● 06.21.13

● Links 21/6/2013: antiX 13.1, More NSA/FBI Revelations

Posted in News Roundup at 11:24 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Cumulus Linux, which bills itself as “the first true, full-featured Linux operating system for datacenter networking,” has emerged from stealth mode. Backed by several VMware (VMW) veterans, Cumulus sounds like a next-generation software-defined networking (SDN) player. And the company has $15 million in venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures and others.

• Cumulus Linux emerged from stealth mode and become generally available on Wednesday. The company behind its development, Cumulus Networks, says the OS will do for networking what Linux has already achieved in other areas.

• Cumulus Networks, a Silicon Valley startup with a Linux operating system for data center networking and Silicon Valley superstar pedigree, came out of stealth Wednesday.

Server

• The ‘surprise’ win for the machine also known as Tianhe-2 marks China’s first return to top spot since 2010.

• Linux’s many strengths are undeniable in numerous aspects of computing today, but if there’s one area in which its domination tends to continue virtually unchallenged, it’s supercomputing.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA is bringing their 319.xx proprietary graphics driver from Linux x86 to ARM.

• Up to now NVIDIA has just supported their proprietary Linux graphics driver for GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla hardware on Intel x86 and x86-64 architectures (and formerly for Itanium), but now ARM support is coming.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

• I am taking a graphic design course and one of the assignements received was to remake the logo of a well known soft drink (for the purpose of this tutorial I replaced that logo with something else, as this is not the place for unpaid advertising, especially for products I don’t use nor endorse). Is a trivial task with Inkscape, so I decided to enrich it with some water drops, as at the final exam I can show my skills and get a higher grade. For the exam I can’t provide a SVG, will have to import/convert it in a proprietary format (such is life…), but Inkscape is my tool of choice so I m sharing the process here.

Games

• Linux is a solid and secure operating system that’s suitable for gaming, but at this time Windows remains the lead platform for PC games. This may be about to change. Last year, Valve Software brought their game distribution system Steam to Linux, along with several of their popular game titles like Left 4 Dead and Half-Life.

• Bookmark and Share Planetary Annihilation one of the most successful games to hit it on Kickstarter has within the last week pushed out their Linux version!

• Planetary Annihilation is a Real Time Strategy game from Uber Entertainment which includes some of the staff that made Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander two games that have a big place in my heart! I do love RTS games so this is a big, big win for me!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• digiKam team is proud to announce the second beta release of digiKam Software Collection 3.3.0. This version currently under development, including a new core implementation to manage faces, especially face recognition feature which have never been completed with previous release. Face detection feature still always here and work as expected.

• I’ve been looking into how easy it is to confirm that a binary package corresponds to a source package. It turns out that it is not easy at all. So I’ve written down my findings in this blog entry.

• Rekonq now provides several popular features found in Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. This web browser may be up for consideration as your new favorite.

• We saw last week the release of the first beta of KDE Plasma Workspace and applications 4.11

• From my side, that’s a very important milestone, because it’s pretty much the coronation of what we intended the 4.x series of the workspace to be. It was a long ride, but I think this future release will be pretty stable and “defined” in its own identity.

• Prolific KDE developer Pawan Yadav has updated the PotenzaRemix theme bringing it to version 1.7. The theme, as he explains, is a mix of Potenza and Awoken (action icon) with his custom icons.

• If you are already running the previous version of this theme and want to update, he suggests deleting the previous theme from the usr/share/icon folder.

Distributions

• Linux is considered by most to be a big scary place for new users to break into, but the truth is that’s Linux distributions provide a great community for many technology enthusiasts to come together and share their ideas and of course their desktops.

• So if you’re sick of looking at that familiar blue Widows desktop and you’re looking to learn something new, or if you just want something that’s more secure than Windows/Mac, then take a look at some of the best beginner Linux distro’s below.

New Releases

• antiX is a lightweight Linux distribution aimed at old systems with not-so-good configurations. It is based on the “testing” branch of Debian. Unlike several other distros based on the “testing” repository of Debian, like Linux Mint Debian Edition, Parsix and PureOS, antiX specifically targets computers that people usually plan to throw away in dustbins. According to its developers, antiX should run on most computers, ranging from 64MB old PII 266 systems with pre-configured 128MB swap to the latest powerful boxes. It’s easy to install, and comes as live CD that users can test-drive before installing on their PCs.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• The developers at the OpenMandriva Association have released the first development version of OpenMandriva Lx 2013, the first release to take place under the governance of the new association. OpenMandriva Lx Alpha includes version 3.8.12 of the Linux kernel, a desktop based on KDE 4.10.4, and current versions of LibreOffice (4.0.3.3) and Firefox (version 21). The distribution, which in the past had been merged with the ROSA Linux code base, also includes a number of tools from the Russian ROSA Laboratory developers including version 1.6 of the ROSA Media Player (ROMP).

Red Hat Family

• The leading Open Source company, and the sponsor of Fedora Linux, Red Hat has posted the total revenue of $363 million for the first quarter of 2013. It’s an increase of 15% in U.S. dollars from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $316 million, up 16% in U.S.

• Linux software developer Red Hat Inc. was among the stocks seeing notable activity in after-hours trading following the company’s quarterly results.

• Red Hat Inc., the company behind the Linux open-source operating system, said Wednesday that net income in its fiscal first-quarter grew 8 percent as subscription revenue increased.

