● 05.26.14

● Links 26/5/2014: Chromebook Prospects, China and GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 11:43 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Despite that I’ve owned an HP 11 Chromebook since its release, I’ve viewed it as little more than a novelty. I work from an office on the third floor of my home, which has a nice size desk, desktop PC and 15.6 inch laptop, both running Windows 8.1.

• However, as the weather warms (finally!) I considered making the move out to my porch, something I did last summer as well. In that case I lugged the Windows laptop with me, not a difficult task, but the size is really more than I need for carrying around.

• This time I elected to give the HP 11 a shot, as it’s light and easy to carry. The only question was “how will I do my job?”

• Infinite has completed the migration of the ERP system named BPCS/LX from the IBM iSeries operating environment to Linux. This migration was fairly complex in that there were over six million lines of RPG, RPG ILE, CL and DDS code to be recompiled and deployed. Using Infinite’s toolset, Infinite i, to recompile and deploy the applications took less than 6 months. The migration was performed for a global food products company based in the United States.

• With Windows 8 now banned from being installed on Chinese government computers, domestic operating system (OS) developers are itching for a niche in the world’s biggest PC market.

• The country’s relatively large OS developers, including China Standard Software Co. and NFS China among others, have fresh opportunities, but their products face long and tough tests.

• Windows 8 was banned from all desktops, laptops and tablet PCs purchased by central state organs last week. The announcement made by the Central Government Procurement Center did not make clear whether other Windows products were prohibited as well.

• The success of the SteamOS Linux distribution is revealing that AMD is going to get a kicking in the future and it just cannot see it.

• For a decade it would have been fair enough for a consumer chipmaker to ignore Linux. All those who said [insert this year] will be the year of Linux on the desktop were usually greeted with much mockery.

• While 2014 is not the year that Linux will take control of the desktop either, the writing is appearing on the wall and it is silly for AMD to ignore it.

• SteamOS users are suffering from a lack of proper AMD driver support and it is taking ages for anyone to get games on the OS running.

• Valve used Nvidia and Intel hardware, with the promise that AMD support will arrive later, however no one seems to be in a rush.

• Ubuntu has the biggest range of interfaces with names such as Unity Desktop, Kubuntu, KDE, Lubuntu and UbuntuGnome. However, most of these interfaces can be downloaded and installed into other distributions. “Beginners often feel more comfortable when the interface is similar to Windows,” says Georg Esser. Two of those distributions are KDE and Cinnamon.

Server

• When industry analysts and research firms have been reporting that the future of proprietary UNIX is bleak, IBM has announced investment of $2 billion in their RISC-based Power platform launching new Power systems based on the Power 8 processors.

• [...]

• IBM is also betting heavily on Linux. Apart from IBM Power Linux, Redhat and Suse, the Power 8 platform supports Ubuntu and Debian. It supports the byte order format little-endian popular in x86 platforms, which makes it easier for developers to port applications from x86 to Power 8.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Following the benchmarks I posted this morning showing Intel Haswell graphics having some OpenGL slowdowns with the newer Mesa graphics driver code, I tested a sharply different Haswell system to see if the performance differential was also to be found on this Intel ultrabook with Iris Graphics 5100…

Benchmarks

Applications

• CherryTree 0.33.3, a hierarchical note-taking application that features rich text and syntax highlighting, storing data in a single XML or SQLite file, has been released and is now available for download.

Proprietary

• I’ve loathed Flash for a long time, I barked about it in a column a while back. Frankly, I’m glad to see it gone from Chromium though I do recognize that that will cause problems for some Linux users. But its really not the end of the world, eventually the web will move on from Flash anyway.

• And let’s remember that not everybody wants Flash on their computers anyway. It can be a huge resource hog that can cause a lot of power management problems on mobile devices and laptops as it tends to drain battery power fairly quickly. Some people simply prefer to avoid Flash as much as possible.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

Games

• When Firaxis announced Civilization: Beyond Earth last month, the developer had a couple of surprises in store. For starters, the game is Linux-bound – a rather major development for fans of that OS. Secondly, the game will also be supporting AMD’s low-level graphics API, Mantle.

• Thanks to the recent fiasco of The Witcher 2 I wanted to write down some thoughts on why we shouldn’t accept bad quality ports from developers.

• Valve is now the biggest service that distributes games for Linux and it looks like it’s the best thing that’s happened for this platform in a long time. The problems with this picture is that Steam is slowly transforming into a monopoly, which is never a good thing.

• Four years ago LGP was offline for months when its lone server failed. Since then, and the takeover by a new CEO, there hasn’t been much to report on… Even with many AAA games coming over to Linux and the outlook for Linux gaming never looking better. LGP has now been offline again for nearly one month.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Kraft is KDE software to help people driving a small business. Emphasis is on small and business. We are not talking CMS, ERP or any other monster. Kraft is about a handy alternative for people who wrote their first 25 invoices using Libre Office and now start to think of how they could could be more efficient in doing that: Using structured templates, being able to create an invoice based on a quote that was done before, no need to fiddle around with slipping paragraphs, a proper address book, such stuff. zollstockSoftware for people who have other things to do than sit in front of their computer. Hard to understand for geeks like us who enjoy this technology, but yes, there are a lot of people who do not, who just use computers because they must, because they have a business.

• With the release yesterday of a Fedora 20 image with KF5 + Plasma-Next as the next-generation KDE stack, I decided to finally give it a whirl.

• This week we had the beta release for our upcoming release of the next iterations of our Plasma workspaces. This also includes KWin 5.0 which has the first major transition since the introduction of Compositing back in 2008. The changes in KWin are huge as we ported to Qt 5 and with that also to XCB and QtQuick2. Personally I comare it to having exchanged the engine, the tires, adding new spoilers and getting a new finish for our car. But after such a huge change there will be the one or other screw which needs to be tightened to get the fastest car in the race.

• The result is a KPhotoAlbum client for Android. The client serves images from a running version of KPhotoAllbum on the desktop. I just released the first preview of the work yesterday, along with a video showing it in action. See this blog for details on how to get a copy of it running on your computer.

