● 05.22.14

● Links 23/5/2014: Linux 3.15 RC6, KDE Previews

Posted in News Roundup at 8:04 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Chinese OS developers are thrilled at news of the ban on Windows 8 by the central government, as the decision presents an opportunity to seize market share in the future, Xinhua news said on Thursday.

Server

• In a series of recent interviews with IBM, the company made official its plans to go head-to-head with Microsoft in the PaaS market, as well as to compete with the likes of Heroku, Engine Yard and a host of others.

Kernel Space

• Netcat is a 4-person band based in Seattle, Washington (USA) that just released an album titled Cycles Per Instruction. The 4-person band includes three soft-bodied persons (humans, if you like) plus one hard-shell human or what’s popularly called a computer (yes, if a corporation is a person, …).

• In a move that stands to strengthen the hand of open source within the embedded Linux market, especially the automotive industry, the Linux Foundation has announced that microcontroller and chip manufacturer Renesas has become a gold member of the non-profit consortium.

• Well, KDBUS landing didn’t happen for the Linux 3.15 kernel. The merge window for the Linux 3.16 kernel will be open in June, but there’s been no uptick in Linux kernel mailing list discussions about reviewing KDBUS or getting anything queued up for mainline nor is there any code for this kernel implementation of D-Bus living within linux-next. Greg’s KDBUS repository also hasn’t been touched in nearly one month. As soon as we learn anything more about KDBUS on approach for landing within the Linux kernel, you can expect to read about it on Phoronix.

• While the power efficiency of Linux on desktop/laptop systems is improving, overall it still doesn’t appear to be on par with Windows 8 or OS X systems, especially when it comes to the “out of the box” power performance as shipped by default. PowerTOP is one of the easiest ways to drop your Linux power usage, but for those curious about other measures, here’s some other common yet useful resources for new Linux users to make their systems more power efficient.

• The sixth test release to the Linux 3.15 kernel is now available after more time than usual lapsed since the 3.15-rc5 release.

Graphics Stack

• While open-source activities around Intel, AMD Radeon, and NVIDIA (Nouveau) hardware continues to flourish, for the unlucky users still dependent upon VIA x86 hardware, the OpenChrome and VIA kernel mode-setting initiatives seem to have come to a standstill.

• I was curious about the state of OpenChrome, since it’s been several months since hearing any VIA kernel mode-setting update for the independent VIA DRM/KMS driver that was in the works for several years by James Simmons. Sadly though, there doesn’t seem to be anything new and the OpenChrome project seems to be in a dire state.

Applications

• For those that may have some extra time over the summer months that are looking to get involved with some new open-source work and are looking for something that’s high-profile but often overlooked, Cairo would be a great project.

• Also, the support for numerous new devices has been improved, RawTherapee’s window size and position are remembered between sessions, users can now click anywhere without dragging to clear crop, and much more.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• It’s a financial risk for a company to put out Steam Machines that much is obvious as if it flops they have a bunch of customized PC’s they have to get rid of somehow. With Steam’s massive user base it could sell better than a lot of companies think it will if Valve can push it enough, this is most likely why Alienware and other companies got involved since it has massive potential.

• Going back to the Kickstarter campaign in 2012 where Linux support was talked about early on, we have been excited to see Wasteland 2 available for Linux gamers. In August is when the game has been announced for its official release.

• Valve has two builds for SteamOS. One is a stable version (sort of) and the other one is a Beta (Alchemist). Up until a week ago the two versions have been almost identical, which meant that maintaining two different branches was really nonsensical. This has started to change and Valve has released a second Beta in just a few days, making some important updates.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The KDE community is working hard on the next major release of KDE software, most notably Framework 5 and Plasma Next. While Arch users can already play with KDE Framework 5 packages via extra repository and also run some components of Plasma Next via kde-unstable repo (which already has KWin), rest of those who can’t get Arch to work (though we have a very user-friendly tutorial), they can get a preview of Plasma Next using the live image of Fedora.

• The last time KDE released a major revision of its interface, users protested bitterly, and the project took several years to live down the reaction.

• Next time, you would expect that KDE would play it safer. And, at times, the newly released beta of the latest Plasma interface does just that. In many respects, it is more a matter of re-alignment and positioning than of overthrowing paradigms.

• To some people an operating system is an operating system. It is a means to an end. Many Windows users definitely look on life in this way.

• A lot of Windows user buy a computer and that computer happens to have Windows on it. Windows lets them connect to the internet via a browser and they can read their email, watch videos, check their mail and perform office type tasks.

• The fact that the computer is running Windows is irrelevant to them. They certainly wouldn’t spend time discussing their operating system or reading articles about it.

• That feature was implemented by several companies starting on low level software components like X11, Cairo and pixman. However desktops where pretty slow to adapt software to the new needs and fix bugs. That was in part of the initially higher costs for the hardware. Only few developers in the open source community had early access to suitable gear. I do not write here about suitable graphic cards and monitor combinations. You should consult the web for this. Search for 30-bit monitor. Many early adopters observed psychedelic colours, not working graphics areas and more. Here the state on the well known KDE X11 desktop in release 4.11 on a openSUSE-13.1 . The login screen colours are broken. The splash screen after login looks correct and after some period the desktop becomes visible with again broken colours. To manually fix most of that, one have to tell that Qt shall use native colours. Create following text into a file called ~/.kde4/env/qtnative.sh .

