● 07.19.13

● Links 19/7/2013: Slackware Turns 20, Nexus 7 2 Images Leaked

Posted in News Roundup at 4:11 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Although The H has produced many widely read stories, it has not been possible to effectively monetise that traffic to produce a working business model.

• Because of this, after four and a half years as The H and six years online, The H is, sadly, closing its doors. We thank all our readers for their deep interest and engagement. Work is taking place to create an archive to ensure that the content of the site will remain publicly accessible.

Desktop

• Henry Blodget in Business Insider: “In the late 1990s, a single technology company became so unfathomably rich and powerful — and so hellbent on dominating not just its own industry but a massive and rapidly growing new one — that the U.S. government dragged the company into court and threatened to break it up over anti-trust violations.

• [...]

• Now, thanks to the rise of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, Windows’ global share has been cut in half, to about 30%. More remarkably, Android is now a bigger platform than Windows.

Server

• If you think provisioning, monitoring, managing and maintaining the virtualized resources on IBM mainframes can be complex, you’d be entirely correct. Yet simplifying those processes and increasing the productivity of mainframe sysadmins have been among CSL International’s primary goals since the company’s founding in 2004. Overall, CSL International should be a perfect fit for IBM.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• The 3.10 Linux kernel release late last month brought a raft of new features worth celebrating for Linux developers and sysadmins alike. This release was especially satisfying, though, to kernel developer Kent Overstreet who saw years of hard work pay off with the inclusion of the Bcache patch set in 3.10.

• Bcache allows Linux machines to use flash-based SSDs (solid-state drives) as cache for other, slower and less expensive, hard disk drives. It can be used in servers, workstations, high-end storage arrays, or “anywhere you want IO to be faster, really,” Overstreet said.

• Greg Stoner of AMD and representing the HSA Foundation talked last week at the Linaro Connect Europe 2013 event about the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) as it concerns ARM.

• Linus Torvalds is usually complaining about too many pull requests during the Linux kernel development cycle when past its merge window, but this time around he’s complaining about too few patches this week. He’s also proclaimed himself the Goldilocks of kernel development.

• This week there’s been much drama in the Linux kernel development world over Intel’s Sarah Sharp and others wanting Torvalds and others to be less “verbally abusive” on the Linux kernel mailing list when criticizing kernel patches and other work. There’s been a proposal to discuss the tone of the Linux kernel mailing list at the upcoming Linux Kernel Summit.

• With developers discussing their views on appropriate behaviour for the Linux kernel mailing list, it’s taken away from kernel development time and that’s making Linus less than happy.

• When Sarah Sharp was a 20-year-old university student in Portland, she took on an extra-credit project writing USB driver code for the Linux kernel. She was too young to stay past 10 p.m. in some of the brew pubs where the local Linux-heads met, but she hung in as long as she could, learned a lot about Linux, and embraced the community.

• Linux creator Linus Torvalds is an interesting fellow. He is notorious for speaking his mind, demeaning developers and using profanity — behavior which is appreciated by some members of the Linux community. On July 14, the RC-1 of Linux Kernel 3.11 was announced. Continuing his quirky behavior, Mr. Torvalds has named it “Linux for Workgroups”.

Graphics Stack

• David Airlie publicly announced plans today for his new Virgil project, a virtual GPU capable of 3D acceleration for QEMU. Guest OpenGL (and potentially Direct3D) commands from the virtualized KVM/QEMU guest are passed onto the host for hardware acceleration.

• Sam Spilsbury, the Compiz developer and former Canonical employee, has made progress in being able to run the XBMC media application directly on Wayland.

• Linux desktop systems can now have working support for Microsoft’s Direct3D 9 API via a new Gallium3D state tracker. Unlike the earlier Direct3D 10/11 state tracker for Gallium3D on Linux, this new code actually can run D3D9 games and at better performance than what’s offered by Wine.

• While Radeon DPM for Linux 3.11 is most of what Linux enthusiasts are talking about, the Nouveau changes in Linux 3.11 include support for H.264 and MPEG2 video decoding. The necessary user-space driver changes have now been made for supporting this accelerated video decode process from Nouveau Gallium3D.

• Vadim Girlin has merged another set of patches concerning his “SB” shader optimization back-end for the R600 Gallium3D driver, including some code that has the potential to affect the performance.

