● 04.15.14

● Links 15/4/2014: Lots of PCLinuxOS Releases, Ukraine Updates

Posted in News Roundup at 4:00 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Should XP users upgrade to Windows 7 or 8 or switch to Linux? “When I converted a bunch of XP machines to GNU/Linux, my administrative workload plunged because GNU/Linux just keeps on working,” said blogger Robert Pogson. “No Patch Tuesdays. No malware. No constant re-imaging. No replacing PCs every few years. We even tripled the number of PCs in the system and still the workload was trivial.”

• For years I’ve heard that year X is the year of the Linux desktop and I’ve always scoffed at it. I scoffed because it’s ridiculous to think that Linux or Mac OS X or anything could supplant Windows on the desktop. That is until now. And don’t get me wrong, it won’t happen for at least another year in businesses but for personal computing and BYOD, it’s already happening. The Linux that’s taking over the desktop is called the Chrome OS and it will happen on the Chromebook device.

Desktop

• Chromebooks are the simplest computers you can buy today, but they’ve proven a tricky formula for manufacturers to get right. The perfect Chromebook is cheap, fast enough, well-built, and lasts all day long on a single charge. We’ve seen plenty of Chromebooks try and come up just short, hitting a few of those points while missing on others. The recent models from HP and Acer have offered decent performance and solid battery life, but don’t go far enough to hide the fact that they are cheap laptops at their core. At the other end of the spectrum is the Chromebook Pixel, which offers premium build and fast performance, but costs more than a full-fledged MacBook or Windows Ultrabook.

• For many years, GNU/Linux on the desktop has been progressing well in government and education. Now that Dell and Canonical have teamed up to sell GNU/Linux widely to consumers, we can really see progress in the web stats.

Kernel Space

• Jean Delvare, a name commonly associated with the LM_Sensors project while being an employee at SUSE, has raised an important discussion item on the kernel mailing list about improving the kernel configuration (Kconfig) options when building the Linux kernel.

Graphics Stack

• For those wishing to test out the new Radeon code, Lauri’s repositories for this work are this kernel repository and this Mesa repository. He said in an email this morning to me, “The code won’t be changing beyond cleanups, there might be small edits to the thesis draft. As the main target was VRAM pressure, it will be pointless to test ioq3 games on 2 GB VRAM, for example – they will show no difference, as they fit completely into VRAM. You can use the radeon.vramlimit=256 kernel parameter to limit VRAM for testing different amounts. The kernel is fully backwards compatible with old mesa, so you should be able to compare just by changing mesa and the vram limit. I should note that there’s a big ioq3 regression currently in mesa git[3], so if your comparison mesa is too far back, it could seem like it was caused by my work, when it’s in reality in master too.”

Benchmarks

• For the past week now we have been extensively benchmarking AMD’s new AM1 APUs with all the current models available to the public: the Sempron 2650 / 3850 and Athlon 5150 / 5350. All of our testing up to this point has been using an updated Linux kernel and Mesa for the open-source Linux graphics driver experience with these APU Radeon R3 Graphics. Today, we’re looking at the performance of the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver in multiple configurations compared to the proprietary Catalyst Linux driver.

Applications

• Picking up one entry for each category was no easy task because applications are divided between GTK and Qt, and there are programs that run in the console and do their job perfectly and are more lightweight than a GUI application. As such, I decided to leave terminal applications out of this review in the first place, but I provided a link below to an article which covers those. Applications listed below are built using various toolkits, not just a single one like GTK, however they are among the most lightweight graphical tools from their category.

• FrostWire, a BitTorrent client (formerly a Gnutella client) that’s the result of a collaborative effort of hundreds of open source and freelance developers, is now at version 5.7.2.

• Picking up one entry for each category was no easy task because applications are divided between GTK and Qt, and there are programs that run in the console and do their job perfectly and are more lightweight than a GUI application. As such, I decided to leave terminal applications out of this review in the first place, but I provided a link below to an article which covers those. Applications listed below are built using various toolkits, not just a single one like GTK, however they are among the most lightweight graphical tools from their category.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine, Samba or Emulation

• Samba 4.0.17, an app that seamlessly integrates Linux/Unix servers and desktops into Active Directory environments using the winbind daemon, has been released with a large number of fixes and other various improvements.

