● 08.14.13

● Links 14/8/2013: Debian Turns 20, New Derivatives

Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The operating system of the future is still to be determined but LInux will play an important role in creating it, says Kevin Kelly, a founding editor and Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine. Just as no one could predict what the Internet would look like 20 years ago, we can’t begin to imagine future technology. But Kelly envisions the Technium, a global interconnected super organism. The Technium is one step up from the Internet of today but can hardly be compared with it.

• Back in December 2013, Acer president Jim Wang said it was too early to say whether Windows 8 was a success or not. Some seven months later — a period during which the company suffered a quarterly loss and the world a shoddy 8-inch Windows 8 tablet from Acer — the Taiwanese company seems to have found the answer.

• He has, in effect, also given up control of his computing experience to Apple.

• Employment attorney Ahmed Minhaj first started using Linux back in 2001 because he appreciated the philosophy behind Linux and other open source projects. He was also looking for an alternative to the buggy and unstable Microsoft Windows and MS Office.

• IT vendor Penguin Computing has rolled out a new line of Ethernet switches running on Cumulus Linux, a distribution of the popular open-source operating system made specifically for data center switches.

• Penguin Computing today announced its new Arctica line of Ethernet network switches, a branded suite of industry standard Ethernet switches that are offered with multiple networking software options and enterprise support.

• When I was first cutting my teeth on Unix, it was a big deal to reboot a server. Rebooting a Solaris machine could be a particularly harrowing experience. The command to do so was something like sync sync sync; init 6. The “sync” command was meant to flush any unwritten filesystem changes in memory to disk before they were lost. More recently, I’m not sure when the last time I used any command other than “reboot” on a modern Linux server. The reboot command properly runs through the init scripts and alerts other users that the server is going down. However, depending on how far back your nix experience goes, you might remember a time when reboot was absolutely not the right thing to do.

• I’m not giving you another dime of my money or my organization’s money until you get right with the Linux Community.

Server

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this week’s episode we touch upon letting go, XMir, UbuCon, and reference an article of interest from New Scientist. Some sort of commercial for a music festival airs at the start of the program. Said commercial will be airing on terrestrial radio closer to the festival site from August 20th through August 24th.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds has issued release candidate five for Linux 3.11, but is a little upset with the fact the final release missed a serendipitous anniversary.

• The date in question is August 11th, 1993, as it was on that day that Windows 3.11 emerged blinking and howling into the world.

• Although there is very little value in the number, Linux’s mother superior Linus “Sweary” Torvalds has pointed out that his latest version of the software has the same number as Windows’ breakaway success.

• Microsoft’s Windows 3.11 was the runaway success which gave Vole total control of the desktop.

• When Torvalds has released Linux 3.11-rc5 he said he wished he were able to release final Linux 3.11 as on the exact same day 20 years ago Microsoft released Windows 3.11.

• This past week Torvalds released the fifth release candidate for Linux 3.11, which has been known somewhat sarcastically as Linux for Workgroups. The Windows 3.11 Release 20 years ago was known at Windows for Workgroups, so that’s the connection there. Windows 3.11 was released on August 11, 1993.

Graphics Stack

• The graphics stack in Linux comprises a number of distinct projects, and in this article we’ll take a look at the current development of X.org, Wayland, and Cairo.

• Version 0.8 of POCL, the Portable Computing/OpenCL Language implementation, is now available. POCL continues to be focused on producing an efficient open-source implementation of the OpenCL 1.2 and 2.0 specifications.

• The basic infrastructure was added to Weston today for handling touch events within Wayland’s “toytoolkit”, a sample tool-kit implementation used by Wayland/Weston for showing off a reference implementation and basic functionality.

• While the Linux 3.11 kernel hasn’t even been officially released yet, on Phoronix we have already published a number of Radeon DPM benchmarks, the new dynamic power management code coming to the open-source driver. Early Phoronix tests of Radeon DPM have yielded performance improvements and great improvements for power/thermal use. In this article are new Linux 3.11 + Mesa Git benchmarks from a variety of AMD/ATI Radeon graphics cards.

Applications

• Samba began life as ‘a bit of a hack’ and became the route for taking free software into the enterprise. Richard Hillesley tells the story…

• Talygen, the world leader in Business Management Automation, has added an Activity Logger to its advanced Linux Desktop Tool to give companies and their clients even more options to audit and review the work being performed by employees.

• Maven is a Java build automation and dependency management tool that automatically downloads required external dependencies for you. Its plugin architecture makes it highly flexible, and its configuration conventions make it easy for developers to get up to speed quickly with a new project’s setup.

Instructionals/Technical

• So, you’re finally considering giving Linux a try. It’s about time! And it’s really not as scary (or different) as you may think. The myth that you had to be some kind of computer guru to use Linux is utterly untrue. Today’s top desktop Linux distributions, such as Mint, openSUSE, and Ubuntu are easier to use than Windows 8.

• Because this issue’s theme is programming, I thought I should cover some of the more-advanced features available in OpenMP. Several issues ago, I looked at the basics of using OpenMP, so you may want go back and review that article. In scientific programming, the basics tend to be the limit of how people use OpenMP, but there is so much more available—and, these other features are useful for so much more than just scientific computing. So, in this article, I delve into other by-waters that never seem to be covered when looking at OpenMP programming. Who knows, you may even replace POSIX threads with OpenMP.

Games

• Inverto (formerly “Gravitron”) is a first person shooter-puzzler with physical puzzles and gravity manipulations. The game is the ideological successor of such games as “Prey” and “Portal” with platformer elements.

• For a Linux gamer, there’s little that’s more depressing than seeing excellent games go on sale for ridiculous prices that won’t work on their platform of choice. The latest example of this is with the ongoing Humble Deep Silver Bundle, where not a single title offered is Linux-compatible (nor OS X-compatible, for that matter).

• Most people will probably have to play Race the Sun over and over again to become proficient at it, so get as early a start as you can: It launches on August 19 for PC, Mac and Linux.

• Massively multiplayer online racing game. Race against the ghost recordings of your friends and players from around the world. Design and share your own racetracks. Collect over 100 cars and race them in 11 classes. Compete on a new racetrack every day. Play in 3D or top-down 2D.

