● 05.24.14

● Links 24/5/2014: Many Games on GNU/Linux, Thai Coup

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Individuals and businesses migrate to Linux for a variety of reasons. Some do it for cost efficiency. Others make the computing change for the greater flexibility open source software provides.

• Either way, leaving behind an existing computing system is not impossible. Deploying Linux desktop or server takes planning and resources, but that is what any business implementation takes.

• The reasons for pushing users away from Microsoft in both desktop and server deployments are different for each customer. One of the recurring migration drivers is constant threat of Microsoft license fee increases. Another is the demand for community-sponsored support in lieu of corporate proprietary solutions, according to Tomas Zubov, CEO of IceWarp.

• Now that Valve has made the In-Home Steaming feature available to everyone who is using Steam, you might ask yourself if it’s of any use for the majority of the Linux players, but that’s not the most important question. This seemingly unimportant feature has much broader implications and it might be the game changer in the competition between Windows and Linux.

• The announcement has gone out. The gist? Flash will no longer work with Chromium on Linux. Many of you are probably wondering, “What is Chromium?” Essentially, Chromium is the open-source version of Google’s massively popular browser, Chrome. The big Flash debacle is simple: the old way of handling Flash (within a browser) is insecure. It was driven by the Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) — an architecture that dates back to Netscape Navigator 2.0. NPAI that’s insecure, obsolete, and doesn’t work well on smartphones and tablets — which is a death knell in and of itself.

Desktop

• I’ve never understood why some Linux distro developers seek to copy OS X. It’s a fine operating system in its own right, but if somebody wants OS X then why not just buy a Mac?

Server

• Designed for massive server deployments, CoreOS consumes less than 200MB of working memory per instance

• IBM’s actual work on Linux in the 2000s wasn’t a philanthropic exercise – it gave IBM something vital in selling its x86 servers. It freed Big Blue from relying on single supplier Microsoft. IBM improvements to Linux and IBM server sales drove customer demand, which then drove improvements to Linux. Linux unhooked the enterprise data centre from its reliance on Windows and saw companies run both OSes.

• AMD’s “Bald Eagle” R-Series processors offer four 3.6GHz “Steamroller” cores with Heterogeneous System Architecture support, plus Mentor Embedded Linux.

• AMD has a dual-platform strategy for embedded: G-Series on the low end and R-Series on the high end. Now, the chipmaker has launched a second generation of AMD Embedded R-series processors in both CPU and APU (accelerated processing unit) variants, with the latter offering integrated, rather than optional discrete AMD Radeon graphics. AMD tipped its Bald Eagle R-Series processors last September, and has launched sales for five new variants. The new R-Series CPUs are designed for gaming machines, digital signage, medical imaging, industrial control and automation, and communications and networking infrastructure, says AMD.

• Version 6.6 Beta 1 of the RHEL-derivative ClearOS is now available with new packages for this Linux distribution designed to serve as a network gateway/server.

• ClearOS 6.6 Beta 1 is based on the latest upstream RHEL/CentOS packages while introducing packages for WordPress, Joomla, Tiki Wiki, and other changes. ClearOS 6.6 development also focuses upon IPv6 network support and ClearOS 7 compatibility.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• If you have a machine with slow hard disks and fast SSDs, and you want to use the SSDs to act as fast persistent caches to speed up access to the hard disk, then until recently you had three choices: bcache and dm-cache are both upstream, or Flashcache/EnhanceIO. Flashcache is not upstream. dm-cache required you to first sit down with a calculator to compute block offsets. bcache was the sanest of the three choices.

• But recently LVM has added caching support (built on top of dm-cache), so in theory you can take your existing logical volumes and convert them to be cached devices.

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA GRID Workspace is a virtualized desktop environment from NVIDIA that offers “cloud-delivered graphics acceleration for enterprise applications.” The NVIDIA GRID Windows client was released yesterday for a limited time only. Linux and Mac OS X are said to be in the works, so while I’m waiting for the Linux client to be released, I decided to test-drive the Windows client on an installation of Windows 7 Pro in a (VirtualBox) virtual environment.

• Yes, that’s running a virtual desktop on a virtual desktop. I didn’t know how responsive the system will be, especially when I allocated only 1.3 GB of RAM to Windows 7 and it did not have hardware acceleration enabled.

Benchmarks

• After this week having carried out benchmarks showing Intel’s Windows 8.1 OpenGL driver is outperforming their open-source Linux driver but NVIDIA’s driver on Ubuntu Linux is commonly faster than Windows 8.1, the time has come to benchmark several different AMD Radeon graphics cards under Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Windows 8.1 Pro x64 with all available updates and each OS using the latest Catalyst 14.4 driver.

Applications

• In my last article, I started a series called Command-Line Cloud. The intent of the series is to discuss how to use the cloud services we are faced with these days without resorting to a Web browser. I spend most of my time on the command line, so that’s where I’d most like to interface with cloud services. My last article described how to use Google Calendar from the command line, and in this article, I talk about a more general cloud service—RSS feeds. If I had written this column a few months ago, it would have been more focused on replacing Google Reader itself, because that was the primary RSS aggregator I used, but Google preemptively killed off the service and left a lot of users, including myself, scrambling to find a replacement. Although a number of people were able to find some sort of Web-based replacement, I realized the main features I wanted (sorting stories by date and vi key bindings to view the next story) were absent in a lot of the existing Google Reader replacements. What’s worse, a lot of people were using this as an opportunity to make a quick buck by selling access to RSS services (and of course, still capturing everyone’s valuable Web-viewing habits).

• Judging by its description and my observations, I fear that tcpspy may have crushed under the Wheels of Progress.

