● 05.07.14

● Links 7/5/2014: OpenELEC 4.0.0, Chromebooks Mainstream

Posted in News Roundup at 4:11 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Another day, another two new Chromebooks get unwrapped. Hot on the heals of Lenovo’s announcement of the N20 and N20p Chromebooks, Asus unveils the C200 and C300. The new Chromebooks come in two sizes and promise battery life of 10 hours.

• Chromebooks are no longer a small, focused selection of purpose-built machines, but a sprawling array of increasingly meaningless choices.

• If Chrome OS use is growing rapidly, and continues to do so, I’d expect the picture to be clearer in the months and years to come. But for now, all I know for sure is that both Chrome skeptics and Chrome boosters can point to stats that seem to back up their respective stances. Convenient, isn’t it?

Server

• Red Hat and Canonical are doing a lot of the work to get the KVM hypervisor running properly on 64-bit ARM and Citrix Systems is also working to get the Xen hypervisor, which is the preferred virtualizer on Linux-based public clouds (Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Hosting, and IBM SoftLayer all use a variant of Xen; it is not clear what Google uses and Microsoft clearly uses Hyper-V). Stephano Stabellini, senior principal software engineer at Citrix, explained that Xenon ARM was a “lean and simple architecture” that “removed all of the cruft accumulated over the years” in the X86 implementation of Xen. The ARM variant of Xen has no emulation and does not make use of QEMU, and it only provides one type of guest, which combines the two options available on X86 machinery. (That would be the full virtualization of a Hardware Virtual Machine and the partial virtualization available through Para-Virtualization).

• A recent article in Fortune magazine entitled “The Dawn of the Chrome Age” highlights the success of the Linux-based OS in the low-cost laptop market. According to the article, “Over the holidays in 2013, two Chromebook models were the No. 1 and No.3 bestselling laptops on Amazon.com, and they’re being adopted in schools and business around the world.” Simply put, Chrome OS represents Web apps on top of Linux, and given that the Web has become the leading application development platform – this is significant.

Kernel Space

• How ZFS on Linux compares to ZFS on Illumos or FreeBSD

Graphics Stack

• The focus of Intel’s DRM Color Manager work is to have a common interface for all color correction / enhancement properties for different hardware, the color manager one be one umbrella DRM property, and DRM drivers can register the color correction properties of its hardware during initialization time.

• Back in the middle of April I wrote about the Improv ARM development board not yet shipping and many of the early pre-order customers being frustrated that the open-source-friendly hardware still isn’t shipping months past its original ship date. Since then, there’s still been no official update and it looks like one of their suppliers isn’t even working with them anymore.

• Mesa, an open source implementation of the OpenGL specification and a system for rendering interactive 3D graphics, is now at version 10.1.2.

• Mesa 10.1.2 is the next iteration in the series and implements the OpenGL 3.1 API. This means that some drivers might not support the specifications for the latest Mesa. This latest iteration of the Mesa library comes with a large number of changes and fixes, so it’s a good idea to update as soon as possible.

Benchmarks

• Most of the performance changes to be found between Mesa 10.1 stable and the current Mesa Git code just past the 10.2 branching was around the HD 7850 graphics card that uses the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver while the other three graphics cards used the R600g driver. With R600g and our assortment of Linux gaming and OpenGL benchmark tests run, we didn’t see any better performance in the code beyond where it’s at with Mesa 10.1.

Applications

• Sysmonitor Indicator is an Ubuntu AppIndicator that can display the CPU, memory, swap, filesystem and network usage as well as various temperature sensors as values on the panel.

Proprietary

• The Kingsoft Office suite uses a Qt-based GUI and is known for its high compatibility with modern Microsoft Office document files but it has no support for ODF. According to multiple user reports, Kingsoft Office does deal better with handling some document elements than LibreOffice/OpenOffice. The Kingsoft Office/WPS software for Linux has been under development since 2012 and was released in June of last year while up through today is still considered in an alpha state. There’s also been official communication about Kingsoft Office for FreeBSD, but its state appears even more premature.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Between stable builds, the developers launch a large number of Beta versions that integrate a lot of new features. Some of the updates are pretty large, if we take into account the first one in the new series, but more intermediary releases only feature a small number of changes.