• The Google Summer of Code coding period starts tomorrow. I have done everything possible in order to have plenty of time to dedicate to my project, adding support for QML and Javascript in KDevelop, and many interesting things are already happening.

• Thanks to Ivan Čukić tip both kactivities packages have been split between binary and libraries. Infact, Ivan told me KDE 4 needs kactivities 4.x libraries, but it works with kactivitymanagerd ship by kactivities from KDE Frameworks.

• In Plasma, we have traditionally relied on the font settings dictated by the distribution we run on. This means that we’ll take whatever “Sans” font the distro has set up (or has left to something else), and worked with that. The results of that were sub-optimal at least, as it meant we had almost no control how things are going to look like for end users. Fonts matter a lot, since they determine how readable the UI is, but also what impression it gives. They also have effect on sizing, and even more so in Plasma Next.

• The idea of these quick talks is to try and get much more content into Akademy. It is a really good opportunity to showcase what your team has been up to for the past year or to present an idea you have.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Apart from the pleasure to walk around in the room, take a look over the shoulders of people and helping out on non-obvious things, it was extremely eye-opening to realize again how many obstacles you need to pass in order to finally make a contribution – running a recent GNOME version, finding the documentation that is supposed to explain the following steps, having a GNOME Bugzilla account, finding a task (bug report) that sounds interesting, finding the corresponding code repository, locating the documentation file to patch in that code repository (in some subfolder called “C” instead of “en”), using git (formatting the patch, providing a commit message), uploading the patch somewhere for review.

• Yesterday the GTK+ gestures support branch was merged but besides that basic gestures support within the GNOME tool-kit, there’s also many other features and improvements on the agenda for GTK+ developers.

• As many other already expressed on planet GNOME, I find Philip‘s post pretty disconcerting, especially since he mentions some of the projects I work on and that over the last years have seen many successful and rewarding contributions from OPW interns and GSOC students.

Distributions

• On the one-hand “Linux” is well-understood; on the other, there is a rich variety of Linux distributions available. How do they differ and what’s new in each release? The term Linux is understood to be a popular open-source operating system. Technically, Linux is the kernel – the heart of the operating system which provides boot capabilities, interacts with hardware and makes a file system and applications available. It is the accompanying wide suite of similarly free and open source software that turns the kernel into something that home and business users alike can use as a productivity or entertainment platform. It is these combinations of kernel, bundled applications and configuration defaults that make up what we know as Linux distributions or distros.

Screenshots

Arch Family

• Manjaro 0.8.9, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, has received its seventh pack in the series and the developers are working to release the next stable version the series, 0.8.10.

• The Manjaro developers have already released quite a few update packs for this version of the operating system and they managed to extend the life of the distribution considerably. This seventh update in the series is a special one and comes with a very important set of packages that allows its users to test the next KDE Framework that is still under development.

• “Our last stable update was a little bumpy. We hope we get this one better. New would be the addition of KDE5s first beta. You can install it side by side to KDE4 or as a single desktop. Please use: pacman -S kf5 kf5-aids To enjoy Plasma-Next packages you have to add Archs kde-unstable repository to your pacman.conf file. Use any Arch-Mirror for that repository,” said the developers in the official announcement…

Slackware Family

Red Hat Family

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

Fedora

• While a bunch of KF5 packages have been already included in Fedora Rawhide, more will be available, starting with the next week. Fedora 21 wil be an interesting release, since the GNOME version uses GNOME 3.14, the first desktop environment with official Wayland support.

Debian Family

• As you may know, the LXDE developers have started the porting of their LXDE desktop environment to Qt, the new project being called LXQt. While LXDE is based on GTK+2, the developers have decided to port LXDE on Qt5, instead of GTK+3.

• Also, the system compositor has been updated, the system being capable to recognize many more third party controllers.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• As you may know, the development of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn has started a few weeks ago. For now, Ubuntu 14.10 is the same system as Ubuntu 14.04, but with some under-development additions.

• While Ubuntu 14.10 was initially based on Kernel 3.13 (the kernel used on Ubuntu Trusty), the developers have recently implemented Kernel 3.15 RC5 to power up Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn.

• Ubuntu AIO (all-in-one) DVD is an unofficial Ubuntu image that enables the users to use Ubuntu 14.04 in all its traditional flavors: Unity, GNOME, KDE, XFCE and LXDE, all from a single image.

• Ubuntu Kylin is an official Ubuntu flavor, developed by Canonical, China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Centre (CSIP) and National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), for the Chinese users, providing a desktop environment in Chinese and the popular software that the Chinese people need, installed by default.

• The Kubuntu team has been thinking about what to bring up to the CC for a few weeks, and at our Mumble meeting, discussed it there as well. Rohan Garg, Scott Kitterman, and Philip Muscovac (Shadeslayer, ScottK, and Yofel) attended with me (thank goodness!).

• As you may know, a new version of Ubuntu Dual boot, codenamed M9 (having similar features as MultiROM Manager), has been released by Canonical, coming with support for both Android and CyanongenMod, a bunch of fixes and some updated on the Ubuntu side. It enables the users to install both Ubuntu Touch and Android, on the same device.

• As you may know, the development of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn has already started. For now, Ubuntu 14.10 is the same system as Ubuntu 14.04 (using Kernel 3.13), but with some under-development additions, but the Canonical developers are about to adopt Kernel 3.15 soon.

• For those curious about the impact of running Intel “Haswell” HD Graphics 4600 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and then pulling in the latest Mesa 10.3-devel code followed by the Linux 3.15 kernel, it’s not entirely a happy story if you are looking to maximize your Intel Linux graphics performance capabilities.

• Having done a clean install of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS this week on a Core i7 4770K system I figured I would do the usual graphics driver performance update of comparing Ubuntu 14.04 out-of-the-box (Linux 3.13 + Mesa 10.1) against pulling in the latest Oibaf PPA packages to have xf86-video-intel 2.99.911 DDX and the Mesa 10.3-devel Git master code (a big leap from Mesa 10.1.0). Lastly, with the updated Intel user-space graphics drivers I then updated kernel-space by moving to the Linux 3.15 kernel via the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.

