● 07.14.13

● Links 14/7/2013: Akademy 2013, GNOME 3.9.4

Posted in News Roundup at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• “It runs air traffic control, it runs your bank, and it runs nuclear submarines. Your life, money, and death is in Linux’s hands, so we can keep you alive, clean you out, or kill you. It’s incredible how important it is.

• “The world without Linux might be a very different place. It’s one where computing is kind of crappy and homogeneous. You’re still using Windows CE on your crappy Windows cell phone. That world is grim and dark and Linux is a reason why that world doesn’t exist.”

• We’ve gathered 12 examples that prove Zemlin’s statements are no exaggeration – for such an oft-forgotten operating system, you rely on Linux far more than you realize.

• Clement Lefebvre, founder of Mint, today announced the immediate availability of Mint 15 Xfce edition. It has all the same goodies under the hood of other Mint 15 versions with Xfce 4.10 as its default desktop. Xfce is preferred by many because of its lightweight design and easy configuration.

• Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced a few minutes ago, July 12, that the final and stable release of the Linux Mint 15 Xfce operating system is available for download.

• I’m Alexandre Filgueira, or faidoc on the Internet. I’m a Spanish system administrator currently teaching kids and older people how to use a computer and basic office/HTML/Internet, waiting for September to come so I can move to Lima, Peru with my girlfriend.

• I’m also the founder of a GNU/Linux distribution called Antergos (aka Cinnarch), based on Arch Linux and focusing on a more user-friendly experience since the beginning. I’m also an Arch Linux Trusted User, maintaining Cinnamon-related packages there.

Desktop

• Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Chromebook was dismissed as a bare-bones laptop with limited appeal when it debuted two years ago. Now it’s defying skeptics and gaining share as the rest of the personal-computer market shrinks.

• While PC sales fell about 11 percent in Q2 2013, Google Chromebook sales continue to grow and now represent roughly 20 to 25 percent of the U.S. market for laptops priced under $300, NDP Group estimates. That sounds impressive — but what are the actual Chromebook sales figures? And is anybody making a buck off the cloud-centric notebooks? Hmmm…

Server

• CSL was started by Sharon Chen, who started out as a mainframe operator three decades ago, and then moved on to Unix system administration and systems programming.

• Chen is CEO at the company, while Amir Glaser is vice president of research and development. Glaser was a mainframe systems programmer for the Israeli Defence Forces when he started out in IT thirteen years ago, and he has expertise in mainframe communications, capacity planning and performance.

• The company’s main product, CSL-WAVE, was just updated with a 3.2 release earlier this year, and is used to manage all aspects of either Red Hat or SUSE Linux variants of the Linux operating system running on top of IBM’s z/VM virtualization layer (which is also an operating system of sorts in its own right).

• Supercomputers are getting faster than ever, but the next generation, which will be able to do a quintillion floating point operations per second, needs software that can keep up.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Over the years I have become increasingly fond and dependent on the podcast medium. As my days seem to consist of more and more out and about, travelling around the country, podcasts act as magazines for my ears, allowing me to keep up-to-date on the latest Linux developments wherever I am. The improvements in Android phones, with ever increasing storage space, combined with high quality open source software podcast aggregators (such as gPodder), makes the management of podcasts to be seamless, even out in the sticks.

Kernel Space

• I’ve been in the IT business long enough that when someone mentions KVM I flash back to days of running serial cables from servers to control boxes and pushing hardware switches to change console control from one server to another. I even remember how big a deal it was when vendors started to use UTP to connect their devices to servers rather than those clunky serial cables, and the wonder of wonders when in-band KVM started to become available and cable concerns became a thing of the past.

• Nearing the end of the Linux 3.11 kernel with most (if not all) of the interesting pull requests merged, here’s a look at the exciting features that will premiere in this next Linux kernel release.

• The Linux 3.11 kernel will support kernel images compressed using the LZ4 compression algorithm.

• Zswap is a feature for the Linux kernel that provides compressed swap caching. It’s been in development for a long time and was finally merged into the mainline Linux kernel for the 3.11 release.

• A Linux kernel scheduler that’s power-aware and aims for offering power-efficient performance has been published. The developer behind this new Linux scheduler is presently seeking other developer feedback on his set of nine patches.

Graphics Stack

• Developers at the Igalia open-source consulting firm are currently working on porting WebKitGTK+ / WebKit2 to Wayland.

• Kristian Høgsberg has announced the first release candidates for the upcoming Wayland 1.2 release along with the Weston 1.2 reference compositor.

• In the past few days after having delivered R600 Gallium3D benchmarks of the R600 SB back-end that is a new shader optimization back-end for the Radeon Gallium3D driver, here’s some comparison benchmarks against the upcoming R600 LLVM back-end.

• Our friends at Geeks3D have updated their GpuTest program so that its OpenGL 3.x benchmarks will work under the Mesa and Gallium3D open-source Linux graphics drivers.

• GpuTest 0.5.0 was released this week as the updated cross-platform 64-bit OpenGL graphics benchmark. The improved Linux support for this release comes via allowing Mesa / Gallium3D drivers to now work with these tests, at least it’s been tested on LLVMpipe, Nouveau NVC0 Fermi, and AMD Radeon R600 Gallium3D.

• Mesa 9.2 is slated for release next month, which means its code will be branched soon, so here’s a look at some of the exciting features that have been merged for this next Mesa open-source Linux graphics release.

• After about three months of development, Wayland 1.2.0 along with the matching version of its Weston reference compositor have been released. The updated Wayland/Weston stack bring many new features to the table.

• OpenCL has an ICD extension, which is for an Installable Client Driver, and allows for multiple OpenCL implementations to exist on the same system. The OpenCL ICD loader library lets applications choose a platform and dispatch the OpenCL API calls to the underlying library. This is quite important for systems with multiple different CPUs/GPUs exposing OpenCL support.

• Keith Packard of Intel has managed to get an initial implementation of the DRI3 Present extension written and running for the X.Org Server.

• Mesa 9.2 and the R600 Gallium3D shader optimization back-end can deliver some nice performance gains for various generations of AMD Radeon HD graphics cards.

• The Wayland LiveCD has been updated against the new Wayland/Weston 1.2 release. This Linux LiveCD also ships with the Wayland-enabled GTK3, Qt5, SDL, and Enlightenment EFL tool-kits for easily trying out this next-generation Linux display stack.

Benchmarks

• As the latest for our early Ubuntu 13.10 Linux performance benchmarks, here’s a brief comparison of the Nouveau Gallium3D vs. NVIDIA binary graphics driver performance from a NVIDIA GeForce “Fermi” graphics processor.

Applications

• youtube-dl is a Python based small command-line tool that allows to download videos from YouTube.com, Dailymotion, Google Video, Photobucket, Facebook, Yahoo, Metacafe, Depositfiles and few more similar sites. It written in pygtk and requires Python interpreter to run this program, it’s not platform restricted. It should run on any Unix, Windows or in Mac OS X based systems.

