● 07.18.13

● Links 18/7/2013: Jolla Smartphone, UberStudent

Posted in News Roundup at 4:07 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Some may argue that there will not be a “year of desktop GNU/Linux” etc. but there definitely is a day, in Italy at least.

• To some, the desktop is an anachronism; a style of input that’s increasingly redundant in a world of tablets and smartphones. But I don’t agree, and I think there’s plenty of evidence to show the desktop is going to be around for some time yet. And more importantly, Linux may become the only viable option. I’m primarily a KDE user, and as such, I’ve been mostly shielded from the turbulence created by several desktops reinventing themselves. KDE went through a similar period and I’m glad it’s now firmly in the past. But like many Linux users, I have more than one installation and use more than one desktop environment.

• We asked in the latest TuxRadar podcast for the reasons that you change distro. The most frequent one was the choice of desktop. But you don’t have to ditch your whole distro in order to get a new user interface: you can follow our Technical Editor Ben’s advice and find the desktop that’s right for you, so you end up bossing your Linux machine around rather than it controlling you

Audiocasts/Shows

• And Churchill’s generally racist views of non-whites are pretty well-established. He spoke of his “jolly little wars against barbarous peoples” and declared of the Kurds, “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes…[It] would spread a lively terror.”

• So that is the state of network television coverage of a whistleblower, held without trial for 3 years, who revealed information that made headlines in the most powerful news outlets around the world for months. That is how U.S. television networks are covering a trial where the U.S. government is attempting to argue that publishing information that finds its way into the hands of U.S. enemies is in fact “aiding the enemy”– a stunning legal strategy that holds the potential to criminalize investigative journalism.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds views so-called “professional” behavior as a hindrance to progress, and his argument for more a freewheeling, less polite work environment is as convincing as it is brazen.

• Intel’s Ironlake hardware may be very old and not nearly as nice as the latest generation Haswell parts, but shipped today was a new patch-set for implementing hardware context support.

Graphics Stack

• AMD’s Alex Deucher has submitted another Radeon DRM pull request for the Linux 3.11 kernel to provide more fixes. This time the bug-fixes are “all over the place” for this open-source graphics driver.

• A set of twelve patches were published on Monday by an Intel OTC developer for allowing support for OpenGL layered rendering as needed for OpenGL 3.2 / GLSL 1.50 support.

• As promised, now that Linux 3.11-rc1 has been released, it’s time for the new dynamic power management support of the Linux 3.11 kernel for AMD Radeon graphics. This first article previews the possible OpenGL performance gains for an AMD APU when enabling “DPM” for allowing the graphics core to properly re-clock based upon its workload.

• Video acceleration support for the GLAMOR library, the open-source way of accelerating 2D X.Org operations via the 3D engine, is still coming and is being worked on by a student this summer.

• One of the 2013 X.Org GSoC projects is adding X-Video support to GLAMOR. GLAMOR is the 2D acceleration library required by the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs with the RadeonSI driver stack while it can optionally be used for older Radeon GPUs or Intel hardware too.

• With Mesa 9.2 due to be released next month, here’s the very latest Git benchmarks of Mesa 9.2-devel on an Intel Core i5 Ultrabook with HD 4000 “Ivy Bridge” graphics compared to the stable Mesa release versions going back to Mesa 8.0.

• This is an interesting article by Paolo Rotolo, it’s a comparison of MIR (in the Xmir version that will be present on Ubuntu 13.10) and the current Xorg.

Benchmarks

• With the Linux 3.11-rc1 release, it’s time now at Phoronix to start benchmarking the Linux 3.11 kernel. The first tests to run over the weekend were of Intel Ivy Bridge graphics, where a few regressions were spotted.

• Beyond Apple’s forthcoming OS X 10.9 “Mavericks” release finally bring OpenGL 4.0 support to Apple hardware, there’s also GL performance improvements to make OS X more competitive with other operating systems for gaming.