• So, you just installed Ubuntu 14.04? Well, it’s time to make it your own. Here are ten little things you can do to make sure the already awesome Trusty Tahr becomes your computing home:

• My choice, and I hope it’s not el beso de la muerte (that’s the kiss of death, to those who don’t speak Spanish) for me to say it, is California LoCo leader Nathan Haines, who I’ve mentioned in an earlier blog post. Again, I have known Nathan for years and he has been an eloquent advocate and steady leader in the California LoCo for quite some time. There are few in FOSS for which I have as much respect as I do for Nathan, and his leadership skills are top-notch. If Canonical misses the chance to hire Nathan as their Community Leader, they should at least — at the ultimate very least — make him the Community Leader’s monkey boy.

Flavours and Variants

• As you may already know, Pinguy OS 14.04 is based on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr and uses GNOME Shell as the default desktop environment, but other interesting apps available by default: Gno-Menu, Media Player Indicator, Top Icons and a bunch of Gnome Shell extensions installed by default, and of course, a Docky for the most used apps and a Conky for displaying system information.

• LXDE 14.04 Beta 1 (64 bit/amd64 only), based on Lubuntu 14.04, has been recently a few days ago, coming with some notable changes.

• Put it all together and you have a very fast, very secure, and very smooth and easy to use desktop. While other operating systems lately seem to be determined to make things harder for users—and no, I’m not just talking about Microsoft and Windows—Mint’s developers keep improving an already superb desktop experiences.

Devices/Embedded

• Based on the GNU/Linux operating system, Red Pitaya can be programmed at different levels using a variety of software interfaces, including: HDL, C/C++, and scripting languages. HTML-based web interfaces enable access to Red Pitaya’s functionality in most Web browsers from a smartphone, tablet or personal computer.

• There have been more than a few tiny computing boards released in the past few years, and this trend won’t be slowing down any time soon. So meet VoCore, which is quite possibly one of the smallest Linux computers ever made.

• The tiny coin-sized board is kitted with 32MB SDRAM, 8MB SPI flash memory and a system-on-chip clocked at 360MHz. It features no video-out or GPU, so don’t expect to turn it into a retro-gaming station or home theatre PC. Although sluggish compared to a Raspberry Pi, versatility, portability and low wattage is the VoCore’s real aim.

• But its secret weapon is its 10/100M Ethernet, USB and 802.11n Wifi support. In fact, VoCore can run the embedded devices Linux-distro OpenWrt, turning it into a little super VPN router that one could realistically take anywhere.

• The open source universe expands one spiral arm wider this week with the formation of a new non-profit foundation called prpl.

• Formerly found on Palm smartphones and HP tablets, webOS has a new lease of life on LG Smart TVs where it offers a change from your typical TV interface. Simple to navigate and mostly pleasing to the eye, webOS is a welcome addition to the Smart TV space.

Phones

• For now, the Jolla phone is available only in shops from Finland and Estonia, but it can also be ordered from the Jolla Store, in a lot of European countries.

• Yes, we know that Android smartphones are the best in the Market right now, but there is a big problem when it comes to battery back, take for example Nexus 5. Hence, Jolla came up with a solution for the same. Jolla recently launched a new smartphone named ‘The First One’ with the new Sailfish OS. For those who are not aware, Sailfish operating system by Jolla – the brainchild of a group of ex-Nokia employees and MeeGo developers got debuted a year ago. The best part, Sailfish OS supports the Android applications and can be operated with some unusual gestures.

Android

• They want to be the first ones to release a dual booting Ubuntu Touch and Android tablet, having 2 GB of RAM memory, 64 GB of internal storage, a quad-core CPU, a 10.1 Retina display, keyboard connectors.

• In the desktop world, most screens have, up until recently, rather similar ppi’s (pixels per inch) and the differences were many times mitigated by the distance to the user eyes, larger screens had smaller ppi’s but were further away from the user eyes. This meant that the fundamental metric to design anything was the PIXEL – the smallest almost indivisible element that you could use. Because of this fact fonts that apparently used different metrics were in reality using pixels, the logical value for ppi was hard-coded in the several desktop OS’s. To avoid that, the font size widget size ratio would change from screen A to screen B. All of this was only possible due to the fact the range in ppi’s was rather limited…

Free Software/Open Source

• The open source community is participating in this race to the cloud in two key ways. First, much open source software, particularly software for enterprises and small businesses, is now available on a SaaS basis. This provides customers with quality, low-cost applications and eliminates the hassles of deploying software on their own servers. At the same time, it gives open source companies a viable business model that allows them to make money from their technology.

• A research lab at Zurich’s University of Applied Science has helped a data centre provider to create a new open source cloud hosting environment for its European research and development program.

• Adobe has released its 100th Typeface family, Source Serif, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Adobe Originals font library. Source Serif is an open-source font available via Adobe Typekit or via SourceForge.

• OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, offers some metering tools as parts of the core OpenStack code. But it lacks a robust performance monitoring framework, which is why GroundWork has rolled out a new solution for tracking the performance of various parts of the OpenStack public and private cloud infrastructure.

• Hortonworks says the deal struck this week to acquire XA Secure will help provide a comprehensive approach to Hadoop security for the first time.

• SnapChat settled with the Federal Trade Commission earlier this month over a complaint that its privacy claims were misleading, as reported by USA Today, and last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published a report listing the company as the least privacy-friendly tech outfit it reviewed, including Comcast, Facebook, and Google. Last year, WhatsApp faced privacy complaints from the Canadian and Dutch governments, and like Snapchat, its security has been an issue as well.

Events

Web Browsers

Chrome

• I’m in the process of trying Fedora 20 on my retina MacBook and I ran into a peculiar issue with Chrome. Some sites would load up normally and I could read everything on the page. Other sites would load up and only some of the text would be displayed. Images were totally unaffected.

Mozilla

• The problem I see, however, is something I’ve witnessed for some time now, and while I’m aware that I will probably look like I’m howling with the pack (something I do not like at all) I believe I should come clean about it. This problem is about Mozilla itself, what it does, how it operates, its own standing within the Free and Open Source Software community and its revenue model. In fact, I believe all these points are tightly connected and discretely conspired to bring Mozilla where it is today. This is not to say that I don’t like what Mozilla does and has done. This is not to say that there isn’t a whole bunch of great people inside Mozilla: there are, I know several of them. This is not to say that Mozilla is not an exciting set of projects and ventures: I think it will continue to be exciting in the years to come. And many of us know what technology does to any project or company in just a few years: kill it or make it blossom.

