● 05.01.14

● Links 1/5/2014: Tails in the News, Firefox 29 Reviews

Posted in News Roundup at 11:23 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• Once upon a time, if you ran a data center, you used virtual machine (VM) management programs (i.e., hypervisors) There was no other practical choice. This dates all the way back to the good old IBM 360 mainframe days with CP-67/CMS in 1967. Today, our data centers and clouds run more advanced hypervisors. Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, is made up of nearly half-a-million Linux servers running the Xen hypervisor, while Microsoft’s Azure cloud relies upon its Hyper-V hypervisor.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• AMD rolled out the Beema and Mullins hardware yesterday. The AMD “Beema” APUs are targeted for mobile products like notebook PCs while AMD Mullins APUs are low-power processors for ultra low-powered devices. The low-end Mullins APUs sport Radeon R2/R3 Graphics. The AMD Mullins APUs include the A10 Micro-6700T, A4 Micro-6400T, and E1 Micro-6200Tl. The Beema APUs include the E2-6010, E2-6110, A4-6210, and A6-6310. The Mullins models top out at 4.5 Watts while the Beema APUs top out at 15 Watts.

Applications

• Time for a sad story. I’m going to list slsc here today, even though in my entire career as a Linux enthusiast, I don’t recall ever having seen it work, on any distro, not even once.

Proprietary

• RawTherapee is an application that specializes in the development of RAW images and it’s probably one the best you will find on the Linux platform. It comes with so many features that it might even put Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom to shame.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• 7 Days to Die was a Kickstarter project about an open world, voxel-based, sandbox game that is a unique mash up of First Person Shooter, Survival Horror, Tower Defense and Role Playing Games combining combat, crafting, looting, mining, exploration, and character growth. The developer had promised a Linux version of the game during its campaign period, saying that they would release a Linux version 2 months after the initial launch. But even after the game was launched, there were no signs of a Linux version or any communications from the company. Now, after a long hiatus, a developer has said that they are indeed working on a Linux version and it should be ready in a couple of weeks.

• Gameloft recently dropped some more details on their upcoming game Modern Combat 5 which, Gameloft assures, is well on its way to be launched. This time around, Gameloft has released the full title and the story in which the game will take place. The new game is titled Modern Combat 5: Blackout.

• In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Brian Fargo, the boss at inXile Entertainment, the developer of Wasteland 2, has hailed Valve as the “savior of the PC” due to their efforts in making digital distribution such a success.

• Double Fine sure do love Linux don’t they! Hack ‘N’ Slash is looking good and will be release for Linux on the 6th of May, to go along with the release date we have a trailer for you!

• Looks like currently it will be a Steam only release, so you will have to hold out if you want it fully DRM free with no Steam attached.

• This is fun, Ars Technica a rather big general tech news website has done a review of Gigabyte’s AMD powered mini gaming box and give it a demerit for its poor Linux support.

• For those not entirely up to date on their Awesomenauts, this month it received a whopper of an update and it might be time you gave it another go, especially with another major update looming.

• Wow Valve is on a roll for Linux gamers aren’t they! 39 more Linux games have been lit up to be included on Steam’s store.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I became the maintainer of KMyMoney reports after the original developer, Ace Jones, went away and was nowhere to be found.

• By chance, I tried to fix a bug in a report, then fixed one more, later added feature here, another there. 5 years later anything that’s report-related in KMyMoney goes into my inbox.

• I was selected this year to work with KDE again, and the Plasma team! Just awesome! The project for 2014 is about Plasma Media Center (PMC), and more specifically DVB support on PMC! To accomplish that I’ll be using the LibVLC library, which is fun to code with. So, stay tuned because this summer, PMC will be able to play TV too! The following days i’ll update you with screenshots and repository links too for everyone interested.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3 is one of the most controversial desktop environments in open source history. Flame wars have raged back and forth between GNOME 3 advocates and critics for quite a while now. Datamation examines the history of GNOME 3 and considers whether or not the GNOME 3 developers violated design principles when they created it.

• GNOME 3 is usually defended in terms of design excellence. However, while GNOME has been developed with close attention to design, that does not mean that its basic foundations are as grounded in design principles as you might infer.

• Rather, a look at GNOME 3′s early history shows that development was mostly a consistent realization of principles described early in the process — principles founded on the impressions of the Design Team and apparently backed by little theory. This inconsistency between how GNOME is marketed and how it was actually designed seems the major reason for its sometimes rocky reception.

