● 08.21.13

● Links 21/8/2013: Diversity on the Desktop, Android as Distro

Posted in News Roundup at 5:22 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• In my view, this is a terrible blow for the open-source and Linux communities. PJ and Groklaw were the voice of reason and resistance in the face of FUD from Linux litigant SCO Group for the better part of the last 10 years. SCO had been trying to argue that Linux somehow infringed or violated SCO’s intellectual property. Over a decade-long battle, Groklaw informed us all (via its direct and email sources) about all the legal and backroom drama of the whole SCO ordeal. – See more at: http://www.eweek.com/blogs/security-watch/groklaw-nsa-and-fear-uncertainty-and-doubt.html/#sthash.KZRUhZKb.dpuf

• Alex Polvi is living the great Silicon Valley archetype. Together with some old school friends, he’s piecing together a tech revolution from inside a two-car Palo Alto garage.

• He’s like Dave Packard or Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin — at least up to a point. The difference is that, from his vantage point here in the 21st century, Polvi views his garage with a certain sense of irony — “straight-up Palo Alto-style,” he says — and he harbors ambitions that suit our particular time. He wants to change the way we build the entire internet, making this worldwide network of computer servers as easy to update as the browsers on our laptops.

• Computer worms are considered to be one of the best weapons in a computer attacker’s arsenal. Through these computer worms, evil-doers intrude into computer systems to destroy files, attack other computer systems, steal data and so on. The concept of a computer worm is not new; attackers have been using worms to attack computer systems for decades now. If you look back at the history of computer worms, you’ll see that the computer worms that caused the most damage were directed toward the Microsoft Windows OS. Is this because of the number of Windows vulnerabilities, or is it merely due to the number of Windows users? The question remains unanswered. Meanwhile, apart from the Morris worm, very few worms have been directed toward Linux.

Desktop

• What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?

• My main PC is an old Ratel Value (ATI graphics) from System76. The portable is the Eee 1005PEB (Intel graphics), and lastly, the Ubuntu rig is a System76 Wild Dog Performance (NVIDIA graphics). The first two rigs run with 2GB RAM, the latter with four. My main system runs with two monitors.

• Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

• Dual-desktop (Samsung monitors),Linus to NVIDIA and Oscar the Grouch wallpapers.

• Today in Open Source: Diversity and the Linux desktop. Plus: Linux IT popularity, and Linux hobbyist developers

• If your school has Wi-Fi, an inexpensive Chromebook may be your best computer choice. Indeed, some schools have already decided that Chromebooks are the best laptops for their students.

Server

• Unix, the core server operating system in enterprise networks for decades, now finds itself in a slow, inexorable decline. IDC predicts that Unix server revenue will slide from $10.2 billion in 2012 to $8.7 billion in 2017, and Gartner sees Unix market share slipping from 16% in 2012 to 9% in 2017.

• Jean Bozman, research vice president at IDC Enterprise Server Group, attributes the decline to platform migration issues; competition from Linux and Microsoft; more efficient hardware with more powerful processor cores, which is less expensive and requires less maintenance; and the abundance of Unix-specific apps that can now also run on competitor’s servers.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Jon Masters describes some of the features coming in Linux 3.10, and summarises the past month of activity in the Linux kernel community

• This past week the newest major update from the KDE Community hit general availability with the release of KDE 4.11.

• “Plasma Workspaces delivers further improvements to basic functionality with a smoother taskbar, smarter battery widget and improved sound mixer,” the release announcement states. “he introduction of KScreen brings intelligent multi-monitor handling to the Workspaces, and large scale performance improvements combined with small usability tweaks make for an overall nicer experience.”

• With the Linux 3.11 kernel due to be released in the coming weeks, here’s an overview of the most exciting changes for this next major Linux kernel update.

Graphics Stack

• Nvidia has announced that a new driver is now available for download, 325.05.03, providing Beta support for OpenGL 4.4 and GLSL 4.40.

• The Qualcomm Snapdragon DRM/KMS graphics driver for the Linux kernel is still being revised and looks like it’s being taken serious enough that it will be mainlined in due time.

• This Snapdragon DRM driver isn’t being written by Qualcomm themselves but rather Rob Clark, the independent Linux graphics contributor now employed by Red Hat who for more than the past year has been working on Freedreno: his pet project to reverse-engineer Qualcomm’s Adreno graphics cores on their SoCs and to provide a fully open-source 2D/3D driver.

Applications

• NixNote (previously Nevernote) is an unofficial open source Evernote client written in Java, but it seems this will change with the next major release and C++/Qt will be used instead.

• The XPRA project provides a means of having “persistent remote application” support for X11 applications atop an X.Org Server. This allows for X applications to live on even if the connection to the server has been dropped.

• In addition to my trunk Inkscape builds, i have also started building trunk builds of the GIMP “Goat Invasion”. The “goat invasion” builds of the GIMP are basically what GIMP 2.10 will be with all the GEGL library goodness (this blog post is a good outline of some of the improvements GEGL provides the GIMP).

• Graphic artist Ludovic Celle has been an open source convert for about 10 years. His first step was trading in Windows for Unbuntu. A couple years after that, transitioned from programs like Sketchup and Photoshop to an open source arsenal of Blender, Inkscape, and GIMP. His artwork is proof of the unsung creative muscle of open source software.

Instructionals/Technical

• If you do a lot of typing it could be useful to have a program that can easily manage your custom shortcuts, create and test them.

• For all these things you can use the program autokey.

Wine or Emulation

• The new version of CrossOver is based on the latest version of Wine and thus includes a lot of improvements for various Windows application, like Starcraft II, World of Tanks or Microsoft Office. But the most conspicuous improvement on Linux is a new graphical user interface, which now includes a menu of launchers for all installed Windows applications, and which can be customized by the user.

Games

• Maybe, the most realistic football simulation, Football Manager 2014 from Sports Interactive, is available to Pre-Order now, and the great news for Linux users is: FM is finally coming to Linux.

• Hate Plus, a visual novel adventure developed by none other than Christine Love, will arrive today on Steam for Linux.

• Wargame Airland Battle had previously stated that it intended to make its way from the PC, to the Mac and Linux. As the time draws nearer, players can now get early access beta to be able to experience the strategy title on the other formats. Plus, since the game is designed to work cross-platform those utilizing the beta for Mac and Linux wont be hampered by a lack of people.

• As of late, things have been moving forward quickly for a little company known as EnGeniux- their console, the OTON, does something that none have done before: it automatically creates games. We’ve checked out the OTON, and it does some pretty neat stuff- one of the promises on the OTON’s official site is that it will allow players to mod games and profit off of their creations. It also says that developers won’t have to worry about licensing fees at all- they’ll receive all the money from sales of their own games.

• Unigine Engine is built by no other than Unigine Corp., the company behind the Heaven DX11 Benchmark software.

• GOG.com is looking to hire a senior software engineer and it seems that this job position is signaling the arrival of this popular digital distribution service on the Linux platform.

• Estranged, a Half-Life 2 mod that has garnered a lot of attention, has been announced for the Linux platform.

• According to the developers, Estranged is a work in progress mod that tells the story of a lone fisherman whose ship is stranded on a mysterious island during a violent storm.

• I’ve updatesteamd the Steam repository with Fedora 20 packages and removed Fedora 17 bits from the SPEC files since it has now gone EOL.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Any regular Linux user will know that the two most common desktop environments are Gnome and KDE. Additionally, each desktop environment likes to pack its own software along with it, everything from core items such as system setting control panels to photo management software.