• A couple of weeks ago, when I first learned about LighZone, a photo editor, was opensourced, my reaction was “heck, even if it is Java, I should try it and compare with darktable”, but the first impression was a failure: my access to the website is blocked! How dumb is for a FOSS project to blindly block all customers of the largest ISP from a country? What else they block? Angry, I made a screenshot and then forgot about it for a while.

• The first development version of the upcoming GNOME Photos 3.10 photo viewer and organizer application for the GNOME desktop environment has been released a couple of days ago, on July 9, 2013.

• Version 3.9.4 of Orca, a free, open source, flexible, and extensible screen reader for the GNOME desktop environment, was released two days ago, on July 9, 2013.

• The development team behind the Devhelp open source API documentation browser for the GNOME desktop environment has announced the immediate availability for download and testing of Devhelp 3.9.4.

• The Darling Project is still moving forward with its goal of being able to run Mac OS X binaries under Linux.

• The project aims to run OS X binaries on Linux in a seamless manner by leveraging GNUstep for the Apple Cocoa frameworks and implementing other OS X components needed for offering binary compatibility. The project is similar in nature to Wine but rather than running Windows applications it is about OS X support.

• The Opus lossy audio compression codec for real-time applications on the Internet that’s comprised of the SILK and CELT codecs is now in beta form for version 1.1.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The fifth release candidate of the feature-rich Wine 1.6 for running Windows applications on Linux and other operating systems is now available.

Games

• Valve’s Dota 2 game will soon be released for Linux gamers. Dota 2 is the sequel to Defense of the Ancients and under Windows has proven to be a highly popular title, which is now being tested on Linux.

• Apple, Linux, you’re okay!

• Just a quick video on world of tanks, the free to play tank combat game and it running on linux via wine and play on linux, i will post some game play latter this month…tin….

• The Steam Summer Sale has started and the second day now features two games with Linux support, although they’re not triple-A titles.

• We have told you before about Strike Suit Zero the space shooter coming to Linux and it looks like it could start rolling out today!

• Epic Games is working on a new first person shooter that’s said to be a triple-A game, but it’s not necessarily part of their famed Unreal series.

• Unigine Corp has readied another batch of changes for their visually stunning and multi-platform Unigine Engine.

• The latest revision to the Unigine Engine introduces a PhysicalNoise object for simulating a force field affecting particles/objects with spatial 3D noise, various render improvements, additions to the engine’s C++ API, better UnigineScript support, tooling improvements, and more.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Aujourd’hui, petite pensée pour les amateurs de l’excellent site Distrowatch. On va installer le plasmoid Distrowatch permettant d’afficher les dernières versions des distributions Linux et des paquets tel que publié sur distrowatch.com. Afin de récupérer les données relatives, les Flux RSS de distrowatch sont utilisés.

• Today, on behalf of the Artikulate team, I proudly announce the first release of Artikulate 0.1.0 (*). This release is a contributor release and hence is not aimed to users/learners, yet. As a fact, this release do not have a training mode. Instead, with this release we focus on stabilizing our course editor to set up a common ground for contributing courses and native speaker recordings.

• Today we are releasing the Qt Creator 2.8 final. If you have followed the beta and rc blog posts you already know what is new in this version. For all others I’ll summarize some of the (subjectively) most important news…

• Up until this very moment the QML drag/drop support is kinda limited. You can only use it within the app’s context. Not many know, but “Chris Meyer” is currently working on this issue and has already send a patch…

• The Krita team is working together with the awesome artist’s community to create cool stuff for the new Krita Shop. And we’re doing interviews with all the artists that are working together with us. Updating the shop will take a few days still, but we can’t wait to show to you all the work and how all artists are doing the best for Krita.

• So, we have for you today our interview with Yuri Fidelis. Yuri is a young Brazilian artist that has been around our community for quite some time, and he is the author of the shortcuts cheat sheet. Thanks to him! We took the time to ask him some questions, and here are the answers. Enjoy!

• Have you ever tried to vertically center an element using CSS or wanted an element to just use the whole remaining space or similar things? Did you ever struggle with complex interfaces when writing a modern website? Did you ever use QML for a desktop-app and were in wonder how amazingly it just works? Then there probably was also the point where you thought ”why can’t I just use QML for my webapp?”. So have I.

• Some KDE developers are currently discussing a proposal to publish major revisions of the KDE Software Collection every three months, rather than the current six-month cycle. The more rapid rhythm aims to simplify the work on new versions and quickly bring new features to users.

• Here’s a brief update on the progress with KStars. The main accomplishment so far is writing new implementations of the coordinate conversions that KStars uses to calculate the positions of sky objects. The new code uses linear algebra instead of spherical trigonometry, so we represent all of our points as vectors of length one, and our coordinate conversions become linear maps.

• As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m working on revamping Amarok’s scripting interface for GSoC 2013. Here’s an update on what I’ve been working on these past 3 weeks.

• In the last two weeks, I have implemented many shiny new things in kte-collaborative! Here’s a short summary of the most prominent ones.

• Starting next weekend, one of the most significant events on the Qt development and contribution calendar is taking place in Bilbao, Spain. The co-located and parallel-running Qt Contributor Summit and Akademy promise to push plans for Qt forward during the coming year.

• This is a status update for my Google Summer of Code 2013 project – implementing advanced statistics importers for Amarok. Please read the first post if you would like to know more about the project.

• A few days ago, the KDESvn repository was converted from Subversion to Git.

• This year’s general assembly of KDE e.V. during Akademy will be my last one as a member of the KDE e.V.‘s Board of Directors. I had been elected during Akademy 2006 in Dublin, and since then served the KDE community by working on organisational bits necessary to support a Free Software project. We’ve seen times where our environment wildly changed, times of growth, consolidation, growing pains. Looking back fills me with satisfaction how we have developed KDE e.V. as an organisation. I think KDE e.V. is exemplary in many ways for other Free Software, and Free Culture projects. One of the cornerstones here is continuity, we simply had the time to learn a lot, to define and implement necessary processes around administration, fund-raising, legal questions, conference organisation and many more. As it stands today, KDE e.V. is an organisation that provides the continuity necessary for a community to think ahead, and the necessary infrastructure to foster and support those next steps. KDE e.V. is also an organisation that constantly evolves, reacting, but also foreseeing and preparing for the next steps. We have a well-functioning team in place to guide this, and I’m confident that the current and coming board members will keep developing KDE e.V. as an organisation towards its goal of supporting KDE.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME Online Accounts 3.9.4 package was officially announced two days ago, July 10, bringing one new feature, updating five translations, and fixing seven annoying bugs.

• GNOME Online Accounts 3.9.4 enabled Flickr by default and fixes its icon. Moreover, the Twitter logo has been updated, support for photos has been added to Facebook accounts, and a PasswordBased interface is no longer offered for Google accounts.

• The GNOME 3.9.4 development release was made available this week with many changes to its desktop stack ahead of the official GNOME 3.10 release in September. With this release, GNOME is in better shape when running with Wayland.

• Paolo Bacchilega announced a couple of days ago, July 10, the immediate availability for download of the gThumb 3.2.3 image viewer and browser utility for the GNOME desktop environment.

• The GNOME 3.9.4 development release was made available this week with many changes to its desktop stack ahead of the official GNOME 3.10 release in September. With this release, GNOME is in better shape when running with Wayland.