Applications

• JOE’s terminal-based interface is reminiscent of early Unix and Linux tools like WordStar and Turbo C editors. I cut my computing teeth at the start of the PC era on early Apple and IBM PC systems, so the keyboard style and terminal atmosphere of JOE are both fun and productive for me. Many of JOE’s keyboard commands are similar to the look and feel of text editors I used with pre-Windows DOS PCs.

• No, there’s SSH in my browser! Although it may not be as logical of a combination as chocolate and peanut butter, for Chromebook users, an HTML5 SSH client is pretty amazing. Granted, Google’s “crosh” shell has SSH abilities, but it’s a very limited implementation. With the Chrome extension “Secure Shell”, it’s easy to SSH in to remote servers and interact like a traditional terminal window—mostly.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• At the beginning of the year Canonical announced its plans to take on the mobile OS market with a mobile version of Ubuntu. Since then, the project has continued to improve and has even made its way to numerous Android devices for testing purposes.

• Valve have been talking about, and slowly making the jump to Linux for a while now, but it looks like Crytek are looking to make a similar move to the open source operating system.

• The following article is not about presenting every single open source game in existence, but more like selecting the best out of popular gaming categories that are really modern, enjoyable and alive as projects.

• Swell afternoon to you guys, wherever you are. Four summers ago, I wrote my first, very extensive tutorial on how to get and install Linux games. It was quite relevant back then, and most of it is still true now, but it’s time for a fresh guide that reflects the new, modern reality. However, the old howto still has a lot of useful information, so don’t miss it.

• The gameplay in Toki Tori is a blend of two genres. While it looks like a platform game, it’s a puzzle game at heart. Looks very colourful too!

• Originally ported to Linux for the Humble Bundle for Android the game is now also available on Steam, this includes Achievements and Cloud support as well.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Ships First Release Candidate of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform 4.11

• After the presentations during the first two days of Akademy, people moved into action. Birds of a Feather sessions and workshops provided the opportunity to discuss, plan and hack. Being Akademy, there was also time away from work for relaxation and camaraderie. Akademy attendees, if there is anything missing, please add in comments.

• I have been thinking of writing a review of Netrunner for quite sometime. I missed out when 12.12 was released. Further, I downloaded the 64-bit Netrunner 13.06 for two weeks or so testing it out, thinking of writing a review later. But, an opportunity came this weekend. Before actually jumping on to the test, an introduction to those who are not aware of Netrunner.

• This is just a very quick announcement that new rootfs tarballs of the current development branch of Plasma Active are available for ArchosG9 and Nexus7. These snapshots are not made based on Mer latest but on an older version. Additionally, to the stock Plasma Active installation these tarballs contain my nemo-compatibility package as well as some Nemomobile apps to show the general practicability of running Nemomobile apps on Plasma Active. The rootfs tarballs are available here:

• tl;dr: If you are a committed KDE contributor and not a KDE e.V. member, you are doing it wrong. If you are a KDE user, consider helping the KDE User Working Group. Read KDE e.V.’s quarterly reports.

Distributions

• UberStudent has been built from the ground-up to be both educate its users and to deliver the tools necessary to succeed in tertiary education

New Releases

Red Hat Family

• It looks to be a big week for Red Hat (RHT) Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in the cloud. The open source company unveiled the 5.10 version of RHEL at about the same time it announced the operating system was being made available on the free usage tier of Amazon (AMZN) Web Services EC2.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• South Africa-based operator group MTN became the latest member of the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group, after Mark Shuttleworth told Mobile World Live in an exclusive interview that relationships with these partners are “essential” to the success of the Ubuntu platform in the mobile space.

• One week after Mir 0.0.6, a Canonical engineer has now tagged Mir 0.0.7 for their experimental display server for Ubuntu Linux.

• MTN has become the first African network operator to join Canonical’s Carrier Advisory Group (CAG), which will influence the development of the smartphone operating system Ubuntu.

• Trademark filing report reveals Canonical’s plans to release next Ubuntu for Mobile OS based smartphone dubbed as Ubuntu Edge.