• According to the changelog, the performance of the Steam client in some cases with the Big Picture window out-of-focus or in-game has been improved, especially on the Linux platform.

• Right out of the gate, Renderdoc isn’t as useful to Linux users as is Valve’s VOGL or other utilities like APITrace. Because, as it stands right now, Renderdoc only targets the Microsoft Direct3D 10/11 graphics API, but support for OpenGL is planned under this open-source Renderdoc. While still targeting D3D11 right now, there is basic build support for Linux of Renderdoc. I imagine in the months ahead it will get much more interesting once there’s OpenGL API support and open-source contributors have had their hand at improving the Renderdoc Linux support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Oh you might think I’m just rambling, and that this is trivial because I don’t mention any talks? You might be right in some way, I am kind of rambling. If you find that trivial on the other hand, you are very mistaken! KDE is people, conf.kde.in is even more about people: the KDE India crew, the other foreign speakers trying to learn of the Indian culture and failing, the students hungry for knowledge.

• Remember Playkot’s Supercity? Game artist Paul Geraskin liked has just started a crowdfunding campaign to support working on a new indie game, inspired by Howard Lovecraft: Road to Providence. As with Supercity, Road to Providence will be created with open source tools: Krita, Blender, and jMonkeyEngine.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• I fail to see what everyone is complaining about. gEdit 3.12 looks fabulous! Better than any previous version. It’s useful, minimalistic in design, allows you better focus on what you’re writing (as intended), and it saves vertical screen space which is honestly welcomed on my laptop’s wide-screen.

Distributions

• If you’re looking to add a reliable, popular and free media center app to your computer, then XBMC is one of the best to go for. Want to go even further? You can press an older computer or small form-factor PC into service as a dedicated media server and center using XBMC at its core via a number of specially constructed Linux builds. And if space is tight – or you’d like to run XBMC directly off a USB flash drive or SD card – then OpenELEC is the build to go for.

Screenshots

Debian Family

• Advanced Package Tool was launched back in 1998, and 16 years later it finally reached version 1.0. Now we already have version 1.0.3, which means that the developers intend to pick up the pace a little with the new builds.

Devices/Embedded

• In conjunction with its Project Skybridge and K2 announcement, AMD said that today it “demonstrated for the first time its 64-bit ARM-based AMD Opteron A-Series processor, codenamed ‘Seattle,’ running a Linux environment derived from the Fedora Project.” The Fedora-based Linux environment is said to enable development — and migration between — applications based on both x86- and ARM-based processors using common tools.

• Hey, Linux fans: a high-profile, colossal, global outfit is about to dump a proprietary operating system and replace it with Linux in a very, very, demanding application that literally involves life and death situations.

• We’ve known this for a while actually, since 2012 to be precise, as that is when the Naval Air Station at Patuxent River in Maryland first announced it was keen on Linux-powered software to control the Northrop Grumman MQ-8. The “Fire Scout”, as it is also known, is an unmanned helicopter said to offer “unprecedented situation awareness and precision targeting support” and capable of carrying Hellfire and/or laser-guided missiles..

Phones

Android

• Probably the biggest thing missing from Intel’s announcements today were any Chromebooks that have a larger or higher-quality screen — most Chromebooks remain stuck with 11-inch screens and relatively low resolutions. Samsung’s new Chromebook may run the less powerful Exynos processor, but it also features a 13-inch, 1080p screen — it seems that Chrome consumers will still need to choose between power and a quality screen for the time being. As always, Intel, Google, and its OEM partners said they’ll continue to innovate on the hardware front, even though these Chromebooks are pretty similar design-wise to earlier models. “As users do more with Chrome, they’ll expect more from the hardware that surrounds it,” said Google VP Caesar Sengupta.

Free Software/Open Source

• Now, the company is opening it up to the public after an apparently successful invite-only phase. Atom is now available for Mac users and is open source, naturally. The company plans on releasing Linux and Windows versions very soon.

• When I walked into Carroll Hall, for a moment I felt like I was back in college… and at the World’s Best Slumber Party. There were tables full of salty snacks, stacks of sleeping bags, and the chatter of excited young women. But, unlike the sleepovers of my youth, talk was about Python, HTML, and Ruby. These were young women interested in learning to code.