• Just days after the first release candidate of the Linux 3.11 kernel, additional user testing of the new Radeon dynamic power management support has revealed more bugs in the open-source driver. Fortunately, there’s already another pull request for Linux 3.11 to take care of some more Radeon “DPM” issues.

• Yesterday I shared open-source Linux graphics benchmarks showing the Intel Ivy Bridge performance improving on Mesa 9.2 over the earlier releases of this important open-source Linux graphics driver component. However, for the latest-generation Intel “Haswell” graphics, Mesa 9.2 is an even more important upgrade. Here’s a look at the performance benefits in moving from Mesa 9.1 to the soon-to-be-released Mesa 9.2.

Applications

• traGtor is a graphical user interface (GUI) for the awesome conversion tool ffmpeg for the use with Linux-OS. It is written in Python and uses the GTK-Engine (standard in GNOME desktops) for displaying it’s interface. The goal of traGtor is not to bring you all of the features ffmpeg offers, but to be a fast and user friendly choice for converting a single media file into any other format. For a full ffmpeg featuring GUI please refer to the other great projects listed below. This GUI is written for not dealing too much with command lines, options and parameters and so on, and refers mostly to the real keyboard haters.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• This release represents 16 months of development effort and around 10,000 individual changes. The main highlights are the new Mac driver, the full support for window transparency, and the new Mono package for .NET applications support.

Games

• We have seen Valve pushing all of its games and of course their platform steam towards linux lately, but it appears that they aren’t the only ones who have set their minds towards open source adoption. Crytek is planning on taking its first step towards open source with their powerful CryEngine 3 game development tool, as it now plans to bring it to Linux.

• Surprise Attack Games to focus on local independent teams

• There’s finally a Phoronix Test Suite test profile for being able to benchmark Valve’s Team Fortress 2 on Steam in a (semi-) automated manner on Linux.

• Valve has released a new stable version for its Steam for Linux client, but the developers have mistakenly launched a Beta version instead.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The other day I went to buy a DDR stick but the shop was closed so the only solution was to sit down and fix some memory hungry applications ;).

• Who is KDE? I did some 30 second interviews on the booze cruise last night to give you a flavour.

• The Color Balance Filter is one of the easiest way to add an “atmosphere” to an image and now this can be done very easily in Krita. The filter can be applied to separate ranges of the image i.e Highlights, Shadows or Midtones to get the desired results. The implementation included making everything from scratch that is designing the User interface and then writing the code for the transformation of the image.

• Hamsi Manager, a file manager that can process multiple files at once and which aims to be really simple to use, is now at version 1.2.2.

• KDE-Services, a program that extends the features of the right mouse click on the Dolphin File Manager for KDE-4 graphical environment and specially designed for OSes based on Red Hat, is now at version 1.8-6.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• ROSA has primarily been a customized KDE desktop distribution. But today the ROSA folks announced an officially supported GNOME 3 variation of their Fresh R1 release. And, ROSA somehow managed to make GNOME 3 consistent with the look of their ROSA desktop.

Distributions

Slackware Family

• Slackware Linux turned 20 years old yesterday and no one gave them a party. Even I, who commonly remembered the illustrious distribution’s birthdays in my now former column, had to be reminded by LWN. Well, that won’t do. Let’s look back at some history of Slack.

• As I look back over my history with Slack, I’m struck by how many distributions were once based on Slackware. Most are no longer maintained, but some names may still be familiar. GoblinX was a strange looking but quite stable and fun distribution. It’s biggest issue in adoption is their pay-to-play business model that often fails in Linuxville. Austrumi is a tiny distro from Latvia, a tiny Northern European country most Americans’ education didn’t include. It was fast and stable and looks to be abandoned. Ultima 4 was trying to provide an easy to use Slackware and Mutagenix was a really cool distro that has disappeared off the face of the Earth. But Slackware is still here. There are many more derivative epitaphs, but the oldest surviving Linux distribution is 20 years old and is still very actively and enthusiastically maintained.

• Slackware Linux, a complete 32-bit multitasking “UNIX-like” system that is currently based around the 3.2 Linux kernel series, has just reached the venerable age of 20.

Red Hat Family

• Cigna , a global health service company that offers health, life, accident, dental, and disability insurance, and related health services, and Red Hat, Inc. (NYS: RHT) , the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Cigna has been named the 2013 Red Hat Innovator of the Year. Cigna was recognized during a ceremony at Red Hat Summit for its innovative use of Red Hat technologies to revitalize the company’s IT infrastructure and solidify the company’s position as a leader in the health care industry. Cigna also won an Innovation Award in the “Outstanding Open Source Architecture” category.

