● 07.08.13

● Links 8/7/2013: A Lot of Linux (Kernel) News

Posted in News Roundup at 1:14 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• As the title suggests, Linux and performance in the same sentence makes for an interesting topic of discussion. Everyone knows there is a multitude of options available to us. In this article, I’m going to attempt to cover a few of them.

Desktop

• I impulsively bought one of the $199 Acer C7 Chromebooks, specifically to find out if I could successfully put pure Linux on the Android laptop. I know Android runs on Linux, the kernel, but I wanted KDE, which is what I normally run. I wanted both, and I thought it’d be fun. I also thought it might be an easier way to get around Microsoft’s Secure Boot, which makes it hard to install a GNU/Linux environment on new laptops. Microsoft never runs out of ways to make it inconvenient to use Linux, of course.

Server

• Beyond the exciting x86 architecture changes that are always under the microscope for the Linux kernel, and lately the great ARM work, IBM has an interesting set of POWER architecture changes for Linux 3.11.

• CA Technologies has announced CA ARCserve D2D for Linux, providing fast, simple data protection and disaster recovery for businesses running virtual and physical servers on the popular open source platform. An image-based solution, CA ARCserve D2D for Linux helps organizations protect the integrity and availability of critical systems, applications and data within their shrinking backup windows. It complements CA ARCserve D2D for Microsoft Windows, providing a complete solution for today’s heterogeneous environments.

• At the upcoming Hot Chips Conference in late August, Oracle, IBM and Fujitsu are all set to announce the release of new high-performance Unix chips.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Before starting with the survey, let’s deal with a couple of terms that are fundamental to this article. First, the word podcast. In simple terms, a podcast is rich media, such as audio or video, distributed via RSS. Podcast derives from the words broadcast and iPod. Podcasting lets you automatically receive the latest show of your chosen programme as soon as it is available.

Kernel Space

• Roughly two-thirds of the patches included focus on drivers, Torvalds noted, “while the rest is evenly split between arch updates and ‘misc.’ No major new subsystems this time around, although there are individual new features.”

• Sphirewall 0.9.9.5 has been released this weekend. Sphirewall is an open-source Linux firewall/router with advanced management capabilities, analytics, and other advanced features.

• The staging pull has been submitted for the Linux 3.11 kernel merge window and with it comes client support for Lustre, the high-performance parallel distributed file-system.

• Chris Wilson has released yet another xf86-video-intel 2.21.x driver point release.

• The Linux support for Apple’s new Haswell-based MacBook Air is less than desirable, but at least it’s on the path to getting better.

• The 2013 MacBook Air is an incredible piece of hardware with its lightweight, well built design, very long battery life, and excellent performance via an Intel Core i5 “Haswell” processor. However, as I have already written about at length, running Ubuntu Linux is messy on the 2013 MacBook Air.

• Ted Ts’o has already sent in his pull request for EXT4 file-system changes targeting the Linux 3.11 kernel.

• Recent Linux kernel releases have seen a number of crypto performance optimizations for this kernel subsystem by taking advantage of newer CPU instruction set extensions for accelerating various cryptographic workloads. This theme has continued for Linux 3.11.

• RAD Game Tools, the video game development tooling company responsible for Telemetry and Pixomatic and other high-end development products, is looking to work on improving Linux debuggers for game developers.

• Beyond Xen and KVM virtualization coming to 64-bit ARM in the Linux 3.11, there’s also other ARM architecture and SoC advancements within this next major kernel release.

• The sound/audio kernel driver pull request has been submitted for the Linux 3.11 merge window. The changes this time around aren’t too exciting, but there’s the continued bettering of the Linux audio stack.

• Samsung’s Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) has been updated for the Linux 3.11 merge window.

• The in-kernel DRM graphics driver changes lined up for the Linux 3.11 kernel are possibly the biggest set of Direct Rendering Manager changes ever, but it looks unlikely that the VIA KMS driver will be merged for this release.

Graphics Stack

• The seventeenth alpha release of the very promising Unvanquished open-source first person shooter was released today. This monthly development update to the Tremulous-derived game continues to improve its GL3 renderer and other game functionality.

• For those looking to test out the long-awaited Radeon dynamic power management support within the Linux 3.11 kernel, here’s some information on the new debugfs and sysfs interfaces for dealing with this “DPM” feature.

• While HDMI audio support may seem like a mundane feature for graphics drivers in 2013, the Radeon KMS driver still hasn’t re-enabled support for Radeon HDMI audio on modern kernel releases. Fortunately, it looks like the important feature for HTPCs might be re-enabled soon for a better “out of the box” experience.

• David Herrmann has a GSoC project for working on DRM render and mode-set nodes and so far he has been making great progress. On Sunday he posted his second revision of his unified VMA offset manager patch-set and DRM render node work.

• The QXL KMS/DRM driver that was merged for Linux 3.10 and supports Red Hat’s SPICE with guest virtual machines on QEMU, is picking up more features for Linux 3.11.

• The DRM pull request has yet to be submitted for the Linux 3.11 kernel and already there is another revision to the Radeon DRM kernel driver to be submitted. This latest Radeon DRM work provides additional dynamic power management fixes and some new sysfs features.