• You awake from the cold chill of your cryo-tube to discover cybernetic implants grafted to your flesh and the crew of the starship Von Braun slaughtered. The infected roam the halls, their screams and moans beckoning you to join them as the rogue artificial intelligence known as SHODAN taunts and ridicules your feeble attempt to unravel the horrifying mystery of the derelict starship Von Braun.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In case you haven’t heard of it, KDE Frameworks 5 is an effort to port our existing kdelibs to Qt5 and split it into smaller components. This requires work in many areas: in addition to the actual porting (which is reasonably easy), dependencies between classes needs to be reduced, some of our classes are being deprecated and their features integrated into Qt5 itself, the code is being made more portable… This huge project is driven by awesome hackers Kévin Ottens and David Faure.

• The Salix distribution is designed to be a small, fast operating system based on the Slackware operating system. In fact, Salix strives to maintain binary compatibility with Slackware so that packages may be shared between the two projects. Salix attempts to provide users with a clean design which features one dedicated application per task. The Salix distribution also features a package manager which handles software dependencies, giving it (in my eyes at least) an advantage over Slackware. Looking at the release notes for Salix 14.0.1 we find the project is available in several editions, including KDE, MATE, Xfce and LXDE. Each of these editions is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds. The 32-bit builds, we are warned, no longer support machines which do not feature PAE-enabled processors. We are also told the 32-bit build requires machines with i686-compatible processors, the older i486 architecture is no longer supported.

• Manage your personal finances with Skrooge for the KDE desktop. Use this tool to track your income, and your expenses. If you are a entrepreneur or a small business owner, you shouldn’t miss out. Here I will review some of the most impressive features for those of you that are interested.

• After the feedback we have received (you guys are awesome), we have made some improvements and fixes to KDEConnect.

• We have so many ways to access email. Gone are the days of the desktop email client being the only route, and gone are the days of having to track down obscure IMAP and SMTP settings to get mainstream services to work.

• We expect to be able to send and receive emails seamlessly to our phones, tablets, PCs and, before long, probably our clothes and fridges. We expect everything to stay in sync and – if we’re using a mainstream email service like Gmail or Yahoo! – we think it should just work.

• 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.

• Umbrello is the premier UML diagram tool for Linux desktops. UML is a standard for making diagrams of software, useful for documenting and planning your programs.

• I took over Umbrello in about 2002 and maintained it as part of my University final year project. One of the first changes that I made to Umbrello was to make it a KDE project, it was the natural home. But I never moved the website or mailing list, Sourceforge was good enough.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Evolution 3.8.5, a complete solution that provides integrated mail, address book, and calendaring functionality to users of the GNOME desktop environment, is now available for download.

• The fifth maintenance release of the Gnome 3.8.x branch is upon us, and Evolution is one of the first to arrive with a new version, as usual.

Distributions

New Releases

• Another great release of Slacko Puppy, coordinated by Mick Amadio (’01micko’ on the Puppy Forum).

• The Neptune team is proud to announce the release of Neptune 3.2 (Codename “Brotkasten on Speed”).

• We worked hard and spend a lot of effort in creating this service release for Neptune 3.0. So if you like it please consider donating to us a small amount of money so we can further develop and strenghtens our efforts.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• There have been several exciting release announcement in the last few days and three of them are from some of my favorite projects. openSUSE 13.1 Milestone 4 is out and ready for abuse and Sabayon 13.08 finally brings systemd and GNOME 3.8 to its users. But perhaps most exciting is the announcement of Mageia 4 Alpha 1.

Red Hat Family

• While most companies fight copycats, Red Hat embraces its top clone, CentOS. Here’s how that helps it fight real enemies like VMware.

Fedora

• Happening this past weekend was Flock, the new Fedora Contributor Conference. Flock is a new take on Fedora’s FUDCon conference from the past. For those that couldn’t make it out to Charleston, South Carolina, there’s slides and video recordings from the Fedora / open-source presentations.

• Here’s the set of sessions from today that had either video and/or transcripts available! The missing vids from Saturday will take some time to recover because the YouTube video editor won’t allow editing of videos that are 4 hours long, apparently. :-/ All right, then. Here’s the recap!

• The Red Hat-sponsored community Linux distribution maps a new path forward that could help it provide more targeted solutions for desktop, cloud and server users.

Debian Family

• How solid, stocky Linux babe kept relationship ‘open’ but stayed true to you

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical is a great company. They have done more than many companies to spread Free Software around the planet. Despite their good effects for Free Software they are still a business and reflect on their bottom line. That’s a bit obscure but Mark Shuttleworth released a few interesting details in an interview:

• Ubuntu’s desktop “on its own will die”—Shuttleworth on why Canonical must expand.

• Android: If you like the look of Ubuntu Touch, or just Ubuntu’s overall color scheme, Ubuntu Lockscreen can turn your boring old slide-to-unlock into something a bit more useful and fun to use. The app supports app notifications, SMS alerts, password unlock, and live animations, so it’s functional and fun to use.

• The project known as Ubuntu Edge is a dual-booting Ubuntu/Android smartphone that may or may not make its way to the real world due to its slightly under-funded initiative for action – but that’s not stopping leaksters from showing the machine off in a set of up-close photos. What you’re seeing here is the Ubuntu Edge looking very much like the device as prototyped in the original campaign. Here we see this “smartphone and desktop PC in one” as what the photographer C Tech calls “absolutely anti-ergonomic”.

Flavours and Variants

• Is it really possible to build an entire OS from an icon set? The answer, it seems, is elementary

• Typically a release article is focused on a few key points of a new product. We’d highlight the new features, problems solved, and encourage you download the latest version right away. But if you’re reading this right now, chances are that you’ve been following along. You’ve read our Beta1 and Beta2 articles along with the miscellaneous app update articles as well as our updates on typography and icons. So instead of that song and dance, we’re going to tell you our story.

• Linux Lite is free, stable, light and simple fully functional out of the box with complete set of applications, it is based on Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) releases and this distribution support period is 5 years. So you don’t need to worry about to install new version after 1 or 2 years but you only need to install just once every 5 years. During these 5 years Linux Lite current version will get security and software updates. It is also recommended to those people who are new to Linux or for those who want really lightweight desktop environment. It is also great choice for old laptop or desktop you gave up on a few years back. Linux Lite is a showcase for just how easy it can be to use Linux. From familiar software like Firefox and Thunderbird, to simply named menu items, to one click updates and software installs.

