● 05.18.14

● Links 18/5/2014: GNU/Linux on the Rise, Privacy in the News

Posted in News Roundup at 4:23 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• One of the newest laptops out of System76, the well known hardware vendor in Linux circles for their Ubuntu support, is the latest version of their Bonobo Extreme. While the laptop weighs 8.6 lbs / 3.9 kg, it does aim to offer extreme Linux performance.

• UK retailer Cloudsto is adding a new small form-factor, low power Linux PC to its lineup. The Cloudsto EVO is a palm-sized computer with an ARM Cortex-A9 quad-core processor and Ubuntu 12.10 software.

• There is a silent battle going on behind the curtains between the major operating systems. When it comes to gaming, for example, Windows is still the leader. If we’re talking about Linux, then everyone knows that it owns the server market. Mac OS X looks pretty and has a few applications that are still making the system a tool for media production. When it comes to Live systems, neither Windows nor Mac OS X can hold a candle to Linux.

Desktop

• They did not hesitate to specify GNU/Linux for hundreds of PCs for education, although the tender-document was published from that other OS…

• Previously, I reported that there was a breakout for GNU/Linux on desktops in Canada, according to StatCounter. That continues.From the chart, one can see a gradual rise from ~1% until school was let out at many Canadian universities. Has GNU/Linux gained mindshare amongst students? Is there some kind of summer research project going on? Is some big university rolling out GNU/Linux clients? I have not been able to find any reports on such activity but I will keep hunting.

Kernel Space

• Just as the Linux operating system has matured and blossomed since creator Linus Torvalds first released it in 1991 — expanding beyond mainframes and desktops into smartphones, cars, in-flight entertainment systems, the International Space Station and even crockpots, to name just a few examples — so, too, have Linux jobs.

• It is my pleasure to announce the release of v3.2.0 of the xfsprogs package.

• We’re still a few weeks away from the release of the Linux 3.15 kernel but open-source Intel developers have already sent in another drm-next pull request to land more of their kernel graphics driver changes for Linux 3.16.

• Intel already sent in their initial intel-drm-next code for Linux 3.16 at the end of April and it included initial Intel Cherryview support, improvements to Intel Broadwell support, run-time power management for Broadwell and Sandy Bridge, Gen7 command parser work, and a lot more.

• Back in March I wrote about Tux3 might finally make it into the mainline Linux kernel and that information panned out on Friday when Tux3′s lead author, Daniel Phillips, called for its code to be reviewed and offered for it to be mainlined within the kernel source tree. Tux3 development is also moving over to a Kernel.org code repository.

• For this weekend’s Linux benchmarks we are looking at the performance of the Intel P-State and ACPI cpufreq drivers and comparing their scaling governor options when testing from an Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition system running with the Linux 3.15 development kernel.

• Given that there’s been renewed concerns recently about Intel’s P-State driver causing odd performance problems and other performance issues related to the scaling governor, from the Linux 3.15 kernel this week I did some fresh tests of using both the intel_pstate and acpi_cpufreq drivers while also trying out their various scaling governor choices: performance, powersave, ondemand, conservative.

Graphics Stack

• After earlier this week doing an Intel vs. Radeon vs. Nouveau comparison using the very latest open-source Linux graphics driver code in the form of Mesa 10.3-devel and the Linux 3.15 kernel, here’s benchmark results comparing the updated open-source AMD Radeon performance on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS against the Catalyst 14.4 Linux graphics driver.

• Josh Arenson committed today the start of a “performance tests” category for Mir, as part of their built-in testing harness. The only test initially added is the OpenGL ES 2.0 port of the glmark2 test. Running this test in Mir simply ensures the performance meets a baseline threshold for ensuring no really bad regressions make it into the Mir code-base for slowing down its graphics performance.

• The installer is a very handy tool that is unique to the Intel platform. All the other developers from NVIDIA and AMD don’t even dream of providing a proper installer, but somehow the Intel dev managed to make this a reality.

• “The Intel Graphics allows you to stay current with the latest enhancements, optimizations, and fixes to the Intel Graphics Stack to ensure the best user experience with your Intel graphics hardware. The Intel Graphics Installer for Linux is available for the latest versions of Ubuntu and Fedora,” reads the official announcement.

Benchmarks

• The latest Linux graphics testing under the microscope at Phoronix is comparing the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS vs. Windows 8.1 performance with all available updates. Results from Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD hardware is coming up next week while today is a bit of a preview of the AMD numbers when using a Radeon R9 290 “Hawaii” graphics card. While the open-source AMD Hawaii support remains broken, with the Catalyst 14.4 driver on each operating system, the Linux Catalyst driver with the R9 290 graphics card can outperform Windows 8.1 Pro with some OpenGL games and benchmarks.

Applications

• There is a world of file managers beyond GNOME’s Nautilus and KDE’s Dolphin. These are perfectly good file managers, but they’re fairly heavyweight and drag in a ton of dependencies. Gentoo File Manager, Rox-filer, Xfe, and PCManFM are some excellent alternatives that are lightweight, powerful, very configurable, independent of any particular desktop environment, and well-maintained. All of them have complete graphical functionality, and also support keyboard shortcuts and command-line operations. If you’re looking for something a little different, give these a try.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.7.19 is now available.

Games

• Shiny The Firefly, a beautiful 2D platformer developed by Stage Clear Studios and published by Headup Games, has been released on the Steam for Linux platform.

• Road Redemption has shown off a brand new trailer crammed full of crazy, it’s actual game-play too of the spiritual successor to Road Rash. Not sure if they ever said it was a spiritual successor, but it is heavily inspired by it of course.

• BattleBlock Theater as promised is now out for Linux on Steam bringing with it some co-op platforming mayhem and it looks awesome.