• So I will post this and then ANOTHER post soon after to delve some more into the work going on with Wallpapers and the wallpaper competition.

• My primary goal for this summer is adding support for OTR protocol in KTp, what will enable both end-to-end encryption of text messages and peer authentication. I believe that thanks to cooperation with my brilliant mentors: David Edmundson and Sandro Knauß, I will introduce a reliable solution without negative effects on user experience.

• First, our Copr repository with KDE Frameworks has been updated to 4.99.0 release, so go get it! All frameworks are co-installable with KDE 4, so you can develop against KF5 without needing any special setup. Also KDE Frameworks 5 were approved as feature for Fedora 21, which means that in next Fedora release, we will ship all Frameworks in the Fedora repositories! There are already some packages imported into rawhide, the rest will follow in next weeks.

Distributions

• A trip through 10 of the more popular desktop Linux distributions, with an eye on the novitiate’s experience.

• Ironically, “Blue” was the Microsoft codename for the Windows 8.1 release. By default, Blue Pup boots into a screen displaying active tiles much like the Windows 8 Metro design. You can remove or add tiles and programs, and change their position and size. You can easily change the default mode so that Blue Pup boots instead into a standard desktop.

• Chakra Linux 2014.05 is the first one in a new series called “Descartes” that will be following the KDE 4.13 releases, although the team will not settle for just a simple implementation of this desktop environment.

• Unlike other developers who are using KDE as their desktop solution, the guys from Chakra didn’t want a run-of-the-mill experience for users. They tried to give it a unique feel so that users know two things right from the start: they are using Chakra and a KDE variation.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• The Wall Street Journal reports (this article is behind a paywall) that, based on documents it reviewed, Red Hat “has chosen not to provide support to its commercial Linux customers if they use rival versions of OpenStack.” It quotes an HP cloud executive, Martin Fink, saying: “Red Hat has taken the art form of closed open-source to a new level.”

Fedora

• I’ve been in the Fedora Project Leader role for a bit over two years now, and was the program manager for Fedora for nearly a year and a half before that; needless to say, Fedora has been my full time and lots of my other time job for a long time now. Being in this role certainly is humbling and daunting at times, and amazingly gratifying at others, but it has also afforded me an almost overwhelming opportunity to learn about anything and everything going on in open source outside the Fedora universe, with the hopes of bringing those people, projects, and ideas into our folds. Some of it is incredibly interesting, and some of it brings incredibly creative thinking into solving problems that we face in the technology space today — and, like those before me, it has also led me inevitably into exploring new opportunities.

• Robyn steps down, FUDCon Beijing, Package Database version 2, help with F21 release notes, and a comparison of CoreOS and Project Atomic….

• One month ago we looked at the latest performance of Fedora 20, but with its more liberal update strategy — especially with the long release time until Fedora 21 — we’re back with some more tests today as since last month the Linux 3.14 kernel has been added and other changes. This article has benchmarks of the Fedora 20 KDE spin out-of-the-box and then with all available updates as of this week to see how the performance has evolved in the half-year since the F20 release.

Debian Family

• It seems like everyone is embracing systemd these days. It’s been in Fedora since 2011 and it’s already in the RHEL 7 release candidate. Arch Linux and Gentoo have it as well. Debian got on board with the jessie release (which is currently in testing).

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Webmin, a web-based interface for system administration for Unix, has just reached version 1.690 and is available for download.

• With Webmin and with the help of any modern browser, users can set up user accounts, Apache servers, DNS, file sharing, and much more. The developers of Webmin have made regular updates to this piece of software. This latest version is not a major one, but some interesting fixes have been implemented.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Adlink has released a rugged, Android 4.0 handheld with a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm SoC, 3.8-inch WVGA display, NFC, 3G, and a 5-megapixel barcoding camera.

• Adlink’s IMX-3000 handheld computer updates its earlier IMX-2000 model. This in turn is a slightly revised version of its first Android handheld, the circa-2011 TIOT 2000. The IMX-3000 is designed for applications including retail, logistics, on-site inspection, warehousing, and transportation, says Adlink.

• Private communications firm Silent Circle has secured $30 million in funding to cope with demand for the privacy-based Blackphone, as well as expand operations globally.

• Our SBC survey has now concluded, and it’s time to reveal the Top 10 SBCs list. Yes, the Pi is still in the sky… but some other winners may surprise you!

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Meanwhile, Samsung is shipping real small cheap computers that fit on your wrist and are inexpensive… At $200 you can have the latest Samsung watch, which some sell for as little as $50 with the purchase of a Samsung smartphone. Yes, M$, A Tizen device is much more affordable than your latest burdensome gadget.

• Since Apple launched the first iPad in 2010, tablet PC shipments have grown continuously. Not only have tablet PCs been well-positioned between the casual and professional computing market segments, but the shift to mobility and the surrounding ecosystem exemplified by apps added to the attraction of the tablet PC. On the other hand, sufficient supply of components has also been a key driving force for tablet PC market growth, as the cost of the bill of materials (BOM) has fallen rapidly. One of the most important components is the LCD panel. According to the latest Quarterly Worldwide FPD Shipment and Forecast Report, tablet PC display shipments are expected to reach 342M in 2014, tremendous growth from 80M in 2011.