• Gnome announced today that their latest development release 2.9.4 is out and ready for the everyday risk-takers consumption, and with it come some new–and perhaps even exciting– changes. Gnome 2.9.4 is the latest development snapshot leading up to Gnome 2.10 in September.

• The recently released developer version of GNOME 3.9.4 sees the addition of Photos (GNOME Photos) to the collection of applications included as part of the desktop. The program, which was actually developed some time ago, is, like many smartphone photo apps, able to display both local and online photos and load local photos to the cloud. The program also includes a small range of editing functions, but it is not intended that it should become either a photo editor or photo manager. It connects to online services with the help of GNOME Online Accounts (GOA).

Distributions

• Today in Open Source: Too many distros? Linux Mint 15 Xfce released, Open Pandora reviewed

• Bugtraq 2 Black Widow builds on Ubuntu, Debian and OpenSUSE in XFCE, Gnome and KDE.

New Releases

• JULinuXP 2013 ETPE Revision 2 was released on 07-09-2013 however I waited to write this article until the FTP upload was complete to sourceforge.net. The main differences in this release are that LibreOffice was replaced by OpenOffice.org, The Custom Control Center was added as you can see in the screenshot on the left, a Netflix installer and updater was added, as well as other utilities and benefits. Gdebi is the default package installer for .deb files and wine is default for .exe. Simple and easy to use.

Screenshots

Arch Family

• Unix and Linux has changed, evolved and matured. But there’s one thing that has not changed too much from the very beginnings. And it is something that we probably all take for granted and don’t really think too much about. I can admit, until recently I had not given it much thought. I am referring to the structure of the Unix/Linux filesystem.

Red Hat Family

• (By Mani) Red Hat Inc.’s (NYSE: RHT) business model of being able to catalyze developer communities and productize open source software potentially offers it a significant runway for growth.

• Based in Raleigh, North Carolina, Red Hat provides open source software solutions primarily to enterprise customers worldwide. The company develops and offers operating-system, middleware, virtualization, storage, and cloud technologies.

• In an exclusive video interview with ServerWatch, Dumas detailed some of the challenges her engineering teams faces. Red Hat Enterprise LinuxShe also explained the relationship with the open source MariaDB database and how it will now become part of the extended Red Hat Enterprise Linux experience.

• I first became aware of Seth Vidal years ago. I didn’t know him at all; I knew him only from his work, and from that work I surmised that he was Not My Friend.

• Police charged a 27-year-old driver Tuesday in the death of a Durham bicyclist who died after a hit-and-run Monday night.

• Maceo Christopher Kemp Jr. of Manson, N.C., turned himself in to police Tuesday afternoon. He is charged with felony hit-and-run and driving while his license was revoked.

• Kemp was in the Durham County Jail Tuesday evening under a $50,000 secured bond.

• He is accused in the death of Seth Vidal.

• Editor’s Note: The Linux and open source communities unexpectedly lost an amazing person this week. Seth Vidal, a member of Red Hat’s Fedora Project team and a longtime open source software contributor and advocate, died tragically July 8 in Durham. Linux Foundation System Administrator Konstantin Ryabitsev knew him well and is allowing us to republish his personal blog post here. In honor of Seth, this will be the only content we publish today and over the weekend.

• In early 2001 I was looking for a new job. My prospects weren’t stellar — I was a foreign worker with a funny name looking for an IT position during the worst dregs of the dot-com crash, and my resume only had one Programming-Slash-Admin job on it. It’s the kind of resume that hiring managers quickly file in the “if_absolutely_desperate” folder.

• [...]

• Seth’s life tragically ended on a summer night when a car slammed into his bike and then drove off. It shouldn’t take a tragedy to remind you that life can end abruptly, but somehow it always does, and it makes us very angry. “What a meaningless death” we say.

• What a meaningful life, say I. Seth was only 36, but look how much he managed to accomplish, how much loyalty and respect he commanded, how much merit his opinion had among his peers. For his having been here, this world is richer, and for his passing it is now poorer.

• We can all add meaning to our lives if we stop treating life as some kind of mundane and exasperating filler between weekends, holidays, and those fleeting breaks every now and again when we get a minute to do things we enjoy. We call it “the human condition,” and we avoid looking at each other when we say that. But I truly believe that if we are just a bit more genuine, and a bit more passionate, and a bit more caring, then perhaps we will no longer have to use apologetic cliches when talking about our own lives.

• We owe it to ourselves, and we owe it to our friend. I miss you terribly, Seth. Rest in Peace.

• The Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform products, which are built around OpenStack Grizzly, have now become available. Both were announced a month ago and combine various Red Hat products that are designed to help businesses get set up running an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud.

• About six weeks ago we offered-up a list of six GNU/Linux distros and asked which you’d choose for your web server if you were limited to the distros on that list. The list was composed of what we’ve found to be the most frequently offered Linux OS choices by web hosting companies for their virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated server customers. We offered each of the six in both their 32 bit and 64 bit implementations, which is also usually the case with web hosting companies.

• Now that Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is available, The VAR Guy has some advice for the open source company: Red Hat (RHT) needs to hijack OpenStack and the open source cloud conversation — for the good of channel partners. Here’s why.

Fedora

• Most of my software development takes place on a Ubuntu 12.04 running LXDE. It is stable and provides me with everything I need. I also keep a copy of Fedora on a different partition on my hard disk. The attraction is the latest version of gcc and glibc. With a new Fedora version just released, it is time to check it out.

• With the aim of getting the UK Fedora community kick started we’ve created a forum. It’s just been created so there isn’t a lot there at the moment, but if it’s a resource you can use, please feel free. You’ll find it at fedora-uk.org

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Verizon is first U.S.-based wireless operator to show serious interest in Canonical’s open source, Linux-based mobile platform

• Canonical reports that Verizon Wireless has joined the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group (CAG), a good sign that the Big Red may one day carry an Ubuntu-based phone. However there’s no real commitment for now: Verizon is simply taking part of the Ubuntu development discussions within the new advisory forum.

• The CAG was unveiled just last month, and includes founding members Deutsche Telekom, Everything Everywhere, Korea Telecom, Telecom Italia, LG UPlus, Portugal Telecom, and SK Telecom. Only CAG members will have access to early information about Ubuntu and device manufacturer plans to support the OS, Canonical stated, as well as the opportunity to be a launch partner for Ubuntu on smartphones.

• Verizon Wireless is the latest company to join Ubuntu’s Carrier Advisory group, which suggests that the US wireless carrier could be planning to offer phones running Ubuntu Phone OS at some point.

• Verizon Wireless has become the first US carrier to join the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group, making a stateside launch for Canonical’s open source smartphone platform that much more likely.

• Our latest look at the current development state of Ubuntu 13.10 is comparing the “Saucy Salamander” performance against that of Ubuntu 13.04, 12.10, 12.04.2 LTS, and 11.10. Testing was done with an Intel Sandy Bridge system to see how the Ubuntu Linux performance has evolved over the past two years in the road to the October release of Ubuntu 13.10.