• There are a lot of Linux Distributions in this world of ours, with a large percentage of them releasing new, major versions at least once (if not twice) per year. And when those new releases come out, most Linux Distros try to differentiate themselves by talking about which versions of which software packages they are utilizing.

Devices/Embedded

• Advantech has breathed new life into its Linux-friendly AMD-based PC/104 single board computer family with a fanless, ruggedized PC/104 model built around an AMD G-Series APU. The PCM-3356 offers up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM, features dual gigabit Ethernet ports, SATA, four USB ports, three serial ports, and two Mini-PCie sockets, and supports -40 to 85°C extended temperature operation.

• Adlink unveiled a rugged x86-based PC/104 SBC with shock and vibration resistance, extended temperature support, and legacy ISA bus support. The 3.6 x 3.8-inch CoreModule1-86DX2 is equipped with a DMP 1GHz Vortex86DX2 system-on-chip, and features I/O including graphics, Ethernet, SATA, USB, serial, and A/D, and offers mini-PCIe and modular PC/104 expansion.

• Adapteva announced a Parallella University Program (PUP) to provide free Parallella single board computers to universities engaged in parallel programming research. Last month Adapteva began limited shipments of its $99 open source Parallella SBC, which combines a Xilinx Zynq-7020 ARM/FPGA SoC, running Ubuntu, with a homegrown 16-core Epiphany coprocessor.

Phones

Ballnux

• Amazon’s entry into the games console market could have a huge impact on Microsoft, Sony, Nvidia and AMD, as well as help to establish Qualcomm as the Intel of the post-PC era.

Android

• Android increased its domination of the market for smartphones in the second quarter of 2013, making up 80 percent of the total devices shipped globally. Apple, on the other hand, declined in market share, shipping only 13 percent.

• How I fell in love with Android and how you can too

• Ready for some more Android Open Source Project woes? In addition to the Nexus 7 drama over AOSP builds in the last couple of weeks, it looks like there are some issues with the Nexus 10 as well. Don’t worry, the Android 4.3 factory image for the N10 is sitting on the Google Developers page, proud and happy, but the binaries and drivers for some individual components on the tablet seem to be missing, most notably the graphics driver. It’s available for 4.2.2, but not 4.3. What’s up?

• You can now dictate more (and better) commands with the latest software update for Google Glass.

• A few years ago, shooting a movie required a lot of talent and money. You needed a good camera, a nice screenplay, and a top-notch movie-editing tool. Moreover, there were plenty of factors to be considered while shooting a video.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• There are some 7-inch Android tablets that can be had for less than US$100, some for just US$70. And virtually all the ones I’ve seen in stores are crappy, from no-name manufacturers. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for.

Free Software/Open Source

• Earlier this year I spent a few weeks playing with Erlang. I wanted to make something out of it, but despite an encouraging start I found it too frustrating to use.

• I got excited about Erlang because a lot of interesting things have been done in Erlang. Like CouchDB, RabbitMQ, Riak and so forth. Besides that, Erlang is a dynamic language and I generally find those quite nice to use.

• Since the dawn of the Web era, one technology has steadfastly dominated as the world’s most popular Web server. That technology is the open-source Apache Web Server, commonly referred to simply as “Apache.”

• Internet research and security services firm Netcraft is now reporting that across the nearly 717 million Websites it has surveyed this month, Apache serves 46.96 percent of them. That is the first time that Apache’s share has fallen below 50 percent since December of 2009. At its height—in November of 2005—Apache held a 71 percent market share.

• 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…

• The good news is, we found plenty of great new blogs and we’ve now reached the second round in our vote. We’ve ended up with ten additional blogs to consider, in addition to the nine that were already on our list. That means voters now have a field of 19 blogs from which to choose. As with the first qualifying round, you can vote for one or two blogs. Because this is an elimination round and not a qualifying round, however, there is no longer any way to add a new blog for consideration. As Flip Wilson’s Geraldine used to say, “What you see is what you get.”

• While open source platforms CloudStack and OpenStack have gained in popularity, VMware’s traditional position atop the market has been trending downwards

Events

• Last month I was fortunate enough to give a couple of talks at OSCON. I was particularly pleased with the reception my keynote received on Creating Communities of Inclusion, which touched on some topics beyond the typical licensing and community around open source software. I was was also asked to expand on these topics at OpenSource.com. Here are the abstracts and links to the presentations and article.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Chromium, the open-source frills-free version of Google Chrome, was put forward as a Firefox replacement for the 13.10 release back in May. The debate on which was better suited continued into June. At that time developers said they were ‘leaning towards Chromium as default’.

• Bug bounties–cash prizes offered by developers to anyone who finds key software bugs–have been steadily on the rise for several years now, with Google and Mozilla increasing their bug bounty programs. In fact, Google has been setting new records with the bounties it offers for meaningful bugs and confirmed earlier this year that it paid out more than $31,000 to a single security researcher who identified three Gooble Chrome bugs.

• Now, in a new post, Google has confirmed that bugs previously rewarded at the $1,000 level will now be considered for rewards of up to $5,000.

• While Canonical engineers keep raising discussions about swapping Mozilla Firefox for Google’s Chromium as the default web-browser for Ubuntu Linux, the 13.10 release will continue using Firefox by default.

Mozilla

• ZTE says it will soon begin sales of an unlocked version of its Firefox OS-based ZTE Open handset on eBay US and UK for $80, following its launch in Spain, Venezuela, and Colombia. In related news, Samsung is once again rumored to be slowing Tizen OS development, and Mozilla released a new version of the Firefox for Android Beta with WebRTC real-time communications support.

• In an attempted preemptive strike on other would be number three smartphone OS makers, Firefox and ZTE has partnered up to bring an $80 Firefox OS, unlocked smartphone to all users everywhere via eBay.

• The smartphone landscape is dominated by Android and iOS with the rest struggling for the distant 3rd spot. Canonical, the parent company of the most popular GNULinux based operating system Ubuntu, is also trying their hands at the mobile phones.

• The Internet Advertising Bureau is not letting up as it fires off screed after screed against Mozilla for its plans to block advertising cookies in the Firefox browser. If you’re like most of us, you get annoyed by how advertising cookies in your browser seem to know what your interests are and serve up creepy ads that hit a little too close to home. That’s why Mozilla has worked with Stanford’s Center for Internet Society which has a new Cookie Clearinghouse that will oversee easy-to-use “allow lists” and “block lists” to help Internet users protect their privacy. Mozilla has worked on its own on methods for suppressing cookies, too.