• I feel as though a great opportunity has been missed, a chance to really drive a peg into the landscape of *nix software. Look at this application, and tell me what you think it ought to be called:

Proprietary

• INTEL HAS OUTED a refreshed version of its software development kit (SDK) for OpenCL applications running on the Windows and Linux operating systems.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

Games

• Most Linux gamers don’t want to spend $30+ USD for some game that’s several years old where they may already own the Linux copy, they could buy the Windows copy for just a few dollars, and where it runs fine under Wine/CrossOver software. With Valve on Linux, we’ll be getting fresh games and if you have the game already on Mac OS X or Windows, it should be available from the Steam Linux client (assuming it’s been ported to Linux).

• The old titles from LGP also aren’t anything that were even really compelling when originally released, with most Windows gamers likely never even having heard of them, like Gorky 17, Hyperspace Delivery Boy, and Gorky 17. The few worthwhile games out of Linux Game Publishing were Shadowgrounds, X2/X3, Postal II, and Cold War.

• Unreal Engine developers Epic Games hope to make Linux a “first class member” of the Unreal Engine family for both gamers and developers.

• While Unreal Tournament’s return to Linux was good news for gamers, developers could’ve been left with subpar tooling that would make it harder for indie developers and large game studios alike to justify the effort to adapt their complex workflows to our favourite OS.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Digia has upgraded its bootable, Linux and Android ready Qt Enterprise Embedded GUI with Qt 5.3, Qt Cloud support, Qt WebEngine, and Qt Quick Compiler.

• A few days ago we had the Krita Sprint 2014 in Deventer. It was very productive, with all expected topics discussed but also unexpected improvements that came from it.

• I continued to work on KOrganizer and was blown away by the community. The people were helpful, passionate, and excellent in what they were doing. It felt like meeting old friends, although we didn’t really know each other, and mostly only communicated via the Internet. Personal meetings came later, and the feeling of meeting friends has never gone away. It’s part of the magic of free software.

• Over the years I wrote a lot of code, maintained frameworks and applications. I learned a lot. I grew into the board of KDE e.V. and am serving as its president now. I met a lot of people in KDE and in many other communities. I got a job working on and with free software, and I’m still doing it. It has been an incredible ride.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The gestures support for GTK+ seem to be primarily the result of One Laptop Per Child and Red Hat. Among the GTK+ gestures are for dragging, long presses, multi-press, panning, rotating, swiping, zooming, etc, and obviously geared for tablets and other input devices. The GTK+ gestures support is almost 10,000 lines of code.

Distributions

• When Windows 8 was first released many people were shocked and even horrified by the garish Metro interface. Some even left Windows for Linux or shifted back to Windows 7. Now you can experience some of the…er…magic of the Metro interface in the Blue Pup distro (a Puppy Linux spin), according to LinuxInsider.

• LXLE is yet another Linux distribution that targets old/slow/aging PCs. LXLE 14.04 is now in beta and at its heart is powered by Ubuntu 14.04 with the LXDE desktop environment.

• LXLE 14.04 Beta uses Lubuntu 14.04 as its base (the LXDE version of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS) while adding TLP by default for power management, improvements to the LXDE desktop components, and features other reported improvements to make this distribution supposedly better for old and slow PCs.

• A penetration test, or the short form pentest, is an attack on a computer system with the intention of finding security weaknesses, potentially gaining access to it, its functionality and data. A Penetration Testing Linux is a special built Linux distro that can be used for analyzing and evaluating security measures of a target system.

• LXLE, or Lubuntu Extra Life Extension Paradigm, is a distribution that is usually based only on the LTS (long term support) releases of Lubuntu, which means that these builds are pretty rare. The developers’ goal is to provide a very stable system that features support for a very long time, in this case for three years

• With a pint-sized PC like the Raspberry Pi, it’s fitting that it be paired with similarly small software. But managing to get a working operating system out of just 25MB? That’s no mean feat.

• Today, the Chakra team has announced the availability of a new version of their Linux distributions. This is the first release of the Chakra Descartes series which will follow KDE point releases( 4.13.1 for the moment ). The new version features new artwork ( more screenshots HERE) which improves many aspects of the operating system.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• The quick — back of the napkin — explanation of the Fedora.Next initiative is that Fedora will be producing 3 distinct products: Workstation, Server and Cloud. With the introduction of these products, each of them will need to have their own logo and a brand that ties them together. Máirín Duffy of the Fedora Design Team recently blogged the initial set of ideas of how these logos might look. Jump over to her blog and check it out, and if you want to get involved, the Fedora Design Team is always open to all volunteers.

• As we’ve covered, there have recently been several articles from publications including the Wall Street Journal and ReadWriteWeb stating that Red Hat won’t support customers who choose a rival OpenStack distribution. There is much controversy, surrounding the issue, and Mirantis’ Boris Renski has an interesting post up about the issue. “We are currently in active talks with Red Hat to collaborate on supporting RHEL for customers who choose the Mirantis OpenStack distribution,” he writes, as he forwards a number of points about how Red Hat’s policies could be more inclusive.

Fedora

• California is simple and to the point. It shows your calendar, appointments, and lets you add appointments too. Pretty much all you need from a calendar app. It is also integrated with the “evolution data server” (the backend service that stores calendar data in Fedora), so your calendars appear in the drop-down when you click the clock at the top of the Fedora desktop.

• KDE Frameworks 5 Beta and Plasma Next, the two pieces of software that will eventually replace the current KDE SC paradigm on the desktops, have just landed in the Fedora 20 repository.

Debian Family

• Acme Systems unveiled a Debian-ready, 53 x 53mm COM using Atmel’s SAMA5D3 SoC, with microSD, optional NAND flash, and extended temperature support.

