● 04.23.14

● Links 23/4/2014: GNOME Maps Application, LG in Headlines

Posted in News Roundup at 10:25 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• LinuxCareer.com: How do you see the future development of Linux professionals recruitment sector?

• Brent Marinaccio: Well, Linux is not going away. It just continues to grow. Thus, it bodes well for the individuals in this space. Throughout our time recruiting in the open source arena, the demand has always outstripped the supply for Linux professionals. Even in the two recessions we have been through. Therefore, I see no indication this is going to change in the near to mid term. All in all, it is a good time to be involved with open source software.

Desktop

• Chromebooks have been able to show system performance through the Task Manager in the Chrome browser, however a future update is showing a new way to view a Chromebook’s system performance. Currently, on the stable build for Chromebooks, going to the chrome://power page allows users to view battery performance over time in the form of a chart. However, the Beta channel shows not only battery performance on this page, but CPU performance over time, too. This view gives Chromebook users a better idea of Chromebook CPU usage. (The Beta channel is one of Google‘s early release channels, where users can receive future updates early, though they can be unstable.)

Server

• The OpenPOWER Foundation is going to reveal new innovations around Big Data technology in the next Open Innovation Summit on April 23, 2014. The OpenPOWER Foundation is a collaboration of technology companies on Power Architecture products initiated by IBM. It is building an ecosystem around IBM POWER hardware and software and making it available for open development for the first time. Canonical has also added support for PowerSystems in the recently released Ubuntu Linux 14.04.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Announced yesterday were a bunch of Mesa/X/Wayland student projects to be worked on this summer by students attending university and participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code. There’s a ton of great open-source work Google is sponsoring that will hopefully be successful in the months ahead.

• While the GSoC work is great and the X.Org Foundation has been involved most years, separate from that is the X.Org Endless Vacation of Code. The X.Org EVoC is the X.Org Foundation’s own GSoC equivalent that they fund out of their own foundation money — generated from corporate donors, etc. This is a very rarely advertised campaign put on by this foundation that also stewards Wayland, Mesa, etc.

Applications

Wine or Emulation

Games

• Nuclear Dawn, the Source Engine game now with full Linux support after a major game update was rolled out on Steam this week, seems to be running fine on AMD Linux hardware.

• Puppy Linux is a lightweight distribution built to run in memory and therefore the overall footprint is very small.

• Puppy is designed to run from a USB drive and not for installation on a hard drive.

• There are a number of Puppy derivatives available including MacPup and Simplicity.

• Puppy Arcade is designed for fun. It includes emulators for every games console imaginable as well as ROM loading software and joystick calibration.

• Tabletop Simulator, the very uncommon physics sandbox game that deals with the accurate simulation of a table top, is now available on Steam Early Access. The game has been creating quite a few ripples ever since its announcement. The game started its journey on Kickstarter which it quite successfully completed and is now headed for a full release on Steam.

• The game is basically a sandbox with the sole purpose of simulating all kinds of possible table top physics. Now the interesting part of the game is that it is kind of a blank table top over which users can put up any game that they fancy. Once set, the game can be played just like in the real world moving around the pieces as if on a real world. But the interesting part is that, just like in the real world, should you decide, you can rage flip the table, throw the pieces at your opponent or just push the table over!

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The icons in Nitrux OS are infinitely scalable, which is one of the most interesting features of this icon pack. This is also one of the biggest collections for the Linux platform, which means that it will be hard to find an application that is not supported.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The KDE community has announced a major update to its desktop application set. KDE Software Compilation 4.13 includes bug fixes and many new features. KDE developers have focused on building a new infrastructure for semantic search, and the Kontact personal information manager includes several improvements.

• For those not keeping up closely with the Qt 5.3 development over the past half-year, fortunately at Phoronix we have you covered. Here’s some of the features that interest me most about the imminent Qt 5.3 tool-kit release

• KDE developers are still discussing whether KDE 4.14 will end up being the last Qt4-based KDE release or if there will be a KDE 4.15 release. Whatever release ends up being the last Qt4-based release will be preserved in a long-term support form. KDE Frameworks 5, Plasma 2, and the other next-generation KDE components are set to be released later in the year, hence the shift in focus to the newer platform.

• Krita, an application that is used to make digital painting files from scratch, received the most attention in this version and that usually garners the most changes. For example, resetting the slider spin box when double clicking on it has been fixed, the tablet press/release events that did not produce any sane buttons are now ignored, support for “evdev” tablets has been added, and line smoothing options are now saved between runs of Krita.