• I do a lot of work on open source, but my most valuable contributions haven’t been code. Writing a patch is the easiest part of open source. The truly hard stuff is all of the rest: bug trackers, mailing lists, documentation, and other management tasks. Here’s some things I’ve learned along the way.

• Today I’m happy to announce the public beta of the Flowhub interface for Flow-Based Programming. This is the latest step in the adventure that started with some UI sketching early last year, went through our successful Kickstarter — and now — thanks to our 1 205 backers, it is available to the public.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Over the past few months, users have seen a change in the way Chrome displays security warnings. Adrienne Porter Felt, one of the people who work on the Chrome security team, did a presentation showing the effect that warnings on Chrome affect people’s browsing experience. In the presentation, she uses data that they have collected to show the CTR (click through rate, or the rate at which users ignore warnings and continue to a webpage). She describes some of the challenges they face, and the solutions they have implemented to prevent users from downloading malicious files, and the effect these solutions have had.

Mozilla

• Just as a meaningless addendum, I actually don’t use Firefox itself, but rather Debian Linux’s “Iceweasel”, which is exactly the same, the only difference being the logo. Debian has insanely high standards for what constitutes “free”, which is in fact laudable but leads to things like this renaming because Firefox’s logo isn’t as completely free as it could be. It causes a lot of confusion for Debian neophytes in the help forums, that’s for sure. I kinda like being an Iceweasel user. Cool name. There’s also Icedove (renamed Thunderbird email program) and my favorite, Iceape (renamed SeaMonkey internet suite). Speaking of SeaMonkey, did you know this even existed? Yes, it’s still possible to use a full featured “internet suite” that includes a web browser, email and newsgroups client, and HTML editor all in one package. Pretty cool, and free of course, and maybe even useful for some folks. All of these things are from the aforementioned fine folks at Mozilla, which is what rose out of the ashes of Netscape years ago. I loved Netscape!

SaaS/Big Data

• David Goldberg is ConteXtream’s lead software engineer and was the first software developer to join the next generation SDN product team. David is also leading ConteXtream’s contribution to the OpenDaylight project and is one of the top commiters to the LISP Flow Mapping project. Prior to Contextream, David was responsible for the development of network analysis tools during his army service in an elite technological group in the IDF Intelligence Corps. David holds a BA in Computer Science and Management (cum laude).

• How has the open-source cloud landscape changed in the last two years? There’s certainly been a lot of moving and shaking, but how much traction has there been in terms of corporate deployment?

• VMware today announced that it is supporting the Pivotal Cloud Foundry (CF) Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) on the vCloud Hybrid Service (VCHS).

• There’s no question that Big Data is now a huge market, but what may surprise some observers is just how rapidly it continues to expand. That growth is evident in reports such as the announcement this week from MapR, which delivers Big Data solutions based on the open source Apache Hadoop platform, that first-quarter growth has tripled over last year.

• Eucalyptus 4.0 targets the needs of IT and DevOps who are deploying and managing large-scale hybrid AWS-compatible cloud computing environments.

Databases

• Satellite-TV provider Dish Network Corp. turned to open source database software in 2012 when its first foray into Big Data crippled its conventional database. Dish wants to capitalize on data it collects in its interactions with customers to be able to better market new products and services.

CMS

• So which CMS is better? Again, it’s not that simple. The first thing you need to know is what you want. Once you’ve figured that out, it’s just a matter of seeing which system can give it to you.

Funding

• Hewlett-Packard Co said it plans to invest more than $1 billion over the next two years to develop and offer cloud-computing products and services.

• The company said it will make its OpenStack-based public cloud services available in 20 data centers over the next 18 months.

• OpenStack, a cloud computing project that HP co-founded, provides a free and open-source cloud computing platform for public and private cloud services.

• There is still healthy venture capital flowing into the OpenStack pool. Metacloud, which offers OpenStack services and support for several large companies, announced it has closed a $15 million Series B round of funding featuring new investors Pelion Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, and UMC Capital, as well as prior investors AME Cloud Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Storm Ventures.