• Acme Systems, which earlier this year released an Arietta G25 computer-on-module built around Atmel’s 400MHz ARM9 SAM9G25 SoC, has now spun an “Acqua A5″ COM using the SAMA5D3. Atmel’s 536MHz, Cortex-A5 based system-on-chip has also appeared in ShiraTech’s SODIMM-style AT-501 COM, which similarly ships with Debian Linux.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, has been very busy in the last couple of weeks promoting Ubuntu, but not the desktop version. It turns out that Ubuntu is a hit in the cloud ecosystem as well and that it dominates the OpenStack race.

Flavours and Variants

• Netrunner 14 RC1, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Kubuntu 14.04 LTS, featuring KDE as the default desktop environment and integrating many GNOME/GTK+ programs to make it Ubuntu-compatible, has been released and is now available for testing.

Devices/Embedded

• The Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer. Tiny Core Linux is a tiny operating system designed to offer the bare minimum you need to get started while taking up as little disk space as possible. Seem like a match made in heaven? The folks behind Tiny Core thought so too… this year they launched a version of their operating system called PiCore which is designed to run on the Raspberry Pi.

• Tobii announced a Linux-based eyewear device with advanced eye-tracking software that lets market researchers see what’s capturing the viewer’s attention.

• At first glance, Tobii Glasses 2 may look like another Google Glass competitor, but there’s more — and less — here than meets the eye. First, this is not a casual date: the glasses cost a whopping $14,900, and the Premium Analytics package goes for $29,900. Second, the eyewear is not designed for snapping photos of checking the Internet on the move. Instead, it lets researchers see what is captivating a test subject’s interest. The device can be used to watch what you’re looking at on a website, a TV screen, or signage, or when walking into a store or restaurant. They can analyze how you drive a car, train on equipment, or even play sports.

Phones

• The Neo900 project remains an effort to provide a motherboard replacement for the once-popular Nokia N900 smart-phone while carrying on the tradition of the OpenMoko project.

• The Neo900 project has been talked about for many months and there’s finally some new news… It turns out the Neo900 is making some progress but Golden Delicious Computers is stepping down from their role and issuing refunds as it’s cancelled the project, meanwhile there’s a new organization to take its place. The developers say Golden Delicious Computers cancelling the project “[fixes] the organizational structure issues and move everything forward.”

Android

• Google introduced the £30 Chromecast in the UK back in March following the successful launch of the device in the US. Compared to the sale figure of more than a million devices shipped in the US, the 100k figure does pale in comparison, but nonetheless it is a solid start for the device in a new land. Also, given that fact that the device isn’t as pricey as some of its other competitors like Apple’s AirPlay and Roku 3, the Chromecast have a very good probability of being a dominant force in the field.

• Amazon, the company behind the most successful e-book reading device in the market has decided to spread its wings once again. The retail giant has been making many technological endeavors recently. First, they came up with Kindle, which was wildly successful. Then came Kindle Fire, which was a direct competitor to the Nexus line of tablets. If competing with Google wasn’t enough one time, Amazon came up with Kindle Fire TV. Now, if the rumors are true, Amazon is coming up with a new smartphone. Will it succeed? We don’t know. But we do have some expectations from the retail megastore.

• Some of you might not know this, but Android is actually based on the Linux kernel, although the Google developers are releasing it with a modified version of the kernel. This has been the case right from the beginning and the Android source has been released under a number of open source pieces of software.

Free Software/Open Source

• Fortunately, this streak of pragmatism was bound to end. In the past few weeks, we’ve picketed Mozilla for supporting DRM and pilloried Red Hat for competing against OpenStack rivals. The community that once spent years counting the number of free software angels that were bumped off the Open Core pin is back to eating its own.

• Vendors like MIPS owner Imagination, Broadcom and Qualcomm are looking to drive MIPS adoption with the Prpl Foundation.

• Two years ago Amit Rohatgi helped bring Google’s Android to MIPS processors. Today he wants to bring the rest of open-source software to the architecture.

• Rohatgi’s latest effort is a consortium called prpl (pronounced purple). (The name was suggested by Rohatgi’s wife, a graphics designer, and refers to the logo color of Imagination Technologies, the company that bought MIPS in February 2013.) Its 10 founders include Broadcom, Cavium, Ikanos, Lantiq, PMC-Sierra, Qualcomm, and a handful of smaller companies that use or make MIPS-based chips.

• Samsung Electronics is considering joining Qualcomm’s AllJoyn project, but there is some debate over the possibility as Samsung is currently developing its own Internet of Things platform, industry watchers said Wednesday.

• Public sector organisations with proprietary systems that are struggling to provide competitive costs or innovation may provide the spur to overcome reluctance in the adoption of open source technology, according to one London CIO.

• Geoff Connell, who is joint ICT head for two London boroughs, Havering and Newham, has said that although open source is already being adopted within the public sector, the technology is present used for more niche tasks rather than total solutions.

• Connell’s thoughts continue the debate over whether open source technology can better cost efficiencies related to the use of proprietary software in the public sector.

• For Connell, total cost of ownership (TCO) remains the key challenge to adopting open source software and technology in the public sector.

• AT&T wants to tap the open-source community to develop cool applications for connected wearables, mobile devices, home appliances and cars.

• Many of you can probably relate to this: that machine, whether it be a laptop or a desktop computer, that just seems to hate any Linux operating system you throw at it. Poor performance, inefficiency or non-working bits of hardware or functionalities seem the norm whenever you try your favourite Linux distro on it to the point where you reluctantly accept this machine may only ever be usable on it’s factory installed OS (often Windows, of course). I too had this experience but it turns out sometimes a little patience and the fast moving nature of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) can turn things around.

• When you want to set up an application, most likely you will need to create an administrative account and add users with different privileges. This scenario happens frequently with content management, wiki, file sharing, and mailing lists as well as code versioning and continuous integration tools. When thinking about user and group centralization, you will need to select an application that fits your needs.

• If the application can connect to a Single Sign On server, users happy will be happy to remember only one password.