• Cameras at the ready – the Ubuntu 13.10 wallpaper contest has opened for entries.

• Hello everyone! I’m delighted to be kicking off the next wallpaper selection process for the 13.10 release of Ubuntu coming this October. As you can see from the Saucy Salamander release schedule, we hit UI freeze on August 29th of this year and we’d like to get all your lovely community submitted images ready before then. To get involved submit your images to the Flickr group for submissions.

• Canonical, the company leading the Ubuntu Touch project, is taking a five pronged approach to ensure the success of the platform.

Flavours and Variants

• The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 15 “Olivia” Xfce.

Devices/Embedded

• [Updated July 12, 2013] — Logic Supply is now shipping an enclosure for BeagleBoard.org’s BeagleBone Black open source development board. Selling for $15, the LGX BB100 comprises a plated steel chassis with a multipoint mounting lid that fits BeagleBone Capes, and offers access to USB, microSD, microHDMI, Ethernet, and other ports.

• An OpenWRT Linux-based hardware adapter designed for unifying USB-connected storage met its $69,000 Kickstarter pledge goal in 12 hours. The tiny Plug device eschews cloud storage for a localized approach whereby an app or driver installed on each participating computer or mobile device intercepts filesystem accesses, and redirects data reads and writes to storage drives attached to the user’s Plug device.

• ARM processors fuel the millions of video-ready smartphones and tablets that are pushing wireless telecom equipment to its limits with growing bandwidth demands, but they have done little to help transmit that data overload. That’s about to change. Much has been made of the growing role of ARM Cortex-A15 system-on-chips in the x86-dominated server market, and the greater server inroads expected from upcoming 64-bit, ARMv8 Cortex-A57 cores. Yet these are also the first ARM designs that actively target networking and telecom equipment – which typically run Linux — in addition to mobile and server applications.

• As reported here recently, the diminutive $25/$35 Linux computer dubbed Raspberry Pi has emerged as one of the biggest open source stories anywhere. It is now found in a supercomputer consisting of many Pi devices lashed together with Lego pieces, and is giving rise to DIY synthesizer and home security concoctions.

• I’ve been talking about using Linux-based systems for embedded use lately. One very popular system is the Raspberry Pi.

• Hardware isn’t generally my thing. When it comes to software, I like to break and create. But in my opinion, hardware should just work. But even though that’s another story altogether, it did explain my apprehension when I greeted the UPS guy one morning delivering a BeagleBone Black.

• Thanks to everyone who sent me a link to this today. Nathan Broadbent has turned his microwave into an Internet of Things microwave, with voice control, charming bingly bongly noises, a barcode scanner to look up cooking times on an online database, a touchscreen, iPad controls, a clock that’s synced to the internet, a habit of tweeting when dinner is ready, and much more. You’ll need to watch the video to believe it. Bonus points, Nathan, for making an honest-to-god raspberry pie in the thing.

• When you think of cloud drives, you think of Dropbox, Google Drive, Bitcsa, and so many more. But if you are tired of only those drives having 1GB limit which most have 5GB or more. If you want your own things and really no limitations, making your computer’s memory bigger. There is a Kickstarter campaign for you.

Phones

• Like every new smartphone operating system, Tizen has to answer the question: what about the apps? Tizen’s answer is to entice developers to create apps, even though no finished Tizen devices are available, by holding a competition. The Linux Foundation, Intel and Samsung have together announced the “Tizen App Challenge”, offering around $4 million in prizes.

• In just two years, Intel’s Jerusalem team paved the way for the company’s challenge in an industry dominated by ARM.

• We have long known that Jolla, the company founded by former Nokia employees, has been toying with Wayland for their future smartphones. We now have confirmation that right from the start their first phone will be running on Wayland.

• Jolla’s phones are to run Sailfish OS as their MeeGo fork and they have been playing around with Wayland support even to the point of allowing Android GPU drivers to work with Wayland (Canonical in turn took a library and adapted that for their Android drivers with Mir).

• After months of waiting for Gingerbread, Android 2.3, to be toppled from its position of most widely used version of Android, the combined forces of Android 4.1 and 4.2 have taken the top spot in the charts. As both are code-named “Jelly Bean”, and generally treated as the same thing with minor differences in their flavours, it is reasonable to award the top spot to their combined numbers in the Android charts.

Ballnux

• A couple of months back, an executive from the South Korean consumer electronics giant, LG claimed that the company was going to pass on the Nexus device this time around. However, given the way the rumour mills are, they think he’s just bluffing.

• A while ago popular Android modder Paul O’Brien revealed that he was cooking up something called MoDaCo.SWITCH. Very little was known about it until this video was revealed demonstrating the feature. Speaking of which, it is supposed to be a quick and convenient way to switch from HTC Sense UI to AOSP.

Android

• If you are an android user and a Facebook user, chances are you already hate the android app, made by Facebook itself, for being severely laggy on any android device, no matter how fast your phone is. Not to mention all the other annoyances that the app entails and it’s horrible User Interface. Some people are so inconvenienced by it that, they rather prefer the mobile version on their browser than use the official app. Enter (drum roll please) Spatio, the new kid on the block that is here to answer your cries.

• Given the recent stream of indigenous Indian companies dabbing their fingers into the mid-range profit pie, it really isn’t a surprise that Xolo is also jumping in on the bandwagon with is Xolo Play, Gaming focused Smartphone. The device is priced at Rs. 15,999 and it is available for pre-order on its official site as we write this article.

• Slovakia-based Antik Technology has developed an advanced TV set-top-box based on the STMicroelectronics STiH416 ARM Cortex-A9 “Orly” SoC, and running an embedded Android OS. The Juice Extreme 2 combines DVB tuner video with OTT (over-the-top) IP streaming, and can transcode four video input streams while simultaneously streaming multimedia out to smart TVs, tablets, and other local devices.

• Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt was spotted using the Moto X phone at the Allen and Co. conference yesterday. This is the first time we got to see the phone in action although it is in the hands of another. As seen before, the phone has a textured white back while the front half of the phone is black. The camera is placed in the center along with the Motorola logo hanging below it. The pictures show the device being used by Eric Schmidt at the conference.

Free Software/Open Source

• To date, much of the WebRTC discussion has revolved around its implementation in web browsers, including Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, but that’s not the whole story. WebRTC also has relevance beyond the browser. It’s now a key technology in VoIP vendor Vonage’s mobile aspirations.

• Baruch Sterman, VP of Technology Research at Vonage, told Enterprise Networking Planet that his company is now relying on WebRTC to power its mobile Vonage application.

• IBM is one of those companies that banks big on open source technology. Those at the helm know this is where the future of technology lies. Diksha P Gupta from Open Source For You spoke to Dipankar Sarma, distinguished engineer, Systems & Technology Labs, IBM India, to discuss the increasing demand for open source professionals and the opportunities that IBM offers them. Excerpts…

• After Citrix bought Xen in 2007, the core of this popular open-source hypervisor remained open source, but some of the rest became proprietary software. Now Citrix has decided to take all of its virtual machine manager and cloud XenServer software back to its open-source roots.