• OK, I hear you loud and clear. Disagreement with my view of Red Hat’s sign atop its downtown Raleigh building – “hideously out of place” – has been clear, but polite.

• I thank you for the polite part.

• Red Hat’s “cereal box sign,” the red billboard crowning the top of what is now known as Red Hat Tower, may be meeting controversy online, but officials at the open-source software company say they’re hearing nothing but compliments.

• Raleigh’s skyline got a bold new splash of color this month, and it has some people in downtown buzzing.

• Software company Red Hat unveiled a bright red sign atop its Wilmington Street high-rise building. However, the reviews range from great to downright ugly.

Fedora

• Fans of the Enlightenment desktop / window manager may finally see the lightweight solution packaged for Fedora 20.

Debian Family

• The results have been tallied and Debian got the most votes in our Community Distro Poll. We would call them the “winner,” but this wasn’t about winners and losers. It was about trying to reach a consensus on what we mean by the term “community distro.” We asked, “Which GNU/Linux distros do you consider to be legitimate community distros?” Choices weren’t limited to one; voters could choose as many as they wanted and even add more through a text box supplied by choosing “Other.”

Derivatives

• As I’ve said in the past, the DistroWatch.com listing of page hit rankings is a good way to see if one’s distro’s page is being looked at. With folks looking at the pages, one would hope that downloads and actual use of the distro would follow. So while it may not give an accurate description of actual use of the distro, the page hit rankings do give folks an idea which distros are doing well and which may not be.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I now use Scientific Linux with the Trinity desktop

• Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu platform, told Mobile World Live that it is “in a good starting position” with developers as it looks to build its presence in the mobile space.

• With Apple’s OS X 10.9 “Mavericks” having better OpenGL performance and in compliance with OpenGL 4.1 rather than being GL3-limited as with existing OS X releases, new benchmarks were carried out at Phoronix to see how well Apple’s OpenGL driver stack on the current OS X 10.9 developer preview compared to Ubuntu Linux when testing the Intel graphics driver.

• A minimal countdown has appeared on the official Ubuntu homepage – but what is it counting down to?

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• Linaro has developed a new way for Linux and Android developers to implement ARM’s Big.Little multi-core load balancing architecture, in a manner that optimizes power/performance tradeoffs. In addition to the In-kernel Switcher (IKS) released in May, the new Global Task Scheduler (GTS) offers faster, more granular scheduling control, support for non-symmetrical core combos, and the ability to run all cores simultaneously.

• If you’re particularly bad at spelling, then this pen can help you out. It’s the Lernstift smart pen, and it vibrates gently whenever its user makes a spelling error. It looks like a regular pen on the outside, but it packs some pretty unique and sophisticated tech on the inside. The Lernstift actually has an embedded Linux inside it’s tiny frame, which is equipped with a motion sensor, memory, and processor, along with a WiFi and vibrating module.

Phones

Android

• All of the netizens, who are somewhat enlightened on the Android scene, have been holding their wallets under immense restraint for the next Nexus pricing to be announced. Now finally there might be concrete evidence suggesting a price point for the upcoming device.

• The Nexus 7 rumours have been floating around the internet for quite a long time. However, like all secrets that end up being leaked, this is the first time that definitive pictures of Nexus 7 have been revealed and leaked over the internet.

• If you thought Google Glass was going to march forward without any competition, think again. GlassUp, an Italian startup company, has already collected over $30,000 of seed money on campaign funding site Indiegogo for its GlassUp concept. According to project leaders, the GlassUp device will focus on Android phone users who want to view messages and notifications, in addition to other possible augmented reality information, on glasses via Bluetooth.

• GlassUp has already been shown at CeBIT, and is a receive-only Bluetooth accessory with a monochrome, 320 x 240-pixel augmented reality display. Project leaders note that they will still produce the project even if they don’t reach crowdsourced funding goals, as they have investors. They also note this: “We are in agreements with some of the most famous eyewear brands for the design, so the final ones will be trendier and more varied.”

• We reported yesterday that Google is planning an event on the 24th of July where Sundar Pichai will possibly be unveiling the next Nexus 7 and Android 4.3, but today we’ve got word that Android 4.3 for the Nexus has already been leaked.

• At last week’s Linaro Connect Europe 2013 conference, there was a presentation regarding bringing Android’s HWComposer on Linux KMS.