Devices/Embedded

• A few months ago, armed with your responses from one of our podcast’s Open Ballot questions, we visited the Cambridge HQ of the Raspberry Pi Foundation to quiz its founder about hardware upgrades, education and what success has meant for the project. The result was an epic 7,000 word interview, the first half of which we published in Linux Format issue 173. But as we didn’t have enough space in the magazine, we thought we’d put the interview online in it’s entirety. And here it is!

• The team behind Raspberry Pi should fix this promptly. Raspberry Pi has emerged as nothing less than the true solution that players like the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) folks were looking for when they proposed creating sub-$100 computers. Raspberry Pis are making it into school systems in parts of the world where kids don’t have computers, and there is even now a supercomputer consisting of many Pi devices lashed together with Lego pieces.

• Few would dispute the value of standards for fostering interoperability, and here in the open source community that tends to be viewed as a particularly important goal.

Phones

• Finnish smartphone startup wants to take on the established giants, UI-changing backplate, fridge-friendly OS and all.

Ballnux

• Flip phones, if you didn’t know are the rage in Asian countries like Japan and Korea and they’ve always been that way. Even the advent of the Android, iOS and other touch sensitive devices hasn’t managed to shake the trend which clearly shows how much that design is admired. Apparently, Samsung is reportedly working on giving the best of both worlds with an Android flip phone called Samsung Galaxy Folder. It sounds like an awkward design choice but it would certainly interest a flip phone admirer.

Android

• NanoTech Entertainment is accepting pre-orders on a $299 4K UltraHD media and game player device that runs Android 4.2 on an quad-core Nvidia Tegra 4 SoC. Designed for gaming, multimedia play, and web browsing, the Nuvola NP-1 may well be the world’s most advanced Android media player.

• BitTorrent today announced the open beta release of its file synchronization tool Sync, and the debut of an Android app. You can download the latest version now for Windows, Mac, and Linux over at labs.bittorrent.com as well as for Android from Google Play.

• Here’s some good news for the smartphone photographers out there who are sick of all the iPhone-only news that seems to flow down the pipeline daily. It turns out that anybody with an Android 4.0 and later phone can install a copy of the superior Android 4.3 camera app without even having to root their phone.

• GlassUp, an Italian startup, has started taking pre-orders on Indiegogo for an Android eyewear display system billed as a simpler, lower-cost alternative to Google Glass. The GlassUp device is a receive-only Bluetooth accessory to a nearby mobile device, providing a monochrome, 320 x 240-pixel augmented reality display of incoming messages and notifications.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• One Laptop Per Child, a non-profit that aims to bring computing to the developing world, has launched its XO Learning Tablet through Walmart.

Free Software/Open Source

• Cloudsmith represents “a crack team of developers” with experience in creating programming languages, tools, virtual machines and enterprise applications, said Luke Kanies, CEO of the Portland, Ore., firm. All seven members of the company will join Puppet.

• “Will publish Hyperloop alpha design by Aug 12. Critical feedback for improvements would be much appreciated,” Musk posted on his Twitter page. Musk also released another detail in response to Ramin Schadlu (@schadlu) about whether this new technology will be proprietary. “I really hate patents unless critical to company survival. Will publish Hyperloop as open source,” Musk replied.

• Collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange has received a US$20 million investment that it will use to expand its development team to speed up feature rollouts for its Web-based office suite, the company announced on Thursday.

• The biggest chunk of the money will go into the expansion of the engineering department, said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. The office development team, which now consists of 15 people, will be doubled in the next 12 months or so, he said.

• BitTorrent’s cross-platform file syncing software could provide some relief for privacy- and security-minded individuals, since data is not housed in a central hub. However, BitTorrent is not exactly the most trusted name on the Internet, thanks to widespread use of its P2P software for piracy. BitTorrent has taken pains to distance itself from such activities, but the association persists.

Events

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Chrome beta for Android has had an update, it’s version 29 and it’s bringing in a few features which are about the same league as updates released in April and May so nothing major but it is noteworthy. It’s noteworthy because Chrome beta for Android now has the latest variety of WebRTC, providing you the luxury of having a face to face chat without the need of any plugins. Not only can you have a good chat with another user but you can now Cube Slam your friend’s face right from your phone thanks to the WebRTC support. Just head over to the WebRTC page for getting the first hand experience of it.