Openness/Sharing

• When you have a problem or opportunity, in business or government, it is typical to call on two groups of people to work on it: Your own staff or external consultants. A third group is emerging as a promising source of innovation and improvement: Everyone.

• Through this partnership, IDA and Red Hat have also agreed to jointly drive the Red Hat Challenge, a regional technology challenge that provides a platform for students to pit their ideas around and use cases for open source.

Open Hardware

• With an Arduino-compatible brain, Bluetooth LE connectivity, 3D-printed case, and open-source approach, Jonathan Cook’s BLE smart watch is the winner of our Arduino Challenge, and will be headed to Maker Faire Rome this Fall.

• Though still nowhere near as ubiquitous as FOSS, open hardware is gaining ground rapidly with the booming popularity of open source 3D printing. There are now hundreds of thousands of free open source designs for products you can download and print on your own printer. Here are 10 of our favorites.

• It’s no secret that open source has shaken up the software world, not least for the savings it’s brought both organizations and consumers. Now it’s starting to look like open source hardware could have a similar, game-changing effect.

Programming

• LLVM 3.4 was released in January and since then LLVM 3.5 has been under heavy development and will be released this summer.

Leftovers

Security

• David Helkowski stood waiting outside a restaurant in Towson, Maryland, fresh from a visit to the unemployment office. Recently let go from his computer consulting job after engaging in some “freelance hacking” of a client’s network, Helkowski was still insistent on one point: his hack, designed to draw attention to security flaws, had been a noble act.

• A project’s choice of a license will have significant effects on its ability to sustain itself.

• The traditional antivirus is “dead” and “doomed to failure,” Symantec’s information security chief declares. Quelle surprise, considering Norton is fading into oblivion. But what next?

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The media now have a new cartoon figure of hate in the bearded, bobble-hatted leader of Boko Haram, and in truth he is a very bad person. But armed rebellions of thousands of people do not just happen. It is not a simple and spontaneous outbreak of evil, still less a sign that we must wage Tony Blair’s war on Muslims everywhere.

• Despite a track record that is stained with the blood of innocent victims, drone technology is quickly becoming the weapon of choice for militaries around the globe, and it’s too late for the United States – presently the leader in UAV technologies – to stop the rush, according to Defense One, a site devoted to security issues.

• The man who established the Australian Army’s first drone unit has hit out at former prime minister Malcolm Fraser’s criticism of Australian involvement in US military drone operations.

• The story of the CIA-led killer drones which are killing women and children on a daily basis is a tale accorded inexcusably scant attention in media. Indeed it is being ignored.

• It remains the most memorable moment of Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) young career in Congress: a 13-hour talking filibuster in 2013 to stall the nomination of John Brennan as director of the CIA. But it was more publicity stunt than a principled stand of much purpose; Paul was merely seeking the answer to a narrowly crafted question about the use of drones in the United States, and Brennan easily won confirmation anyway.

• Secrecy in a democracy is highly problematic (as is the question of whether the United States remains a democracy). Arguably, there have been a few cases where Washington was right to keep the American public in the dark. The Manhattan Project which built the atomic bomb and the timing and location of the Allied D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe were the two most closely guarded secrets of World War Two. But more frequently, secrecy’s only purpose is to protect the rulers (Pentagon Papers, anyone?).

• Pakistan is in a perilous, decapitating state, thanks to US drones. A man who lost his family to a US drone attack begs for President Barack Obama to answer his question, “Why did you ruin my paradise?” The Voice of Russia, in joint cooperation with a local Pakistani journalist, interviewed 35-year-old electrician Haji Gul, whose entire family was wiped out from an American drone strike, revealed that his young daughter and wife died due to the US’ erratic actions and unjust drone practices.

• The US, China, Israel, Russia, South Korea, and the UK are all reported to be pursuing autonomous weapons

• For three years, they’ve watched the sky turn from black to blue — the sun rising over the Sierra Nevada range — as they denounce drones at Beale Air Force Base.

• The protesters gather monthly, flashing signs at the airmen driving onto base.

• “You can’t bomb the world to peace.”

• “Kill the drones, not innocent people.”

