclays Sees A ‘Healthy Setup’ Into Red Hat’s Q1 Earnings

    • July 29th Options Now Available For Red Hat (RHT)

  • Fedora

    • Phabricator RPMs for RHEL, Fedora

      If you work with Phabricator, by engaging with Kolab (for example), you may be interested to know about our Infrastructure and Tools repositories.

      These contain Phabricator’s stable branches for Phabricator itself, arcanist and libphutil.

    • Fedora Cloud FAD 2016 Report

      The Fedora Cloud Working Group met on June 7 and 8 in Raleigh to work on deliverables for Fedora 25 and beyond. As it turns out, we had a really productive set of discussions and have some good ideas for the Cloud Working Group going forward.

    • Keeping Busy with Side Projects

      This doesn’t just apply to side projects. Even with my work in the Fedora Project, I bounce between projects. Some days you’ll see me spend time hacking on Infrastructure projects, helping with updates to servers, fixing services that go down randomly at 3am (I’m a night owl, so I’m up anyway). Other days you’ll see me working on the packages I maintain, keeping them updated or fixing bugs that people report on them. Other days I’ll work on Fedora’s plethora of web applications, fixing bugs or writing Haskell clients to interact with them (finding and reporting bugs as I go). Still other days you’ll see me work on the Websites team and pretend to be a designer. If I didn’t have this freedom to move around between projects, I would not have lasted very long in the Fedora community. It is this freedom to move between projects that makes Fedora so interesting to me.

• Debian Family

  • Reproducible builds: week 59 in Stretch cycle

  • The road to debconf 2016, tourism and arts.

    I didn’t have high hopes as there obviously are many more talented peers around me who understand FOSS and Debian at a much more fundamental, philosophical as well as technical level than me. Much to my surprise though, about a month (and around two or three weeks just before the event was about to take place) I got the bursary/sponsorships for food, accommodation as well as travel. I was unsure that the remaining time was enough to get a visa hence declined that time around.

  • On discomfort and new groups

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • OnePlus 3 to Become an Unofficial Ubuntu Phone, Development Will Start Soon

        We had a quick chat today with Marius Gripsgård from UBports.com, a group of independent developers trying to port Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system to as many devices as possible, about an upcoming port to OnePlus 3.

        Yes, you’re reading it right, OnePlus 3 is about to become an unofficial Ubuntu Phone, as Mr. Gripsgård informs Softpedia today that he already ordered the device and will start development, porting of Ubuntu Touch, as soon as it arrives.

      • Canonical Releases Snapd 2.0.8 with Universal Snaps, New Desktop Interfaces

        On June 15, 2016, Canonical’s David Callé proudly announced the availability of an updated version of the snapd tool for Snappy Ubuntu Core and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating systems.

        snapd 2.0.8 is now live, coming one month after the release of snapd 2.0.3 to bring various improvements to the technology Canonical uses to interact with the Snappy infrastructure of Ubuntu Core, a variant of the Ubuntu Linux OS designed for embedded and IoT devices.

      • How high will Shuttleworth’s snap initiative fly?

        Over the last 12 years since he started the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Canonical, has made many efforts to bring about what he has characterised as unity in the Linux community.

        Of course, whenever he has suggested such initiatives — like universal release schedules, for example — he has always had a vested interest in them himself. Nothing wrong with that, if the initiatives were also benefitting the Linux community at large.

        But given that he has rubbed up far too many people the wrong way, his initiatives have generally failed to gain acceptance. And his latest move, to have a single packaging format for Linux packages, something he calls snap, has already brought out opposition.

      • Developer to port Ubuntu Touch onto OnePlus

        If all goes according to the UBports team’s plans, OnePlus 3 may unofficially be powered by Ubuntu Touch. Ubuntu developer, Marius Gripsgård from UBports.com told Softpedia that they had acquired a OnePlus 3 and would soon be porting Ubuntu Touch onto it.

      • Ubuntu’s snaps come to other Linux distros

      • Ubuntu’s ‘Snap’ packages may be the future of software installation on every Linux PC

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Ubuntu MATE Linux: It’s Not Rocket Science

          Granted, this was no deep dive into the belly of the beast, but it was a positive first step in introducing me to the world of Linux on a machine that was otherwise gathering dust in my closet. In comparison to how it ran with Windows XP, I was impressed with how quickly everything responded in Ubuntu MATE — though cautiously optimistic because I know that’s how it tends to go with newly installed operating systems. It’s only been a week so far since the installation, so I’ll see if it still plays nicely after being shackled to my habitually unreasonable human demands for a little longer.

Devices/Embedded

• Xilinx adds dual core Cortex-A53/FPGA Zynq SoC model

  Xilinx unveiled a dual-core “CG” version of its Cortex-A53/FPGA Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, and Mentor Graphics announced Android 5.1 and Linux support.

  Back in Feb. 2015, Xilinx announced its next generation Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC (multiprocessor system-on-chip) follow-on to its popular Zynq 7000 hybrid ARM/FPGA system-on-chips. The 16nm, quad-core Cortex-A53 SoC, which features a faster FPGA, a GPU, and two Cortex-R5 MCUs, has reached production, and now Xilinx has revealed a dual-core “CG” version of the SoC due to ship in the first half of 2017.

• Hackable Runcible pocket smartwatch goes on pre-order

  Monohm has relaunched its disc-shaped, open source “Runcible” mobile device, which runs an Android-based OS on a Snapdragon 410, and has a 2.5-inch display.

  The Runcible received a lot of media attention when it was originally announced running Firefox OS in Feb. 2015. But it also left a lot of questions. Was the rounded, disc-shaped gizmo a phone, a pocket smartwatch, or a hippie talisman for warding off mean people?

• Bringing Raspberry Pi to schools in Tanzania

  Thanks to open source software, Powering Potential and the Raspberry Pi Foundation are able to bring computers and a library of digital education content to rural schools in the East African nation of Tanzania. Recently, the Foundation funded a project that is now distributing Raspberry Pi computers with uploaded educational content alongside portable projectors and screens to 56 schools across the Zanzibar archipelago and two mainland regions of Tanzania. The Segal Family Foundation also provided matching funds, which enables the project to reach twice as many schools.

  With a five-fold increase in the number of students in the decade following 2003, Tanzania is struggling to provide more schools, classrooms, teachers, desks, and textbooks. Yet whenever you visit rural secondary schools in Tanzania, you will find eager girls and boys in roughly equal numbers outfitted in uniforms with ready smiles.

  I spoke with Janice Lathen, founding director and president of Powering Potential, to learn more about the program and its use of open source software.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Shazam for Android can now automatically discover what music you’re listening to

    • How to get new Android N now & how to downgrade Android N): How to install Android N – Developer Preview 4 out now

    • We asked developers what they think about Android apps on Chrome OS

    • Android Growth Slowing — But Still Gaining Ground

    • iOS 10 and Android N: Piling more frosting on a stale cake

    • Awesome Android Home Screens: The Chrome Phone

    • Android/Mobile Microconference Accepted into 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference

    • Android/Mobile Microconference Accepted into 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference

    • Tips, Tricks And Apps For Total Android Security

    • TED for Android updated with overhauled interface, improved navigation, more

    • Android N 7.0 UK release date and name rumours, public beta and new features – Android ‘Namey McNameFace’ Developer Preview 4 is out now

    • AT&T brings WiFi calling to Android phones

    • AT&T brings Wi-Fi calling to Android

    • Android N Direct Reply Works with Twitter’s Direct Messages

    • Here’s everything that’s new in Android N Developer Preview 4 [Gallery]

    • 6 quick ways to clear space on an overstuffed Android device

    • iMessage for Android was a dumb idea, anyway

    • Evie brings instant search to Android

    • Five Things Android Does Right With Security, Four Things It Does Wrong, And Five Things You Should Be Doing

    • Android VP really wants you to think the next version of Android is called Nutella

    • Android N to be called Namey McNameface, Google jokingly confirms

    • Google might be trolling us with Android Nutella name

    • OnePlus 3 open source kernel files are available on Github

      Custom ROMs are fun. More than that, they offer ways to significantly extend the software life of phones. Manufacturer decides it no longer wants to support hardware? Hopefully someone out there will take up the mantle. But to do that, they need the kernel source code for a given device.

      OnePlus has already made those files available for the OnePlus 3. Developers and tinkerers can snag the goods from Github.

    • Former Android chief is betting on quantum computing and AI

      Andy Rubin — one of the people who invented the Android platform — left Google in 2014, but he’s still helping shape the future of technology. At Bloomberg Technology Conference, he revealed that one of the startups his hardware incubator is backing has a pretty lofty goal: finding a way to commercialize quantum computing devices with the manufacturing processes we use today. Rubin said new computing platforms “happen every 10 to 12 years.” He believes it’s time to start building quantum computers and using them to run AI.

    • The new Jide Remix Pro is perhaps the best Android-based alternative to the Microsoft Surface series

      Jide Technologies, a Chinese company that’s known among Android fans as the developer of the PC-style interpretation of Android called the Remix OS, has launched a new tablet. The new Jide Remix Pro 2-in-1 follows Jide’s two previous productivity-oriented Android devices, the Remix Mini PC and the Remix tablet.

      Much like Microsoft’s Surface tablets, the Jide Remix Pro comes with a keyboard dock accessory that transforms the slab into a notebook. However, unlike most other productivity-centered Android tablets, the Jide Remix Pro has a unique advantage.

      While many Android manufacturers have attempted to create Android-based competitors to the Microsoft Surface, all of these attempts have been muffled by Android’s multitasking limitations. Jide’s Remix OS is an Android implementation that focuses on solving this struggle by allowing users to open multiple apps. Better still, these apps can be freely resized according to preference.

    • Oh hey, here’s another new Android phone, the Meizu m3s

      Chinese phone manufacturer Meizu showed off its m3s yesterday, and wow it sounds a lot like these phones from Xiaomi. What a day for Chinese Android phones! Like Xiaomi’s Redmi 3S, the m3s has two variations, one with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage and another with 3GB of RAM with 32GB of internal storage. They even have the same price of $106 for the 2GB version and $136 for the 3GB. Are these the exact same phones? Are you intrigued? Do you want an answer? Great. Here are some specs:

    • Android vs. iOS: Key Features Android Lacks

      Despite the things I feel are missing from Android, I believe it remains the best mobile operating system for my needs. It’s got the apps I want, allows me control over my phone and I get to choose my default applications. Perhaps best of all, I get to choose my user interface thanks to launchers like Nova. Toss in the fact that I get to choose my phone hardware vs having it dictated to me and I can’t fathom returning to iOS – ever. My needs have simply outgrown it.

Scality S3 Server Now Generally Available

Scality Releases Open Source S3 Server

Scality Releases S3 Server Open Source Version of Its S3 API

Migrating to Nextcloud 9

Chef’s open source tool lets applications automate infrastructure provisioning

Chef Habitat Project Embeds IT Automation Code Within Applications

Chef launches Habitat open source project to develop ‘application automation’

Chef cooks up a new open-source application automation project

Events

• OUCE (OpenNMS Users’ Conference- Europe)

• Richard Stallman to speak in Montreal, Canada

SaaS/Back End

• Why you can’t win by focusing on software

  Boris Renski, co-founder and CMO of cloud computing services company Mirantis, wrote a blog post today sending a dire warning to the software industry. In his words: “numbered are the days of any company whose core business is pinned to selling licenses or subscriptions to infrastructure software bits.”

Databases

• Splice Machine releases dual-engine RDBMS to open source

  Splice Machine, the startup behind a dual-engine relational database management system (RDBMS) powered by Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, last week announced that it would release that technology to open source.

  Splice Machine uses resource isolation — separate processes and resource management for its Hadoop and Spark components — to ensure that large, complex online analytical processing (OLAP) queries don’t overwhelm time-sensitive online transaction processing (OLTP) queries. The hybrid architecture allows you to run analytical workloads and transactional workloads concurrently — a boon for use cases ranging from digital marketing to ETL acceleration, operational data lakes, data warehouse offloads, Internet of Things (IoT) applications, web, mobile and social applications and operational applications.

Education

• Is open source a clear path to success for new grads?

  Open source is a great career direction for newly minted computer science and IT graduates. Here’s why.

• Holberton School Wakes Students up to IT Operations

  The Holberton School got its start in 2015, offering the promise of a new way to teach students how to code. Now the school is expanding further, with a new partnership with PagerDuty, an IT incident management firm, that aims to teach students the reality of modern IT.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Netflix to open source orchestration framework [Ed: DRM giant (and lobbyist for DRM inside the WWW) wants us to think it’s “open”]

  Netflix is hoping to open source a system it built to orchestrate the machine learning workflows that improve recommendations to users on what to watch next.

• Microsoft releases open source bug-bomb in the rambling house of C

• Microsoft looks into extending the C programming language

• Microsoft open-sources a safer version of C language

• Microsoft Open Sources Checked C

• Open Source: Unpatched Vulnerabilities Show a Dark Side to Open Source [Ed: The parasites from Black Duck spread FUD again, as originally intended]

• Open Source Cloud Hosted eCommerce [Ed: I cannot find source code of Arastta (only binaries or static files). Seems like false marketing.]