• Paradigm is a tentative attempt to create four different desktop paradigms for users to choose from once they start up their aging computers when using LXLE. Just because a computer may be aging shouldn’t hinder your work flow.

• People grow accustom to a certain way of doing things, particularly on a computer. If a basic layout (paradigm) of a familiar OS is available then its much more likely the user will enjoy the platform and have an easier time learning and using it.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• David King, the maintainer of the Vinagre VNC client for the GNOME desktop environment, had the pleasure of announcing earlier today, August 20, that the first Beta release of the upcoming Vinagre 3.10 application is available for download and testing.

• The application has been updated recently, getting a window mode (previously it was full-screen only) along with other interesting changes. Also, the application now uses GraphicsMagick which means it supports 80+ file types.

• A new version of the digiKam Recipes ebook is available for download. All screenshots and material have been updated to reflect changes in the most recent version of digiKam. The new release of the ebook also features the new Apply EXIF Metadata to Multiple Photos recipe and a refreshed cover.

• I start my work as a SOK(season of KDE) 2011 student. I found my project thanks to Lydia and started. My first problem was downloading calligra source that was about 500Mb that time, and one of my friend did that for me.

• The UI this moment is more/less just a graphical interface to the most common subversion commands. It has no real defined workflows integrated (branching, tagging etc.), user has to know what them have to use. But it interact with other KDE components for instance export/import with drag&drop from dolphin or other filemanager.

• KIO is very basic, it is a simple chance displaying contents of SVN repositories including views on specific revisions from within standard filemanager. With the commandline interface of kdesvn some context menus are integrated which let you do some basic stuff.

• Packages for the release of Plasma Mediacentre 1.1 are available for Kubuntu 13.04 and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA (which also contains KDE SC 4.11).

• After discussions at kde-core-devel, Akademy and release-team you can find the release schedule for KDE SC 4.12 at http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.12_Release_Schedule

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Quick update for Numix fans: a new Numix PPA has been created and it hosts daily builds for Numix GTK theme, two Numix icon themes, a Plank theme and even a Numix wallpaper. More Numix related artwork will be added to this PPA in the future.

Distributions

• Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Red Hat (RHT) have their own OpenStack distributions. SUSE and Ubuntu each bundle OpenStack with their private cloud platforms. So does VMware (VMW) — king of virtualization — need its own OpenStack distribution to compete with emerging cloud rivals?

• Parsix GNU/Linux 5.0, a live and installation DVD based on Debian, aiming to provide a ready-to-use, easy-to-install desktop and laptop optimized operating system, has been announced and is now available for download.

• Simple because I did not see any point in it. The distribution wasn’t bringing anything new to the table, and the custom-coded installer was several steps removed (in the wrong direction) from that of its parent distribution. But that was back in 2011, which for a distribution with a 6-month release cycle, is a long time.

Slackware Family

• Well, not much, but at least it will make Slackware works better with Linux Kernel 3.x and also GPT-based hard disks.

Debian Family

• Last weekend was Debian’s 20th birthday, making it the oldest Linux distributions still in existence. Debian was created on 16th August, 1993, and is named for Debra Lynn and Ian Murdock. (The next oldest distribution is Red Hat, which was created in October 1994.) A birthday party was held in conjunction with DebConf

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Ubuntu Edge smartphone campaign has raised over $11 million on crowdfunding portal Indiegogo, making it the most-funded campaign in crowdfunding history.

• There is some really awesome work going on right now in Ubuntu, and much of it is fixing and resolving issues and bottlenecks that have been an issue in Ubuntu for many years. Not only are we building an awesome convergence platform and cloud orchestration story, but we are re-building much of the core foundations to make these efforts more successful.

• Linux has over the years consistently proven itself to be a worthwhile alternative on the desktop and has even become the champion in mobile space in the form of Android. For a long time though its inability to bring about the much advertised Year of the Linux desktop has been blamed, at least partly, on its pathetic gaming support but since the inception and release of Steam for Linux, that is all changing.

• Another Virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit is set to take place next week to get a better grasp of the Ubuntu 13.10 goals reached and the work ahead within the Ubuntu ecosystem for the next three to six months.

• This next “vUDS” event is taking place online from the 27th to 29th of August. Details for those wanting to participate can be found at uds.ubuntu.com.

Flavours and Variants

• Elementary OS is a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop, and like many or most distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop, does not use the parent distribution’s Unity desktop. It also does not use the GNOME Shell either.

• Rather, it uses a custom desktop interface called Pantheon, which like the Depth Desktop Environment of Linux Deepin, is built atop GNOME 3 technologies.

• The RhinoLINUX Software Project was pleased to announce Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of the RhinoLINUX Lite Xfce Edition 6.0 Linux operating system.

• Two years after the “Jupiter” release, elementary OS 0.2 Luna (stable) has been made available for download recently. With a bit of a delay, here’s a quick overview of what to expect from Luna, along with screenshots and of course, a video.

Devices/Embedded

• Malayasian car company Proton has launched a Suprima S hatchback with an Android-based IVI system. The Proton Infotainment System runs on a “pre-ICS” version of Android, and has a 7-inch touchscreen, WiFi, Bluetooth, microSD, and a GPS with Malaysia’s Lokatoo navigation software.

• Intel kicked off a five month Yocto Project Innovation Challenge today, offering 254 prizes to developers who submit embedded Linux product or project ideas involving Yocto Project software running on Intel processors. Six types of prizes — ranging from $50 gift cards, to Yocto Project hoodies and blimps, to 480GB SSDs — will be awarded to winning contest entries between now and the end of the year, and all the ideas will be shared publicly.

• Arrow Electronics and Terasic have announced a $249, Linux- and Android-ready SBC development kit built around Altera’s hybrid ARM+FPGA Cyclone V SoC, supported by a RocketBoards.org community site. The Sockit Development Kit offers 2GB RAM plus I/O interfaces including VGA, audio, gigabit Ethernet, and USB, plus high speed on-board expansion via off-the-shelf or custom expansion cards.

• Thinking about launching a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign to fund a custom Linux-powered SBC for controlling your dream product? Gumstix says it has come up with a better way: find 50 collaborators, agree on a design, and have first articles of your custom SBC built and booting Linux in under three weeks. Sounds tempting, but how is this possible?

• Gumstix, a company that has been selling small system boards – about the size of a “gum stick” – for years, is now offering crowdfunding for hardware that users can design themselves. (Stick with me here, this is pretty cool.)

• There’s nothing you do on a Pi that you can’t do on any Linux system.

Phones

• New competition is emerging for Apple and Android-based smartphones, with smaller players taking away some market share in developing countries, Juniper Research said in a report released on Monday.

• The new emerging players include Nokia’s Asha operating system, Linux-based Sailfish and the HTML 5 system that Juniper believes will begin to gain ground in niche markets around the world within the next five years.

• • White House: US given ‘heads up’ before Miranda detained

• On Sunday, David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained for 9 hours at Heathrow airport. He was questioned under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and freed only when officers reached the legal time limit for either arresting or releasing him. His electronic equipment was confiscated and he had no access to publicly funded legal advice.

Ballnux

• Tablets go large: Samsung is reportedly doing a 12-incher. Apple is also looking into larger tablets. Is this a trend?

Android

• Many of us have ‘learn a foreign language’ written on our bucket list somewhere. Be it French, Spanish, or even Swahili, learning a new language not only makes you multilingual, but also introduces to another culture. That said, despite the fact that most of us want to learn a new language, only few of us succeed in doing so.