• Originally the Linux version was to “follow” the Windows version, thankfully the developers were able to bring it to us on day 1.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• If all goes according to plan, we will see the official Qt 5.3 unveiling next Tuesday, 20 May. A new snapshot was released today to encourage last minute testing. If nothing serious is found, today’s snapshot will be the final packages otherwise Digia will need to spin new packages and this will push back Tuesday’s release.

• The third monthly bugfix release for Krita 2.8 is out! Download your Windows installer now, or get your distribution’s updated packages! There are quite a few bugfixes and improvements.

• The first beta of what will become the next-generation KDE Plasma workspace (KDE Next) was released yesterday. The final release is scheduled for release sometime in July (2014), so things should be moving really fast from now on. Here’s an excerpt from the release announcement:

• The Plasma team would like to ask the wider Free Software community to test this release and give any feedback . Plasma Next is built using QML and runs on top of a fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack using Qt 5, QtQuick 2 and an OpenGL(-ES) scenegraph. Plasma Next provides a core desktop experience that will be easy and familiar for current users of KDE workspaces or alternative Free Software or proprietary offerings.

• This is the third (and last but one) update to the 2.8 series of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active released to fix recently found issues. The Calligra team recommends everybody to update.

• The size of many widgets depend on the font as they adjust depending on the space required to fit text. The problem increases with translated versions of the text. Sebastian explains that Plasma relies on sensible font settings and metrics for better support of HDPI displays. There is a stronger emphasis on fontsize-as-rendered-on-a-given screen. The UIs are designed to fit a certain number of columns and rows of text with ample dynamic spacing, so that even translations fit well. The size of the UI elements are roughly the same size on different displays. This design seems to be received well by the users.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• If you need to solve a tricky GTK+ problem in your application, gtkparasite is a very useful tool to have around. It lets you explore the widget hierarchy, change properties, tweak theme settings, and so on.

• Unfortunately, gtkparasite is a tool for people ‘in the know’ – it is not part of GTK+, not advertised on our website, and not available out of the box on your average GTK+ installation.

• At the Developer Experience hackfest in Berlin a few weeks ago, the assembled GTK+ developers discussed fixing this situation by making an interactive debugger like gtkparasite part of GTK+ itself. This way, it will be available whenever you run a GTK+ application, and we can develop and improve the debugging tools alongside the toolkit.

• It’s been a long time since the Antergos release, but the developers of this interesting distribution have returned with a new version. They are using the latest GNOME 3.12 packages, but they are also working to change the default GNOME look that can be found in the stock release.

• The Zukitwo theme was one of the first to get GNOME 3.12 support, shortly after the launch of the new desktop environment. This theme only works with GNOME Shell 3.12 and GTK+ 3.12, which means that it might create problems on other systems.

• According to the changelog, the progress bar has been corrected and the button border is now better focused. This should make the buttons much more visible.

• GNOME Shell development branch 3.12.x is now updated to version 3.12.2. GNOME Shell is an integral part of GNOME as this is the first application that the users are greeted with and is used frequently throughout their login. 3.12 has been received quite well by the users and till now the minor releases on this branch were quite heavy.

• The GNOME Desktop Environment (DE) has received its second maintenance update (3.12.2). Frederic Peters, a GNOME developer, announced the second update of the GNOME 3.12 stable branch a few hours ago. The update mainly focuses on consistency and security of included packages and apps. Besides the recent fix of the Airplane Mode in GNOME shell, there are many minor fixes, improvements and language translations included in the update.

Distributions

• ROSA Desktop Fresh R3 is the latest edition of the Mandriva-derived Linux distribution from ROSA Laboratories, a Linux software solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia. This is one of my favorite desktop distributions because the developers are actually creating original applications and system utilities designed to make the desktop easy and fun to use.

• The KDE edition, which is the distribution’s flagship edition, includes a few user-friendly features that are not available in vanilla KDE desktops. That’s why it’s one I never hesitate to recommend it to new and experienced users alike. The released installation images are for KDE only. Installation images for GNOME 3 and LXDE will likely be released in about a month.

• Highlights of ROSA Desktop Fresh R3 are.

• The Deepin Linux distribution is aimed at professional and normal users alike, focusing on the best user experience possible, and uses its own desktop environment, which is not something that you usually see these days.

• The Deepin developers are known for their unorthodox way of doing things. The previous edition of the operating system was full of interesting features, which even included facial recognition software. Now they have returned with a brand new desktop environment and a fresh desktop ecosystem.

New Releases

• GParted Live, a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86-based computers that can be used for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions with the help of tools that allow managing filesystems, is now at version 0.18.0-5.

• Linux Lite is a distribution based on Ubuntu LTS releases, and this is the main reason we don’t see builds made for this OS more often. Ubuntu LTS versions are only made available every two years and it takes the Linux Lite developers a while to make the proper adjustments.

• The OpenELEC developers are not waiting around for XBMC to get a new stable release and they have adopted the first 13.1 Beta 1 that was made available a couple of days ago. It’s likely that they analyzed what the new XBMC was fixing and decided it was safe to implement in their stable version.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Slackware Family

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Inc. has spent the past decade becoming one of the dominant commercial providers of the Linux operating system, but it is now looking to expand by exploiting opportunities in Indonesia, and in the field of cloud-computing systems. Red Hat Inc., which generated approximately 1.5 billion dollars in revenue last year, is expecting double digit revenue growth over the next year. This would follow 48 consecutive financial quarters in which Red Hat has shown revenue growth, but it is nonetheless a very optimistic expectation on the part of David Yap, Red Hat’s country manager for Malaysia and Brunei. This optimism, however, is strongly supported by indicators from the Asian Pacific market.

• One of the biggest topics of discussion at the OpenStack Summit here was something that didn’t actually happen here. An article in the Wall St. Journal published on May 13 made broad allegations that Red Hat was “playing hardball” with OpenStack.