Games

• For those that missed the news from this past weekend at PAX East 2014, a Linux game port of Star Citizen has been officially confirmed.

• Wasteland 2‘s beta has been going pretty great and it’s looking like the next beta update will make things even better, as Project Lead Chris Keenan explained in a super-sized blog post. The update is expected to go live this week, and along with the standard optimization and balance tweaks, it will also introduce new enemies like the suicide monks, who have unique AI, a new tutorial and two new maps – the Missile Silo and the Darwin Village – along with various other additions.

• Unless you have been living in a cave for the last few weeks, you would have heard about GOG.com (formally known as Good Old Games) finally announcing they will be adding Linux support! I think this is a great thing and here’s 5 good reasons why.

• Moebius: Empire Rising an adventure game from Jane Jensen is already confirmed for Linux and we mentioned recently the Linux release has been delayed. We now know what is causing the delay.

• Here is yet another overview of 10 free and open-source games for Linux. These are maybe not the most popular ones, but each definitely has a certain addictive tint to it.

• Our source added that the completion of Valve’s Steam Controller was the final piece that would precede the availability of most Steam Machines, which indicates that Steam Machines will also begin to release at the end of the year. The source also told PC Gamer that they expect “about 500” games to be natively playable on SteamOS by the end of this year, up from the current count of 382.

• After helping players rewrite history for decades, Sid Meier’s Civilization has finally turned their gaze upward and beyond: Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth lets players take their very own Noah’s Ark and sculpt the future of humanity as they see fit. Firaxis also confirmed that the game will be launching this fall on Linux, Mac & Windows for $49.99.

• From the famous creators of Myst and Riven the newest Kickstarter project is Obduction. They went through Kickstarter successfully last year. Now, thanks to Unreal Engine supporting Linux natively, Cyan is looking at a Linux release as a possibility for their new game.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• We are happy to release another stable update for the 1.9.x series and Enlightenement 0.18.7.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• When it comes to file managers, the choices can be made from a very wide range, from simple, minimalist ones like Thunar up to more feature-rich ones like Konqueror and GNOME Commander, or the console-based applications like Midnight Commander.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Cinnamon 2.2 releases ahead of Ubuntu 14.04 and in preparation for the Linux Mint version. New version includes many aesthetic and usability updates

• Zukitwo, a beautiful theme designed for GNOME 3.12 that makes use of the GTK2 engine Murrine and the GTK2 pixbuf engine, has been updated.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• PCLinuxOS LXDE 2014.04, a free and easy-to-use Linux-based operating system for desktops or laptops based on LXDE, is now available for download.

• The developers of PCLinuxOS have released a new version of the famous Linux distribution, featuring LXDE, one of the lightest desktop environments available right now. Even if the system is perfectly capable of running on modern computers, this particular version of PCLinuxOS is aimed at low-end hardware.

• PCLinuxOS comes with numerous flavors, but the default one is actually KDE. Just like Fedora, which uses GNOME, and Linux Mint, which uses Cinnamon, the PCLinuxOS Linux distribution is based on KDE.

• Unlike other distributions that also integrate KDE as the default desktop environment, PCLinuxOS provides a customized experience. Most developers and maintainers out there don’t bother too much with KDE and they usually choose to offer a KDE desktop that resembles the stock one. On the other hand, the PCLinuxOS developers customize the desktop to quite an extent, and it looks unique and is easily identifiable.

• PCLinuxOS MATE 2014.04, a free Linux and MATE-based operating system for desktops or laptops, has been released and is now available for download.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat is pushing forward with its next generation of enterprise Linux technologies, and virtualization containers are set to play a starring role. Today, Red Hat announced new virtualization and cloud initiatives leveraging open-source container technology, including an effort known as Project Atomic.

• Seven years after the failed Red Hat Exchange, a new attempt to sell partner services emerges. Red Hat today is announcing the OpenShift Marketplace in an effort to help grow its market share in the emerging cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) space.

• OpenShift is Red Hat’s PaaS platform. First introduced back in 2011, it was initially based on technology Red Hat acquired from technology vendor Makara in 2010.