• In the proprietary landscape of directory servers, Active Directory is the dominant tool, but there are directory servers that can also satisfy your needs. The LDAP protocol is the base for all the open source alternatives, independently of how they are implemented. This protocol is an industry standard and allows you to create, search, modify, and delete your users or groups. And, if the application is able to connect to an LDAP server, you will not have to be concerned with understanding the protocol.

Events

• The OpenStack Juno Summit from May 12 to 16 provided users, vendors and developers of the open-source cloud platform with a forum to discuss ideas and innovations. The OpenStack initiative got started in 2010 as a joint effort of NASA and Rackspace, and has grown to include tech heavyweights such as including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cisco and AT&T.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Other Chrome releases are also now updated to Version 35, including Chrome OS and Chrome for Android.

• After what feels like forever in the making, Google has today released the first stable version of Chrome for Linux to use Aura, the search giant’s in-house graphics stack.

Mozilla

• Fresh Player Plugin is a new (alpha!) wrapper that allows Linux users to use Pepper Flash from Google Chrome in Firefox, Opera and other NPAPI-compatible browsers.

SaaS/Big Data

• The CEO of Nebula as well as the company’s founder discuss how they plan on scaling the business in an increasingly competitive market.

• OpenStack at its core is an open source project – it’s free code. But what makes OpenStack come alive are the vendors that have contributed to make that raw code and then turned it into a product businesses can use. Here are the top 15 companies leading that effort.

• OpenStack has an impressive list of corporate backers. Red Hat, Rackspace, HP, IBM and AT&T are contributing thousands of lines of code to the open source project and helping deliver an updated version of the cloud computing platform twice a year to allow for easier installation and better manageability.

• What is an OpenStack superuser? Or perhaps more aptly, who is an OpenStack superuser? As OpenStack continues to mature and slowly make its way into production environments, the focus on the user is continuing to grow. And so, to better meet the needs of users, the community is working hard to get users to meet the next step of engagement by highlighing those users who are change agents both in their organization and within the OpenStack community at large: the superusers.

Healthcare

• An NHS England leader has told Trusts to look towards open source for electronic patient record (EPR) systems.

• During the e-Health Insider (EHI) CCIO open source conference, Richard Jefferson, the Health Service’s head of business systems, claimed such solutions provide “the biggest bang for buck.”

• Jefferson also added that the organisation is prioritising the EPR space and encouraging a move to open source because of the greater value for money it offers for Trusts.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Command line options take precedence over configuration file statements.

Openness/Sharing

• Huang’s diligence paid off and at a time when other kids were focused on getting a high score on Asteroids, he was reading DIY electronics guides in Byte magazine and building add-on cards for the Apple II.

• Today Huang, who goes by the nickname ‘bunnie’, has just drummed up more than $700,000 through the website Crowd Supply for his project to build an open source computer called Novena.

• Huang is setting out to create a machine whose inner workings are as transparent as the computer that three decades ago sparked his lifelong interest in creating hardware.

Open Data

• Not long ago, the working definitions of “open government” and “open data” barely overlapped. Open government was all about holding up government to public scrutiny via Watergate-era methods—namely, making sure that meetings were held in public and that agencies responded to requests for information. Open data was about providing information in formats that computers can understand. Today, open government and open data overlap so substantially that it’s routinely necessary to explain that they’re different.

Open Hardware

• Servergy, a Texas-based IT innovation and design firm and IBM technology partner announced a partnership with the University of Texas Wednesday in a move that will see the two open a lab designed to marry innovations developed through IBM’s OpenPower Foundation and the Facebook-led Open Compute Project.

Leftovers

• In March 2014 alone, Twitch was single handedly responsible for 1.35% of all downstream traffic in North America.

• The evidence is mounting that a deliberate action by someone on board caused the diversion and disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. But over the past week and a half since the plane vanished, as contradictory information came in from various sources, people floated plenty of crazier ideas about the plane’s fate.

Security

• A day has passed since the online tat bazaar admitted its customer database was hacked back in February, and the method of encryption is still not known. We do what wasn’t encrypted: millions of people’s names, home addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and email addresses, which were stored in the ransacked database alongside the passwords.

• Jordan said in his tweet that he notified about the vulnerability to eBay. A screenshot published in his twitter account shows that he is able to upload a ‘shell.php’ file in the following location…

• Another day, another company that has disclosed that one of its main databases has been hacked and user information has been compromised. So far eBay hasn’t divulged full details of the breach. Reportedly the attackers accessed about 145 million records. Now, the online auction company is urging its 128 million active users to change their passwords. The attackers were able to access everything from users’ full names and addresses to email addresses. But eBay asserts that the compromised database didn’t contain financial information, which the company encrypts anyway. The company also said PayPal users weren’t impacted. The breach, which is just the latest in a long list of security issues that have affected large enterprises with large customer bases, should teach us a lot about security, or the general lack of it, across the Web. The massive Target breach in December showed what can happen when huge databases containing customer information are breached and the data stolen. Reports about eBay demonstrate, once again, how even a huge Internet business, which should know how to defend itself against sophisticated cyber-attacks, can be compromised. This eWEEK slide show highlights what we can learn from this latest attack.

• A protocol based on “discrete logarithms”, deemed as one of the candidates for the Internet’s future security systems, was decrypted by EPFL researchers. Allegedly tamper-proof, it could only stand up to the school machines’ decryption attempts for two hours.

• Traditional password authentication has long been recognised as the weak link in the security chain, even before the Heartbleed vulnerability exposed the private keys of millions of servers worldwide. A password the user can easily remember is rarely a good password, while a good password is rarely easy to remember.