• CentOS, the open source Linux-based operating system that recently came under the purview of Red Hat, has launched a new initiative aimed at helping vendors to deploy open source virtualization technologies on the CentOS system. And the Xen Project, whose members will chair the effort, is leading the charge, according to a recent announcement.

Fedora

• Background transparency, which was removed after GNOME 3.6 release on Fedora 2 years back is enabled once again. There were both requests from users and workarounds to make transparency work again. On popular demand, the feature is back on Fedora 20 and GNOME 3.12 COPR. Rawhide will also have it soon.

• We need your submissions to make beautiful wallpapers available for Fedora 21! The supplemental wallpaper submission process is open and we’re ready for your work!

• Stephen says that the Fedora Server Working Group is intended to be the place for development of “the next stable platform for Linux”. He explains that this doesn’t just mean downstream RHEL or CentOS, but that upstream projects should look at us and see a place to work for integration of technologies that might be in all of the various stable platforms in three years.

Debian Family

• The new operating system from Univention is an open source infrastructure solution that can be implemented in any kind of systems and is based on Debian, which makes it a great tool for regular users as well.

• Tails has been a curiosity to us for a while now, long before Snowden made it known to the mainstream. Cropping up every now and then on Distrowatch, we acknowledged that it existed and its list of features seemed to convey that the team knew what they were doing in constructing an ultra-secure and privacy-driven Linux distro. Now post-Snowden and Heartbleed, with the need for journalists and whistleblowers to have true internet privacy, we’ve come to see Tails as a necessity in the changing tech world.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• All of this means that life in OpenStack Land is suddenly very interesting. Ubuntu leads by a considerable margin in production deployments—but that’s today. But whether it can maintain that lead will depend on its ability to build up an ecosystem to rival Red Hat’s. In the data center, it’s way behind. But in the OpenStack cloud, it’s a much more even playing field, with Canonical recently expanding its partner footprint with Microsoft, IBM and others.

• It’s a new market. Canonical hasn’t won anything yet, of course, but this is the most level playing field it’s had in a decade. Game on.

• Canonical, famous for its distribution of the Linux operating system called Ubuntu, has also been very active with the popular open source cloud operating system OpenStack. The company announced a number of things at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta this week. Some announcements demonstrated the strength and speed of Ubuntu on OpenStack at hyperscale and some were aimed at making it easier to adopt OpenStack and improving interoperability.

• Canonical is working tirelessly on Ubuntu for phones, and the developers are trying to improve every aspect of the experience. One of the most important components of Ubuntu, the browser, will also receive some changes that will definitely set it apart from everything else.

• “Since changes to the Ubuntu support cycle mean that Ubuntu 13.04 has reached end of life before Ubuntu 12.10, the support cycle for Ubuntu 12.10 has been extended slightly to overlap with the release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. This will allow users to move directly from Ubuntu 12.10 to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (via Ubuntu 13.10). This period of overlap is now coming to a close, and we will be retiring Ubuntu 12.10 on Friday, May 16,” said Canonical’s José Antonio Rey in the original announcement.

• The VirtualBox solution is capable of running a large number of OSes, including Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts, not to mention a lot of other guest additions.

• The developers of VirtualBox have been working hard on this latest branch of the software and they’ve already issued a few updates for the applications. This latest one is just a maintenance update, but it comes with numerous fixes that make this a mandatory upgrade for anyone who is using it.

Flavours and Variants

• The first and last pre-stable version of what will become Linux Mint 17 has been released. It will be code-named Qiana and will be an LTS (Long-term Support) release, supported until 2019. Released installation images are for Cinnamon and MATE desktop environment only and are based on Ubuntu 14.04.

Devices/Embedded

• SDG Systems has long offered the useful service of porting rugged Windows-based tablets and handhelds to Linux. Spin-offs include a 2008 port of the TDS Nomad handheld. This time, it’s the Windows 7-based Trimble Yuma 2 tablet that is being tuxified. The supplied Ubuntu 12.04 LTS distro is not to be confused with the most recent LTS release, last month’s Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The default configuration is a dual-boot system with Windows, although you can ask for an all-Linux look as well.

• The education conference in Manchester worked well for the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the dedicated team it has assembled with the aim of supporting teachers. Last year, the Raspberry Pi Jamboree staged by Alan O’Donohoe was sectioned off in its own series of rooms in the vast space of Manchester Central. This year, with O’Donohoe still at the helm, all things Pi were thrown into the main conference arena. Teachers walking around the venue would spot a classroom of the future on one corner, be able to buy a Pi on another and listen to talks in one of two areas set aside for such purpose. The Pi sat centre stage and could not be ignored.

• Operating system — Debian Linux, Android

Phones

Ballnux

Android

• High fives are in order for Google’s Gmail team, as Gmail is the first Android application to notch 1 billion downloads in its belt. The feat, which actually occured a few days ago, was announced today by Google VP Sundar Pichai, who posted the achievement on his Google+ page. It was a succinct (albeit excited) recognition, though crossing 1 billion downloads doesn’t mean there are a billion people using Gmail.

• Xiaomi, a Chinese company, has just launched a new Android powered tablet, the MiPad to the market. The unique thing about this Android powered tablet is that it is powered by the powerful NVidia Tegra K1 mobile processor, thus making it stand out from the already crowded android powered tablet segment.

• SlateKit Base has been released for the Google Nexus 7 (2013) tablet. SlateKit Base is a basic Linux OS with just having Qt5 running off a frame-buffer. SlateKit Base is very simply designed and within the Qt5 environment is designed primarily for use with QtWebKit-based Slate web-browser.

