● 04.27.14

● Links 27/4/2014: US Troops in Lithuania, Clinton Disses Snowden

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 10:57 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I’m inclined to agree with the conclusion of the article at Forbes. At this point it just doesn’t make sense to wait around to see if Microsoft will ever open source Windows XP. There are so many different Linux distributions available to replace it. Plus, it’s very doubtful that Microsoft would ever do such a thing anyway. It’s just not in their DNA to open source Windows, even an old and outdated version of it.

• Consider a school librarian wanting a cluster of PCs for customers. Typically, the concept would be raised in a staff meeting or annual plan and have to percolate upwards through the chain of command where no budget for the request exists. That means either fundraising or “next year” in the budget. What is lost by teachers and students traipsing around the community raising a few $thousand for PCs? What is lost by shifting limited funds from salaries or other supplies to PCs? It’s all a disruption from the desired goal of preparing students for the future.

• For those not in the know, let us first discuss what Linux is. It is not an application program; it is an operating system, in the same class as Windows or Apple’s Mac OS. An operating system is the piece of software that makes it possible to run any other application or user software on a computer. The operating system manages and provides the ability for programs to access the computer’s hardware, and it provides security mechanisms such as password-protected accounts that control user access. Operating systems have evolved into highly complex, multi-layered conglomerations that are essential to the operation of a computer.

• Now then, your question essentially is whether Linux is a viable replacement for Windows. As usual, the answer is “that depends”. Specifically, it depends on what you want to do with the machine, and how much time you’re willing to put into learning about Linux. Where Windows is a vendor-built and supported operating system, Linux is open-source. That means the code base is public, and not supported by a company. Instead, it is supported by the community of users who contribute to its development. Since nobody “owns” Linux the way Microsoft owns Windows, it also means that multiple “flavors” of it exist – at least six or seven depending on how you count them.

Desktop

• There is no customer-service to call with such questions or when something goes wrong, but there is the Internet, and Linux support groups are very easy to find. A secondary advantage is that it runs in a far smaller footprint, and far more efficiently than Windows. That means that it can indeed breathe new life into that old system you were going to toss.

• So what won’t Linux do? Well, it will not run Windows software, for one thing. Outlook, Office, Internet Explorer, certain games, etc. are all designed to run under Windows. The upside is that there are Linux-specific versions of just about any application software you need, so you’ll have ready access to a choice of web browsers, Office Automation Suites, photo editing utilities, or whatever you normally run under Windows — you just have to find them online, and then learn and get used to a new version.

Server

• Docker containers gain a major new deployment target with support across the Amazon cloud. The open-source Docker container virtualization technology is getting a major boost that could serve as affirmation of its practical utility and may also help to accelerate adoption.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• At the start of this quarter we looked at how 2013′s graphics developments were more incremental than revolutionary, perhaps with the need for LTS stability in mind. Things are looking quite different this year, with several major changes quietly under way.

• Last time, we identified XWayland’s upstream status as a potential barometer of Wayland’s desktop future. We’ll look at what has recently landed and what’s still to come.

• After yesterday’s testing of the GeForce 700 vs. Radeon Rx 200 Series With The Latest Linux Drivers test results were made available, the official Catalyst 14.4 Linux graphics driver was offered up to the public.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The Unreal engine is one of the most prolific pieces of technology used in the gaming industry, and the fact that the developers from Epic have just added official support for SteamOS and Linux is actually one of the biggest leaps for the open source platform since the release of Steam.

• Clockwork Tales: of Glass and Ink, an adventure game developed and published by Artifex Mundi sp. z o.o., has just received a Linux version and is now available on Steam.

• Clockwork Tales: of Glass and Ink was initially made available on the Windows platform more than a year ago, but it seems that the developers managed to port the game for the Linux players.

• “A continuing string of strange earthquakes are causing the world’s cities to crumble to ruin. Dr. Ambrose Ink—one of the foremost minds of the technological revolution—hopes to expose the underlying cause of this supernatural phenomenon. It’s up to Dr. Ink’s longtime friend and confidante, Agent Evangeline Glass to save Dr. Ink and reveal what is causing the earthquakes,” reads the official Steam website.

• Infinity Runner is a game that tells everything about the gameplay just with its name. The mobile platforms are filled with games that feature perpetual running, but there are very few on the desktop, and even fewer on Linux.