• Rob Clark has expanded his Freedreno efforts from just being a reverse-engineered user-space (Gallium3D) graphics driver for Qualcomm’s Adreno/Snapdragon hardware. Rob has now written his own DRM/KMS kernel driver for dealing with the Snapdragon graphics hardware.

• While the reverse-engineered Nouveau graphics driver has limited support for OpenCL/GPGPU support, it’s been mainly capped to older “NV50″ graphics cards. Published today though for review are patches for the Fermi “NVC0″ hardware to expose compute support as well as the hardware performance counters.

• The open-source reverse-engineered Nouveau driver now has 2D EXA acceleration and X-Video support for NVIDIA’s “NVF0″ or better known as the GK110 GPU found in the NVIDIA GeForce TITAN and GeForce GTX 780. Updates to the Nouveau DRM and Mesa Gallium3D driver have also arrived.

• Ian Romanick of Intel who generally has been serving as the release manager of new Mesa releases, has announced some planned changes for releasing Mesa 3D drivers.

• Ian shared the planned changes on the Mesa developers’ list. The key information for Phoronix readers include:

• Marek Olšák published a set of twelve patches earlier this week for improving the AMD R600 Radeon Gallium3D driver support code for MSAA.

• While we have known the VIA DRM/KMS driver would likely not be merged for Linux 3.11, the Armada DRM ARM driver also isn’t going to be merged for this next kernel release.

• For those looking to test out the long-awaited Radeon dynamic power management support within the Linux 3.11 kernel, here’s some information on the new debugfs and sysfs interfaces for dealing with this “DPM” feature.

Benchmarks

• This past weekend I delivered benchmarks of the AMD A10-6800K Richland APU under Ubuntu Linux. This mild upgrade over AMD’s Trinity APU ran faster on the CPU side and overclocked well, but how do the graphics performance under Linux? In this article are benchmarks of the Radeon HD 8670D running the Catalyst Linux driver on Ubuntu and compared to the previous-generation Radeon HD 7660D APU graphics.

• This morning there were the RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. AMD Catalyst Linux benchmarks for the high-end Radeon HD 7850/7950 “Southern Islands” graphics cards. While the new Southern Islands GPUs understandingly have a long way to catch up on their new open-source Linux Gallium3D driver compared to Catalyst, how is the AMD Radeon HD 8670D “Richland” APU performance between the open and closed-source drivers? Here are some benchmarks.

• When running Fedora 19 with its updated open-source Linux graphics drivers, 15 different Intel, AMD Radeon, and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs were compared when looking at the open-source Linux OpenGL performance. The tested graphics processors span from the Intel HD Graphics 4600 “Haswell” integrated graphics to the AMD Radeon HD 7950 “Southern Islands” graphics card to the vintage Radeon X1800XL.

• While the open-source Radeon and Nouveau Gallium3D drivers have a limited level of OpenCL support via Gallium3D’s “Clover” state tracker, it’s not too useful. Radeon Gallium3D on OpenCL can run some simple demos and even a bit of open-source BitCoin mining, but it’s not enough to be useful yet or really performant. There isn’t any tier-one Linux distribution shipping this open-source OpenCL support yet by default and it will likely be some months before it’s really useful for end-users.

• Along with benchmarking the AMD A10-6800K “Richland” APU on Linux and its Radeon HD 8670D graphics, I provided some GCC compiler tuning benchmarks for this AMD APU with Piledriver cores. The latest Linux testing from the A10-6800K is a comparison of GCC 4.8.1 to LLVM/Clang 3.3 on this latest-generation AMD low-power system.

• With the Linux 3.10 kernel having been pulled recently into the Ubuntu 13.10 archive, new benchmarks have been conducted comparing the open-source Nouveau driver against the binary NVIDIA 319.32 Linux graphics driver on a NVIDIA-powered laptop.

• The latest chapter to our lengthy Intel Haswell on Linux saga is virtualization benchmarks. From Fedora 19 with the very latest software components for Linux virtualization, the performance of KVM, Xen, and VirtualBox were benchmarked from the Intel Core i7 4770K “Haswell” CPU.

Applications

• Ask just about any Linux user, and they’ll more than likely recommend VLC Player as the best choice for playing any media format you can think of. They have plenty of reasons to do so as VLC is indeed a fantastic piece of software with plenty of awesome features. But it only offers one implementation — a complete media playing package that uses its own technologies (such as its own hardware acceleration) as well as its own GUI.

• Clementine is one of the best audio players, hyper-complete, highly configurable, powerful but easy to use, Clementine Player is simply the ideal for me. Multiplatform, open source and free, it’s a real pearl to try without hesitation.

Proprietary

• The Norwegians announced today Opera 15, the first release of their closed-source cross-platform web-browser that’s now powered by Google’s Chromium/Blink engine.

• Beyond changing from their own in-house browser engine to now using what’s used by Google’s Chrome/Chromium, Opera 15 also has a much simpler user-interface, Speed Dial and other features have been incorporated into this revamped browser, a new Stash feature, and much more.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• A patch that was committed for the Linux 3.11 kernel will allow more Microsoft Windows RT / ARM applications to now run with Wine.