• The SlateKit developers have written in this morning to share that SlateKit is working now as a drop-in replacement for the Android UI stack and can be used for making a custom tablet UI using just Qt/QML, JavaScript, and the Chromium-based code. SlateKit Base has now been ported to run on last year’s Google Nexus 7 tablet as long as it’s rooted with ADB shell access and is running Android 4.4.2.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

• The schedule for Google I/O 2014 is announced. It is going to be a 2 day conference (Jun 25-26) packed with technical talks, sessions and workshops from eminent Google developers and guests closely working with Google technologies. The venue remains San Francisco.

SaaS/Big Data

Databases

• PostgreSQL is the second most-widely-used open-source database on the market, trailing MySQL. At least some users have migrated from MySQL to PostgreSQL since MySQL was acquired by Oracle in its 2010 purchase of Sun Microsystems.

• Like PostgreSQL, MySQL has been retrofitted to handle NoSQL workloads.

• EnterpriseDB offers a commercially backed distribution of the open-source database.

Business

Funding

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The latest Free Software Foundation Bulletin for fall 2013 is now online. Check it out for interesting articles on free software and free software activism.

• There are several interesting things to report in this month’s update:

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• The training services of Open Data Support aim to build both theoretical and technical capacity to EU public administrations, in particular to favour the uptake of (linked) open data.

• After delivering eleven onsite trainings in ten different countries, i.e. Spain, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, The Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, Greece and Estonia, and to the European Institutions, and having trained over 500 public servants on open data, we are proud to announce a second release of the training material of Open Data Support, featuring a number of improvements coming from feedback received from the trainees.

Open Hardware

• There’s a rash of open source hardware announcements today in advance of this weekend’s Maker Faire in San Mateo, California—and two are related to the popular Arduino microcontroller. While Arduino and its manufacturing partner Amtel are announcing Arduino Zero—a new high-end 32-bit version of the open-source microcontroller board—another Arduino partner is releasing a simplified version of the controller intended to make it easier for beginners to start prototyping devices with little or no knowledge of electronics.

Programming

• Recently I posted new benchmarks showing LLVM’s Clang compiler performing well against GCC from AMD’s x86-based Athlon APUs with the performance of the resulting binaries being quite fast but not without some blemishes for both of these open-source compilers. In seeing how the compiler race is doing in the ARM space with many ARM vendors taking interest in LLVM/Clang, here’s some fresh benchmarks of both compilers on NVIDIA’s Tegra K1 SoC found by the Jetson TK1 development board.

Leftovers

• ‘The BBC is fundamentally flawed. The system is fractured’: David Lowe at home in Torquay

• Adobe is struggling to correct a global outage that has already locked customers out of its Creative Cloud online services for nearly 24 hours.

• While we potential users may argue the pros and cons of “Cloud Computing”, those who provide cloud-computing solutions are having to work hard for a living. That’s a pleasant change to having to pay the asking price to a monopolist, eh? I like that aspect of it. It’s also very efficient in that experts who should know how to run the service will fuss over it instead of the users or their randomly-hired staff. It is an ancient truth in the history of mankind that specialization is a good thing, all things being equal.

• Something for the Weekend, Sir? Adobe’s spectacular FAIL over the last 48 hours confirmed, rather than revealed, cloud computing to be so unreliable as to be positively dangerous. Cloud computing is shite. It takes over everything you’ve got, then farts in your face and runs away giggling.

• At OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, GA, one of the topics of bar conversation was why Rackspace, one of OpenStack’s founding companies was keeping such a low profile at the show. Now we know it was probably because the company had been approached by companies looking for strategic partnerships or acquisitions.

Health/Nutrition

• The Obama administration earlier this month quietly handed the insurance industry another loophole in the Affordable Care Act—infuriating advocates for universal coverage who say this shows that an insurance-driven health system is doomed to fail.

• Announced on May 2, the provision opens the door to “reference pricing,” which allows insurance companies to set a price for medical procedures. If a patient receives a treatment that costs more, he/she will simply have to pay out of pocket. The measure is slated to apply to a majority of work-based health insurance plans and exchanges under the Affordable Care Act (also known as “Obamacare”), according to the Associated Press.

• Many worry that reference pricing will force patients to bear the burden of a costly and difficult-to-navigate medical system.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Bowling Green Republican Rand Paul says he wants to block the President’s nomination of David Barron for the First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals because of Barron’s legal memos related to drones. During his time as a U.S. Justice Department lawyer, Barron reportedly authored at least two classified opinions giving the go-ahead to use drones to kill the U.S.-born extremist Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011 in Yemen.

• When US First Lady Michelle Obama appeared in a picture supporting the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria, she was praised for taking a stand against Boko Haram. But others quickly subverted her message and turned it into an anti-drone campaign.

• But most Americans do not know why Iranians have excellent reason not to trust our word, nor why Africans remember us quite differently than Americans suppose.

• Imagine attending your son or daughter’s or brother or sister’s wedding, a family member’s funeral, or just relaxing with friends at a local restaurant. While you may be busily living the most exciting high point of your life to the lowest grieving the loss of a family loved one, to just attending an everyday social gathering, all of a sudden your world is abruptly shattered never to be the same. Out of the blue from out of nowhere, a bomb hits and you are either dead, or barely alive suffering from life threatening injuries, or traumatized for life, forever changed for the worse. You will never enjoy another wedding, attend another funeral, or experience another emotional high or joy without sudden flashback memories of that fateful day flooding your consciousness and invading your world. Intrusive fear and panic rule your daily life where your sense of normalcy and homeostasis is forever knocked out of whack. Destroying lives is what US predator drones do every day of the week, year in and year out for more than a dozen years to thousands of innocent people in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa and no doubt other hidden places we do not even know.