• The main reason for this is that learning a language takes a lot of self-discipline, and more importantly, immersion. Immersion means you have to keep in touch with the language many times over. You have to revise the vocabulary and practice the conjugations and many other aspects of the languages almost every day.

• Thom’s point is that Linux, not specifically addressing GNU/Linux, is a kernel, the core of an operating system that allows other processes to access the hardware. Without the kernel, there is no computer, so building an operating system around a kernel makes sense. The term “GNU/Linux” addresses the combination of userland programs (like a shell and command line tools) and desktop environments with the Linux kernel, building what we call the Linux distros. Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware, and every other Linux distro are combinations of desktop environments built on top of their own fork of the Linux kernel, this is what creates an operating system. It takes both to make a computer run.

• One of the issues with writing opinion posts on a site like Phandroid is that nobody outside the community takes you too seriously. “You’re just a fanboy” is the usual reception I would receive, without paying attention to the argument I had made.

• PandaWill opened pre-sales on a $221, Android-based pico-projector that can be used as a standalone mini-PC via Bluetooth-paired peripherals. The pocket-sized EPICT EPP-100 runs Android 4.2.2 on a dual-core Allwiner A20 SoC, offers WiFi and dual USB ports, and displays 800 x 480-pixel, 35 lumens images at up to 80 inches away.

• Is Android Really a Linux Distribution? OS News has a short but pithy article about whether or not Android is really Linux, and if it’s actually just another Linux distribution.

• The CyanogenMod team is launching a new online service that that lets you locate a missing phone, remotely wipe it, or perform other actions. If that doesn’t sound original, it’s because there are a number of similar service already available.

• When I wrote my LibreOffice 4 review, I mentioned an Android port. Well, I was a little bit mistaken, because an official release is still well off. However, there’s one cool thing that the latest version of this office suite brings, and that’s remote control from Android devices.

• Android has been growing its market share at such a fast clip that it is creating success for numerous companies focused on it. According to new research from the folks over at Flurry, Samsung may be the biggest Android-driven winner of all. Flurry surveyed 45,340 Android device users, of whom 88 percent used phones and 12 percent used tablets, and found that Samsung is far and away the dominant Android device maker. In fact, Apple should consider Samsung the biggest threat to its iOS business.

Free Software/Open Source

• Brackets, the open-source editor created by Adobe is now available for Linux systems. It is very usefull for web designers and developers, because it has support for HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

• This “Open Source” organization did a lot of cool projects along the time, I participated myself in a few and reported positively about them, one such project was a summer program with many workshops (mostly about development) at a local university. So I gladly accepted when I was invited as a guest at the ‘graphics design and editing’ workshop, which as the title says, it didn’t went that smooth…

• Mailpile is a relatively rare thing: a software project that looks certain to achieve its crowdfunding goal. The Mailpile Indiegogo campaign is less than $5,000 away from its $100,000 target, still with 22 days left to run, so it’s clearly struck a chord with its close to 2,000 backers. Still, it’s not hugely surprising — given how timely this pro-privacy project is.

• Dropbox has made its mark as an integral productivity tool. Simple file sharing and syncing makes it easy to keep all your important documents and files on hand, wherever you are.

• If you’re anything like me, you’ve hit the space limit of your free Dropbox account, and wondered if the Open Source world has any alternatives. Good news! Sparkleshare has you covered. Combined with a Bitbucket account and a little effort, you can have practically unlimited storage, for free!

• What would you not use Sparkleshare for? Git is not designed for large files. Bitbucket will not allow you to upload a file bigger than a 100MB, and you may see a significant performance impact for files over 10MB. Sparkleshare may not be the best choice if you’re sharing your MP3 collection, or other sizeable files.

Events

• LinuxCon and CloudOpen Europe Co-Located With Linux Kernel Summit Represents Largest Gathering of Linux and Open Cloud Professionals Across Europe

Web Browsers

• When it comes to crashing, just like with speed, Sauce Labs finds that not all Web browsers are created equally.

Chrome

• SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Google has released the latest version of its Chrome web browser for the Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems with security fixes and improvements.

• A blog post from Google project manager Jason Kersey said that there are 25 security fixes and that a number of them came from the reporting community.

• Also fresh are improved Omnibox suggestions, and Google said that these will be based more closely on previous searches. The Omnibox, by the way, is what Google calls the Chrome search box or website address field.

• Google was proud to announce a few minutes ago, August 20, the promotion of the Google Chrome 29 web browser to the stable channel, supporting the Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and Chrome Frame platforms.

Mozilla

• This past weekend myself and reps from across North America spent the weekend working from Mozilla’s San Francisco office to collaborate on a plan for North America. During these two days, we built a plan that will help us grow the contributor community in North America and focus on areas we feel are priorities.

• Web app testing-as-a-service company Sauce Labs has released its latest browser crash data, and remarkably enough, the least stable web browser today probably isn’t the one you think it is.

• A group of over 10 volunteers have completed a near full translation of the free opensource Internet browser after more than a year’s work.

• The following tutorial will teach all Mozilla Firefox users how to re-enable the Blink Tag (also known as the blink element) and the blink effect from the text-decoration: blink; CSS property on the latest stable version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

• The Google Chrome browser is out in a new version 29 and it includes fixes for at least 25 vulnerabilities in addition to a few cool new features. Most significantly, Goole has improved omnibox suggestions for what you may be searching for or interested in based on your recent activity. There is also a nearly instant way to reset the browser back to original settings, which can be useful if extensions or any other components are presenting problems.

SaaS/Big Data

• “One problem about Big Data is that people want to deal with a bunch of data that is not neatly structured into columns with fields that hold a person’s first name, last name, etc. That structured data works well for information that does not change very often. In the world of Big Data, a lot of the data comes from server logs or the navigation history of a particular visitor to your website.”

• Morphlabs, which has focused on enabling Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) functions through public and private OpenStack cloud deployments, has announced a new new $10 million Series D investment that will help it expand its OpenStack efforts in Asia. The company had already been offering training services for OpenStack in both the U.S. and Asia, and is also working in partnership with NEC on OpenStack public cloud services for Asia.

Databases

• Since the National Security Agency’s PRISM surveillence program was leaked to the press in June, the public and corporate backlash has some analysts estimating billions of dollars in losses for the IT services industry. In this context, developing an open source alternative to commercial cloud platforms becomes even more important, argues Brian Aker, a fellow in the HP cloud services division.

• Oracle, the company behind MySQL, provides MySQL Utilities, a collection of command-line scripts for accomplishing some common database administration tasks. We put the utilities through their paces on CentOS 6 and MySQL 5.6.

• NoSQL database startup FoundationDB has made its ACID-compliant tech generally available, after an extended beta that has seen over 2,000 people try out the company’s unorthodox database.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Questions about LibreOffice development efforts or how to implement specific improvements are among the most frequent requests we see at Lanedo. As a result, this LibreOffice development howto summarizes steps and tips to allow everyone interested to easily get involved.

CMS

• Lawyer Plugin, a new WordPress plugin for attorneys and law firms, is bringing open source development to the legal industry.

Education

• As of this writing, there are only 28 hours left in the indiegogo campaign to build the Ubuntu Edge phone, and the campaign looks to be $20 million short of the goal. On the bright side, this also means that there were 10,760 people willing to pay a good chunk of money for a phone that they most likely didn’t need. For the past month, Larry the Free Software Guy has been posting a list of worthy projects that are in need of funds every time he mentions Ubuntu Edge. If you are disappointed in the fund raising campaign this list might be worth a look.