• Red Hat CEO and President Jim Whitehurst kicked off the 2014 Red Hat Summit, celebrating 10 years of growth and innovation. Whitehurst addressed a crowded ballroom at Moscone Center South. “You are all part of our mission statement,” he said.

• Red Hat and Docker.io today announced an expanded collaboration that will bring Docker’s container technologies to the Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux high-touch beta program and its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service offering.

PR

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Casio Computer Company Ltd., Tokyo, Japan, has realized significant results in IT efficiency, performance and cost savings with a solution comprising Red Hat Storage, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and IBM System x servers. By combining virtualized industry-standard servers with open software-defined storage, Casio now has a highly available and agile storage solution that can accommodate heavy data workloads by scaling to petabytes.

Fedora

• Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for April 15th, 2014:

• Remote journal logging for systemd’s journal. The feature elaborates, “The high-level goal is to have a mechanism where journal logging can be extended to keep a copy of logs on a remote server, without requiring any maintenance, done fairly efficiently and in a secure way.” To this remoute journal logging with systemd’s journald would be a receiver side systemd-journal-remote process accepting messages in the Journal Export Format and then on the sender side would be a new systemd-journal-upload component. Communication between the server and client daemons would be over HTTPS.

Debian Family

• Ken Miller, Makulu forum moderator, wrote this weekend to announce the release of MakuluLinx 6 MATE. This release, based on Debian Testing, features MATE 1.8, Linux 3.13.7 PAE, and systemd support. MakuluLinux 6 also introduced a new installer that Jamie Watson calls much improved.

• Debian has been around for a long time. It is a mature, diverse distro highly valued by users.

• When NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden first emailed Glenn Greenwald, he insisted on using email encryption software called PGP for all communications. But this month, we learned that Snowden used another technology to keep his communications out of the NSA’s prying eyes. It’s called Tails. And naturally, nobody knows exactly who created it.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• We’re still waiting for Ubuntu Mobile, Canonical’s mobile operating system, to finally make its official debut on a smartphone. To whet our appetite, smartphone manufacturer Meizu has published a short demonstration video showing the OS in action on one of its phones. In it, we get a closer look at how the software will perform when used for everyday tasks, such as typing on the keyboard, switching apps, and navigating though the home screens. Consider our appetite whetted Canonical, just get on with releasing a phone we can go out and buy.

• With the dominance of Android and iOS, the prospect of new mobile operating systems that could challenge their market share is always welcome for developers looking for alternative channels to distribute their apps.

• Canonical is preparing to launch Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) in just a couple of days, but the Ubuntu developers are already starting to reveal what major changes will be implemented in Ubuntu 14.10.

• Canonical has been talking about the convergence of the platforms for quite some time, and the next Ubuntu 14.10 might just be the first version to actually get close to it. When Ubuntu developers talk about convergence, they think about a single operating system built for PCs and mobile platforms, with a single set of applications and a single vision that spans across platforms.

• Canonical is trying to position the Ubuntu OS as integral to enterprises expanding onto cloud and scale-out computing platforms.

• That ambition is reflected in the make-up of Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS, the latest release of the operating system, which will be available to download on Thursday.

• Ubuntu 14.04, the newest edition of Canonical’s open source Linux-based OS, will not make huge waves among PC and mobile users, for whom it brings only minor software updates. For server users, however, the latest and greatest Ubuntu release delivers more, particularly in the realms of automation, cloud computing and virtualization.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Ugoos is readying a “UT3″ media player mini-PC that will run Android 4.4 on a Rockchip quad-core, Cortex-A17 RK3288 SoC, and will support 4K video output.

• Samsung brought in heavyweight champion Google to fight in its corner in its latest patent bout with Apple in the US on Friday.

• In the latest instalment of the ongoing patent wars, current veep of engineering for Android, Hiroshi Lockheimer, testified that Android was all Google’s idea.

• The hype is growing for the iPhone 6, and TheStreet jumped on the bandwagon with another silly article about how the iPhone 6 is going to “demolish Android.” TheStreet essentially claims that a larger screen iPhone 6 will be so good that it will just blow away every Android phone and bring zillions of Android users over to the iPhone. The fanboyish blather in this article reeks of a desperate attempt on TheStreet’s part to gin up page views and ad impressions.