• Google Glass has been in the hands of developers on Google’s Explorer programme for a while now, but some of those who have got their hands on the high-tech specs have been pushing the boundaries of what Google wants them to do.

• One hacker has successfully managed to get facial recognition technology to run on Glass, despite Google explicitly stating in its developer policy that this isn’t allowed. Stephen Balaban, founder of Lambda Labs in San Francisco, is challenging Google and hoping that others will do the same, actively encouraging people to use the hashtag #ihackglass on Twitter.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• After all the leaks, rumours and speculations, HTC has finally officially announced the HTC One Mini. HTC had teased the announcement of One Mini on twitter earlier, and now they have finally revealed the first look.

• Part of the OS wars is definitely the competition between tablets and notebooks. In a recent bit of spam, a retailer sent me these choices:

• * “New! Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Now available! Starting at $199.99″

• * “Save $49 – Acer Gateway 15.6″ notebook for $379.99″

Free Software/Open Source

• Today in Open Source: Tons of free apps and games. Plus: Linux Mint 15 Xfce install guide, and Ubuntu versus Debian!

• Its top recommended free audio converter software revealed today by Boffin, after the site reviewers assessed numerous candidates.

Events

• The schedule for the 2013 GUADEC, the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference, has been finalized, and registration is open.

• LinuxCon, CloudOpen and Co-Located Events Become Largest Technical Gathering of Linux and Open Cloud Professionals in North America

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• At a time when your ISP is tracking your online activities, sites you visit are doing the same (even the one you do not visit are able to track you), Google is not to be left out in the game, and the NSA is tracking everybody else, it’s easy to be depressed.

• Back in March, I wrote about the odd little attack by the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) on Mozilla’s plans to put control of cookies firmly in the hands of users. Alas, the IAB seems not to have come to its senses since then, but has instead doubled down, and launched one of the most bizarre assaults on Mozilla and the open Web that I have ever read. I warmly recommend you to read it – I suspect you will find it as entertaining in its utter absurdity as I do.

• It’s entitled “Has Mozilla Lost Its Values?”, which is strange, because what follows is a rambling moan about precisely those values, and Mozilla for daring to adhere to them. As you might expect, Mozilla has not “lost its values”, it’s defending them here just as it has always defended them. Here’s the central argument of the IAB piece.

• It was only a few weeks ago when the news broke that Mozilla would join forces with Stanford’s Center for Internet Society to support a new Cookie Clearinghouse that will oversee easy-to-use “allow lists” and “block lists” to help Internet users protect their privacy. The privacy scheme could have become a default setup in the Firefox browser, and paved the way for usage in other browsers. As that news broke, it seemed likely that it might draw a caustic reaction from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), which has blasted Mozilla’s attempts to control online ads and cookies before.

• The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) blasted Mozilla over its third party cookie blocking plans and said that the non-profit organization has an anti-business bent.

SaaS/Big Data

• Three years ago, on July 19th, 2010, Rackspace and NASA introduced OpenStack. Then, it was just another cloud stack project, a promising one but only one among many. Fast forward to today and OpenStack’s list of backers is a technology giant’s who’s who: HP, IBM, Red Hat, VMware, the list goes on and on. How did this happen?

• Say you want a private cloud, but you also want to be able to expand out into the public cloud when you must? What can you do? One answer is use Eucalyptus 3.3, which can work hand in glove with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Healthcare

• Conservatives have argued that unchecked immigration contributes to the rising costs of health care because immigrants do not put the same amount of money into healthcare as citizens do. As Seth Freed Wessler of Colorlines reports, a recent study proves otherwise.

Funding

• Investors from three venture firms are joining to launch OpenIncubate and support the rise of startups keen on advancing open-source hardware and software.

BSD

• While the popular kernel DRM drivers are still being ported to OpenBSD, support for the OpenBSD operating system within Mesa is being improved.

Project Releases

• It’s time for another big release of the Blender open-source 3D modelling software. Blender 2.68 contains fixes and enhancements throughout the entire multi-platform program.

Openness/Sharing

• In the fall of 2010, I asked the biology class I teach at Western Carolina University for volunteers to help map the campus. Three years later, dozens of students have participated in learning how to use aerial photography and cartography techniques created by Public Lab.

• I recently spoke with Larry Cooperman, director of OpenCourseWare at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Larry also serves on the boards of the OpenCourseWare Consortium and the African Virtual University. I asked Larry about UC Irvine’s new OpenChem project.