• Valve just pushed another update for Steam, their digital distribution platform. The update contains a variety of bug fixes. In addition to that, this update now makes Steam for Linux officially compatible with the new distribution of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 14.04, which was a pretty fast move on the part of Valve. Apart from those, this update also improves and readies Steam to be fully compatible with Steam’s Virtual Reality. Instead of having to start it by the –vr command line option, the VR support is now integrated into Steam and it is capable of turning it on and off based on the hardware presence.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• After a stable version gets released the GNOME developers start the work on the next development version right away. In this case, the development release that we’re talking about is GNOME 3.13 that will be slowly turned into 3.14 in about six months.

Distributions

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• Here’s a short video showing how Cockpit manages Docker containers. Cockpit is in RHEL branding here, but it’s basically the same thing as you get from cockpit-project.org

• “Lightworks for Linux Is Finally Here” says www.maketecheasier.com. The article states that after a 3-year beta cycle, a stable version was released in January. “It is completely free to use (the basic version, at least) and has a lot of features to offer to an amateur as well as a professional editor.” Their bottom line is, “If you’re looking for professional grade video editing software for Linux, look no further than Lightworks!” See the full article for all the details.

• Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, has deployed open source Red Hat systems for mission-critical applications.

• Last year, Cern said it was in the middle of expanding its IT infrastructure to accommodate the growing amount of data being produced by its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• It’s been a week since Canonical released the latest Long-Term Support (LTS) version of its Linux distribution, Ubuntu. This version will be supported for the next 5 years, so it doesn’t introduce anything radical. Muktware reviewed the latest version, 14.04, when it first rolled out but after a week with the upgrade, here are some things that I’ve noticed that you may want to take note of.

• While Ubuntu 14.04 can be easily downloaded from the official site and installed via LiveUSB, there are some old fashioned geeks that prefer to have the actual DVD of the system.

• According to the developers, Ubuntu 14.04 should work on systems with 768 MB of RAM memory and 5 GB of disk space, or better, of course.

• This is a guide to programs that are included by default in Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr. Here I overview the most important applications from each main category (like Firefox for web browsing or Nautilus for file management), and at the end I includes some more applications that I find useful to install from the Software Center. These are either useful utilities of configuration tools, as well as some open-source games installable from Ubuntu’s default repositories.

• That’s right. Business, with a capital B. It’s too late for me to write anything coherent, so here’s a quick list of things we did pre-opening to make your life more painful^Winteresting:

• - ruby-defaults updated to 2.1 - boost-defaults updated to 1.55 - new binutils snapshot - tiny unicorns in every package

• This release of Ubuntu Tweak contains a few small fixes.For example the nautilus scripts support for Ubuntu 13.10 and later has been fixed and the tool does not crash anymore when sources.list is not parsable.

Devices/Embedded

• The maker community loves the Raspberry Pi Single Board Computer (SBC). But, the $35 Raspberry Pi, which was introduced in 2012, with its 700MHz ARM11 processor and 512MBs of RAM, is looking a little dowdy these days. So, Lemaker.org has introduced the faster Banana Pi.

• Picuntu is a custom version of Ubuntu Linux designed to run on devices with Rockchip processors. That effectively lets you turn a cheap Android TV box into a full-fledged PC capable of running desktop apps such as LibreOffice, GIMP and Firefox.

Phones

• A LINUX ENGINEER has built the first smartphone based on a Raspberry Pi computer, and has cleverly named it the Piphone.

• Liz Upton of the Raspberry Pi Foundation lauded the device in a blog post on Friday, largely due to the fact that it cost just $158 to build. What’s more, the Piphone is constructed entirely from off the shelf components, which means “there’s no soldering required, and no fiddly electronics work,” she said.

• Here’s my latest DIY project, a smartphone based on a Raspberry Pi. It’s called – wait for it – the PiPhone. It makes use an Adafruit touchscreen interface and a Sim900 GSM/GPRS module to make phone calls. It’s more of a proof of concept to see what could be done with a relatively small form factor with off-the-shelf (cheap) components. I don’t expect everyone to be rushing out to build this one, but I had great fun in doing it, as it builds quite nicely on my previous projects, especially the Lapse Pi, a touchscreen time-lapse controller, and uses most of the same hardware.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Adobe Photoshop is considered to be the ultimate photo editor. Certainly it’s great, but it can be replaced. We all heard about GIMP and if you wonder “Can it compete with Photoshop?”, the answer is “Yes.” It may require some adjustments, you’ll need a separate converter for RAWs and some time to get used to its shortcuts, but ultimately you can switch to GIMP. No subscription required – it’s free, powerful and cross-platform.