• Android users should be aware of a sneaky phishing and malware scheme that FireEye mobile security researchers have uncovered. The researchers have put up a blog post about the issue, which involves a malicious app with normal protection level permissions that can probe icons on an Android home screen and then modify them to point to phishing websites or a malicious app without notifying the user. Basically, the malicious app makes very subtle modifications to the desktop, leaving hard to detect booby traps.

• A new analysis for online jobs done by Freelancer reveals that the number of jobs for Android developers is growing at a faster rate than the number of iPhone developers. According to the report, In Q2 of 2013, the number of Android jobs (7,073 jobs) overtook iPhone (6,989 jobs) for the first time; now in Q1 2014, Android is continuing its reign with a 33.9% increase to 11,141 jobs versus iPhone’s 32.0% to 10,207 jobs. In Q1 2014, over 270,000 jobs were analyzed by Freelancer to provide a snapshot of the global business ecosystem.

Moving to Mobile

• The article ends on an optimistic note about Microsoft’s new strategy. However, I think it’s far too early to make any kind of judgements about Microsoft’s future. We’ll know in a few years if they’ve made any progress, but right now the jury is still out on their new CEO.

• In the beginning, Microsoft’s business model was simple. They made the Windows operating system and licensed it to manufacturers, who then put it on their various computing machines. In the mid-nineties, Windows gained critical mass with businesses which, in turn, led to the adoption of the Windows operating system by consumers. The PC OS Wars were not just won by Microsoft, they were decisively won by Microsoft. Every other company that made competing PC operating systems was annihilated, save Apple, which only held on by the skin of their teeth.

Free Software/Open Source

• For the next ten years, scientists will be probing the human brain in software form. It could revolutionise mental health research and lead to machines learning like us…

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has begun putting the pieces together with the appointment of CMO Chris Beard to its board and to take the helm as interim CEO…

SaaS/Big Data

• Dell is bolstering its cloud and datacenter portfolios, first and foremost through a series of collaborative efforts with Red Hat.

• Announced amid the Dell Enterprise Forum EMEA in Frankfurt, Germany and the Red Hat Summit in San Francisco this week, the tech giants are working off the venerable open source cloud platform OpenStack, aiming to serve IT priorities around non-business critical apps. That includes better support of developer test environments for mobile, social, and analytics apps.c

• It’s sort of funny that the press release announcing the new Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS release seems as focused on Ubuntu OpenStack as on Linux per se. It’s studded with partner testimonials from Cisco, Mellanox, NTT Software, Brocade lauding Ubuntu OpenStack. But then again, that makes sense given that the vendor battlefield has shifted from core operating system to core cloud infrastructure, where Canonical OpenStack has gained traction with Hewlett Packard and other big cloud providers.

Education

• As a systems librarian at an academic institution, I am a conduit between those who want to access the resources our library offers and my colleagues who describe the resources on behalf of researchers. I direct our limited development resources so that our systems can best meet the needs of all of our users. In their paper, Schwarz and Takhteyev claim that software freedom makes “it possible for the modifications to be done by those actors who have the best information about their value [and] are best equipped to carry them out.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Over a year after ist predecessor, this release updates the build system. One may hope that this will help building wdiff on more recent architectures.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

Programming

• AutoFDO is short for the Automatic Feedback Directed Optimizer that uses the Linux kernel’s perf to collect sample profiles and to then pass that translated profile data back into the compiler so it’s able to better optimize code generation of the targeted perf’ed binary to yield better performance. AutoFDO was originally written for GCC and can be found via gcc.gnu.org.

Leftovers

Hardware

Health/Nutrition

• An automated pot-selling machine was unveiled at an event held at an Avon, Colo., restaurant Saturday, promising a potential new era of selling marijuana and pot-infused snacks from vending machines directly to customers.

• Its creators say the machine, called the ZaZZZ, uses biometrics to verify a customer’s age. The machine is climate-controlled to keep its product fresh.

Security

• The basic need to encrypt digital communication seems to be becoming common sense lately. It probably results from increased public awareness about the number of parties involved in providing the systems required (ISPs, backbone providers, carriers, sysadmins) and the number of parties these days taking an interest in digital communications and activities (advertisers, criminals, state authorities, voyeurs, …). How much to encrypt and to what extend seems to be harder to grasp though.