Free Software/Open Source

• Devcoin is an open source project designed to support open source projects through the use of a dedicated crypto currency.

• Crypto currency is a new form of digital money which is decentralized and runs on a distributed network of computers. Cryptographic techniques are used to secure the network and each individual’s funds, while open source code provides the shared protocol through which each wallet or service communicates with the public “block chain” where information on all transactions is stored. The most famous example of this is, of course, Bitcoin.

• Large companies like Google don’t really like open source projects, although their Chrome browser is based on Chromium. Now, the PDF rendering engine that is being used in Google Chrome has been released as open source.

Events

• EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for users and developers of BSD-based systems.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google has unveiled Chrome 35 FINAL for Windows, Mac and Linux. After the relative excitement of version 34, version 35 contains little of note for the end user to get excited about.

• Developers, however, will be pleased to see a number of new and improved features implemented, including the ability to take more control over touch input. There’s also an undocumented switch to the Aura user interface on the Linux platform.

• Google has released Chrome 35 today for Windows, OS X, and Linux platforms. Special about the Linux version of Chrome 35 is that it replaces the GTK interface with their in-house Aura system.

Mozilla

• Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox for Windows and Linux, but it doesn’t come down to a silly theming fork or other basic changes. The fundamental differences between upstream Firefox and Pale Moon is that they will not be implementing HTML5 DRM/EME support, they are sticking with the original Firefox interface rather than the new Australis UI, and they will not be accepting sponsored ad pages / tiles.

SaaS/Big Data

• Thierry Carrez, who has been in charge of OpenStack release management since 2010, discussed key elements of OpenStack project management.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The developers from The Document Foundation are making some progress in the new 4.3 branch, which promises to bring some very interesting changes, not only under the hood of the software, but also in the visual department.

• There are no particular details about this branch of the application, but the devs have made public some of their goals for the 4.3 release.

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today awarded Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the Tehnoetic TET-N150 wireless USB adapter.

• The RYF certification mark is awarded to products that meet the FSF’s standards in regard to users’ freedom, control over the product, and privacy. The TET-N150 can be purchased from Tehnoetic’s online store.

• GNU Parallel 20140522 (‘Boko Haram’) has been released.

• The GNU Compiler Collection version 4.8.3 has been released.

• GCC 4.8.3 is the third bug-fix release containing important fixes for regressions and serious bugs in GCC 4.8.2 with over 141 bugs fixed since the previous release.

Public Services/Government

• Open government isn’t a new concept. Thanks to the proliferation of the printing press, the Age of Enlightenment blasted through Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries and brought demands for new rights: free speech, assembly, and, of course, the freedom of the press.

• “Open source helps to solve IT vendor lock-in situations”, Norbert Weidinger, ICT-Strategist for the city, said in a presentation on the city’s use of free and open source solutions.

Openness/Sharing

• J. R. R. Tolkien, perhaps best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was, in his academic life, a scholar of Anglo-Saxon language and literature. After a delay of 90 years, his translation of Beowulf will finally be published today. Through this newly available translation, readers will have the opportunity to visit (or revisit) King Hrothgar’s mead hall and experience Beowulf’s battles against Grendel and Grendel’s mother without having to learn to read Anglo-Saxon, or as it is also known, Old English.

Open Data

• In 2007, Colin Drane wanted to know more about the crime that was happening in his Baltimore neighborhood. Utilizing the momentum of the open government movement, he founded SpotCrime, a public facing crime mapping and email alert website that collects public crime data from police agencies around the world.

• Scandals, mismanagement, and back-room deals; the City of New Orleans has long endured a legacy of opaque policies and decision-making processes closed to its citizens. A historic disconnect caused by the city’s lack of available information has led to generations of disenfranchised residents.

• National Rail Enquiries to open live database for all

Open Hardware

• Arduino launches an amazing beta program for Arduino TRE developers. Giving the novelty of the board and of the approach I think it’s a great opportunity for you to experiment and give feedback!

Programming

Leftovers

Science

• Well scientists have to take their share of the blame for this, in that if anyone can promote science, it’s them. However speaking as a research scientist I KNOW why communicating science/ debunking pseudoscience (in science circles) is generally seen as a gamma rate objective, typically only pursued by betas.

Security

• eBay announced this morning that they’ve been hacked and that “encrypted passwords and other non-financial data” have been compromised. They’re expected to begin notifying their customer base later today, which will include a suggestion for users to change their passwords. The company says that PayPal, an eBay subsidiary, uses its own servers and was not affected by the attack.

• PayPal did not say why the passwords needed to be changed, and then later the message was removed altogether.

• eBay’s morning just went from bad to worse. The e-commerce site confirmed Wednesday that its corporate network was hacked and a database with users’ passwords was compromised. While eBay says there is no evidence that users’ financial information was accessed in the hack, the company is telling all users to change their passwords.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• It is quite extraordinary to me how very little publicity is being given to the CIA sponsored military coup in Libya, following the same event in Egypt. The Arab Spring was front page headlines. The CIA and Saudi sponsored cooperation to turn it back to the deepest of freezes virtually gets no mention. This is even true of Libya, where we bombed tens of thousands of civilians to a pulp to ensure the changeover of regime, under the guise of installing democracy. The real aim was never democracy, but a neo-con friendly government, which is so much better secured under the auspices of the CIA.