• First quarter revenue of $363 million, up 15% year-over-year

• U.S. stock-index futures pointed to a lower opening on the Wall Street as investors weighed comments by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) post-meeting policy statement.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• How important is Mark Shuttleworth’s to Canonical, Ubuntu, Linux and open source? Officially, Shuttleworth’s role at the company behind Ubuntu, which he founded in 2004, has been limited to product strategy and design since he stepped down as CEO in December 2009. Still, his presence looms much larger in the Ubuntu community.

• Like many Canonical-led projects, Mir is under GPLv3 – a strong copyleft license. There’s a couple of aspects of GPLv3 that are intended to protect users from being unable to make use of the rights that the license grants them. The first is that if GPLv3 code is shipped as part of a user product, it must be possible for the user to replace that GPLv3 code. That’s a problem if your device is intended to be locked down enough that it can only run vendor code. The second is that it grants an explicit patent license to downstream recipients, permitting them to make use of those patents in derivative works.

• Several high-profile telecom carriers have signalled their interest in supporting Ubuntu Touch – Canonical’s mobile platform

• The debate that has sparked around Mir and its use with the other flavors of Ubuntu has also raised another interesting question regarding the Legacy support.

• Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager, has recently been working to finalize a fair and transparent plan for how the money raised from the community, upstreams, and flavors sliders can be used to benefit the most valuable projects and efforts within the Ubuntu and flavors community. Jono prepared a plan and reviewed it with the Community Council who were happy with the programme he proposed.

Devices/Embedded

• The Cubieboard is a tiny computer that’s about the size and shape of a Raspberry Pi, but which features more memory, built-in storage, and a few other goodies that the Raspberry Pi lacks.

• Linux.com interviewed Wolfgang Denk, founder of Denx and the creator of the U-Boot bootloader. The embedded Linux pioneer spoke on a range of issues including the future of U-Boot, the importance of Yocto Project code and how it has changed Denx’s own ELDK distribution, and the growth of ARM and real-time Linux in embedded computing.

Phones

• Electronics manufacturer Foxconn Technology Group is putting yet more effort behind Mozilla’s Firefox OS, and plans to hire up to 3,000 people in Taiwan with expertise in HTML5 and cloud computing.

• On Thursday, Foxconn said it was looking to hire between 2,000 and 3,000 people in order to bolster its research into software. It’s looking for software engineers with skills in HTML5 operating systems, HTML5 apps, and cloud computing, the company said.

Ballnux

• Samsung’s Galaxy series is a range of mobile computers that all run on Google’s Android mobile operating system. One branch of the series is not smartphones, though, but rather Samsung’s stab at point-and-shoot style cameras. The company has apparently decided that the camera business suits it, and subsequently introduced the logical next step in image capturing: the Galaxy NX Digital Single-Lens Reflex camera (or simply DSLR).

• The device is designed for customers on a budget, and features a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 processor and 4GB of onboard storage.

• Samsung unveiled a quad-core, 20-megapixel Galaxy NX camera with 4G LTE and a 4.8-inch display, billed as being the first Android-based, connected interchangeable-lens camera, following up on last week’s announcement of its Android-powered 16-megapixel, 10x-zoom Galaxy S4 Zoom. Also today, Samsung unveiled the Ativ Q, a dual-boot 13.3-inch convertible tablet that runs Android and Windows 8 on an Intel “Haswell” Core processor.

Android

• Apple and Microsoft have been doing this for years, so it’s not a new concept. But Google is trying to make sure it keeps riding on the success wave till as long as possible. Android is already the leading mobile operating systems in most parts of the world, ahead of Apple’s proprietary iOS that powers its iPhones and iPads, especially in the Asia region. Yet Google doesn’t want to leave a stone unturned. Google has partnered with Spice Global, an Indian conglomerate headquartered in Singapore, to open an Android Nation store in the capital city of New Delhi.

• So a few people have sent me this review of the OUYA console, and asked if things were really that bad. I’ve been tweeting about receiving the final retail version of the console, and I was surprised to see a review get up so quickly. The retail kits were only sent to the press today. So I read the review and just as I thought, that’s old hardware being reviewed.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Smaller variations are going to account for over half of overall tablets this year, analysts say.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Minister of Finance and the Economy, Nicolas Marceau, has announced that LINAGORA, a French company specializing in open source software development, will open a facility in Montréal.

Web Browsers

Chrome

SaaS/Big Data

• The U.S. has spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting terrorists. Ironically, however, the best technology available to fight terror likely isn’t a line item on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) $8 to $10 billion budget. More probably it’s Hadoop, which is open source and 100% free.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.0.4, the last version of the open source office suite before it moves on to the 4.1.x branch of releases, which is currently scheduled to arrive at the end of July. For this release, the developers of LibreOffice have closed 98 bug reports that also include a few improvements and some enhanced translations.

• MariaDB founder Ulf Michael “Monty” Widenius says that Oracle has failed to make a success of MySQL because the company doesn’t understand open source. “It’s not in their blood,” Widenius, one of the three co-founders of MySQL, told iTWire in an interview.

Healthcare

• The advancements in medicine over the last 50 years are remarkable. Diseases once thought of as terminal are now curable. Chronic conditions today can be treated far more effectively than just a decade ago, making a huge impact on a patient’s quality of life.

Business

• “There is a trend where a company starts with open source and builds out to follow the commercial model. Certainly all of our large customers want a company behind the platform, so they opt for that notion. A lot of smaller companies start in the open source world and then gradually move towards the commercial as they get bigger or get more dependent on those solutions.”

• More than half of UK private and public sector organisations will spend at least 20% of their IT budget on open source applications and software within the next five years, this is the claim arising from an Open for Business study, conducted by IT service provider Reconnix,

• A total of 61% of respondents intend to invest 20% or more into open source.

• The majority (48%) expect to invest between 20% – 40%.