• Since September 2013, a handful of cryptographers have been discussing new problems and alternatives to the popular security application. By February 2014, the Open Crypto Audit Project—a new organization based in North Carolina that seeks formal 501(c)3 non-profit status—raised around $80,000 towards this goal on various online fundraising sites.

• “[The results] don’t panic me,” Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins cryptography professor who has been one of the people leading this effort, told Ars. “I think the code quality is not as high as it should be, but on the other hand, nothing terrible is in there, so that’s reassuring”

• There were decent indicators of the flick’s themes after directors Joe and Anthony Russo were interviewed by the Washington Post. When asked if they knew how timely the movie’s theme would be, Anthony Russo replied:

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• If the person accused of the shootings at Jewish facilities is guilty, he was certainly trying to intimidate a civilian population! And the Nevada cattle grazing extremists, if their behavior is being accurately described in the press, are trying to affect the conduct of government with threatened violence.

• The U.S.-Russia relationship is facing another setback as Russia has turned off the Voice of America and the American Councils, a U.S. education NGO, has been ordered to suspend its activity in Russia.

• I’m confused. A few weeks ago we were told in the West that people occupying government buildings in Ukraine was a very good thing. These people, we were told by our political leaders and elite media commentators, were ‘pro-democracy protestors’.

• Moscow: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday said Moscow would like Washington to explain reports in the Russian media that CIA director John Brennan visited the Ukrainian capital at the weekend.

• The decision of the Obama administration and the resolution passed by Congress barring entry to Iran’s designated ambassador to the United Nations has angered Tehran and provoked demonstrations in Iran. Hamid Aboutalebi has served as ambassador to several European countries. He is accused by Washington politicians of having participated in the taking of US diplomats hostage in 1979-81. Aboutalebi says that he was not among the militants who took the hostages, but rather later on agreed to serve as a translator for the group.

• The hostage-taking in revolutionary Iran is a deeply distasteful episode that contravened international law as well as Shiite Islamic law (which recognizes the immunity of diplomats). I have friends among the surviving diplomats, and don’t forgive the criminals who terrorized them.

• Previously, deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich accused Brennan of ordering a crackdown on pro-Russian activists in the east of the country.

• The media coverage of Russian integration with Crimea has been shameful, irresponsible and misleading.

• Ukraine’s ousted president has accused the CIA of being behind the new Ukrainian government’s decision to deploy armed forces to quash an increasingly brazen pro-Russian insurgency. Speaking late Sunday on Russian state television, Viktor Yanukovych claimed that CIA director John Brennan had met with Ukraine’s new leadership and “in fact sanctioned the use of weapons and provoked bloodshed.”

• CIA Director John Brennan was sent to Ukraine over the weekend to launch a military suppression of pro-federalization protests in the southeastern part of the country, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts told RIA Novosti on Tuesday.

• “The CIA director was sent to Kiev to launch a military suppression [campaign] in eastern and southern Ukraine, former Russian territories for the most part that were foolishly attached to Ukraine in the early years of Soviet rule,” Roberts said.

• Washington’s plan to grab Ukraine overlooked that the Russian and Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine were not likely to go along with their insertion into the EU and NATO while submitting to the persecution of Russian speaking peoples. Washington has lost Crimea, from which Washington intended to eject Russia from its Black Sea naval base. Instead of admitting that its plan for grabbing Ukraine has gone amiss, Washington is unable to admit a mistake and, therefore, is pushing the crisis to more dangerous levels.

• An advisor to Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that the United States may decide to send arms to eastern Ukraine as tensions continue to worsen there between pro-Russian protesters and supporters of the country’s interim government.

• Reuters reported on Monday that US State Department Counselor Thomas Shannon — a senior diplomat and member of Sec. Kerry’s inner circle — said the possibility of providing arms to Ukrainian forces is indeed currently on the table.

• After all, Kerry personally experienced the horrors of a war fought on false pretenses as a young Navy officer patrolling the rivers of South Vietnam. After winning the Silver Star, he returned home from the war and spoke eloquently against it, making his first significant mark as a public figure.