• How many innocent people will the Obama administration kill before it comes clean on who these people are and why they were taken from their families, their friends and their communities? Despite President Obama’s repeated promises of more transparency, he had James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, sent a letter to the heads of the Select Committee on Intelligence seeking the removal of a provision from the proposed Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014 that would have modestly required President Obama to report the number of innocent people killed in drone strikes from only the previous year. Not surprisingly, this request was granted.

• If you think that as a United States citizen you’re entitled to a trial by jury before the government can decide to kill you–– you’re wrong. During his stint as a lawyer at the Department of Justice, David Barron was able to manipulate constitutional law so as to legally justify killing American citizens with drone strikes. If you’re wondering what the justification for that is, that’s just too bad – the legal memos are classified. Sounds a little suspicious, doesn’t it? What’s even more suspicious is that now the Obama Administration wants to appoint the lawyer who wrote that legal memos to become a high-ranking judge for life.

• When you’re a member of a club that includes Saudi Arabia, Iran, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Russia, China, Equatorial Guinea, and Turkmenistan, you may very well be doing something you shouldn’t be doing. And that is the motley crew the United States finds itself alongside in refusing to sign the Convention on Cluster Munitions, an international treaty prohibiting the use, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster bombs.

• After a brief respite, U.S. drones are buzzing above Yemen once again, reportedly killing six al-Qaeda “militants” on May 12.

• Hellfire missiles launched from the U.S.-piloted unmanned aircraft destroyed a car driving through the Marib province, according to a statement made by unnamed local officials. The identities of the dead were not readily available, however.

• Including strikes conducted early this year, the drone war in Yemen has resulted in the death of at least 12 suspected al-Qaeda operatives.

• As robots become ever more present in daily life, the question of how to control their behaviour naturally arises. Does Asimov have the answer?

• In 13 short years, killer drones have gone from being exotic military technology featured primarily in the pages of specialized aviation magazines to a phenomenon of popular culture, splashed across daily newspapers and fictionalized in film and television, including the new season of “24.”

• What has not changed all that much — at least superficially — is the basic aircraft that most people associate with drone warfare: the armed Predator.

• In his new book, “No Place to Hide,” journalist Glenn Greenwald provides new details on Edward Snowden’s personal story and his motivation to expose the U.S. surveillance state. “The stuff I saw really began to disturb me. I could watch drones in real time as they surveilled the people they might kill,” Snowden told Greenwald about his time as a National Security Agency contractor. “You could watch entire villages and see what everyone was doing. I watched NSA tracking people’s Internet activities as they typed. I became aware of just how invasive U.S. surveillance capabilities had become. I realized the true breadth of this system. And almost nobody knew it was happening.”

• Former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad on Sunday suggested that Boeing and the Central Intelligence Agency should be questioned over the missing Flight MH370.

• “Someone is hiding something. It is not fair that Malaysian Airlines (MAS) and Malaysia should take the blame,” he said in his blog Chedet.cc.

• In his 11-paragraph long post, Mahathir expressed his viewpoints and theories on the situation and stressed that something was out of place and that the media would not post anything about Boeing or CIA.

• “They can land safely or they may crash, but airplanes do not just disappear. Certainly not these days with all the powerful communication systems which operate almost indefinitely and possess huge storage capacities,” Mahathir said.

• Stating that he believes the tracking system on the plane was intentionally disabled, Mahathir questioned on where was the data of the plane, which was supposed to have been recorded by the satellite.

• “MH370 is a Boeing 777 aircraft. It was built and equipped by Boeing, hence all the communications and GPS equipment must have been installed by Boeing.

• The arrest of four infiltrated anti-Castro militants from Miami, sent to attack military units, highlights the situation of some 20 Cuban-Americans, who upon leaving prison in Cuba are considered unwelcome by Washington.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• This morning I, like any of you, was disappointed to see that the frontpage of The Times carried a story by the paper’s environment editor, Ben Webster, which read, ‘Scientists in cover-up of “damaging” climate view.’

• Variations of the story had been plastered everywhere, spearheaded by Murdoch-owned outlets, repeated uncritically by others.

• The Daily Mail, much loved for its objective reporting on climate change (and other stuff), declared: ‘Climate change scientist claims he has been forced from new job in “McCarthy”-style witch-hunt by academics across the world.’

• These stories were quoted approvingly by the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto as “the latest reason to distrust the authority of ‘consensus’ climate scientists.”

Finance

• Voters expected to say “no” to union-initiated referendum that would raise basic income to more than $4,000 a month.

• Widening gaps between rich and poor, the top 1% and the rest, are heating up debates, struggles and recriminations over redistributing income. Should governments’ taxing, spending, and regulatory powers redistribute income from the wealthy to others, and if so, how exactly? As opinions and feelings polarize, political conflicts sharpen.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• We’re a little late on this (past few days have been quite busy…) but Larry Lessig’s SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs has hit its first target way early. As you hopefully remember, the goal was to reach $1 million in 30 days, which would then be matched by an (as yet) unknown donor, followed by a second campaign to raise $5 million in June — again matched by a donor. The plan then would be to use the $12 million to work on a few specific Congressional races to prove that it can have an impact, and then kick off in 2015 with a much bigger campaign to have an even larger impact.

Censorship

• A teenager walked into a Pakistani police station on Friday and shot dead a 65-year-old man from a minority sect accused of blasphemy, the second murder involving the country’s controversial blasphemy laws in as many weeks.

• Rights activists said the attack, and a spike in the number of blasphemy cases, was evidence of rising intolerance in the mainly Sunni Muslim south Asian nation of 180 million people.

• A HOST of further “right to be forgotten” requests have been received by Google in the wake of a European court ruling.

• The requests to remove information from Google search results include a man who tried to kill members of his family requesting that links to a news story about the incident be removed.

• The National Election Committee (NEC) admitted Friday it had axed some footage from an opposition-produced video that was broadcast on state TV Thursday night as part of an equal-airtime policy during the council election campaign period.