• Andy Greenberg has an online article in this morning’s (May 23, 2014) Wired.com, with the title above. Mr. Greenberg writes that, “for the past two years, DARPA has been working to make waging cyber war — as easy as playing a video game.” “On Wednesday,” he notes, “DARPA showed off its latest demos for Plan X, a long-standing software platform designed to unify digital attack and defense tools into a single, easy-to-use interface for American military hackers. And for the last few months: that program has had a new toy. The agency is experimenting with using Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset — to give cyber warriors a new way to visualize three-dimensional network simulations — in some cases with the goal of better targeting for them to attack.”

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The defendants were three Chechen brothers, one of whom was accused of shooting Politkovskaya in the lobby of her Moscow apartment building on 7 October 2006, as well as their uncle and a former police officer.

• In a New Zealand television interview last week, American investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill said in that the National Party government is “extremely aware” of US drone attacks, including one which killed NZ citizen Daryl Jones (also known as Muslim bin John) in Yemen last year. Scahill, author of Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, who was in Auckland at a writers’ festival, also implicated the Australian government.

• Gov. Terry Branstad signed 11 bills into law Friday, including a ban the sale of electronic cigarettes and alternative nicotine products to minors in Iowa and a separate measure designed to create parameters for the use of drones, otherwise known as unmanned aerial vehicles.

• A year ago, President Obama delivered a speech at the National Defense University in Washington in which he made the case that it was time to wind down the “boundless global war on terror ” and “perpetual wartime footing” that has been a feature of American life since 9/11.

• Indeed, the CIA drone program in Pakistan has stopped completely since the beginning of this year. This is a noteworthy development given the fact that there have been 370 drone strikes in Pakistan over the past decade that have killed somewhere between 2,080 to 3,428 people; most of whom were suspected militants, but also a smaller number of civilians.

• During a discussion on President Obama sending troops into Chad to help the search for the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, Fox’s Judge Andrew Napolitano told Shepard Smith that American drone strikes have done more damage than the terrorist organization.

• Twelve months ago today, Barack Obama gave a landmark national security speech in which he frankly acknowledged that the United States had at least in some cases compromised its values in the years since 9/11 – and offered his vision of a US national security policy more directly in line with “the freedoms and ideals that we defend.” It was widely praised as “a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America”.

• Addressing an audience at the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, the president pledged greater transparency about targeted killings, rededicated himself to closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay and urged Congress to refine and ultimately repeal the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which has been invoked to justify everything from military detention to drones strikes.

• Five new Reaper drones announced by David Cameron in December 2010 to support British troops in Afghanistan are still not yet in operation, the Bureau can reveal.

• The new drones were bought as an urgent purchase and were part of a £135m package intended to effectively double the size of the UK’s fleet of armed drones in Afghanistan, and its surveillance capacity. But more than three years after the purchase was announced, and with just months to go before the UK’s troops are due to leave the conflict, the additional Reapers are yet to take to the skies.

• Anti-war protesters displaying model drones and photos of known victims of the US military and secret CIA targeted assignation program will greet family and friends of the graduates as they enter West Point gates at 7 am. The protest will extend to 9:30 am; graduation ceremonies begin at 10:00 am.

• The protest has special meaning for those in the US Army because the MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone, a more deadly version of the infamous Predator drone, is being integrated into use in every Army division.

• That President Obama, formerly a professor of constitutional law, and David J. Barron, “one of the memo’s authors” and an Obama nominee to a federal appeals court judgeship, could conceive of even a shred of justification for such crimes boggles the mind.

• President Obama gave an eloquent speech on May 23, 2013 on the issues of endless war, US drone strikes, Guantanamo, and the 12-year old AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Military Force). Compare his words then with the reality one year later.

• “For over the last decade, our nation has spent well over a trillion dollars on war, helping to explode our debts and constraining our ability to nation-build here at home.”Reality? The “direct” cost of our Iraq & Afghan wars is over $1.5 trillion, and the Administration wants a $79 billion blank check for fighting undefined wars in FY 2015. (That’s on top of a “basic” Pentagon budget of $495 billion).

• “…there is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility (Guantanamo) that should never have been opened.” Reality? There were 166 prisoners at Guantanamo a year ago, 154 now. Most of them have been formally cleared for release, and most of the rest have not been formally charged. Hunger strikes there are on-going. Efforts to secure the release of US Army POW Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for Afghan Guantanamo prisoners have not succeeded.

• A year after President Obama laid out new conditions for drone attacks around the world, US forces are failing to comply fully with the rules he set for them.

• Libya’s renegade General Khalifa Haftar is leading a military campaign against the country’s Islamist-led government and militants; however, his past life in America and old ties to the CIA are likely to be a stumbling block on his road to power.

• Following his botched February coup attempt –when he appeared on television announcing the dissolution of the government only to be scoffed at by the-then Prime Minister Ali Zeidan as “ridiculous” – launched this week “Operation Dignity” to rid Libya of “terrorists” and “corrupt” officials.

• Commander has managed to rally influential bodies in offensive against post-Gaddafi government but is dogged by old CIA link

• The American public might never get to know the entire history of the events that occurred during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, not at least until the Central Intelligence Agency is finished revising the draft copy of its history, which seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.

• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit yesterday joined the CIA’s cover-up of its Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 by ruling that a 30-year-old volume of the CIA’s draft “official history” could be withheld from the public under the “deliberative process” privilege, even though four of the five volumes have previously been released with no harm either to national security or any government deliberation.

• Every day across the planet the CIA instigates the arrest, torture and murder of people whose only wrongdoing is opposing the crimes being committed by those in league with Pax Americana. Arms trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, all of the most evil activities on this planet are being instigated and directed by the CIA. So why is Glenn Greenwald protecting these bastards?

• The confrontation between the Kiev putschists, backed by NATO and Ukrainian federalists, supported by Russia, has reached a point of no return.

• Made available today: a letter from Senators Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, which was sent to President Obama in January of this year and urged him to speed things up in the 9/11 case—chiefly by declassifying additional information regarding the CIA’s long-since-discontinued program of rendition, detention and interrogation.