• A smaller 10% of firms believe that their open source spend could account for as much as 60% of their total budget.

Semi-Open Source

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The next-generation VP9 and HEVC codecs are the latest incremental refinements of a basic codec design that dates back 25 years to h.261. This conservative, linear development strategy evolving a proven design has yielded reliable improvement with relatively low risk, but the law of diminishing returns is setting in. Recent performance increases are coming at exponentially increasing computational cost.

Licensing

• Oracle accidentally changed the licence of MySQL manual pages from the previous GPLv2 licence to a non-free licence. The change was revealed by Colin Charles, MariaDB evangelist, in a post on the MariaDB Foundation’s blog. But as the news spread, a bug report in Oracle’s issue tracker revealed that what had been found was actually a problem in the build system.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

Programming

• If, despite the upcoming release of the web framework Ruby on Rails 4.0, users are not interested in giving up version 2.3, they can look to a German company for support. In future, Makandra will provide security updates for Ruby 2.3.x. As announced a few months ago, the Rails developers will officially no longer provide support for that version once Ruby on Rails 4.0 is launched; only Ruby 3.2.x and later versions will continue to receive updates.

• Employing the open source R programming language for statistical analysis can reduce the pain of dealing with large and complex data sets. That’s why R is becoming more popular, as it automates the analysis process, saving a substantial amount of time, according to Open Universities’ digital analytics manager, Johann de Boer.

• Speaking at the Google Analytics User Conference in Sydney, de Boer demonstrated how he could do a full analysis, fetching and cleaning up data, merging data sets together, processing the data and visualising the results, using the R language in minutes.

Leftovers

• Hastings, a reporter for Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed who died in a car crash in L.A. yesterday at the age of 33, didn’t see it as his job to maintain “good media/military relations,” or to decide what is “necessary to report.” To the contrary–he told CounterSpin (1/27/12) that one of his golden rules for reporting was, “What does everybody know who’s on the inside, but no one’s willing to say or write.”

• Hastings never forgot that journalists’ loyalties are supposed to be with the public and not to the government officials whose actions they cover–and that approach distinguished him not only from Burns but from most of his colleagues.

• Google has admitted that the headscratching questions it once used to quiz job applicants (How many piano tuners are there in the entire world? Why are manhole covers round?) were utterly useless as a predictor of who will be a good employee.

Science

• Physicists at The University of Texas at Austin have built a tabletop particle accelerator that can generate energies and speeds previously reached only by major facilities that are hundreds of meters long and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build.

Hardware

Health/Nutrition

• The surprise defeat of the farm bill in the House on Thursday underscored the ideological divide between the more conservative, antispending Republican lawmakers and their leadership, who failed to garner sufficient votes from their caucus as well as from Democrats.

• [...]

• The failure was a stinging defeat for Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, who continues to have trouble marshaling the Republican support he needs to pass major legislation. Without the solid backing of his party, Mr. Boehner has to rely on some Democratic support, which deserted him Thursday.

Security

• Recent email found by blogger Brandon Dixon indicates that the latest spear-phishing campaigns from the group behind NetTraveler are using the PRISM controversy to lure victims into reading the booby-trapped email. The mail, which tells the tale of the disclosure of PRISM and other NSA programmes, offers a 2.5MB file – “Monitored List1.doc” – and implies that this contains a list of those monitored by the NSA. The file, of course, actually contains malware that exploits an older vulnerability CVE-2012-0158 to infect the computer.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• In perfect Bush-like fashion, President Obama has invented a bogus pretense for military intervention in yet another Middle East country. The president’s claim that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons — and thus crossed Obama’s imaginary “red line” — will likely fool very few Americans, who already distrust their president after the massive NSA spying scandal.

• We’re still waiting for the FBI to finish its internal investigation into exactly what happened in an Orlando apartment last month, when an FBI agent shot and killed Ibragim Todashev, a Chechan man who knew Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Since the shooting, unnamed officials have painted a number of different pictures of the scene in the room in the moments before the agent opened fire. Among them, that Todashev was unarmed, that he was brandishing a knife, and that he was carrying a pipe or maybe a broomstick.

• Iraq is being buffeted by both sides in the civil war raging across its border in Syria and Baghdad’s official policy of neutrality is at risk as the conflict spirals into a region-wide proxy war, its foreign minister said.

• During the weeks before he was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles, reporter Michael Hastings was researching a story about a privacy lawsuit brought by Florida socialite Jill Kelley against the Department of Defense and the FBI.

• Hastings, 33, was scheduled to meet with a representative of Kelley next week in Los Angeles to discuss the case, according to a person close to Kelley. Hastings wrote for Rolling Stone and the website BuzzFeed.

• Kelley alleges that military officials and the FBI leaked her name to the media to discredit her after she reported receiving a stream of emails that were traced to Paula Broadwell, a biographer of former CIA director David H. Petraeus, according to a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., on June 3.

• Some Bradley Manning supporters have put together a very compelling campaign, called I Am Bradley Manning, asking the government to drop the “aiding the enemy” charge against Bradley Manning and noting the chilling effects it has on whistleblowers. The key part of the campaign is a five minute video of various well-known people talking about Bradley Manning and asking what would you do if you were in his shoes, and saw that your government was lying to the public, and doing things that you believed went against the very values and principles you were supposed to be fighting for.

• No word on whether these companies would delay a patch if asked nicely — or if there’s any way the government can require them to. Anyone feel safer because of this?

• It was a central fuel tank explosion that sent TWA Flight 800 plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean in a 1996 crash that remains one of the country’s most devastating airline accidents.