Healthcare

• When health care is struggling to meet demand, open source innovation could improve service and save money…

BSD

• The FreeBSD Project has announced the second release candidate for FreeBSD 9.2.

• Relying on more than one OS helps ensure the online availability and reliability of the Internet’s global DNS infrastructure, according to VeriSign.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The main difference is that there is now an option to save jobs (via “unqueue”, but also from gbch-xr) in a single XML file rather than a “script” file and a “command” file.

Project Releases

• For quite a long time now, I have been compiling VLC packages in the 2.0 series (nicknamed “Twoflower”). My standard way of working is to prepare tarballs with pre-compiled code for the internally used libraries (the “contribs” in VideoLAN terms – stuff like ffmpeg, matroska, dvdcss etcetera) and then leave those precompiled tarballs relatively unchanged while I update the VLC version between builds. That way I can kind of guarantee that the internal encoding and decoding capabilities do not break all of a sudden – new bugs are usually easily tracked down to VLC bugs.

Public Services/Government

• Open source evangelists are arguing that the government should pursue wholesale open source adoption as soon as possible. Is this approach the best route to take for sustained, long term government use of open source?

• As even a cursory glance at articles on Open Enterprise over the last few years will indicate, open source is a massive success in practically every market. Except, unfortunately, on the desktop (famously) and more, generally, for consumers. And as Aral Balkan points out in an important post from a few weeks ago, that’s a real problem….

• [...]

• A company based around open source and privacy, inspired by Snowden’s leaks and GCHQ’s massive surveillance programme? That’s pretty remarkable, and on its own would make the endeavour worth supporting. But there’s another hugely important reason why we should get behind this idea: this is a British project, based in Brighton.

• Silicon Roundabout is all very well, but it’s largely driven by giant US companies and their agendas. What the UK’s computing industry needs is a vision and a platform that is suitable for a wide variety of startups offering both local and global products. It’s hard to tell from the rather scant details we have, but the premise of Codename Prometheus is certainly promising, since it would allow new entrants to use open source to address the mainstream consumer market – something that has been hard to do so far.

Licensing

• Samsung has released software that could help a brand new class of storage devices work with Linux-based smartphones and computers.

• Made late last week, the code release is the result of a mini-saga involving Samsung and the open source software community. It might never have happened — at least not officially — if not for an anonymous hacker who calls herself “rxrz.”

Openness/Sharing

• We have seen this happen in the world of creative content with Creative Commons. Larry Lessig, following a straightforward reading of the US Constitution and building on many of the insights published years earlier by Lewis Hyde in the book The Gift, realized that while there was nothing wrong with commercializing content per se, there was something very wrong about treating cultural resources as private, alienable property forever. Lessig believed, and I agree, that there is a benefit to giving the public some agency over the content that defines their culture, just as open source gives other developers—even users—agency over the software they have. Look at how the public has used that agency to create Wikipedia, a phenomenal collection of one of our most valuable cultural artifacts: human knowledge.

• Dr. James Bradner and Jun Qi work together in a lab at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. They have been using “crowd-sourcing” – asking for ideas from scientists everywhere – in developing JQ1, a new cancer drug named for Qi. Bradner’s lab worked with Dr. Saptarsi Haldar at Case to publish his recent results using JQ1 to treat mice with heart failure. (Sam Ogden, Dana-Farber)

• Last year, our team of Code for America Fellows received a call to action. Our partners at the City of Philadelphia needed a way to reach out to citizens left out of traditional public engagement. So we built a tool that used the simple power of text messaging to help government and citizens connect. We called it Textizen.

Open Access/Content

• The City of Boston has teamed with edX to create BostonX. It will offer free online college courses throughout the city. And it will make MOOCs (massive open online courses) available at community colleges and libraries throughout the city.

Open Hardware

• Ikea’s not the only place you can get a build-your-own-furniture puzzle. If you’re into the whole open source thing, there’s a new repository of completely free furniture designs that are ripe for the downloadin’. The only hurdle? You have to actually make the pieces before you can put ‘em together.

• Technopark-based International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) has developed a low-cost telepresence robot prototype ‘TR-7’ based on open source hardware and software platforms.

Programming

• The open-source PHP language is one of the most widely deployed technologies on the Web today, powering millions of Websites (including eWEEK). This past week, two important updates were issued for PHP, providing both security and bug fixes. Like many things in the open-source world (and technology in general), there isn’t just one version of PHP that is currently in use—in fact, there are now at least three main stable releases, including PHP 5.5, 5.4 and 5.3. The new security updates are for the 5.5 and 5.4 branches.

• Despite all the programming languages, the thousands of libraries, and the millions (or so it seems) of JavaScript libraries in the web ecosystem, there is still one path to building modern web applications: store everything on a server and when users open up their web browser, the “client”—the code running inside the browser—displays the data and receives user input that is sent back to the server.

• Build systems are deeply siloed by development language and primarily rely on the ’80s model of spelling out targets and instructions. But new tools, such as Gradle, that cater to polyglot apps and the needs of continuous delivery are finally emerging.

Leftovers

• This giant, ambitious chart fit neatly with a trend in nonfiction book publishing of the 1920s and 1930s: the “outline,” in which large subjects (the history of the world! every school of philosophy! all of modern physics!) were distilled into a form comprehensible to the most uneducated layman.

• I wonder if it is good tiding NOW not to restrict singular contribution celebrated by Advanced Computing Systems Association to UNIX but to return to older and simpler computing design principles, like the FORTH dimension , empowering individual programmers across all social domains?

• Oracle Team USA is owned by software billionaire Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle Corp.

• Paint your nails rainbow colors and face disqualification, the Swedish Olympic Committee warned athletes Tuesday.

• Officials are taking a strong stance on Olympic attire after two Swedish athletes sported rainbow nails to support gay rights during the IAAF World Athletics Championships in Moscow last week.

Health/Nutrition

• When Sacha Hall realised her local Tesco was throwing away thousands of pounds of fresh food following a power cut, she thought there could be no harm in taking some to eat.

Security

• Mystery has long shrouded how Apple vets iPhone, iPad, and iPod apps for safety. Now, researchers who managed to get a malicious app up for sale in the App Store have determined that the company’s review process runs at least some programs for only a few seconds before giving the green light.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• It’s not that journalists shouldn’t have opinions–they inevitably do, and they reveal them in numerous ways. But weighing in like this seems especially permissible when a journalist is taking a position that supports existing U.S. policy. It’s only opposing such policies that’s considered “advocacy.”

• Thousands have taken to the streets of Yemen to protest deadly US drone strikes which killed dozens of people over the last two weeks, Iranian media reported. Critics say Washington’s secretive policy is only pushing Yemenis to favor radical groups.

• The White House has quietly placed military aid to Egypt on hold, despite not saying publicly whether the Egyptian military takeover was a coup, Josh Rogin reports exclusively.

• Sgt. Robert Bales and his wife laughed at the charges brought against him for the murder of 16 Afghan civilians in a phone conversation. Prosecutors say they have a recording of the exchange which they will use to demonstrate Bales’ lack of remorse.

• Kristol soon enough weighed in on the the politics of New York police department’s stop-and-frisk program, which had just been declared unconstitutional and amounted to, in the words of federal judge Shira Scheindlin, a “policy of indirect racial profiling.”

• In January 2012, former war correspondent Christopher Hedges and others, including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and specifically the Act’s Section 1021(b)(2), which allows for indefinite detention by the US military of people “who are part of or substantially support Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces engaged in hostilities against the United States.”