• Covert U.S. planning to block the democratic election of Salvador Allende in Chile began weeks before his September 4, 1970, victory, according to just declassified minutes of an August 19, 1970, meeting of the high-level interagency committee known as the Special Review Group, chaired by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. “Kissinger asked that the plan be as precise as possible and include what orders would be given September 5, to whom, and in what way,” as the summary recorded Kissinger’s instructions to CIA Director Richard Helms. “Kissinger said we should present to the President an action plan to prevent [the Chilean Congress from ratifying] an Allende victory…and noted that the President may decide to move even if we do not recommend it.” – See more at: http://hnn.us/article/155768#sthash.svf3Lrin.dpuf

• The CIA, the Coup Against Allende, and the Rise of Pinochet

• In fact, that’s why America’s Founding Fathers opposed a standing army for the United States. It’s also why President Eisenhower warned the American people about the dangers that the military-industrial complex pose to America’s democratic processes. It’s also why President Truman, thirty days after the Kennedy assassination, authored an op-ed in the Washington Post that talked about the sinister nature of the CIA.

• West also said he was told the attackers were with Ansar al-Sharia and government officials are being threatened with their pensions being cut if they speak out about Benghazi.

• As far as why U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was in Benghazi at the time, West claims he was informed that there was a “covert weapons scheme going on in Libya, Benghazi.”

• “We had been supplying radical Islamists with weapons against Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi, effectively supplying the enemy and destabilizing that country,” he added.

• “And it seems that there was a CIA weapons buy-back program, the aim of which was to ship the retrieved weapons out of Libya through Turkey, and to the Islamist forces in Syria.”

• West apparently believes in his source enough to allege Benghazi will “make Iran-Contra look like Romper Room.” However, due to the unanswered questions about the source, it’s impossible to verify the claims at this time.

• Those were the words not of an aggressive Chinese spy, but none other than Stansfield Turner, the Carter-era CIA director, who in 1992 argued that the United States should more aggressively carry out intelligence operations aimed at securing America’s leading economic position in the world.

• If it weren’t for matters of patriotism, the former CIA director probably wouldn’t raise an eyebrow at allegations of Chinese spying unveiled by a Pennsylvania grand jury and the Department of Justice this week.

• Indeed, the tactics the Obama administration has accused China of using have also been debated at the highest levels of the U.S. government as possible instruments of American power. Other countries  have carried out operations similar to those the Pennsylvania grand jury have accused Chinese spies of carrying out.

Transparency Reporting

• Of course, thanks to Wikileaks this even­ing, we now know the coun­try that Glenn Gre­en­wald redac­ted from his ori­ginal report was Afghanistan.

• Why on earth should the Afgh­anis not be allowed to know the sheer scale of sur­veil­lance they live under? In fact, would many be sur­prised? This is an excel­lent related art­icle, do read.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• At least 21 people were killed and nearly 100 injured in Vietnam on Thursday during violent protests against China in one of the deadliest confrontations between the two neighbours since 1979.

• Crowds set fire to industrial parks and factories, hunted down Chinese workers and attacked police during the riots, which have spread from the south to the central part of the country following the start of the protests on Tuesday.

• The violence has been sparked by the dispute concerning China stationing an oil rig in an area of the South China Sea claimed by Vietnam. The two nations have been fighting out a maritime battle over sovereignty and that battle has now seemingly come ashore.

• Glaciologist Richard Alley explains that losing West Antarctica would produce 10 feet of sea level rise in coming centuries. That’s comparable to the flooding from Sandy—but permanent.

• Sawant and Spear are buddies because she left her scientific research to help run Sawant’s victorious Socialist Alternative campaign for City Council last year. She also spent much of that time as Organizing Director of the $15 Now campaign, which is somehow magically about to pass just a year after it began, to the collective bewilderment of the rest of the United States.

• Who could forget? At the time, in the fall of 2002, there was such a drumbeat of “information” from top figures in the Bush administration about the secret Iraqi program to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and so endanger the United States. And who—other than a few suckers—could have doubted that Saddam Hussein was eventually going to get a nuclear weapon? The only question, as our vice president suggested on “Meet the Press,” was: Would it take one year or five? And he wasn’t alone in his fears, since there was plenty of proof of what was going on. For starters, there were those “specially designed aluminum tubes” that the Iraqi autocrat had ordered as components for centrifuges to enrich uranium in his thriving nuclear weapons program. Reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon hit the front page of the New York Times with that story on September 8, 2002.

Finance

• Three in ten Britons believe that they will soon be replaced in their job by a robot, according to a report.

• Almost half of the 2,000 members of the British public surveyed (46 per cent) admitted they are concerned that technology is evolving too quickly and is undermining traditional ways of life.

• Searching for growth opportunities in a world still beset by financial crisis, multinational corporations and globalists are hyping all kinds of “emerging markets.”

• Almost four out of 10 Canadians who don’t have a job have completely given up hope of ever finding one, a new survey suggests.

• In a poll carried out by Harris Poll and published Friday by employment agency Express Employment Professionals, the company surveyed 1,502 unemployed Canadians. None of them had a job, and not all of them were receiving EI benefits.

• The results were eye-opening.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Labour played the game of negative expectations in a massive way, claiming a net gain of 150 seats would be a victory for them. So far they have a net gain of just 82. But the extraordinary thing is that the BBC have, throughout the Breakfast News period – the largest TV news watch of the day – been unable to add up all the council seats yet. Sky has totaled every single one of the council seats declared overnight, while the BBC has been able to total under half – and the BBC has come up with a Labour net gain of 102. This has enabled the BBC to show a three figure Labour gain on its strapline all morning, and lead every news bulletin: “Major gains for UKIP in English local elections. Labour has also made gains. A poor night for the Conservatives and Lib Dems”.