• Corporations are trying to use the PATRIOT Act in ways that have nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden because the PATRIOT Act gives transnational corporations the power to snuff out the activism of all those who oppose them.

• Terrorism, as it is commonly considered, is the use of violence against civilians to achieve any number of political ends: the destruction of the federal government, the overturning of Roe V. Wade, the restoration of a Caliphate. If you try to kill people – or succeed in killing people for a political purpose – you’re a terrorist. If you blow up the Alfred P. Murrow Federal Building and kill 168 civilians, like Timothy McVeigh, you’ve committed an act of terrorism.

• Seems pretty self-explanatory – right? Not according to TransCanada Corp., the Canadian owned energy conglomerate that is the backer of the Keystone XL pipeline extension. A new set of documents obtained by the group Bold Nebraska shows that this foreign corporation is encouraging American law enforcement agencies to treat anti-pipeline protestors like terrorists. Yes, terrorists.

• The documents, which Bold Nebraska got a hold of through a FOIA request, were part of a briefing given to Nebraska law enforcement agents about the “emerging threat” of groups like Tar Sands Blockade and Rainforest Action.

• It’s dangerous business when private contractors recruit top government employees and then effectively lease them back to the government.

• That was President John F. Kennedy speaking to the 1963 graduating class of American University —announcing that the human race was ready to move beyond war. This was the speech in which he revealed that talks on a Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union had begun, and that the U.S. was unilaterally suspending atmospheric nuclear testing.

• Today we’re publishing—for the first time—the FBI’s drone licenses and supporting records for the last several years. Unfortunately, to say that the FBI has been less than forthcoming with these records would be a gross understatement.

• Just yesterday, Wired broke the story that the FBI has been using drones to surveil Americans. Wired noted that, during an FBI oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller let slip that the FBI flies surveillance drones on American soil. Mueller tried to reassure the senators that FBI’s drone program “is very narrowly focused on particularized cases and particularized leads.” However, there’s no way to check the Director on these statements, given the Bureau’s extreme lack of transparency about its program.

• When a journalist dies, how can you tell if they’ve had a career that’s upheld the proudest journalistic traditions of challenging the powerful and fearlessly exposing the truth?

• The New York Times will attempt to piss on that career in the journalist’s obituary.

• In the 24 hours since the tragic death of journalist and author Michael Hastings was first reported on Tuesday, those who knew him, worked with him, and covered his work have offered numerous remembrances of the man best known for his Polk Award-winning Rolling Stone piece, “The Runaway General.”

• That article, which presented a dim view of the U.S. strategy in the Afghanistan war and exposed a military command structure working to actively undermine its civilian leadership, also contained several accounts of less-than-professional behavior and comments by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the International Security Assistance Force commander, the disclosure of which led to McChrystal tendering his resignation in June 2010.

• But it’s an obituary in The New York Times that has sounded a discordant note amid the rest of the encomiums. And now Hastings’ widow, Elise Jordan, is firing back at Times brass.

• Bill O’Reilly probably lost it during his sow O’Reilly Factor on Wednesday when he wondered why far-left loons who opposed drones and Gitmo detention are ‘so crazy.’

• Well, it appears it’s the other way round since O’Reilly did a really pathetic impression of a German reporter who quite rightly questioned Obama’s drone warfare policy in Berlin that day.

Cablegate

• RT’s promos for Julian Assange’s ‘The World Tomorrow’ and Spanish-language ‘La lista de Erick’ have received two gold PromaxBDA awards for Promotion, Marketing and Design as part of an international competition held in the US.

• Speaking on the one-year anniversary of his flight to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said that his group has a “common cause” with Edward Snowden and is in touch with the NSA leaker’s lawyers to help him seek asylum in Iceland.

• A year ago, Assange took to the embassy to avoid being extradited from the United Kingdom to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning on allegations of sexual assault. Sounding fatigued from a confinement during which he has reportedly suffered from a chronic lung condition, Assange nevertheless let loose a provocative series of rhetorical questions about Snowden and The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, who broke the NSA story, on Wednesday.

• Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said on Wednesday that his antisecrecy group has been in touch with National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden’s legal team in a bid to help him secure asylum in Iceland.

• “I feel a great deal of personal sympathy with Mr Snowden,” Assange told reporters on a conference call. He joined the call from the Ecuadoran embassy in London, where he has lived since entering the diplomatic mission and seeking asylum exactly one year ago.

• WikiLeaks said it needs a reply from Iceland on whether former U.S. national security contractor Edward Snowden will be granted asylum before it transports him to the Nordic island.

• In the hours leading up to his death in a fiery car crash, a ‘paranoid’ Michael Hastings told WikiLeaks he was being investigated by the FBI, according to the whistleblowing website.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Wednesday his organization is helping Edward Snowden seek asylum in Iceland. Assange also hinted that he might publish Snowden’s next revelations.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A massive mine proposal could wipe out half of the world’s remaining wild population

Finance

• The common defense of the unpaid internship is that, even if the role doesn’t exactly pay, it will pay off eventually in the form of a job. Turns out, the data suggests that defense is wrong, at least when it comes to college students.

• For three years, the National Association of Colleges and Employers has asked graduating seniors if they’ve received a job offer and if they’ve ever had either a paid or unpaid internship. And for three years, it’s reached the same conclusion: Unpaid internships don’t seem to give college kids much of a leg up when it comes time to look for employment.

• Americans were no less greedy, ignorant, selfish and violent then than they are today, and no more generous, fair-minded and idealistic.

• Global markets have fallen sharply after the Federal Reserve signalled it may begin to scale back its stimulus of the US economy later this year.