Open Access/Content

• awyers representing MIT are filing a motion to intervene in my FOIA lawsuit over thousands of pages of Secret Service documents about the late activist and coder Aaron Swartz.

• I am the plaintiff in this lawsuit. In February, the Secret Service denied in full my request for any files it held on Swartz, citing a FOIA exemption that covers sensitive law enforcement records that are part of an ongoing proceeding. Other requestors reported receiving the same respons

• We recently noted that Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly had ordered Homeland Security to release the Secret Service file on Aaron Swartz that had been requested by Wired reporter/editor Kevin Poulsen. However, MIT has now stepped into the case trying to block the release of the information. The judge has consented to putting a stay on the initial order until MIT can file its motion.

• MIT’s concern — as it was in a separate legal fight concerning releasing the evidence used against Aaron — is apparently that the released documents will reveal which MIT employees helped with the investigation, and that could lead to unwarranted harassment. However, as Poulsen notes, the documents that have already been released have been redacting those names, so it’s unlikely that these further releases would leave those same names unredacted.

• Free online courses have run into a backlash of late. But a handful of community colleges may have found a way to dial up open-source content to help tackle one of higher education’s thorniest problems: remedial education.

Open Hardware

• Last month, Massimo Banzi, co-founder of the Arduino project, held a workshop at the Foundation Achille Castiglioni in Milan called: Arduino and the light.

Programming

• GitHub has created a social network where programmers get together and get work done without bosses, e-mails, or meetings.

• SourceForge is offering to share download revenue with open source developers. Here’s how the plan stacks up

• Duetto is an alternative open-source project to EmScripten, the LLVM-based project for compiling C/C++ code-bases into JavaScript for execution by modern HTML5 web-browsers. Duetto is still LLVM-based and relies on JavaScript, but there’s a few changes over EmScripten.

Leftovers

• Noam Chomsky, the professional contrarian, has accused Slavoj Žižek, the professional heretic, of posturing in the place of theory. This is an accusation often levelled at Žižek from within the Anglo-Saxon empirical tradition. Even those like Chomsky who are on the proto-anarchist left of this tradition like to maintain that their theories are empirically verifiable and rooted in reality.

Science

• As drones, bipedal robots, and algorithm technologies continue to improve, the world of autonomous everything is looming. Perhaps looming isn’t the right word, but I feel compelled to set an ominous tone in order to provide an interesting conclusion. Beyond the iPad, synchronized quad-copters, and even 3D printers, one of the world’s most powerful forms of emerging technology is the ability to make more machines and devices autonomous.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Drones aren’t just for killing “enemy combatants” and nearby innocents, with a band of rubberstamp judges appointed by conservative Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, providing flimsy legal cover. These flying robots (or “unmanned aerial vehicles”) engage in a wide array of activities. They patrol farmers’ fields and monitor crops planted on steep hills. Some engage in surveillance on the US border and act as eyes and ears for the police in cities like New York, while journalists have begun to make use of them.

• Damning evidence against the intelligence gathering, targeting the militants in Pakistan via drone was brought to light in March 2011 when 40 people were killed in a drone attack attending a tribal meeting in North Waziristan, mostly civilians. The intelligence gathering on potential targets is obviously faulty.

• Residents of a small Colorado town will be able to buy licenses to shoot down U.S. government drones, if a proposed ordinance is passed by the community of Deer Trail.

• President Obama’s nominee to head the FBI told senators that he opposed the use of drones to kill Americans inside the United States unless they qualified as “imminent threats” to the security of the homeland.

• The Air Force was ready to drop the RQ-4B Block 30, but a Northrup Grumman lobbying campaign convinced Congress to resuscitate it.

• The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) usually gets all the credit for the first US drone targeted killing beyond the conventional battlefield.

• On Friday, a federal judge in Washington will hear a challenge to the Obama administration’s approach to targeted killings. I find myself frustrated by how little progress we’ve made.

• Bureau data suggests the CIA is killing fewer people in each strike in Pakistan.

• A former CIA station chief who was convicted in Italy of kidnapping a terror suspect has been arrested in Panama, according to Italian authorities.

• Robert Seldon Lady was convicted in absentia by Italian court for 2003 abduction of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr in Milan

• A former CIA base chief in Italy who was convicted in the 2003 abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect from a street in Milan has been detained in Panama, the Italian justice ministry said.