• A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the incredible spectacle of the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) attacking Mozilla on the grounds that the latter had “lost its values” because it insisted on defending the users’ rights to control how cookies were used on their systems.

• Mozilla’s open-source browser will receive new developer-friendly capabilities on the desktop and user-facing features on Android.

SaaS/Big Data

• “If a customer wants a particular performance set with unique parameters, most public cloud providers do not provide that kind of service. They only have one or two flavors. So the big question is, how do you take that ease of use and that simplicity from Amazon or another public cloud, and marry that with customizability and the ability to specify different parameters for your storage?”

Databases

• IDG News Service (New York Bureau) — Oracle has revamped the user interface for its MySQL Workbench administration software, streamlining a number of routine operations and adding some new time-saving features as well.

• Traditional relational databases like Microsoft (MSFT) SQL Server, Oracle (ORCL) and MySQL continue to gain popularity. But channel partners would be wise to check out NoSQL (Not only SQL) alternatives, which are catching on for big data, analytics and real-time cloud computing applications.

CMS

Funding

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• To get announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu. Nearly all GNU software is available from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors (https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html). You can use the url http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

• GNUstep is a free software project which seeks to implement the Cocoa APIs and supporting libraries on as many platforms as possible.

Openness/Sharing

• In his TED Talk architect Alstair Parvin shared a fascinating view of how open source thinking can transform architecture and multiply its benefits to society at large.

• Architects and community leaders are combining forces to lead the way in creating many types of innovative housing in developing nations as part of an open-source collaboration.

• There aren’t many times when we confuse the building and construction of physical buildings with the building and construction of software applications.

• Thanks in part to a high energy keynote rant from Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, even non-techies seem to have an idea that developers, developers, developers means software application developers — and not the guys in the yellow hard hats.

• When we talk about open source architecture we are once again, mostly talking about the “architecting” of software applications and their modelling, construction and later development, debugging and refinement.

• The Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has developed Energy DataBus, an open-source application for monitoring, storing and analyzing energy-related data for optimizing energy use and detecting energy “leaks.”

Open Access/Content

• “On 1/11/13, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his apartment in Brooklyn, as a result of an apparent suicide,” reads a January 17, 2013 Secret Service memo. “A suppression hearing in this had been scheduled for 1/25/13 with a trial date of 4/1/13, in U.S. District Court of the District of Massachusetts.”

• In January 2011, Swartz was caught using MIT’s public network to bulk-download 4 million academic articles from the JSTOR archive. MIT had a subscription to the archive that made it free to use from MIT’s campus. The Secret Service was brought into the case early on, and federal prosecutors ultimately charged Swartz with wire fraud and computer hacking.

• Kevin Poulsen at Wired reports that the first 104 pages of Aaron Swartz’s Secret Service files are available now, with a lot more to come, as a result of court ordered release. There are apparently 14,500 more pages to come.

• Look at page 97. It’s redacted so the identity of the woman is kept confidential, but it appears from the notation that a woman was in contact with authorities and informing them of conversations between her and Swartz.

Programming

• After many years in development, SDL 2.0.0 has finally been released!

• Few would deny that the rise of GitHub as a popular hosting service for software projects is one of the most significant developments to affect open source during the past five years. GitHub’s extraordinary success is necessary context for understanding the criticism leveled at it during the past year from some within or close to the open source world. This criticism has focused on licensing, or rather the lack of it: it is claimed that GitHub hosts an enormous amount of code with no explicit software license. Some critics have suggested that this situation results from a combination of the ignorance of younger developers about legal matters and willful inaction by GitHub’s management. In a followup article I will discuss the measures recently taken by GitHub to address these concerns; this article explores aspects of the complaint itself.

• With the buy of Marakana, the social network’s engineers will get crash courses in open-source technologies like Python and Android.

Standards/Consortia

• IBM has recruited several top tech firms, including Google and Nvidia, to join its newly founded OpenPOWER Consortium, an industry alliance formed to promote IBM’s flagging Power microprocessor architecture for back-end systems in an effort to better compete with Intel and ARM.

• As part of the effort, IBM is following ARM’s lead and opening up its proprietary Power-based hardware and software technologies to outside developers for the first time and will offer licenses for parties wishing to use Power IP in their own products, the company said this week.

Leftovers

• When it comes to illegal structures, a rooftop villa built by an eccentric Beijing resident on top of a 26-storey residential building puts Henry Tang’s wine cellar to shame.

Science

• Study found ‘a reliable negative relation between intelligence and religiosity’ in 53 out of 63 studies

Health/Nutrition

• For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Millions Against Monsanto page and our Genetic Engineering page.

• One glance at the statistics and it’s clear: The U.S. and Monsanto dominate the global market for genetically engineered crops. Forty percent of the world’s genetically modified (GM) crops are grown in the U.S., where Monsanto controls 80 percent of the GM corn market, and 93 percent of the GM soy market.

• If you have a terrible job or home life, being unhappy is hardly inappropriate. Pathologising it can only make everything worse

• “The vitamin D in your milk . . . is almost surely a derivative — after many chemical stages — from lanolin from Australian sheep wool, concocted in a factory in China. . . . Vitamin A, is often synthesized from acetone, a principal ingredient in nail polish remover,” notes George Kenney based on his interview with Melanie Warner, a former writer for the New York Times.

Security

• Given the recent Hand of Thief-news, in which RSA’s Limor Kessem explains how a Linux malware-kit is sold on Russian websites, I have been contemplating about Linux security again.

• Canalys predicts the IT security spending market will reach $30.1 billion in 2017 and grow at a 7 percent compound annual growth rate from now until then. Security spending is growing faster than overall IT spend.

• Agile security expert Ryan Berg addresses the common myths and misconceptions of securing open-source software and offers practical tips on how to build in security throughout the software development lifecycle – from design, development and deployment through to production

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Many humanitarian-minded lawyers will bristle at this, but why not admit that the law is on the side of the B-52s, not that of the civilians below? Who do you think wrote the law in the first place? We urgently need to see how the laws of war work in practice, given that so many hawks of both left and right insist that law and lawyers are a viable means of fashioning military force into a precise, therapeutic instrument. But as this book suggests throughout, the primary function of the Rules of Engagement and military law in general is not to restrain lethal force but to authorize it. In Vietnam, the overriding principle of International Humanitarian Law, the current preferred euphemism for the laws of war, turned out to be the Mere Gook Rule.