• The Pirate Bay’s anti-censorship browser continues to rapidly expand its user base. The Tor-based PirateBrowser, which allows people to bypass ISP filtering and access blocked websites, has already been downloaded more than five million times since its launch

• A Chinese official in charge of regulating the Internet has said Beijing must strengthen Internet security because “overseas hostile forces” are using the Internet to “attack, slander and spread rumors”, state media said on Sunday.

Privacy

• A web of deception has finally been untangled: the Justice Department got the US supreme court to dismiss a case that could have curtailed the NSA’s dragnet. Why?

• Modern American privacy law begins with Charles Katz, an accused gambler, making a call from a Los Angeles phone booth. In a now-famous opinion, Justice John Marshall Harlan concluded that the US Constitution protected Katz’s “expectation of privacy” in his call. American phone booths are now a thing of the past, of course, and Americans’ expectations of privacy seem to be fast disappearing, too.

• In two significant but almost-completely overlooked legal briefs filed last week, the US government defended the constitutionality of the Fisa Amendments Act, the controversial 2008 law that codified the Bush administration’s warrantless-wiretapping program. That law permits the government to monitor Americans’ international communications without first obtaining individualized court orders or establishing any suspicion of wrongdoing.

• History is filled with companies shamed by their shoddy cryptography implementations – even though the underlying maths is bang on.

• In a presentation titled “Crypto Won’t Save You” at the AusCERT conference on Australia’s Gold Coast, respected cryptographer Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland took security bods through a decade of breaches featuring a laundry list of the world’s biggest brands.

• For years, the US government has accused Chinese companies of placing surveillance equipment inside routers being exported to America, but this week evidence suggests the exact opposite may be happening.

• New photos implicate the US National Security Agency (NSA) in planting “beacons” into servers, routers and other network gear prior to being exported worldwide.

• The Guardian originally published details May 12 of how the covert operation works, part of bombshell allegations from the new book “No Place to Hide” by Glenn Greenwald, who claims the US is doing exactly what it’s accused Chinese telecommunications manufacturers of in the past.

• According to the Washington Post, Sprint was the only telecom carrier to ask the government for their legal rationale to justify the NSA’s ever-expanding warrantless wiretapping operations back in 2010, before much of it was revealed by Edward Snowden. While Sprint was different from their fellow carriers in that they at least asked the government for justification (as opposed to saying “how high”?) Sprint’s questions didn’t last long.

• Newly declassified documents show the dilemma faced by telecommunications companies when the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) came calling.

• According to a story this week in the Washington Post, Sprint asked the NSA for legal justification when it received requests for phone metadata in 2009. Reportedly, it was the only telco to require a legal rationale. The documents related to previous occasions for which the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA, had issued orders.

• One new email service promising “end-to-end” encryption launched on Friday, and others are being developed while major services such as Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail have stepped up security measures.

• Journalist Glenn Greenwald, at the centre of controversy since breaking the story about the existence of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programme, has told Al Jazeera that there are “many more stories to go” based on the top secret documents taken by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

• Greenwald also told Al Jazeera interviewer John Seigenthaler that despite accusations to the contrary — the Obama administration has repeatedly said that the leaks hurt U.S national security — “nobody has been injured or in any way harmed as a result of our reporting.”

• The document, among those unleashed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and revealed by journalist Glenn Greenwald in his new memoir, carries the assessment that Israel is a good partner to the US for joint electronic spying programs against foreign agents but practices problematic operations.

• The consequences of eliminating Fourth Amendment protections for all international communication with foreigners

• Privacy advocates are worried that a bill intended to reform the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) is being watered down before it heads to the House floor.

• “Last stage negotiations” between members of the House and the Obama administration could significantly weaken provisions in the NSA bill, people familiar with the discussions say.

• “Behind the scenes, there’s some nervousness,” one House aide said.

• Last year, Ars documented how Skype encryption posed little challenge to Microsoft abuse filters that scanned instant messages for potentially abusive Web links. Within hours of newly created, never-before-visited URLs being transmitted over the service, the scanners were able to pluck them out of a cryptographically protected stream and test if they were malicious. Now comes word that the National Security Agency is also able to work around Skype crypto—so much so that analysts have deemed the Microsoft-owned service “vital” to a key surveillance regimen known as PRISM.

• All the PhDs in the world aren’t going to save you from having your own direct quotes turned against you. If anything, it only confirms what Schindler’s critics believe: that he’s pompous, arrogant and unwilling to actually engage in a debate. Instead, he prefers to belittle anyone who doesn’t hold a precious PhD in history, using his doctorate to paper over any flaws in arguments.

• I can’t imagine it’s much fun to see your Twitter feed boiled down to little more than shouts of “stupid!” and continuous pointing to a framed piece of paper, but whether Schindler likes it or not, those are his words and those are his go-to rhetorical devices. For someone who frequently uses the hashtag #caring to show his contempt for the ire he provokes, he certainly can’t seem to take having his own abuse heaped on his Carebear-surrounded head.z

• Speaking at Microsoft’s TechEd North America event earlier this week, the founder of the Cyber Crime Security Forum said that hackers and government agencies can now compromise the security of the TOR network.

• First set up in September 2002, TOR was originally conceived as means for Internet users from those countries with oppressive regimes to side step any state monitoring and similar controls on the web.

• Lots of folks have sent along links to the New York Times’s new executive editor Dean Baquet’s backstory, spiking an important revelation about national surveillance when he was editor of the LA Times. At Huffington Post, David Bromwich, author of a new book about the political imagination, offers his own deep analysis of the abrupt change in command at the Times in the context of coverage of the national security state.

• Cisco’s emerging markets business—the engine for the networking giant’s future growth—continues to take a hit and that situation isn’t likely to change now that it’s common knowledge that the NSA has been intercepting routers—and other IT gear—in the supply chain so it can install call-home beacons.