• An Italian official familiar with Italy’s investigation and prosecution of Robert Seldon Lady said the former CIA official entered Panama, traveled to Costa Rica, and that officials there then sent him back to Panama where he was detained. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because only Italy’s justice ministry was publicly discussing the case.

• Former CIA Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady, convicted in Italy of kidnapping an Egyptian Muslim cleric, has been arrested in Panama, Italian judicial sources told Reuters on Thursday.

• ormer Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers confirmed the presence of American nuclear warheads in bunkers at the Netherlands’ Volkel air base.

• Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua can’t protect the NSA whistle-blower from rendition at the hands of the CIA

• What is CIA Director John Brennan holding in his hands? Marcy Wheeler reports that it’s the CIA’s response to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the post-9/11 CIA torture program.

• A FORMER CIA station chief who was convicted in the 2003 abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect from a street of Milan has been detained in Panama.

• The suit, brought by Olson’s family in federal court in Washington, was filed too late and is barred under an earlier settlement, a judge ruled today. Eric and Nils Olson alleged their father, who the CIA admitted was given LSD a few days before his death, didn’t jump from a 13th floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York, but rather was pushed.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The country of Peru is looking to provide free electricity to over 2 million of its poorest citizens by harvesting energy from the sun. Energy and Mining Minister Jorge Merino said that the National Photovoltaic Household Electrification Program will provide electricity to poor households through the installation of photovoltaic panels.

Finance

• Detroit has become the largest city in US history to file for bankruptcy after accumulating spiralling long term debt estimated at $18.5 billion.

• The Government was tonight accused of gambling with the UK’s blood supply by selling the state owned NHS plasma supplier to a US private equity firm.

• The Department of Health overlooked several healthcare or pharmaceutical firms and at least one blood plasma specialist before choosing to sell an 80 per cent stake in Plasma Resources UK to Bain Capital, the company co-founded by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in a £230m deal. The Government will retain a 20 per stake and a share of potential future profits.

• The big question is whether Detroit’s bankruptcy and likely further decline is a fluke or whether it tells us something about the dystopia that the United States is becoming. It seems to me that the city’s problems are the difficulties of the country as a whole, especially the issues of deindustrialization, robotification, structural unemployment, the rise of the 1% in gated communities, and the racial divide. The mayor has called on families living in the largely depopulated west of the city to come in toward the center, so that they can be taken care of. It struck me as post-apocalyptic. Sometimes the abandoned neighborhoods accidentally catch fire, and 30 buildings will abruptly go up in smoke.

• Moscow plays host today to the G20 Finance Ministers’ meeting, the crowning jewel of which is the freshly unveiled Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting. Released under the auspices of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this document sets out 15 specific recommendations for national governments to implement in order to stem the widespread abuse of tax loopholes by multinational companies.

• At the center of the issue has been the asymmetry between tightly integrated global corporations and the fragmented, piecemeal responses from individual states. One of the best known and most derided examples of this is the practice of setting up shell companies in low-tax jurisdictions like Ireland, which are then used to account for profits from higher-tax nations — something that Google, Facebook, and Starbucks have all been accused of. The new Action Plan tackles this issue head-on, by urging that tax should be paid in the territory where goods or services are sold, not where the company is based. That would thwart Amazon’s practice of booking its Europe-wide profits in Luxembourg, forcing it to compete on the same terms as local retailers.

Censorship

• Though immigration figured prominently on the national political agenda in February 2013, an analysis by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) of news coverage during that month shows that immigrants themselves are not getting their say. The study examined all ABC, CBS and NBC news programs, the PBS NewsHour, CNN’s Situation Room, Fox News’ Special Report and MSNBC’s Hardball for all of February. It found 54 reports on immigration featuring 157 news sources during that time.

• Courts have not been forthcoming with access to website blocking orders, citing administrative reasons for refusing to treat them as public documents.

• ”
The second documentary showed in the series was “High tech, low life.” The cameras followed two citizen journalists as they reported what they saw in China, where censorship is prevalent and penalties for those reporting on unfavorable topics can be strict.

• Internet Service Providers have agreed to roll out network level filtering to protect children online, following significant political pressure. We have sent them 20 questions on how their Internet filtering systems will work – questions policy makers have failed to ask.

• The below letter was sent to TalkTalk, Virgin, BSkyB and BT. We’ve written a blog post about this, which has some more background.