• The changes are rather light this early on into the GNOME 3.13 development cycle, and there weren’t even any NEWS release files to accompany Mutter 3.13.1 and GNOME Shell 3.13.1, but both packages are now checked in for the imminent release of GNOME 3.13.1.

Distributions

• Version 14.04 “Baboon” of NixOS, the Linux distribution built around the Nix purely-functional package manager, has been released.

• Pinguy OS 14.04 Mini (based on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr) is already available for download, while the full release is scheduled for next week.

• Emmabuntüs Collective, the one that stands behind the Emmabuntüs Linux distribution, was recently named a finalist in a contest rewarding the cyber-activism. The competition in question is THE BOBS contest. It was organized ten years ago by a German radio and television to reward cyber-activism.

• A new stable point release for Debian GNU/Linux (Wheezy), an Update Pack for SolydXK (201404), and updates for MakuluLinux and Tanglu Aequorea Victoria

• If you’re looking to move away from Windows XP and Linux is an option, then here is our pick of linux-XP alternatives.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• One of Firefox’s big strengths as a web browser has always been it’s ability to be customized. The community has already developed a plethora of Themes and Plugins for Firefox users to utilize. Firefox 29 makes the experience of tweaking your browser that much easier with the new Customization Mode.

Debian Family

• TAILS — The Amnesiac Incognito Live System — is a highly secure operating system intended to be booted from an external USB stick without leaving behind any trace of your activity on either your computer or the drive. It comes with a full suite multimedia creation, communications, and utility software, all configured to be as secure as possible out of the box.

• It was Edward Snowden’s tradecraft tool of choice for harvesting and exfiltrating NSA documents. Yesterday, it went 1.0. If you need to turn a computer whose operating system you don’t trust into one that you can use with confidence, download the free disk image. (Note: TAILS won’t help you defend against hardware keyloggers, hidden CCTVs inside the computer, or some deep malware hidden in the BIOS). It’s free as in speech and free as in beer, and anyone can (and should) audit it.

• Tails’ website states that its member users have increased its wide-world adoption in the last 18 months by a multiple of 4. Its user members include Freedom of Press Foundation, Reporters without Borders and Bruce Schneier, security expert and writer who assisted Greenwald on how to read and digest the NSA documents. The NSA is a member user of Tails.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The release dates for Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, in all its stages has been published on one of the Ubuntu wikis.

• Ubuntu seemed to dominate much of the headlines today. Two new reviews emerged, both rather flattering for Ubuntu. This couldn’t come at a better time to draw attention away from Canonical’s decision to pull-back from their Ubuntu on Android project. An Aussie has discovered a most embarrassing security issue for Ubuntu while the release schedule for 14.10 is drafted.

• When it was first announced, the idea of Ubuntu for Android sounded excellent. Running Ubuntu – a popular Linux distribution for Desktops, similar to Windows or Mac OS X – alongside Android seemed a great idea. Being able to plug in your phone to a docking station connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse to turn your smartphone into your computer was something out of the future. However, the project never really got anywhere, as support from partner vendors was thin to say the least and now, it looks like Canonical has all but given up on the innovative project. News broke earlier in the week of the company behind Ubuntu ceasing development on the platform and since then a official word from Canonical has appeared.

• Ubuntu 14.04 marks a turning point for the popular Linux operating system. Here’s our Ubuntu 14.04 LTS review.

• That means that if you use Ubuntu 12.10, you should upgrade to Ubuntu 13.10 (Ubuntu 13.04 has already reached end of life) and then (recommended) to 14.04. That’s because after May 16 2014, “Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 12.10″.

• It’s also important to mention that PPA maintainers will no longer be able to upload packages for Ubuntu 12.10 after that date.

Flavours and Variants

• The Bodhi Linux systems are known for their minimalistic approach, and the current release is no different. The distribution was based from the get-go on Ubuntu 14.04, but the development of Bodhi started when Ubuntu 14.04 was still a Beta release. Now that the final version of Ubuntu has been released, Bodhi is ready to switch to Beta.

• Xubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr is an official derivative of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, released with many improvement and updates. Come with LTS (Long Term Support) version Xubuntu 14.04 will be supported by xubuntu team and developer for 3 years. Without adding tons of new features, Xubuntu focuses on stability, simple, light and fully customizable.

• Xubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr uses the Xfce desktop environment instead of Unity 7, so it works very well as a lightweight alternative to regular ubuntu desktop. On this release Xubuntu developers have introduced the new Whiskermenu a more modern menu with the ability to easily launch your favorite applications, as well as have a useful search bar and various customizations. You can also find the new Xfwm4 4.11 which includes support for Sync VBlank, Xfdesktop 4.11 and other updates.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• Since its launch and slightly delayed shipping in 2012, we’ve seen Raspberry Pi computers used for everything from a bartender to robots to a bizarre musical instrument. Now dedicated tinkerer Dave Hunt has used a Model B to create a touchscreen smartphone called the PiPhone, though he readily admits that it would be easier and cheaper to pick up an (arguably much better looking) budget cellphone from a shop in the mall, “but hey, where’s the fun in that.”

Android

• From today, Ouya players can play any of the games provided during the beta period for free. Games included with the service include Lego Batman, Frontlines: Fuel of War, Prince of Persia, Sonic & Sega All-Star Racing, Super Street Fighter IV, Dirt 3 and Mirror’s Edge.

• Playcast says that only a small handful of games will be available today, and that the number will ramp up over the coming weeks as the service’s stability is proven. All games will be available to play using Ouya controllers.

• Google is developing a program called Android Silver, which would find carriers dedicating a section of their store to some of the top Android phones. The company is making this move to enhance development of premium Android smartphones and take total control over the Android ecosystem to compete with the Apple iPhone and the growing power of Samsung, the leading manufacturer of Android smartphones.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source. What started as a simple description for software source code and a development model has moved far beyond that into a strong culture where presentation of patterns and models for debate is promoted. Open source has become a challenge to view the world in a pioneering way, looking for solutions that break from tradition, and doing so in a collective environment where transparency and openness are virtues that are held in the highest regard.

• LibreS3, a robust Open Source implementation of the Amazon S3 service, has just been released!

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Version 29 of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser went stable on Tuesday, showcasing a new design, deemed “Australis” that has been testing in the Firefox Nightly beta channel since November. Among the most noticeable features of this new design are the curved tabs and the Firefox Menu (similar to Chrome’s “hotdog menu“), which make for a much sleeker look, albeit a look much like its competitor browser, Google Chrome.

• This week, many of us are kicking the tires on the new version 29 of the Firefox browser, which is more than just an incremental release falling within Mozilla’s rapid release cycle. Version 29 includes the Australis interface, which has been in the works for five years and gives the browser several features similar to the ones found in Google Chrome. So far, I like version 29, and its updated look and feel are impressive.

• Mozilla launches its first open-source browser release in the post-Brendan Eich era.

• Firefox 29 has been revealed and is billed as the biggest update to the open source browser since Firefox 4 in 2011, with a new design and more customisation tools

SaaS/Big Data

• Oracle today announced the beta availability of its Solaris 11.2 Unix operating system. The Solaris 11.2 release will be the second major update of Solaris in less than two years from Oracle, following the debut of Solaris 11.1 in October of 2012.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation announces that the first RC version of LibreOffice 4.2.4 has been released and is now available for download.

• When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, there was a lot of speculation about which Sun products and projects would continue and which would fall by the wayside. Solaris was among the products that many people felt wouldn’t have a bright future. On Tuesday, though, Oracle unveiled Solaris 11.2, which is only the second point release of Solaris since version 11 appeared in 2011.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• Tibco Software announced late yesterday its plan to acquire privately-held open source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft for $185 million. Under Tibco’s ownership, the current plan is to keep the JasperSoft’s BI brand intact.

BSD

• OpenBSD is one of the few projects that manage to stick to a specific release schedule, so a new version of this operating system is usually made available twice a year. The previous OpenBSD release was on November 3, which means that now it’s time for another one.

Leftovers

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The Ukrainian crisis has not radically changed the international situation but it has precipitated ongoing developments. Western propaganda, which has never been stronger, especially hides the reality of Western decline to the populations of NATO, but has no further effect on political reality. Inexorably, Russia and China, assisted by the other BRICS, occupy their rightful place in international relations.

• The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that the Pentagon’s latest “action plan” is intended to address “concerns” held by Washington’s “closest allies in Asia” over the Obama administration’s willingness to confront Beijing. The newspaper said these allies “have told American counterparts” that the response to Russia’s “aggression” in Crimea “is seen as a possible litmus test of what Washington will do if China attempted a similar power grab.” It also noted that “concerns were raised” by South Korean officials last September after Obama’s last-minute decision to call off plans to bomb Syria—partly to avoid a potential military confrontation with Russia.