• There’s only 1 tool to deal with an unsupported Windows XP…

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME Foundation is happy to announce that 39 participants have been accepted for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the Outreach Program For Women (OPW) internships to work with the GNOME Project this summer.

• The work will cover a wide range of tasks including improving Shell animations, annotation support in Evince, DLNA capabilities in Photos, and documentation updates. Information about all accepted participants and their projects is available in the e-mail welcoming the interns, which was sent to the Foundation mailing list.

• GNOME Maps is a simple maps application being developed in javascript, using the Gjs bindings. The map data for Maps comes from OpenStreetMap which is a collaborative project to create a free and editable map of the world.

• Tweet GNOME Maps began development during the GNOME 3.10 cycle and going ahead for GNOME 3.14 and beyond are some ambitious plans to make this open-source OpenStreetMap-powered JavaScript application more like Google Maps in its abilities.

• Right now GNOME Maps is written in JavaScript with Gjs bindings, loads up data from OpenStreetMap, and attempts to auto-find your position using the Geoclue D-Bus service. There’s also basic search support.

Distributions

• “It comes with a security fix for the strongswan package which is responsible for IPsec VPN connections. The vulnerability has got the number CVE-2014-2338. It was possible to bypass the authentication and therefore to overtake a VPN connection whilst the original peers are rekeying. IKEv1 connections are not vulnerable, but IKEv2,” reads the official announcement.

• The Linux kernel for this latest testing version has been upgraded to version 3.13.10-1, which is one of the newest stable releases available, and the drbl package has been updated to version 2.8.16-drbl1. It’s likely that future versions will switch to Linux kernel 3.14 soon.

• Clonezilla Live is a Linux distribution that does only one thing: bare metal backup and recovery. It’s very similar to other older cloning software, such as True Image or Norton Ghost.

• DEFT stands for Digital Evidence & Forensic Toolkit and is based on Lubuntu. It’s a set of tools used by law enforcement agencies during computer forensic investigations.

• “Computer Forensics software must be able to ensure the integrity of file structures and metadata on the system being investigated in order to provide an accurate analysis. It also needs to reliably analyze the system being investigated without altering, deleting, overwriting or otherwise changing data,” reads the official website.

• The rest of the changes in this latest version are not all that exciting and consist of mostly updated packages. For example, Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.4, glibc has been updated to version 2.18, GCC has been updated to version 4.7, perl has been updated to version 5.14, Squid has been updated to version 3.3, httpd has been updated to version 2.2.26, iptables has been updated to version 1.4.14, and openswan is now at version 2.6.4.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• For anyone wishing to try out the release candidate to the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system release, the ISO is now publicly available.

• Last week Red Hat released the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Release Candidate and initially it was just made available to Red Hat’s partners, OEMs, ISVs, etc. However, as planned, this week they have opened up the release candidate to everyone.

• Fedora in general tends to have a more liberal update policy than Ubuntu and others when it comes to stable releases of software; new versions of the Linux kernel are shipped down to stable releases of Fedora, etc. With Fedora 21 not arriving until late in 2014, exceptions have been given to also ship new Mesa updates for Fedora 20 users to provide a more modern and updated hardware experience. For those curious how Fedora 20′s performance compares to when it made its debut in December to how it performs now with all official stable updates, here’s some benchmarks.

• Cern, “the European Organization for Nuclear Research” and probably best known for the Large Hadron Collider, has chosen Red Hat for its mission critical systems according to a report on ComputerWorlduk.com. Elsewhere, folks are still all worked up over Heartbleed, but some say its beyond the little guy – so relax. Finally today, Chris Clay at ZDNet.com has deployed CentOS on his desktop. How’d that work out?

• Having this platform with the long-term support (10 years) for me is a step in a positive direction for desktop Linux. Not only is the base operating system good for the 10-year period, but I’m also able to find updated applications that keep in line with some of the latest Fedora versions, without having to upgrade the entire operating system at one time. Plus, the recent adoption of CentOS by Red Hat will only make this GNU/Linux distribution even stronger.

• The upgrade process with Fedora is fine for some and is an easy way to refresh the entire system at once, but for remote computers that I support it just makes sense to go with an operating system with long-term support so that the base will stay static for many years to come and packages on that base can be updated remotely. I’ll definitely be doing more work with CentOS 6, while we wait for the release of CentOS 7 later this year.