Events

• The trip was rather uneventful… except Gary decided to bypass Seattle and take a much more scenic router that goes through a quaint town named Leavenworth, Washington. What’s quaint about it? Well, Leavenworth is styled after a Bavarian village. How can you tell that? Well the buildings on the road through town all look like they are in the Alps or something. The lettering used on all of the business signs is in some kind of weird font that is obviously somehow mandated by the place… since even the big box stores and fast food chains have altered signage that uses the city font. Really… even Napa and McDonald’s don’t look quite right. It was definitely a pretty route with quite a bit of snow in the mountains with occational streams flowing down… (the road followed) a winding river much of the way… and apple orchards. The spead limit was 60 MPH but there was very little traffic and we hit the Seattle area just North of Everett I believe… so even when we got on the 6 lane highway, it wasn’t that crowded. It difinitely made for a much more pleasant trip. Gary took the same route home last year but this is the first time we took it on the way up.

• The OSI is thrilled to announce the launch of the International Competition in Free and Open Source Software Multimedia (ICOM). Organized by the Sena Primary School (SK Sena), Malaysia and Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP) along with the state government of Perlis, Malaysia and the Ministry of Education Malaysia the video competition is open to students from around the world: from primary school children to those attending institutions of higher learning. The main objectives of ICOM are as follows:

SaaS/Big Data

• It’s no secret that cloud computing is one of the hottest trends in all of technology. Microsoft’s upbeat earnings report this week was partly driven by success in the cloud, and companies like Red Hat are organizing their whole business strategies around open source cloud computing platforms like OpenStack. Forrester Research is out with a new report that puts some numbers on the hypergrowth being seen in the cloud arena. Among other forecasts, the report predicts that the global public cloud market will hit $191 billion by 2020. To put that in perspective, Forrester reported that the public cloud market was at $58 billion as of the end of last year.

Databases

• Infor applications on a Red Hat and EnterpriseDB open technology stack provide a lower total cost of ownership alternative

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Healthcare

• There are reasons FLOSS works in health. There’s no lower-cost, no more reliable and no more flexible model for software in IT.

Business

• Support for open source software is ‘unbundled’ from the software itself. That actually makes it much easier to get the right level of support at the right price.

Semi-Open Source

Public Services/Government

• Open source delivers safe, efficient and modern e-health services to Warsaw’s university hospital. Its integrated medical system is based completely on open source and, according to project leader and medical specialist Radosław Rzepka, is shaping the future of Poland’s medical databases.

• Spain’s largest hospital chain, Quirón, will be piloting a portal based on the Openstack open source cloud computing solution, to provide patients with access to their radiology data. The pilot is one part of a three-year research project called Coco Cloud, which in 2013 received a 2.8 million euro grant from the European Commission’s FP7 funding programme. Some of the requirements for the secure cloud-computing environment will be formulated by Italy’s governmental ICT resource centre, the Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale (AGID).

Openness/Sharing

• There’s a tomato called Rutgers, a variety that was favored by New Jersey’s canning industry in the 1930s, when Campbell Soup, Heinz, and Hunt were all sourcing fruit from the Garden State’s some 36,000 acres of vines. Today, the processing tomato varieties offered by Seminis, which was the largest seed company in the world before Monsanto acquired it, have nondescript names such as Apt 410, Hypeel 108, and PS 345.

Leftovers

Science

• When they learned through a Usenet group that former NASA employee Nancy Evans might have both the tapes and the super-rare Ampex FR-900 drives needed to read them, they jumped into action. They drove to Los Angeles, where the refrigerator-sized drives were being stored in a backyard shed surrounded by chickens. At the same time, they retrieved the tapes from a storage unit in nearby Moorpark, and things gradually began to take shape. Funding the project out of pocket at first, they were consumed with figuring out how to release the images trapped in the tapes.

• Plans to open the world’s first mine in the deep ocean have moved significantly closer to becoming reality.

Security

• Microsoft just published security advisory 2963983 which acknowleges limited exploits against a 0-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE). The vulnerability CVE-2014-1776 affects all versions of IE starting with version 6 and including version 11, but the currently active attacks are targeting IE9, IE10 and IE11. The attack vector is a malicious web page that the targeted user has to access with one of the affected browsers.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Improbable it may seem, but doctrine and capabilities exist on both sides that could lead to nuclear use in a confrontation over Ukraine.

• According to a report by veteran journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, the US Military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence powered by the National Security Agency (NSA) for electronic surveillance and assassination of suspected militants in Pakistan’s northern areas.