Games

• Version 0.2.3 of the Oculus SDK for the popular virtual reality (VR) headset was released yesterday. While we know they have been planning to officially support Linux, with this new v0.2.3 SDK the support is finally here.

• In case you don’t know, Limit Theory developer Josh Parnell said in his last update video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqT1Lr6dnLs&feature=em-subs_digest) that the first port of LT to Linux has been realized.

• A couple of days ago, version 0.2.3 of the official SDK (requires login) for the crowdfunded Oculus Rift was released with Linux support, and I thought now would be a good time to put together a belated unboxing/first impressions video! Watch or read on for more textual thoughts with a lot less “umm”.

• Nordic Games has announced the release of the first in-game trailer for The Raven – Legacy of Master of Thief Chapter 1. Players will be able to download the game on July 23rd for PC, Mac and Linux. The new trailer will give more insight into the journey ahead in the first chapter entitled The Eye of the Sphinx.

• Ittle Dew, a cartoony, classic adventure game that uses a Zelda-like dungeon formula, is available now for $13.99 through developer Ludosity’s official site. The game includes online leaderboards and a number of shortcuts, so it is designed to encourage speedrunning.

• The Source Development Kit offers the possibility to create your own modifications and new content to the existing games based on the Source Engine. Some of the games based on Source are Team Fortress, Left for Dead and Dota 2.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The lightweight LXDE desktop will be slowly transitioning from being GTK2-based to using the Qt tool-kit.

• After posting a preview screenshot for LXDE-Qt, I got quite a lot of feedback from various sources. Generally the responses from the users are positive, but there are also some people saying that LXDE is no longer lightweight.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• One day after the Qt 4.8.5 release, after facing many delays Qt 5.1 is finally available.

• Over the past few weeks, the build scripts supporting our Continuous Integration system at build.kde.org have been refactored in some areas, and have had some extra features implemented as well. This refactoring has laid the foundations for building multiple projects at the same time – something we will need later when implementing support for automatic uploading of results to Coverity.

• The popular KDE desktop now includes a new and exciting typing tutor application called KTouch. The KTouch typing trainer will help users take their typing skills to the next level in a fast and fun way. This tool provides a very comfortable interface, and you can create profiles for each system user.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Paging is just to help spatial memory (my app is around page 2-3), but Shell’s search has hugely improved , you can just type (text) and get all the text editors, so paging might not be really necessary –at least for keyboards

• Freedom and choice are hallmarks of the Linux world, and that’s certainly evident in the number of desktop environments users have to choose from. “This is yet another example of arguing over where the deck chairs are while the boat sinks,” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “I mean, has nobody read that study where too much choice is just as bad as not enough?” – See more at: http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/78422.html#sthash.JYXvzeVi.dpuf

Distributions

• Following on from my previous post on Slackware I have to root for SalixOS here which has almost slipped out of sight over the last two years or so after a spectacular start. It handled everything I’ve thrown at it which is more than I can say for any other distribution. The story goes like this:

New Releases

• The whole team is very glad to inform you that DoudouLinux 2.0 Hyperborea is now officially out :).

• David Tavares, the developer of the Pear OS Linux operating system, has recently announced the features and roadmap for the upcoming Pear OS 8 distribution.

• Salix, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast, easy to use, and based on Xfce desktop environment, is now at version 14.0.1 RC1.

Screenshots

Arch Family

• Manjaro Linux is a distribution that makes it very easy to play with Arch. Manjaro is to Arch as Sabayon or Calculate Linux is to Gentoo. Manjaro makes it very easy to deploy an Arch-based desktop using Xfce and other lightweight components, a theme that’s continuing with their upcoming 0.8.7 release.

Slackware Family

• Slackware-Current has moved on to bring KDE 4.10.5 and also the latest stable kernel from 3.9.x branch: 3.9.9. It seems that Pat believed that Linux Kernel 3.9.x is the best choice for the next Slackware release and he also put some configuration for the Linux Kernel 3.10 in testing/.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• 2013 has been an exceptional year in a sense that Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian, the three major Linux distros, had their releases this year. Debian 7 finally got released, Ubuntu came up with a better Unity along with more social integration and it is now turn of Fedora to showcase it’s latest offering. I was really interested to know Fedora 19 – whether the latest Fedora is able to live up to the other two illustrious counterparts plus what’s brewing in RHEL stable.

• Fedora 19 ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’ got released few days ago, and since I have not reviewed Fedora on this blog (mainly because I did not have a lot of positive things to say about it), I decided to review it.

Debian Family

• Having migrated my websites away from my ssh/mail box I’m going to upgrade that this weekend.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Ubuntu Touch image model has been flipped around so that Android is no longer on the bottom side and that Ubuntu is going for a different position.

• On Friday I delivered the first benchmarks of Ubuntu’s Unity desktop running on XMir — the X.Org Server compatibility layer for talking to the Mir Display Server. Those benchmarks showered there was noticeable performance overhead to running XMir with Intel’s graphics driver. Later benchmarks showed XMir 2D performance was also negatively affected. In this article are benchmarks looking at the XMir performance with the Nouveau driver.