• The senior former Iranian intelligence officer who quarterbacked the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut and killed scores of Americans was recently living under CIA protection in the United States, a book being published Tuesday says.

• From alleged connections to the CIA to possible plans to overthrow the government, there is a sense of mystery surrounding Khalifa Haftar, the rogue general whose forces led an attack on the Libyan parliament in Tripoli Sunday.

• This could be the real Benghazi scandal: As Libya’s major cities see some of the worst fighting since 2011, a Libyan general who once defected to the U.S. is leading the charge.

• The CIA is said to have blocked a plan to supply Western-backed Syrian rebels with up to 70,000 assault rifles for the war against President Bashar Assad.

• The Wall Street Journal said a plan by a private U.S. group to provide Russian-made light weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition to the Free Syrian Army was foiled by the CIA.

• In a 2-1 split ruling, the US Court of Appeals has decided that the CIA can keep its Bay of Pigs invasion history report secret on the grounds that the history only exists in a “draft” form, and was never marked as a final document.

• After receiving a court order in April to reveal a secret memo that justifies drone strikes to kill U.S. citizens who live overseas, the Obama administration has announced that it will not appeal the order and will comply with the request. The announcement came as the Senate votes on President Obama’s nomination of David Barron—the author of the memo—to the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

• When the Administration first released the Awlaki memo to all members of the Senate Intelligence Committee last year, Dianne Feinstein revealed that the Committee had never seen at least 5 other OLC memos pertaining to targeted killing. In her statement, she cited 9 total memos, while reporting at the time suggested there might be 11 (and therefore 7 memos even the Intelligence Committees had not seen).

• Just after that disclosure, the National Journal provided some description of what might be in the memos withheld even from the Intelligence Committees: “secret protocols with foreign governments, including Pakistan and Yemen,” the two countries where the US is known to have used signature strikes. Members of the House Judiciary Committee have twice asked for memos pertaining to signature strikes; and John McCain has posed questions about them as well.

• Bolstered by the promised public release of a secret legal memo, Senate Democrats are ready to approve a top federal judgeship for a former Obama administration official who helped formulate the justification for the drone killings of suspected American terrorists overseas.

• The Senate was expected Thursday to approve David Barron to join the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in Boston.

• The 120-mile walk had begun eight days earlier at the gates of Ft. Benning. Drones researched and developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) Research Institute are then tested at the Fort Benning Maneuver Battle Lab through a project federally funded by the U.S. Army Threat Systems Management Office.

• And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us a secret memo that gets us out of the bit about Thou-shalt-not-kill.

• And, lo, as I was driving home from the committee hearing I was pulled over for speeding, and I said unto the officer, “I’ve got a memo that lets me speed. Would you like to see it?” and he said, “No thank you, and not your grocery list or your diary either.”

• Transparency in drone murders has been a demand pushed by U.N. lawyers and pre-vetted Congressional witnesses, and not by the victims’ families. Nobody asks for transparency in child abuse or rape. “Oh, have you got a memo that explains how aliens commanded you to kill and eat those people? Oh, well that’s all right then.”

• Seriously, what the filibuster?

• I don’t want to see the memo that David Barron wrote “legalizing” the killing of U.S. citizens with drone strikes, after which (or is it beforehand?) I’ll decide whether he should be a federal judge.

• The Los Angeles Times is reporting: “President Obama’s Justice Department will release a long-sought secret document laying out the legal basis for using drones to kill Americans suspected of terrorist activities abroad, administration officials confirmed Tuesday.

• Faced with the threat the U.S. Senate would block judicial nominees, the Obama administration announced this week it would release the so-called “drone memos” outlining the supposed legal rationale for using drones to attack and kill American citizens.

• The “most transparent administration in history” just needed to be asked 22 different ways.

• So, thanks to our membership of the Five Eyes network, the GCSB spy agency has been supplying information on “persons of interest” in Afghanistan (at least) that may be used for targeting them in US drone strikes. At his post-Cabinet press conference yesterday, Prime Minister John Key said that he did not know how, or for what purposes, the information that New Zealand supplies to the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan is being used. He did however confirm that GCSB-supplied information had not been used to target the New Zealand citizen Daryl Jones, killed by a drone strike in Yemen last November. (How Key could be so sure when he claimed not to know the purposes for which ISAF uses the data that we supply, was left unclear.) Key would not confirm whether any other New Zealanders had been killed by drone operations.

• Prime Minister John Key admits drones occasionally hit the wrong targets and kill innocent civilians, but he’s comfortable with New Zealand’s indirect involvement in the programme.

• The Government Communications Security Bureau doesn’t give the United States information for the express purpose of carrying out strikes, Mr Key said on Firstline this morning – but it does pass on intelligence that could be useful.

• “There are environments like Afghanistan where our people have gathered information, and that’s information on people of interest to our ISAF partners, and we’ve passed that information onto ISAF partners – and one of those is the United States – and ISAF have passed that information on,” says Mr Key.

• John Key today admitted that the GCSB is supporting the US state sanctioned assassination programme. He said that the GCSB provided information to the United States that was used to conduct drone strikes in Afghanistan and possibly elsewhere.