Mozilla

• T-Mobile will begin its rollout of phones based on Mozilla’s Firefox OS when it puts the Alcatel One Touch on sale in Poland next week.

• Meanwhile, I’ll go and do some work for Mozilla, trying to improve site compatibility for Firefox on Android. I’ll probably be more useful to the web there than at Opera, in the near future.

SaaS/Big Data

• Not surprisingly, a number of open source private cloud technologies have emerged as alternatives commercial software. They feature varying degrees of maturity and adoption. Among these open source platforms are offerings from Eucalyptus, Citrix CloudPlatform, OpenNebula and OpenStack.

• Rackspace has been pushing the OpenStack cloud computing platform forward since its inception, and in its latest example of OpenStack-centric innovation, the company has now released an update to its Android app that lets administrators manage Rackspace OpenStack clouds while on the go.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Customer and Partner Momentum Enable Oracle Linux to Achieve Fastest Growing Enterprise Linux Status

CMS

• Everyone loves the promise of Open Source Software (OSS). It’s free (or almost free); it’s built by passionate communities of developers; you can “look under the hood”; and there’s no vendor lock-in. Add to that, that the rate of innovation is supposed to be faster with OSS — why would anyone choose to work with anything else?

Funding

• A Kickstarter project promising faster, cheaper Level 2 240V, 15 kW charging has reached its goal, with the first units expected to deliver this month.

• Open-source code is a huge boon startups and the internet at large — it allows for apps and services that would take months or even years of coding to spring up without much extra work. But there’s also a distinct problem with open source: It doesn’t pay.

• The Kickstarter crowd-funding development platform has successfully worked for funding many computer games, a few interesting hardware projects, and other initiatives, but would it work for having an open-source graphics processor? A company may be turning to Kickstarter to open-source their 2D and 3D graphics designs.

Project Releases

Openness/Sharing

• Frederick Kaufman has penned a provocative article for Slate’s Future Tense column in which he makes the case for open-source genetically modified foods. “It will help fight climate change,” he says, “and stick one in Monsanto’s eye.” What’s more, it’s an approach that still favors scientific advancement.

Open Data

• The U.S. government’s portal for the data it creates, Next.Data.gov, is getting a revamp that should make it easier to view and reuse government data.

Programming

• That omission is problematic because unlicensed code’s copyright rests with its author, without the coder having to do anything to claim it. Yet GitHub’s legalese makes it plain that accepting forking is a condition for using the service but is otherwise vague on where rights rest.

• The LLVM compiler infrastructure may be generating some speedier binaries by default for the -O3 optimization level by turning on the straight-line SLP vectorizer.

• GitHub has emerged to be one of the most popular (if not THE most popular) tool for collaborative online version control and development. While it is often associated with open source software development, that’s not always a requirement.

• GitHub, the popular open-source development community site, is finally getting its licensing act together. It’s high time since Black Duck has found that 77-percent of GitHub projects have no declared open-source license.

Leftovers

• It’s relatively easy to deal with those who pour forth hatred online. But the greater threat comes from the more subtle spreaders of misery and doubt

Health/Nutrition

• The fast food burrito chain Chipotle, which advertises “food with integrity,” became the first restaurant chain in the United States to label genetically modified ingredients in its food in March 2013.

• Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have sparked concerns about potential human health effects and confirmed environmental effects. Chipotle has 1,450 restaurants as of June 2013 and $2.7 billion in annual revenue, so the labeling is no small potatoes.

• Lawyers for Liberty University have announced that they will seek to take the case back to the Supreme Court.

Security

• If you felt a twinge of angst after reading Ars’ May feature that showed how password crackers ransack even long passwords such as “qeadzcwrsfxv1331″, you weren’t alone. The upshot was clear: If long passwords containing numbers, symbols, and upper- and lower-case letters are this easy to break, what are users to do?