• Hey guys. I’m back with a very picture heavy update.

• Since my last update i’ve got the whole case powdercoated in “ripple X15 orange”. I’ve also got a heap of stickers from jared.

Devices/Embedded

• Chinese Android development firm Borqs announced an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system based on Android 4.1. The Borqs Smart Vehicle Mounted Terminal incorporates navigation technology from Beidou and a wireless data cloud from TD-LTE, and supports applications including navigation, multimedia, and video calling.

• Before the PC, computers were devices: custom hardware combined with software specifically written for the machine, and the machines themselves were usually designed for a select few (if not single) purposes. The problem that PCs seemed to address was diversity. Where customers had previously relied on one company to support both hardware and software, the PC clones opened the doors to a brave new world where anyone could build, support, or maintain a computer.

Phones

• The debut phone using the upstart Tizen operating system was originally slated to launch in July or August, but has been pushed back to the last quarter of the year.

• The company will try to compete with the likes of Apple and Android with a smartphone that will offer a “differentiated experience.”

Android

• Amazon and HP have made their tablets even more attractive with recent price cuts. The 7-inch Android tablets namely HP Slate 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire HD have slashed their prices in response to price cuts introduced by Barnes and Noble for their Nook HD and Nook HD+ tablets.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• We live in a world where the tablet or smart device dominates – both on the high Street and online. Instead of people going out at Christmas to buy a shiny new laptop, they opted for one of the many 10-inch tablets that appear to be everywhere at the moment.

Free Software/Open Source

• Job listings mentioning “DevOps” have burgeoned over the past year or so, and people who include the term in their LinkedIn profiles and resumes are hotly pursued by tech recruiters.

• For those of us who believe DevOps thinking and practices are the way to better IT and happier, more productive technology teams, this trend is both discouraging and encouraging. It’s discouraging because we don’t want to see “DevOps” become a mere buzzword, used to put a new shiny gloss on old, ineffective practices and assumptions. And it’s encouraging because it indicates a growing awareness that operations people and developers produce better software when they collaborate closely, using the tools and disciplines from both worlds.

• I once read that a network firewall was as much a central point for getting visibility into your network as it was a point for restricting and securing your network. It is my personal belief that these things go hand in hand. How can you secure your network if you don’t understand what is actually going on inside it? how can you differentiate between what is good and bad traffic, if you can’t actually see the traffic? A few years ago, I invested a serious amount of time searching for an open-source firewall that I could insert into a network on some standard hardware and see what was happening, then respond to this. I was disappointed to say the least.

• Searchdaimon today announced its flagship enterprise search product is now available as open source software. The Searchdaimon solution, highlighted at http://www.searchdaimon.com, is the only enterprise-grade alternative to Solr available.

Events

Web Browsers

• Adblock Plus accepts payment to “whitelist” certain ads.

Mozilla

• Per the release announcement, “This release had a markedly different focus from previous releases, with fewer language changes and many improvements to the standard library. The highlights this time include a rewrite of the borrow checker that makes working with borrowed pointers significantly easier and a comprehensive new iterator module (std::iterator) that will eventually replace the previous closure-based iterators.”

SaaS/Big Data

• “If our office burnt down today,” says Goran Stefkovski, “we would be running the business from the cafe next door tomorrow.”

• It seems an appropriate sentiment from Stefkovski, given that he is the director of technology at Kogan, the online electronics retailer whose founder, Ruslan Kogan, has waged a very public war of words with bricks-and-mortar retailers (most notably Harvey Norman’s chairman, Gerry Harvey).

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• AMD has joined The Document Foundation’s Advisory Board to take on a supporting role of accelerating LibreOffice in new ways.

• The LibreOffice Documentation Team has published two books: the LibreOffice 4.0 Math Guide and the LibreOffice 4.0 Base Handbook.

BSD

• The porting of the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver to FreeBSD is coming along well. The developer behind this work is hoping that the user-space Radeon Mesa/Gallium3D driver changes will be merged upstream for Mesa 9.2.

• MidnightBSD 0.4 has been released as an operating system derived from FreeBSD 9.1, but with many extra features, including a new package management tool.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.5.3, the fourth release in the 2.5.x series of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.6.0. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris and Mac OSX.

• GNU gettext 0.18.3 has been released. It has support for 4 new programming languages: Glade 3, JavaScript, Lua, and Vala, support for Python 3 format strings, support for newer Automake, portability fixes, and normal bug fixes.

Project Releases

• eNovance’s software engineering team is releasing the eDeploy project publicly today. A series of articles will describe the project.

Openness/Sharing

• The law used to prosecute the late open source internet advocate Aaron Swartz would be curtailed, under bipartisan legislation introduced in Congress.

• Swartz was a leading computer programmer, internet activist and writer who wanted as much information as possible to be free online. He died at age 26, having been involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the organization Creative Commons, the website framework web.py and the social news site Reddit, among other achievements.

Open Hardware

• We’re pretty sure that nobody could argue against the cool factor of ‘hoverboards,’ the magically powered skateboards from the future, which have been blessed with a self-explanatory name, requiring no additional clarification. The idea stems from the 1989 movie “Back to the Future II,” which has main character Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox, go back and forth in time, from 2015 to the year 1955.