• That’s according to multiple former drone pilots featured in a new Norwegian documentary, aptly titled Drone, which cites both on- and off-the-record interviews with one-time operators of the Pentagon’s Predator and Reaper drone. In the film, the whistleblowers allege that regular Air Force pilots, not the CIA proper, are doing the heavy lifting in the CIA’s shadow wars over Pakistan.

• TWO Australian citizens have been killed in a US airstrike in Yemen in what is the first known example of Australian extremists dying as a result of Washington’s highly controversial use of predator drones.

• On the ground in a country where unmanned missile attacks are a terrifyingly regular occurrence

• A Bay Area federal judge says the Obama administration can keep secret a memo spelling out the legal rationale for a 2011 drone attack in Yemen that killed a U.S. citizen and alleged terrorist mastermind.

• The film identifies the 17th Reconnaissance Squadron as the unit which has been conducting CIA-led strikes in the tribal areas. They operate from a secure compound in a corner of Creech air force base, 45 miles from Las Vegas in the Mojave Desert.

• A regular US air force unit based in the Nevada desert is responsible for flying the CIA’s drone strike programme in Pakistan, according to a new documentary to be released on Tuesday.

• Local Afghan officials say at least three civilians– including a woman and two children — have been killed in a US-led airstrike in the country’s troubled east.

• Title 18′s Article 2339B further states that: “whoever knowingly provides material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization, or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 15 years or both, and, if the death of any person results, shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life.”

• Any act “intended to cause death or serious bodily injury to a civilian” — that stands as a perfectly legitimate definition of terrorism. President Barack Obama offered an equally straightforward definition of terrorism on the eve of the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings when he stated: “Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror.”

• My concern is that my government has a long and abiding history of engaging in acts that clearly meet all-of-the-above definitions of terrorism.

• Fort Wayne for Peace organized an event at Headwaters Park Sunday afternoon focused on the use of military drones in the Middle East.

• Dozens of people of all ages showed up to the “Fly Kites, Not Drones” event in an effort to raise awareness towards U.S. foreign policy practices as well as fly kites with a message. Kite flying is a popular tradition in Afghanistan, but the pastime was banned during the Taliban reign.

• Fort Wayne for Peace, as part of April Days of Action Against Drones, hosted an event Sunday afternoon at Headwaters Park, called, “Fly Kites, Not Drones.”

• Something seems all-around perverse to me when innocent people are killed. I understand that accidents happen and innocent people die for no apparent reason sometimes, especially in war, yet when planned attacks are carried out to eradicate whole families due to the suspicion that they might be harboring a terrorist, something is downright wrong. It is absolutely reprehensible that families are being wiped out with a single missile—a missile whose total cost to build and deploy is more than what that family has or will ever earn in their entire lifetime. Can you seriously see soldiers earning medals for valor, courage, and honor for conducting such video game-like warfare? There is no honor in drone warfare.

• But in reaching that conclusion, the court also found it “plausible” that Awlaki’s Fifth Amendment due-process rights were violated. Ultimately, the judge decided, there was no remedy available, so the lawsuit was dismissed. But this sets a dangerous precedent for the targeted-killing program. And the problem began with the Obama administration itself – several key members of which are defendants in this case — which argued several years ago that the determination to target Awlaki complied with due process.

• The US’s Secretary of State John Kerry and its UN ambassador, Samantha Power have been pushing for more assistance to be given to the Syrian rebels.

• In January, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the assault by a local militia in September 2012 on the American consulate and a nearby undercover CIA facility in Benghazi, which resulted in the death of the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three others. The report’s criticism of the State Department for not providing adequate security at the consulate, and of the intelligence community for not alerting the US military to the presence of a CIA outpost in the area, received front-page coverage and revived animosities in Washington, with Republicans accusing Obama and Hillary Clinton of a cover-up.

• Online videos show Syrian rebels using what appear to be US anti-tank rockets, weapons experts say, the first significant American-built armaments in the country’s civil war.

• They would signal a further internationalisation of the conflict, with new rockets suspected from Russia and drones from Iran also spotted in the forces of President Bashar Al Assad. None of that equipment, however, is seen as enough to turn the tide of battle in a now broadly stalemated war, with Al Assad dominant in Syria’s central cities and along the Mediterranean coast and the rebels in the interior north and east.