  Being Open Source provides another great advantage to Arastta Cloud users: freedom of leaving. If you are not satisfied with the Arastta, then you can leave it with all your data because you can access all the files and database. But this is not possible with other cloud platforms since they only allow access to limited areas of your store.

  Arastta Cloud brings all advantages of being an Open Source platform to its users but at the same time that doesn’t cost them. Whole structure is built as single-tenant, thus all stores are isolated from each other. In case of an attack or hack, it doesn’t affect other stores and accounts.

• Open Source Community Helps Shape New Swift 3.0 Developer Preview

• Apple’s Swift 3 developer preview arrives for MacOS and Linux

• IBM Enhances Support For The Swift Programming Language

• IBM Moves Swift to the Enterprise

BSD

• ZFS: Apple’s New Filesystem That Wasn’t

  In the 7 years since ZFS development halted at Apple, they’ve worked on a variety of improvements in HFS and Core Storage, and hacked at at least two replacements for HFS that didn’t make it out the door. This week Apple announced their new filesystem, APFS, after 2 years in development. It’s not done; some features are still in development, and they’ve announced the ambitious goal of rolling it out to laptop, phone, watch, and tv within the next 18 months. At Sun we started ZFS in 2001. It shipped in 2005 and that was really the starting line, not the finish line. Since then I’ve shipped the ZFS Storage Appliance in 2008 and Delphix in 2010 and each has required investment in ZFS / OpenZFS to make them ready for prime time. A broadly featured, highly functional filesystem takes a long time.

Public Services/Government

• Open Source Software Finds its Sweet Spot in the Public Sector

  For more than sixteen years, James Passingham, Chief Technical Officer at Foehn, has pioneered the development of communication systems using open source software. Here, James explains where government policy encouraging the use of open source is bearing fruit.

  It was some four years ago, with the founding of the Government Digital Service (GDS), that open source software first came into the public sector limelight. Under the direction of Liam Maxwell, Government CTO at that time, the ‘Better for Less’ report that he co-authored set out the policies that gave government IT management the remit to pursue the advantages of two specific technologies – cloud and open source software.

• Life cycle support also a priority for open source

  Open source software development projects and public administrations have similar concerns about software support. The two also share an approach to classify software requirements, concludes the EU-FOSSA project, a software security audit project on open source by the European Commission and the European Parliament.

• Romania augments eProcurement portal

  Romania’s electronic procurement portal ‘e-licitatie’ now provides more information on the public procurement process, the portal announced on 8 June. Users can now find preliminary information on planned calls for tender, and can learn how to bid for national and European contracts.

• EU eGovernment factsheet

  The European Commission published this week an update to its eGovernment factsheet. The previous version was from 2015. This factsheet update is the last in the suite of 34 covering eGovernment in Europe. The text presents an overview of the state and progress of eGovernment in Europe and at the European Commission.

  On the political level, this 2016 update casts a light on numerous strategic directions, programmes and initiatives promoted at European level in order to deliver sustainable, economic and social benefits from a Digital Single Market. One of these programmes is the freshly launched EU eGovernment Action plan 2016-2020 substantiated into 20 concrete actions. This plan strives for efficient, inclusive, user friendly and end-to-end digital public services in EU by 2020.

• Adullact about to unveil revamped repository

  Next week, France’s platform for civil servants working on free software, Adullact, will unveil its revamped software development platform and repository. At its 6th annual congress, the association will also launch a label to highlight and reward French public administrations contributing to free software.

Licensing/Legal

• A Brief History of Free and Open Source Software Licensing

  Open source software licenses may not excite people as much as open source code, but they have been just as important in keeping software free. Open source licensing as we know it today didn’t always exist, however. It evolved as programmers developed more sophisticated strategies regarding their intellectual property.

  Below is a look at the major milestones in open source licensing history. It doesn’t cover every twist and turn. That would take a book.

  But it outlines the major arc in open source licensing strategies, from the days when free software promoters disdained licenses altogether through present-day battles about software licensing and the cloud.

• Licensing resources series: A Quick Guide to GPLv3

  One of our main goals here in the Free Software Foundation’s Licensing & Compliance Lab is education. Over the years we have created a wide breadth of tools and resources to help users and developers understand free software licenses and related legal issues. We’ve been doing this for so long that some resources, published some years ago but still very relevant, aren’t consulted as often as they could be. With all these great tools available, we thought it would be good to take some time to highlight individual resources that you may not know about. With that, we are starting a regular series of articles, each promoting a particular tool or resource to help you understand the legal side of free software.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Marty the 3D printed open-source robot for STEM education launches on Indiegogo

    The robots are coming and 3D printing is partially to blame for the impending invasion. Similar in concept but different in execution to the 3D printed WireBeings robot we covered a few months back, Marty the Robot is a being promoted through a new indiegogo campaign that’s hoping to introduce robotics to younger generations.

Programming/Development

• “You don’t need design thinking” – How GitLab made open source their management style

  Open sourcing your code is one thing – openly sharing your roadmap, marketing playbook, and strategy is another matter entirely. In New Orleans, GitLab CMO Ashley Smith gave me the skinny on GitLab’s business model, and how a radical open source style drives their growth.

Standards/Consortia

• Microsoft Updates Office for iPhone with OpenDocument Format Support

  Microsoft has just rolled out a new update for its Office productivity suite on iOS devices, so iPhone and iPad users can now benefit from important additions, such as support for the OpenDocument format.

  All productivity apps included in the Office suite have been updated to version 1.22, which, according to the listings added in the App Store, comes with support for exporting a document to the OpenDocument Text (.ODT) format.

  No other change is included in the release notes, although some other bug fixes and performance improvements are very likely to be part of the update, but the addition of ODT format support for exporting is anyway a pretty important thing.

Admins in outcry as Microsoft fix borks Group Policy

Microsoft’s most recent security update is causing problems with Windows Group Policy settings.

Users on Reddit and Microsoft support forums are reporting that after the MS16-072 update was installed, changes were made in Group Policy object (GPO) settings that left previously hidden drives and devices accessible.

“I installed windows patches last night and this morning found out that there were a number of issues with my GPOs,” writes one admin.

“Example: desktop image would not show up, A, B, C and D drives that were meant to be hidden from users are now showing up.”

Science

• Removing Climate Change Denial from Textbooks: Censorship or In Best Interest?

  When teachers were asked why teaching climate change correctly is such a difficult task, their answers made sense.

  Not only did they report being challenged by peers and parents when attempting to teach the science behind climate change, they also said a lack of aligned materials is to blame, too.

Health/Nutrition

• ‘Pharmaceutical Companies Have Pressured Doctors, Suppressed Evidence’

  In 2014, a class of drugs known as opioids were involved in more than 28,000 deaths, or 61 percent of all drug overdose deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The rate of opioid overdoses has tripled since the year 2000. Recent data show two different but related trends: an increase in so-called illicit opioid overdoses, largely due to heroin, and then this 15-year increase in overdose deaths involving prescription opioid pain relievers. Those drugs, like oxycodone and hydrocodone, or brand names like OxyContin and Vicodin, account for more than 16,000 fatal overdoses each year. The CDC says they’re comfortable using the term “epidemic” to describe the crisis.

Security

• BadTunnel Bug Hijacks Network Traffic, Affects All Windows Versions

  The research of Yang Yu, founder of Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab, has helped Microsoft patch a severe security issue in its implementation of the NetBIOS protocol that affected all Windows versions ever released.

• ‘BadTunnel’ Bugs Left Every Microsoft Windows PC Vulnerable For 20 Years [Ed: no paywall/malware in this link]

  Microsoft is today closing off a vulnerability that one Chinese researcher claims has “probably the widest impact in the history of Windows.” Every version of the Microsoft operating system going back to Windows 95 is affected, leaving anyone still running unsupported operating systems, such as XP, in danger of being surreptitiously surveilled.

  According to Yang Yu, founder of Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab, the bug can be exploited silently with a “near-perfect success rate”, as the problems lie in the design of Windows. The ultimate impact? An attacker can hijack all a target’s web use, granting the hacker “Big Brother power”, as soon as the victim opens a link or plugs in a USB stick, claimed Yu. He received $50,000 from Microsoft’s bug bounty program for uncovering the weakness, which the researcher has dubbed BadTunnel. Microsoft issued a fix today in its Patch Tuesday list of updates.

  “Even security software equipped with active defense mechanisms are not able to detect the attack,” Yu told FORBES. “Of course it is capable of execute malicious code on the target system if required.”

• Getting Things Wrong From The Beginning…

  GNU/Linux and never had any problems with software the rest of the school year. I’ve been using GNU/Linux ever since and have had no regrets. It’s been the right way to do IT. My wife saw the light a few years ago. She was tired of years of TOOS failing every now and then and needing re-installation. Once her business started using a web application, she had no more need of TOOS, none.

• Intel x86s hide another CPU that can take over your machine (you can’t audit it)

  Recent Intel x86 processors implement a secret, powerful control mechanism that runs on a separate chip that no one is allowed to audit or examine. When these are eventually compromised, they’ll expose all affected systems to nearly unkillable, undetectable rootkit attacks. I’ve made it my mission to open up this system and make free, open replacements, before it’s too late.

• Hackers Show How To Hack Anyone’s Facebook Account Just By Knowing Phone Number

  By exploiting the SS7 flaw, a hacker can hack someone’s Facebook account just by knowing the associated phone number. This flaw allows a hacker to divert the OTP code to his/her own phone and use it to access the victim’s Facebook account. The security researchers, who have explained the hack in a video, advise the users to avoid adding their phone numbers to the public services.

• Security advisories for Wednesday

• Hacking News: ISIS Twitter Accounts Hacked By Anonymous, ISIS Hacker Faces 25 Years In Prison

  An Anonymous-affiliated hacker has painted numerous ISIS Twitter accounts with gay pride messages and pictures in support of the Orlando shooting victims. On the other hand, a 21-year-old hacker has pleaded guilty to helping ISIS and he is scheduled to get a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.

Defence/Aggression

• Teaching Kids About Genocide

  Public schoolchildren in Michigan are now required to learn about the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide as part of their social studies curriculum, according to a law Governor Rick Snyder signed on Tuesday.

  While most students in Michigan no doubt learn about the Holocaust already, the new law would require teachers in public schools to spend a certain amount of time on these topics. Between eighth and 12th grades, schools must spend a combined six hours on genocide education, specifically the Holocaust—in which, during World War II, Nazi Germany killed 11 million Jews, Roma, and other ethnic minorities—and the Armenian genocide—in which Ottoman Turks killed 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1920. While Turkey denies a genocide took place, 29 countries and 45 U.S. states use the term “genocide” to refer to the killings.

• Dalai Lama Urges Suu Kyi to Address Buddhist-Muslim Tensions

  Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has a moral responsibility to try to ease tensions between majority Buddhists and minority Rohingya Muslims, her fellow Nobel laureate, the Dalai Lama, said on Monday.

  The Tibetan spiritual leader said he had stressed the issue in meetings with Suu Kyi, who came to power in April in the newly created role of state counsellor in Myanmar’s first democratically elected government in five decades.

  “She already has the Nobel Peace Prize, a Nobel Laureate, so morally she should… make efforts to reduce this tension between the Buddhist community and Muslim community,” he told Reuters in an interview in Washington.

  “I actually told her she should speak more openly.”

  Violence between majority Buddhists and minority Muslims in recent years has cast a cloud over progress with democratic reforms in Myanmar. Rights groups have sharply criticised Suu Kyi‘s reluctance to speak out on the Rohingya‘s plight.

  The Dalai Lama said Suu Kyi, who won worldwide acclaim and a Nobel Peace Prize as a champion of democratic change in the face of military persecution, had responded to his calls by saying that the situation was “really complicated.”

• Florida Man Falsely Connected by Fox News to Orlando Shooter Receives Death Threats

  Not long after last Sunday’s deadly shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a news story published by Fox News suggested that the shooter, Omar Mateen, had been radicalized by his connection to a local imam.

  Citing anonymous officials, the report claimed that a man named Marcus Dwayne Robertson, also known as Abu Taubah, had been “rounded up,” along with several of his associates, in connection to the attack. The official quoted in the article, described as “a law enforcement source familiar with Robertson’s history of recruiting terrorists and inciting violence,” claimed that Mateen had been a student of Robertson’s online Islamic seminary.

• Democrats Embrace Secretive, Flawed Terror Watchlist in Fight Against Gun Violence

  Democratic leaders came out in force on Wednesday in favor of a proposal to prohibit Americans who are on federal government terrorist watchlists from purchasing firearms. A group of Democratic senators waged a fillibuster on the Senate floor. And after presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump announced that he intends to meet with the powerful National Rifle Association to discuss a similar restriction, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton welcomed him to the cause.