Programming

• Now Peter Selinger of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and colleagues have brought the field up to speed by creating Quipper, the first high-level quantum programming language. Quipper is designed to express instructions in terms of bigger concepts, and to make it easy to bring together multiple algorithms in a modular way. High-level languages for classical computers such as Java do most of the heavy lifting in modern computation. Quipper is based on a classical programming language called Haskell, which is particularly suited to programming for physics applications. What Selinger’s team has done is to customise it to deal with qubits.

• Harlan is a new research programming language focused around taking advantage of modern GPUs. The Harlan language syntax is derived from Scheme while the language itself currently compiles to OpenCL.

• For those curious about how the system performance is impacted by applying compiler optimizations to the AMD A10-6800K “Richland” APU, here’s some benchmarks of GCC 4.8.1 on Ubuntu Linux.

Leftovers

• Obit The New Zealand authorities have formally called off the search for the sailing cruiser Nina, and say its seven-person crew, which includes Evi Nemeth who for the last 30 years has written the system administration handbooks for Unix and Linux, is now presumed lost at sea.

• The cause of the crash landing of a Boeing 777 in San Francisco is still unclear. But pilots say they had been worried about conditions at the West Coast airport for a while. An important flight control system had been out of service for weeks.

Security

• The precise amount of time the vulnerability was active is in dispute, with Cryptocat developers putting it at seven months and a security researcher saying it was closer to 19 months. Both sides agree that the effect of the bug was that the keys used to encrypt and decrypt conversations among groups of users were easy for outsiders to calculate. As a result, activists, journalists, or others who relied on Cryptocat to protect their group chats from government or industry snoops got little more protection than is typically available in standard chat programs. Critics said it was hard to excuse such a rudimentary error in an open-source piece of software held out as a way to protect sensitive communications.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The question was directed at Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist who broke the story of NSA surveillance using material provided by on-the-lam leaker Edward Snowden. The person grilling Greenwald wasn’t a government prosecutor or a frustrated member of the intelligence community. It was David Gregory, host of NBC’s Sunday morning political talk show Meet the Press.

• SWAT teams raiding poker games and trying to stop underage drinking? Overwhelming paramilitary force is on the rise

• The nation’s top special operations commander ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public.

• The nation’s top special operations commander ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public.

• Four years ago, my research documenting the Bush administration frame-up of Alabama’s former governor Don Siegelman led me to find nationwide patterns of similar horrors.

• Records about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout were ordered purged from Pentagon computers and sent to the CIA – a place where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public.

• Austin Goodrich, an undercover CIA officer during the Cold War who also worked for several years as a CBS television correspondent before his identity was unmasked, died June 9 at his home in Port Washington, Wis. He was 87.

• A fair number of the NSA keys appear to be spoofs — it is easy to register a PK with a fake email address. Perhaps others are stings. The three Alex Belleque keys are hoots. Few NSA or CIA staff would use PGP with an nsa/ucia.gov address, knowing its compromisability, in contrast to the hundreds of national secuity staff who do (DHS, USSS, FBI, DoJ, NATO, et al.)

• National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden says the United States partnered with Germany and other nations to invade people’s privacy.

• In an interview to be published this week, Snowden said the NSA has close working ties with Germany’s foreign intelligence agency and similar agencies of other countries, and that NSA staff are “in bed together with the Germans,” the German magazine Der Spiegel reported Sunday.

• Philip Agee spent 12 years (1957-69) as a CIA case officer, most of it in Latin America. His first book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, published in 1974 – a pioneering work on the Agency’s methods and their devastating consequences – appeared in about 30 languages around the world and was a best seller in many countries; it included a 23-page appendix with the names of hundreds of undercover Agency operatives and organizations.

• [...]

• Agee’s goal in naming all these individuals, quite simply, was to make it as difficult as he could for the CIA to continue doing its dirty work.

• A common Agency tactic was writing editorials and phony news stories to be knowingly published by Latin American media with no indication of the CIA authorship or CIA payment to the media. The propaganda value of such a “news” item might be multiplied by being picked up by other CIA stations in Latin America who would disseminate it through a CIA-owned news agency or a CIA-owned radio station. Some of these stories made their way back to the United States to be read or heard by unknowing North Americans.

• Bob Lambert admits to adopting the identity of a seven-year-old boy and has conceded to having four affairs while undercover

• As the growing number of Techdirt stories on the subject testify, drones are becoming a more familiar part of modern life. But their presence can add a new element to situations. An obvious example is during demonstrations, where drones can be used to monitor those taking part — but also the authorities’ reaction. As with cases where members of the public have used smartphones to capture police abuse, so drones offer the possibility of revealing questionable police activity that might in the past have gone unrecorded.

• An activist was watching State Senator Wendy Davis filibuster an abortion bill in the Texas Legislature when two Texas DPS Troopers approached her and told her to come with them. (Note: Although they are troopers, they are also known as Capitol Police, and function more as security guards than as peace officers).

• According to the Probable Cause Affidavit, the Lt. Governor order that the gallery be cleared and the Troopers were enforcing that order. When they got to Martha Northington and told her to leave, there was a problem.