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• In France, Greenpeace activists got past security and climbed reactor structures at the Tricastin nuclear power plant. They unfurled a banner which read: TRICASTIN ACCIDENT NUCLÉAIRE: PRÉSIDENT DE LA CATASTROPHE? (Tricastin Nuclear Accident: President of the Disaster?). Earlier this morning, other activists projected a crack onto the superstructure of the plant illustrating that French President, Hollande, needs to shut down 20 nuclear reactors in the country by 2020 in keeping with his promise to cut nuclear power from three-quarters to half by 2025.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a conservative advocacy group founded and funded by David Koch, is spearheading an ad campaign aimed at young women attacking the 2010 federal health reform law dubbed “ObamaCare.” It is spending more than $1 million to run the ad in Virginia and Ohio, with plans to expand it to a total of seven states.

Privacy

• We met with Helen Goodman MP last month to talk about mobile companies developing marketing and analytics products based on data about their customers without clear consent. After that meeting, she was able to secure the Commons debate on the issue.

• The ISC has today made a statement on it’s investigation into PRISM, following the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

• While it appears the investigation was limited to PRISM, as opposed to Tempora or any of the other programmes we now know to be operational, it reaffirms that the statutory basis for PRISM at least is the 1994 Intelligence Services Act.

• Ah, Stewart Baker. We’ve mentioned him a few times in the past. He’s the former Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security and General Counsel for the NSA. He’s, as you may have guessed, strongly in the “pro-surveillance” camp, and has even attacked some of the journalists who revealed the NSA leaks, claiming that by revealing the truth they’re no longer journalists, but advocates. He’s taking part in a House Judiciary Committee hearing looking into oversight on the administration’s use of FISA and his testimony is quite incredible. It goes way beyond what we’ve seen from others. While it repeats his baseless and confused attack that some journalists who were key players in this story were evil “advocates” rather than journalists, that’s nothing compared to his lack of regard for the Constitution and basic civil liberties. In fact, he very clearly blames 9/11 on civil liberties advocates, and fears that all this talk about surveillance may lead to a repeat event.

• The Justice Department has proposed changing its policies on leak investigations so that it would be more difficult to secretly seize reporters’ records, in response to widespread criticism about the department’s practices.

• Back in the Founder’s time, paper was state-of-the-art for containing information so “papers” contained a person’s information. Today, in addition to paper, we have digital media to contain our information. Without probable cause, the blanket seizure of data on every American is unconstitutional.

• Judge Richard A. Posner contends that this data collection is not a grave threat to civil liberties.

• There have been several articles in the press recently about users flocking to DuckDuckGo in the wake of the recent NSA snooping revelations. If you are in this category this post is meant for you.

• If you use DuckDuckGo solely for the myriad of other benefits, such as reducing advertiser tracking, filter boxing, etc. move along nothing to see here. DuckDuckGo will provide you at least that level of “privacy”.

• [...]

• If Google’s servers can be compromised by a bunch of Chinese hackers, and if the computers controlling Iran’s uranium enrichment equipment can be compromised without even being connected to the internet, how long would a service like DuckDuckGo (or Verizon Internet Services) standup against a concerted effort by the NSA?

• The National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting massive amounts of information about people in the United States and throughout the world. From details about every phone call to collections of people’s activities online–the US government is creating a monumental amount of data on each individual person in existence. The balance between privacy and security is always difficult, and the ethics of the NSA’s practices be will debated for the near future. However, as a physician I worry about something just as difficult. Excellent reasons exist why I as a physician do not order every test on every patient. I know that amassing too much data can be harmful.

• The latest effort to distract attention from the NSA revelations is more absurd than most

• [...]

• Like everything in the matter of these NSA leaks, this interview is being wildly distorted to attract attention away from the revelations themselves. It’s particularly being seized on to attack Edward Snowden and, secondarily, me, for supposedly “blackmailing” and “threatening” the US government. That is just absurd.

• A retired federal judge, who formerly served on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, on Tuesday praised the growing public discussion about government surveillance fostered by the leaks of classified information by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor whom the Obama administration has charged with espionage and who remains a fugitive.