SaaS/Big Data

• At last weeks OpenStack conference, Red Hat found itself being painted as the pantomime villain by some of its competitors.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The beta release of LibreOffice 4.3 is available this week with many new features being under development for this popular open-source office suite.

• Among the features being worked on for LibreOffice 4.3 is going from a 16-bit character limitation of Writer paragraphs to now 32-bit, changes to navigation buttons and other UI elements, DrawingML import/export support, proportional image scaling support, support for printing comments in margins, improved formula engine support within the Calc spreadsheet, auto detection of fax4CUPS printers, improved PDF importing, improved OOXML support, and many other changes.

CMS

• Director of new media technologies at the Executive Office of the President of the United State of America Leigh Heyman was recently reported to be the man behind all the modern interactive media delivered during Barack Obama’s last ‘state of the union’ address.

• Orion announced in early May that it has launched a redesigned client portal that uses open-source code so other providers can build their own pages to integrate into the site.

Education

• Damian Conway is well known in the Perl community and has worked on Perl 6 for many years; he’s a speaker and teacher, author of several technical books and Perl software modules, and runs an international IT training company, Thoughtstream, which provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level in Europe, North America, and Australasia. His website is: http://damian.conway.org

Funding

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• For those that haven’t already moved over to the recently released GCC 4.9, the third point release to the GNU Compiler Collection 4.8 series has finally surfaced.

Public Services/Government

• The administration in the Austrian capital, Vienna, is expanding its use of open source solutions, including on its workstations, because of new requirements, open data, budget constraints and the major shift towards smartphones and tablets.

• “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.

• Open source is now well-established in the city’s main IT operations, according to the presentation which Weidinger delivered at a Major Cities of Europe conference in Dublin on 17 January. The city has 454 Linux servers (from a total of 2,000 servers), 270 Apache instances, uses Postgres to manage 380 databases and MySQL to manage another 90. Open source is used for file and printing services, for e-government services and for external and internal websites.

• “We’re promoting the use of open source products where possible”, Weidinger said.

• The IT department’s responsibilities include the IT in the city’s public healthcare, public schools and the administration of city-owned housing.

• In the UK, The National ICT Category Management Programme (NICTMP) is intended to guide local governments towards better IT, including using FLOSS. It’s about time. Many small businesses and governments are scarcely more skilled at IT than consumers and a little help can go a long way towards huge savings greater diversity and better IT. With FLOSS it’s easy to put up a web-server sharing information with the public and using open standards to ensure interoperability with minimal cost. I think savings of 20% are at the lower end of estimates. In my experience, software licences can save 20% of IT costs but ease of maintenance could do that again and getting full performance out of hardware purchases that much again. Local governments in UK spend hundreds of millions of dollars on hardware and software for IT each year. Break-even can be immediate if hardware is re-used by using FLOSS. Governments should be looking at savings of ~50% by using FLOSS. There’s a reason M$ and “partners” do what they do. It doubles the cost of IT making slaves of us all providing free labour. FLOSS works for us the users and not some monopolists.

• A new model for IT procurement for local governments in the United Kingdom is urging public administrations to use open standards, to create room for agile and innovative software solutions including open source. One of the aims of the National ICT Commercial Category Strategy for Local Government is to reduce IT expenses by 10 to 20 percent over the next five years.

• Technology is the easy part in government. The biggest challenges are cultural barriers – it’s a question of thinking in a more collaborative and open way, believes Ben Balter, Government Evangelist for GitHub, a social network for open source communities.

• Aneesh Chopra, President Obama’s choice to be the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer from 2009 to 2012, wants to do something about the problem. He is teaming up with a group called the Open Source Elections Technology Foundation to address the problem. Their plan: develop the software necessary to run an election and release it as an open-source project. Chopra and his colleagues believe that could lead to better election systems while simultaneously saving cash-strapped states money.

• White House and agency IT leaders discuss how open source can empower government IT project teams, at FOSE conference in Washington, D.C.

Licensing

• The latest version of a tool used to teach kids how to program video games, animations and interactive art is now open source. The Scratch 2.0 editor and player can now be found in GitHub under the GPL version 2 license.

Openness/Sharing

• Skyhook is new to the bitcoin ATM-scape but is already interesting many with its first project – the first ever portable, open-source bitcoin ATM machine, with prices starting at $999.

Open Data

• The Danish capital, Copenhagen, has been making available the open source code for its bicycle navigation app, I Bike CPH. The app will be demonstrated at Traffic Jam Session, a public transport innovation hackathon next week Tuesday to Thursday in the Swedish city of Malmö.

Open Hardware

• “The horizon [in open source hardware] I am most excited about is open cores, open source designs for processors that can be implemented in firmware in an FPGA, for example,” said Oskay, the vice president of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), an educational non-profit group started in 2012.

• In this article we’ll be using Node.js and the Duino library to get real-time CPU data and display it with a series of LEDs. We’ll also look into adjusting the brightness of those LEDs with a potentiometer, and running the app as a background process with Forever.js.

• Novena, an open laptop platform designed for hackers, has surpassed 280 percent of its crowd-funding target, and the open-hardware computing devices will start shipping in November.

• Galileo 2.0, an uncased computer, will be the follow-on to the first-generation single-board system that sells for around US$70. It could ship as soon as next month, said Mike Bell, vice president and general manager of Intel’s New Devices Group.

• A Beijing-based company, ANTVR Technology Co., Ltd., has created an open source version of the Oculus Rift and has reached $145,000 of its $200,000 Kickstarter goal after just four days.

Programming

• Back in March Apple open-sourced their ARM 64-bit LLVM back-end (dubbed ARM64) many months after other ARM vendors had already developed a competing 64-bit ARM back-end (dubbed “AArch64″ as ARM’s official name for architecture). Since Apple opened up their back-end, Apple and outside LLVM developers have been working to converge the competing 64-bit ARM back-ends into a single 64-bit ARM target. That work is now complete.