Cablegate

• He didn’t have the space for it, but Gavin MacFadyen needed more bodies. The American running a British think tank for investigative journalism had eight staffers crammed into an 15-by-12-foot office in east central London, trying to crack a story on wrongdoing at a multinational company.

• I have carefully listened to the interview – conducted in Spanish – of President Rafael Correa with the Guardian on the “Snowden saga”, also focused on the role of the WikiLeaks founder Mr Julian Assange. Frankly, I became astonished realizing the extent to which the answers of Rafael Correa were misrepresented by the Guardian, and subsequently by other MSM. Instead of what it has been reported, Ecuador has never retracted of their positive statements on whisteblower Edward Snowden, or on their openness to study his asylum. Correa affirms clearly that Ecuador has not “negated” the safe-conduct issued to Mr Snowden. He also says emphatically that “Mr Assange continues to enjoy our respect”

• This is random. Just as Mastercard and Visa are allowing payments to Wikileaks again after a two year hiatus, those same two companies have started banning VPN providers. If you don’t recall, the credit card companies refused to process payments for Wikileaks, following significant pressure from US officials, even as they have no problem processing payments to hate groups like the KKK. After a long legal dispute, an Icelandic court ordered the credit card companies to start processing payments to Wikileaks again.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The Earth experienced unprecedented recorded climate extremes during the decade 2001-2010, according to the World Meteorological Organisation.

Finance

• Friday’s employment report wasn’t bad. But given how depressed our economy remains, we really should be adding more than 300,000 jobs a month, not fewer than 200,000. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, we would need more than five years of job growth at this rate to get back to the level of unemployment that prevailed before the Great Recession. Full recovery still looks a very long way off. And I’m beginning to worry that it may never happen.

• Imagine that you were entertaining a business deal with a man with an supernatural ability to make two kinds of promises: 1) promises that are impossible for him to break and 2) ordinary, breakable promises. Why would you accept anything other than the unbreakable promises from him? If he offered to make breakable promises you might grow suspicious about his intent.

• It’s easy to see how unbreakable promises would be a revolution for contracts and law. Enforcement costs for contracts would be drastically reduced. It would enable a new era of globalization, allowing people to participate in contracts with each other without regard to jurisdiction. The rights promised to a citizen of a country could be guaranteed instead of relying on the benevolence and caprice of their sovereign.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Ostensibly web-savvy State Department employees spent $630,000 to earn more Facebook “likes,” in an effort that struggled to reach its target audience, according to a searing Inspector General’s report from May.

• The release of a report from the Inspector General on the Bureau of Internal Information Programs (BIIP) brings with it the surprising news that the various agencies under its purview spent $630,000 pursuing Facebook “likes” in an attempt to increase their popularity. Normally, I would be setting the keyboard to “Mock Relentlessly,” but this isn’t so much a case of the government blowing tax dollars on stupid stuff as it is a case of using the wrong tool (bureaucracy) for the job (increasing engagement). That being said, it still means the money was ultimately wasted, but not in the “espresso machine in every cubicle” sort of way. (And there will probably be a little mocking.)

Censorship

• That’s a pretty remarkable statement, since it comes from a nation that has tried to impose Net censorship more rigorously than most. It’s also important, because it underlines why Western countries that keep flirting with the idea of introducing Net filtering are simply wasting their time. Rouhani has some other points that Western leaders would do well to remember…

Privacy

• Today, Google’s RSS reader is kaput. Maybe most don’t notice, maybe some are relieved not to have another box with 396,955,428 unread items. But the loss casts a shadow over a stalwart contingent.

• As it does in many non-adversarial countries, the surveillance agency is bulk collecting the communications of millions of citizens of Brazil

• Attempts by the US to close down intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden’s asylum options are strengthening his case to seek a safe harbour outside of Russia, legal experts claim.

• Snowden, who is believed to be in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, has received provisional offers of asylum from Nicaragua and Venezuela, and last night Bolivia also offered him sanctuary. He has applied to at least six other countries, says the Wikileaks organisation providing legal support.

• The Information Commissioner Officer of the UK, in a recent statement, said that he believes that Google’s Privacy Policy does not comply with the current UK Data Protection Act. He also further says that Google does not make it clear on how it uses the private data gathered by its various data mining tools and systems, thus further adding to the blame and aggravating the situation.

• A privacy rights group plans to file an emergency petition with the Supreme Court on Monday asking it to stop the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program that collects the telephone records of millions of Americans.

• Clayton Seymour, a 36-year-old IT specialist from Hilliard, Ohio, recently sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the NSA, curious as to whether any data about him was being collected.

• What he received in response made his blood boil.

• “I am a generally law abiding citizen with nothing I can think of that would require monitoring,” Seymour told me, “but I wanted to know if I was having data collected about me and if so, what.”

• So Seymour sent in an FOIA request. Weeks later, a letter from the NSA arrived explaining that he was not entitled to any information. “When I got the declined letter, I was furious,” he told me. “I feel betrayed.”

• The fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden alleged on Sunday that the National Security Agency was “in bed together” with German intelligence despite claims by politicians in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition that they were shocked by the extent of American spying in Germany.