• Of course, it is possible that Kerry really believed he was speaking truths, having internalized the assumptions that flow from U.S. “exceptionalism,” which make words like “invasion,” “aggression” and “international law” inapplicable to us as the world’s police; and what might be a “completely trumped up pretext” if offered by the Russians is only a slight and excusable error or misjudgment when we do it. After all, the New York Times quickly used the word “aggression” in editorializing on the Crimea events (“Russia’s Aggression,” March 2, 2014), whereas it never used the word to describe the invasion-occupation of Iraq, nor did it mention the words “UN Charter” or “international law” in its 70 editorials on Iraq from September 11, 2001 to March 21, 2003 (Howard Friel and Richard Falk, The Record of the Paper).

• War is Peace. What was known as a famous quote from George Orwell’s fiction 1984 has become a reality. Or maybe it is still fiction if you consider that the mainstream media is making up reality on a daily basis.

• On April 28, 2014, the homepage of The Washington Post web site featured the picture of a nuclear explosion with the following title: “War is brutal. The alternative is worse.”

• The relationship between the US and Pakistan has deteriorated “alarmingly” over the course of the Afghan conflict, a former national security advisor to President Barack Obama has said.

• Arguing that the role of Pakistan is crucial for resolving the Afghan crisis, Gen (rtd) James Jones, former National Security Advisor to Obama, said that there is absence of trust between Pakistan and the US now.

• People and Power investigates how Israeli drone technology came to be used by the US.

• In Marvel’s latest popcorn thriller, Captain America battles Hydra, a malevolent organization that has infiltrated the highest levels of the United States government. There are missile attacks, screeching car chases, enormous explosions, evil assassins, data-mining supercomputers and giant killer drones ready to obliterate millions of people.

• Its inspiration?

• President Obama, the optimistic candidate of hope and change.

• An Albany man who dressed as the Grim Reaper outside a Syracuse airbase to protest the U.S. drone aircraft program was acquitted this week of criminal charges.

• But Wagner said Block presented “passive resistance” when asked to leave the base property.

• “She just declined to go,” Wagner said.

• An Iraqi judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought against certain individuals in the Iraqi government who killed George Bush with a drone strike in 2005—the lawsuit was filed by Bush family members.

• Allowing a lawsuit against individuals “would hinder their ability in the future to act decisively in defense of Iraq interests” said the Iraqi judge.

• I can understand the outrage that people here in America are experiencing right now. That a foreign judge would so easily dismiss something not based on it being right or wrong, but I based on keeping the door open so people from the judge’s country are free to kill more with drone strikes. They seem to carry out justice only when it is convenient for them and in their best interest.

• If you wanted proof that virtue is its own reward in theatreland, take a look at Lucy Ellinson’s performance in Grounded. She is nothing short of mesmerising as a Top Gun pilot, who, after having a baby, is reduced to doing shifts in front of a computer screen in an air-conditioned trailer near Las Vegas. Her job is to steer unmanned “drone” aircraft towards their targets in the Middle East. And then to press the button that blows the enemy combatants below to pieces.

• I had in mind to write about Tony Blair’s remarkable regurgitation of bloodlust and bile last week. The former British PM managed to tear himself away from his consulting work for dictatorships and other lucrative sidelines long enough to make a “major speech” calling for — guess what? — even more military intervention in the endless, global “War on Terror.” The fact that this war on terror — which he did so much to exacerbate during his time in power, not least in his mass-murder partnership with George W. Bush in Iraq — has actually spawned more terror, and left the primary ‘enemy,’ al Qaeda and its related groups, more powerful than ever, has obviously escaped the great global visionary. No doubt his mad, messianic glare — coupled with the dazzling glow of self-love — makes it hard for the poor wretch to see reality.

• Waterboarding, a technique in which water is poured over the angled face of a prisoner — so as to fill his nose, mouth and lungs — terrifyingly creates the feeling of drowning. “When performed on an unsuspecting prisoner, waterboarding is a torture technique — without a doubt,” Malcolm Nance, former master instructor and chief of training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego states. “There is no way to sugarcoat it,” he writes, referring to the fact that he personally witnessed and supervised the waterboarding of hundreds of U.S. military trainees who were drilling to resist torture.