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 22nd, 2014.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• For this new Long-Term Support release, major changes have been implemented, not only in Ubuntu, but in its derivatives as well. Trusty will be supported for five years for Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu Kylin, while the other flavors using a different desktop environment will be supported as well, if only for three years. These include Xubuntu and Lubuntu.

• Ubuntu 14.04 adds back an option to have window level menus. There are two caveats, though. First, the defaults have not changed. If you want the new menus you’ll need to head to the system settings and enable them yourself. Once you’ve done that you’ll find that Canonical’s decision on where to put the menus is a tad unusual: instead of adding the menu as a line of options below the window title bar the way you might expect, Ubuntu 14.04 packs them into the title bar itself to save space.

• Testing Ubuntu for phones is now even simpler with an application that is capable of installing the new operating system from Canonical without having to delete Android. Getting a dual boot system in place will perhaps turn the attention of even more users towards the new open source platform for mobiles and tablets.

Devices/Embedded

• When LG acquired the WebOS project from HP early last year, it was a stripped down Linux-based mobile operating system hardly fit to run on any hardware. Then in January, less than a year later, LG debuted its new WebOS smart TVs at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And until the first WebOS TVs hit retail shelves earlier this month the team was working around the clock for the release.

• For years now, pundits have predicted that the age of connected TVs is upon us, and televisions have become much smarter, but LG Electronics is one of a growing number of companies betting that an open source development model can really drive the trend forward. The company recently made Connect SDK, an open source software development kit, available to Android and iOS developers for the creation of apps that could reach tens of millions of big TV screens around the world.

• Shenzhen China based Lemaker.org has launched its Banana Pi single board computer for $49 plus shipping at Ali Express. The Banana Pi is aimed at Raspberry Pi users who want a more powerful processor without abandoning the comfort and convenience of a familiar board design. First noticed by CNXSoft, the board has dimensions, port positions, and 24-pin header layout similar to the Raspberry Pi, and supports the same add-on modules, says Lemaker.org.

• The “BB.Suit,” a wearable wireless router garment prototype created by Dutch design house By Borre, runs OpenWRT Linux on a TP-Link router board.

• Last month at South-by-Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, Dutch fashion designer Borre Akkersdijk unveiled his wearable computer called the BB.Suit. While most wearables are eye- or wrist-wear, the BB.Suit is an actual onesie garment with electronic circuitry woven in, including Bluetooth, GPS, NFC, and a WiFi access point.

Phones

Android

• Review While most Chinese smartphone OEMs started life making cheap tat and then slowly began moving upmarket, Oppo has taken a slightly different tack. Its devices have been fairly high-end from the get-go and the N1, initially released running Android 4.2 back in September 2013, made quite a splash.

• CyanogenMod is now officially supporting the Kindle Fire HD 7 and Kindle Fire HD 8.9. CyanogenMod 11 comes with a relatively clean version of KitKat, plus a number of enhancements that make CyanogenMod the single most popular custom ROM on the planet.

• Google’s Project Tango is a platform for Android phones and tablets designed to track the full 3-dimensional motion of the device as you hold it, while simultaneously creating a map of the environment around it. The devices track themselves with an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and collect 3D points with a built-in depth-sensing camera. Project Tango is progressing at a fast pace thanks to many open source tools that facilitate the use of the 3D data.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Pricing for white-box tablet products in China are likely to drop during 2014 as demand is expected to decrease while competition intensifies, according to China-based supply chain sources.

Free Software/Open Source

• “Even though the IT industry and geek culture can be innovative and progressive, the reality is it is often antiquated and backward,” said 451 Research analyst Jay Lyman. “This is particularly so when it comes to workplace discrimination and harassment based on gender, sexual orientation, race, age or other factors. You would expect more from good software developers and IT professionals.”

SaaS/Big Data

• When it comes to software, the best way to learn something new, or even just figure out if it’s the right tool for you, is to dig your hands in, get dirty, and try it out. For the OpenStack universe, this is where TryStack comes in.

Education

• Every generation since the beginning of human existence has passed its value system, principles, methodologies, and skillsets on to the next generation. This passing on of information within cultures has been followed by the development of a systematic approach to learning techniques. Formal structures were created throughout the world to learn and apply these skillsets.