• If women’s rights in Yemen were of real international concern, say locals, health funding would not remain a meager 4 percent of the government’s budget, leaving little money to provide primary health care and nutrition, and nothing for reproductive health. The development community would be working to combat female illiteracy (which hovers at a staggering 70 percent) and helping women set up small businesses and monitor the use of money — which we know women are better at than men — to cut down on rampant corruption. Since social capital remains strong among women, and they are providing much of the remaining glue in this unstable society, this is where the West should invest.

• Greg Dawes condemns New Zealand’s involvement with drone strike ”murders”.

• Almost a year ago, I drew readers’ attention to the fact our security services may be spying on New Zealanders.

• Sadly, it now seems they may be doing much worse.

• They may be complicit in extra-judicial killings, acts that violate principles of natural justice and, almost certainly, international law.

• If they are supporting such actions – and the prime minister has all but admitted it – our security services have blood on their hands.

• What I am talking about is the involvement of the GSCB, the Government’s electronic spy agency, in the drone killing programme that for some years has been undertaken by the United States.

• Declaring that a Harvard University law professor nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals violated the Bill of Rights by penning a memo justifying the administration’s drone killing of Americans overseas, Sen. Rand Paul on Wednesday vowed to fight David Barron’s appointment.

• “I cannot and will not support a lifetime appointment of someone who believes it is okay to kill an American citizen not involved in combat without a trial,” Paul said in a Senate floor speech in opposing Barron’s nomination to the Boston court, considered a sure bet.

• In a Senate hearing Wednesday, irate lawmakers criticized senior administration officials over the lack of follow-up with one of the strategy’s principal goals: Obama had said he was looking forward to “engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine and ultimately repeal” the nearly 13-year-old congressional authorization to use force against those individuals, groups and nations responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

• Does the President have to have a statute authorizing the use of military force in order to legally wage war against terrorist groups that may or may not pose an imminent threat to the United States? Or can the President simply target, capture and kill whomever in whatever terrorist group wherever, even if Congress has not authorized action?

• “It’s unfortunate that it took Mr. Barron’s nomination for the Justice Department to make these memos public,” Wyden said. “I believe that every American has the right to know when their government believes it is allowed to kill them.”

• He has also rubbished claims by a US journalist the country’s spies likely provided information which led to a drone strike which killed a New Zealander.

• Drone strikes are justified – even if innocent civilians are mistakenly killed, Prime Minister John Key says.

• Key confirmed yesterday that intelligence collected by the Government Communications Security Bureau might be passed to the controversial US programme.

• At least four Taliban militants were killed following a drone strike in eastern Kunar province of Afghanistan, local officials said Wednesday.

• The basic premise of the Obama Administration’s drone program is that decapitation, the killing of a terrorist organization’s top leadership, works. Killing al-Qaeda’s leadership should, in theory, limit the organization’s ability to plot attacks on the US and its allies.

• But what if that’s not true? That’s the core finding of a just-published study in the prestigious journal International Security. In it, Georgia Tech professor Jenna Jordan takes a look at the history of targeting terrorist leaders and draws lessons for the fight against al-Qaeda. According to Jordan, believing that targeted killing can actually weaken al-Qaeda means assuming al-Qaeda depends on a group of charismatic leaders. But that’s wrong, and that mistaken assumption has led the Obama Administration to pursue a strategy centered on targeting al-Qaeda’s leadership with drones when it’d really be better to cut down on targeted killings altogether.

Transparency Reporting

• When whistleblowers clash over whether information should be censored from the public then alarm bells should be ringing in the heads of all free thinkers. In this particular instance we are talking about an organisation headed by a political prisoner and another spearheaded by an acclaimed prize winning journalist.

• Of course we are talking about two giants in the whistleblowing community – Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald – both of whom work for very different organisations.

• Assange, who heads up Wikileaks, has been a political prisoner, held without charge, for more than three years, including almost two years in the tiny Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Wikileaks has also been treated as a pariah organisation cut off from the usual avenues of international funding from would be donors.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• About 2,000 bullfights are still held every year in Spain, but the numbers are falling. In 2010, Catalonia became the second Spanish region after the Canary Islands to ban the tradition.

• The fresh waters of the Colorado river reached the Gulf of California at high tide on Thursday, the first time in decades that the river has flowed all the way to the sea.

Finance

• Students who take out private loans to pay for college could face a nasty surprise if their co-signer dies or files for bankruptcy: The lender may suddenly demand the loan be paid in full—or even worse, put that loan in default—even though all payments are being made on time.

Censorship

• Facebook’s censorship rules have been thrust into the spotlight after a seemingly innocuous photo of two women kissing was removed on the grounds that it ‘violated the community’s standards on nudity and pornography’.

• Students learn so much in fighting for their First Amendment rights. They learn the extent of their resolve. They learn that the ideals of the Bill of Rights extolled in the classroom aren’t so revered by school administrators intent on protecting their fiefdoms. And they learn that there’s nothing like a swimsuit issue to boost circulation.

• [...]

• Fond du Lac High School’s student newspaper, the Cardinal Columns, won multiple awards this year, including a prize for a recent article about rape victims at the school. After publication of the piece, titled “The Rape Joke,” administrators enacted oversight guidelines. Let it be known that award-winning journalism will not go unchecked at Fond du Lac High.

• Twitter’s ability to block certain tweets or users from being seen in specific countries, a somewhat Orwellian feature it calls the “country-withheld content” tool, seems to be getting more popular, according to the Chilling Effects clearinghouse, which tracks such things: tweets and/or users are now being blocked in Pakistan as well as Turkey, and a pro-Ukrainian account is apparently unavailable to users who try to view it from inside Russia, at the request of the government.