• Janie Kesselman, a peace activist from North San Juan, said the group’s goal is to end the “remote-controlled murder of innocent people.”

• The White House pledged Tuesday to give lawmakers expanded access to memos on the legality of killing American citizens in drone strikes, a concession aimed at heading off Senate opposition to a judicial nominee involved in drafting those secret documents.

• Before he authored legal memos related to the Obama administration’s targeted killing program, David Barron joined a group of left-leaning legal scholars and endorsed a statement of principles urging more transparency from the very office now withholding his work from the public.

• If Harvard Law Professor David J. Barron fails to win confirmation as a federal appeals court judge, it won’t be because he was “blocked” by Sen. Rand Paul.

• If Barron doesn’t make it to the bench, it will likely be because Democrats have unease about the legal justifications for drone strikes. In a post-nuclear-option world, Republicans can send letters talking about blocking or delaying nominees but their practical impact is nil.

• White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Tuesday that the Obama administration will allow senators to access classified materials related to the drone program before voting on the Barron nomination.

• “I can confirm that the Administration is working to ensure that any remaining questions members of the Senate have about Barron’s legal work at the Department of Justice are addressed, including making available in a classified setting a copy of the al-Awlaki opinion to any Senator who wishes to review it prior to Barron’s confirmation vote. Last year, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee had access to the memo, and I would note that in his Committee vote, Barron received unanimous Democratic support,” Schultz said in a statement. “We are confident Barron will be confirmed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals and that he will serve with distinction.”

• Barron, back when he worked for Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel, apparently helped author one or two of the memos providing authorization for the September 2011 drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen working with al-Qaeda in Yemen. Those memos are among several documents that the Obama administration has been ordered to release; it has not done so, claiming that it might still appeal the court ruling.

• Mirza Shahzad Akbar pleaded to the court to lodge case against CIA officials.

• A Milwaukee woman Monday became the second of five protesters convicted at trial of trespassing for walking onto the Volk Field military base at Camp Douglas in 2013.

• Joyce E. Ellwanger, 77, told Juneau County Circuit Judge Paul Curran she preferred to serve jail time rather than pay the $232 fine for trespassing during a protest of U.S. drone warfare.

• “I can’t in good conscience pay it, judge,” Ellwanger told the court.

• Curran sentenced Ellwanger to five days in the Juneau County jail on the trespassing violation but found her not guilty of a charge of disorderly conduct.

• At least 37 al Qaeda militants have been killed in southern Yemen. The area is one of the country’s most impenetrable ones, and the army has recently intensified an offensive to root out foreign and local Islamist fighters there. The number of attacks against Yemen’s US-backed army and security forces in the south has risen since the launch of an anti al-Qaeda offensive. The Voice of Russia talked to Dr. Lina Khatib, Director of Carnegie Middle East Center.

• The Senate’s high-profile summary of a 6,600-page CIA torture report was supposed to be released by now, at least in a redacted form. It hasn’t been, and no one in the Senate seems sure why.

• Despite both the White House and CIA promising a quick declassification review, Politico reported this week that the White House and CIA are now refusing to even answer questions as to when the report will be sent back to the Intelligence Committee for release. Senator Dianne Feinstein said, “I would hope that it would be short and quick. That may be a vain [effort].” Senator Dick Durbin said, “I don’t know what the reason is [for the delay].”

• Sadly, it was quite predictable that the White House and CIA would delay the release of a report, which is reportedly devestating in its criticism of the CIA, and will remind the public that the Obama administration refused to hold anyone at the CIA accountable for its crimes. Disturbingly, the CIA itself—the same agency the report accuses of years of prisoner abuse and systematic lying—is in charge of the redaction process for the report, despite the fact that it has already dragged its feet for over a year, has been accused of misleading the Senate Intelligence Committee, and even allegedly spied on its staffers all in an apparent attempt to prevent the report from seeing light.

• The CIA has released thousands of Afghan fighters from its payroll, leaving a major security vacuum.

• The US has signed a deal with Djibouti, a tiny nation in the Horn of Africa, extending by decades the presence of America’s largest military base in Eastern Africa. The site serves as a hub for drone strikes in Yemen and is a suspected CIA secret prison.