• During the middle ages, the monasteries of the church became the nucleus of education and literacy. Ireland, during those times, was known as a country of saints and scholars. During the Islamic Golden age in Baghdad, the House of Wisdom was established and became the intellectual hub. Similar institutions of great nature and vision were established in other parts of the globe as well.

Funding

• Google has published today their list of accepted student proposals for various open-source organizations to work on this summer… The X.Org Foundation work, which includes work to Mesa and Wayland, has seven projects to be tackled.

BSD

• OpenSSL is the dominant SSL/TLS library on the Internet, but has suffered significant reputation damage in recent days for the Heartbleed bug. The incident has revived criticism of OpenSSL as a poorly-run project with source code that is impenetrable and documented, where it is at all documented, badly and inaccurately.

• LibreSSL is a fork of the SSL/TLS protocol code from OpenSSL and aims to rewrite code as well as remove a lot of functionality that is only of limited use or has been deprecated and destined for removal. Developers will still worry about portability and they will work on multi-OS support once LibreSSL has an established baseline. For now, OpenBSD is the only supported platform of LibreSSL and there’s already plans to ship it as part of OpenBSD 5.6.

• OpenBSD developers “removed half of the OpenSSL source tree in a week.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Jakub Jelinek on behalf of all the GNU Compiler Collection developers associated with the Free Software Foundation, has announced the official release of the GCC 4.9 compiler.

• Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat wrote in the release announcement, “One year and one month passed from the time when the last major version of the GNU Compiler Collection has been announced, so it is the time again to announce a new major GCC release, 4.9.0. GCC 4.9.0 is a major release containing substantial new functionality not available in GCC 4.8.x or previous GCC releases.”

• I’ve fixed a couple of bugs affecting the network interactions which crept in a couple of releases ago. Sorry about that!

Public Services/Government

• The education sector in the Basque Region is increasingly switching to free and open source, reports ESLE, an industry trade group representing free software IT service providers in the autonomous region in Spain. This type of software is helping schools in computing, mobile learning, open data and 3D printing, ESLE writes in a first strategic review, published in December.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• No, it’s not clear why anyone would ever connect a phone to a medical device.

• Sixty percent of underground water in China which is officially monitored is too polluted to drink directly, state media have reported, underlining the country’s grave environmental problems.

• Water quality measured in 203 cities across the country last year rated “very poor” or “relatively poor” in an annual survey released by the Ministry of Land and Resources, the official Xinhua news agency said late Tuesday.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Twitter users swamp New York Police Department’s online campaign with police brutality photos.

• In response to a string of recent break-ins, the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan has given a local Pennsylvania chapter the go-ahead to form a neighborhood watch group.

• Amherst and Leverett are holding town meetings to consider resolutions to regulate drones, and to end government use of the aircraft for assassinations.

• The peace walkers arrived sweaty and gross, feet blistered and knees creaking, and Phil was waiting for them. Phil had his signs up, his American flags out, his star-spangled cap on. He extended a tight-fisted thumbs up toward the cars exiting Creech Air Force Base. A couple hundred yards away, every couple of minutes, a drone glided earthward with a baleful elegance.

• A federal appeals court ordered the US Department of Justice on Monday to turn over key portions of a memorandum justifying the government’s targeted use of drones to kill terror suspects, including Americans.

• In the latest wave of attacks, 55 “militants” are said to have been killed.

• It would probably be much more accurate to report that approximately 55 people were killed, few if any of their names are known and they are suspected to have been members of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

• Rather than calling these targeted killings, they should probably be seen as speculative murders — the act of terminating someone’s life when the U.S. government has the suspicion that person might pose an unspecified threat in the future.

• The Senate’s forthcoming report on the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques could add to the legal complications facing the long-delayed U.S. military tribunals of terrorist suspects at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

• The man widely considered to be an architect of the CIA’s controversial enhanced interrogation techniques program is a retired Air Force psychologist living in Land O’ Lakes who likens the use of waterboarding and other methods now considered torture to “good cop/bad cop” interrogation efforts employed by law enforcement.

• Imagine you are chained with your hands between your legs, crouching. You’re isolated in a small, dark room with earphones you can’t take off. Queen’s “We Are the Champions” has been playing on repeat for 30 hours now at full volume, and you’ve lost your ability to think. It could go on for months.

• The limits put on John Kiriakou’s freedom of speech is telling of how the United States treats its political prisoners.