• In an interview with Der Spiegel , Snowden claimed that the NSA provided German intelligence, with analysis tools to help the organisation monitor data flowing through Germany. “The NSA people are in bed together with the Germans,”” he told the magazine.

• Britain’s intelligence service stores millions of bits of online data in Internet buffers. In SPIEGEL, Edward Snowden explains GCHQ’s “full take” approach. All data that travels through the UK is captured.

• France’s foreign intelligence service intercepts computer and telephone data on a vast scale, like the controversial US Prism programme, according to the French daily Le Monde.

• The data is stored on a supercomputer at the headquarters of the DGSE intelligence service, the paper says.

• The international tensions stirred up by recent revelations about American spying spread to yet another nation on Sunday, when Brazil’s foreign minister expressed “deep concern” over the issue and said his government would press the United Nations to take action that “preserves the sovereignty of all countries.”

• The White House has finally responded to criticism over US President Barack Obama’s hushed signing last week of an Executive Order that allows the government to command privately-owned communication systems and acknowledges its implications.

• When President Obama inked his name to the Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions Executive Order on July 6, he authorized the US Department of Homeland Security to take control of the country’s wired and wireless communications — including the Internet — in instances of emergency. The signing was accompanied with little to no acknowledgment outside of the White House, but initial reports on the order quickly caused the public to speak out over what some equated to creating an Oval Office kill switch for the Web. Now the Obama administration is addressing those complaints by calling the Executive Order a necessary implement for America’s national security.

• The president should fire James Clapper and Keith Alexander over domestic spying revealed by Edward Snowden

• Read more: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-nsa-20130708,0,7170946.story#ixzz2YSlQQoST

• The new colonization paradigm aims to conquer the kingdom of individual privacy. Privacy is a recent phenomenon in human society, and it is the last frontier that even kings and armies have failed to conquer. But the NSA and telecom giants are staking claims in the vast domain of human relations. This trend towards reigning in individuality for the sake of exploitation and control has had its heralds. Orwell gave us the ‘who’, the government, “our” government. Aldous Huxley warned us “that we musn’t be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology.” Together, the powers of both the corporate world and government have played pivotal roles in destroying individual privacy.

• NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has reportedly revealed Australian intelligence’s involvement with the alleged US ‘snoop-op’.

• According to the Age, Snowden has identified four Australian facilities which work in co-ordination with the US’ surveillance programme and have been furnishing citizen data and contributing to the programme.

• The National Security Agency’s ability to gather phone data on millions of Americans hinges on a secret court ruling that redefined a single word: “relevant.”

• NSA contractor-turned-surveillance-whistleblower Edward Snowden has been offered asylum in three Latin American countries.

• Interview carried out before NSA whistleblower fled to Hong Kong appears to contradict Merkel’s public surprise at snooping

• The British and US spy programmes that allow intelligence agencies to gather, store and share data on millions of people have been challenged in a legal claim brought by privacy campaigners.

• Papers filed on Monday call for an immediate suspension of Britain’s use of material from the Prism programme, which is run by America’s National Security Agency.

• The public is being told that the NSA and GCHQ have ‘only’ been collecting metadata, not content. That’s nothing to be thankful for

• Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: a handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home.

• Read this while thinking about the lack of any legal notion of civil disobedience in cyberspace.

• The police tend to think that those who evade surveillance are criminals. Yet the evasion may only be a protest against the surveillance itself. Faced with the growing surveillance capacities of the government, some people object. They buy “burners” (prepaid phones) or “freedom phones” from Asia that have had all tracking devices removed, or they hide their smartphones in ad hoc Faraday cages that block their signals. They use to surf the internet. They identify tracking devices with GPS detectors. They avoid credit cards and choose cash, prepaid debit cards, or bitcoins. They burn their garbage. At the extreme end, some “live off the grid” and cut off all contact with the modern world.

• Edward Snowden is not a constitutional lawyer. But his public statement explaining his decision to blow the whistle on what he and Congress both know to be only the “tip of the iceberg” of state snooping secrets expresses a belief in the meaning of the Constitution: in a democracy, the people – not his defense contractor employers or the government that hires them – should ultimately determine whether mass surveillance interfering with everyone’s privacy is reasonable.

• Some have tried to minimize the import of the snooping exposed by Snowden on the grounds that the government is just storing the information it gathers, and has not yet searched it. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Seizure – the taking of private information – is what the government has now been forced to admit in its decision to prosecute Snowden for telling the truth about their secret seizures. Whether or not the state ever chooses to “search” the seized information, the universal, non-consensual seizure itself of what used to be called “pen register” data grossly invades individual privacy and vastly empowers government, all in violation of the Constitution if “unreasonable.”

• An MIT project shows Wayne Rash just how much information PRISM can get without opening a single email

• A leading French newspaper says France’s intelligence services have put in place a giant electronic surveillance gathering network.

• Citing no sources, the Le Monde daily says France’s Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, the country’s foreign intelligence agency, systematically collects information about all electronic data sent by computers and telephones in France, as well as communications between France and abroad.