• Last summer, after the in-FBI-custody shooting of Ibragim Todashev, a friend of the elder Boston bomber, the Bureau told the same story they have been telling since 1993 – this was justified. Furthermore, documents acquired by The New York Times last June showed that there were more than 150 FBI shootings by agents in the last 20 years – almost half fatal – and every single one was ruled justified after internal investigations.

• Google search guru Matt Cutts says we should encrypt the entire internet. And he’s not alone. In the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations of widespread internet eavesdropping by the NSA, the human rights organization Access is also campaigning for all websites to encrypt their connections to internet users, a pretty good way of thwarting interlopers.

• People have started taking Edward Snowden’s advice on using Web encryption to shield their movements online, according to a new study. After the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor leaked documents on the government’s surveillance programs, encrypted web traffic has more than doubled worldwide.

• In March, Snowden told a room full of tech industry workers at the SXSW Interactive conference that the only way people can protect themselves from government surveillance was to use Web encryption. He said that the United States didn’t even know all the documents he had because “encryption works.” And it looks like people worldwide are heeding that advice.

• “Zero Dark Thirty” maker nabs rights to Glenn Greenwald’s look at working with Edward Snowden to reveal reach of NSA.

• No German federal contracts will go to companies that turn over data to the NSA and other spy agencies in the U.S., and elsewhere. There may, however, be one crucial exemption.

• Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been at the center of controversy ever since breaking the story about the existence of the expansive National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program, told Al Jazeera’s John Seigenthaler on Wednesday that there were “many more stories to go” based on the top secret documents taken by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

• Revisionist history is looking back at past events in light of more recent information. What really happened? And no recent source of information has been more important when it comes to revising the history of digital communications than former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. Today I’m really curious about the impact of the NSA on the troubled history of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) communication.

• The National Security Agency and the FBI teamed up in October 2010 to develop techniques for turning Facebook into a surveillance tool.

• Documents released alongside security journalist Glenn Greenwald’s new book, “No Place To Hide,” reveal the NSA and FBI partnership, in which the two agencies developed techniques for exploiting Facebook chats, capturing private photos, collecting IP addresses, and gathering private profile data.

• Purloined formerly top-secret NSA documents are now there for the downloading, even as the calls for truth and privacy buttressed by irrefutable information, has run up against the institutional armor of the surveillance state that has little respect for public opinion or calls for “reform.”

• Today’s National Security Agency is housed in a sprawling complex in Fort Meade, Md., but, according to a recent lecturer at Arlington Public Library, domestic surveillance by the NSA was perhaps born in Arlington.

• David Robarge, the CIA’s Chief Historian, told a standing-room only crowd last week about the history of espionage in Arlington, which started at Arlington Hall during World War II.

• Would you like to listen to Gweek podcasts live, as they are being recorded? Get a job at the FBI and plug into Skype, which Microsoft has handed over to US spy agencies as a kind of lovers’ gift, and you can hear Dean and me chatting away!

• As in many countries, the Snowden revelations were front page news in the Netherlands. The PowerPoint slides showing the intensity of (inter)national surveillance received considerable attention in the political arena. Special debates were scheduled, and dozens of questions were asked by members of parliament. What made things special in the Netherlands was the fact that the revelations coincided with a review of the Dutch Intelligence and Security Act (WiV, Wet op de inlichtingen en veiligheidsdiensten), a process that was then already underway.

• The review committee delivered its report in early December 2013. In the meantime, the newspaper NRC reported on Dutch Snowden revelations. The documents given by ‘intermediary’ Greenwald to the NRC revealed that the Netherlands had been an NSA target between 1946 and 1968. The information that the Dutch counterpart of the NSA, the AIVD, was hacking into websites added to the impact. A third ‘Snowden’ issue was the stats showing that the NSA had access to 1.8 million telecommunications metadata. This chart had already been published some time ago but had escaped attention.

• For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work correspondence. I do so to keep autonomy, control, and privacy over my email and so that no big company has copies of all of my personal email.

• A few years ago, I was surprised to find out that my friend Peter Eckersley — a very privacy conscious person who is Technology Projects Director at the EFF — used Gmail. I asked him why he would willingly give Google copies of all his email. Peter pointed out that if all of your friends use Gmail, Google has your email anyway. Any time I email somebody who uses Gmail — and anytime they email me — Google has that email.

• Startups like Secret and Whisper have defined a buzzy new category of social media, attracting millions of users and tens of millions of dollars in venture capital investments with the promise of allowing anyone to communicate with anonymity. But when it comes to actually revealing corporate and government secrets–a “whistleblowing” function that the two services either implicitly or explicitly condone–users should read the fine print.

• We’ve already questioned if it’s really true that the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply to foreigners (the Amendment refers to “people” not “citizens”). But in some new filings by the DOJ, the US government appears to take its “no 4th Amendment protections for foreigners” to absurd new levels. It says, quite clearly, that because foreigners have no 4th Amendment protections it means that any Americans lose their 4th Amendment protections when communicating with foreigners. They’re using a very twisted understanding of the (already troubling) third party doctrine to do this. As you may recall, after lying to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department said that it would start informing defendants if warrantless collection of information under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) was used in the investigation against them.

• Whatsapp has been removed from its Windows Phone Store….bad news for all 4 Windows Phone users

• If you’re looking for an online service that has a habit of incorporating lots of the problems inherent in the approach to modern day technology, then pull yourself up a seat, help yourself to the coffee, and perhaps nab a biscuit from the jar. Because I want to talk about LinkedIn.

Civil Rights

• The CIA could still be months away from approving the release of a long-awaited Senate report that is sharply critical of the agency’s use of harsh interrogation measures on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a request the Obama administration filed in federal court Thursday.