• The Taliban portrays vaccination drives as a western plot to sterilize Muslim children or as a cover for spies. The CIA unfortunately lent credence to the latter claim by using a phony vaccination campaign as a ruse to collect DNA evidence from Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Stanford University has announced that it is pulling its endowment out of investments in any of 100 publicly traded companies that are focused on extracting coal. No future investments will be made in any of those companies, and the university will instruct the managers that run its non-endowment investments to avoid these stocks as well.

• That’s when the world’s oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.

• The study by Boris Worm, PhD, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, — with colleagues in the U.K., U.S., Sweden, and Panama — was an effort to understand what this loss of ocean species might mean to the world.

• The researchers analyzed several different kinds of data. Even to these ecology-minded scientists, the results were an unpleasant surprise.

• Climate change is no longer a distant threat, but a real and present danger in the United States, according to a government report issued Tuesday.

Finance

• A string of academic reports documenting in detail the impacts of austerity on health care and health outcomes in Greece have recently been released [1]. They show how European authorities, IMF and Greek government policies implemented in response to the economic crisis have led to deaths and attacks on the health of ordinary people. But there was nothing inevitable about those consequences. As the medical journal the Lancet stated: “Experience elsewhere in Europe shows that those countries which prioritise social protection (including health) in the midst of austerity, and favour fiscal stimulation, secure better outcomes for their populations.”

• We may as well call it “edu-pay-tion,” as far as many prospective students are concerned. The cost of a college degree has risen 1,120 percent since 1978, but wages have increased a mere 6 percent during that same period. The national collective college debt is more than $1 trillion! We have college grads mired in $29,000 of debt, on average, while they are looking for jobs that do not exist. Parents and grandparents of those grads are also saddled with much of that debt, which is immune to bankruptcy, and they will have to make the payments until they die.

• What have we gotten ourselves into? The greed that accompanied those easy-to-obtain, just-sign-here college tuition loans, borders on immoral. Financial institutions were like Black Friday crowds, trampling one another to get in on the act. New lending operations cropped up every day, and new proprietary colleges and universities opened their doors throughout the nation, advertising their degrees and easy to get loans for tuition. What would happen if students and parents just stop paying on that $1 trillion debt? Who would pay then? Bingo! I can see another bailout coming, and this time it will be for student loans.

• International credit card companies face a “severe impact” on their operations in Russia following a strict new law Moscow has adopted in response to Visa and Mastercard freezing service to banks under US sanctions.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Hundreds of lobbyists and state legislators gathered in downtown Kansas City last week for ALEC’s Spring 2014 task force summit, where a task force led by a tobacco lobbyist discussed education, corporate interests plotted ways to thwart shareholder activism, and legislators took a trip to a coal-fired power plant.

• At least so believes famed political activist and Harvard ethics and law professor Lawrence Lessig and other co-founders of MayOne.US. The KickStarter fundraising campaign aims to ignite fundamental U.S. campaign finance reform by crowdfunding an initial $1 million to create a super PAC (short for political action committee) to rival those created by public figures, big corporate donors, powerful lobbyist and special interest groups.

Privacy

• The inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, warned the web is ‘in the balance’ as technology giants against closing parts of the web to new users.

• Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.

• Exchanges between NSA director and Google execs suggest cooperation on data security

• The idea that Apple, Google, and other tech companies have always distanced themselves from the NSA may not be accurate thanks to emails that recently surfaced. The emails show communication between Google executives and the NSA, plus they mention other companies, including Apple, Microsoft, and HP, undermining the trust companies have been working so hard to maintain after the NSA’s wide spread surveillance tactics were uncovered.

• Recently, a NSA lawyer made it clear that Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and others were fully aware of the levels of data collection that were being performed. This flies in the face of the earlier claims that these firms were completely ignorant of what was happening. You might have thought that such mass surveillance would be illegal, but no, this was absolutely fine according to a federal judge.

• These emails showing a very close relationship between Google and the NSA are internal Google emails, which essentially catches Google red-handed. The emails also mention cooperation from Apple and Microsoft, but there is no direct proof of this. There is simply mention that Google, Apple and Microsoft “came to agreement on a set of core security principles” with the NSA.