• This detention denies those held of the ability to “contest the allegations against them because they have no right to be notified of the specific charges against them,” according to the complaint. The particular issue in question was the vagueness of the terms “substantially support” and “associated forces.”

• Business is booming at the vast base in Nevada, where tomorrow’s Top Guns are learning to target terrorists from afar

• “The use of drones is heavily constrained,” said President Obama during his May speech about national security matters, held in response to growing criticism of the U.S. drone program. “Before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.” Obama went on to promise to repeal some of his own war powers, saying that he intends to “engage Congress about the existing Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF, to determine how we can continue to fight terrorism without keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing.”

• Somewhere in Yemen are about two dozen individuals whom the United States is looking to capture or kill. These are al-Qaida’s senior operational leaders, the men administration officials think are plotting to attack the U.S. and its interests abroad.

• Group brings mock drone aircraft to National Guard Armory

• Murder is murder.

• Valte deferred to the defense officials to respond to questions on whether Philippine laws are clear on the operation of drones in the archipelago.

• More often than not, the United Nations secretariat is perceived to be pliable to American pressures – but not always, at least not on the question in relation to legality of armed drone strikes. And that we learnt first-hand on Tuesday when Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was urged to comment on the frequent use of drones by the CIA against targets in Pakistan’s restive tribal areas. “I have often said, the use of armed drones, like any other weapon, should be subject to long-standing rules of international law including humanitarian law,” he said, and added “This is a very clear position of the United Nations. Every effort should be made to avoid mistakes and civilian casualties”. Of course, he was not as categorical as another UN official who was here sometime back to investigate the impact of drone attacks, Ben Emerson, that the drone strikes ‘contravene international law because they violate Pakistan’s sovereignty’. Not that UN’s rejection is absolute; it does have a role for it and that’s that it is a ‘flying camera’ and that it would shortly put into use unarmed surveillance drones in eastern Congo that is beset with war for the last 20 years or so. But beyond that parallelism, if you please, there is nothing common between what the UN thinks of drones and how the CIA operates them against targets in Pakistan. The US is not at war with Pakistan, nor do its drone operations carry the UN mandate. As to who gets killed there is no accountability; even the CIA is blank about who the drones kill in Pakistan.

• A true cynic would question the timing of Middle East-wide U.S. embassy closings and a barrage of drone attacks in Yemen when the Obama administration is defending its intrusive spying on Americans after exposure by an intelligence agency contractor. Although in May, President Obama told us that he would wind down the war against Al Qaeda and its affiliates, perhaps his newly “outed” unconstitutional domestic spying programs required a threat refresher to justify them. Yet one doesn’t even have to be that cynical to question Obama’s recently reinvigorated war on terrorism.

• Only 2 percent of drone strikes have killed “high value targets,” former counter-terror adviser to David Petraeus, David Kilcullen, notoriously remarked in a New York Times column early in the Obama presidency, where he said that 50 civilians were killed for every “high-value target” assassinated. That means that 98 percent of drone-caused deaths have been a mix of low-level militants, civilians, or another dubious Pentagon classification called “unknown militants.”

• Chancellor Angela Merkel has ignited a furious political row by becoming the first post-war German leader to visit the former Nazi concentration camp at Dachau and then went on to address a campaign rally for her conservative party in a noisy beer tent at a nearby fair.

• Ms Merkel, who faces a general election on 22 September, had been invited to speak at a Bavarian conservative rally in the town of Dachau outside Munich. She agreed to spend an hour at the site of the town’s infamous Nazi concentration camp where 41,500 people were murdered, before her campaign appearance.

• As for us, there are least two lessons to draw. First, we should pay more attention to history. In watching the events convulsing the Middle East, and thinking about how to react to them, it is essential to be aware of how we got to this juncture. Second, the official version of history is often very different from what really happened. During the Cold War, as now, the reality of what the U.S. government was doing was often hidden in classified documents. In the case of the coup against Mossadegh, it’s taken sixty years for the full truth to emerge. Doubtless, it will take almost as long for us to learn everything about the spying agencies’ electronic prosecution of the “War on Terror.” But thanks to Edward Snowden and journalists like Glenn Greenwald, we’ve at least had an advance briefing.

• What is happening today in Egypt has many parallels to the events of 1953 in Iran.

• There’s a war going on for the future CPU cycles of the US Central Intelligence Agency, and behind closed doors and under fluorescent lights, representatives of IBM and Amazon are spitting blood at each other as they vie for the contract.

• Virtually every secrecy debate in the 9/11 case involves the CIA and the overseas prisons where it held and interrogated the five alleged al Qaeda conspirators for three or four years before they were sent to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba in 2006.

• The government maintains everything about that now-defunct program is top secret and that disclosure could jeopardize national security, although some details have leaked or been disclosed by the CIA itself.

• When the Russians moved into Afghanistan, the United States saw that war was an opportunity to mobilize the Muslim world against communism. So the CIA recruited Mujahdeen like Osama bin Laden from all over the Muslin world and they came from Algeria, the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Palestine.

• These fighters were given an ideology and told that the armed struggle is a virtuous thing to do and the notion of jihad as an Islamic terrorist movement was born.

• They were trained and armed by the CIA in Afghanistan. And America has been reaping the harvest of war that the CIA planted.

• Judicial Watch announced that it has filed a certiorari petition with the Supreme Court of the United States to review a 2013 Appeals Court ruling against the Judicial Watch lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Dept. of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency (No. 12-5137)). The suit seeks to force the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to release more than 50 photographs and video recordings of Osama bin Laden taken during and after the U.S. raid upon the terrorist leader’s compound in Pakistan on May 1, 2011.

• Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, and five decades later the US government and the CIA have yet to disclose the documents pertaining to the incident.

• Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter, is currently suing the CIA to release a file containing about 300 pages on Joannides, whom he thinks may have had contact with Oswald prior to the assassination.

• The concept of Remote Viewing is so bizarre that I can’t comprehend what it is or how it is done. In fact, I think that it embraces forces that we don’t understand. I liken it to playing with radioactive materials. At best, it may be fascinating, but the effects can be long-lasting and harmful.

• On Tuesday, Medea Benjamin led a dozen protesters outside the Walter E. Convention Center in Washington D. C. against the United States’ use of drones. Inside, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, including manufacturers who made the drones, was meeting with participants from all over the world.

• Yemen has seen a major surge in drone strikes in the past two weeks, as the US hunts for al Qaeda-affiliated insurgents. But the secretive and indiscriminate attacks are terrorizing and radicalizing Yemenis, say critics.

• If one can understand that President Obama’s administration has sought to avert yet another “Benghazi” debacle—an incident like the death of US ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and several others at the hands of militants in 2012—by pulling out its staff and ordering an unparalleled military mobilization in Yemen, one cannot shy away from acknowledging the danger of a “trigger-happy” strategy in a country as fragile and geo-strategically important as Yemen. Both the Netherlands’ and German intelligence services have disputed the US’s perceived over-reaction at what they viewed as a diffuse threat from Yemen.

Transparency Reporting

• WikiLeaks has released a trove of encrypted “insurance” data on Twitter and Facebook. The data can’t be read without an encryption key, but the movement’s supporters say that could be published later in case anything happens to leading WikiLeaks figures.

• Army whistleblower Pfc. Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison on Wednesday for releasing a trove of government and military documents to WikiLeaks.

• Judge Denise Lind, an Army colonel, delivered the sentence that, while much shorter than the 60 years sought by prosecutors, is unprecedented for a media leak, the Brennan Center for Justice stated.