• Quite often on Phoronix we cover various experimental open-source projects that catch our interest as they’re interesting from a technical perspective, but often these projects don’t end up stabilizing due to limited manpower or prove to be too technically ambitious. Here’s a look at some of the less heard of open-source projects that have previously been covered on Phoronix to look at where they are today.

• Searchdaimon, a search engine designed for corporate data and web sites, has been open sourced by its eponymous Norwegian developers. The application, which is capable of filtering, sorting and federating content, as well as auto-suggestion of search terms, spell checking and stemming, comes with a web-based administration interface with which data sources can be added or removed and statistics analysed. The company positions its software as “the only enterprise-grade alternative to Solr available”.

• Robert May, the founder and main developer of the Photographer.io photo sharing site, has announced on the project’s blog that he is open sourcing the code for the application running the online platform. The Photographer.io site is currently in beta and gives users unlimited storage for photographs with a 100 photos per month upload limit that can be increased by referring other users. The service is ad-free and will be supported by subscriptions and affiliate links for photography hardware in the future, according to its about page.

Events

• The GNOME Foundation, through Fabiana Simões, announced at the beginning of this month that the upcoming 14th GUADEC Conference for GNOME developers will take place in Brno, Czech Republic between 1-8 August.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Chrome’s enhanced Web apps, known as Packaged Apps, take on more features to compete with native mobile apps, including in-app payments.

• Google has released the stable version 28 of its Chrome browser. It is the first version to use the new Blink engine for rendering web pages and it appears that the new engine will allow web pages to be loaded about ten per cent faster. The developers say that the increased speed is also thanks to the new threaded HTML parser, which frees up the JavaScript thread, allowing DOM content to be displayed faster. The HTML parser also takes fewer breaks, which is said to result in time savings of up to 40 per cent. Another contributor to the faster working speed is the optimised V8 JavaScript engine.

Mozilla

• Deutsche Telekom opened sales of the Firefox OS-based Alcatel One Touch Fire phone in Poland today for one Zloty (30 cents) on contract, a few days after Telefonica launched the ZTE Open for 69 Euros ($89) in Spain. On July 11, Mozilla released Firefox OS Simulator 4.0, which adds features like a “Connect” button and simulated touch events.

• In Linux Land, every year seems to start with a wave of prophecies that this will be ‘the year of the something’, usually the desktop. These predictions almost universally turn out to be over-hyped.

• The Firefox web browser is loading all web pages pretty fast on my system, not slower than Google Chrome for example, and also starting up just fine and in a matter of a second or so. While I have nothing to complain about, other users may not be that lucky. Some are reporting that Firefox takes a long time to load even though that should not really happen, especially since page loads just fine and fast in other web browsers.

• At a press conference in Warsaw, Poland, today, Deutsche Telekom announced that sales of the ALCATEL ONE TOUCH Fire powered by Firefox OS will start soon in Europe. T-Mobile Poland will offer the Firefox OS-powered smartphone via its online sales channels already from tomorrow on and from July 15 nationwide in 850 shops.

• As Firefox OS phones arrive in markets, the Firefox OS simulator has had an update which will help developers who are planning to make money with their HTML5 apps. In version 4.0 of the Firefox OS Simulator, which runs as an add-on to desktop Firefox, there is now the ability to download and install the three varieties of receipt that the Mozilla Marketplace can issue. The app dashboard lets a developer select a receipt (valid, invalid or refunded) and the simulator restarts with that type of receipt in place. This allows the behaviour of trial, purchased and refunded applications to be tested.

SaaS/Big Data

• The OpenStack Foundation may have good reason to host its next summit in Hong Kong, and not just because OpenStack is growing in popularity in China. The foundation could hope that its decision to base the summit in Hong Kong in November might draw contributors into the fold so that they don’t splinter.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• After reading the backlog dated back to February 2011, the original script was reimplemented using JQuery to get familiar with the subject. In the meantime Rainer Bielefeld created wiki pages to gather all the informations necessary to proceed with the implementation, starting with Bug Submission Assistant home page.

Healthcare

• Safety net providers have both succeeded and struggled with open source software, according a federally-funded study.

• On the whole, though, researchers from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center found found “ample evidence to indicate that these systems created workflow efficiencies within their clinical environments,” and they concluded that the federal government should offer further funding assistance.

• As part of the study, required as part of the HITECH Act (a part of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act), the researchers interviewed staff at six safety net providers — one in West Virginia, three in California and two in Arizona.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• The Wakanda Development Business licence, for just under 100 euros a year per developer, allows users to keep their source code private, unlike the Community Edition, which, with the AGPLv3 licence, requires that all code is made open source. The commercial licence also allows the use of the commercial versions of Wakanda Server, Wakanda Studio and the Wakanda Application Framework for testing purposes.

• The SpringSource developers have announced a new major release of their Eclipse-based tooling for Spring developers and Groovy/Grails developers. The new release is updated to the recent Eclipse release train, Eclipse Kepler 4.3, but a distribution for its predecessor, Eclipse Juno 3.8 is available, though it lacks any 4.3 specific fixes and enhancements. Updated bundled components include tcServer, now at version 2.9.2, Spring Roo, at version 1.2.4, and Grails, updated to version 2.2.4.

Funding

• Leadwerks Software has reached their Kickstarter campaign goal of $20,000 to make their game development tools run natively in Linux. The campaign began June 18 and raised their target amount in just three weeks. With an extra three weeks left in the campaign, the company is setting out “stretch goals” including Android and OUYA development in Linux, as well as support for the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift.

BSD

• Viking OS is an open-source head-mounted display (HMD) operating system for wearable computing, including smart glasses. The operating system is derived from FreeBSD to integrate more closely with Apple.

• A new package manager and better hardware support are the major changes in MidnightBSD 0.4, an derivative of the better known FreeBSD 9.1. The release pulls in features from FreeBSD 9.1 such as ZFS with ZPOOL 28/dedup support, LLVM+CLANG, a migration to GPT as the installer default and the newer FreeBSD USB stack and NFSv4 client. This is the first new release following more than three years of development work. ISO images and images for VMware and Parallels are available to download from the web site and various mirrors.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• For the last few months, we’ve been raising an outcry against Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a plan by Netflix and a block of other media and software companies to squeeze support for Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) into the HTML standard, the core language of the Worldwide Web. The HTML standard is set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which this block of corporations has been heavily lobbying as of late.

Project Releases

• Basho’s latest update to its distributed open source key/value database, Riak 1.4, has been released and brings with it the database’s first distributed data type, PN-Counters. These are eventually consistent and can be incremented and decremented on any node across the cluster; a cookbook is in development which documents their use.

• While everyone is still adjusting to the JBoss application server being renamed to WildFly, development on it hasn’t taken a rest. The developers have released a first beta version of Undertow, a new, performant web server that supports blocking and non-blocking I/O and is being used as the default web server in WildFly.

Public Services/Government

• The country of Estonia has released its pioneering e-voting system on GitHub, opening the doors for citizens to see how the process works — and for programmers to explore and try to break things.

• Applying the European Commission’s ‘Guide for the procurement of standards-based ICT’ will not be enough for public administrations to get rid of IT vendor lock-in, says Jutta Kreyss, IT-architect for the German city of Munich. “Standards alone are insufficient for any non-simple IT project. To get out of the vendor-lock in, one has to use standards and open source.”