• Why Did FBI’s Multiple Informants Fail to Catch Omar Mateen in a Sting?

  Normally, when the FBI identifies a Muslim mouthing off about joining ISIS, they throw one or more informants at him, develop his trust, then have him press a button or buy a plane ticket to Syria, which they use to arrest the guy.

  That didn’t happen here. While they did record the conversations between these informants and Mateen, they never got him to do something they could arrest him for.

• Violence Begets Violence: The Orlando Shootings and the War on Terror

  We can rail against ISIS, hate crimes, terror threats, Islamic radicalization, gun control and national security. We can blame Muslims, lax gun laws, a homophobic culture and a toxic politic environmental. We can even use the Orlando shooting as fodder for this year’s presidential campaigns.

  But until we start addressing the U.S. government’s part in creating, cultivating and abetting domestic and global terrorism – and hold agencies such as the FBI and Defense Department accountable for importing and exporting violence, breeding extremism and generating blowback, which then gets turned loose on an unsuspecting American populace – we’ll be no closer to putting an end to the violence that claimed 50 lives at an Orlando nightclub on June 12, 2016, than we were 15 years ago when nearly 3,000 individuals were killed on Sept. 11, 2001.

• Bridging Divides of a New Cold War

  As NATO steps up military maneuvers near Russia’s borders and congressmen fume about “Russian aggression,” a delegation of Americans including former U.S. officials is looking for face-to-face ways to encourage peace, writes Ann Wright.

• Jo Cox shooting: Eyewitnesses describe moment Labour MP shot outside constituency office

  Eyewitneses have described the moment Labour MP Jo Cox was shot outside her consitituency office in Birstall.

  Ms Cox is believed to be a in a “critical condition” and has been airlifted to Leeds General Infirmary. The Labour MP was shot while holding an advice surgery for her constituents.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• WikiLeaks will release new Clinton emails to add to incriminating evidence, Julian Assange says, in “big year ahead”

  Julian Assange, editor-in chief of WikiLeaks, says the whistle-blowing journalism organization will soon be publishing unreleased emails from Hillary Clinton.

  Clinton, the Democratic Party presidential front-runner, has been under criminal investigation by the FBI for using a personal email account on a private server in her home that contained top-secret information.

  Assange doesn’t believe that Clinton will be indicted, but argues that the government has more than enough evidence, in both her emails and in the dealings of the Clinton Foundation, if it were truly committed to doing so.

  “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton,” Assange said. “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.”

  Assange made these remarks in an interview with the British ITV network on Sunday. The host noted WikiLeaks has been “taking interest” in Clinton’s use of the private email server.

• Authorities Arrest an IT Worker From the Panama Papers Law Firm

  When Edward Snowden went public as the NSA whistleblower in 2013, few were surprised that a system administrator was behind the spy agency’s leak. Inside administrators who hold the keys to an organization’s data kingdom are a much greater threat to security than outside hackers.

  Now it appears another technical insider may be connected to a leak at Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the heart of the massive Panama Papers scandal. A computer technician employed by Mossack Fonseca’s Geneva office was arrested this week on suspicion of removing “large amounts of data” from the law firm’s network, according to Swiss newspaper Le Temps. Le Temps reported that the worker was arrested after the law firm filed a complaint accusing him of unauthorized access and breach of trust, and of stealing a large amount of confidential data. Investigators also seized computers in the law firm’s Swiss office.

• Air Force, Lockheed Martin Combine Forces To ‘Lose’ 100,000 Inspector General Investigations

  The Air Force says there’s no evidence of malicious intent, as far as it can tell. But there’s also no evidence of competence. Why is it that files related to oversight of a government agency have no apparent redundancy? It’s small details like these that show the government generally isn’t much interested in policing itself.

  If anything’s going to be recovered, it’s going to be Lockheed’s job, and it’s already spent a few weeks trying with little success. There may be some files stored locally at bases where investigations originated, but they’re likely to be incomplete.

  While I understand the inherent nature of bureaucracy makes it difficult to build fully-functioning systems that can handle digital migration with any sort of grace, it’s completely incomprehensible that a system containing files collected over the last decade would funnel into a single storage space with no backup. It’s one thing if this was just the Air Force’s fault.

  But this is more Lockheed’s fault — and despite its position as a favored government contractor — it’s also known for its innovation and technical prowess. Neither of those qualities are on display in this public embarrassment. And if it can’t recover the data, it’s pretty much erasing more than a decade’s-worth of government mistakes, abuse, and misconduct. And while no one’s going to say anything remotely close to this out loud, there has to be more than a few people relieved to see black marks on their permanent records suddenly converted to a useless tangle of 1s and 0s.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Indonesia Yet to learn from their mistakes: Haze & Indonesia counterparts

  Singapore cannot step further to enter Indonesia’s legal domain on the issue of forest fires because the two countries do not have an agreement in the matter, said Indonesia’s Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar.

  “The protocol on forest fires in the Transboundary Haze Pollution Act (THPA) is a multilateral agreement, so there was never a bilateral agreement between Indonesia and Singapore, that must be remembered,” Dr Nurbaya said during a breaking of fast session with reporters on Monday (Jun 13).

  She was responding to a question about Singapore’s Transboundary Haze Pollution Act (THPA) which it passed in 2014 to go after companies that start fires or let their concessions burn.

  Indonesia has taken issue with Singapore’s attempts to act against companies responsible for the haze-causing forest fires that choked parts of Indonesia and the region. Jakarta previously objected by lodging a strong protest through its ambassador in Singapore.

  Dr Nurbaya said that she has explained to Singapore’s Foreign Minister that the THPA is controversial, and that it is being continuously discussed on the Asean’s sub-regional ministers level between Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand.

• Celebrating 10 Years of Ocean Conservation

  The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument, later named Papahānaumokuākea, was established by Presidential Proclamation 8031 on June 15, 2006 using the Antiquities Act. It was created to protect an exceptional array of natural and cultural resources. It encompasses 139,797 square miles of the Pacific Ocean and is home to more than 7,000 marine species, one quarter of which are found only in the Hawaiian Archipelago.

Finance

• TPP’s Corporate Sovereignty Chapter A ‘Threat To Democracy And Regulation’

  When the negotiations for the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada were concluded in September 2014, the text was finally released after years of secrecy. At the time, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives put together what remains the best overall analysis of the main text’s 1598 pages, in a series of studies collectively called “Making Sense of CETA.” The same organization has now published a set of analyses looking at key aspects of TPP, entitled “What’s the big deal? Understanding the Trans-Pacific Partnership”.

  They are all worth looking at, but Techdirt readers will probably be particularly interested in one called “Foreign investor protections in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.” It’s by Gus Van Harten, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto, Canada, and a well-known commentator on trade law and policy. The first part of his analysis provides a good summary of the world of corporate sovereignty, or investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) as it is more formally known. The later section looks at some new research that provides additional insight into just how bad corporate sovereignty is for those of us who are not insanely rich.

  For example, Van Harten quotes some recent work showing that 90% of ISDS fines against countries went to corporations with over $1 billion in annual revenue or to individuals with over $100 million in net wealth. Similarly, the success rate among the largest multinationals — those with turnovers of at least $10 billion — was 71% in the 48 cases they initiated, compared with a success rate for everyone else of 42%. So any claim that ISDS is equally useful to all companies, including small and medium-sized businesses, is not borne out by the facts.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• More people turning to social media for news: study

  Around half of the people in 26 countries surveyed by Reuters, including Australia, say they use social media as a source of news each week, with one in 10 saying it was their main source.

• Social media ‘outstrips TV’ as news source for young people

  Of the 18-to-24-year-olds surveyed, 28% cited social media as their main news source, compared with 24% for TV.

• NPR Retracts False Claim About Terror and Politics, But Doesn’t Tell Listeners the Truth

  As Husseini noted in a response on his own blog (6/15/16), the correction does little to explain the significance of Temple-Raston’s mistake: She had speculated that ISIS might intentionally attack the United States in the run-up to the November elections, possibly in order to help elect Donald Trump, since “they would be able to perhaps get more recruits because of the way he talks about Muslims.” Though noting there was no evidence that this was happening, Temple-Raston claimed that “it’s happened in the past”—which is how she led in to her false statement that “the more conservative candidate ended up winning” in the Spanish election immediately following the Madrid train station bombing.

• Hillary Wants to Bring Back Bill. She Shouldn’t.

  Why would Hillary threaten workaday Americans with another poke in the eye from her con man spouse?

Censorship/Free Speech

• Popular Muslim Youtuber deconstructs Amos Yee

  Amos was jailed last year for making offensive remarks against Christianity and posting obscene images online. He was charged in Court again on May 26 this year and faces 8 charges.

• Censorship’s nanny state

  The liberal Indian who cares for the rule of law and freedom of expression now faces a unique predicament. He must acquiesce to the arbitrary and whimsical decisions of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) and allow Pahlaj Nihalani and his bunch of hypersensitive nannies to expand their reach and become the nation’s moral arbiters. Or he must turn to overburdened courts to restrain the board’s wanton vandalism and restore some sanity, such as treating audiences as responsible adults and not as mollycoddled, over-protected and impressionable adolescents.

• Twitter Appears To Censor Popular #GaysForTrump Hashtag

  Multiple Twitter users have reported that the popular #GaysForTrump hashtag is being censored on the platform.

  A GIF posted by Twitter user @PunishedSage has revealed that the Twitter hashtag does not appear in the site’s suggested searches. When you type “#GaysFor” or even “#GaysForTr” into the site’s search function, the hashtags does not appear as a recommendation, despite its popularity in the wake of the Orlando shootings.

• Anurag Kashyap and Nihalani want Censorship rules changed

  Indian film producer Anurag Kashyap and Central Board of Film Certification chief Pahlaj Nihalani are pressing for the censorship guidance to be revamped.

• “Apple Stole My “Breathe” App And Created Its Own” — App Developer Accuses Apple [Ed: and later Apple can remove the original from the store]

  A developer named Ben Erez has blamed Cupertino for stealing his Yoga-inspired app called “Breathe”. At WWDC 2016, along with the unveiling of watchOS 3, Apple revealed its own breathing app named Breathe. Taking a look at both the apps, they seem quite familiar in appearance and behavior.

• After a censorship battle, Bollywood film ‘Udta Punjab’ leaked online before its release

  After a series of objections from the India’s Censor Board, Bollywood film Udta Punjab was recently cleared for release with just a single cut. However on June 15, the prints of the entire film were leaked online, just two days before its release on June 17.

• Udta Punjab to pave the way for better censorship and certification in India?

  Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor and Diljit Dosanjh’s Udta Punjab engaged in a legal battle with the CBFC after it ordered the film to make a total of 94 alterations in film. The makers were furious with CBFC, but with a favourable court ruling, will it pave the way for better censorship in India…

• Myanmar scraps screening of disputed film

• Myanmar censors ban movie at human rights film festival

• Human Rights on screen and skin-deep

• Censors cite national reconciliation in pulling film from festival screening

• Twitter bans & reinstates gay conservative journalist who criticized Islam

• Twitter Suspends, Reinstates Milo Yiannopoulos After Users Revolt — See His Defiant Message to Company’s CEO

• ‘Arabic Twitter’ Swarms Breitbart Editor Milo Yiannopoulos Ahead Of Orlando Speech

• Milo Yiannopoulos Slams Twitter For Being ‘Sharia-Compliant,’ Credits Drudge With Reinstatement

• Milo blasts left after his UCF speech was canceled

• Milo Reinstated On Twitter After Gigantic Backlash

• ‘It Is Incompatible with Modern Free Western Liberal Democracy’: Milo’s Warnings on Islam

• WATCH: Milo Yiannopoulos finds out his Twitter account is suspended LIVE on Gavin McInnes’ show

• Twitter Restores Milo Yiannopoulos But He’s Missing Tens of Thousands of His Followers

• Twitter Suspends, Immediately Unsuspends, Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos

• Milo Yiannopoulos Finds Out He’s Been Suspended From Twitter Live On Air

• Milo Yiannopoulos Briefly Booted From Twitter, Then Reinstated Because the World is Terrible

• Twitter briefly suspends conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos

• Twitter briefly suspends conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos

• Twitter briefly suspended the right-wing writer Milo Yiannopoulous

• Twitter Bans Gay Conservative Milo After Anti-Islam Tweets **UPDATE** Twitter Caves

• Milo Yiannopoulos Has Been Suspended From Twitter

• Prominent Gay Conservative Activist’s Twitter Account Suspended

• Twitter Doesn’t Have To Live by the First Amendment, But Milo Yiannopoulos Shows It Should

• Twitter accused of censorship after it suspends account of gay conservative writer Milo Yiannopoulos for ‘anti-Islam views’ and blocks GaysForTrump hashtag

Privacy/Surveillance

• Consumer Groups Say AT&T, Comcast Violate Privacy Law By Hoovering Up Cable Box Data Without Full User Consent

  In addition to the $21 billion made annually by cable set top box rental fees, cable companies make untold billions from monetizing the user viewing data these boxes help collect. That captive revenue alone is the driving force behind the pay TV sectors histrionic opposition to the FCC’s plan to open the sector up to third-party hardware competition. Consumer viewing and behavioral data is an immense cash cow, one the cable industry has occasionally threatened to take even further — with patents on tech that lets the cable box literally watch or listen in on American living rooms.