• When President Obama decided sometime during his first term that he wanted to be able to use unmanned aerial drones in foreign lands to kill people — including Americans — he instructed Attorney General Eric H. Holder to find a way to make it legal, despite the absolute prohibition on governmental extrajudicial killing in federal and state laws and in the Constitution itself.

• The identification of the dead revealed that non-Yemeni Arab fighters were also among those killed. The U.S. hasn’t commented on the strikes, but reports say that the U.S. carried out the drone offensive based on intelligence inputs from Saudi Arabia.

• Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone noted in a 2012 article that there is a much larger concern: transparency.

• On Friday, John Jacob Schmidt of Radio Free Redoubt said that according to Stewart Rhodes, founder of Oath Keepers, Attorney General Eric Holder has approved drone strikes against the Bundy ranch to take place some time in the next 48 hours. According to Schmidt, the information came from a source Oath Keepers has within the Department of Defense.

• Drones are like vigilantes or lynching parties — lawless and cowardly. They use brute power to kill the powerless. The powerful choose who is right and who is wrong; the powerless have no ability to defend themselves with arms or due process. Oh, sometimes the killers make mistakes, but their intentions are pure, aren’t they?

• The enormous increase in public attention to the drone war in the past year arguably began with the leak of a Justice Department “white paper” laying out the legal rationale for killing a US citizen who’d joined Al Qaeda. A few months later, President Obama gave a major speech in which described the government’s criteria for going after suspected terrorists beyond the war in Afghanistan. The administration also released the names of four US citizens who had been killed in drone strikes. Among them was Anwar Al Awlaki, the New Mexico-born cleric who died in Yemen in September 2011. – See more at: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/foia_win_against_government_on.php#sthash.3j2nJQXo.dpuf

• After two years of legislative work, a bill that would restrict the use of commercial drones was effectively killed by the Senate Thursday.

• As with much of the past three days, it is unclear which U.S. agencies or departments took part in the raids.

• I think this message should be sent to our commanders who allow drones to fly over villages, terrorizing the people there, who never know if or when the next bomb is falling on their house, whom it is killing next. People who come home to find pieces of their loved ones in the ruin of their house, killed by a drone; people whose crime is to be living in the wrong place, it seems.

• “We own the finish line!” Our Vice President was saying that America owns the world. That “God” is on our side, marching in lockstep with our troops. That America is exceptional, and superior, and the envy of other nations. Like a “city set on a hill.” Biden embodies America’s delusionary—and destructive–“exceptional” reality.

• The propaganda effort to demonize anyone to the right of Josef Stalin continues, as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes called supporters of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy “insurgents,” Paul Joseph Watson said at Infowars Tuesday. Hayes and his guests spent about 15 minutes in what was clearly a propaganda effort designed to marginalize Bundy supporters and certain alternate media outlets as fringe kooks.

• National democratic activists, the bloc usually lumped by mainstream press as ‘the Left,’ have declared the entire week that US President Barack Obama is in Asia as “National Sovereignty and Patrimony Week” in the Philippines (22-30 April). They propose to discuss and challenge what they call as “heightening US intervention, increasing presence of US and allied foreign troops, intensifying foreign economic plunder and worsening puppetry of the Aquino regime to the US government.”

• But President Barack Obama appears to have taken the option of cyber attacks off the table. The reason: the United States is vulnerable to counterstrikes.

• Furthermore, the people of this country have the right to understand how the administration constitutionally justifies the killing of one of its citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki, in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen.

• In a victory for transparency, opponents of the President’s veil of secrecy over drone killings has been partially lifted by the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeal’s opinion filed on Monday in New York Times v. Departments of Justice (DOJ), Defense (DoD), and the CIA (Case Nos. 13-422 and 13-445).

• The United States is siphoning weapons and providing combat training to moderate Syria rebels via a secret Central Intelligence Agency programme in Jordan.

• Growing US involvement has been propelled by continued strikes on rebel strongholds by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

• Among the terrorists groups directly and indirectly affiliated with the Syrian rebels, and possibly benefiting from US support include the following:

• 1) Al-Nusra Front (ANF), an Al-Qaeda associate operating in Syria.

• ANF – has been described as “the most aggressive and successful arm of the rebel force”. This group has been designated as a terrorist organisation by the United Nations, the United States (see article: US blacklists Syrian rebel group al-Nusra http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/12/2012121117048117723.html) , Australia, and the United Kingdom.