• Remember 1997? That’s when Carnivore was in use by the FBI. Soon after we heard rumours of an AT&T Room 641A, where the NSA would have a colocated interception facility that would tap into all communications being handled by that telco. Then all the rage about ECHELON, a SIGINT collection network operated by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the United States of America).

• Yesterday’s New York Times story on the secret legal opinions of the FISA court prompts a natural question: How should the FISA court reach its decisions, and how do we know it is doing so correctly? That breaks down into two questions. First, what procedures should the FISA court use to reach legal conclusions? And second, when or how should those legal conclusions be made public? The latter has received much more attention than the former. Like a lot of people, I tend to think that it wouldn’t impact national security for the FISA court to release more information about its decisions, at least in those cases when the judges consider abstract legal issues.. Perhaps the court could issue opinions in redacted form; perhaps it could simply release a summary of its legal conclusions and reasoning. Either way, a lot of people have voiced opinions on that issue. In this post, I want to focus on the first question that hasn’t received as much attention: What procedures should the FISA court use to reach its legal conclusions?

• Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Professor Orin Kerr has a thought-provoking post on one route to reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court: have Congress give an adversarial role to the Oversight Section at DOJ’s National Security Division, such that security-cleared DOJ lawyers would “have a right to file a motion to oppose any application before the FISC,” and such a motion would then trigger litigation and a dispositive ruling with many–if not most–of the hallmarks of adversarial process. Such a reform, in Orin’s view, would thereby ameliorate, if not eliminate, at least some of the oft-repeated concerns with the ex parte FISC process. And as importantly from the government’s perspective, Orin would have such a motion follow the initial issuance of an order/certification by the FISA Court, so that the litigation isn’t slowing down the government’s ability to actually conduct the authorized surveillance. Such an approach, Orin writes, “offers a middle ground that may please no one.”

• …do not allow users to be anonymous.

• Remember the 2011 attack that crippled Sony’s PlayStation Network, leaked almost a quarter million users’ information and generally was a nuisance? It’s still cleaning up after that mess. Earlier this year, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) slapped the company’s European wing with a £250,000 fine ($377,575), saying it should have been better prepared for the attack — now Sony’s agreed to pay up. The electronics giant still maintains that the charge is without merit, but ceded to the penalty to avoid disclosing details about its security procedures. Apparently, the two months of free PS+ wasn’t enough to make everybody forget.

• The secret surveillance court that approved the U.S. government’s broad collection of millions of Americans’ e-mail and telephone records called Monday for the Obama administration to declassify and release as much as it can of one of the court’s early legal decisions sanctioning that collection.

• The chief of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered the Justice Department to begin a review to see how much it can reasonably declassify from a 2008 opinion — a ruling in which the court allegedly ordered Yahoo to turn over the records of its customers’ online communications.

• A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal.

• German intelligence authorities have denied a report that the US agency at the center of a major snooping scandal is building a new base in Germany. The US Army claims the facility will deal with military intelligence.

• Former US President Jimmy Carter lambasted US intelligence methods as undemocratic and described Edward Snowden’s NSA leak as “beneficial” for the country.

• Carter lashed out at the US political system when the issue of the previously top-secret NSA surveillance program was touched upon at the Atlantic Bridge meeting on Tuesday in Atlanta, Georgia.

• Much of the American public is in favor of the NSA conducting widespread surveillance. So much, in fact, that a lawsuit challenging the NSA’s power is unlikely to succeed, Steven Rambam, the founder and CEO of Pallorium investigative agency, told RT.

• Americans are apparently blasé about government eavesdropping.

• In the days after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that Washington spies extensively on its own citizens, polls found that about half of Americans have no problem with such snooping, as long as it protects them from terrorism.

• But a scandal unfolding here in South Korea illustrates how such domestic snooping can easily harm a democracy.

• The imbroglio — which has sparked student protests and candlelight vigils around Seoul — actually consists of two episodes rolled into one.