  While things haven’t quite reached that level of total information awareness yet, consumer groups this week filed a formal complaint with both the FTC and FCC arguing that things have gone far enough. Public Knowledge, the Center for Digital Democracy and Consumer Watchdog have filed formal privacy complaints with both the FCC and FTC saying that major cable companies routinely fail to inform consumers about the degree in which their viewing data is collected, stored and monetized via ye olde cable box.

• An abandoned NSA Cold War spy station in Berlin has been turned into an artists’ playground

  “Go to Teufelsberg,” he replied confidently, before going on to explain that Teufelsberg is an abandoned listening post in West Berlin that the US National Security Agency (NSA) once used to intercept East Berlin and Soviet communications…

• The Forest for the Trees

  When I first started seeking out other victims, about six months ago, I did not want to formally report any of the stories I had heard from Jake’s victims to the Tor Project or others, for two primary reasons. First, that my main motivation in this was to ensure that these behaviours stopped, and it was not clear to me that any traditional punitive “justice” measures would achieve such. Second, I feared retaliation from Jake, as well as retaliation towards any of the victims whose stories I would divulge. Multiple victims at the time expressed that they didn’t want me to tell The Tor Project, later admitting they feared retaliation to be extremely likely, as well as difficult to combat.

• A California County Breaks New Ground for Surveillance Transparency

  Last week, a county in California encompassing much of Silicon Valley set a new standard in local surveillance transparency after months of activism by residents and allies from across the bay area. Their efforts, and the policy it enabled, suggest an overlooked strategy in the national battle to curtail unaccountable secret mass surveillance.

  While federal agencies play a controversial role in monitoring Americans, their local counterparts also conduct similar activities—not only in the context of counterterrorism, but even for the sake of routine public safety. While concerns about the militarization of local police have long united Americans across the political spectrum, the metastasis of surveillance platforms across local police departments, county sheriffs, and state highway patrols too often went largely unnoticed until recently.

• Snowden Disclosure Prompts Backlash in Scotland

  Top government officials in Scotland are under pressure to explain their knowledge of a secretive police surveillance unit that was exposed in documents leaked by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

  On Tuesday, cabinet secretary for justice Michael Matheson was grilled in the country’s parliament about the so-called Scottish Recording Centre and its previously undisclosed involvement in covert surveillance operations.

• National Security Agency (NSA) Exploring Use Of Biomedical Device Data

  The National Security Agency (NSA) is interested in collecting information from biomedical devices for national security purposes, according to recent statements made by the agency’s deputy director, Richard Ledgett. Under- and unprotected devices in the Internet of Things (IoT), including medical devices, could be both a help and a hindrance to intelligence agencies like NSA, he said, providing them with a wealth of information and potentially exposing them to terrorist surveillance.

• Why Microsoft Wanted LinkedIn

  LinkedIn, for its part, has been struggling; in February, its stock dropped more than forty per cent in a single day, after it announced a forecast that fell far short of what analysts had expected. The company’s C.E.O., Jeff Weiner, has blamed its recent troubles largely on a broader economic slowdown; LinkedIn’s business model relies on charging employers and employees for premium services, like sending messages to strangers, and when the economy isn’t thriving headhunters and workers tend not to be as willing to pay for connections. But the dominance of Facebook, among other big rivals, has also made it harder for LinkedIn, whose ad business competes with Facebook’s, to survive as an independent company. As Nicholas Lemann wrote in a Profile, last year, of the LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, “Silicon Valley is obsessed with ‘scale,’ and LinkedIn is, as yet, insufficiently enormous.” On Monday, Weiner acknowledged as much. “Imagine a world where we’re no longer looking up at Tech Titans such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook, and wondering what it would be like to operate at their extraordinary scale—because we’re one of them,” he wrote.

• FBI Sues To Block Disclosure Of Surveillance Cameras Locations Because It Would Violate The Privacy Of Those Surveilled

  Another injunction request has been filed in response to a Phil Mocek public records request pertaining to Seattle’s power utility. This time, Mocek and MuckRock (through which Mocek’s requests have been routed) are not named as defendants. It’s only the city of Seattle and its public utility (Seattle City Light) being named as defendants, but Mocek’s public records request is specified in the federal court filing [PDF]. (h/t Mike Scarcella)

  This time, the plaintiff isn’t a multinational corporation. It’s the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The nexus for the FBI’s attempt to block further disclosures to Mocek (and other requesters like local new station KIRO) is its remora-esque relationship with Seattle’s public utility. After a long paragraph utilizing terms like “tradecraft,” “concealments,” and “advanced electronic surveillance,” we finally get to the real reason the FBI wants the court to keep the city of Seattle from handing out any more public utility documents to requesters.

• House eyes new chance to reform surveillance

• House to Vote on Curbing NSA Surveillance in Wake of Orlando

• Privacy Advocates Aim to Use Defense Spending Bill to Protect Encryption

• House Intel Boss, Rep. Devin Nunes, Lying To Congress About Attempt To Stop Encryption Backdoors

• Congressman Cites Orlando Tragedy as Reason to Fight Surveillance Reform

  The head of the House Intelligence Committee is hand-delivering a letter to colleagues on Capitol Hill, demanding they not restrict the FBI’s surveillance power — and citing the recent mass shooting in Orlando as justification. The letter opposes a proposed amendment that would put an end to FBI “backdoor” searches of an NSA database of foreign intelligence without judicial oversight.

  “The national security threats to the United States and its allies are greater today than at any point since 9/11. To keep Americans safe, our intelligence community needs to fully employ every tool available to it,” Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., wrote in the letter obtained by The Intercept, cosigned with Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga.

• Government Surveillance Can’t Prevent Attacks Like Orlando. We Shouldn’t Expand It Now.

  There’s much that’s depressingly familiar about the news coming out of Orlando, where Omar Mateen committed the worst mass shooting of its kind in U.S. history: the heartbreaking images and stories of survivors and the relatives of those gunned down; the almost immediate offering of empty platitudes by politicians conspiring to do nothing about yet another bloodbath carried out with a high-powered weapon; the just-as-immediate resort to naked bigotry by the ignorant and the unscrupulous; the eagerness to declare the shooter in some way associated with foreign terror threats before the bodies of the dead are cold.

• Inside the GCHQ doughnut, code breakers face up to our encrypted future [Ed: puff piece.]

Civil Rights/Policing

• ‘Ferguson Effect’ is a plausible reason for spike in violent US crime, study says [Trevor Timm: "If the police are too afraid to do their job due to transparency and public scrutiny, isn't that the police's fault?"]

  A new justice department-funded study concludes that a version of the so-called “Ferguson Effect” is a “plausible” explanation for the spike in violent crime seen in most of the country’s largest cities in 2015, but cautions that more research is still needed.

  The study, released by the National Institute of Justice on Wednesday, suggests three possible drivers for the more than 16% spike in homicide from 2014 to 2015 in 56 of the nation’s largest cities. But based on the timing of the increase, University of Missouri St Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld concluded, there is “stronger support” for some version of the Ferguson Effect hypothesis than its alternatives.

• Dozens of news orgs demand DOJ release its secret rules for targeting journalists with secret National Security Letters

  Freedom of the Press Foundation recently filed a huge brief in the organization’s case demanding that the Justice Department release its secret rules for targeting journalists with National Security Letters. And in related news, a coalition of 37 news organizations – including the New York Times, The Associated Press, USA Today, Buzzfeed, and tons more – filed an amicus brief in support of the Freedom of the Press Foundation case, demanding that the Department of Justice do the same.

• Dozens of news orgs demand DOJ release its secret rules for targeting journalists with National Security Letters

  A coalition of thirty-seven of news organizations—including the New York Times, the Associated Press, NPR, USA Today, and Buzzfeed—filed a legal brief over the weekend in support of Freedom of the Press Foundation’s case demanding that the Justice Department release its secret rules for targeting journalists with National Security Letters (NSLs).

• CIA Files Show Prisoner Waterboarded 83 Times Would Have Cooperated Before Torture

  A cache of declassified documents has revealed new details about the CIA’s torture program. Among other findings, the records show a prisoner who was waterboarded 83 times was likely willing to cooperate with interrogators before the torture. The account from medical personnel who helped with the first waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah deals a major blow to the CIA’s insistence it gained crucial information through torture.

• CIA Releases New and Gruesome Details on Its Torture Program

  The CIA released 50 new documents yesterday relating to its post-9/11 torture and rendition program. Despite the many disclosures that have come in the course of our decade-long fight to reveal the details of the program, the new revelations still have the capacity to shock.

• New CIA Documents Reveal More Horrors of President Bush’s Torture Program

  The CIA on Tuesday released dozens of documents detailing its torture and rendition program under the Bush administration, from the horrific treatment of detainees to the agency’s 2002 plan to ask the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) not to prosecute interrogators.

  The heavily redacted trove of more than 50 documents was published in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the ACLU last year, which sought records referenced in the U.S. Senate’s damning report on the CIA’s program—commonly referred to as the torture report—released in December 2014.

• New York Lawmakers Race to Toughen Oversight of Nurses and Other Professionals

  Spurred by concerns about problem nurses, New York lawmakers are racing to pass legislation to toughen oversight of more than 50 types of licensed professionals in the state.

  Earlier this month, Senate and Assembly committees unanimously passed bills that would allow the state Education Department to suspend licenses more swiftly and compel more reporting of criminal convictions and misconduct. A ProPublica investigation published in April found New York lagged behind other states in these regards, citing examples of nurses who retained their licenses even after being charged with or convicted of violent crimes.

• It’s Not Me, It’s You: Tips for Strong Relationships With Sources

  Later this week, many of the nation’s best investigative journalists will be gathering in New Orleans for the annual Investigative Reporters & Editors conference. They’ll swap ideas, learn new skills and hopefully return to their hometowns to dig with renewed fervor. Full disclosure: I serve on the board of IRE, so can be totally unbiased in saying that I think the organization is the best resource in the universe for investigative reporters.

• British Politics Descends Into Nativism and Farce, and Trump Hasn’t Even Arrived Yet

  With just over a week to go before Britons vote on whether or not to leave the European Union, the campaign for “independence” from the EU has turned farcical and deeply nasty, with nationalists relying heavily on anti-immigrant hysteria and racism to make their case.

  And it turns out that Donald Trump has chosen next Friday, June 24 — the day the referendum votes will be counted — to visit his mother’s ancestral homeland, Scotland. Trump’s avowed purpose is to celebrate the reopening of a golf resort he owns there, but the timing suggests he may be hoping to be on hand to cheer the success of a reactionary political movement based on the same sort of appeals to nativism and xenophobia that have served him so well in America.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Safari 10 dumps Flash, Java, Silverlight, QuickTime in the trash

  Apple has taken its turn at the hammer, and added its own i-Nail to the coffin of Flash.

  Over at the Webkit blog, Ricky Mondello of the Safari team writes that Safari 10, due in the northern fall, will “behave as though common legacy plug-ins on users’ Macs are not installed”.

  Instead, it will try to default to HTML5 for content like video, and Safari will not ship with an exception list. If a site only offers Flash, the user will have to explicitly switch it on for that site and add it to their own exceptio

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • Citigroup Sues AT&T For Saying ‘Thanks’ To Customers

    Whenver we discuss a particularly egregious case of trademark abuse, usually centered around the trademarking of some insanely common word or phrase, there’s always at least one instance of “that joke” in the comments. You know the joke I’m talking about: well, I’ll just trademark X and sue everyone, where X=super-common word or phrase. For example: “I’ll just trademark “trademark” and sue anyone who uses a trademark!”, or, “I’ll just trademark “the” and sue everyone who uses it!” These jokes play on the common problem of generic terms being granted trademarks, but of course they are examples so ridiculous that it couldn’t happen for those specific words and terms. Still, to our lovely commenters, we say, “Thank you.”

  • Citigroup trademarks “THANKYOU” and sues AT&T for thanking clients

    Who knew? Banking giant Citigroup has trademarked “THANKYOU” and is now suing technology giant AT&T for how it says thanks to its own loyal customers. This is “unlawful conduct” amounting to wanton trademark infringement, Citigroup claims in its federal lawsuit.

    Here is a copy (PDF) of the trademark certificates and trademark applications connected to what Citigroup is calling its “THANKYOU Marks.”

• Copyrights

  • ISP Association Nominates Copyright Troll As ‘Internet Villain’

    The UK’s trade association for providers of Internet services have nominated a notorious copyright troll for the much coveted title of “Internet Villain of the Year”. ISPA UK, which counts the major ISPs and Google as members, shortlisted TCYK LLC for its “speculative invoicing” campaign against Internet account holders.