• All that said, prior to revealing the mass conspiracy against the good guys, there are some moments where Captain America has to face the America we’re all more familiar with. He looks in on a group of veterans working to heal mentally after deployment. He even questions Fury’s assertion that killing terrorists before they commit crimes is really justice. It’s not security, but it’s surprising to see an action blockbuster.

• It’s clear that Marvel didn’t think that governmental and social pressures that led to NSA’s domestic psying program made for superhero-grade entertainment, and maybe they’re right. I was still glad to see that the ideas of government openness were enshrined next to the usual superhero clichés of truth and justice. It was also just a very, very fun movie.

• On Tuesday, Clayton Lockett died of a heart attack more than an hour after his botched lethal injection began. Things went so wrong that the state of Oklahoma’s second scheduled execution for that night was stayed for 14 days.

• Remember around this time last year when President Obama gave his big ballyhooed Drone Speech, promising more transparency to the citizen-consumers of America about who, when, where and why he obliterates and maims with his flying missiles?

• It appears Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and her colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee have largely forgiven the U.S. intelligence community for eavesdropping on their phone calls and spying on their email correspondence.

• Acting on the request of James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Feinstein and her colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee voted on Monday to remove a provision from a major intelligence bill that would have required the U.S. government to disclose information about when drone strikes occur — especially overseas — as well as information about the victims of the drone strikes.

• Barack Obama promised to install his administration in a glass house lit up like the Super Bowl, with everything visible to the citizenry he serves. So you will not be surprised to learn that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wants nothing more than to keep the public well informed.

• Not a single major newspaper nor any national news broadcast has ever reported that on Feb. 6, 1985, a jury in Miami concluded that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

• The CIA does not give up its secrets easily. Even under public scrutiny and pressure from a Senate committee to declassify parts of a congressional report on harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, the CIA remains shadowed by its reluctance to open up about its operations and its past.

• The White House has directed the CIA to declassify parts of a Senate report criticizing harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, but history shows that the agency is accomplished at preventing embarrassing or damaging disclosures.

• After more than three years of civil war in Syria, the Obama administration may soon send shoulder-fired missiles to the rebels fighting the country’s dictator, Bashar Assad. But before the first missiles fly, they’ll have to be outfitted with fingerprint scanners and GPS systems designed to keep the weapons from falling into the wrong hands. There’s only one problem: It’s not clear the relatively high-tech security equipment will be compatible with the decidedly low-tech, twenty-year-old missiles.

• The CIA denied having any role in arming Libyan rebels before the deadly 2012 Benghazi attacks, despite reporting by TheBlaze that the U.S. was covertly involved in providing rebels with weapons during Libya’s civil war that ultimately ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda militants.

• On Sept. 11, 2011, an Armenian carrier from Albania landed in Benghazi, Libya. It was carrying 800,000 rounds of ammunition originating from Albanian surplus stocks. Three of those stocks belonged to armed forces of the United Arab Emirates, according to a 2013 United Nations investigation.

• This timeline was compiled by TheBlaze and For the Record as part of their investigation into the U.S. government’s actions regarding the diplomatic team in Benghazi — and how Al Qaeda-affiliated militants benefited from the lethal aid provided to rebel forces on the ground in Libya.

• In the face of continued revelations of United States’ torture policies during the Bush administration, Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), today sent letters to President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel demanding an end to all ongoing practices of torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners and detainees. The letter specifically calls for revoking techniques permitted in Appendix ‘M’ of the current Army Field Manual, such as solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, forms of sensory deprivation, and environmental manipulations, which individually and combined have been condemned internationally as forms of torture, cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, and therefore violate the United States’ obligations under the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. In addition, PsySR expressed particularly concern that health professionals, including psychologists, have been engaged to support such efforts in violation of their ethical responsibilities.

• If you have to worry that your proxy militias will turn your own weapons against you, maybe it’s not such a good idea to give them weapons in the first place. Just a thought.

• James Petras, retired Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, and adjunct professor at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, wrote a damning article on September 18, 2002, exposing the Ford Foundation’s sinister choice of beneficiaries of its donations. He accused the CIA of using “philanthropic foundations as the most effective conduit to channel large sums of money to Agency projects without alerting the recipients to their source”.

• As first reported by the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg on April 17, during a pretrial hearing of a Guantanamo prisoner previously held at a series of CIA secret prisons, judge Army Col. James Pohl ordered the agency to provide the long-concealed “names of agents, interrogators and medical personnel who worked at the so-called black sites.”