• “I can’t speak about Mr. Manning personally,” he said, “but the U.S. military is an interesting institution. Most personnel are simply death engineers. But exclude the emotive overtone and you are left with engineer. These are people who like the truth and don’t like bureaucracy.”

• President Obama should commute US Army Private Bradley Manning’s sentence to time already served to allow his immediate release, Amnesty International said today.

• This was never a fair trial – Obama declared Manning’s guilt in advance. But Manning’s punishment is an affront to democracy

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Japan’s nuclear agency dramatically raises status after saying a day earlier that radioactive water leak was only an ‘anomaly’

• Japan’s nuclear agency dramatically raises status after saying a day earlier that radioactive water leak was only an ‘anomaly’

Finance

• …before noting that “critics say” the cuts could have been avoided.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Some of the banners read: “ALEC Makes For-Profit Prisons,” “Moral Monday: No To ALEC,” and “ALEC Attacks All Workers.” The Chicago Moral Monday Coalition partners include: local clergy and laypeople, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), National Nurses United (NNU), US Uncut, Chicago Youth Climate Coalition, Chicago Fracking Working Group, Communities United Against Foreclosures and Evictions, Young People’s Assembly on Violence and Youth Services Project, Southside Together Organizing for Power.

Privacy

• Verizon’s willingness to give the federal government unfettered access to its customers’ phone records is paying off handsomely for the telecommunications giant.

• Simply comparing the number of queries to the number of rules violations doesn’t really tell us very much.

• [...]

• The Obama Administration tends to release classified information that makes it look good.

• …NSA is now collecting the content of domestic e-mails

• The British authorities forced the Guardian newspaper to destroy material leaked by Edward Snowden, its editor has revealed, calling it a “pointless” move that would not prevent further reporting on US and British surveillance programs.

• In a column on Tuesday, Alan Rusbridger said he had received a call from a government official a month ago who told him: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.”

• Here’s a simple rule for any government agency that monitors or polices Americans: If you get to watch us, we get to watch you.

• The plot thickens. British authorities reportedly destroyed hard drives in an attempt to stop the Guardian from disseminating stories about classified mass-surveillance projects. Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger details how security experts from British intelligence agency, GCHQ, told him that the Guardian would have to either hand over their information or have their hard drives destroyed.

• The revelation is especially damaging to British authorities after yesterday’s international incident, where they detained David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, in London’s Heathrow airport and confiscated his laptop and camera.

• As the Post noted, members of Congress can read the unredacted version of the semiannual reports, but only in a special secure room. They cannot take notes or publicly discuss what they read.

• Kudelski SA (KUD), a Swiss digital security company, said it’s accelerating investment in its cybersecurity unit as demand climbed after recent revelations about government surveillance.

• Former congressman Dennis Kucinich has urged that most strict measures, including abolition, should be introduced for those government agencies who have betrayed the American people.

• Whistleblower drew Glenn Greenwald and film-maker Laura Poitras together to expose surveillance programmes

• A probation officer who disclosed a domestic abuse victims details to the alleged abuser has been fined £150 and ordered to pay court costs. Compare this to the fine of £300,000 that Tesco received for ‘false and misleading’ strawberry pricing, and it becomes very apparent just how inconsequential a fine of £150 actually is.

• We have warned about lax attitudes to data protection in the past, highlighting the shockingly low reprimand and dismissal rate for data breaches. The fact that only a tiny fraction of staff are disciplined brings into question how seriously managers take protecting the privacy of their users and local residents.

• In light of ongoing debate about data privacy and security and government surveillance, courtesy of the decision that Edward Snowden made, a significant percentage of users have been flocking to companies that provide some form of security and privacy guarantees. Those guarantees should, however, only be taken with a grain of salt. Put another way, only trust them as far as you can throw them.

• Civil libertarians have long ago lost faith in Barack Obama’s and his continuing expression of support for privacy and individual rights. Just in case anyone is still not convinced, consider the petition this month to the Supreme Court by the Obama Administration. Just last week, Obama waxed poetic about his commitment to privacy. Yesterday however, his Administration took another major swipe at privacy and asked the Supreme Court to reverse the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which held that the police could not conduct warrantless searches of your cellphone when you are arrested. The decision in United States v. Wurie is below.

• If you’re reading quickly, you might skip over the caveat “where necessary, and depending on the context” in that last paragraph. But it’s actually a significant caveat, and the white paper doesn’t discuss the precedent on the other side that complicates the Administration’s position.

• They point out that they really can’t reveal the details, but they’re hopeful that President Obama and the intelligence community recognizes that it’s better for them to come clean themselves. The obvious implication is that everyone knows that there are still thousands of documents held by reporters, and these other abuses are likely to come to light before long:

• The Obama administration, taking the advice of two judges to rush the issue to the Supreme Court, has moved quickly to ask the Justices to rule that police are free to look through the contents of a private cellphone they take from an individual they arrest, and to do so without a judge’s approval.

• Greenwald raises his own money from readers who support what he does, as he explained in a June 4th column in The Guardian:

• “Ever since I began political writing, I’ve relied on annual reader donations to enable me to do the journalism I want to do: first when I wrote at my own Blogspot page and then at Salon. Far and away, that has been the primary factor enabling me to remain independent – to be unconstrained in what I can say and do – because it means I’m ultimately accountable to my readers, who don’t have an agenda other than demanding that I write what I actually think, that the work I produce be unconstrained by institutional orthodoxies and without fear of negative reaction from anyone. It is also reader support that has directly funded much of the work I do, from being able to have research assistants and other needed resources to avoiding having to do the kind of inconsequential work that distracts from that which I think is most necessary and valuable.

• “For that reason, when I moved my blog from Salon to the Guardian, the Guardian and I agreed that I would continue to rely in part on reader support. Having this be part of the arrangement, rather than exclusively relying on the Guardian paying to publish the column, was vital to me. It’s the model I really believe in.”

• This was the last thing he wrote for the Guardian before the Snowden story took over his life, but he dropped a hint of what was coming. “I’ve spent all of this week extensively traveling and working continuously on what will be a huge story: something made possible by being at the Guardian but also by my ability to devote all of my time and efforts to projects like this one.”

• 1. Governments lie about the scope of their surveillance measures against us.

• 2. Governments say that what they are doing in the war on terrorism needs to be secret, but governments have an established record of lying about their need for secrecy.

• 3. When governments say that they are using their powers to fight terrorists, government are lying. Government actually use their expanded powers to pursue whatever they want, including copyright infringement and the War of Drugs. Therefore it would not surprise me in the least if a nominally anti-terrorist measure were stretched here to accommodate a leak investigation.

• 4. Governments say that they are using their power to fight terrorists, as if the identity of “terrorists” is a static and principled matter. In fact, who is or isn’t a terrorist is a political question resolved in the discretion of the government based on the balance of power at any given time, as I learned to my regret.

• Those four points are mostly supported by references to U.S. actions, but I see no particular reason to expect the U.K. to act differently.

• As the events in a Heathrow transit lounge – and the Guardian offices – have shown, the threat to journalism is real and growing

• In a remarkable post, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger describes how the British government raided the Guardian’s offices in order to destroy hard drives containing information provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. The British government had been pressuring the Guardian to return or destroy the Snowden documents. Rusbridger says he tried to explain that destroying hard drives would be pointless:

• This subverted the benefit of the doubt that liberal democracies ask for when they arm themselves against terrorism

• Again, the ratio is a meaningless number. You’re not declared innocent of murder because you didn’t happen to murder someone every other day of your life. But, perhaps more important in this is the revelation of the 20 million queries every single month. Or, approximately 600,000 queries every day. How about 25,000 queries every hour? Or 417 queries every minute? Seven queries every single second. Holy crap, that’s a lot of queries.