  • EFF, Public Citizen Enter Legal Battle That Started With Defamation But Is Somehow Now All About Copyright

    Copyright is supposed to be a limited-use protection for creative works. The “limited” part went away with endless term extensions and auto-copyright for any creation attached to a “fixed medium.” These days, copyright is the magical cure-all that doesn’t actually cure anything. It’s a weapon to be wielded dishonestly and inelegantly against the ignorant, in hopes of limiting speech to only what IP abusers like.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Give New Life to Old PCs with Linux

Do you have some old hardware collecting dust in the basement, attic, or garage? Don’t let it go to waste just because it’s not powerful enough to run modern operating systems. Linux can breathe new life into such machines. I have revived many old PCs in this way. For example, I use one as my main file server, another as a family laptop in the living room for quick browsing, and third one as a media center in the kids’ room. Additionally, I have donated two revived laptops to a cause.

So, don’t let good hardware die of old age.

Desktop

• Liberating Crippled Chromebooks

  This seems like a great idea for anyone already confident in their use of GNU/Linux. Liberate the Chromebook from the straight-jacket of Chrome OS. It is a GNU/Linux OS but anchored to the browser. This procedure should permit full use of the hardware to run general applications. Amen.

Server

• 3 Reasons IBM Participates in Linux Foundation Projects

  It’s impressive that IBM was founded more than a century ago with decades of research, technologies, and products behind it. But even more impressive is that the company continues to evolve and embrace emerging technologies. It’s done so, in part, due to its continued involvement with Linux and open source through The Linux Foundation.

  “IBM has a long history with The Linux Foundation,” says Todd Moore, VP of Open Technology at IBM. “We’ve been one of the bedrock members of The Linux Foundation since its inception.” And, more generally, says Moore, “We have a long history of doing open source projects throughout many communities.”

• A Shared History & Mission with The Linux Foundation: Todd Moore, IBM

• ON.Lab releases latest ONOS SDN platform

  The Open Network Lab’s Open Network Operating System project unveiled its seventh release targeting a software-defined networking operating system, dubbed “Goldeneye.”

Kernel Space

• Blockchain Could Transform Local Economies, and Prevent Crises

  As we’ve reported, if you ask some people, they’ll tell you that the concept of the Blockchain is as dramatic as the creation of the Internet. A continuously growing group of top technology and finance companies including IBM, Wells Fargo and the London Stock Exchange Group is partnering and working with The Linux Foundation to advance blockchain technology, which is central to how many businesses process transactions.

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Opens Up A New Mailing List For Open-Source AMDGPU Development

• Benchmarks

  • A new benchmark video shows Dota 2 with Vulkan performing better on Windows than Linux

    This is sad to see. A new benchmark video for Windows and Linux using Dota 2 actually shows Windows doing quite a lot better than Linux.

  • Running The Latest Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux OpenGL/Vulkan Benchmarks

    Now that my Linux reviews of the GeForce GTX 1070 and GeForce GTX 1080 have been published, next on my agenda this week are running some fresh Windows vs. Linux graphics benchmarks with these Pascal graphics cards.

    I’m planning on making this a rather interesting comparison and will include our first Vulkan benchmarks under both operating systems too. Still deciding the complete set of graphics/game tests being run under Windows and Linux, besides our usual cross-platform compatible test profiles.

Applications

• Proprietary

  • The Seven Apps I Pay For

    I’m a free and open software lover, but the free I appreciate is the free as in freedom and not the free as in beer.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Mark Geddes’ Arduino Project Handbook (No Starch Press)

  • True Network Hardware Virtualization

  • Make Peace With Your Processes: Part 1

  • Funny Linux Commands – Check Weather And Surf StackOverflow In Linux Terminal

    Let’s have fun with Linux Terminal today. Also, if you are a developer, let’s reduce one context switch that you perform while development; switching to browser for solution in StackOverflow. It’s well-known fact, less context switch, less distraction and more productivity. In this article, we’ll explore two fun and useful things that you can do right through terminal without opening browser that you would do normally.

• Games

  • We Happy Few, an action/adventure game set in a drug-fuelled, retrofuturistic city will hit Linux in Early Access

    This is awesome news. We Happy Few a fantastic looking action/adventure game is due to get a Linux version during Early Access.

  • Defender’s Quest Deluxe launched, a free upgrade for Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten

  • Nation Red, an arena-based shooter against zombies is now available on Linux, rated highly

    I’ve been looking forward to giving Nation Red a go, as it is a few years old but still highly rated by a lot of people.

  • This War of Mine – The Little Ones DLC released, adds in children to this war-torn survival game

    Probably one of the bleakest DLC around, This War of Mine – The Little Ones DLC is a big expansion to the depressing (but good) survival game This War of Mine.

    Honestly, I hadn’t played this game for many many months until this DLC came out, and now I am wondering why I’ve left it so long to play more of it. Bleak as it is, it’s actually a very good survival game.

    Not only is it a good game, but the performance is fantastic on Linux. There was a time when it was broken for a while, but they fixed it and it runs perfectly again.

  • Deep Silver & Techland are not supporting Dead Island Definitive Edition on Linux, at all

  • Nuclear Dawn FPS/RTS hybrid updated, some important fixes for Linux included

    Yes, Nuclear Dawn is still alive and still being updated. I’m actually shocked, but impressed at this. The new version will make the Linux and Mac versions a bit better too.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Dispatches from the GTK+ hackfest

    A quick update from the GTK+ hackfest. I don’t really want to talk about the versioning discussion, except for two points:

    First, I want to apologize to Allison for encouraging her to post about this – I really didn’t anticipate the amount of uninformed, unreasonable and hateful reactions that we received.

Distributions

• New Linux Lite Is a Powerhouse Distro in Disguise

  Linux Lite 3.0 offers a great deal of flexibility and usability for both recent Microsoft Windows expatriots and seasoned Linux users. A new user application puts all of the needed information for using the distro in one spot. Just click on the topic and automatically view the information in a Web browser display.

  All of the system controls and settings are located in the Settings option within the main menu display. Windows users will find a close similarity to the Control Panel in that OS. Even recent Linux newcomers will not need much exploring or head-scratching to navigate their way around Linux Lite.

• New Releases

  • Antergos 2016.06.14 ISOs Are Out Now, the Last to Offer Support for 32-Bit PCs

    Antergos’ Dustin Falgout announced just a few minutes ago, June 15, 2016, that the latest ISO images for the Arch Linux-based operating system are now available for download.

  • ISO Refresh 2016.06.14

  • GParted Live 0.26.1-1 Released Based on Debian Sid, Kernel 4.6 & GParted 0.26.1

    We’ve reported earlier on the release of the GParted 0.26.1 open-source partition editor, as well the GParted Live 0.26.1-1 distrolette that lets you use the latest GParted release on any personal computer.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

  • PCLinuxOS 64 2016.05 Trinity Linux OS Brings Back Old Memories for KDE3.5 Fans

    We’ve promised to introduce you, guys, to more PCLinuxOS editions as soon as we are in possession of the needed information, so today, June 15, 2016, we’re presenting the PCLinuxOS Trinity Community Edition.

• OpenSUSE/SUSE

  • GCC 6 Imminent for openSUSE Tumbleweed, openSUSE Leap 42.2 Alpha 2 Coming Soon

    Today, June 15, 2016, the openSUSE Tumbleweed maintainers have informed the community that the long-anticipated GCC 6 compiler is imminent for the rolling operating system.

  • OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Will Very Soon Have GCC 6

  • New compiler expected in next Tumbleweed snapshot

    A new GNU Compiler Collection for openSUSE‘s rolling release Tumbleweed is scheduled to arrive soon.

    Tumbleweed 20160613 snapshot will be the last snapshot to be based on GCC 5, according to the openSUSE Project’s Dominique Leuenberger.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Day in the life of a Fedora Packager

      Ever wondered what it’s like being involved with the Fedora Project? There are many different roles and types of people that help make Fedora what it is. One common form of contributing is packaging. This is when someone takes software, “packages” it in the RPM format, and publishes the RPM to the Fedora repositories. There’s some steps along the way to being a packager. In this article, Fedora packager James Hogarth, responsible for ownCloud, Certbot (formerly LetsEncrypt), and more, details a day in the life of what it’s like being a Fedora Packager.

    • Fedora Wallpaper

      For some a computer wallpaper is not thought about and the default wallpaper stays for the live of their computer, others they like to pick a soothing scene of peace and serenity. At time I like The Serenity, but I usually like to rotate my wallpaper on a semi-monthly basis. While search the web for a new wallpaper I stumbled across a Legends of Zelda Logo wallpaper that I liked the look of. Not a fan of the Legend of Zelda I wanted to do something similar for Fedora.

• Debian Family

  • First alpha release of reprotest

    The first, very-alpha release of reprotest is now out at PyPi. It should hit Debian experimental later this week. While it only builds on an existing system (as I’m still working on support for virtualization), it can now check its own reproducibility, which it does in its own tests, both using setuptools and debuild. Unfortunately, setuptools seems to generate file-order-dependent binaries, meaning python setup.py bdist creates unreproducible binaries. With debuild, reprotest probably would be reproducible with the modified packages from the Reproducible Builds project, though I haven’t tested that yet. It tests ‘captures_environment’, ‘fileordering’ (renamed from ‘filesystem’), ‘home’, ‘kernel’, ‘locales’, ‘path’, ‘time’, ‘timezone’, and ‘umask’. The other variations require superuser privileges and modifications that would be unsafe to make to a running system, so they will only be enabled in the containers.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • LibreOffice 5.2 Beta 2 Now Available as a Snap for Ubuntu Linux, Other Distros

        GNU/Linux developer Björn Michaelsen reported on June 14, 2016, managing to package the latest Beta build of the upcoming LibreOffice 5.2 office suite as a Snap package for various GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu.

      • Linux Installshield and MS LinkedIn, World Gone Mad

      • Developers back universal snap package format for Linux

      • Ubuntu bids to eliminate Linux fragmentation by making Snap packages available to all

      • Canonical’s ‘Snap’ apps move beyond Ubuntu to Linux distributions everywhere

      • Playing Around With Ubuntu’s Snaps, On Fedora

      • The End of Apt And Yum? Ubuntu Snaps Now Work On All Linux Distributions

      • How to Install and Manage Snap Packages on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

      • Universal “snap” packages launch on multiple Linux distros

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Ubuntu MATE 16.04: there is always room for improvement

          Who is the main audience of Ubuntu 16.04 MATE? From my point of view, these are people who started their Linux life a long time ago when GNOME 2 was one of few desktop environments available for Linux distributions. Since then, we have gotten a lot more players and forks on the “market”.

          Yes, MATE is better looking than GNOME 2 was a few years ago. But other desktop environments also did not stay the same during this time.

          I used the Cinnamon desktop environment on Linux Mint for some time a year or so ago. For me, it was a much more convenient desktop environment than I found MATE to be in Ubuntu realization of it.

          I also faced some crashes of different applications during my Live run of Ubuntu 16.04 MATE.

          It all means that MATE team still has room for improvement.

          Will I try Ubuntu MATE sometime in the future? Maybe. Let’s see where history takes us.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi Zero: Hands-on with the Zero4U 4-Port USB Hub

  In browsing around the UUGear web page I saw that they have a variety of other boards, such as a 7-port USB Hub designed for the “standard-sized” Raspberry Pi models and an acrylic case to fit that assembly.

  One last thing. There have been a number of comments about two things that some people think the Raspberry Pi is “missing” – a real-time clock and a complete power-off at shutdown capability. UUGear offers another board called the Witty Pi which incorporates both of those. They also have an acrylic case for this assembly, and even a larger case for the Pi, 7-port USB Hub and Witty Pi all together. Good stuff.

• Putting the ‘Micro’ Into Microservices With Raspberry Pi

  I decided to really put the ‘micro’ into ‘microservices’, so I prepared a system of Raspberry Pis and pcDuinos. WebSphere Liberty is so lightweight that it can easily run on a Pi, and it’s so small and cheap that I can easily build up a collection of computers. I called it the ‘data center in a handbag.’ Because each machine really is a machine, the topology is more obvious.

• Phones

  • Android

    • How to manage Smart Storage on your Nextbit Robin Android device

      If you’ve purchased an unlocked Nextbit Robin, you’ll want to take advantage of the impressive Smart Storage feature. Jack Wallen shows you how.

    • New Android ransomware targets smart TVs

    • Android N 7.0 review – hands on, how to get it, best features, release date, name

      Bucking its usual trend, Google has been treating us to Developer Preview versions of its next mobile operating system, Android N. While its name is still yet to be officially decided, following Google I/O you’re now able to try out Developer Preview 3, which Google is describing as the first beta-quality candidate.