Openness/Sharing

• Before looking closer at API branding, it helps to understand how developer community members are subtly shifting their focus from open source projects to open APIs. Today, effective developers not only review and include open source project frameworks into their solution, but also evaluate and integrate open Web APIs.

Programming

• See, for may years, our main organization was The HeliOS Project. HeliOS still exists as the educational arm of Reglue. HeliOS is responsible for running the Gurls-R-Geez2 program as well as our adult education classes in comptuter 101. This coming month, we will also be bringing in a Python Guru to help teach kids beginning Python.

• Over the last two years, Firefox has demonstrated that releasing new versions at a rapid tempo offers many advantages and doesn’t reduce quality. Its approach could offer a blueprint for other projects, such as KDE.

• PHP has, without a doubt, gained widespread popularity, but the scripting language no longer enjoys a very high hype factor. Just like Java, it has become mainstream in a positive sense. Nevertheless, some think that the popularity of PHP is already on a downwards trend with many programmers. The new figures from the monthly TIOBE Programming Index, which establishes the most popular programming languages, disagree with those views. The index rates the language at 7.2% in July, which is 2.17 percentage points higher than last year. This makes PHP the “fastest climber” among the languages that are included in the index.

• Kunjika is a modern question and answer forum application that aims to give users the same features available on Stack Overflow. It is the brain-child of Shiv Shankar Dayal, an Instrumentation Engineer and software programmer.

Leftovers

Science

• Though previously unobserved, scientists long assumed that, just like any other object moving through a medium, the solar system had a tail. Not until NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) however, were scientists able to perceive it and map its boundaries, which, it turns out, resembles something like a four-leaf clover.

Hardware

• In case you weren’t totally sure that the PC manufacturing industry was on the decline, consider this: there have now been five quarters in a row of declining shipments of PCs, the “longest duration of decline in the PC market’s history,” according to new analysis from Gartner Research.

• An analyst raises questions about a benchmark for the Intel and ARM chips that go into smartphones.

• It’s pretty clear that the PC industry has hit the tar pits, with PC sales expected to plummet by double digits this year. It’s getting so bad that the big players – companies such as Intel, who were the engine for PC industry – are scrabbling to come up with an exit strategy while at the same time trying not to spook or panic investors.

Security

• The Economic Development Administration (EDA) is an agency in the Department of Commerce that promotes economic development in regions of the US suffering slow growth, low employment, and other economic problems. In December 2011, the Department of Homeland Security notified both the EDA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that there was a possible malware infection within the two agencies’ systems.

• There’s no question that accused hacker Andrew Auernheimer is a jerk. But computer security experts say it would be a mistake to make him a felon.

• The Apache Software Foundation is out with a pair of important updates to its namesake Apache HTTP Server.

• The new updates are the Apache 2.0.65 and Apache 2.2.25 releases. Of particular note is the fact that the Apache 2.0.65 release is the final release of the Apache 2.0.x line of HTTP server.

• In a blog entry on the conference web site, DEF CON founder Jeff Moss (aka The Dark Tangent) has asked federal agents not to attend this year’s DEF CON, which is set to take place in early August. Since recent news of the US government’s extensive eavesdropping operations has made it difficult for many hackers to feel comfortable casually mixing with law enforcement officials, Moss is asking FBI agents, known as “feds”, to take the year off. “This will give everybody time to think about how we got here, and what comes next,” Moss wrote.

• A dispute has erupted between Secunia and the developers of the VLC media player. In December 2012, Secunia released a security advisory for the VLC media player. The developers of the player responded by releasing a patch. However, Secunia says that the patch didn’t fix the vulnerability, and that it is still contained in the current version, 2.0.7, of VLC. Now, the security firm has criticised the VLC developers in a blog post, saying that the developers had questioned the validity of the security advisory and threatened Secunia with legal action on 21 May 2013. The VLC developers have responded.

• $170,000 of equipment, including mice and keyboards, was physically destroyed when, according to a reportPDF, the Economic Development Administration (EDA) over-reacted to an over-stated malware threat. The EDA, a part of the US Commerce Department, also spent $823,000 on a contractor to investigate the infection, over one million dollars on temporary infrastructure and $688,000 for assistance from a contractor for a long term recovery plan.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• I want to thank the ACLU for asking me to guest blog this week to coincide the release of my new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.

• I suppose I should start by telling you what the book is all about. Between about the early 1980s and today, American police forces have undergone some substantial changes. Most notable among these is the ascent of the SWAT team. Once limited to large cities and reserved for emergency situations like hostage takings, active shooters, or escaped fugitives, SWAT teams today are primarily used to serve warrants on people suspected of nonviolent, consensual drug crimes.

• George Zimmerman, the man accused of murdering Trayvon Martin, was found not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter Saturday night.

• The verdict is the culmination of a case that captured the nation’s attention and will undoubtedly be imprinted in America’s history. For Zimmerman, it means trying to recapture his life after he was at the center of a national maelstrom over racial profiling, state gun laws and what constitutes self-defense.

• An employee of the Florida State Attorney’s Office who testified that prosecutors withheld evidence from George Zimmerman’s defense team has been fired.

• Ben Kruidbos had been on paid administrative leave since May 28 from his job as director of information technology for the State Attorney’s Office.

• A spokeswoman for Fourth Judicial Circuit State Attorney Angela Corey said Kruidbos was no longer an employee of the office.

• Zimmerman, a former neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, is on trial in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last year.

• Nationwide protests ignited in US following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, 17, out of apparent self-defense. Demonstrators have been burning flags, smashing windows and police cars.

• Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama shifted the CIA’s top priority from “gathering intelligence on foreign governments” to “man hunting.” The agency became a secret machine to locate and kill “terrorists.”

• Imprisoned CIA whistle-blower John Kiriakou has advice for Snowden — and a warning for the rest of us

• In the moments following the announcement of George Zimmerman being found not guilty in the death of Trayvon Martin, conservative pundits and bloggers took to Twitter to gloat. Here is a small sampling of some of the hate, vindictiveness and poor taste flowing from the right tonight…

• The Times cited Middle East intelligence sources as stating that the Israeli Dolphin-class submarines targeted a contingent of 50 Russian-made Yakhont P-800 anti-ship missiles that had reportedly arrived earlier this year to support Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime.

• As the old media pro­pa­ganda battle inev­it­ably heats up around the Edward Snowden case, I stumbled across this little Amer­ican news gem recently. The premise being that poten­tial whis­tleblowers are now deemed to be the new “insider threat”.

• Well, the US spooks and their friends have already had a pretty good run through the “reds under the bed” of McCarthy­ism, polit­ical sub­vers­ives, illeg­als, Muslims and “domestic extrem­ists”, whatever the hell that really means leg­ally. Now they’ve hit on another threat­en­ing cat­egory to jus­tify yet fur­ther sur­veil­lance crack­downs. What’s in a name.….