• The recently retired director of the United States National Security Agency says Australia was correct to exclude Chinese telecommunications manufacturer Huawei from helping build the national broadband network because of evidence of Chinese espionage against the nation.

• A group representing Facebook Inc. (FB:US), Apple Inc. (AAPL:US) and other technology companies is lobbying Congress today as lawmakers prepare to vote on limits to U.S. National Security Agency spying, said a person familiar with the matter.

• The National Security Agency appears to have devised a process to discourage lawsuits challenging NSA surveillance.

• NSA Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) director Theresa M. Shea submitted a “top secret” declaration to the court in two lawsuits brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The declaration was in response to concerns that the NSA was about to destroy evidence relevant to their cases.

• NSA data is supposed to “age off” and no longer remain in the agency’s system after five years, but that data being “aged off” could help the EFF win its cases, which is what led attorneys to file a motion to prevent destruction of evidence in March.

• House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (shown, R-Va.) announced May 5 that on May 7 the committee will mark up the USA Freedom Act (H.R. 3361). The legislation was introduced last October 29 by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), chairman of Judiciary’s Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations Subcommittee, to reform the federal government’s intelligence-gathering programs — especially those conducted by the National Security Agency, or NSA — operated under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

• The Center for Investigative Reporting hopes to raise $25,000 to report on surveillance by local authorities, a practice speeded by technological improvements and federal money. Subscribers get benefits on a sliding scale — from a tote bag and a tour of CIR’s newsroom if you donate $350 to email alerts when new stories go up if you pledge $5 per month.

• Web users and developers should take new steps to avoid surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency and other spy organizations, a group of privacy and digital rights advocates said Monday.

• The 30-plus groups, including Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, Reddit, Free Press and the Libertarian Party, have set June 5 as the day to “reset the ‘Net” by deploying new privacy tools. June 5 is the anniversary of the first news stories about NSA surveillance based on leaks by former agency contractor Edward Snowden.

• The NSA’s “collect it all” ethos has led the agency to try to fill in gaps in its vast surveillance dragnet, including e-mails, texts and phone calls made on commercial airplanes. Because the the communications are routed through independent satellite systems, they are hard to track, Glenn Greenwald reveals in “No Place To Hide.”

• Privacy and security are on everybody’s minds these days, given the NSA spying scandal. Many people are looking for quick and easy ways to secure their online activities. Enter the oRouter, a tiny computer powered by Linux that protects your privacy and secures your Internet connection by connecting via the Tor network.

• “Encryption does work,” Snowden said, via a remote connection at the SXSW tech conference. “It is a defense against the dark arts for the digital realm.”

• ProPublica has written about the NSA’s attempts to break encryption, but we don’t know for sure how successful the spy agency has been, and security experts still recommend using these techniques.

• And besides, who doesn’t want to defend against the dark arts? But getting started with encryption can be daunting. Here are a few techniques that most people can use.

• Encrypt the data you store. This protects your data from being read by people with access to your computer.

Civil Rights

• The Commons looked set for a game of ping pong with the Lords today, after MPs voted to give Theresa May tthe power to strip Brits of their citizenship.

• The Home Secretary should remember the US Supreme Court’s description of making someone stateless: “a form of punishment more primitive than torture”.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The internet is closing in on three billion users, according to the United Nations International Telecommunications Union

• For years now, every time the net neutrality debate starts getting really confusing, Tim Lee comes along and puts it all into useful perspective. Six years ago, there was his exceptionally useful position paper on net neutrality for the Cato Institute. A couple years ago, he wrote another great piece for National Affairs magazine that deftly explained why the internet wasn’t competitive and why that’s a problem. Now working for Vox, he’s put together a great piece that explains the technical difference between the interconnection fights and the net neutrality battle — but also explains how the end result is basically the same.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The argument over whether or not the raid on Kim Dotcom’s mansion back in January 2012 was legal is heading to the highest court in New Zealand. Yesterday the Supreme Court gave Dotcom permission to appeal a February Court of Appeal ruling that overturned an earlier High Court decision that the raid was unlawful.

• The US company is forcing ISPs to participate in the copyright crusade, but will this approach work in Europe?

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