• Abu Mohammad al-Golani, the current leader of ANF, has confirmed the ANF’s allegiance to Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. By May 2013, a faction of ANF declared its loyalty to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

• Physicians for Human Rights Calls for Public Reckoning on U.S. Violations of the Convention Against Torture

• Anti-government protests in Venezuela that seek regime change have been led by several individuals and organizations with close ties to the US government. Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado- two of the public leaders behind the violent protests that started in February – have long histories as collaborators, grantees and agents of Washington. The National Endowment for Democracy “NED” and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have channeled multi-million dollar funding to Lopez’s political parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and Machado’s NGO Sumate and her electoral campaigns.

• Inspected by US and Iraqi forces since late 2005, Site 4 is a detention facility operated by the Iraqi National Police, which according to the cable is overcrowded, with little running water, and sewage spills. In one inspection of the facility, prisoners told the inspectors cases of abuse, rape, and molestation. The gravest of the crimes was children, held illegally in the jail, informing investigators they were anally raped, beaten, and forced to perform oral sex on interrogators.

• The United States deployed 150 paratroopers to Lithuania today, part of efforts by Washington to reassure its eastern European allies, worried by events in Ukraine, that NATO would offer protection if they face Russian aggression.

• A total of 600 US troops are to be deployed to Poland and the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania for infantry exercises. They are expected to remain in the region on rotation until the end of the year.

• The situation in Ukraine continues escalating. A military operation against pro-reform protesters in southeastern Ukraine, launched by Kiev, is tearing the country apart and forced Russia’s move to heighten security at its border. US Secretary of State, John Kerry, threatens that “the window to change course is closing” while additional troops are deployed to Lithuania. Using discredited “evidence” prompts some observers to doubt Kerry’s “wisdom”. Don’t, said a German analyst who reiterates that the US is systematically pushing Europe into a crisis for which the US has planned for decades.

• The US pivot to Asia, which is the raison d’etre for the entire visit, is, after all, not just about shifting its military weight closer to China. It also involves repairing and reinforcing its economic and political alliances in the region and creating more favorable conditions for furthering the neoliberal agenda to arrest its own deep crisis and overall decline.

• Ahmad Zia Durrani, a spokesman for the Kandahar police chief’s office, said the helicopter was on a “training flight” and that it was unclear why it crashed.

• Ecuador has ordered the U.S. Embassy’s military group, about 20 Defense Department employees, to leave the country by month’s end, in a further indication of strained relations.

• The group was ordered to halt operations in Ecuador in a letter dated April 7, the U.S. Embassy confirmed Friday.

• Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has ordered all US military officers to leave the country by the end of month and canceled a security cooperation program with the Pentagon, US officials said on Friday.

• Ecuador has ordered the U.S. Embassy’s military group, about 20 Defense Department employees, to leave the country by month’s end, in a further indication of strained relations.

• Scotland Yard has run up a “ludicrous” bill of £6 million (Dh37 million) patrolling outside an embassy in London since Julian Assange sought refuge there two years ago.

• Police are stationed day and night outside the Ecuadorian Embassy, racking up £1million in overtime alone, as they wait to arrest the WikiLeaks founder, who claimed asylum as he faced extradition to Sweden over sexual assault allegations.

• The WikiLeaks founder met with boxing champion Solomon Egberime, then had a sparring match with Father David Smith (a.k.a. ‘Fighting’ Father Dave), his team tells The Huffington Post. Smith describes himself on Twitter as a professional boxer, 6th degree black belt and social activist (as well as an Anglican parish priest).

Transparency Reporting

• The US State Department announced the launch of its third annual “Free the Press” campaign today, which will purportedly highlight “journalists or media outlets that are censored, attacked, threatened, or otherwise oppressed because of their reporting.” A noble mission for sure. But maybe they should kick off the campaign by criticizing their own Justice Department, which on the very same day, has asked the Supreme Court to help them force Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter James Risen into jail.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Thousands have been marching in Washington DC to protest against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Launched by Cowboy and Indian Alliance, the six-day event “Reject and Protect” is aimed at urging President Barack Obama to refuse the project.

• While Morales saw the wealth underground as a tool for liberation, Rojas saw the president as someone who was pressing forward with extractive industries – in mining, oil and gas operations – without concern for the environmental destruction and displacement of rural communities they left in their wake.

• An internal tracking document– obtained from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) by the Center for Media and Democracy/the Progressive Inc. under Texas public records law — reveals the scope of ALEC’s anti-environmental efforts in 2014.