• While Scratch may seem like a very simplistic programming language that’s just for kids, you’d be wrong to overlook it as an excellent first step into coding for all age levels. One aspect of learning to code is understanding the underlying logic that makes up all programs; comparing two systems, learning to work with loops and general decision-making within the code.

• I’ve been working on an automated wildlife camera, to catch birds at the feeder, and the coyotes, deer, rabbits and perhaps roadrunners (we haven’t seen one yet, but they ought to be out there) that roam the juniper woodland.

• Clive is the new operating system announced on Friday and is written in Google’s Go programming language, features a “new weird file protocol” called ZX, and uses parts of the Plan 9 operating system. Clive is also going to run on a modified Nix kernel.

• A quick option for building Web and iOS apps is on the horizon from a group of developers in Europe. Hoodie is an open source tool for building Web applications in days via an open source library described as being easier to use than JQuery.

Leftovers

• Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin is signaling that Pope Francis in his visit to Bethlehem on Sunday will strongly support the right of Palestinians to a sovereign state.

• Implicitly, Pope Francis will condemn the Apartheid system of military rule used by Israel in the West Bank, though he likely won’t use the word.

• Amirzai Sangin, Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Afghanistan said Sunday that the phone calls are recorded by devices which have been set up in the country to fight drugs smuggling.

• [...]

• Assange said that Afghanistan was the second country where NSA “has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic and international phone calls.”

• Bahamas was revealed as one of the country where the phone calls were being recorded by National Security Agency in earlier reports; however the second country was called “country x.”

• The White House inadvertently included the name of the top CIA official in Afghanistan on a list of participants in a military briefing with President Barack Obama that was distributed to reporters on Sunday, the Washington Post reported.

Science

• In an article published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, University of California at San Diego behavioral scientist Ayelet Gneezy and University of Chicago business professor Nicholas Epley tracked people’s responses to three types of promises: broken ones, kept ones, and then ones that were fulfilled beyond expectations. And while it’s true that everyone gets upset when a promise is broken (I’m looking at you, housing-contractors-who-claim-bathroom-renovations-will-be-done-in-a-week), it turns out that overdelivering on something won’t make anyone significantly more impressed by your awesomeness.

Health/Nutrition

• On Tuesday, May 20, voters in two counties in Oregon passed ballot initiatives to ban the growing of genetically engineered crops.

• Jackson County’s Measure 15-119 passed overwhelmingly, by 66 percent – 34 percent. Proponents of the ban raised only $375,000 compared with a record nearly $1 million raised by the opposition, which included agribusiness giants Monsanto, Syngenta and DuPont Pioneer.

Security

• Wired reports that Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka “Sabu”, the LulzSec hacker who became an FBI informant and helped take down numerous other hackers, will be sentenced on Tuesday, May 27. The government will seek a sentence of just seven months, citing time served and his immense cooperation with the government.

• Anarchism and the Lower East Side go hand in hand, so should we be super surprised that one of the most notorious hackers of our day operated from within the Jacob Riis Houses on Avenue D?

• You’ll recall that in June 2011, hacker Hector Xavier Monsegur, an unemployed father of two, was caught by the FBI and quickly turned snitch. The high-ranking capture immediately paid dividends, as “Sabu” was the man who once led the outlaw LulzSec, an offshoot of the notorious Anonymous organization. With the new traitor status, he helped deliver a number of top hackers on a platter and still helps the bureau with his connections.

• U.S. prosecutors say a hacking group’s mastermind should be spared a long prison sentence due to his quick and fruitful cooperation with law enforcement.

• The man, Hector Xavier Monsegur of New York, is accused of leading a gang of international miscreants calling themselves “Lulzsec,” short for Lulz Security, on a noisy hacking spree in 2011, striking companies such as HBGary, Fox Entertainment and Sony Pictures.

• Lulzsec, an offshoot of Anonymous, led a high-profile campaign that taunted law enforcement, released stolen data publicly and bragged of their exploits on Twitter. Their campaign touched off a worldwide law enforcement action that resulted in more than a dozen arrests.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• For one group of Americans, that wasn’t enough. On their own, the Americans offered to provide 70,000 Russian-made assault rifles and 21 million rounds of ammunition to the Free Syrian Army, a major infusion they said could be a game changer. With a tentative nod from the rebels, the group set about arranging a weapons shipment from Eastern Europe, to be paid for by a Saudi prince.

• While Canada exports oil, maple syrup, and hockey players, it also deals a lot of arms. And Canadian military exports are growing: the latest available figures say sales jumped more than 50 percent from 2010 to 2011, with later years reportedly expected to spike.

• On June 9th, 2006, it is said that three prisoners in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp committed suicide in a coordinated effort. They all died using the exact same methods, in their cells, on that evening.

• However, when NCOs (non-commissioned officers) contradicted this account, cracks began to show in the official NCIS investigation. The NCOs revealed that these three prisoners were actually not in their cellblocks the night they died. Rather, they were taken to a secret CIA black spot nearby, dubbed ‘Penny Lane’ or ‘Camp No’. While they were returned to their cell at the time of death, more than 12 papers that contradicted the official report of that night were suppressed during an internal investigation.

• Legal charity Reprieve has called on the Scottish Government to ensure that police investigating the use of Scottish airports by CIA ‘torture flights’ have access to a major US Senate report on the spy agency’s secret ‘rendition’ programme.

• Political. America is freeloading. Events belie the local panel’s assertion that the Philippines invited the United States as our guest, to use our former bases and facilities—rent-free—as counterweight to China. The Chinese became aggressive in the West Philippine Sea in 2012; the United States decreed its “pivot” to Asia much earlier. Clearly, America decided, unilaterally, to make the Philippines home to thousands of its soldiers, aircraft carriers, battleships and warplanes. And the Philippines followed America in a zombie-like stupor.

• Egypt has been deemed a leading supporter of this week’s mutiny within the Libyan military.

• Diplomatic sources said renegade Gen. Khalifa Hafter was receiving guidance and military support from Egypt.