• In the midst of a thirty-month prison sentence at the federal correctional institution of Loretto Pennsylvania, former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou has written a letter where he reports that his children were told they had to leave the visitors room because it was “overcrowded.” Kiriakou immediately saw this as an act of retaliation for writing letters from prison.

• An Australian has been killed overseas. But the federal government is strangely incurious about it, and has nothing to say about it. Its ideology is getting in the way.

• Prime Minister John Key is refusing to comment on the possibility that more Kiwis have been killed by drone strikes in Yemen.

• He last week confirmed that one New Zealander, known as Muslim bin John, had been killed alongside three others, one of them an Australian.

• Nonetheless, the reporting on shadowy military strikes that are part of a program that US government does not officially speak about is bound to rely on mostly unnamed government officials, either here in the US or in Yemen.

• Just look at today’s New York Times story (4/22/14), with the headline “US Drones and Yemeni Forces Kill Qaeda-Linked Fighters, Officials Say.” The paper explains that those targeted were “militants who were planning to attack civilian and military facilities, government officials said in a statement.”

• [...]

• While it’s possible that the strikes are indeed targeting and killing terrorists on the verge of launching attacks, history suggests that initial claims can be flat-out wrong.

• When a US drone struck a wedding convoy in Yemen last December, for example, the Times offered a sketchy account that backed the official line–”Most of the dead appeared to be people suspected of being militants linked to Al-Qaeda,” the paper explained (FAIR Blog, 12/13/13)

• A 2009 US attack that included cluster bombs was initially reported by the Times as an attack on an Al-Qaeda camp. On-the-ground reporting (Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 3/29/12) later disclosed that the attack had killed 41 civilians, including 22 children and five pregnant women.

• US frigate USS Taylor (FFG 50) has entered the Black Sea, according to the US Navy, as the Pentagon announces plans to dispatch some 600 troops to Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia for military exercises.

• Biden’s visit is not the first time Western representatives have traveled to Kiev in direct support of the “Euromaidan” protests and the subsequent unelected regime that violently seized power. US Senator John McCain would literally take the stage with the ultra-right, Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party leaders as well as meet with “Fatherland Party” member and future “prime minister,” Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

• Pavel Durov, the founder of VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social network, said on Monday that he had been fired and that the site was now “under the complete control” of two close allies of President Vladimir Putin.

• Announcing his firing on his VKontakte page, Durov said: “Today, VKontakte goes under the complete control of Igor Sechin and Alisher Usmanov.” Usmanov is a metals tycoon who expanded into tech via his company Mail.ru, which has steadily upped its stake in the Russian social network. Until recently, Usmanov owned a 10% stake in Facebook. Sechin is the leader of the hardline silovik faction that backs Putin, is CEO of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, and is believed to be one of the Russian president’s closest advisors.

• George W Bush and five of his co-conspirators in the illegal war against Iraq are being taken to court for their violation of international law.

• Exclusive: The mainstream U.S. news media is flooding the American people with one-sided propaganda on Ukraine, rewriting the narrative to leave out the key role of neo-Nazis and insisting on a “group think” that exceeds even the misguided consensus on Iraq’s WMD, reports Robert Parry.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A newly published study has uncovered alarming indications of biological loss and ecological collapse in the area around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that exploded in Ukraine on April 26, 1986.

• Nuclear boosters have long claimed that the superficial appearance of teeming wildlife in the approximately 1,000 square mile Chernobyl exclusion zone indicates an Eden-like outcome. But the study observed a frightening halt to organic decay and the disappearance of important microbes that indicate the steady advance of a potential “silent spring.”

• One of the most divisive issues in Kitimat, B.C., in a generation came to a head Saturday night as residents voted ‘no’ against Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline project.

• The ballot count from Saturday’s vote was 1,793 opposed versus 1,278 who supported the multi-billion dollar project — a margin of 58.4 per cent to 41.6 per cent.

• “The people have spoken. That’s what we wanted — it’s a democratic process,” said Mayor Joanne Monaghan in a statement on Sunday. “We’ll be talking about this Monday night at Council, and then we’ll go from there with whatever Council decides.”

• More than 900 residents voted in advance polls on a question that has split the community.

• The Harper government is downgrading the protection of the North Pacific humpback whale despite objections from a clear majority of groups that were consulted.