Finance

• But none of my interview was shown in the programme, nor was I mentioned. Instead a New Labour minister was interviewed and he was allowed to say, unchallenged, that the film was absolutely shocking and the British government had no prior idea this was happening; they would now look into it etc. Needless to say they still did nothing, nor has anything ever been done to have child slave cotton banned from the UK. Why do you think Primark is so cheap?

• Last month, we pointed out that Google, Apple, Adobe and Intel would almost certainly settle, rather than face an ongoing lawsuit concerning their collusive hiring practices, in which they promised not to poach employees from one another in an effort to keep employees longer and (more importantly for them) to keep salaries down. That has now come to pass, with the four companies agreeing to pay out $324 million to settle the charges. This is good. As we noted in our original story, the hiring collusion was shameful and, worse, antithetical to the kind of job shifting and idea sharing that helped make Silicon Valley into Silicon Valley.

• The relationship between advanced economies and their developing counterparts is complex. Human rights and working conditions in emerging nations, where many products consumed in developed countries are made, have been debated for many years. The contours of the Rana Plaza accident that killed 1,100 people, which I discussed yesterday*, the first anniversary of the tragedy, captured the key issues of that debate. But none of it is new. Its origins lie in the colonial past.

• On a routine drive to the beauty salon, Robin Johnson had one of those life-happens moments: Her 13-year-old Durango, with 200,000 miles on the odometer, overheated and started sputtering. Convinced that the car was on its last legs, Robin and Scott Johnson scrutinized their already-tight family budget, looking for a way to fit in car payments.

• At age 53, everything changed. Following my whistleblowing first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, I was run out of the good job I had held for more than 20 years with the U.S. Department of State. As one of its threats, State also took aim at the pension and benefits I’d earned, even as it forced me into retirement. Would my family and I lose everything I’d worked for as part of the retaliation campaign State was waging? I was worried. That pension was the thing I’d counted on to provide for us and it remained in jeopardy for many months. I was scared.

Censorship

• Clearly those onerous conditions are designed to make any blogger think twice or three times before publishing anything at all controversial or embarrassing for the authorities. The article notes that the new law may be challenged before Russia’s Constitutional Court, and that there’s a huge loophole in the form of blogs located overseas, which are not covered by the legislation. The fear has to be that the Russian government will now move on to blocking them too.

• As we recently covered, Jim Ardis, the absurdly thin-skinned mayor of Peoria, IL, got the boys in blue to raid a house over a parody Twitter account that portrayed him as a.) a possible drug user, b.) a possible patron of the world’s oldest profession and c.) “trill as fuck.” Peoria’s Finest have never been finer, deploying seven plainclothes officers to nail a dangerous tweeter whose Ardis-mocking account had been shut down by Twitter weeks before. Bonus: drugs were discovered during the raid, which meant the cops could at least declare victory over marijuana use, if not the internet itself.

• Police shouldn’t be able to search people’s emails without a warrant, privacy and civil liberties backers said on Friday.

• Still, Big Brother concerns are creeping in. Some privacy advocates worry about possible security breaches and the reconnecting of personal identities to the data.

• THE NEW York Times recently offered a revealing look at how family members of a senior Chinese political figure had amassed a nine-figure fortune. It also struck a welcome blow against an aggressive effort by Chinese authorities to censor such information not just from domestic media but also from the U.S. press.

• You see, I was working from a hotel room last week in Istanbul, where the Turkish government has blocked access to YouTube. The government had earlier blocked Twitter, but the ban was lifted by court order. A court also ordered that YouTube access be restored, but according to Reuters, the government has decided to defy that order.

• Many people will be familiar with the name Carlos Slim as intermittently the richest person in the world, generally vying with Bill Gates for that title. Some will probably be aware that his huge fortune — currently listed as $69.67 billion in his Wikipedia entry — is derived from a business empire based on telecommunications.

• Mónica Mancero writing for the paper El Telégrafo [The Telegraph] gives a feminist-based opinion: “Debates generated by the subject of censorship should go beyond the strait-laced and reductionist view, which ends up victimizing a woman that supposedly needs to be defended and spoken for.”

Privacy

• Microsoft’s remote storage disservice, OneDrive, has been caught inserting modifications into code in some of the files users store there.

• Although this has not been reported about any other remote storage disservice, any of them could start doing this, which means you would be a fool to trust them with anything other than checksummed files.

• All of these disservices spy on their users, and that is plenty of reason to reject them, for anything other than encrypted (and checksummed) files. In order for the encryption to be trustworthy, you need to do it on your own computer with free software.