• The BBC are way behind in their totalizing, and cherry picking the Labour gains. The BBC have consistently been showing about 7% of all seats contested as Labour gains. Sky consistently shows under 3% of all seats contested as Labor gains.

• The public may be on the cusp of learning more about the two “John Doe” investigations into Scott Walker, his associates, and groups that spent millions to get him elected.

• On May 21, the Wisconsin judge in the now-closed 2010-2013 “John Doe I” investigation into Walker’s County Executive during his 2010 run for governor ordered the release of all records gathered in the probe that pertain to county business. That probe resulted in six convictions for Walker aides and associates, including for political fundraising on the taxpayer’s dime. Now, the decision about what records to release rests with Walker’s successor as County Executive, Chris Abele.

Censorship

• Information minister Ahmed Bilal Osmanan announced on 21 May that a “special commission” would soon be created to examine all proposed articles about corruption to decide whether or not they can be published. The commission would be under his ministry’s supervision and would consist of members of the president’s office, the government and parliament, he said.

• A former political science professor was discussing the Thai army’s declaration of martial law on live TV when the talk show was suddenly interrupted to transmit order No. 9 from the Peace and Order Maintaining Command.

• An Iranian court ordered Iran’s Ministry of Telecommunications to block Instagram due to privacy concerns on Friday, according to the “semiofficial” Iranian news agency Mehr.

• A columnist for a Turkish newspaper has proved her own point all too well after a piece she wrote criticizing Ankara’s crackdown on press freedom was rejected by her editor.

Privacy

• LG certainly feels it has the right to do this. In fact, it makes no secret of this in its long Privacy Policy — a document that spends more time discussing the lack thereof, rather than privacy itself. The opening paragraph makes this perfectly clear.

• [...]

• LG seems very concerned that Smart TV owners won’t allow it to provide them with “relevant ads.” This focus on advertising might give one the impression that a Smart TV is subsidized by ad sales, rather than paid for completely by the end user.

• When LG was caught sending plaintext data on files stored on customers’ USB devices, it amended its policies and data collection tactics to exclude this data. This happened not on the strength of a customer complaint (in fact, LG told the customer to take it up with the store that sold him the TV) but because the UK government announced its intention to dig into LG’s practices and see if they conformed with the Data Protection Act.

• COLORADO SPRINGS: The intelligence community is on the verge of “revolutionary” technical advances. Spy satellites and other systems will be able to watch a place or a person for long periods of time and warn intelligence analysts and operatives when target changes its behavior. Satellites and their sensors could be redirected automatically to ensure nothing is missed.

• The first legislation aimed specifically at curbing US surveillance abuses revealed by Edward Snowden passed the House of Representatives on Thursday, with a majority of both Republicans and Democrats.

• But last-minute efforts by intelligence community loyalists to weaken key language in the USA Freedom Act led to a larger-than-expected rebellion by members of Congress, with the measure passing by 303 votes to 121.

• Do I need to continue to participate in the debate over whether many U.S. journalists are pitifully obeisant to the U.S. government? Did they not just resolve that debate for me? What better evidence can that argument find than multiple influential American journalists standing up and cheering while a fellow journalist is given space in The New York Times to argue that those who publish information against the government’s wishes are not only acting immorally but criminally?

• The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been recording and storing nearly all domestic and international phone calls from Afghanistan, according to Wikileaks’ front man Julian Assange.

• Wikileaks revealed the name of the country after The Intercept reported Monday that the NSA was actively recording and archiving “virtually every” cellphone call in the Bahamas and one other country under a program called SOMALGET. The Intercept said it did not name the second country because of concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence.

• The National Security Agency has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic (and international) phone calls from two or more target countries as of 2013. Both the Washington Post and The Intercept (based in the US and published by eBay chairman Pierre Omidyar) have censored the name of one of the victim states, which the latter publication refers to as country “X”.

• Mostly lost in the past week’s media gossip around NYT executive editor Jill Abramson’s ouster, and Dean Baquet’s promotion to her role: Baquet is the former LA Times editor who killed the biggest NSA leak pre-Edward Snowden.

• The seven-page secret report by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), seen by Bild newspaper, discusses five possible ways the NSA could have gained access to Merkel’s phone. The story caused outrage in Germany when it came to light in October last year.

• The National Security Agency [NSA] has reportedly gained direct access to the fiber optic network linking Vienna, Austria to the Internet, and has been spying on the roughly 17,000 diplomats stationed in the Austrian capital city, where several important international organizations are headquartered, including the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, the International Atomic Energy Agency and Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/us/news/2014_05_24/NSA-Spying-In-Austria-Beyond-Unacceptable-Analyst-9767/

• Frontline’s expansive report on the NSA in the wake of the Snowden leaks (United States of Secrets) has uncovered some rather amazing stuff about the agency’s mindset. The post-9/11 decision to deflect every question or concern with conjecture about how “thousands of lives” will be lost if its programs are rolled back or altered in any way continues to this day — rehashed in every government hearing and set of talking points since the leaks began.

• “Live in fear” is the motto. Every question about domestic surveillance is greeted with nods to its legality and assertions that even acknowledging known facts about the NSA’s programs gives our nation’s enemies the upper hand.

• The US government used security concerns to essentially drive Chinese companies out of the American networking marketplace. Now China is doing the same thing, as the Chinese government is planning to require all products sold in the country to pass a “cyber security vetting process,” the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency reported.

• Julian Assange’s whistle-blowing group announced plans to publish an NSA report that allegedly could get people killed. The question is: How did they get the documents?

• Members of the German parliamentary commission, which is investigating the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) questionable activity, want the heads of US high-tech companies, including Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Google, to testify to the Bundestag, writes Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

• In March, the German parliament’s lower house voted to investigate the NSA’s operations in Germany. According to the documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA monitored the telephone conversations of Chancellor Angela Merkel and other members of the German political and economic elite.