• Britain has tried to block the release of US ‘torture files’ that could prove how the Blair Government was complicit in the capture and ill-treatment of dozens of terror suspects, it was claimed last night.

• US Senators are within weeks of publishing a top-secret report on America’s torture and rendition programme carried out in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

• The 6,300 files will expose the horror of the CIA’s waterboarding and other tortures and could also reveal the extent of British co-operation in the programme.

• Future American historians will marvel at how long the CIA engaged in such utter unconstitutional lawlessness as the torture of its captives and drone-plane executions of alleged terrorists — including U.S. citizens — without trials, using “kill lists” provided by President Barack Obama (“Obama’s kill list — All males near drone strike sites are terrorists,” rt.com, May 30, 2012).

• Yasser Al-Zahrani was twenty-one years-old when he died at Guantanamo Bay. The US military claims he, along with two other prisoners, committed suicide in their cells. However, a new document uncovered by journalist Scott Horton and published by Harper’s Magazine strongly suggests that they were killed at a CIA black site prison.

• The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) investigated the deaths of Al-Zahrani, Ali Abdulla Ahmed, and Mana Shaman Allabard al Tabi. They concluded that they had died on June 10, 2006, after taking their own lives by making a rope out of bed sheets and T-shirts and hanging themselves.

• The Obama administration is bracing for the potential of a violent backlash against U.S. military personnel, diplomats and even allied governments when a declassified version of a Senate report on Bush-era interrogation policies is released in the next few months, according to court filings and American officials.

• Justice Department lawyers responding to a lawsuit seeking documents from a Central Intelligence Agency review of aspects of the interrogation program said Thursday that a response to the suit must await not only the declassification of a summary of the Senate report, but also planning to deal with potential fallout from that release.

• “The guy I sit next to on the Oversight Committee, Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., is chairing the committee, and we have done a lot of work on this issue,” DesJarlais said. “We are going to talk about why the CIA was there and the guns they had there. They were being traded legally or illegally out of the annex. Why was the ambassador there? It was an unsafe area.

• Watch the video of comrade André Ferrari speaking on behalf of the LSR at a rally of the Landless Workers’ Movement in Sao Paulo, followed by a few pictures of the protest action.

• A win for free speech (as expressed by vanity license plates) has just been handed down by the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The plate at the center of the case — “COPSLIE” — was originally deemed to be “offensive to good taste” by a lower court, which felt a “reasonable person” would be offended that the driver of this vehicle believed that cops do, in fact, lie.

• A Boynton Beach police officer is on administrative duty after a video surfaced that shows what appears to be the officer sweeping the legs out from underneath a 13-year-old boy who is in handcuffs.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• As a president who has professed to be a staunch supporter of net neutrality, Obama must voice his opposition to the proposal just advanced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a group advocating for an open Internet charges.

• Watchdog decries politicians’ claims that they “are acting in the public interest.”

• Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler‘s net-neutrality proposal has sparked an outcry of protest from Obama’s earliest supporters — consumer advocates, high-tech firms and investors, and Democratic lawmakers.

• U.S. regulators on Thursday advanced a “net neutrality” proposal that would ban Internet providers from blocking or slowing down access to websites but may let them charge content companies for faster and more reliable delivery of their traffic to users.

• The Federal Communications Commission today voted in favor of a preliminary proposal to allow Internet “fast lanes” while asking the public for comment on whether the commission should change the proposal before enacting final rules later this year. The order was approved 3-2, with two Republican commissioners dissenting.

• Perhaps we need Google, Microsoft, and other defenders of Net neutrality to give us a public example of Slow Lane Internet to show everyone where the FCC is taking us

DRM

• Dear Commissioner Malmstroem,

• we are writing to you on the occasion of the international Day Against Digital Restrictions Management, which today is being celebrated around the world. We are very concerned about the security of European citizens, and we ask you to take action to protect them.

• The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is an independent charitable non-profit dedicated to promoting Free Software and freedom in the information society. Today we would like to direct your attention to a very specific threat to the freedom and security of computer users everywhere.

Intellectual Monopolies

• It’s something of a misnomer to call TPP, TTIP and TISA trade agreements: they go far beyond traditional discussions about things like tariff removal, and are encroaching on domains that are as much cultural as economic. That is, many of things that the US dubs “trade barriers” are in fact long-standing expressions of national priorities, preferences and beliefs. That’s evident in an interesting post from Public Citizen’s Eyes on Trade blog, which explores the 2014 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers (pdf).

Trademarks

• A federal appeals court is letting stand a decision denying a trademark to a website’s banner because it could be perceived as disparaging to Muslims.

Copyrights

• A person who claimed that the operators of Grooveshark were engaged in systematic copyright infringement will keep his anonymity, a court has ruled. The allegations, which were made in the comments section of an online news article, prompted Grooveshark’s parent company to unmask their author. They have now failed in that mission.

• This week it was revealed that following a request from a Swedish anti-piracy group, police action was taken against a torrent site hosted on Canadian soil. The general understanding is that torrent sites are currently legal in Canada, so how does a situation like this come to pass?

• Last week news broke that UK ISPs are teaming up with copyright holders to notify Internet subscribers caught sharing pirated material. The plan has been widely covered in the media, but unfortunately fact and fiction are often intertwined. So how scary are these piracy warnings really? Let’s find out.

• In somewhat of a surprise move, Canadian police have raided a local torrent site and confiscated its server. With around 10,000 members, Spavar.org was a relatively small site. However, any police action against a Canada-based site is likely to cause wider concern since the country is home to countless torrent sites, from the very small to the very large.

• The American Society of Civil Engineers is cracking down on researchers who post their own articles on their personal websites. The publisher, which owns dozens of highly cited journals, claims that the authors commit copyright infringement by sharing their work in public.

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