• Judicial Watch, the conservative organization that has been FOIAing and FOIAing for an email record of the Obama administration’s talking points from the week of the Benghazi attack, has obtained one that loops White House adviser Ben Rhodes into the conversation with advice about how to massage the story for the White House. Sorry, that was a boring lede—this is the lede you want.

• It’s hard to defend Jay Carney, or the institution of the White House press secretary in general. We’re talking about a taxpayer-funded position that exists to feed spin to reporters who are at the top of their field and could be doing literally anything else. The Benghazi Smoking Gun naturally took up a chunk of today’s Carney briefing, and ABC News’ Jonathan Karl is being celebrated on the right for sticking it to the man and being “vindicated” for previous stories about the White House’s talking points role. Carney’s excuse—that Ben Rhodes’ email about the talking points was not about Benghazi per se, and didn’t need to be released—is his typical sort of ridiculousness.

• For a government worker, nothing concentrates the mind quicker or makes you at first angry and later perhaps more cautious than the prospect that you might go to jail for doing your job.

• It’s a reminder from the conflict between the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the CIA over the panel’s more-than-6,300-page report on the CIA’s coercive interrogations during the administration of President George W. Bush. They included waterboarding and other torture-like methods.

Finance

• The International Monetary Fund has approved a two-year $17.1 billion loan package for Ukraine. The immediate disbursement of $3.2 billion will allow Ukraine to avoid a potential debt default.

• I grew up in Western Europe in the 1980s. My teenage years were characterized by the Cold War between the United States and the now-collapsed Soviet Union. We learned that the West was liberty, and that the East was oppression. Presumably, the East learned the reverse in their corresponding teenage years. But when did the West become the enemy they painted?

• It’s hard to communicate how everpresent the threat of nuclear war was. Basically, you could say that us who grew up in the 1980s didn’t expect to grow old. In this time of polarization and belligerence, identifying with your home team was more important than ever. In retrospect, it was a false sense of liberty that we were given – mass surveillance started with ECHELON and similar programs in the mid-1970s – but it was nevertheless a very strong sense of liberty.

• Today in the U.S., we can thank the immigrant rights movement for the rebirth of May Day. On May 1, 2006 over 2 million working people and their allies poured into the streets of America’s big cities. The immigrant rights mega-marches shut down the repressive, anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner bill that criminalized undocumented immigrants and other working people who show solidarity with them. 120 years after Haymarket, another attack from big business and right-wing politicians was beat back by the power of the people.

• The extraordinary success of Thomas Piketty’s best-seller shows that progressive ideas are at last winning

• If the government genuinely means to help people find work after a long spell of unemployment, they would not have come up with Help to Work, a curious plan that insists on a daily visit to the jobcentre or an enforced period of unpaid labour. If the government means to punish them and save its own face, the plan makes more sense.

• …the top 1% owning 40% of the wealth while the bottom 80% just own 7%.

Censorship

• Is Twitter in trouble? The company reported first quarter earnings on Tuesday, and Wall Street immediately reacted with a big thumbs down. In just half an hour, Twitter’s stock price fell 9 percent, nearing its all-time post-IPO low.

• The reasons why aren’t immediately clear. The overall numbers were mostly in line with analyst expectations, so much so that CEO Dick Costolo kicked off the company’s earnings call by declaring that “we had a great first quarter.” Twitter did register a net loss of $132 million for the quarter, which is a hefty chunk of change. But no one was expecting the company to turn a profit this quarter, and overall revenue doubled compared to last year’s first quarter, to $250 million.

• Newtownabbey council said “yes” when they cancelled what they labelled a blasphemous play, The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged), due to be performed by the Reduced Shakespeare Company (RSC) earlier this year. Members of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a political party with roots in the Free Presbyterian Church, called for the show to be axed fearing it would offend and mock Christian beliefs.

• In protest of the crowd-funding site’s “censorship” of his TV movie project about convicted abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, McAleer commissioned a bold billboard near Kickstarter’s Brooklyn headquarters.

• In Uganda, journalists are not only dealing with outright censorship. It seems the government of president Yoweri Museveni is employing a strategy that is aimed at pushing journalists towards self-censorship using a broad range of measures. Although the Ugandan media has a very strong tradition of critical reporting some journalists are probably more prone to self-censor.