• Tia Lessen and Carl Deal are far from giving up after public television pulled funding for their film “Citizen Koch:” the filmmakers have launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdsource the funds necessary to release their documentary on money, power and democracy.

• When Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) purchased Tumblr in May for $1.1 billion in cash, many wondered what changes Yahoo would bring to the hip microblogging service. One of the top questions was what Yahoo would do with the massive amount of pornographic content hosted on Tumblr pages.

Privacy

• The headaches for Huawei Technologies Co. keep growing, fresh after the U.K. government said that it would conduct a review of the Chinese company’s cybersecurity arrangements and a former U.S. intelligence official reportedly accused it of spying for Beijing.

• Huawei Technologies Co. strongly denied a former U.S. intelligence official’s reported remarks that accused the telecommunications equipment supplier of spying for the Chinese government, saying that such “unsubstantiated” accusations are distractions from real cybersecurity issues.

• Officials decline to comment on whether they will seek to renew order that permits bulk collection of Americans’ phone records

• I love this question simply because it means I’m making progress getting companies up to speed on their IT requirements. What set this encounter apart was the unexpected question that followed: “What about the sovereignty of our data?”

• I have researched data sovereignty issues for my clients since the NSA’s PRISM project first hit the news – and I think I’m about ready to answer this question. So let’s take a look at what I’ve learnt about data sovereignty.

• Dozens of companies, non-profits and trade organisations including Apple, Google and Facebook have written to the US government asking for more disclosures on the government’s national security-related requests for user data.

• Fugitive security contractor Edward Snowden“did this country a service” by igniting a debate about the reach of the U.S. government’s electronic surveillance programs, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union said today.

• The plot thickens as the NSA’s data collection net widens. NSA leaks reveal that governments are tapping into “the Internet’s backbone” to siphon off huge quantities of data. That is, government programs in the US and UK are able to gain access to tremendous amounts of data by accessing networks of undersea fiber optic cable, according to a report from The Atlantic.

• If you head over to the Play Store, you can download US Prism Plus and lend a helping hand! The app will take pictures from your mobile device, automatically, and send them to the NSA twitter account. That’s right, all you have to do is download the app and you’re on your way to being a helpful citizen.

• The European Parliament (EP) is calling for the appearance and testimony of Edward Snowden and General Keith Alexander in the incipient investigation into National Security Agency (NSA) information-gathering programs that have affected Europeans. The NSA’s internet surveillance program, PRISM, is of particular interest. These two individuals, for very different reasons, will be very difficult to get a hold of. One is stranded without travel documents in a Russian airport and the other is America’s greatest spymaster. The EP will get its investigation, but it will not get its desired results and likely neither of these two testimonies.

• The National Security Agency appears to be tracking data from more people—way, way more people—than it had previously admitted, the Atlantic Wire reported. In congressional testimony yesterday, NSA deputy director Chris Inglis “casually” indicated that the agency looks “two to three hops” from terror suspects. That means the agency monitor not only the people terror suspects talk to on the phone, but also who those people talk to—and then who those people talk to.

• The world might be fed up with the idea of government surveillance, but that hasn’t quelled the intelligence community’s thirst for more data and better tools to analyze it. The latest example: On Thursday, geospatial data expert OpenGeo announced a investment from In-Q-Tel, an arm of the U.S. intelligence community, originally spun out of the CIA, that makes strategic investments in technologies that could benefit the community’s mission.

• Reading through In-Q-Tel’s list of investments is like reading a who’s who of data startups: 10gen, Cloudera, Narrative Science, Palantir and Platfora are among the companies into which it has put money. When it comes to technologies that can store lots of data or new types of data, or analyze or visualize data in novel ways, In-Q-Tel is interested.

• There’s been lots of talk about electronic surveillance and government-sponsored hacking lately, but Foreign Policy takes a fascinating look at how the Central Intelligence Agency’s digital “black bag” squads get access the old fashioned way — by breaking into peoples’ houses.

• Crocodile tears to mask US imperialism’s role as the enemy of African liberation

• A coalition of 19 organizations s formed to file a lawsuit Tuesday (PDF) against the National Security Administration, alleging that the government is supporting “an illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet electronic surveillance.”

• The U.S. National Security Agency and Department of Justice exceeded their legal authority to conduct surveillance when collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. residents, several U.S. lawmakers said Wednesday.