• Critics say the whales could face greater danger if two major oilsands pipeline projects get the go-ahead, since both would result in a sharp increase in movement of large vessels on the West Coast that occasionally collide with, and kill, whales like the humpback.

• Scientists are studying cases of climate-related mistiming among dozens of species, from Arctic terns to pied flycatchers. But there is one important species they are missing—us. Homo sapiens. We too are suffering from a terrible case of climate-related mistiming, albeit in a cultural-historical, rather than a biological, sense. Our problem is that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude—that moment being the tail end of the go-go ’80s, the blastoff point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere.

• We can, and must, create common ground between the labor and climate movements.

Finance

• Food banks were almost unheard of just a few years ago – now they are being opened in the UK at the rate of one every four days.

• For Kenny and Leanne Jones, spiralling debts caused by rising utility bills and high rents led them to the St Andrew’s Community Centre in north Liverpool.

• Study finds clear link between spending cuts and rise in number of men who killed themselves between 2009 and 2010

• To understand a crucial reason for the European financial crisis that nearly caused a global financial collapse and threatened to undo a six-decade push toward a united Europe, you could look at a bunch of charts of bond markets and current account deficits and fiscal imbalances.

• Or, you could take a look at new data compiled by LIS, a group that maintains the Luxembourg Income Study Database, that shows how income is distributed in countries around the world. It offers a surprising insight about why Europe came to the financial brink.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Guardian will still do anything to oblige the war criminals who invaded Iraq.

• New court filings in a federal challenge to Wisconsin’s John Doe campaign finance probe into Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker undermine claims from Wisconsin Club for Growth and the Wall Street Journal that the investigation is a “partisan witch-hunt” and a case of biased selective prosecution on the part of Milwaukee’s Democratic District Attorney.

• La guerre is what you supported so enthusiastically in Iraq, and involves the blasting to pieces of young children, the rape of countless women, the end of hundreds of thousands of lives and the wrecking of millions more. It involves the destruction of the infrastructure of countries and the loss of decades of economic development, and a ruinous expense to our own economy. It involves the bombing of densely packed urban areas in Gaza, for which you are an enthusiast, and from which the terror and suffering is something you will never understand. For you just sit here in the highly paid heart of the warmongering Murdoch establishment, and indulge in lies and cheats to further your income and your grubby little career.

Censorship

• Because there is nothing of merit going on in this election-year Legislature, beyond the sort of sad lobbyist ass-patting and electoral base-touching of a state run by actual fools – fools who love guns and God and glory – our Legislature made a bit of national news last week when the Florida Senate actually passed a bill that would allow the censorship of school textbooks by individual counties. Home rule, right?

• The Chinese government has set forth its rules for the censorship of foreign video games – and it looks like a fair number of titles may be affected.

• NEWS WEBSITE Reddit has downgraded the /r/ technology stream following reports of censorship.

• A statement from Reddit administrators said that some users have been overzealous, and have exerted too much control over the thread and its content and broken it as a news source.

• Here’s the situation: President Obama himself is in secretive meetings with key political figures and lobbyists in Asia to lock the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s Internet censorship plan into place.

• We’ve covered the ridiculousness of the UK’s “voluntary” web filters. UK officials have been pushing such things for years and finally pushed them through by focusing on stopping “pornography” (for the children, of course). While it quickly came out that the filters were blocking tons of legitimate content (as filters always do), the UK government quickly moved to talk about ways to expand what the filters covered.

Privacy

• A global conference in Brazil on the future of the Internet in the wake of U.S. spying revelations might be much less anti-American than first thought after Washington said it was willing to loosen its control over the Web.

• China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, the world’s No.2 telecoms equipment maker, on Wednesday shrugged off analysts’ concerns that its growth will suffer from media reports alleging the United States accessed servers at its Shenzhen headquarters.

• It’s been over ten months since the Guardian published the first disclosure of secret documents confirming the true depths of NSA surveillance, and Congress has still not touched the shoddy legal architecture of NSA spying.

• There have been myriad NSA bills presented in Congress since last June. None of them are comprehensive proposals that fix all the problems. Many of them seem to be dead in the water, languishing in committee.

• The NSA has finally decided to tell the world how the Internet surveillance program PRISM works, though it’s been almost a year since its existence was revealed by one of the very first Edward Snowden leaks.

• On Tuesday, the spy agency released a report on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is the legal justification for PRISM. The document explains how the NSA collects Internet data but, perhaps unsurprisingly, it reveals almost nothing new.