• Is the U.S. secretly training Libyan militiamen in the Canary Islands? And if not, are they planning to?

• The Education Secretary announced that Peter Clarke, who served as head of the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit, is to become education commissioner, with responsibility to investigate the allegations.

• Since the “war on terror” began, various policies have been adopted on both sides of the Atlantic that have played on, or exacerbated, our fear of the “Islamic extremist.” Perhaps none has been more pernicious than the recent British practice of stripping citizenship from dozens of people who were considered possible terrorism suspects, as soon as they traveled abroad — which then made it less politically complicated for American agents to hunt them down as dangers.

• Fifteen years ago, it was possible to pretend the U.S. government opposed torture. Then it became widely known that the government tortured. And it was believed (with whatever accuracy) that officials had tried to keep the torturing secret. Next it became clear that nobody would be punished, that, in fact, top officials responsible for torture would be permitted to openly defend what they had done as good and noble.

• It’s hard for me to pin down just when “admitting wrongdoing and learning from mistakes” was a “practice” in American government, but I digress. Ever since the completion of this report, its authors in the Senate intelligence committee have urged its release. But after Feinstein went to the Senate floor last month to accuse the CIA of illegally trying to stonewall the investigation and block its release, Feinstein seemed to have changed her mind. Now the demand is not to have all 6,300+ pages released to the public, but to have approximately 500 pages of an executive summary submitted for declassification review.

• A military tribunal trail was thrown into confusion when it was revealed that a member of a defense team may have had a contract with the CIA.

• A human rights group is demanding the United Kingdom to “come clean” over allegations that it gave permission for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to run a “black site” detention facility on British soil.

• A human rights group is urging Britain’s Foreign office to “come clean” over claims that a British-administered island in the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia, was used as a secret “black site” detention center by the CIA.

• President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War. President Franklin Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans following Pearl Harbor.

Transparency Reporting

• The appropriation of culture into the so-called culture industry – the mass production of cultural products – brought forth the homogenization of human expression, and a new control over human knowledge, a topic explored by Adorno and Horkheimer, of enlightenment as the deception of the masses. “The step from the telephone to the radio,” they write “has clearly distinguished the roles. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same” (pp.121, 122). The television was the continuation and perfection of the same idea, and at the time, no mention was made “of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest” (p. 121). The mass deception is achieved by the control and vetting of knowledge within this new technological context of enlightenment, and so it becomes an ideological machine of tremendous power. “Tragedy is reduced to the threat to destroy anyone who does not cooperate, whereas its paradoxical significance once lay in a hopeless resistance to mythic destiny. Tragic fate becomes just punishment, which is what bourgeois aesthetics always tried to turn it into. The morality of mass culture is the cheap form of yesterday’s children’s books” (p. 152) Then came the Internet, and from it was constructed a model of industrial culture as well as an appropriation of the knowledge of the Internet using individuals; mass surveillance. It is not a coincidence that the motto of the Information Awareness Office was also “scientia est potentia” – knowledge is power. Then came WikiLeaks.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Poisons from the chimneys kill nature in the borderland to Norway, but Russia’s Norilsk-Nickel is a river of cash flow for its owners.

• Plants, after all, are the reigning global masters of clean energy. They use 100-percent solar power: The chloroplast, the so-called “powerhouse” of a plant cell, is a “3-billion-year-old solar energy collector” and a “submicroscopic solar battery,” as Tyson put it. Basically, chloroplasts use sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water to store energy in sugars, and give off oxygen as a byproduct. And without this fundamental green energy technology, life on this planet as we know it wouldn’t exist.

• In a vote cheered as a victory for democracy, one community in British Columbia has given a flat rejection to a proposed tar sands pipeline.

• Over 58 percent of voters who headed to the polls in the North Coast municipality of Kitimat on Saturday said “no” to Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project.

• ‘Mining tar sand will destroy Govt’ read the headline in April of 2012. The statement was made to Trinidad and Tobago’s Express newspaper by well-known environmental campaigner Dr. Wayne Kublalsingh to the news that Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar had made statements about working with Canada’s Harper Government to start development of tar sands for oil in Trinidad’s southwest peninsula. If anyone could make such a bold statement stick in Trinidad and Tobago, it would be Kublalsingh, a veteran of multiple struggles against what he and community members believe to be ill-advised industrial projects.