      As such, if you were sat on the fence as to whether or not to try it out on your main phone or tablet, now might be the time to jump in and get among the Beta fun. If you’re already on the Beta, an OTA update should be rolling out to get you to the latest version. If you’re looking to do a fresh install, instructions are below.

    • Android inventor Andy Rubin thinks the future of smartphones might be a single AI

      Andy Rubin, who co-founded Android and jump-started Google’s robotics efforts, imagines a future where artificial intelligence is so powerful that it powers every connected device. Speaking at Bloomberg’s Tech Conference in San Francisco today, Rubin said a combination of quantum computing and AI advancements could yield a conscious intelligence that would underpin every piece of technology. “If you have computing that is as powerful as this could be, you might only need one,” Rubin says. “It might not be something you carry around; it just has to be conscious.”

    • Hyve Mobility announces Buzz and Storm smartphones with pure Android

      Hyve Mobility, a new technology startup has announced its first two smartphones. The Buzz and Storm smartphones will run pure Android.

      Hyve Buzz and Storm smartphones run stock Android 5.1 Lollipop, although an Android Marshmallow update is being promised soon.

      The focus here is not the devices itself, but the pure Android experience. However, apart from pure Android, Hyve Mobility’s Buzz and Storm are just like any other smartphone in the market.

    • Android continues market share gains around the world as Apple’s iPhone slips

      Thanks to the growing wave of first-time smartphone buyers, Android is expanding its market share lead over Apple’s iOS.

      That conclusion was part of Kantar Worldpanel ComTech’s latest smartphone report.

      Kantar found that for the three months ending April 2016, Android grabbed 76 percent of smartphone sales in Europe’s five largest markets, up 5.8 percent from the 70.2 percent it had for the same three months a year ago. (Those five markets: Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.)

A History of Open Source Fonts

With the advent of free software for non-programmers, users ran into a licensing dilemma in a world of proprietary fonts.

Most Linux users soon hear of the influence of the GNU General Public License (GPL) in the development of free software. However, fewer have heard of the influence of the SIL Font License, although it is as important for design as the GPL has been for software. Just as the GPL is responsible for the development of free software, so the SIL Font License has enabled the rise of the free font movement, making Linux a practical choice for designers and artists. Today, it is the most popular free license for fonts, although few know its story.

Events

• How My Trip to SELF Turned Into a Nightmare

  Our writer goes to the Queen City of Charlotte, North Carolina for the SouthEast LinuxFest. Instead of having a good time, however, the trip turned into a nightmare — but the fault lies with Econo Lodge, not with SELF.

  What a great time I had during the day I spent at this year’s SouthEast LinuxFest. Those of you who read Friday’s Week-in-Review know that I had planned to stick around for the full three days of festivities at my favorite community oriented Linux and open source conference on the East Coast, but alas that wasn’t meant to be. But what a blast I had during the day I was there.

SaaS/Back End

• 5 new OpenStack tutorials for cloud mastery

Healthcare

• Leeds and Ripple pick Lockheed Martin to help build open source digital care record

  It added that Lockheed Martin will help support the work that is underway in Leeds for the benefit of frontline health and care staff. Leeds, which has the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) – soon to be renamed NHS Digital – based in the city, as well as the second largest teaching hospital in Europe, is regarded as one of the best cities for health and well being. At the same time, facing continuing austerity, the city council sees its role as one of leadership, facilitation and commissioning.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• IBM Ratchets Up its Focus on the Swift Programming Language

• Meet Microsoft’s ‘planet scale’ NoSQL database [Ed: Meet Microsoft’s Mary Branscombe, marketing person inside IDG pretending to be journalist]

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GnuTLS 3.5.1

  Released GnuTLS 3.5.1 a feature update release in the next stable branche.

Public Services/Government

• European colleges share SMEs open source training

  Tertiary education institutes (hochschule and university college) and ICT training specialists from across Europe are creating a course to train students to help small and medium-sized enterprises select and use open source cloud services. The course will be tested on Spanish and British exchange students working for SMEs in the two countries.

Programming/Development

• Top 100 Most Popular Programming Languages Of 2016

  You might be familiarized with the top programming languages like C++, Java, Python, JavaScript etc., but there exists a vast pool of programming languages that you need to know about. All these languages have different strengths and applications that should be studied before learning them. Here, we are sharing a list of the top 100 most popular programming languages of 2016.

• What cognitive linguistics can teach developers

  Chris Prather never metaphor he didn’t like.

  That’s what he tells developers, at any rate. And on stage at SouthEast LinuxFest in Charlotte, NC, Prather explained how a deep understanding of metaphor—and the critical role it plays in cognitive function—can improve an open source software developer’s work. He delivered his presentation, “I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like: How Cognitive Linguistics Can Help You Be A (More) Bad-ass Developer,” last Friday.

  Metaphors “are more than just flowery language, even though that’s how they’re taught to us in gradeschool and college,” said Prather, CEO of Tamarou, a boutique Perl development shop.

This USB adapter is Microsoft’s final admission that Kinect failed

Microsoft had a bold vision for its Xbox One console that involved its Kinect accessory. While the Kinect for Xbox 360 was one of the most popular game console accessories of all time, a bundled Kinect with the Xbox One introduced a $100 price premium over the PS4 competition. Despite switching course and unbundling the Kinect, Microsoft hasn’t recovered yet in the games console battle, with reports suggesting it has sold 20 million Xbox One consoles vs. Sony’s 40 million PS4 shipments.

Science

• On Agent Orange, VA Weighs Politics and Cost Along With Science

  Last year, a group of federal scientists was debating whether as many as 2,100 Air Force veterans should qualify for cash benefits for ailments they claimed stemmed from flying aircraft contaminated by Agent Orange.

  An outside panel of experts had already determined that the scientific evidence showed the vets were likely exposed to the toxic herbicide.

  The scientists within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs agreed the airmen had a strong case. But they had a more calculated concern: If the VA doled out cash to these veterans, others might want it too, according to an internal document obtained by ProPublica and The Virginian-Pilot.

Security

• Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump [Ed: Microsoft Windows again]

  Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.

• Bears in the Midst: Intrusion into the Democratic National Committee

  The COZY BEAR intrusion relied primarily on the SeaDaddy implant developed in Python and compiled with py2exe and another Powershell backdoor with persistence accomplished via Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) system, which allowed the adversary to launch malicious code automatically after a specified period of system uptime or on a specific schedule. The Powershell backdoor is ingenious in its simplicity and power. It consists of a single obfuscated command setup to run persistently, such as…

• Big data will fix internet security … eventually [Ed: Microsoft’s Grimes says mass surveillance (‘big data’) will fix Internet security eventually]

  I’ve always thought that improved computer security controls would “fix” the internet and stop persistent criminality — turns out it might be big data analytics instead.

• Symantec dons a Blue Coat [Ed: two evil companies are now one]

  Symantec will pay US$4.65 billion in an all-cash deal to buy privately-held Blue Coat to ramp up its enterprise security offerings.

• How A Student Fooled 17,000 Coders Into Running His ‘Sketchy’ Programming Code

  Using the typosquatting technique, a German college student tricked more than 17,000 people from cybersecurity and programming community into clicking his fake software packages. More than half the time his code ran with administrative rights, affecting government and military organizations.

Defence/Aggression

• 4 people shot in downtown Oakland, 1 fatally

  Four people were shot in downtown Oakland early Tuesday evening — leaving one dead, according to police.

• Drawing Wrong Lessons from Orlando

  America’s mass shootings, especially those linked to Islamic terrorism like the slaughter in Orlando, Florida, prompt a reflex of responses, but some reactions are particularly unhelpful, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

• Mitch McConnell Says He May Be ‘Open’ to Post-Orlando Gun Control

  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) says he be may be “open” to placing new gun controls on law-abiding citizens following the terror attack on Pulse Orlando.

  According to CBS News’s Steven Portnoy, McConnell has a meeting with FBI director James Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Wednesday. Portnoy Tweeted that McConnell has signaled he may be willing to consider new gun controls after that meeting.

• Your One-Size-Fits-All American Mass Slaughter Article

  We American value efficiency. We like to “get to it.” So why do we have to write and read pretty much the same articles, and do the same stuff, every time another mass slaughter occurs?

  So to help out, here’s your one-size-fits-all article. I hope you bookmark it, and refer back to it when the next act takes place. And a request– for those commenting, please try and keep your remarks as generic as possible as well in the spirit of things.

• Orlando Mass Shooting Not Deadliest in American History

  To call it that is to forget the last hundred years of U.S. history of mass violence fueled by racial hatred and homophobia. Although precise numbers of deaths are impossible to specify, at least 100 African Americans were killed in East S​t.​ Louis, Ill., in one bloody night in July 1917; anywhere from 55 to 300 blacks were massacred in Tulsa​, Okla.,​ in 16 hours in June 1921; and dozens more were killed in Rosewood, Fla., in January 1923. And of course, more recently, 32 died in the 1973 bombing of the UpStairs Lounge, a gay bar in New Orleans.

• Muhammad Ali’s True Patriotism

  Muhammad Ali angered much of America by declaring “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong” and refusing to fight in Vietnam, but his principled stand was vindicated by history and is a lesson for today, says Ivan Eland.

• How the FBI’s Pursue-Every-Lead Policy Allowed the Orlando Shooting

  The FBI first discovered Omar Mateen, the man who would kill 49 and injure more than 50 others at a gay nightclub, when he boasted of a friendship with terrorists.

  Mateen told one of his co-workers at a private security firm in 2013 that he knew Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Mateen’s co-worker reported that information to the FBI.

• What the FBI Was Doing Instead of Catching the Orlando Shooter

  After the most recent mass shooting in Orlando, Florida – the worst in U.S. history – one might ask how the FBI was able to investigate the perpetrator, twice, without deciding to take any further action. This question is further confounded by the fact the perpetrator was, according to his wife, an abusive, unstable man suffering from bipolar disorder.

• Despite Orlando Killer’s Desire to Glorify ISIS, Discussion Moves on to His Sexuality

  As the first details about the massacre in Orlando trickled out on Sunday, Ali H. Soufan, a former counterterrorism agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, watched the media coverage unfold in a familiar way.

  Soufan, who now runs a consulting firm, told The Intercept that before it became known that the killer, in a call to the police during the attack, had dedicated his rampage to the leader of the Islamic State militant group, news reports focused on the timing and location of the shooting spree. An attack on an LGBT club during a month dedicated to expressing pride in that community — and the gunman’s personal profile — seemed strongly suggestive of a hate crime.

• Orlando Shooting – RT Interview

• When Media Learned Killer’s Ethnicity, Then They Knew to Call It ‘Terrorism’

  News coverage over the past 48 hours of the Orlando nightclub attacks has shown how corporate media use specific vocabulary to manipulate public perceptions and perpetuate harmful stereotypes and xenophobia.

  In the early hours of June 12, as reports poured in about a shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, news outlets were reluctant to characterize the incident beyond calling it an act of violence.

• Orlando Shooter Wasn’t the First Murderer Employed By Global Mercenary Firm

  The man who shot over 100 people and killed 49 in an Orlando nightclub Saturday worked at a retirement home as a security guard for G4S – a giant, often controversial global contracting corporation that provides mercenary forces, prison guards and security services. G4S is one of the world’s largest private security companies, with more than 620,000 employees and a presence in over 100 countries.

• Post-Orlando Demagoguery Described as Trump’s Most Horrifying to Date

  “A man on TV is trying to make political capital out of the mass murder of innocent people.”

  “This is the scariest political speech I have ever seen in America.”

  “As a woman, and daughter of immigrants with an Arabic last name, this is probably the most frightening Trump speech I’ve heard.”

  Those were just a sampling of responses to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s fear-mongering and fallacy-ridden speech, delivered Monday afternoon in New Hampshire as a response to the mass shooting in Orlando.

• Queer Muslims exist – and we are in mourning too

  A strange thing happened a few months ago. I got a news alert that my photo project, Just Me and Allah, which documents queer Muslims and their diverse experiences, had been mentioned in a major LGBT magazine website.

  I didn’t recall having done an interview with them, so I clicked on the article. The piece was about a 17-year-old Muslim girl in North Dakota allegedly having had a gun pointed at her head by her father after he discovered that she was a lesbian. In the piece, I was cited as proof of the existence of pro-LGBT Muslims – as if that were an anomaly. I wondered whether some random LGBT Christian would’ve been mentioned had the story involved an evangelical father and his daughter.

• Euro 2016: Police fire tear gas at fans in Lille

  Tear gas has been used against football fans in Lille amid reports of renewed clashes at Euro 2016.

  It has not been been made clear which team’s fans were involved. England and Wales fans have been gathering in Lille ahead of their match in nearby Lens.

  Russian and Slovakian supporters are also in Lille, after their match at the city’s Stade Pierre-Mauroy.

  There are also reports that hundreds of England fans have been surrounded by riot police in the city’s main square.