• On Wall Street, the Dow Jones dropped 354 points, or 2.3%, to close at 14,758, while the S&P 500 had its worst day since November 2011, shedding 2.5%.

• The economic crisis has caused the United Kingdom to drift apart, creating ever-widening rifts between rich and poor, native and immigrant, English and Scot. With the anti-Europe UKIP party on the rise, Great Britain stands at a crossroads.

• Competition from China and other low-wage rivals, coupled with fallout from the 2007-09 financial crisis, has put American wages under such unprecedented strain that they have shifted into reverse — not merely stagnating, but falling.

• “Water finds its equilibrium, its own level,” said Jeff Joerres, chief executive of Milwaukee-based global staffing giant ManpowerGroup Inc., who refers to this accelerating leveling of wages as “global labor arbitrage.”

• Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/business/news/us-wages-fall-amid-overseas-pressure-692123/#ixzz2WpuIFBiI

• At one time, it seems decades ago now, the general thinking in the USA was that President Barack Obama would jolt the American political system into actually doing something beneficial for its citizens rather than spying on them, building F-35 aircraft, upgrading nuclear weapons, spending trillions of dollars (US) on national security, cutting unemployment benefits/food stamps, fomenting war with Iran, Syria, China and Russia; and dragging out the war in Afghanistan.

• Of all the public entities that have fallen victim to the big bank-induced economic downturn, cities have the most compelling stories of being burned. If “all politics is local,” this is even more true for economics, at least where people’s ordinary lives are concerned. City budgets contain the life blood of communities. School districts, contracts with utility companies, waste services, and street repairs all filter locally. City social services are often the first line of response for people in need. City councils also fund soup kitchens, domestic violence shelters, and animal shelters.

Privacy

• The libertarian senator picked up on the dip in support for the POTUS among younger Americans

• [...]

• Rand Paul is claiming that the youth of America have his back in his battle against Big Brother, reports Politico.

• The NSA warrantless spying program is only a part of a “vast” American secrecy regime that has developed and expanded since 9/11, former NSA senior official and a whistleblower Thomas Drake has told RT.

• Thomas Drake, who worked for the American National Security Agency (NSA) from 2001 to 2008, says he was at the place “from the very beginning” of the development of the mass surveillance program, PRISM, that grants the government access to Internet users’ emails, search results, video chats and other data.

• Recent revelations of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) data mining capabilities have come to the forefront recently, making “big data” a new subject of interest and concern for many people.

• So what better time than now to launch a data analytics tool based on the very technology that the NSA uses to perform its real-time analysis of massive amounts of data being pulled in from sources like the PRISM program?

• Last week, in Your Computer Is Watching You: AOL Rolls Out Emotion Tracking, I described how YouEye and other firms could use the webcam built into your computer to measure your emotional reactions to videos. There’s nothing nefarious about this program – the participants in the video testing explicitly opt-in to be part of the process. But, with the recent revelations about NSA vacuuming up phone and computer data, one wonders what might be possible with clever engineers and an unlimited budget…

• After the PRISM leak, you probably want to know exactly what the NSA has on file about you. And here’s some good news amid all the are-we-living-in-a-surveillance-state hand-wringing: Civil rights advocate Jonathan Corbett put together a website called My NSA Records that wants to help you understand what your records looks like.

• Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old fugitive who revealed the NSA’s PRISM system, has told the technology companies involved in surveillance to stand up for users’ rights and demand a change in the current law.

• “If for example Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple refused to provide this cooperation with the Intelligence Community, what do you think the government would do? Shut them down?” he said, during a question and answer session hosted by The Guardian

• Booz Allen, whose top personnel served in key positions at the NSA and vice versa after the inconvenient collapse of the Cold War, has been attempting to substitute terrorist for communist as the enemy of choice. A difficult switch indeed for the military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower, the general-turned-president, had so eloquently warned us.

• Muslim and Arab Americans have been targets of intrusive monitoring programs even when they ‘have nothing to hide’

• Answering the questions about him being a potential Chinese spy, Snowden said that by calling him a traitor, the US government has destroyed any possibility of a fair trial.

• So, making the assumption that the NSA can eavesdrop on our Internet traffic already, does it really need access to Apple and Google’s server farms? After all, there’s nothing irreproducible about their systems—the rise of cloud computing technologies in recent years means that these companies’ servers are virtual constructs in any case, running on fungible hardware. With enough storage space and computing power, it is certainly technically possible to imagine shadow servers, emulating the relevant functions of a number of companies’ online services, and synchronized with data from Internet backbone taps at telcos. It might not be a perfect copy of what’s on the real servers, but such a system would still allow extensive historical searches in many cases. With such a system, “direct access” versus “intercepting traffic in transit” becomes a distinction without a difference.

• “I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American.” – Edward Snowden

• [...]

• There are weeks that change the course of human history. There are weeks when people must choose sides. There are weeks that expose the real American traitors. There is no middle ground in this debate. You are either on the side of freedom, liberty, truth, transparency and the U.S. Constitution or you are on the side of mindless obedience, oppression, deception, corruption and tyranny. A courageous young Millennial named Edward Snowden has risked his life and his future to expose the illegal, surreptitious surveillance programs being conducted by the United States government in clear violation of the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The NSA, with the full knowledge of Barack Obama and Congress, has been covertly collecting phone and internet records on millions of Americans with the full cooperation of Verizon and other mega media/data corporations. Our owners have been using the U.S. Constitution to wipe their asses. The 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is so unambiguous that any intelligent politician, bright journalist or fifth grader in Miss Sabatini’s history class could interpret its meaning and intention. Our founding fathers believed in truth, clarity and simplicity. The traitorous sociopaths in control of our government today believe in obfuscation, ambiguity and complexity.