Finance

• From Martin Luther King to Erich Fromm, the universal – or unconditional – basic income (UBI) has always had its supporters. The idea is not new. But the economic crisis has brought it back to the forefront “as a solution” to the most pressing issues facing the EU today.

Privacy

• The truth is, I really don’t have anything on my hard drive that I would be upset over someone seeing. I have some cat photos. I have a few text files with ideas for future books and/or short stories, and a couple half-written starts to NaNoWriMo novels. It would be easy to say that there’s no point encrypting my hard drive, because I have nothing to hide. The problem is, we wrongly correlate a “desire for privacy” with “having something to hide”. I think where I live, in America, we’ve taken our rights to privacy for granted. Rather than the traditional “he must be hiding porn or bombs”, think about something a little more mundane.

• Google has updated its terms of service, informing users that their emails are scanned by software to deliver targeted advertising.

• The new terms explicitly state that “automated systems analyse your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customised search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection”.

• The search giant is considering giving a boost to encrypted sites in its results, one of its top engineers has hinted. The move is to encourage better security across the web in the wake of the Heartbleed bug causing widespread concern among Netizens

• If you thought that the NSA wanted too much personal information, just wait a few months. The EFF is reporting that the FBI’s new facial recognition database, containing data for almost a third of the US population, will be ready to launch this summer. Codenamed NGI, the system combines the bureau’s 100 million-strong fingerprint database with palm prints, iris scans and mugshots. Naturally, this has alarmed privacy advocates, since it’s not just felons whose images are added, but anyone who has supplied a photo ID for a government job or background check. According to the EFF’s documents, the system will be capable of adding 55,000 images per day, and could have the facial data for anything up to 52 million people by next year. Let’s just hope that no-one tells the Feds about Facebook, or we’re all in serious trouble.

• GCHQ: “This is the first time we have ever been asked to comment on art.”

• The Guardian is the first British paper to win one of America’s famed Pulitzer prizes, albeit for its American edition as papers outside the US technically can’t win.

• Pakistan’s Upper House this week began debating a new bill seeking to establish a National Cyber Security Council, an agency the nation feels is needed in the wake of Edward Snowden’s myriad revelations about NSA surveillance.

• The former US secretary of state, who supported the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping programme, is seen as a terrible choice to sit on the board of the cloud storage company.

• Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (pictured) is among the team of reporters to win the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism.

• US-based civil society organisation Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) took US telecom AT&T to court for willingly sharing material with the NSA to help its surveillance regime. The case forced the Bush administration to pass a law to give retroactive protection to the telecom companies for cooperating with the NSA.

• Should private citizens be permitted to make fun of an agency of the federal government? You bet they should! But when the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security found themselves the butts of such humor, they tried to shut down the jokester and those selling his merchandise.

• Ten months after Edward Snowden’s first disclosures, three main legislative proposals have emerged for surveillance reform: one from President Obama, one from the House Intelligence Committee, and one proposal favored by civil libertarians.

Civil Rights

• A man facing deportation from Sweden has been granted a temporary reprieve after fellow passengers aboard his flight to Iran prevented it from taking off by refusing to fasten their seat belts.

• A Kurd fearing persecution in his home country of Iran, Ghader Ghalamere fled the country years ago and now has two young children with his wife Fatemeh, a Swedish resident.

• As a result he qualifies for a residence permit himself – yet because of a quirk in immigration laws he is required to apply for it from outside Sweden.

DRM

• One of the world’s largest games companies says that DRM is a necessary part of doing business and isn’t going away anytime soon. Speaking with TorrentFreak, Square Enix says that while it understands that DRM shouldn’t interfere with gaming and there is currently no perfect solution, profit dictates that the controversial practice remains.

Intellectual Monopolies

• One instance of this conflict is the pharma companies’ vice-like grip, via patents, on the production of newly-developed drugs. This can put heavy financial pressure on health services, particularly in developing countries. Another conflict, which is the focus of this article, involves the publication of clinical trial data. Clinical trials are carried out on a massive scale as part of the process of bringing a new drug onto the market: the trials are meant to determine whether the drug is effective and safe, and whether patients would benefit from being prescribed it.

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