• …White House policy “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.”

• Given that the administration had previously defined militants as military-age males in the vicinity of a target (Salon, 5/29/12), one would hope reporters would take official claims–from U.S. or Yemeni officials–with a grain of salt.

• While Western news reports have cast casualties of the next strike, on Aug. 1, as militants, locals in the area of Hadramawt where it took place have claimed that the dead had no links to the al Qaida group and included a child.

• Outgoing CIA Deputy Leader Michael Morrell raised more than a few eyebrows this weekend when in an interview he declared Syria to be the “top current threat to US national security,” a spot usually reserved for someplace the US is directly militarily involved in.

• Last week, the CIA’s second-in-command, Michael Morell told WSJ that toppling the Syrian regime could pose a threat to the national security of the US. Morell’s admission came as a shock and the American media did its best to ignore it.

• [...]

• We’ve asked Peter Koenig, a former World Bank economist and a proficient analyst of the tactics used by the media manipulators, to comment on the “stunning admissions” made by the CIA official:

• “Putting this ‘admission’ into context reveals the falsehood of the statement. The CIA is secretly controlling and managing the world’s largest gun-running operation out of Benghazi, Libya, supplying the “Syrian opposition” with state of the art weapons via Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf States. This includes weapons from countries other than the US, so as to disguise the source of supply and funding”, he told the Voice of Russia.

• The US Central Intelligence Agency has finally come forward and admitted it does have documents about US drone strikes, but says it can’t share them with the public because doing so would pose a massive security risk to the country. As the CIA stated in a document filed in federal district court in Washington, DC last week (and made public today): “The details of those records, including the number and nature of responsive documents, remain currently and properly classified facts exempt from disclosure.”

• Despite ruling that agency can’t ignore FOIAs on drone program, CIA files brief to keep documents secret

• There have been nine drone strikes reported in Yemen in the past two weeks – an uptick apparently connected to the Al Qaeda threat that shut down U.S. embassies across the Middle East and Africa. As many as six civilian deaths have also been reported.

• President Obama at his pre-vacation press conference Friday promised more “transparency” on U.S. government surveillance programs. But he made no mention of the need for more information about who our government is secretly killing abroad. And while U.S. government officials have happily reported intercepting an alleged phone conversationamong al Qaeda leaders (the details of which keep changing) that prompted the embassy closures and evacuations, they’ve provided no information on who the United States has killed in retaliation with its latest drone strikes, or why.

• That’s no small omission.

• Months after a federal appeals court reinstated a lawsuit seeking Central Intelligence Agency documents outlining the government’s drone targeted killing program, the President Barack Obama administration is again claiming that acknowledging if it has such paperwork could disclose classified secrets concerning whether it even carries out targeted killings.

• UN chief Ban Ki-moon waded into the controversy surrounding US drone strikes during a visit to Pakistan Tuesday, insisting they must operate within international law.

• New information about circumstances surrounding the attack on the U.S. consulate on Sept. 11, 2012 raises concern about the U.S.’s involvement in Libya and Syria. According to Joe DiGenova, an attorney for whistleblower Thompson, the State Department’s deputy coordinator of operations, 400 U.S. missiles were sent to Libya covertly and have since been stolen by an unidentified group. The night this fatal assault occurred, 35 CIA operatives were said to have been working in an “annex near the consulate on a project to supply missiles from Libyan armories to Syrian rebels.” Since then, the CIA has undergone incredible lengths to suppress information about the incident from leaking out. This suppression of information indicates that the CIA has something to hide. It is crucial that an open investigation be conducted to figure out the missile’s whereabouts, as leaving this mystery unresolved could result in the weapons landing in the wrong hands.

• A former CIA analyst has accused the US government of saying much and doing less about illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

• “They’re in a scary business,” says Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Lee Tien. ACLU analyst Jay Stanley has written that Palantir’s software could enable a “true totalitarian nightmare, monitoring the activities of innocent Americans on a mass scale.”

Transparency Reporting

• The Nobel Prize committee has received a petition that endorses awarding the peace prize to US Army Private Bradley Manning, who is convicted of espionage and facing up to 90 years behind bars for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks.

• The critical moment in the political trial of the century was on 28 February when Bradley Manning stood and explained why he had risked his life to leak tens of thousands of official files. It was a statement of morality, conscience and truth: the very qualities that distinguish human beings. This was not deemed mainstream news in America; and were it not for Alexa O’Brien, an independent freelance journalist, Manning’s voice would have been silenced. Working through the night, she transcribed and released his every word. It is a rare, revealing document.

• Describing the attack by an Apache helicopter crew who filmed civilians as they murdered and wounded them in Baghdad in 2007, Manning said: “The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemingly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have. They seemed not to value human life by referring to them as ‘dead bastards’ and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers. At one point in the video there is an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety [who] is seriously wounded… For me, this seems similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.” He hoped “the public would be as alarmed as me” about a crime which, as his subsequent leaks revealed, was not an aberration.

• Yesterday’s witnesses were called to the stand to testify on whether the Army had been under pressure to deploy Manning to Iraq. It came out that his unit was at least a third “under strength” when it came to intelligence analysts. This raises the question of how much officers ignored any mental health or behavioral problems Manning may have had prior to deployment.

• Defense attorney, David Coombs, also focused on the lack of leadership in Manning’s unit from superior officers and whether officers had taken proper disciplinary action when Manning had outbursts while stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Baghdad.

• And, before proceedings were over yesterday, the judge issued a ruling granting a government motion for the court to force the defense to turn over a sanity board report minus Pfc. Bradley Manning’s statements, which had been put together when reviewing whether Manning was mentally fit to stand trial.

• Coombs argued prosecutors were not entitled to the report because Manning’s mental condition had not been raised in court prior to the judge’s verdict. But the judge agreed with the government that, since the defense is going to call a witness who is a psychology expert to testify on Manning, the government was entitled to the report.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Waves for days. Trash for eternity. That’s what photographer Zak Noyle discovered on a recent trip to Java, Indonesia. The waves of Java, always known for being pristine and barreling, were now rolling swells of disgusting trash and debris.