• Services provided by network servers can raise several different ethical issues, including nonfree client-side JavaScript (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html), surveillance (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html), and SaaSS (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html). Whether any of these problems applies depends on the facts.

• The purpose of the marketing buzzword “cloud” is to encourage you to disregard the facts and not judge. Don’t let them “cloud” your mind: reject the term “cloud”.

• My previous two posts were about the angst of privileged middle classes. I wrote first about the middle class habit of moving into the catchment area for good schools. Then I excused our tendency to maintain a less-than ethical existence. Untrained eyes could be forgiven for mistaking my motives in writing these posts. Am I not simply trying to assuage my own guilt at doing precisely those things?

• Hillary Clinton didn’t have to directly deal with Edward Snowden’s leaks when she was secretary of state. Clinton had already stepped down from her post by the time the Guardian published its first revelations on the expansive scope of spying by the National Security Agency. But at an event at the University of Connecticut on Wednesday night, Clinton made it clear that she’s no fan of the NSA leaker, insinuating that Snowden had cooperated with countries hostile to the United States and unintentionally aided terrorist organizations. “I don’t understand why he couldn’t have been part of the debate at home,” she said.

• One of the phone companies participating in the US National Security Agency’s call data collection program challenged its legality before the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court early this year. But according to newly declassified court filings, that challenge was rejected.

• Shahid Buttar, the Executive Director of The Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and Kevin Zeese of Popular Resistance sit down with host Dennis Trainor, Jr. in this episode of Acronym TV to discuss, among other things…

• The NSA document is very clear about data collection or surveillance of U.S. citizens living in foreign country.

• “World leaders may be fretting over whether the NSA bugged their phones, but Canadian government officials aren’t particularly worried—they bought theirs directly from the agency. A survey of procurement records kept on public government websites reveals that Canada has spent over $50 million purchasing a bevy of secure communications equipment from the largest branch of the American intelligence community.”

• EFF has been on the road, traveling to cities and towns across the country to bring our message of digital rights and reform to community and student groups.

• And while we had the tremendous opportunity to talk about our work and our two lawsuits against the NSA, the best part of the trip was learning about all of the inspiring and transformative activism happening everyday on the local level to combat government surveillance and defend our digital rights.

• We met students and professors in Eugene, Oregon who held a campus-wide digital rights event at the University of Oregon. There, students had the opportunity to unpack their campus privacy policy, download and learn freedom-enhancing software, and explore their library’s open access initiative.

• The intricate surveillance equipment used by the federal government to track and store the cellphone data of millions of people and to monitor terrorism suspects is making its way to Main Street.

• Both Obama and now Clinton want the public to overlook the administration’s history of support for spying, as presented by The New York Times, prior to the disclosures. Obama aides anonymously told the Times that the president had been “surprised to learn after the leaks…just how far the surveillance had gone.” The administration fought groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in the courts as they tried to convince judges to release documents that would at minimum confirm the secret legal interpretations of surveillance authorities under the law. So, it is fraudulent for Obama, Clinton or any other politician to claim to Americans that the White House was about to bring transparency and promote debate on government surveillance.

• An experimental ‘mesh network’ in Tunisia aims to curtail government spying. The project has a surprising backer – the U.S. State Department

Civil Rights

• Indiana state lawmakers have taken steps to improve privacy protections for people by restricting police collection of cellphone data.

• Gov. Mike Pence signed a bill into law prohibiting police from searching cellphones during routine traffic stops without a search warrant.

• Right-wing media have been rushing to distance themselves from the Nevada rancher they’ve spent weeks championing after Cliven Bundy revealed his racist worldview, but two of Bundy’s biggest cheerleaders — Sean Hannity and Fox News — have vested corporate, financial, and political interests in the promotion of Cliven Bundy’s anti-government land ownership agenda.

• Good news, Americans! The former “top watchdog” for the Department of Homeland Security, Charles K. Edwards, was an incredibly perverse blend of crooked and spineless and yet we still managed to avoid being terrorized to death during his run as Inspector General (2011-2013). That’s the resilience of the American public. Even while the agency was being bumblefucked into (even greater) uselessness, those who hate us for our way of life (which now includes drone strikes, neverending military ‘interventions’ and the constant watching of damn near everybody) were unable to find a way to maneuver around the “security” “provided” by the DHS.

• The Switzerland-Cuba association Geneva’s section condemned the secret program of the United States Agency for International Assistance (USAID), called Zunzuneo, which was targeted at boosting subversion and destabilization in the Caribbean country.