• The largest Internet companies in the United States have joined forces with top civil liberties groups to call on the White House and Congress to increase the transparency surrounding the government’s controversial National Security Agency surveillance programs. Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Twitter are among the tech giants that have signed a letter to the feds, asking for the right to disclose more information about national security data requests. Notably absent are the nation’s largest phone companies, including AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which have remained silent about their participation in the government’s snooping program.

• Tech companies and privacy groups petition the White House and Congress, urging “greater transparency” over secret demands for accessing private user data.

• A top defense official says the National Security Agency is implementing new security measures because of the disclosures by former NSA-systems-analyst-turned-fugitive Edward Snowden.

• So far, this attempt at justification has satisfied no one. Neither has U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s baffling claim of ignorance on the topic.

• A top official at the National Security Agency explained to members of Congress on Wednesday that it spies on people who know people who know people who might be terrorists.

• Whether it’s ethically right or wrong to investigate deep into suspects’ networks of connections, the NSA certainly has the processing power to do it. “Three hops” away isn’t much when you can map potentially trillions of identities.

• The lawmakers’ criticisms came at a hearing with administration officials who sought to defend the once-secret government telephone snooping made public last month by former government contractor Edward Snowden.

• Both Republicans and Democrats express reservations about NSA programs during hearing.

• The interview of Snowden describes that prior to his release of classified intelligence documents, NSA and other nation’s intelligence agencies conducted the broad surveillance. Snowden also asserted that NSA shares surveillance and cooperates with other nations including Israel.

• Unlike most sane people, I spend a lot of time fretting over LinkedIn. More specifically, I think about LinkedIn’s People You May Know feature. How does LinkedIn know I may know these people? What do my alleged connections say about me? And just where is LinkedIn getting its information? I have deep suspicions, but no proof.

• Lately, though, things have taken a turn for the absurd. Looking at my endlessly scrolling list of People You May Know, I discovered Latvians. Not just four or five Latvians – more like 40 or 50 Latvians, most of whom aren’t even distantly connected to me.

Civil Rights

• A nineteen-year-old has been jailed since March 27, 2013. He’s been beaten — by other inmates, allegedly. He’s been subjected to solitary confinement, sometimes stripped naked. The authorities have rejected calls for his release on a reasonable bail his family could possibly afford. All of this has happened because he wrote something online that concerned or offended or enraged the state.

• [...]

• The nineteen-year-old is Justin Carter. Carter, like many Americans his age (or mine, for that matter) plays online games and indulges in the exaggerated trash-talk common to that culture. In the course of an argument involving the game League of Legends, he got into a dispute with another player, who called him crazy or “messed up in the head.” That is a rather mild epithet coming from an online gamer; it’s nothing like Carter might have gotten if, for instance, he’d had the bad taste to Game While Female.

• The singer refuses to perform in the state until its Stand Your Ground law is “abolished.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The internet is a wonderful tool for openness, freedom and innovation. No wonder it is so important to so many citizens. And no wonder the debate over “net neutrality” can seem so charged.

Intellectual Monopolies

• In the war against inequality, we’ve become so used to bad news that we’re almost taken aback when something positive happens. And with the Supreme Court having affirmed that wealthy people and corporations have a constitutional right to buy American elections, who would have expected it to bring good news? But a decision in the term that just ended gave ordinary Americans something that is more precious than money alone — the right to live.

• At first glance, the case, Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, might seem like scientific arcana: the court ruled, unanimously, that human genes cannot be patented, though synthetic DNA, created in the laboratory, can be. But the real stakes were much higher, and the issues much more fundamental, than is commonly understood. The case was a battle between those who would privatize good health, making it a privilege to be enjoyed in proportion to wealth, and those who see it as a right for all — and a central component of a fair society and well-functioning economy. Even more deeply, it was about the way inequality is shaping our politics, legal institutions and the health of our population.

Copyrights

• Copyright troll Prenda Law has become best known for the major setbacks it has faced in a Los Angeles case in the court of US District Judge Otis Wright. But the tough sanction order penned by Wright has been accompanied by setbacks in other jurisdictions as well.

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