• But as The New York Times and others reported earlier this year, there is a suite of programs, codenamed QUANTUM, which allows the NSA access to a much wider variety of computers.

• Over the past two weeks, I watched the two-part PBS “Frontline” investigation broadcast locally on WNED titled, “The United States of Secrets.” This was an engrossing yet chilling report on the secret NSA spy program that encompasses the intrusions into the privacy of all U.S. citizens as well as foreign entities. This is the program that began after 9/11 under President George W. Bush and has been expanded upon under President Obama.

• I found myself becoming very angry while watching this program, perhaps more for the fact that both presidents continue to mislead and even lie to the American public about the scope of the spying rather than the actual privacy intrusion itself. Yes, many people will say: “Oh, it doesn’t affect me. I have nothing to hide.” But this country was built upon the Constitution and our rights are being trampled under the guise of security from terrorism. Major U.S. Internet and communications providers are cooperating with the NSA in granting access to our emails, phone calls, messages, Skype calls and even our financial transactions.

• I think the thing that may disturb me the most is the silence over this issue from the American public. In my opinion, Edward Snowden is a whistle-blower and should be applauded for his disclosures rather than ostracized and condemned as a criminal. Wake up, America, before it’s too late.

• Irony alert! Google Maps has labelled the now infamous NSA data centre in Utah a “hard drive backup service.”

• While not technically inaccurate, it’s also hardly descriptive.

• The NSA’s data centre in Utah is the focal point of many of the surveillance operations brought to light by the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013. It was popularized after an article in Wired Magazine last year profiled its construction and purpose. It includes four 25,000-square-foot buildings just to hold servers. It has its own power plant and substation. Security is intense and nobody gets close to it without proper clearance.

• Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said she is willing to consider the surveillance reform bill passed by the House on Thursday, which would end the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection of phone records.

• In the final part of our extended interview, Glenn Greenwald reflects on the Pulitzer Prize, adversarial journalism and the corporate media’s response to his reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaked National Security Agency documents. “We knew that once we started publishing not one or two stories, but dozens of stories … that not just the government, but even fellow journalists were going to start to look at what we were doing with increasing levels of hostility and to start to say, ‘This doesn’t actually seem like journalism anymore,’ because it’s not the kind of journalism that they do,” Greenwald says. “It doesn’t abide by these unspoken rules that are designed to protect the government.”

• One of the results of the endless propagation of this myth was the creation of so-called “intelligence fusion centers” throughout the United States, initially funded by the Department of Homeland Security. Now sustained by state and local governments, with occasional aid from DHS, fusion centers are staffed by representatives from federal, local, and state agencies, as well as members of private industry. They have cost the United States hundreds of millions of dollars over the last ten years, but even though they were set up as anti-terrorism intelligence offices, none has thus far produced any useful information about terrorism.

• This is interesting. People accept government surveillance out of fear: fear of the terrorists, fear of the criminals. If Watts is right, then there’s a conflict of fears. Because terrorists and criminals — kidnappers, child pornographers, drug dealers, whatever — is more evocative than the nebulous fear of being stalked, it wins.

Civil Rights

• Corrie’s father expresses hope that the top justices ‘understand what it means to protect civilians,’ and that they reverse the trend of impunity for the IDF.

• Sweden: Yesterday, on May 21st, 7 swedish anti-fascists were convicted for up to 2 years and 4 months. This comes shortly after Joel Almgren was accused of protecting a rally from a neo-nazi attack that the police knowingly let happen. Antifascist comrade Joel has been sentenced to 6 and 1/2 years for stabbing a neo nazi in self defense during the incident. Please check the Free Joel event page for updates on how to help these comrades, and how to write them.

• The real battle is between popular politicians and an entrenched elite that is frightened by its electoral defeat

• Iranian court is asked to order the public flogging of award-winning actress Leila Hatami for greeting Cannes festival president with a kiss

• There was a time when reparations for slavery was a hot issue in race discussions in America. Randall Robinson’s The Debt was widely read, and there were endless forums on the issue nationwide. However, 9/11 broke the flow, and before long, Hurricane Katrina and then a certain senator from Illinois basically rendered reparations yesterday’s news.

• Thousands of demonstrators staging a peaceful protest at the McDonald’s headquarters were met by police in riot gear on Wednesday when the low-wage fast food workers and their supporters stormed the Illinois campus to say: “Make our Wage Supersize!”

• The protest was held on the eve of the fast food giant’s annual shareholder meeting at the company’s corporate campus outside Chicago, during which activist shareholders are expected to vote against CEO Donald Thompson’s $9.5m pay package, the Guardian reports. Protesters are also planning to picket that meeting.

• The blogger was warned in his interrogation that exposing the identity of security operatives was a “crime against national security.” Doing so, he was told, carried a three-year jail term. Only in police states is this the case. In democracies, we’re entitled to know the names of our accusers whether civilian or official. They also used another classic police state tactic: they asked Noam to name the names of other peace activists with whom he worked. Though I understand why he couldn’t do so, I would’ve asked to make a bargain with Rona and told her I’d name a name for every Shin Bet agent she would name.

• Accusations of torture and mistreatment abound as several Palestinian lawyers are arrested by Israeli authorities.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Bogus copyright claims on YouTube are getting more and more prevalent, but they only get exposure when they do damage to high-profile targets. Michael Tiemann is the Chief of Open Source Affairs at Redhat Inc. and apparently he can’t use Creative Commons music in his uploads without being bombarded with copyright claims.

• This testimony – “Why I’m Voting Pirate” – was published by Leila Borg, a person who grew up in the Soviet Union but moved to Sweden after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It has been translated to English and reposted here for a wider audience.

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