• Noyle was shooting Indonesian surfer Dede Surinaya in a remote bay when he and Surinaya discovered the water to be covered in garbage, according to GrindTV. The bay was miles from any town, yet strong currents had carried the trash of the world’s most populated island, Java, to its once pure waters.

• The organization believes that increased drought, extreme storms, and rising sea levels are significant threats to economies worldwide.

• Beverly McGuire saw the warning signs before the town well went dry: sand in the toilet bowl, the sputter of air in the tap, a pump working overtime to no effect. But it still did not prepare her for the night last month when she turned on the tap and discovered the tiny town where she had made her home for 35 years was out of water.

Finance

• Yet the financial crisis still reverberates for many others, in large part because of the insidious reach of the financial products that Wall Street created. Subprime securities still pose a significant legal risk to the firms that packaged them, and they use up capital that could be deployed elsewhere in the economy.

• But hold on–why did I get a press release from the office of Sen. Bernie Sanders (Ind.-Vt.) that was headlined, “Student Loan Rates Rising”?

• Because, in a way, they are.

Privacy

• Linux users didn’t need the recent NSA eavesdropping scandal to convince them that securing communication was a good idea. For years, free software developers have been creating secure tools that offer similar functionalities to all of those popular but very leaky services with ridiculous names.

• President Obama has appointed James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence who was recently caught misleading Congress about the extent of NSA surveillance, as the head of the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies that will investigate the agency.

• On Monday, one devilish detail emerged when the White House instructed James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, to form the “high-level group of outside experts,” that President Obama had promised to Americans on Friday.

• James “least untruthful” Clapper will review his own agency to promote “trust” not shift policy

• Whether he passes reforms or not, President Obama’s mass surveillance program has made him the closest thing we have to Big Brother. Will his top lieutenants, Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, take that funk with them into the next election?

• The Obama administration released a “white paper” on Friday that purports to provide a legal justification for one of its telephone surveillance programs. Under conditions of growing public concern over revelations by National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, the document was clearly prepared for public relations purposes. Its release was timed to coincide with Friday’s press conference, at which Obama attempted to put a friendly face on police state spying.

• In his press conference on Friday President Obama offered several measures meant to reassure people about NSA surveillance programs. His fourth measure involved setting up an outside and independent board to review the programs.

• James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, will not be involved in selecting or leading members of a group reviewing the NSA’s surveillance methods. On August 12th, President Barack Obama issued a memo telling Clapper to “establish a review group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies,” responsible for determining whether the US surveillance system was both advancing American interests and behaving in a way that would “maintain the public trust.” Now, though, a White House spokesperson tells both us and The Hill that Clapper won’t be a part of the process.

• If there was one topic about which Ellison was unflinchingly enthusiastic, however, it was NSA surveillance, some details of which were revealed by former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden, now a fugitive enjoying asylum in Russia.

• “It’s great,” Ellison said of the domestic spying. “It’s great, it’s essential. President Obama thinks it’s essential. It’s essential if we want to minimize the kind of strikes that we just had in Boston. It’s absolutely essential.”

• The United States pledged on Tuesday that Brazil and other allies will get answers about American communications surveillance aimed at thwarting terrorism, but gave no indication it would change the way it gathers such information.

• The South American country was planning to spend $4 billion on 36 fighter jets for its air force in a contract promised to the U.S. Now that Edward Snowden has revealed that the National Security Agency had been mining information on Brazil’s commercial, military and energy intelligence, President Dilma Rousseff seems to be having second thoughts. A source told Reuters that the Brazilian government “cannot talk about the fighters now. … You cannot give such a contract to a country that you do not trust.”

• German hackers have poured scorn on Deutsche Telekom’s plan to offer “secure email”, describing it as little more than a marketing gimmick.

• Deutsche Telekom and partner United Internet are rolling out SSL-encrypted connections between users’ computers and the companies’ mail servers as part of the “Email made in Germany” offer.

• Plan to screen internet traffic against cyber attacks unlikely to progress, officials say

• The filmmaker who helped Snowden publish NSA revelations shares her story with the New York Times

• The level of surveillance across the US and the UK should not come as a shock to their citizens. To what extent is the nature of these actions rooted in history? Would even the most benevolent of governments be able to stop the constant monitoring of its citizens?

• Lately, installations such as Menwith Hill have come under scrutiny and criticism, following disclosures made by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden that the U.S. was using NSA surveillance programs to secretly gather information about phone calls and Internet communications worldwide.

• In May 2011, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) took the floor of the Senate to warn his colleagues that Americans would one day be outraged to learn that the U.S. Government was actively engaged in surveillance activities that most citizens would consider outright criminal.

• Edward Snowden’s leaks about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs might have been avoided if more members of Congress had done their duty to stay informed about these classified activities, rather than get distracted by the fluff of politics, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

• The “Lawful Interception Recovery Fee” many phone users are reportedly spotting on AT&T bills is giving rise to a bit of frustrating and just-like-those-government-bozos speculation… that the controversial NSA spying program has resulted in a charge tacked on to our cell phone bills. Have you ever in your life?

• The short answer to whether the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) programs for reviewing emails and telephone calls as well as metadata (pieces of information about communications like when and from where an email was sent) arising from them is legal would appear to be: yes.

• Unlike some past controversies about the balance between protecting the nation’s security and privacy rights, no one is saying that the executive branch went out completely secretly on its own (though the scope of the program has shocked many even in Congress) with the new far-reaching checks into people’s personal lives.

• Again, this isn’t really a surprise, per se. Like we said, as bad as America is in some respects, other countries are worse. And it’s safe to assume that 99% of what you’re doing goes unread because there’s little if anything that, say, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service cares about.

• The New York Times Magazine cover story by Peter Maass detailing how Edward Snowden reached out to the two reporters that broke the NSA surveillance story isn’t about that surveillance. It’s only sort of about journalism. Instead, it’s largely a story about how close to the boundaries of civilization you must get — literally and figuratively — to be assured that you can protect your privacy. And it’s about how the United States government pushes people there.

• US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden said in an interview released on Tuesday he chose to divulge details of a vast US surveillance effort to journalists who reported “fearlessly” on controversial subjects.

• Snowden, in the interview released by The New York Times, said he chose documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras and Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald because they were not cowed by the US government.