• It is evident that the US government does not give up its effort to destroy the Cuban Revolution, if necessary by the flagrant violation of the national legislation, and the international regulations, noted the organization in a communique released today.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• When Netflix opposed Comcast’s looming merger with Time Warner Cable on Monday, the streaming video company did so by raising net neutrality concerns. It argued that Comcast could use its newfound power to charge a toll for content that might compete with its own video offerings — a toll like the one that Netflix already found itself paying to improve the quality of streaming for Comcast customers. Comcast wasn’t too happy about that, of course, firing back that it was Netflix’s decision to cut out the middleman and work directly with Comcast to speed things up, and that the fee is standard practice for companies that offer “transit service” to quickly move data between networks.

• Dividing traffic on the Internet into fast and slow lanes is exactly what the Federal Communications Commission would do with its proposed …

• FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler says new proposed rules will protect competition, while consumer advocates call them an “insult” to the open Internet.

• The problem is that ISP’s are more than capable of increasing speeds in the U.S., but choose not to so they can gouge consumers for more money. For those who are in areas that offer Google Fiber, have you noticed how prices have mysteriously dropped and services have improved on the part of the competition?

• The proposal would formalize pay-for-play arrangements in which streaming video companies and other types of Web services pay Internet service providers for a faster path to consumers over the “last mile” of the network.

• Ten years ago (!?!) we wrote about how Verizon conned Pennsylvania taxpayers out of billions of dollars. Verizon predecessor Bell Atlantic had cut a deal with the state to wire up every home in the state with symmetrical fiber. That didn’t happen. And while Verizon’s former CEO Ivan Seidenberg did, in fact, make a big bet on fiber with FiOS, Wall Street hated it and kept punishing the company for daring to do something so stupid as investing in the future. This is a quarter-to-quarter world, and spending on capital improvements that would bulk up the entire economy over the long haul is not a bet that Wall Street folks want to make, since it doesn’t pay off in a few months. So, it was no surprise that once Seidenberg was out of the picture, it basically dropped all plans to expand FiOS — and then started looking to push its DSL users to cable providers, so it could focus on the wireless business instead.

Intellectual Monopolies

• President Obama recently wrapped up a meeting in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, where the leaders once again failed to make a breakthrough on their deadlock in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement.

• Obama and Abe have been in negotiations over Japan’s treatment of sensitive agricultural products, including rice, beef, pork, wheat, and dairy products, and over trade in automobiles — but a breakthrough is still out of reach. This lack of progress is just one of several indicators that the TPP is faltering, if not failing.

Copyrights

• Via Silverscarcat we learn of an absolutely bizarre situation in which it appears that the ex-wife of a man who committed suicide late last year, is claiming copyright on his lengthy suicide letter in an attempt to get it taken offline entirely. It should be noted that all of the public information at this point is coming from websites that advocate for men’s rights in family courts (i.e., not quite a neutral third party), but it is true that original version of the letter has been removed from Scribd, and the reason stated is a copyright claim. The site A Voice for Men has refused to take the letter down, but provides the following explanation:

• Alex Tabarrock, one of the contributors to Marginal Revolution (and associate professor of Economics at George Mason University) has often dealt with the subject of intellectual property from an economist’s perspective. Recently, he changed things up and posted about his personal experiences with the frustrations inherent to intellectual property laws. Dealing with copyright in practice is much, much more aggravating and ridiculous than dealing with it in theory.

• The RIAA is not exactly known for its positive treatment of musicians. If you’re at all familiar with the art of RIAA accounting, you’d know about how they structure deals to totally screw over musicians, doing everything possible to make sure they never get paid a dime. Yes, many are given advances, but those advances are “loans” on terrible terms in which the labels add on every possible expense that needs to be “paid back” before you ever see another dime. Very few musicians ever “recoup” — even after the labels have made back many times what they actually gave the artists. For the most succinct example of how the labels make out like bandits, profiting mightily while still telling artists they haven’t recouped, here’s Tim Quirk, who a few years back explained how it worked with his band, Too Much Joy (TMJ):

• A few years ago, we wrote about an insanely aggressive anti-piracy campaign in South Africa, in which the local version of the RIAA (RISA) suggested people “shoot the pirate.” That hyperbolic and ultra-aggressive campaign resulted in some actual violence, when RISA sent a group of artists (armed with that slogan) onto the streets to “confront” counterfeit CD sellers. So, perhaps it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to find out that a man in South Africa has been criminally convicted for posting a torrent for a local movie to the Pirate Bay, and given a suspended prison sentence.

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