• Michael Dowling, a Denver-based attorney who acted as Zazi’s defence counsel, said the full picture remained unclear as Zazi pleaded guilty before all details of the investigation were made public. But the lawyer said he was sceptical that mass data sweeps could explain what led law enforcement to Zazi.

• “The government says that it does not monitor content of these communications in its data collection. So I find it hard to believe that this would have uncovered Zazi’s contacts with a known terrorist in Pakistan,” Dowling said.

• Further scepticism has been expressed by David Davis, a former British foreign office minister who described the citing of the Zazi case as an example of the merits of data-mining as “misleading” and “an illusion”. Davis pointed out that Operation Pathway was prematurely aborted in April 2009 after Bob Quick, then the UK’s most senior counter-terrorism police officer, was pictured walking into Downing Street with top secret documents containing details of the operation in full view of cameras.

• One of the most articulate commentators to come to the defense of the NSA is Thomas Friedman. His recent column in the New York Times epitomizes what bothers me most about this whole affair—the readiness of people who claim to be defenders of an open society to make excuses for people and policies that undermine it.

• Friedman argues that although what the NSA is doing is distasteful, we should put up with it because it might stop some future terrorist attack, which in turn, would prompt even more intrusive violations of our freedoms.

• Russia will not ignore the actions of the US authorities who had admitted leaks of personal data of Russian citizens to which the US security services had access, the Foreign Ministry’s plenipotentiary for human rights, Konstantin Dolgov, said at a special meeting initiated by the Upper House of the Russian parliament.

• Obama and other NSA defenders insist there are robust limitations on surveillance but the documents show otherwise

• Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who broke the NSA surveillance story earlier this month, joins us one day after both President Obama and whistleblower Edward Snowden gave extensive interviews on the surveillance programs Snowden exposed and Obama is now forced to defend. Speaking to PBS, Obama distinguished his surveillance efforts from those of the Bush administration and reaffirmed his insistence that no Americans’ phone calls or emails are being directly monitored without court orders. Greenwald calls Obama’s statements “outright false” for omitting the warrantless spying on phone calls between Americans and callers outside the United States. “It is true that the NSA can’t deliberately target U.S. citizens for [warrantless] surveillance, but it is also the case they are frequently engaged in surveillance of exactly that kind of invasive technique involving U.S. persons,” Greenwald says. After moderating Snowden’s online Q&A with Guardian readers, Greenwald says of the whistleblower: “I think what you see here is a person who was very disturbed by this massive surveillance apparatus built in the U.S. that spies not only on American citizens, but the world, with very little checks, very little oversight. He’s making clear his intention was to inform citizens even at the expense of his own liberty or even life.”

• The former intelligence contractor who leaked documents on US surveillance programmes has defended himself in an online chat, the Guardian reports.

• National Security Agency discloses in secret Capitol Hill briefing that thousands of analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. That authorization appears to extend to e-mail and text messages too.

• “You have to assume everything is being collected,” said Bruce Schneier, who has been studying and writing about cryptography and computer security for two decades.

• The other two types of collection, which operate on a much smaller scale, are aimed at content. One of them intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words to a system called ­NUCLEON.

• What are secret courts? Why do we need them? To protect Britain’s special relationship with the United States, we are officially told; to protect the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services. Never mind that for decades we have handled security-sensitive cases by clearing the court whenever necessary, and allowing our secret servants to withhold their names and testify from behind screens, real or virtual: now, all of a sudden, the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services are at stake, and need urgent and draconian protection.

• …massive operation to secretly keep track of everyone’s phone calls on a daily basis…

• Polls conducted in the days since Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian pulled back the curtain on the NSA’s surveillance program have found that a majority of Americans are fine with said program so long as it targets suspected terrorists, but are less fine with being targeted themselves; and that they’re skeptical of the claim that leaking information about the NSA’s spying program will jeopardize the government’s ability to keep America safe.

• In a landmark ruling, Sweden’s data protection authority (the Swedish Data Inspection Board) this week issued a decision that prohibits the nation’s public sector bodies from using the cloud service Google Apps.

• It’s a step closer to protecting your electronic privacy… in Texas.

• WikiLeaks activists in Iceland are discussing with government officials there the possibility of asylum for Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who disclosed hundreds of classified documents on N.S.A. surveillance, Julian Assange, the founder of the antisecrecy group, said Wednesday.

• An alternative search engine DuckDuckGo has enjoyed a record surge in traffic as NSA scandals spark fears and frighten away Internet users from the more popular Google or Yahoo!.

• Over the previous week DuckDuckGo, a private search engine, which claims not to collect users’ searches or create any personal user profile, has increased its traffic by 26 per cent and passed 3.1 million of direct queries.

• To make matters worse, DuckDuckGo are not audited by any external body, so we only have their word that they are not an NSA honeypot setup to monitor people that deliberately avoid Google on privacy grounds (exactly the type of people the NSA are interested in) and we only have their word that their privacy policy is upheld – frankly Gabriel, that is not good enough.