• The number of Britons approving of the publications of NSA secret files by The Guardian and The Washington Post is twice the number of those who are against, according to a poll by the YouGov analytical agency. According to the survey, 46 percent of Britons polled believe that British society stood to gain by the publications of files provided by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_04_23/Most-Britons-approve-of-publication-of-NSA-secret-files-revealed-by-Snowden-survey-2574/

• Back in December, it was revealed that the NSA had given RSA $10 million to push weakened crypto. Specifically, RSA took $10 million to make Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator, better known as Dual_EC_DRBG, as the default random number generator in its BSAFE offering. The random number generator is a key part of crypto, because true randomness is nearly impossible, so you need to be as random as possible. If it’s not truly random, you’ve basically made incredibly weak crypto that is easy to break. And that’s clearly what happened here. There were other stories, released earlier, about how the NSA spent hundreds of millions of dollars to effectively take over security standards surreptitiously, including at least one standard from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). People quickly realized they were talking about Dual_EC_DRBG, meaning that the algorithm was suspect from at least September of last year (though there were indications many suspected it much earlier).

• Following revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) deliberately weakened cryptographic standards put out by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), NIST recently proposed a series of principles to guide cryptography standards-setting going forward. Access, together with a coalition of eleven other digital rights, technology, privacy, and open government groups, submitted a letter today calling on NIST to strengthen cryptography principles, noting in particular that the principles must be “modified and amended to provide greater transparency and access.”

• Recently, news of a bug called Heartbleed spread, and with it came news of the National Security Agency possibly abusing the bug to gather information on U.S. citizens. If this information is true, it would be yet another strike against the NSA.

• Intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden has been installed as rector at Glasgow University.

• The former US National Security Agency contractor fled from his homeland last May after revealing extensive details of internet and phone surveillance.

• The 30-year-old is currently staying in Russia, where he has temporary asylum.

• Speaking via a satellite link from Russia, Mr Snowden said he was honoured to take up the post but could not attend as he was not allowed in the UK.

Civil Rights

• Just yesterday, I wrote a post about how a South Carolina construction worker was fined $525 and lost his job for not paying $0.89 for a drink refill while working at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center in downtown Charleston. The point was to emphasize how the law comes down with a devastating vengeance when an average citizen commits a minor crime, yet allows the super rich to loot and pillage with zero repercussions. There is now a systemic two-tier justice system operating in these United States, and the result will unquestionably be tyranny if the trend continues unabated.

• No doubt inspired in part by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who called supporters of the Bundy ranch “domestic terrorists,” a number of liberals on Twitter expressed their desire to see the ranch and its supporters killed by drone strikes, Paul Joseph Watson reported at Infowars Monday. Such a raid would, of course, kill innocent children as well as men and women, but it seems that didn’t matter to those demanding the deadly raid.

• Christian Legal Centre calls on David Cameron to intervene in alleged religious discrimination case

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Netflix has continued to criticise US Internet Service Providers (ISPs) over the issue of net neutrality, warning that if the proposed Comcast and Time Warner Cable merger is approved, the new company will be able to use its market dominance to demand greater fees from streaming services.

• AT&T plans to possibly bring speeds of up to a gigabit to 21 new cities. But before these cities get too excited it’s time to call Ma Bell out for its gigawashing.

• For almost 15 years, “Internet Governance” meetings1 have been drawing attention and driving our imaginaries towards believing that consensual rules for the Internet could emerge from global “multi-stakeholder” discussions. A few days ahead of the “NETmundial” Forum in Sao Paulo it has become obvious that “Internet Governance” is a farcical way of keeping us busy and hiding a sad reality: Nothing concrete in these 15 years, not a single action, ever emerged from “multi-stakeholder” meetings, while at the same time, technology as a whole has been turned against its users, as a tool for surveillance, control and oppression.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Jane Kelsey (58), professor of law at the University of Auckland in New Zealand said that the United States would mention the 2014 report on trade barriers and raise an issue with South Korea to get what they want in exchange for approving South Korea’s membership in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Copyrights

• Responding to a consultation of the EU Commission, various music industry groups are warning against a right for consumers to sell their MP3s. IFPI notes that people should be barred from selling their digital purchases because it’s too convenient, while the quality of digital copies remains top-notch. Interestingly, the UK Government opposes this stance with a rather progressive view.

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