• End of Ceasefire in Syria: Aleppo on Fire

  On June 9, the defense ministers of Russia, Syria and Iran met in Tehran to discuss counter-terrorism activities and security initiatives that would prevent jihadists from conducting wider operations in the region. Russian Defense Ministry statement said the talks were focused on «priority measures in reinforcing the cooperation» in the fight with Islamic State (IS) and al-Nusra terrorist groups.

• China says Dalai Lama-Obama meeting will damage bilateral ties

  China has lodged diplomatic representations with the United States over a planned meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama at the White House on Wednesday saying it would damage Chinese-U.S. ties, the Foreign Ministry said.

  China considers the exiled Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader a dangerous separatist, and ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a regular briefing the meeting would encourage “separatist forces”.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Indonesia hits back at Singapore in latest haze row

  Indonesia insisted Monday Singapore cannot take legal action against its citizens over the haze that choked Southeast Asia last year after the city-state sought to question the director of an Indonesian company.

  Forest fires in Indonesia produced acrid smog that shrouded Singapore, Malaysia and other parts of the region for weeks, pushing air quality to unhealthy levels, causing many to fall ill and disrupting air travel.

  The blazes are an annual occurrence during the dry season as land is cleared using slash-and-burn methods but they were the worst for years in 2015, with Singapore particularly angered at what it said was Jakarta’s failure to take action.

  Tempers have frayed again after Singapore last month attempted to call in the director of an Indonesian company suspected of being linked to the haze for questioning, Singaporean media reported, citing the National Environment Agency.

• Why is this liberal congresswoman spreading anti-solar arguments?

  With the home solar panel industry and the electric utility industry at war, you might expect a liberal Democratic congresswoman from New York City to support the solar side. But that’s not what happened recently when Rep. Yvette Clarke decided to wade into this fight. Instead, she signed her name to a letter apparently written by utility lobbyists that warns about the risk of solar companies duping consumers.

  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is holding a workshop on June 21 to learn about the booming rooftop solar market and how it’s affecting consumers. There are concerns on both pro- and anti-solar sides: The solar industry is hoping that the FTC will look into what they consider to be anti-competitive practices by the electric utility industry, intended to stymie the growth of solar. The utilities hope to prod the FTC to investigate allegedly unscrupulous solar companies, in the name of protecting consumers.

• World’s Banks Driving Climate Chaos with Hundreds of Billions in Extreme Energy Financing

  Turning their backs on climate science and the consensus of governments and civil society across the globe, the world’s biggest banks are dangerously advancing the climate crisis by pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the world’s most polluting fossil fuel industries, according to a new report published Tuesday.

Finance

• Rolls-Royce says Brexit will heighten investment risk

  Engineering giant Rolls Royce has written to employees saying it wants the UK to stay in the European Union.

  Brexit would “limit any company’s ability to plan and budget for the future,” the firm said.

  Meanwhile, the CBI has said a vote to Leave would “put British businesses out in the cold”.

  But Leave campaigners said the CBI does not represent British business and is “the voice of Brussels”.

• NYT Dismisses Social Programs, Routine in Much of the World, as ‘Unsustainable’

  And as his candidacy’s political purpose became clearer, corporate media criticism of his intention to stay in the race has become sharper. After the June 7 primaries, when it became mathematically impossible for Sanders to win a majority of the pledged delegates, much of the media circled the wagons, insisting Sanders drop out in the interest of “party unity” and “stopping Trump”—something Sanders himself has pledged to work toward.

  [...]

  With this one sentence, the New York Times not only embraced a right-wing canard that’s been peddled by everyone from the Wall Street Journal to the neoliberal Urban Institute, it also contradicted its previous editorial stance on the issue. In 2013, the Times (9/29/13) presented universal healthcare as a widespread standard that the US ought to meet…

  [...]

  One major change was in the official policy position of the Democratic Party. While universal healthcare was once a broad goal of putative liberals, the Democrats’ soon-to-be leader, Hillary Clinton, says that single-payer healthcare will “never, ever happen.” New York Times Clinton partisan and leading center-left economist Paul Krugman insisted in January that single-payer was “a distraction.” Adam Gaffney of the New Republic wrote in March, “Republicans are no longer afraid of the menace of single-payer, for a perfectly good reason: The mainstream of the Democratic Party has largely abandoned it.”

• Bankers win big on UK referendum ballot

  The financial sector has used the threat of Brexit via the UK referendum on EU membership to promote its deregulatory agenda since 2013, according to a new study (1) by Corporate Europe Observatory.

  “How Cameron’s referendum delivered victories to Big Finance” tells the story of how, from the day a ballot on UK membership was first announced by David Cameron three years ago, the financial sector has sought and won significant lobbying victories thanks to a complicit UK government and EU efforts to keep the City of London happy.

  The appointment of Jonathan Hill as European commissioner for financial services, the deregulation agenda of the so-called “Capital Markets Union”, the impending roll-backs on rules to protect against financial instability, and special decision-making privileges for the UK should the interests of banks come under attack, are all highlighted as the key triumphs of the sector and its allies in the UK government since the prospect of Brexit was raised as a serious possibility.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Sanders: End of Voting Does Not Mean End of Political Revolution

  Bernie Sanders held a press conference on Tuesday calling for reform of the Democratic party—starting with the ouster of Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz—and said he would remain in the presidential race until the end.

  Speaking ahead of a planned meeting with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, Sanders said, “The time is now—in fact, the time is long overdue, for a fundamental transformation of the Democratic party.”

• A Campaign Based on Conspiracy Theory

  Conspiracy theories – suspicions without evidence – have become a bane of modern life, but Donald Trump seeks to make them a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, as Todd Gitlin describes.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Bryan Lim’s threat should be treated more seriously than Amos Yee’s

  While I do not ascribe to any of his points of views, I view him as nothing more than a teenager trying to find his way in the world. As a fellow citizen, I am of the opinion that we should nurture his intelligence rather than alienate him. It is painfully obvious that he isn’t some kind of violent criminal. Nor has he incited anyone to violence. All he has done is mouthed off on religion and the late Mr Lee. Now, I am not suggesting that he is a respectful child. But since when has disrespect become a crime?

• Peter Thiel’s Gawker-Killing Lawyer Now Issuing Bogus Defamation Threats Over Story On Donald Trump’s Hair

  Earlier this week we noted that Peter Thiel’s legal vendetta against Gawker went way beyond just the Hulk Hogan case. In fact, it appeared that Thiel not only paid the lawyer, Charles Harder, to set up his own legal practice (without revealing to Holder who was really paying the bills), but basically sought to help pay the bills of lots of folks pushing legal claims on Gawker, no matter how tenuous. That included a questionable labor dispute (where even the plaintiff said he felt used by the lawyer) and a weird defamation case in which the court easily tossed out the defamation claim against Gawker, but the plaintiff, Meanith Huon, settled the claim against Above The Law (where his argument was marginally stronger), but appealed the ruling against Gawker, telling the court that he wasn’t concerned about the appeal because he was “getting support from Hulk Hogan’s lawyers in California.” The deeper you look at the Huon case, the more ridiculous it seems.

  [...]

  We see these kinds of notices all the time, and know that you absolutely can republish such threat letters without fear of actual infringement, but as Gawker’s reporter rightly notes, doing so might only give Harder yet another opportunity to pile on a questionable lawsuit. After some consideration, however, Gawker changed its mind and posted the letter. It’s as ridiculous as you’d expect. It lists out 19 specific statements from the original article, which it claims are false and defamatory. At the very least, that’s more advanced than most purely bogus threats that don’t highlight exact statements.

  Still, the key statements that Harder claims are defamatory are taken directly from other lawsuits against Ivari, and there’s what’s known as fair reporting privilege, which allows you to quote what’s found in a lawsuit and not be liable as if you’d said it yourself. Many of the other statements are minor issues that hardly rise to the level of defamation in any sense of the term, let alone hitting the necessary standards of being done recklessly with malicious intent, as would be necessary for a defamation claim to succeed. Incredibly, in the very first item, Harder even changes a word to misrepresent what Gawker’s article said.

• Donald Trump revokes Washington Post press credentials

  Donald Trump says he is “revoking” the Washington Post’s press access at his campaign events because the newspaper is “phony and dishonest.”

  In a Facebook post, the presumptive GOP nominee attributed the decision to the newspaper’s “incredibly inaccurate coverage” of him.

• Google’s Arbitrary Morality Police Threaten Us Yet Again; Media Sites Probably Shouldn’t Use Google Ads

  Two years ago, we wrote about a ridiculous situation in which the morality police who work for Google’s AdSense team threatened to kill our account because they saw that their ads were being displayed on this page, which has a story (from 2012) about a publicity rights claim involving a music video using footage of a porn star without her permission. The story was quite clearly about the intellectual property issues at play, but the AdSense team insisted that since the still image displayed from the embedded video showed a (clothed) woman pole dancing, it violated their policies on “adult or mature content.” We protested and AdSense rejected our protest, insisting that the still image of the pole dancing violated their policies. Never mind the fact that the same exact video was hosted on Google-owned YouTube where it had Google’s ads enabled…

  For what it’s worth, this happened just months after we had started using Google AdSense, after representatives from that team put together a big effort to get us switch from the other ad provider we’d been using at the time.

• Censorship in cinema

  ‘Udta Punjab’ is in the news for the wrong reasons. After a wrung-out battle with the CBFC, the film is set to hit the screens soon. Here is a quiz on other such movies that have run into trouble due to their content.

• Sadiq Khan’s ‘unrealistic body’ ads ban nothing more than censorship – advertising’s loss will be PR’s gain

  For two short years, before I wormed my way into PR, I worked as a personal trainer – and, slight dip since starting a business aside – still like to look after myself.

  What does that have to do with anything? Well, some of you will have read that, from next month, London’s new mayor Sadiq Khan is moving to ban ads promoting an ‘unhealthy’ or ‘unrealistic’ body image from appearing on London’s transport network – and I’d like to look at this logically, knowing what I know and having worked with hundreds of people of all shapes and sizes.

  As per an election promise, Khan’s going to issue a total ban on ad campaigns that could “pressurise people” (don’t get me started on pressurise – since when was ‘pressure’ not good enough?) to conform to idealised body standards.

  In his statement, Khan said that he was going after the kind of advertising that can demean people and make them feel ashamed of their bodies – noting, as the father of two teenage girls, that women were often particularly affected by this.

• Twitter, Facebook & Google Sued For ‘Material Support For Terrorism’ Over Paris Attacks

  It’s an understandable reaction to tragedy. When faced with the unthinkable — like the death of a loved one in a terrorist attack — people tend to make bad decisions. We saw this recently when the widow of a man killed in an ISIS raid sued Twitter for “providing material support to terrorists.” Twitter’s involvement was nothing more than the unavoidable outcome of providing a social media platform: it was (and is) used by terrorist organizations to communicate and recruit new members.

  That doesn’t mean Twitter somehow supports terrorism, though. Like most social media platforms, Twitter proactively works to eliminate accounts linked with terrorists. But there’s only so much that can be done when all that’s needed to create an account is an email address.

  As difficult as it may be to accept, platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc. are not the problem. Like any, mostly-open social platform, they can be used by terrible people to do terrible things. But they are not responsible for individual users’ actions, nor should they be expected to assume this responsibility.

• Myanmar censors ban movie at human rights film festival

• Paving the Way for Peace in Burma

• Myanmar scraps screening of film critical of military’s excesses during its 49-year rule

• Twilight Over Burma: Myanmar censors pull film from festival

• New Govt, Old Censorship Laws: Film About Shan Prince Banned as Threat to ‘Ethnic Unity’

• Filmmakers reel after human rights festival motion picture ban

• Myanmar scraps screening of film critical of military’s past

• ‘Twilight Over Burma’ Eclipsed by Censorship Board

  “Twilight Over Burma,” a film about the real-life story of an Austrian woman, Inge Sargent, who became royalty when she married Sao Kya Seng, an ethnic Shan prince, was banned from premiering in Burma at the annual Human Rights Human Dignity International Film Festival that started on Tuesday. A film censorship board member told The Irrawaddy that the film was under review because it could allegedly damage ethnic unity in the country.

• In China, it’s a cat and mouse game between censors and internet activists

• Russia and China seek media control

• China takes its authoritarian ways to the Internet

• ASNE condemns Trump’s attempt at press censorship

• Editorial: The slippery slope of censorship under Trump

• Censorship attempts must end

• Post Reporter at Trump Rally Despite ‘Ban’

• Donald Trump’s ban on news outlets should alarm voters (Your letters)

Privacy/Surveillance

• John Cornyn Wants to Pass Law Letting FBI Collect Information on Omar Mateen It Already Collected

  The bodies from Sunday’s Orlando massacre are not yet buried, but that hasn’t stopped John Cornyn from trying to use their deaths to expand surveillance that would not have stopped the attack.

  Cornyn told reporters yesterday he will use the attack to push to include Electronic Communications Transaction Records in the things FBI can obtain with a National Security Letter.