• Firstly, this is old news resur­rec­ted in the wake of the Edward Snowden dis­clos­ures to scare people anew. Way back in 2008 the US gov­ern­ment wrote a report about “insider threats” and the per­ceived danger of the high-tech pub­lisher Wikileaks and, in early 2010 the report was leaked to the very same organisation.

Transparency Reporting

• But Benkler’s point was not that WikiLeaks’ “journalistic reputation” had been undercut; he was criticizing the Times for maligning WikiLeaks.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A study has shown that the speed of evolutionary change is far outstripped by the rate of global warming, meaning many creatures will face extinction

• [...]

• Among the many strange mantras repeated by climate change deniers is the claim that even in an overheated, climate-altered planet, animals and plants will still survive by adapting to global warming. Corals, trees, birds, mammals and butterflies are already changing to the routine reality of global warming, it is argued.

Finance

• A new initiative from the EU aiming to boost entrepreneurship has been launched: Startup Europe’s Accelerator Assembly. It brings together a group of 20 accelerator programmes plus entrepreneurs and policy makers, in a bid to open up communication between these parties and provide more support for European startups.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University recently released a special report, “The Koch Club,” that details how David and Charles Koch are using their millions to spread influence through “what may be the best funded, multifaceted, public policy, political and educational presence in the nation today.”

Privacy

• A request made by Internet giant Yahoo to a secretive federal court could allow the Silicon Valley company to finally detail a past attempt to fend off a surveillance program it insisted was unconstitutional.

• The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court told Yahoo in 2007 that it had to provide the government with data on the Internet activity of users without waiting for a signed warrant, a request that the company ignored and then unsuccessfully tried to refute. Despite claims that providing the court with that data would violate the constitutionally-protected privacy of its users, though, a panel of judges assigned under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, told Yahoo they would be required to comply or else they would be in violation of the law.

• Of course, there are the obvious concerns, like privacy, security, and reliability. Dropbox has been hacked before, and even accidentally turned off authentication for millions of users in 2011. The service hasn’t been immune to service outages either. And given all that we’ve learned about the NSA and Prism, it’s clear that users can no longer expect complete privacy with their online data. The more data we put online, the more vulnerable we are.

• Fugitive from US intelligence services emerges from hiding and says he wants to be allowed to fly to Latin America

• In the wake of NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s recent revelations, the Obama administration may be willing to backtrack on some of its more notorious surveillance policies, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) told reporters.

• Fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has met human rights groups and lawyers at a Moscow airport, in his first appearance in three weeks.

• The NSA surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden has said US officials are waging a campaign to prevent him from taking up asylum offers as he called a meeting in Moscow airport with human rights groups.

• In a letter sent to groups including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the former intelligence agency contractor claimed there was “an unlawful campaign by officials in the US government to deny my right to seek and enjoy … asylum under article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and invited them to meet him at 5pm local time.

• In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.

• The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.

• … and what it says about the British media company’s emerging threat to The New York Times

• Earlier documents put in context with recent revelations show that Sweden has been systematically wiretapping Russia on behalf of the United States. This is clear after putting a number of previous questionable agreements and developments in context today. The question that remains is what Sweden gets in return.

• In recent weeks, the NSA has stressed that it only “targets” people with foreign ties. That argument may satisfy most Americans. But the foreigners in Europe aren’t happy about it.

• The U.S. government had a problem: Spying in the digital age required access to the fiber-optic cables traversing the world’s oceans, carrying torrents of data at the speed of light. And one of the biggest operators of those cables was being sold to an Asian firm, potentially complicating American surveillance efforts.

• Enter “Team Telecom.”

• Ezra Klein noted that “Roberts’ nominations to the FISA court are almost exclusively Republican

• The Obama administration, in a new court filing, urged the nation’s surveillance court to throw out a request by civil liberties groups to disclose its secret rulings about the scope and legality of the Patriot Act.

• In the New York Times, Eric Lichtblau has a major scoop describing some of the secret rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, aka the FISC (and sometimes just called “the FISA court”). According to Lichtblau’s sources, described as “current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions,” the FISA court has issued over a dozen significant rulings. Some of the rulings are “nearly 100 pages long.” Although Lichtblau purports to summarize the rulings, I find his descriptions a frustrating read.

• The German motorway shooter example is instructive on how a system that provided both security and privacy might work. Police never considered acquiring all data, or demanding it from outside firms. They set up their own temporary collection tool, and German privacy officials are already demanding that the 60 to 80 million records collected from innocent people be handled with care.

• In the world of email or mobile surveillance, it would be possible to imitate this example, Schneier says. Internet and phone record collection should not be indiscriminate, but limited, focused and temporary.

• “Here’s the middle path: transparency and oversight,” he said. “We’ve already recognized that police need extraordinary powers to violate privacy … but we have to recognize that when you give someone the power to violate privacy, that power is ripe for abuse.”

• Government officials have often said that oversight itself must be a secret: Mere disclosure of the existence of government surveillance programs tips off the terrorists. Schneier rejects this.

• “So they tell the terrorists they are eavesdropping on email. What’s the problem? We assume the terrorists don’t know? This is fanciful nonsense,” he said.

• But even if access is tightly controlled today, there’s no guarantee that it will stay that way. The more tightly access to the database is controlled, the more difficult it will be for NSA analysts to make effective use of it. There will be a natural pressure to expand access as new uses for the database are discovered and concerns about privacy recede.

• And the fact that access to the database is officially limited to 22 people doesn’t mean that no one else has unofficial access. One reason the FBI has trouble preventing abuse of the NCIC database is that cops share passwords or forget to log themselves out after using the database, allowing others to gain access using their credentials.

• [...]

• Of course, the fact that a database can be abused doesn’t necessarily mean it shouldn’t exist. Despite the frequent abuse of the NCIC database, few are calling for it to be dismantled. It’s just too useful for legitimate law enforcement purposes.

• James Robertson breaks ranks and says he was shocked to hear of changes to allow broader authorisation of NSA programs

• In a rare legal move, Yahoo (YHOO) is asking a secretive U.S. surveillance court to let the public see its arguments in a 2008 case that played an important role in persuading tech companies to cooperate with a controversial government data-gathering effort.

• Russia’s Federal Protective Service, a KGB successor agency in charge of protecting President Vladimir Putin and his officials, has placed an order for 20 typewriters and is ready to pay $750 each for them, according to Thursday’s report in Izvestia.

• European policy makers are discussing an update to European data protection law. ORG and others have grown concerned that the proposals are being watered down. You can read about what’s been happening in our report, or visit the campaign site ‘NakedCitizens’ to contact your MEP.

• Opposition parties and IT groups say German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich failed in his trip to the US. One told DW the meeting was a “placebo,” while another said the German-US balance of power is at stake.

• Russia has not received an asylum bid from fugitive Edward Snowden, Moscow officials say after the NSA whistlebower emerged from hiding.

• Before PRISM there was ECHELON:

• Google, Facebook and other service providers have also been criticized for their cooperation with the PRISM program. The companies have stressed that they do not allow direct access to user data and only respond to specific, legally obtained court orders.

• Reports suggest that the US spying network extends across the whole of Latin America. The leaders of the region are up in arms – but they could also profit from the situation.