• We thought you might be getting a little bored while you’re stuck in the airport, so we sent you some reading material. We don’t know if you like Linux, but given your technical background, we hope it’ll be of interest. It’s just a tiny indication of our gratitude.

• Classified presentation slides detailing aspects of PRISM were leaked by a former NSA contractor. On June 6th, The Guardian and The Washington Post published reports based on the leaked slides, which state that the NSA has “direct access” to the servers of Google, Facebook, and others. In the days since the leak, the implicated companies have vehemently denied knowledge of and participation in PRISM, and have rejected allegations that the US government is able to directly tap into their users’ data.

• Both the companies and the government insist that data is only collected with court approval and for specific targets. As The Washington Post reported, PRISM is said to merely be a streamlined system — varying between companies — that allows them to expedite court-approved data collection requests. Because there are few technical details about how PRISM operates, and because of the fact that the FISA court operates in secret, critics are concerned about the extent of the program and whether it violates the constitutional rights of US citizens.

• The Department of Homeland Security has warned its employees that the government may penalize them for opening a Washington Post article containing a classified slide that shows how the National Security Agency eavesdrops on international communications.

• The Obama administration tried to placate Europe’s anger over spying programs. Not as ex-President Jimmy Carter: The Democrat attacked the U.S. intelligence sharp. The disclosure by whistleblowers Snowden was “useful.”

• Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter was in the wake of the NSA Scandals criticized the American political system. “America has no functioning democracy,” Carter said Tuesday at a meeting of the “Atlantic Bridge” in Atlanta.

• Edward Snowden is unlikely to make new revelations since “he doesn’t want to end up in a cage like Bradley Manning”, said The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, adding that he himself decides what to publish from the thousands of leaked documents.

Civil Rights

• Information revealed by a Truthout Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request was included in testimony presented to a federal judge in New York City who ruled this week to permanently block the United States military from enforcing part of a law allowing it to indefinitely detain anyone – including US citizens – accused of aiding terrorist organizations.

• With arms tied down and feet shackled, Yasiin Bey writhes in anguish as a feeding tube is shoved into his right nostril. Groaning in extreme discomfort as his handlers push the tube deeper, Bey – better known as Mos Def – breaks into sobs as he begs for the torment to stop. “This is me, please, stop! I can’t do it anymore.”

• After years of fighting impunity for U.S. torture, the Center for Constitutional Rights welcomes reports that Panama has detained former CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady in response to an international arrest warrant for his role in the “extraordinary rendition” of Abu Omar from Milan to Egypt. While the United States refuses to investigate or prosecute its own officials for torture and other serious breaches of domestic and international law, other countries like Italy have been willing to place the demands of justice above politics.

• According to the Global Research, there are approximately 2 million prisoners in the United States occupying state, federal, and private prisons. The vast majority of this population is made up of Blacks and Hispanics. By the number, America maintains 25 percent of the total prison population on the planet – half a million more prisoners than the next largest jailer, China, which has five times the population of the US. California Prison Focus concludes “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.”

• The Second Circuit has permanently vacated the injunction issued by the District Court against NDAA 2012 indefinite detention powers. The case has been remanded to District Court Judge Kathryn Forrest. who originally issued the injunction.

• The Obama administration has won the latest battle in their fight to indefinitely detain US citizens and foreigners suspected of being affiliated with terrorists under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.

• Judge Lewis Kaplan’s excellent Second Circuit opinion in Hedges yesterday should end the controversy over whether the 2012 NDAA expands or merely codifies the government’s AUMF detention authority—though it almost surely won’t. The key discussion begins on page 33 and represents as lucid and straightforward an account of how to read the detention language of Section 1021 as I have seen.

• New historical research says hungry aboriginal children and adults were once used as unwitting subjects in nutritional experiments by the Canadian government.

• The supposed “irony” of whistle-blower Edward Snowden seeking asylum in countries such as Ecuador and Venezuela has become a media meme. Numerous articles, op-eds, reports and editorials in outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and MSNBC have hammered on this idea since the news first broke that Snowden was seeking asylum in Ecuador. It was a predictable retread of the same meme last year when Julian Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and the Ecuadorian government deliberated his asylum request for months.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Since last week, after citizen groups started criticizing the EU Commission over its leaked draft regulation threatening to kill Net neutrality, Commissioner Neelie Kroes and her staff have tried to defend their proposal on Twitter, arguing that these criticisms were “misleading European citizens”. Here is a summary of what was said, not said, and how it reveals that these criticisms are absolutely right.

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