• In 2012, when Twitter announced in a blog post that it was launching a system that would allow the company to take down content on a country-by-country basis—as opposed to taking it down across the entire Twitter network—EFF defended that decision as the least terrible option. After all, when a company refuses to comply with an official government request, the government’s response is often to block an entire platform.

Privacy

• The Feds ran roughshod over Lavabit, forcing it to shut down and proving that in the privacy wars, the government is fighting to win — and fighting dirty

• …NSA’s DROPOUTJEEP program, which describes the agency’s ability to infiltrate the Apple iPhone.

• New documents released by Snowden through Greenwald’s new website, The Intercept, show just how much further the NSA program goes. The spy agency logged and recorded EVERY cell phone call in the small island nation of Bermuda. Audio from those calls was stored on servers and could be played back for up to a month by NSA analysts.

• At least 25 police departments own a Stingray, a suitcase-size device that costs as much as $400,000 and acts as a fake cell tower. The system, typically installed in a vehicle so it can be moved into any neighborhood, tricks all nearby phones into connecting to it and feeding data to police. In some states, the devices are available to any local police department via state surveillance units. The federal government funds most of the purchases, via anti-terror grants.

• When the NSA surveillance news broke last year it sent shockwaves through CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Switzerland. Andy Yen, a PhD student, took to the Young at CERN Facebook group with a simple message: “I am very concerned about the privacy issue, and I was wondering what I could do about it.”

• There was a massive response, and of the 40 or so active in the discussion, six started meeting at CERN’s Restaurant Number 1, pooling their deep knowledge of computing and physics to found ProtonMail, a gmail-like email system which uses end-to-end encryption, making it impossible for outside parties to monitor.

• Encrypted emails have actually been around since the 1980s, but they are extremely difficult to use. When Edward Snowden asked a reporter to use an end-to-end encrypted email to share details of the NSA surveillance program the reporter couldn’t get the system to work, says Yen.

• A day before the House will vote on a major bill designed to rein in government surveillance, a group of blue-chip tech firms are warning that the measure falls far short of what is advertised.

• Yet recent closed-door negotiations between the leadership of the Republican-led House and the Obama administration have left the bill with sapped privacy protections that do not adequately address mass surveillance abuses, privacy advocates say.

• In 2003, an AT&T technician discovered a secret room being used to copy all internet traffic coming through his building

• The NSA and AT&T refuse to discuss exactly what was going on in now-legendary Room 641A at 611 Folsom Street.

• “The level of trust in U.S. companies has been seriously damaged, especially but not exclusively outside the U.S. Every time a new shoe drops — and there are 10,000 of them — it serves a blow to the U.S.,” he said.

• A year ago this June, things were uncertain for U.S.-based cloud service providers after revelations of the National Security Agency’s surveillance of customer data intercepted from U.S. tech companies. The U.S. tech industry was on the defensive amid concerns that customers would shift their hosted data and services to providers in other parts of the world. U.S. businesses ostensibly stood to lose up to $35 billion over three years as a result, according to a dire prediction by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Forrester put the losses as high as $180 billion.

• After the US spooks effectively shut down Lavabit last year, a truly secure email system which is unhackable by the spooks has been a holy grail.

• The locations may not make sense — the Bahamas, Mexico, the Philippines, Kenya — but that’s not stopping the DEA from teaming up with the NSA to amass information on phone calls there.

• The Aquino government must protest the collection of cellphone metadata and text messages by the United States National Security Agency, the leftist organization Bayan said Wednesday.

• In a statement, Bayan’s Renato Reyes was reacting to news reports that the US spy agency through the computer program Mystic embedded in Philippine telecommunications networks is able to collect metadata (information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls) and text (SMS, or short messaging services) messages.

• Despite warnings that doing so “could lead to increased violence” and potentially deaths, anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks says it plans to publish the name of a country targeted by a massive United States surveillance operation.

• ‘The Intercept’ is the new publication created by the journalists who revealed the secrets of the National Security Agency (NSA), including Glenn Greenwald. The online publication revealed that the NSA collects metadata from telecommunications systems in five countries, including Mexico, through a program called MYSTIC. MYSTIC collects information about the time, origin and destination of calls, and is funded, in the case of Mexico, by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

• The U.S. National Security Agency has been recording and archiving “virtually every” cellphone call in the Bahamas without knowledge and permission from the island nation’s government, according to a report from The Intercept.

• The surveillance is part of an NSA secret system called SOMALGET that tapped into access legally granted to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and opened a “backdoor” into the country’s cell telephone network, the article states.

• It’s been a couple of months since the Washington Post published a scoop on the extraordinary overseas eavesdropping capabilities of the U.S. government. Under the bylines of Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, the paper revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had amassed a system — known as “MYSTIC” — enabling it to “rewind and review” all of the telephone conversations of a foreign country.

• Wikileaks has announced that it will reveal the name of the country that is having nearly all of its mobile phone calls tapped by the US National Security Agency (NSA) within the next 72 hours.

• The group tweeted that it will “reveal the name of the censored country whose population is being mass recorded in 72 hours” despite warnings from investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald that he was “very convinced” the leak could “lead to deaths”.