• Neocons never blush at their own hypocrisies, demanding Russia respect international law and do nothing to protect eastern Ukrainians, while demanding President Obama ignore international law and create a rebel “safe zone” in Syria, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

• In other words, the incitement of North against South, Christians against Muslims, was recognised as the most potent strategy that could push Nigeria into sectarianism. In fact, that Boko Haram has extremist religious connotation is believed to be enough to keep Nigeria busy to think beyond its survival.

• So carefully managed, it is impossible to trace Boko Haram’s funding and arms supply sources; unless one has a privileged access to the CIA-led trillion dollar terror economy, which Loretta Napoleoni, in her book, ‘’Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Network,’’ argued is impossible for CIA’s unofficial funding sources include money laundering, terrorism, extrajudicial killings, drug trafficking, prostitution, kidnapping, human trafficking, gambling and illegal arms and oil sales.

• Known not to leave anything to chance, the CIA ensured that it was in full control of both the mainstream and grassroots media in Nigeria. This was a smart move since it is a given that the one who controls what the people read, hear and watch invariably controls what the people think about and how they think.

• Thus, fully aware that press freedom actually belongs only to those who own the press, the CIA is secret marriage with some media owners and as a result has been successful at controlling and manipulating what gets to most Nigerians.

• Little wonder no one seems to wonder how the US Embassy (and by that the CIA) gets its intelligence, including the recent announcement it made that “As of late April, groups associated with terrorism allegedly planned to mount an unspecified attack against the Sheraton Hotel, in Nigeria.”

• The problem is that our government is not bold enough to demand their source of intelligence, and why rather than sharing such important intelligence with Nigeria, the US chose to make them public in the form of announcements.

• Prime Minister John Key thought the candlelight vigil outside his house last night was “not really cricket”.

• About 30 protesters gathered outside his Auckland home last night in a candlelight vigil commemorating “the numerous deaths of civilians and the illegal killing of ‘supposed’ terrorists, including New Zealander Daryl Jones — killed by the US drone strike programme”.

• Prime Minister John Key has hit out at protesters who gathered at his home last night, to protest his position on deadly drone strikes.

• Last week Key said drone strikes were justified, but acknowledged innocent civilians were caught in the crossfire.

• While the last couple of weeks have been taken up with thinking about the Budget and its disproportionate impact on poorer Australians, another, more spectacular, area of government disregard for the lives and rights of its citizens has gone relatively unremarked.

• Domestic buildings have been hit by drone strikes more than any other type of target in the CIA’s 10-year campaign in the tribal regions of northern Pakistan, new research reveals.

• By way of contrast, since 2008, in neighbouring Afghanistan drone strikes on buildings have been banned in all but the most urgent situations, as part of measures to protect civilian lives. But a new investigative project by the Bureau, Forensic Architecture, a research unit based at London’s Goldsmiths University, and New York-based Situ Research, reveals that in Pakistan, domestic buildings continue to be the most frequent target of drone attacks.

• A secret cable released by Wikileaks on Tuesday revealed that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned Washington as far back as 2008 that US-EU-NATO meddling in Ukraine could split the country in two.

• “Following a muted first reaction to Ukraine’s intent to seek a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) at the Bucharest summit (ref A), Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat,” said the 2008 cable classified by William Burns, than US Ambassador to Moscow and currently the US Deputy Secretary of State.

• A secret U.S. diplomatic cable written six years ago (and tweeted by Wikileaks on Tuesday) foreshadowed much of the tension between Russia and the U.S. over Ukraine.

• A secret cable released by Wikileaks on Tuesday revealed that Washington had been warned by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as early as 2008 that US-EU-NATO interfering in Ukraine would result in the country splitting in two.

• Miffed with the US over indictment of five People’s Liberation Army officers over commercial cyber espionage charges, China accused the US of hypocrisy and double standards.

• Chinese Defence Ministry posted a statement on its website, saying, “From ‘WikiLeaks’ to the ‘Snowden’ case, US hypocrisy and double standards regarding the issue of cyber-security have long been abundantly clear”.

• “The so-called ‘commercial espionage network’ is a pure fabrication by the US, a move to mislead the public based on ulterior motives,” the AFP quoted the statement.

• During the defense appropriations amendment process, Adam Schiff (CA-28) proposed an amendment that would sunset the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) with the end of our combat role in Afghanistan, i.e. December 31, 2014.

• The Russian president accuses the Prince of Wales of ‘unacceptable’ and ‘unroyal behaviour’

• Speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Paul said, “I rise today in opposition to killing American citizens without trials. I rise today to oppose the nomination of anyone who would argue that the President has the power to kill American citizens not involved in combat.”

• “I rise today to say that there is no legal precedent for killing American citizens not directly involved in combat and that any nominee who rubber stamps and grants such power to a President is not worthy of being placed one step away from the Supreme Court,” the Kentucky senator said.

• On Wednesday, the Obama administration agreed to release to senators a redacted version of the document co-authored by Barron that provided the legal justification for the targeted drone killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.

• Given that he was confirmed on a 53-45 vote, it is highly unlikely that Barron’s nomination would have survived had Senate majority leader Harry Reid not imposed the “nuclear option” last year to prevent senators from stopping a contentious nomination by requiring 60 senators to approve the idea of even having a confirmation vote. As for waterboarding, Barron’s nomination became controversial because he is, as Fram noted, the “architect of the Obama administration’s legal foundation for killing American terror suspects overseas with drones.” 53 Democratic senators are apparently okay with that, even though many if not most of them have gone apoplectic over the idea of waterboarding known terrorists of any nationality who may have knowledge of their fellow travelers’ plans.

• 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

• A deep boom rocked through Sanaa, Yemen, the sound coming from outside of the city, perhaps from near the village of al-Masna’a.

• There will be a candlelight vigil outside Prime Minister John Key’s home in Auckland to highlight the issue of US drone strikes.

• Psychopaths are in love with power and risk taking, masters of manipulation, self-serving opportunism and self-aggrandizement, and hold doctorates in deceit and deception. Psychopaths are super intelligent charmers who are highly skilled at playing others in order to get what they want. They are keenly perceptive at reading people, understanding their motives and values, brilliant at learning their weaknesses and blind spots, and highly effective at inducing both sympathy and guilt in others.