• For the above reasons, I once again turn my old friends at Ixquick. If you are looking for a private search engine, you cannot do better than Ixquick and Startpage at this time – they have been audited and certified by Europrise, they are not based in the US and therefore not under the jurisdiction of FISC and I know them personally and know that they stand by their word. They haven’t paid me to say this, so no, this isn’t some profit making scheme by me, but the facts are as they stand – it is literally impossible to trust that your data is private and secure if you use a company that has any legal ties to the United States. That means Cloud, Email, Blogs, ECommerce, Hosting, Image Galleries, Microblogs, Voice over IP, Instant Messaging, Social Networking – yes absolutely -everything- which makes up our digital society. If you still don’t quite understand what that means, GMail, Hotmail, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Crashplan, Blogger, Google Search, Bing, Yahoo Mail etc. are all inherently insecure as a direct result of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the PATRIOT Act, the National Security Agency and PRISM – and that is before we even start to discuss CALEA and whether or not your broadband router has a built in back door…

• Fisa court submissions show broad scope of procedures governing NSA’s surveillance of Americans’ communication

• “National security” agencies and major tech sectors have teamed up to make Big Brother a reality. “Of the estimated $80 billion the government will spend on intelligence this year, most is spent on private contractors,” the New York Times noted. The synergy is great for war-crazed snoops in Washington and profit-crazed moguls in Silicon Valley, but poisonous for civil liberties and democracy.

• The US PRISM internet surveillance case highlights the urgent need to pass legislation to protect EU citizens’ personal data, most MEPs agreed in Wednesday’s Civil Liberties Committee debate with Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding. MEPs also called for safeguards for personal data transferred outside the EU.

• USA Today has published an extraordinary interview with three former NSA employees who praise Edward Snowden’s leaks, corroborate some of his claims, and warn about unlawful government acts.

• When it comes to surveillance rules, some US people are more equal than others.

• There are still people warning us of sleepwalking into a Stasi or “1984” society. They missed the boat by a long shot: we are already far, far past the point of Stasi or “1984”. The apparatus that governments have built to trace, track, and record citizens is the stuff of nightmares.

• So now the penny drops, and we all know why GCHQ has long refused to allow government departments to store information classified at “Restricted” or above in US cloud computing services. But what about the private sector? Well, Edward Snowden’s revelations are now causing something of a crisis in the IT industry as its international customers start thinking through the implications. In the past week I’ve heard of big firms reconsidering plans to spend hundreds of millions on services that would have been hosted in the US, as they start to realise that US agencies might snoop on their data and use it to tip off their competitors. US service firms now fear this will harm their growth, and it’s not just Microsoft and Google; many other companies such as Amazon, Salesforce and Rackspace could lose out.

• President Obama, the former college lecturer on constitutional law, got a lecture on privacy rights Wednesday from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and faced tough questions from the German press about his perceived failure to be less warlike after winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

• Mrs. Merkel raised the subject of National Security Agency surveillance of the Internet in a private meeting with Mr. Obama in Berlin, where she emphasized the need for “proportionality.”

• Russ Tice, a former intelligence analyst and Bush-era NSA whistleblower, claimed Wednesday that the intelligence community has ordered surveillance on a wide range of groups and individuals, including high-ranking military officials, lawmakers and diplomats.

• He also made another stunning allegation. He says the NSA had ordered wiretaps on phones connected to then-Senate candidate Barack Obama back in 2004.

• “They went after–and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things–they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the–and judicial,” Tice told Peter B. Collins on Boiling Frog Post News.

• If you use privacy tools, according to the apparent logic of the National Security Agency, it doesn’t much matter if you’re a foreigner or an American: Your communications are subject to an extra dose of surveillance.

• Since 29-year-old systems administrator Edward Snowden began leaking secret documentation of the NSA’s broad surveillance programs, the agency has reassured Americans that it doesn’t indiscriminately collect their data without a warrant, and that what it does collect is deleted after five years. But according to a document signed by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and published Thursday by the Guardian, it seems the NSA is allowed to make ambiguous exceptions for a laundry list of data it gathers from Internet and phone companies. One of those exceptions applies specifically to encrypted information, allowing it to gather the data regardless of its U.S. or foreign origin and to hold it for as long as it takes to crack the data’s privacy protections.

• Contradicting a statement by ex-vice president Dick Cheney on Sunday that warrantless domestic surveillance might have prevented 9/11, 2007 court records indicate that the Bush-Cheney administration began such surveillance at least 7 months prior to 9/11.

• The Bush administration bypassed the law requiring such actions to be authorized by FISA court warrants, the body set up in the Seventies to oversee Executive Branch spying powers after abuses by Richard Nixon. Former QWest CEO John Nacchios said that at a meeting with the NSA on February 27, 2001, he and other QWest officials declined to participate. AT&T, Verizon and Bellsouth all agreed to shunt customer communications records to an NSA database.

• For defense contractors, the government officials who write them mega checks, and the hawks in the media who cheer them on, the name of the game is threat inflation. And no one has been better at it than the folks at Booz Allen Hamilton, the inventors of the new boondoggle called cyber warfare.

• Two US congressmen introduced a bill on Thursday compelling the Obama administration to declassify the secret legal justifications for the wide-ranging surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency.

• The disclosure bill, a complement to one pushed in the Senate last week, is the latest in a series of legislative attempts to rein in the NSA’s collection and analysis of Americans’ phone records and, potentially, Internet usage.

• Avoid Prism and the NSA with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s guide to maintaining your privacy – comprised of free and open source software

• The French data protection authority, CNIL, has today announced that Data Protection Authorities from France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom have respectively launched enforcement actions against Google.

• The Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has backed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and admitted he feels “a little bit guilty” that new technologies had introduced new ways for governments to monitor people.

• “I felt about Edward Snowden the same way I felt about Daniel Ellsberg, who changed my life, who taught me a lot,” he said.

• Speaking to Piers Morgan on CNN he said he was not the kind of person to “just take sides in the world – ‘I’m always against anything government, any three letter agency,’ or ‘I’m for them’.”