• In a secured room beneath the US Capitol last week, legislative aides working to finalize a bill intended to constrain the National Security Agency attempted to out-think a battery of lawyers working for the Obama administration and the intelligence services.

• The Reform Government Surveillance coalition – AOL, Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo – offered a statement on Wednesday denouncing the USA Freedom Act as a weak attempt at ending the government’s bulk storage of domestic phone metadata.

• The NSA’s wide-ranging surveillance programme should be curtailed, says hardware-maker Cisco in a letter to President Obama.

• Cisco boss John Chambers said faith in US technology companies was being eroded by the NSA’s activities.

• The German government is to block IT companies that have links to the NSA from being awarded public contracts in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance.

• According to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and public broadcaster NDR, Germany’s coalition government has changed the rules for awarding IT contracts to eliminate those companies suspected of passing on data to foreign secret services. Companies awarded contracts by the state will have to sign contracts saying that they won’t pass on data relating to German citizens. The rule will mainly apply to US companies that are bound to give back-door access to the data they collect.

• US Attorney General Eric Holder will travel to Germany to discuss privacy concerns after the NSA spying scandal damaged relations between the two allies, Germany said Wednesday.

• German lawmakers may call the heads of the largest U.S. technology companies to testify before their investigation into the National Security Agency’s data-collection activities, adding a new corporate twist to the spying scandal.

• Without trust in the unelected officials who run government programs, it is impossible for our elected representatives to conduct public business in a manner that instills in the public a sense of trust or legitimacy.

• Revelations about government surveillance programs, and the inaccurate statements made by public officials about them, some under oath, indicate that we have a serious problem.

• The NSA is supposed to be America’s offshore spy agency, forbidden from spying on Americans. But as an important article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Nadia Kayyali points out, the FBI, DEA and other US agencies have closely integrated the NSA into their own efforts, using the NSA’s mass surveillance to gather intelligence on Americans — as Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide discloses, the NSA isn’t a stand-alone agency, it is part of an overarching surveillance state.

• Almost one year ago, documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed the existence of PRISM, a top secret program that allows the NSA to access user data from major Silicon Valley companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, an Apple.

• The tech world was surprised and appalled — how could the companies allow something like that? As it turned out, they were just complying with the law. But PRISM was just the first of an array of revelations that uncovered how the NSA exploits technology, and our reliance on Silicon Valley companies, to conduct its surveillance.

• The state of California is looking to pass a law stating the federal government would need a warrant from a judge if it wants to search residents’ cellphones and computer records. The bill passed the state senate with just one person voting against.

• As U.S. National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers seeks to repair the damage to the agency caused by leaks about its electronic spying programs, the abuses of government revealed in the wake of the Watergate scandal are very much on his mind.

• IT companies that want to work for the German public sector will have to guarantee they are not supplying information to any foreign intelligence agency, including the US government’s NSA, as part of the new rules proposed by the coalition government.

• According to the German publication Süddeutsche Zeitung, the rules are primarily aimed at organisations that cooperate with the US National Security Agency (NSA), and could put many US businesses in a difficult position.

• If you’ve been imagining NSA surveillance as something distant, with analysts sitting in remote data centers quietly analyzing metadata—stop now. NSA surveillance has become a part of day-to-day law enforcement fabric in the United States. The Snowden disclosures that were made public as part of Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide drive this point home, and they emphasize why we need real change to government surveillance, not minor reforms.

• Maybe someday we’ll patch vulnerabilities faster than the enemy can use them in an attack, but we’re not there yet.

• It was December 11, 2012, and in a small art space behind a furniture store in Honolulu, NSA contractor Edward Snowden was working to subvert the machinery of global surveillance.

• Snowden was not yet famous. His blockbuster leaks were still six months away, but the man destined to confront world leaders on a global stage was addressing a much smaller audience that Sunday evening. He was leading a local “Crypto Party,” teaching less than two dozen Hawaii residents how to encrypt their hard drives and use the internet anonymously.

• Developers are reaching to us both because there is a new understanding about what is happening to our electronic communications and also response to rapidly changing requirements from the public and private sectors.

• Expect the Chinese to make the U.S. pay an economic price in retaliation, said former CIA deputy director and CBS News senior security analyst Mike Morell.

Civil Rights

• “The purpose of this review was to uncover the facts behind this secret program, and the results were shocking. The report exposes brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation. It chronicles a stain on our history that must never again be allowed to happen.

• 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.

• A federal judge has ruled that Pennsylvania’s state law banning same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, bringing the total number of state marriage amendments to be overturned in the federal courts over the past year to over a dozen. Pennsylvania is one of the five states that does not have marriage equality but only has a state law banning it — not a state constitutional amendment. The decision did not include a stay, which means couples could possibly begin applying for marriages immediately immediately. Pennsylvania law, however requires a 3-day waiting period between when an application is filed and when a license can be issued, which could prevent any marriages from being finalized should the 3rd Circuit issue an emergency stay.

• A computer hacker who was released early from prison last month due to a federal appeals court decision is demanding that the Justice Department pay him for what he calls acts of fraud and violence committed by the United States government.

• On Tuesday, 28-year-old Andrew Auernheimer of Fayetteville, Arkansas published an open letter addressed to the members of the New Jersey Direct Court and US Department of Justice who oversaw his 2012 conviction for computer hacking and identity fraud vacated last month by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

• Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer, whose struggles with federal prosecutors have fueled calls for reforming the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), wants the government to pay him $13 million for taking away his freedom for the past three years.