• Leaker Edward Snowden accused the National Security Agency of targeting reporters who wrote critically about the government after the 9/11 attacks and warned it was “unforgivably reckless” for journalists to use unencrypted email messages when discussing sensitive matters.

• Charlotte Scot isn’t one to take things lying down — like the time President George W. Bush was re-elected and she moved to Canada in protest.

• Back in 2010, social media had finally grown out of colleges and into mainstream awareness. Twitter rolled out a new design that allowed pictures within feeds, and Facebook crossed the 500 million user threshold shortly before the release of “The Social Network,” the David Fincher film about Facebook’s founding. A newcomer, Foursquare, allowed users to “check-in” to physical locations with their smartphones and was quickly growing in popularity.

• [...]

• …images taken with a smartphone could be used to track the physical location of the person in the photo.

• Malware lodged on the web-servers of Freedom Hosting — the renowned “hidden service” web hoster on the ‘Tor’ anonymized network shut down during the first week of August 2013- might have de-anonymized visitors to the websites on that server. This could send information regarding identity of visitors to an IP address which was coded into a malware script and injected into browsers. Apparently, the IP addresses under discussion belong to the NSA or National Security Agency, note security researchers, reported arstechnica.com on August 5, 2013.

• They should do so, and they should do so immediately, dramatically and very publicly. Because the real danger of these covert surveillance programs is that once they are no longer completely covert, their existence undermines everyone’s trust in the government.

• On Monday, Spain’s Foreign Ministry demanded “clarification and information” concerning a report published in Der Spiegel which said Spain was a target of secret surveillance by the NSA.

• The report published in Der Spiegel explains how German intelligence services cooperate closely with the NSA, but also states that Germany for its own part is a target of US surveillance. But there is more to this story within the European Union.

• Mailpile is an Iceland-based free/open source email service that’s privacy oriented, integrating easy-to-use encryption and scalable searching. The idea is to produce something that’ll run well as a cloud-based service or on your own desktop. They want to ship their first milestone in January 2014, and are looking to raise $100K on Indi-egogo to pay for the developer hours to see the project through. With the Mozilla foundation abandoning support for my beloved (but creaky) Thunderbird, I’m very interested in seeing what they come up with, and I’ve put my money where my mouth is, with a $128 donation. I’m especially impressed by their determination to integrate easy-to-use mail crypto — the holy grail of email for decades now.

• Critics demands answers from chairman Mike Rogers after claims that committee failed to share document before key vote

• The hiring team for the NSA doesn’t have it easy these days. Their advance scouts got absolutely slammed by some college students during a meet-and-greet at a Wisconsin university. And just recently, the agency cut a ton of potential Snowdens loose by unceremoniously announcing plans to fire 90% of its systems administrators. With the agency swiftly being voted “least popular” by many Americans (and around the world), the HR division has its hands full keeping the agency staffed.

• he NSA has plans for a new online surveillance system…

• …contradicted by two revelations at the end of last week.

• Discussions aimed at banning espionage between the two countries in the future are scheduled at the end of August between Gerhard Schindler, the head of the German Foreign Intelligence Service (BND), and his US counterparts.

• No sooner had the Obama administration released a white paper laying out the legal justification for its mass phone data collection program than legal experts began to poke holes in it.

• A German writer is fed up with the hypocrisy of an exhibitionist society outraged by the limits of privacy. Yes, you are being monitored. Now get back to your celebrity Twitter feed.

• Thanks to Edward Snowden, the question of internet security is one currently raised across the globe. While US-based online platforms are facing a significant amount of users leaving their services, the NSA scandal has also been a godsend for some providers, who have seen a rush of new customers.

• In one haunting piece, Stew recalled meeting the great folk singer Victor Jara during an early-‘70s visit to Chile with Phil Ochs and Jerry Rubin. Not long after that, Jara, only 27, had been tortured—his fingers cut off–and killed by Pinochet’s thugs following the coup that deposed of democratically elected Salvador Allende. (Phil Ochs, in probably the final major act of his tortured life, later organized a tribute to Jara in New York that I attended, featuring a surprise guest appearance by Bob Dylan.)

• Edward Snowden is safe from American “justice” for the moment, and he will certainly go down as the most effective whistle-blower in history. His revelations are going to cause a wholesale restructuring of the world’s most important communications system, the Internet. And that, rather than his whereabouts and fate, is now the real story.

• The National Security Agency’s collection of every American’s telephone dialing information is hotly contested in the court of public opinion and in Congress. It is now seeing its first test in the courts since its existence was revealed.

• Email has come a long way in the last decade. Much of this has to do with the rise of centralised services offered by the likes of Google,

• Microsoft and Yahoo. But, the fact that user data rests physically on their servers, located mostly within the legal jurisdiction of the U.S.

• State, raises serious questions about how user data is vulnerable to the snooping eyes of the State. The abrupt shutdown of Lavabit and Silent Mail, two services that offered robust encryption at the server-end to protect user privacy, has highlighted the need to explore alternative services and approaches to mail storage.

• Previously we covered how to protect your privacy by preventing people from tagging your photos in both Facebook and Picasa. Consider this a follow-up as it looks like Facebook is a bit more involved in privacy intrusions than anyone had previously thought.

• Jon Stewart once reacted to a Barack Obama speech by marveling that “at 11 o’clock on a Tuesday, a prominent politician spoke to Americans about race as though they were adults.”

• But Mr Bowden said the figures were “utterly meaningless” since the memorandum is vague about where the data is taken from.

• He adds: “After subtracting video media and spam, which accounts for most data by volume, 1.6% is an admission the NSA has become a surveillance leviathan.”

• Mr Bowden also said there was “no privacy restraint or restriction” in the way that the NSA can access the communications of foreigners.

• Republican who led Congress revolt against surveillance insists members did not see document before 2011 Patriot Act vote

• German intelligence agency criticised for sending large quantities of mobile phone metadata to the NSA and GCHQ

• Deutsche Telekom and United Internet have launched a super-secure German email service that they claim defeats the data-sniffing shenanigans of the likes of the NSA.

• Spying must get boring sometimes. Identifying targets. Wiretapping unsuspecting citizens. Sifting through all that private data. It must get old. Maybe that’s why the NSA introduced gamification elements into its software to encourage a little bit of healthy competition between analysts.