• Thursday 6 June, the day the PRISM story broke, was a good day to be a cryptographer. The sudden prospect of mass, unwarranted surveillance delivered an electric shock to thousands who were now looking for ways to protect their privacy online. At Cryptocat, we saw nearly 5,000 new individuals starting to use our free encrypted chat software. Other privacy and encryption services saw a rise of as much as 3,000 per cent in new users. – See more at: http://newint.org/blog/2013/06/21/prism-surveillance-nsa-software/#sthash.bP6q2IQe.dpuf

• Music veteran also says MP3s ‘sound like shit’ and journalists are ‘very problematic’ in first appearance since liver transplant

• The independent senator Nick Xenophon is pressing for answers about whether Australian parliamentarians are being watched by intelligence agencies in the wake of revelations in the Guardian about the US Prism programme.

• The founder of the world’s biggest marketing services company, Sir Martin Sorrell, has said he believes revelations about the National Security Agency’s Prism internet surveillance programme are a “game changer” that will spark a fundamental rethink of web privacy by web users.

• Leaked documents have revealed how the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) is able to gather and use information on US citizens.

• The Guardian released new details about the National Security Agency’s spying practices, which reveals how analysts can store vast sums of data without a warrant. Specifically, if the NSA “inadvertently” stumbles upon anything related to a potential crime, it can store the data for later investigations.

• Quite reasonably, the Supreme Court has declared that law enforcement can charge citizens with a crime if it’s being conducted in “plain sight“–e.g. if cops see pot sitting in the passenger seat of a car during a traffic stop. That is, the presumption of innocence doesn’t apply to if police inadvertent witness a crime. Unfortunately, the scope of the presumption of innocence gets tinier as the government’s eyes get bigger.

• The National Security Agency may keep Americans’ emails and phone calls if they’re “believed to contain significant foreign intelligence,” secret papers show.

• The world’s largest spy agency may also keep U.S. citizens and legal residents’ domestic communications if NSA analysts believe the communications could suggest evidence of a crime, the documents published Friday by British newspaper The Guardian and The Washington Post indicated.

• Two secret documents describing the procedures the National Security Agency (NSA) is required to follow when spying on foreign terror suspects reveal the provisions that allow the agency to collect, retain and use information on U.S residents without a warrant, The Guardian newspaper reported today.

• The National Defense Authorization Act recently approved by the House would build on powers currently available to government to allow unrestricted access to all personal data collected “during combat operations from countries, organizations, or individuals, now or once hostile to the United States,” political analyst Stephen Benavides reports at Truthout.

• The data are known officially as “captured records” and include any kind of personal file belonging to parties deemed to be in conflict with the United States. Of course, the war on terror’s expanding battlefield means those records do not have to be collected outside of the United States.

• Passed in 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) set the groundwork for surveillance, collection, and analysis of intelligence gathered from foreign powers and agents of foreign powers, up to and including any individual residing within the U.S., who were suspected of involvement in potential terrorist activity. On October 26, 2001, a little over a month after 9/11, President George W. Bush signed the USA Patriot Act into law. Two provisions, Sec. 206, permitting government to obtain secret court orders allowing roving wiretaps without requiring identification of the person, organization, or facility to be surveyed, and Sec. 215 authorizing government to access and obtain “any tangible thing” relevant to a terrorist investigation, transformed foreign intelligence into domestic intelligence.

Civil Rights

• The streets of central Rio de Janeiro and dozens of other cities echoed with percussion grenades and swirled with teargas last night as ranks of riot police scattered the biggest demonstrations Brazil has seen for more than two decades.

• As a minority of protesters threw rocks, torched cars and pulled down lamp-posts, the police fired volleys of pepper spray and rubber bullets into the crowd and up onto overpasses where car drivers and bus passengers were stuck in traffic jams. At least 40 people were injured in the city and many more elsewhere.

• A vast crowd – estimated by the authorities at 300,000 and more than a million by participants – filled Rio’s streets, one of a wave of huge nationwide marches against corruption, police brutality, poor public services and excess spending on the World Cup.

• Protests have popped up across the globe in recent years, but government response has varied. Rousseff’s approach contrasted with the adversarial position of Turkey’s Erdogan, for example.

• For decades, California’s political leaders have tried every imaginable approach to dealing with its overcrowded prisons – sending inmates out of state, fighting the federal courts all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, promising more prison beds and insisting that it has done plenty to cut inmate populations and improve health care.

• Calls for the doctors who force-feed hunger-striking prisoners at Guantánamo Bay to refuse to perform the practice on ethical grounds have got nowhere, a spokesman for the prison said on Thursday.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• In a user forum on Verizon’s website, a couple users claim their Netflix instant streaming quality has been on the decline. Some claim to continue to experience problems even after contacting Verizon’s customer service agents and working with them to resolve it.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The House of Commons may have adjourned for the summer, but just hours before breaking, the government filed its response to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology’s report on the Intellectual Property Regime in Canada. That may sound dry, but the document provides a clear indication of what the government has planned for the coming years on IP reform.

• So what’s in store? Leaving aside an assortment of promised studies on international best practices, improving patent quality, and improving research and development, the government response includes five notable plans (or non-plans).

Copyrights

• Following a trial spanning two weeks, the Stockholm District Court has just handed down its sentence in the Gottfrid Svartholm hacking case. The 28-year-old was found guilty of hacking into Logica, a company carrying out work for local tax authorities, and sentenced to two years in jail. Another man, said to be his accomplice, was sentenced to probation.

• The co-founder of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay has been sentenced to two years in prison for hacking into the computers of a firm that administers data for Swedish authorities, and for making illegal online money transfers.

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