• Kim Dotcom is a man who is no stranger to controversy, that’s for sure, and this time around, he intends to offer something that most folks would most probably trip over in their quest to obtain it – we are referring to his Mega service rolling out an encrypted messaging service anytime from a month to a month and a half from now. This web-based messaging platform is said to be secure enough that even the folks over at the NSA are unable to eavesdrop on it, or so that is what has been touted across some channels on the Internet. : http://www.ubergizmo.com/2013/07/kim-dotcom-delivers-nsa-proof-messaging-with-secure-email-to-follow/

• At this point in time, everyone is properly upset about the National Security Agency’s PRISM program and the seemingly endless surveillance it enabled. But guess what? It’s not the only one.

• Sprinkled in the NSA files leaked by Edward Snowden are some details about FAIRVIEW, a sort of international version of PRISM. Along with a program called BLARNEY and a couple other unnamed “upstream” data collection programs, FAIRVIEW is how the NSA gains access to the very optical cables that carry internet data from the United States to the rest of the world and vice versa. In effect, it’s how the NSA can go directly to the source when trying to gather intelligence on what’s flowing across American borders and through the 550,000 odd miles of cable twisted around the world.

• Mobile carriers, including Verizon Wireless, have begun selling aggregate location data. Verizon, on its website, promises advertisers “detailed demographics; location analysis to determine where your target consumer segment lives and works; and foot-and-mobile traffic habits,” though not names or phone numbers.

• Ever since the Edward Snowden story about the NSA spying program erupted, there has been a disturbingly eerie silence from progressives. Yes, perfunctory articles have been written, the usual pundits have spoken, and the ACLU has filed a much needed lawsuit, but progressive action groups have scarcely eked out a handful of petitions. As we are facing what is arguably one of the greatest historic struggles of our time, there is barely a ripple in the progressive universe.

• More secrets, more water? The NSA data center in Bluffdale could require as many as 1.7 million gallons of water per day to operate and keep computers cool.

• Initial reported estimates suggested the center would use 1,200 gallons per minute, but more recent estimates suggest the usage could be closer to half that amount.

• With its PRISM Internet surveillance program, the National Security Agency can reportedly monitor targets’ emails and do live surveillance of Google searches and other data. Now, the latest batch of revealed secret documents suggests the agency may have the ability to spy on Google Maps use, too.

• Despite having fewer resources and a fraction of the customers that broadband giants like Verizon and AT&T boast, one small internet service provider has resisted pressure from the NSA and refused to turn over customer data without a warrant.

• Typewriters aren’t just for hipsters anymore. Yesterday, the Russian newspaper Izvestia reported that the Kremlin’s Federal Protective Service, the agency responsible for protecting Russian President Vladimir Putin and his officials, is buying typewriters, too.

• Prism whistleblower reportedly hopes temporary asylum will buy time as he seeks safe passage to Latin America

• Bolivia’s leftist president Evo Morales on Saturday accused US intelligence of hacking into the email accounts of top Bolivian officials, saying he had shut his own account down.

• Latin American leaders have lashed out at Washington over recent revelations of vast surveillance programs, some of which allegedly targeted regional allies and adversaries alike.

• Bolivia has joined Venezuela and Nicaragua in offering asylum to Edward Snowden, the former IT contractor for the US National Security Agency who publicized details of the programs and is now on the run from espionage charges.

• At first glance, it looked like Edward Snowden was wearing the same blue-gray button down dress shirt that he wore during his interview with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in that Hong Kong hotel room on June 6, which until now was essentially the only photograph we had of him. That already seems – as it must even more so for him – so long ago. Another continent. Another life. He had already made the decisive step to break with the NSA, but still had a passport, was still free.

• A positive statement by the Swedish authorities on that Sweden would consider asylum for Mr Snowden, will help the world to better understand the real libertarian and independent spirit of the Swedish people – an aspect that has been sadly obscured in most recent years due to the abandonment by Swedish authorities of the traditional non-aligned stance of the nation. Also, it will help stimulate anew dialogue to resolve the issues at stake and that have thrown a shadow over our sovereignty, such as the management of the case against Mr Assange. Beyond the alleged case of Sweden vs. Assange, or the alleged irregularities of the case, the issue for Sweden is ultimately the question of self-government and of whether Sweden can reassume – as many of us dearly wish – the world podium of No. 1 country in fairness and justice, in political beauty and respect for human rights to all.

Civil Rights

• Orin Kerr now lists four amicus briefs filed in the Andrew “weev” Auernheimer case. He is one of the attorneys representing him in his appeal pro bono. We have one of the amicus briefs done as text here, the one by security researchers, and now let’s look closely at a second amicus [PDF], this one filed by Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, C. “Space Rogue” Thomas, Dan Hirsch, Gabriella Coleman, and other prestigious professional security researchers in support of Auernheimer. This one is particularly valuable, in that it carefully explains how a server acts on the World Wide Web and points the finger of blame at AT&T, pointing out that it had the choice to make the page private, but it failed to do so, leaving it open and public to all comers.

• If the US government succeeds in criminalising Brown’s posting of a hyperlink, the freedom of all internet users is in jeopardy

• America’s police are beginning to look like an army, and the author says there’s very little we can do about it

• I find it absolutely amazing how far our country has digressed politically since its founding in 1787. Take, for example, the latest Obama Administration scandals: Soylndra, Benghazi, Fast & Furious, the IRS profiling various Conservative political organizations, domestic wiretapping probes on AP journalists, and the PRISM program run by the NSA.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• A leaked draft legislative text shows that the European Commission might be about to kill the open and free Internet. Under the guise of protecting Net neutrality, the Commission wants to give telecom operators a free hand to develop business models that would irremediably undermine freedom of communication on the Internet. For years now, commissioner Neelie Kroes has been bafflingly sympathetic to big telecom companies on the fundamental issue of Net neutrality, but with this draft text she would be going much too far in betraying citizens.

DRM

• A federal court in New York has come down hard on Apple in a closely watched case over ebook pricing. In a ruling issued Tuesday morning, US District Judge Denise Cote ruled that the company “brilliantly” organized a conspiracy to raise prices and thwart competition.

• Digital rights and anti-DRM activists should be a little happy to learn that a major player in the comics’ world has decided to make actual ownership of its comics possible.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• After two years, Apple no longer wants to legally pursue Amazon over the use of the term “app store”.

• In 2011, Apple launched its lawsuit against Amazon over the use of the phrase “app store”. Back then, Amazon was preparing to launch an Android app store for its Kindle tablets. Amazon now uses the term “Appstore” across its website.

Copyrights

• “Please take it down,” an atypically polite Kanye tweets to websites posting his leaked ‘Black Skinhead’ video.

• Peter Sunde plans crowdfunded application that offers privacy in the age of the NSA’s Prism, Facebook, Apple and Google

• Embattled porn troll Prenda Law has appealed the sanctions imposed on it earlier this year by US District Judge Otis Wright. But when Wright ordered Prenda to post a larger bond totaling $237,584, Prenda balked. The law firm was losing its “ability to appeal what it believes to be serious violations of its Due Process rights,” Prenda wrote in an emergency motion to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

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