• Just in time for Memorial Day, we’re once again being treated to a generous serving of praise and grandstanding by politicians and corporations eager to go on record as being supportive of our veterans.

• Patriotic platitudes aside, however, America has done a deplorable job of caring for her veterans. We erect monuments for those who die while serving in the military, yet for those who return home, there’s little honor to be found.

• The plight of veterans today is deplorable, with large numbers of them impoverished, unemployed, traumatized mentally and physically, struggling with depression, thoughts of suicide, and marital stress, homeless (a third of all homeless Americans are veterans), subjected to sub-par treatment at clinics and hospitals, and left to molder while their paperwork piles up within Veterans Administration (VA) offices.

• AN IRANIAN terrorist responsible for the murder of hundreds of Americans in the 1983 Beirut bombings was resettled in the United States by the CIA in return for divulging secrets about Tehran’s nuclear programme, a new book claims.

• Ali Reza Asgari is believed to have masterminded the attacks in April 1983 on the US embassy in the Lebanese capital, which killed 63 people, and another attack six months later on the marine barracks and the French barracks, in which 241 US servicemen and 58 French citizens died.

• An inconvenient truth about America’s use of capital punishment is that it puts the U.S. in company with unappealing authoritarian states, like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, while creating a divide from modern democratic societies in Europe and the Americas, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar, consortiumnews.com reported.

• An inconvenient truth about America’s use of capital punishment is that it puts the U.S. in company with unappealing authoritarian states, like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, while creating a divide from modern democratic societies in Europe and the Americas, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

• Robert Gates, the new president of the Boy Scouts of America, says he has no problems with allowing openly gay adults in the organization, but won’t address changing their policy right now.

• SCOTLAND’s role in the interrogation and alleged torture of terror suspects by the CIA could be laid bare by a recently declassified US intelligence report, it has been revealed.

• Police are currently investigating claims Scottish airports were used as a stop-off for “rendition” flights, which transferred prisoners to secret jails overseas.

• The unknowing also includes Qatar that has sentenced a Filipino national to death for allegedly selling top secret Qatari military information to “Filipino state security forces” that the Qataris left unnamed.

• The US government continues its efforts to clamp down on leaks of classified information.

• A former police officer in Northern California is being investigated for collecting a disability pension while he is currently working for the FBI.

• Oakland city officials are looking into how former police officer Aaron McFarlane receives more than $52,000 in disability benefits from the city while he has been working as an FBI special agent in Boston.

• Federal prosecutors have acknowledged that the two FBI agents and a Homeland Security Investigations agent questioning the youth at the state police barracks in North Darmouth knew a lawyer had called, but neither they nor the trooper who spoke with Griffin passed that information along to the students.

• James Comey became FBI director last year, at a time when Osama bin Laden was dead, terrorism at home was on the decline and the United States was shrinking its inflammatory presence in the Muslim world. So naturally, he says the danger is way worse than you think.

• James Comey became FBI director last year, at a time when Osama bin Laden was dead, terrorism at home was on the decline and the United States was shrinking its inflammatory presence in the Muslim world. So naturally, he says the danger is way worse than you think.

• Referring to al Qaeda groups in Africa and the Middle East, he recently told the New York Times, “I didn’t have anywhere near the appreciation I got after I came into this job just how virulent those affiliates had become. There are both many more than I appreciated, and they are stronger than I appreciated.”

• Terrorism has fed the FBI’s growth. Between 2001 and 2013, its budget nearly doubled after adjusting for inflation. But Comey was not pleased on arriving to learn that he would be inconvenienced by last year’s federal budget sequester.

• You had to take Johnson’s point. The question was, Why did Obama choose this man? As defense secretary, Gates oversaw an increase in troop strength in Afghanistan from 32,000 (when Obama took office and named him) to roughly 100,000 (before withdrawals began). Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting does the counting here. Why did Obama do that?

Transparency Reporting

• “They think of WikiLeaks like Al-Qaeda,” he said of the U.S. government. “I needed to move away from it all. I [still] talked to a few people on the computer but I generally completely disassociated myself with anything to do with Anonymous.”

• In essence, Media Direct seeks to enable encrypted interactions between anonymous whistleblowers, who access it via the Tor relay network, and specified journalists, with the submission server itself not logging anything, thus meaning it has no information to provide should it be targeted by the government of its host country (which remains secret, even from the administrators to the Media Direct site here in Australia). The site automatically deletes material that isn’t used within two weeks, and the keys whistleblowers use to access the server also have a limited lifespan. It’s close to plug-and-play for whistleblowers, as long as they can install Tor.

• The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice are still actively pursuing a criminal investigation against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.

• WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange remains the subject of an active criminal investigation by the United States Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation, newly published court documents reveal.

• Papers released in US legal proceedings have revealed that a “criminal/national security investigation” by the US Department of Justice and FBI probe of WikiLeaks is “a multi-subject investigation” that is still “active and ongoing” more than four years after the anti-secrecy website began publishing secret US diplomatic and military documents.

• Confirmation that US prosecutors have not closed the book on WikiLeaks and Mr Assange comes as a consequence of litigation by the US Electronic Privacy Information Centre to enforce a freedom of information request for documents relating to the FBI’s WikiLeaks investigation.

• JOHN Shipton says he is not, by nature, the most outgoing of people.

• “I’m a private person; I’d prefer to be at home reading a book,” Mr Shipton said yesterday.

• But having WikiLeaks whistle-blower Julian Assange for a son means Mr Shipton’s life is no longer solely his own.

• Assange will receive an International Award for Outstanding Service in the Defence of Human Rights and Global Justice. You know, one of those.

• Though they’re often lumped together as crusaders against state secrets, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and journalist Glenn Greenwald don’t always see eye to eye.

• A rift is forming in the world of leaked top-secret government documents. On one side is Glenn Greenwald, the founding editor of The Intercept online news site, who earlier this week reported that the U.S. government was recording practically every single cell phone call made to or from the Bahamas and another, unnamed country.

• On May 14, João Paulo Rodrigues, a leader of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), met with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The two men discussed ways in which Latin American social movements might help Wikileaks. Following their two-hour discussion, the leader told Assange, “If you need asylum in Brazil, we offer our land settlements.” Assange responded with a hug.