• A little-known aspect of the juvenile justice system requires young offenders to pay for their own prosecution and incarceration.

• The CIA has ended the use of vaccine programmes in its spying operations amid concerns for the safety of health workers, the White House has said.

• In a letter to US public health schools, a White House aide said the CIA stopped such practices in August.

• The CIA used a fake vaccine programme to try to find Osama Bin Laden before US special forces killed him in 2011.

• The former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, has accused the CIA of possibly knowing the whereabouts of missing flight MH370.

• Dr Mahathir says that someone is hiding something because if the plane’s GPS system failed then Boeing or the US government agency would know why.

• The former Prime Minister of Malaysia has accused a US intelligence agency and the Boeing aircraft firm of concealing the whereabouts of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which has been missing since 8 March.

• Get ready to live in a world without privacy or secrecy, warns historian Richard Aldrich, who specializes in intelligence gathering and espionage.

• Speaking at the PINC 15 conference in Amsterdam, Aldrich said it’s not just government agencies that are spying on us now.

• According to Wired, Aldrich believes the big intelligence gatherers are now airlines, banks, Internet providers, and others.

• In one of the great mysteries of the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, three prisoners, two from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen, died the night of June 9, 2006. Authorities at Guantánamo said the three men — Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, Salah Ahmed al-Salami and Mani Shaman al-Utaybi — had killed themselves. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, described their deaths as an “act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

• “If we look at the original report that was released some years ago, about four years ago now, it gave a narrative of how these three prisoners committed suicide in their cells simultaneously and in a rather strange way,” Horton explained. “When we reviewed that account with well-known medical examiners, they all had the same conclusion, which was: impossible. No one has ever committed suicide that way and it’s pretty much impossible to do.”

• On the hook to release a redacted version of the so-called torture report, the CIA has asked a federal judge for more time to review the study by the Senate Intelligence Committee that harshly criticizes its interrogation techniques.

• Why did Human Rights Watch select a former CIA official to sit on its advisory committee for eight years?

• That’s a question two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, a former UN assistant secretary general, a UN special rapporteur, and over 100 scholars are asking HRW’s executive director Kenneth Roth in an open letter. They note that Miguel Díaz, a CIA analyst in the 1990s, served as an advisor on human rights to HRW Americas from 2003-11 before moving back into government, as a State Department “interlocutor between the intelligence community and non-government experts.”

• Wyoming has become the latest death penalty state to consider a return to the firing squad, as concern rises over the scarcity and secrecy surrounding medical drugs used in lethal injections.

• State legislators have begun to draft a bill that they plan to introduce in Wyoming’s next legislative session that would reintroduce executions at the point of a gun. The move was prompted, elected members said, by the drought in lethal injection drugs caused by a pharmaceutical boycott of US death chambers.

• The Wyoming move adds to a mounting sense of crisis across the US in the practice of the death penalty, which is arguably more profound that at any time since a federal moratorium was imposed by the supreme court in Furman V Georgia in 1972. Utah is also considering reviving the firing squad, which it abolished for all death sentences handed down since 2004, and states including Missouri have also debated the return of the gas chamber.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Republican legislators don’t even want the Federal Communications Commission to think about reclassifying broadband as a utility—a route the regulator could take in order to reinstate net neutrality rules.

• Mania is peaking over the “open Internet,” but the last thing you should want is the FCC getting involved.

• [...]

• The public can find a lot of ways to punish a corporation that abuses its privileges. This situation should not be escalated to the point that the FCC has anything to do with it.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Activists are mobilising against another international trade treaty, with the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) negotiations between America and the EU starting to cause angst.

• European milk producers are calling for the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement negotiations between the USA and the EU to cease.

• It says: “The negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – the TTIP – are causing the European Milk Board (EMB) great concern.

Copyrights

• The European Elections are upon us and several groups are keen to see as many pro-digital rights MEPs elected as possible. A campaign called WePromise.eu is encouraging MEP candidates to support a charter of 10 digital rights principles, and in returning is encouraging citizens to pledge their votes to those candidates.

• Wired.co.uk has picked out five MEPs and wannabes who have shown real dedication to supporting digital rights with input from the Open Rights Group, which is supporting the WePromise campaign, and the Pirate Party, which has many of its candidates signed up to the charter.

• The Swedish Supreme Court has rejected an application by Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde to have his case reopened. Based on new EU rulings, Sunde’s legal team argued that he cannot be held responsible for copyright infringements carried out by users of The Pirate Bay, but the Court didn’t see any reason to reopen the case.

• As we’ve pointed out many times in the past, the originally stated purpose of copyright law was to encourage the sharing of scientific knowledge for the purpose of learning. The first copyright act in the US was actually entitled “for the encouragement of learning.” Yet, as copyright law has evolved, it’s frequently been used to make learning much more difficult. Just a few months ago, we covered how publishing giant Elsevier had started to demand that academics who had published their own research on Academia.edu take down those works. As we noted then, while big journal publishers often demand that academics hand over their copyright in order to get published, they usually would either grant an exception for an academic to post their own work, or at least look the other way when the academics would do so. And many, many academics obviously decided to post their own papers to the web.

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