• Remember, too, that the NSA has insisted that it doesn’t datamine its data collection, which is clearly hogwash. That many queries means they’re trolling through that database all the time. Remember how the NSA was trying to play down how often it did queries by saying that only 300 phone numbers had been used to “initiate” a query? Yeah, well, once again, it would appear that the NSA was not being fully forthcoming about these sorts of things. Shocking, I know, but I’d imagine they’d claim it was the “least untruthful” answer they could come up with after having a good week or so to answer the question.

• Legal analysis website says it can’t continue because of a lack of privacy

• Though Rusbridger complied, and indeed did destroy the hard drives in question under the supervision of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), in his article Rusbridger called the move a “peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age.”

• Under the amendments, data collected about Brazilian internet users would have to be stored locally.

• The National Security Agency’s surveillance network has the capacity to reach around 75 percent of all U.S. Internet communications in the hunt for foreign intelligence, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

• 1. The NSA is the most powerful single institution in the world. It can collect more information, more quickly, and cause action from that information, more efficiently than any company, country or intelligence entity. Even if no one accused the NSA of doing anything wrong, it is the interest of a freedom-seeking society to layer in as much transparency as possible for no other reason than that there is really no historical precedent for an organization that large with that much power not abusing it, whether incidentally or deliberately. See here.

• New Zealand has passed a hotly-disputed bill that radically expands the powers of its spying agency. The legislation was passed 61 votes to 59 in a move that was slammed by the opposition as a death knell for privacy rights in New Zealand.

• White House says it would be ‘difficult to imagine’ US authorities adopting GCHQ tactics

• The question of how much contact the NSA has with internet traffic throughout the US is being raised again, this time by the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday The Atlantic took issue with the security agency’s mathematics and 1.6 percent claim, while the WSJ report looks more closely at its reach into telecommunications companies. The mishmash of codenamed programs are said to cover up to 75 percent of US internet traffic, although the amount actually stored and accessed is much smaller. The main difference between the calculations may be due to the difference between what ISPs — handing over data under FISA orders — carry, and what the NSA specifically requests. Its capabilities mean it can pull a lot more than just metadata, with access to the actual content of what’s sent back and forth becoming even more troubling as privacy violations exposed by its own audits come to light.

• US politicians are expected to retreat from their obsession with spying on citizens after it was revealed that the biggest losers were actually corporations.

• According to an NBC News report, an “overwhelmed” National Security Agency still isn’t sure which files Edward Snowden took with him when he fled to Hong Kong more than two months ago.

• Today the Wall Street Journal reported the existence of several NSA programs that were either previously unknown, or little was known about. Meet Blarney, Fairview, Oakstar, Lithium and Stormbrew. The programs allow for far greater surveillance than the government has admitted to, and, importantly, detail how the government forces Internet service providers (ISPs) to hand over raw data.

• Agency has built a system that can reach 75 percent of all U.S. Internet traffic, The Wall Street Journal reports.

• Just a few weeks ago, the secure email service Lavabit — which Edward Snowden used while corresponding with Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald about NSA leaks, ironically — shut down because of the founder’s concern about government surveillance, as did fellow email provider Silent Circle. Now, the well-respected legal discussion forum Groklaw has done the same, driven by what its founder has called the “forced exposure” of NSA surveillance. How many more web services do we have to lose before NSA chilling effects become a serious drain on the internet we all take for granted?

• Guardian editor-in-chief says he agreed to ‘slightly pointless’ task because newspaper has digital copies outside Britain

• The federal government’s collection of information on every single American’s activity, without regard for the establishment of probable cause, is a violation of our individual rights, in blatant disregard of the Fourth Amendment. The general warrants of King George III were nothing compared to what our own government is perpetrating every day upon its own citizens.

• Who wants to work on a collaborative data project with a badly wounded intelligence agency? I’m not seeing a lot of hands… How about if I ask it with a couple of exclamation points thrown in?!?! Still nothing…

• The National Security Agency’s surveillance network has the capacity to reach around 75 percent of all US Internet communications in the hunt for foreign intelligence, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

• The National Security Agency is still baffled by the extent of information Edward Snowden accessed, according to a new report.

• The broad reach of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance network has the ability to cover roughly 75 percent of all U.S. Internet traffic, the Wall Street Journal reported late Tuesday. The alarming report suggests the agency’s digital spying capabilities are even more encompassing than officials have publicly disclosed.

• Though privacy and civil liberties advocates continue to agitate over recent revelations about the U.S. government’s surveillance programs, last night they turned their ire to the other side of the pond. In the last 48 hours, the U.K. government has taken unprecedented steps against reporting on the spy programs.

• The government says phone and email traffic is not protected by the Fourth Amendment, and does not require a court warrant to search. The logic is based on a 1978 case that has been hauled out regularly to justify acquisition of third-party information. But does that logic apply to bulk collection of the sort that’s at the heart of the debate over NSA surveillance?

• When an audit revealed last week that the NSA hasn’t just been amassing data on millions of American citizens, but has actually been doing it illegally, the reaction was… pretty subdued. Let’s face it, after a summer of Snowden leaks, our eyes have just begun to glaze over when confronted with the word “surveillance.”

• The National Security Agency assured Americans last week that it only surveils a tiny percentage of the web data it collects. But it turns out the NSA screwed up the math, and that percentage was off by an order of magnitude.

• Days ago, when the Washington Post reported on an internal NSA audit showing thousands of rules violations every year, civil libertarians got the hard proof of rights violations they’ve long sought. Yet defenders of the NSA insisted that the audit reflected well on the surveillance agency, arguing that a comparison of database queries to violations shows an extremely low error rate. As I explain at length here, that’s an almost useless metric for exonerating the NSA. How easy to manipulate that ratio at an agency capable of carrying out automated queries by the millions!

• Roughly 75%: The National Security Agency, working with telecommunications companies, has built a surveillance system that can reach deep into the U.S. Internet backbone and cover 75% of traffic in the country, including not only metadata but the content of online communications. WSJ

• Before the Church Committee reports were released, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller described the shocking CIA abuses it chronicled as “not major.”

• NSA followers won’t be terribly surprised at the discrepancy between public and private statements from the agency.

• Left unchecked, power will always get used in arbitrary ways, often in areas that have little to do with national security and more to do with political agendas

• Before getting into the latest with the agency, it’s important to remember NSA’s role. It’s a spy agency. Their job is to collect information related to threats on national security without those threats knowing it. So to complain that we don’t know enough about what the NSA’s doing is somewhat counterproductive. We can, however, hold them accountable. If the president points to the NSA as a transparent organization, the agency should illustrate that. If the agency makes an effort to be more transparent, it should actually make an effort. Lately, we’ve seen that neither of those expectations are being met.

• Arguing that congressional hearings and new safeguards recently announced by President Barack Obama might not be enough to ensure privacy rights, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called for the Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.

• A further delve into the latest NSA surveillance bombshell from the WSJ highlights the ridiculousness of the claims that there were “no violations” by the NSA over the years. We’ve been aware for a while that the FISC ruled a certain NSA program unconstitutional, but the details had been kept secret. It only came out that something was found unconstitutional a year ago, through the efforts of Senator Ron Wyden. Since then, people have been digging for more. The DOJ finally has agreed to release a redacted version of the FISC ruling after fighting it for a while, but as we wait, some more details have been coming out. Last week’s Washington Post story about abuses claimed that this particular program wasn’t reported to the FISC for “many months.”