Privacy

• Last week I received the kind of email that would have many startup founders jumping for joy – a cold pitch from a fairly well known VC firm, inquiring if we would like to have a conversation with them about possible funding. In addition to funding, there was hinting about help getting some high-profile customers onboard as well. As a (currently) self-funded startup which is fairly under-capitalized, it’s hard not to find something like that exciting. Surely in any sane universe I should have immediately replied to say “Yes, call me right now”.

• The NSA has lost the trust of the American people as a result of the Edward Snowden leaks, and needs to be more transparent to gain it back, the NSA’s new director said Wednesday in his first public comments since taking control of the embattled spy agency.

• “I tell the [NSA] workforce out there as the new guy, let’s be honest with each other, the nation has lost a measure of trust in us,” Admiral Michael Rogers told a conference of the Women in Aerospace conference in Crystal City, Va.

• The Government Communications Headquarters has presented its collaboration with the National Security Agency’s massive electronic spying efforts as proportionate, carefully monitored, and well within the bounds of privacy laws. However, a new document from the Edward Snowden collection shows that GCHQ secretly coveted the NSA’s vast troves of private communications and sought “unsupervised access” to its data as recently as last year.

• NSA watchers have seen this evasion a million times. Say that the “target” isn’t the American people, knowing most listeners will take that to mean that the NSA is spying on the private communications of foreigners or terrorists, not regular Americans.

• The U.S. needs more cyberwarriors, and it needs them fast, according to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. He plans to more than triple the size of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command over the next two years.

• But where will they come from? These are not the kind of skills you can teach in basic training.

• Enter the embattled National Security Agency. Its new director, Adm. Michael Rogers, also directs the Cyber Command. Ten miles down the road from the NSA, at a defense contractor’s office in Columbia, Md., the NSA recently held a live-fire cyberwarfare exercise aimed at developing more cyberwarriors.

• All of these ‘exhibits’ are part of current or past art projects exploring surveillance technology, social media or related issues, which seem to be growing almost as fast as the NSA mission statement and enemies list.

• Snowden also took several shots at the National Security Agency and its top officials, and criticized the agency for wearing two contradictory hats of protecting U.S. data and exploiting security flaws to gather intelligence on foreign threats.

• For the first time, the federal court overseeing the country’s surveillance programs heard a formal argument this month that the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk collection of people’s phone records is illegal.

• British government’s draconian response to the Guardian’s reporting sees UK drop five places on Freedom House list

• Tuesday’s US supreme court arguments involved a seemingly basic legal question about the future of the Fourth Amendment: do police officers need a warrant to search the cellphone of a person they arrest? But the two privacy cases pit against each other two very different conceptions of what it means to be a supreme court in the first place – and what it means to do constitutional law in the 21st century.

• Facebook will now deliver targeted advertisements to practically any smartphone app, after unveiling a mobile ad network at its F8 developer conference in San Francisco.

• This week, the President is expected to release a report on big data, the result of a 90-day study that brought together experts and the public to weigh in on the opportunities and pitfalls of the collection and use of personal information in government, academia, and industry. Many people say that the solution to this discomforting level of personal data collection is simple: if you don’t like it, just opt out. But as my experience shows, it’s not as simple as that. And it may leave you feeling like a criminal.

• The German government on Wednesday rejected a testimony of whistleblower Edward Snowden through the German NSA panel, local media reported, citing a conclusion of the draft opinion of the government for the parliamentary committee.

• According to information from the German media, a 27-page paper indicated that an invitation for the former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor would jeopardize the foreign and security interests of Germany considerably.

• Verizon Wireless will monitor customers’ activities on wireless devices as well as wired or Wi-Fi-connected desktop computers and laptops. Collected data on users’ online activity will then be passed to marketers for targeted advertising.

• Verizon customers recently began receiving a notice from the company that it is “enhancing” its Relevant Mobile Advertising operations to glean more information from its customers, the Los Angeles Times reported.

• “In addition to the customer information that’s currently part of the program, we will soon use an anonymous, unique identifier we create when you register on our websites,” Verizon Wireless tells customers.

• “This identifier may allow an advertiser to use information they have about your visits to websites from your desktop computer to deliver marketing messages to mobile devices on our network.”

• The telecom giant will automatically download a “cookie,” or tracking software, onto a user’s computer or device without explicit warning when the customer visits the company’s “My Verizon” website to view a bill or watch television programming online, according to Verizon spokeswoman Debra Lewis.

• Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who fled to Moscow last year after revealing details of massive U.S. intelligence-gathering programs, expects his asylum status in Russia to be renewed before it expires this summer, his lawyer said on Wednesday.