• Encryption and human rights: La Quadrature du Net takes part in a UN conference

  La Quadrature du Net is participating at the panel “Encryption and Human Rights” organised at the United Nations by the Committee Justice and Peace of the Dominican Order. This conference will talk about the right to encryption and to privacy in a time where in Europe, those rights are at regularly at risk. The video of this conference will be available on the Mediakit of La Quadrature du Net.

  Right to encryption is one of the essential condition to the existence of the right to privacy and to freedom of speech.

  Individuals and civil society are regularly subject to intrusions and restrictions of those rights by State, when those are asked to respect privacy of their citizens. The development of mass surveillance technologies and their legalisation in the name of the fight against terrorism act as a barrier to the application of those rights and seriously infringe a large number of civil liberties. Encryption has increasingly become a major breaking point and appear as a essential barrier against the demolition of our liberties in the digital era.

• One Creepy Word Captures the NSA’s Culture of Secrecy

  A bill reforming the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is on its way to the president right now. It makes clearer the presumption of disclosure and centralizes requests for information from the feds. The Obama White House has arguably the worst record of finding records following FOIA requests of any administration, according to the AP. One advantage to keeping records locked up is that it helps to remove any sense that lower echelon public servants close to a given issue have doubts about political leaders’ chosen course of action.

  [...]

  One word in one document has been bugging us ever since: “corporate.”

  An NSA writer used the word in a newsletter story about its Legislative Affairs and Intelligence Security Issues office. That office watches budgets, answers questions from elected officials and vets all communication between NSA staff and Congress. As the newsletter article put it, if a staffer needs to communicate with a legislator, the office “will assist you in analyzing the request, providing background and context to the responsible action office, and reviewing the responses to ensure that they meet the five Cs (candid, complete, correct, consistent and corporate) for dealing with Congress.”

• Why LinkedIn and Microsoft Isn’t Crazy [Ed: Calling people "dataset", along the lines of "assets" or "products".]

• Microsoft buys LinkedIn: the value of data

  By acquiring the world’s largest professional social network, Microsoft gets immediate access to data from more than 433 million LinkedIn members. Microsoft fills out the “social graph” and “interests” circles.

• Microsoft to Acquire LinkedIn for $26.2 Billion

  At the same time, I expect that many free tech advocates will begin abandoning LinkedIn as much as possible as soon as the site begins to push users to take advantage of features requiring the use of Microsoft products, if not before. As one member of an email list I’m on commented upon hearing the news, “Anybody recommend a good alternative to LinkedIn?”

• You don’t need a Linkedin account

  In recent years, Linkedin has perceivably become a rather important part of the modern business world. People use this social network to search for jobs, advertise jobs, and get their own work-related resume out there into the spotlight. Which is why I always get a funny look when people ask me to add them on Linkedin, and I tell them, I don’t have one.

  The same why I told you why you should not be using Facebook back in 2010, and the arguments still hold valid, I would like to tell you why you might want to entertain the idea of not having a business profile on a social media site, and why this could actually be good for your career. To wit, let us philosophize.

• Dropbox CEO Pushes Toward Profitability in a ‘Post-Unicorn Era’

  Since attaining a $10 billion valuation from investors in 2014, Dropbox Inc. has become a symbol of unicorn startup exuberance. But several shareholders have recently written down the value of their investments in the cloud storage company while it cut costs and focused on generating more revenue.

• Tuesday’s papers: Finland’s surveillance plans, Metro expansion boss under fire, Finnish director’s Chinese fantasy

  A working group on cyber security has submitted a list of proposals to Prime Minister Juha Sipilä, aimed to improve Finland’s cyber surveillance, according to newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.

  The proposals, drawn up by a joint group from the Ministry of the Interior, the Security Intelligence Service, the National Bureau of Investigation and a police task force, include the recruitment of 101 new cyber crime police officers.

  According to the paper group also suggests changing laws to broaden law enforcement’s capabilities of monitoring telephone communications.

  Additionally, the group proposes increased training in computer crime of police.

  The group’s report also point out laws on the books that they say hampers police work, the paper writes.

  The report states that even though identity theft was criminalised in Finland last autumn, the majority of cases are never reported to the police and many cases that are reported are often left unresolved.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Alabama Cop Snatches Camera from Man Recording Police Station to Prevent Terrorism

  Fearing a terrorist plot, an Alabama police officer snatched a camera from a man who was video recording a police station from across the street, turning the man’s camera off to keep it from recording.

  However, the man had a back-up body camera that was live streaming.

  “I don’t care about your First Amendment rights,” said the Wetumpka police officer, who has been identified as Charles Shannon.

  “I don’t know if you’re a terrorist or not, trying to film our building.”

• Alabama Cops Retaliate Against Citizen Journalist After PINAC Readers Call Flood Police Department (Updated II)

  One day after PINAC posted a video showing an Alabama cop snatching a camera from a man recording a police station, sparking a call flood from hundreds of angry readers, that same police department retaliated by having the man arrested on felony charges.

  Wetumpka police claim that Keith Golden aka Bama Cameradisrupted their emergency phone lines by posting their non-emergency phone number in his video, which we then reposted in our article.

• British Islamic scholar faces ban from Australia for preaching ‘death is the sentence’ for homosexuality

  Farrokh Sekaleshfar preached in Orlando in March but no evidence he influenced Omar Mateen who killed 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando

• Killing Homosexuals Is Not ISIS Law, It Is Muslim Law

  Various reports indicate that the death toll from the jihadist attack overnight at a popular gay club in Orlando may exceed 50 people, with more than 50 others wounded. The terrorist’s identity has been reported: He is Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old American citizen and devout Muslim from Fort Pierce, Fla., the son of immigrants from Afghanistan.

• Clement Freud, My Part in his Downfall

  It is hard to know what to make of Freud owning a holiday villa close to where Madeleine McCann disappeared. Clement was apparently not in Portugal at the time. When you add in the fact that the McCanns’ sleazy “spokesman”, Clarence Mitchell, works for Freud’s son Matthew, the coincidences do add up. I am not jumping to any conclusions at present. But I found the following fascinating.

• CIA Lied about Leaking to Screw David Passaro and Protect Bush and Tenet

  In the SSCI Torture Report, it has two references to how press people were leaking details of the the torture program to the press even while lawyers were claiming that the program was top secret. In this document, someone notes “our Glomar fig leaf is getting pretty thin.” In this one, a lawyer admits the declaration he had just written “about the secrecy of the interrogation program” was “a work of fiction.”

• CIA Finally Declassifies “Gloves Come Off” Memorandum of Notification Reference

  The title was part of some smart CYA on the part of George Tenet. When things started to go south with the torture program in 2003, he wrote this document, ostensibly putting order to the torture program, but also making it clear the whole thing operated on Presidential authority. (The document, which should have been released to David Passaro in his criminal trial for torturing a detainee who subsequently died, was withheld, which prevented him from pointing out anything he did, he did with Presidential approval, so Tenet’s CYA didn’t help him at all.)

• The Senate’s Popular Sentencing Reform Bill Would Sort Prisoners By ‘Risk Score’

  At a time when Democrats and Republicans in Congress can’t agree on just about anything, there is one issue that unites them: the urgent need for criminal justice reform.

  A Senate bill on the issue has attracted an impressive 37 co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle. The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act has gained support from figures as politically diverse as the Koch brothers and President Obama for its goals of reforming mandatory minimum sentences, reducing prison populations, and rehabilitating prisoners.

• 7 Questions With EFF’s New Criminal Defense Staff Attorney Stephanie Lacambra

  EFF’s team of fearless lawyers defends your rights on the frontlines of technology and the law, from police stops on the street to arguments in the courtroom to the halls of government where policies are ground out. EFF’s latest hire, Criminal Defense Staff Attorney Stephanie Lacambra, is a fierce and accomplished public defender who will lend her unique expertise to our ongoing and emerging battles against law enforcement and prosecutorial overreach.

  I sat down with Stephanie to learn more about her story up until now and where she hopes this new endeavor will take her.

• America’s Gestapo – The FBI’s Reign of Terror

  We discuss the seemingly-inexorable transformation of the USA into a police state

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Court Backs Rules Treating Internet as Utility, Not Luxury

• U.S. Appeals Court Upholds Net Neutrality Rules In Full

• Obama’s Web Rules Upheld in Win for Google, Loss for AT&T

• After net neutrality loss, ISPs get ready to take case to Supreme Court

• Net Neutrality Won Big Today, But Don’t Celebrate Just Yet

• Net Neutrality Rules Upheld: Go Team Internet!

  In a crucial win for Internet users, today a federal appeals court upheld [PDF] clear net neutrality rules that will let us all use and enjoy the Internet without unfair interference from Internet service providers. The rules will keep providers from blocking or slowing traffic, or speeding up traffic for those who pay.

  Last year, EFF and other advocacy groups, along with millions of Americans, called on the FCC to do its part to defend Internet expression and innovation. We urged them to adopt focused rules based on a legal framework that would finally stand up to the inevitable legal challenge, but also limit their own authority in order to help prevent a future FCC from abusing its regulatory power. The FCC responded with an Open Internet Order that largely did just that.

• The Cable Industry Trots Out Mitch McConnell To Fight Against Cable Box Competition

  We’ve been talking for weeks about how the cable industry has dramatically ramped up lobbying in an attempt to kill the FCC’s plan to bring some competition to the set top box market. The cable industry opposes the idea for two reasons: competition would dramatically reduce the $21 billion the sector makes each year off of rental fees, but the flood of new, cheaper boxes would also likely direct users — historically locked behind cable’s walled gardens — to a huge variety of streaming video alternatives.

  But the cable industry can’t just come out and admit that they’re terrified of competition — so they’ve been attacking the FCC’s plan with a two pronged approach. One, pay for an absolute torrent of hysterically-misleading editorials that claim set top competition will hurt consumers, scare the children, ramp up piracy, and knock the planet off of its orbital axis. The other prong of their attack involves a lobbying mainstay: throwing money at politicians to take positions they don’t have the slightest actual understanding of.

Intellectual Monopolies

• EU Trade Secrets Directive to come into force on 5 July 2016 [Ed: anti-whistleblowers law in Europe]

• UN Development Agency Issues Guidelines For Pharmaceutical Patent Examiners

  A new set of guidelines for pharmaceutical patent examination has been published by the United Nations Development Programme that seek to help reduce poor quality patents and ensure efficient market entry of generic products.

  The guidelines, written by a well-known advocate of access to medicines, aim at advising patent examiners in assessing the patentability requirements of applications relating to pharmaceutical products and processes.

• Generics, Biosimilars Makers Join Global Medical Harmonisation Body

  Doors to a global medical harmonisation organisation opened to the generic and biosimilar industry, which described it as an historical moment for them. The industry will now be able to sit on the assembly of the international body that joins regulators and the pharmaceutical industry.

  At issue is the International Council for Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH). According to a press release, the ICH‘s General Assembly today approved the International Generic and Biosimilar Medicines Association (IGBA) as an ICH assembly member. ICH is a Geneva-based organisation that brings together regulatory authorities and the pharmaceutical industry.

• Panels Brainstorm Ideas On Innovation And Drug Access

  The quest of balance between encouraging medical innovation and the imperative of broad access to medicines has so far been elusive. Two Harvard University programmes jointly organised a workshop this week with the aim of encouraging a conversation between global health actors and see if some “outside the box” thinking is possible.

• Trademarks

  • The Metaphorical Trademark “Bully”: A Problem?

    Many have tried to answer the question of whether there is a trademark bullying problem–also known as trademark enforcement abuse. First, there have been anecdotal accounts of trademark holders making overreaching claims against persons or entities with less resources. In the United States, these claims are particularly troublesome when First Amendment values, such as free speech, are implicated or when fair competition may be threatened. One of the first trademark “bully” accounts that received substantial attention involved Monster Energy drinks and its enforcement of its trademark against a small brewery offering a beer called, “Vermonster.” However, my favorite trademark “bully” story involves Louis Vuitton who sent a cease and desist letter to the IP student group at University of Pennsylvania Law School directing them to stop using some of Louis Vuitton’s trademarks in an advertisement for a law school symposium. Anecdotal examples abound.

• Copyrights

  • Ruling From EU’s Top Court Confirms Copyright Levies Are A Ridiculous, Unworkable Mess

    It’s really not clear how that could be done in practice. Maybe by allocating a tiny tax rebate to companies by way of “reimbursement” for the copyright levy payment made from the state budget. But that would add yet another layer of complexity to the tax system, hardly a welcome outcome. It would be far simpler just to get rid of the unwieldy and anachronistic copyright levy system altogether. It’s time to recognize that everybody has a fundamental right to make copies of stuff they own, and that the “fair compensation” for doing that is a big, fat nothing.

  • BREIN Wants Usenet Providers to Expose Prolific Uploaders

    The Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN is going after two anonymous Usenet uploaders, who shared more than 2,000 books in total. The group requested the personal details of the users from their providers, but they refused to hand them over citing privacy concerns. As a result, BREIN is now taking the matter to court.