• In Europe, Germany has been a nexus of debate over American surveillance: it’s allegedly both one of the most-watched countries in western Europe and a close partner of the NSA. It’s said to be central to the XKeyscore information-gathering program — and, according to new documents reviewed by Der Spiegel, its analysts have the maddest skilz in the business.

• U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance program was a “very small” part of his talks in Colombia.

• Is the U.S. ready to embrace the notion that Brazil has finally arrived on the world stage? Judging from the recent National Security Agency (N.S.A.) scandal, Washington is very skittish about the up and coming South American player. According to journalist Glen Greenwald, N.S.A. intercepts of Brazilian transmissions, including phone calls and internet communications, have been massive. Indeed, within the wider Americas region, N.S.A. snooping on the South American nation is second only to the U.S. in terms of overall scope. Writing in O Globo newspaper, Greenwald adds that the N.S.A. spied on the Brazilian Embassy in Washington and the South American nation’s mission at the United Nations in New York.

• “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer drew fire Monday for hosting what critics said was a deeply unbalanced forum on the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities.

• Schieffer, who has been vocally critical of leaker Edward Snowden, brought together three people who supported the NSA: its former director, Michael Hayden, Peter King, a Republican congressman, and Dutch Ruppersberger, a Democrat.

• My black friends in New York, particularly those who don’t live in the fancier precincts of Manhattan, have been harassed by the NYPD in a way that I, as a white guy, will never experience.

• They’ve been stopped and frisked, for reasons known only to the officers. Almost every young black male I know has a story to tell.

• His performance was an embarrassment to journalism.

• The opposition Social Democrats have slammed German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government over its handling of the NSA spying affair. Meanwhile, Chancellery Minister Ronald Pofalla is testifying again in parliament.

• It turns out that the NSA’s domestic and world-wide surveillance apparatus is even more extensive than we thought. Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the largest Internet companies provide information to the NSA, betraying their users. Some, as we’ve learned, fight and lose. Others cooperate, either out of patriotism or because they believe it’s easier that way.

• The modest reforms Obama proposed do not begin to address the fundamental question of whether we want the National Security Agency to log all of our phone calls and read at least some of our emails, relying on secret judicial orders from a secret court for permission. The president indicated he is willing to discuss how all this is done — but not whether.

• Longstanding BBW supporters may remember that I was once Director of this parish. For the past two years, I’ve been a Common Councilman in the City of London, aka the Square Mile. These two things crossed over significantly this week, with the news (broken by Quartz) that a company named Renew, which had installed bins in the Square Mile, was using a data collection capacity installed in those bins to collect information about mobile telephone usage amongst passers-by.

Civil Rights

• A Freedom of Information Act request has shown that the Central Intelligence Agency once maintained a file on MIT professor Noam Chomsky.

• The agency had for years denied keeping a file on MIT professor; FOIAed file reveals the truth

• The Central Intelligence Agency compiled, and may have illegally destroyed, records on anti-war activist Noam Chomsky, according to a Freedom of Information Act response obtained by Foreign Policy.

• The CIA would never keep a file on political dissident Noam Chomsky—right? For years, the agency denied keeping a Chomsky file, but a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI has punctured a hole in that story, Foreign Policy reports. Turns out that a CIA memo to the FBI on June 8, 1970, highlights Chomsky’s opposition to the Vietnam War, and requests information on an upcoming trip by activists to North Vietnam that has the “ENDORSEMENT OF NOAM CHOMSKY.”

• Renowned American journalist and author Michael Hastings was working on an exposé of CIA director John Brennan before dying in a car crash in June.

• According to “San Diego 6 News”, Hastings’s wife, Elise Jordan, has confirmed that CIA Director, John Brennan was Hastings’ next exposé project. Jordan said the article would be published in an upcoming edition of Rolling Stone magazine.

• San Diego 6 News reported that last month “a source” provided it an email hacked from vice president for STRATFOR Global Intelligence, Fred Burton, claiming that Brennan was leading the “witch hunts” against journalists. Text of the email reads: “Brennan is behind the witch hunts of investigative journalists learning information from inside the beltway sources.” Stratfor is a CIA contractor.

• The 33-year-old Hastings was killed in a car crash on 18th June 2013 in Los Angeles. “San Diego 6 News” has said Hastings died “under suspicious circumstances.”

• After issuing years of denials, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has revealed that it kept a file on MIT professor Noam Chomsky dating back to his days as an anti-war activist in the 1970s. According to John Hudson of Foreign Policy magazine’s The Cable blog, a public records request by FOIA attorney Ken McClanahan turned up a memo referring to the file, leading to the realization that a file must have existed although it had since been purged from the record.

• Elise Jordan, wife of Michael Hastings confirmed that her husband had been working on a story involving CIA Director John Brennan. Last month a source provided San Diego Channel Six, with a copy of an email, hacked from super secret contractor Stratfor’s President Fred Burton. The email , which was posted on Wikileaks, says that then Obama counter terrorism czar Brennan was in charge of the spying on journalists.

• Hastings, who died under very mysterious circumstances in an auto accident had contacted the WikiLeaks lawyer just before he died and seemed very nervous. The details of his accident remain murky. A witness, who claimed the car was speeding, also said he saw an explosion before the car hit the palm tree.

• After years of outright denial, the Central Intelligence Agency has finally admitted to having gathered records on Noam Chomsky during his days as an anti-war activist in the 1970s.

• Foreign Policy‘s “The Cable” blog obtained a government disclosure from the FBI revealing that the CIA not only snooped on the well-known linguistics professor, but also maintained a file and secretly attempted to scrub it from their archives at some point over the past few decades.

• The Central Intelligence Agency compiled and may have illegally destroyed records about political scientists and anti-war activist Noam Chomsky, revealed a Foreign Policy magazine article.

• The NDAA violates the Geneva Convention international treaty agreement for humanitarian treatment of prisoners of war. Constitutionally authorized treaties are incorporated into our Constitution as part of the “supreme law of the land.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• An internet milestone has just been reached: Pirate Bay has passed its 10th anniversary. The iconic/notorious site (pick your adjective) celebrated with a party just outside Stockholm. Who knows, perhaps entertainment bosses were simultaneously weeping into their champagne and plotting new action against their favourite enemy. The filesharing hub is arguably the most famous of all sites providing access to torrent files and magnet links to allow peer-to-peer sharing. If that means nothing to you, it’s like being able to swap those tapes you made of Radio 1 chart shows with anyone in the world.

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