• Speaking during his keynote talk at Infosecurity Europe on Wednesday, Hypponen delved into whistle-blowing in the modern age and – looking at the revelations from Snowden – said that this was not just a case of the US ‘misbehaving’.

Civil Rights

• It was after 10 p.m. on July 8, 2009, when Sandra Mansour answered her cellphone to the panicked voice of her daughter-in-law, Nasreen. A week earlier, Nasreen and her husband, Naji Mansour, had been detained in the southern Sudanese city of Juba by agents of the country’s internal security bureau. In the days since, Sandra had been desperately trying to find out where the couple was being held. Now Nasreen was calling to say that she’d been released—driven straight to the airport and booked on a flight to her native Kenya—but Naji remained in custody. He was being held in a dark, squalid basement cell, with a bucket for a bathroom and a dense swarm of mosquitoes that attacked his body as he slept. “You have to get him out of there,” Nasreen said. But she was unfamiliar with Juba and could only offer the barest details about where they’d been held. “He’s in a blue building. You’ve seen it. It’s not far from your hotel.”

• In a landmark decision, a federal judge in Milwaukee has struck down Wisconsin’s strict voter ID restrictions as both an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote and, for the first time, a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act based on the law’s “disproportionate racial impact and discriminatory result” of depriving “the right of Black and Latino citizens to vote on account of race or color.”

• Swartz committed suicide in January 2013 at age 26, but his reach and impact on the tech and tech-policy worlds were already enormous. A computer-programming prodigy, he worked on projects like RSS and Creative Commons before he was 16. He dove into politics and became an advocate and activist for publicly available content and an open Internet. But by the time of his death, Swartz was being federally prosecuted for downloading a huge quantity of copyrighted material from JSTOR, the online academic library, at MIT. He was facing jail time and fines.

• “The draft minimum age law is a real beacon of hope for the thousands of Yemeni girls vulnerable to being married off while still children,” said Nadim Houry, deputy Middle East and North Africa director. “The government should act quickly on this measure and develop enforcement mechanisms to prevent even more girls from becoming victims of early and forced marriage.”

• The symptom of Sri Lanka phobia which is common among the politicians in the West, is caused through personal political ambitions. It comes from the presence of a large number of expatriates Tamils living in these Western countries. It makes the patients have a distorted view of human rights. They become blind to their own actions of violation of human rights, and war crimes.

• The nation’s highest court refused to hear a case that is challenging the authority and legality of the National Defense Authorization Act’s “Indefinite Detention” clause. The refusal to hear the case has plaintiffs calling for action.

• A group of journalists and activists who filed a lawsuit two years ago challenging a controversial provision in a national defense spending bill that they claimed allows for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens were dealt a crushing blow Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear their appeal.

• Pulitzer prize winning reporter Chris Hedges – along with journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, activist Tangerine Bolen and others – sued the government to join the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans.

• The Supreme Court declined to hear the case that a group of activists, journalists, and academics including Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, and Daniel Ellsberg brought against the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA.

• A decision by the U.S. Supreme Court means the federal government now has an open door to “detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker,” according to critics.

• Which leads me to a further thought. I am pretty sure I had no concept of people’s colour as a small child, and the following I know for certain. My elder children attended a primary school in Gravesend in which a little over half the children were Sikh. By age seven, they had absolutely no conception of any racial difference between themselves and any others in their class. It is a slender piece of evidence, but I am generally fairly convinced that racial difference is a taught construct.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• “The idea of net neutrality (or the Open Internet) has been discussed for a decade with no lasting results,” writes Wheeler in a lengthy blog post. “Today Internet Openness is being decided on an ad hoc basis by big companies. Further delay will only exacerbate this problem.”

• Once again, Wheeler completely glosses over the fact that the only reason a federal appeals court gutted the previous neutrality rules was because a shortsighted FCC never thought to categorize Internet service providers as vital communications infrastructure. As numerous supporters of a true net neutrality have repeatedly pointed out, reclassifying ISPs would likely mean the FCC could reinstate the old rules (and possibly more stringent ones) and survive a legal challenge.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• While recording a movie strictly for personal use is entirely legal in UK cinemas, the same definitely cannot be said about the United States. Recording or ‘camming’ a movie in the U.S. can result in jail-time, particularly if the activity is connected to subsequent bootlegging or illegal online distribution.

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