• The Department of Homeland Security is developing new technology that would allow it to scan people’s faces and identify them in a crowd. The Biometric Optic Surveillance System (BOSS), has been in development for over two years and the DHS tested it in the fall of 2012. The technology is already making headway in the private sector but the federal government needs to develop it further to scan fast-paced crowd movement.

• [...]

• There is still time to act before the DHS develops the technology enough for law enforcement uses. With unrestricted use of BOSS, the NSA and other federal agencies could compel Facebook, Google, and other websites and browsers to give them personal user information obtained from private-sector facial recognition software, just as it does in the current iteration of the PRISM program.

• Angry about domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency, former New Mexico governor and 2012 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson has launched an online drive centered on the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure.

• It would make a good front page Washington Post story to learn a bit about the more than a half of a billion dollars that the CIA is going to pay Amazon to develop a spook computer cloud. (For those who don’t follow computer technology, “clouds” are the next stage in digital data storage.)

• Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who first published secrets leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, promised Monday to release more documents, saying the UK would be “sorry” for detaining his partner for nine hours.

• The deputy Prime Minster, Nick Clegg, who is leader of the more liberally leaning Liberal Democrat party, has told the British media that he backed Cameron’s decision, a spokesman for the Deputy prime Minster said in a statement.

Civil Rights

• As long as a journalist doesn’t report anything other than official government propaganda, they’ll be just fine.

• It is clear that Miranda was not suspected of any connection to terrorism. To detain and rob Miranda on this pretext is no more legal than to have done so on trumped-up allegations that he was transporting cocaine. The White House has admitted that Washington had advance knowledge of the crime, and so we can infer approval – if not active collaboration.

• It is interesting, too, because the UK government had previously kept a relatively low public profile on the Snowden case, despite the fact that Snowden had leaked files from its own intelligence-gathering and not just the NSA’s. Until Sunday, it looked as though the British authorities had learned at least a little bit about public relations after their international embarrassment last year, when they threatened to invade Ecuador’s embassy in order to capture Julian Assange. Nevertheless, they are still keeping Assange trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, illegally, and presumably at the behest of you-know-who.

• UK authorities reportedly raided the Guardian’s office in London to destroy hard drives in an effort to stop future publications of leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The action is unlikely to prevent new materials coming out.

• Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger revealed in a Monday article posted on the British newspaper’s website that intelligence officials from the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) told him that he would either have to hand over all the classified documents or have the newspaper’s hard drives destroyed.

• After more talks, two “security experts” from GCHQ – the British version of the National Security Agency – visited the Guardian’s London offices.

• Rusbridger wrote that the government officials then watched as computers, which contained classified information passed on by Snowden, were physically destroyed in one of the newspaper building’s basements.

• A US federal judge ruled that state and federal prison officials in California will be allowed to start force-feeding inmates participating in a nearly two-month-long hunger strike, if the prisoners appear to be approaching their death.

• Tom Eddlem, writer for The New American magazine, talks about the National Defense Authorization Act and how it specifically infringes upon American citizens’ rights.

• Further details continue to emerge about the case of David Miranda. There are those who think that it is acceptable to use the Terrorism Act 2000 to pursue someone carrying information that may or may not be sensitive to the UK.

• However, even if David Miranda was carrying documents to Glenn Greenwald, on a ticket paid for by the Guardian, it doesn’t change the fundamental facts.

• he UK Home Office says it has “to protect the public”, but Miranda has accused Britain of a “total abuse of power” and has said he will take legal action against the Home Office. The Guardian is “supportive” of his action.

• David Miranda, the partner of US journalist Glenn Greenwald, who published documents about the NSA and GCHQ spying activities leaked by Edward Snowden, in Britain’s Guardian newspaper was questioned for nine hours in London’s Heathrow airport on Sunday under Schedule 7 of the UK’s anti-terrorism law.

• Miranda’s lawyer, Gwendolen Morgan, said her client was seeking a judicial review of the legal basis for his detention and wanted assurances that the property seized from him by police would not be examined.

• None of these tactics would appear to discourage the journalists who are being targeted. But the stories, taken together, represent a direct attack on news gathering. This should outrage every single journalist, and anyone who believes in freedom of expression.

• PJ plans to “get off the Internet to the degree it’s possible.”

• The award-winning and much respectable website Groklaw which covers legal news around free and open source software and provides critical information in complex cases is shutting down.

• Groklaw played a very pivotal role during the SCO-Linux case, Micorosft’s lawsuite in Europe, Micrsoft’s OOXML standardization and then it’s once again providing users with better understanding of the Android – Oracle lawsuit. The site plays a very important role to fight FUD spreading Microsoft backed blogs like FOSSPatents.

• During the debate over the Aaron Swartz case, one of the legal issues was whether Swartz had committed an unauthorized access under the CFAA when he changed his IP address to circumvent IP address blocking imposed by system administrators trying to keep Swartz off the network. There was significantly more to the CFAA charges than that, to be clear, including circumventing a subsequent MAC address block and (most significantly) entering an MIT storage closet to install his computer directly. But changing IP addresses to get around IP address blocking was at least one of the possible grounds of unauthorized access. On Friday, Judge Breyer of the Northern District of California handed down the first decision directly addressing the issue. Judge Breyer ruled that changing IP addresses to get around a block is an unauthorized access in violation of the CFAA. The decision is here: Craigslist v. 3taps, Inc..

• The prosecution made a motion for a “Gag Order” (a motion to disallow media) in the case of Barrett Brown. Brown is one of the subjects of my film, The Reality Wars, which is about the targeting of hacktivists, activists and journalists by the US government. Brown is both a journalist and a hacktivitst. He does not possess technical hacking skills though he does promote the public’s right to information. He is facing 105 years in federal prison primarily for doing his job as a journalist.

• Brown’s counsel, Ahmed Ghappour and Charles Swift, moved to continue (postpone trial date), explaining that more time is required in order to prepare his defense. There are two terabytes of electronic evidence to be reviewed. The government opposed on August 8, 2013, and, in its opposition, surprisingly requested a Gag Order. The Gag Order is for all parties to refrain from talking to members of any television, radio, newspaper, magazine, website (including bloggers), or other media organization about this case, other than in matters of public record.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• As more and more countries start introducing Web blocks, some people console themselves with the “at least there’s always Tor” argument. Politicians may be slow, but they are not all completely stupid, and they are beginning to get the message that Tor and other anonymous services potentially render their Web blocks moot.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Evidence is stacking up that Prenda Law has been operating a honeypot in order to lure Internet users into downloading copyrighted material. A subpoena just returned by Comcast confirms that a Pirate Bay user called “Sharkmp4″ is directly linked to the infamous anti-piracy law firm. The case is controversial in many ways, not least because The Pirate Bay actively helped to expose the copyright troll in question.

• President Barack Obama’s chief intellectual property adviser has stepped down from her post after more than three years on the job.

• [..]

• Espinel could be one of the top candidates to head BSA

• This morning, I posted about a series of legal threats sent to TorrentFreak by Comcast’s (creepy) enforcers Cyveillance. At the time I posted, TorrentFreak had less than 24 hours to resolve the issue before being booted off its webhost, and was unable to get anyone at Cyveillance or Comcast to answer its repeated emails.

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