• AT&T is planning to cash in on the large amount of data it collects from its subscribers every month. The company said this week that it is looking to follow in the footsteps of Google, Facebook and Verizon, and begin selling information about its customers to other businesses. AT&T says it’s considering selling its customers’ wireless and Wi-Fi locations, U-verse usage, website browsing habits, mobile app usage and “other information.” The carrier notes that the data will be anonymous and in some cases will group together with other subscribers, which it says will protect a customer’s privacy. Those who aren’t fond of AT&T selling their information, however, will have the opportunity to opt out of the program. AT&T didn’t reveal when the data selling program will go into effect.

• I’m drinking an espresso shot. It’s half-cold. There’s still gunk in my eyes from sleeping.

• I’ve been thinking a lot about how I use the Internet. A year ago, I nearly vanished from the public web because I had an intuitive feeling the centralized web was a backdoor to the government. Now, as the dust settles from our collective experiences over the past week, I know this to be true.

• As a federal prosecutor in the 1980s, I used to think nothing of scooping up the phone numbers that a suspect called. I viewed that surveillance as no big deal because the Supreme Court had ruled in Smith v. Maryland (1979) that we have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the phone numbers we dial, as opposed to the content of the calls. And in any event, I had limited time or practical ability to follow up on those numbers.

• Speaking late Saturday afternoon at the Aspen Ideas Festival, U.S Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was every bit as diplomatic as you would expect a woman who has survived the Senate confirmation process to be. Chief Justice John Roberts? “A great chief justice,” who faces the “tall order (of) trying to forge agreement” on a court whose members traditionally treasure the right to go their own way. Justice Clarence Thomas? “I enjoy him enormously. He’s a justice with incredible integrity and a very principled one,” Kagan said. “We disagree on a lot of stuff and we’re going to disagree on a lot of stuff but I enjoy every moment I spend with him.”

• In one of the most innovative uses of the bizarre rules of international travel, whistle-blower Edward Snowden sits in an airport transit lounge outside the customs barrier that is Russian enough to not invade but not Russian enough to claim the Russians are hiding him. He has now reportedly applied for asylum in Russia.

• Today, the European Parliament held a three-hour long debate on PRISM, Tempora and what the EU response should be. Many wanted TAFTA/TTIP put on hold; others didn’t. But one theme cropped up again and again: the need for strong data protection laws that would offer at least some legal protection against massive and unregulated transfer of Europeans’ personal data to the US.

• It may seem to be a paradox that a law concerning protection of people’s secrets should be legislated in the open, but in fact, the paradox is the other way around.

Civil Rights

• ougher penalties for a wide range of cybercrimes have been agreed by European politicians.

• A draft directive outlining minimum jail terms for some crimes was adopted by the European Parliament on 4 July.

• The directive says those found guilty of running a botnet of hijacked home computers should serve at least three years in jail.

• There is a lot of very disturbing language throughout this recently leaked military file. When this file is coupled with the NDAA, one cannot help but put together a scenario in which the US government is readying to detain US citizens. Many of the people who have attempted to debunk the idea of FEMA camps have asked what the purpose of these camps would be. For the answer to this I must quote Alan Moore, “People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.”

• The Chilean dictator presided over the torture and murder of thousands, yet still the free-market right reveres his name

• Protests have continued for several weeks in South Korea against revelations that the country’s intelligence agency allegedly meddled in December’s presidential election by undertaking an anonymous online attack campaign against opposition parties.

• The security services of Russia, Ukraine and the Central Asian republics are colluding in the abduction, disappearance, unlawful transfer and torture of wanted individuals with a regularity that amounts to a region wide renditions programme, Amnesty International said in a report published today.

• Amnesty International is warning against a crackdown on supporters of Mohamed Morsi, after documenting a new wave of arrests of Muslim Brotherhood leaders, raids on media and an incident in which a protester was killed by army live fire.

• Amnesty International has accused the Israeli authorities of bullying and judicial harassment of Nariman Tamimi, a Palestinian rights activist who was placed under partial house arrest today to prevent her taking part in peaceful protests while she awaits trial next week.

• We wrote recently about New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s apoplectic response to the passage of two bills aimed at his beloved stop and frisk program. In addition to claiming the city would fall immediately and be beset on all sides by the tyranny of evil men swept up in an unprecedented crime wave (which would seem to imply stop and frisk isn’t catching that many criminals), he also promised to veto both bills despite both having landed on his desk with veto-proof votes.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Mike Masnick lets go with a strong blast on patents because they may yet again cripple innovation in 3D printing link here. As he writes, “One of the reasons 3D printing is suddenly on the cusp of going mainstream is the expiration of some key patents that have held the technology back for decades.”

Copyrights

• It was a busy day for Team Prenda yesterday, as summarized by Joe Mullin. Down in Central California, in the case overseen by Judge Otis Wright — who famously called out Team Prenda on their scam — four of the members of Team Prenda all sent coordinated filings, attacking the opposing lawyers, Morgan Pietz and Nick Ranallo, claiming that they should be sanctioned for failing to serve the various members of Team Prenda concerning the additional filings in the case. John Steele, Paul Hansmeier, Peter Hansmeier and Mark Lutz all claim that they’ve been blissfully unaware that anything was happening in the case.

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