• Notorious whistleblower Julian Assange spoke glowingly about Bitcoin during a technology conference in South Africa on Wednesday, calling the currency “the most intellectually interesting development in the last two years.”

• A US intelligence agency is allegedly tapping all phone calls made in Kenya, possibly informing the recent travel advisories and the heightened alert at its Embassy in Nairobi.

• The film 1971, which just had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, documents the activities of “eight ordinary citizens,” but their story is far beyond the ordinary. On March 8, 1971, the group orchestrated a robbery at an FBI office in the Philadelphia suburb aptly called Media, making off with every file. Those hundreds of documents, mailed to the press leading to 50,000 more pages, laid bare the details and degree of government surveillance of the American people. Congressional hearings in subsequent years revealed that the FBI, under the autocratic leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, infiltrated institutions from universities to community groups and even threatened the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. The mere fact of the existence of residential FBI offices, in low-slung brick buildings along tree-lined, mostly residential streets, reflected the acceptance — and even deification of the agency in earlier decades. No member of the Media, Pa., group was ever caught or prosecuted for the break-in. They broke their long silence in the film and a new book by Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The government ignores the drawbacks to shale gas, while its erratic policies around solar frustrate budding entrepreneurs

• Sea level rise impacting naval bases. Climate change altering natural disaster response. Drought influenced by climate change in the Middle East and Africa leading to conflicts over food and water — as in, for instance, Syria.

• The current stage of the climate crisis will afflict our Earth for innumerable generations to come, creating increasing havoc. Stage one will eventually transform to a crueler stage two later this century and other stages eventually unless severe measures are introduced immediately. We know the dire consequences for future generations if we fail to act immediately.

• Military coups in Thailand are nothing new. But the latest seizure of power by army chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha underscores the risks to democracy when governments consistently fail to deal adequately with the complex convergence of systemic crises.

Finance

• As a man who has himself experienced wardens deciding, with their “discretion”, to give him a ticket in that very spot before, Steve McMillan perhaps understandably felt he could not just let it slide.

• Filming the whole incident on his mobile phone, he can be seen confronting a warden who initially says that it hasn’t yet “been five minutes”.

• But when Mr McMillan explains that it clearly has – and that he has this recorded on his phone – the unnamed warden quickly goes on the defensive.

• President Barack Obama has taken several steps over the past few years to address the $1 trillion problem of student loan debt. He’s pushed loan forgiveness programs and efforts to help borrowers reduce payments. One thing that apparently isn’t factoring into his plans, though, is reining in abusive debt collectors that the Department of Education hires to collect student loans debt when people can’t pay.

• More than $94 billion of the nation’s student loan debt was in default as of September 2013, according to a March report from the Government Accountability Office. And the percentage of people defaulting on school loans has increased steadily for six years in a row. In 2011, the Department of Education paid private debt collectors $1 billion to try to collect on that debt—a number that is expected to double by 2016. The tactics used by those debt collectors range from harassing to downright abusive. In March 2012, Bloomberg reported that three of the companies working for the Department of Education had settled federal or state charges that they’d engaged in abusive debt collection.

• We’re at a critical moment in our economic recovery that requires real leadership and people power to ensure true economic democracy in our country. There is incredible work being done to build a strong antipoverty movement, and spaces like these are fundamental to encourage an open dialogue about our strategies and tactics as well as our successes and failures.

• As corporate profits keep soaring, workers’ wages continue to stagnate, creating the widest income inequality gap our nation has seen in modern times. At Jobs With Justice we still believe that in America, people who work hard should be paid enough to live with dignity and raise a family. Today, millions of people go to work every day and still don’t earn enough money to feed their families. If people can work full-time and still can’t afford groceries, rent and medication, then the entire model is flawed and unfair. We can’t continue down this path of creating bottom-of-the-barrel, low-wage jobs that condemn our friends and neighbors to poverty.

• Attorney General Eric Holder’s sweetheart settlement with Switzerland’s second largest bank, corporate criminal Credit Suisse, sent the wrong message to other corporate barons. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) says it well:

• “Nor does the plea deal hold any officers, directors or key executives individually accountable for wrongdoing, raising the question of whether it will sufficiently deter similar misconduct in the future.”

• Mr. Holder, of course, touted the deal as tough. Credit Suisse was fined a non-deductible $2.6 billion for their long, elaborate plan to provide tax evasion services for many thousands of wealthy Americans. The bank agreed to plead guilty of criminal wrongdoing – a rare demand on the usually coddled large financial institutions. In addition, Credit Suisse, in Mr. Holder’s words, failed “to retain key documents, allowed evidence to be lost or destroyed, and conducted a shamefully inadequate internal inquiry”… through a “conspiracy” that “spanned decades.”

• An anonymous Twitter account is highlighting the poor treatment of maids in Brazil.

• Having watched Tim Geithner’s disgusting defense of the tax-payer-backed re-inflation of a corrupt and knowingly devastating banking system on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, and watching the US fine (no jail time for anyone) a Swiss bank which admits its guilt over billions of fraud yet allow them to remain a prime dealer of US Treasuries; we thought the following story from a ’3rd world banking system’ would open a few eyes in the US this weekend as ‘we remember’. As AP reports, a billionaire businessman at the heart of a $2.6 billion state bank scam in Iran, the largest fraud case since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, was executed Saturday, state television reported.

• Maybe this is because lefties don’t complain enough. You may remember the hissy fit thrown by Fox News when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report suggesting that the election of a black president might spur recruitment among right-wing extremist groups and “even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past.” As it turns out, that was a good call. But the specter of jack-booted Obama thugs smashing down the doors of earnest, heartland Republicans dominated the news cycle long enough for DHS to repudiate the report under pressure and eventually dissolve the team that had produced it.

• And the similar report about left-wing extremism that DHS had produced a few months earlier? You don’t remember that? I don’t suppose you would. That’s because it was barely noticed, let alone an object of complaint. And even if lefties had complained, I doubt that anyone would have taken it seriously. There’s just no equivalent of Fox News on the left when it comes to turning partisan grievances into mainstream news.

• Housing booms are today’s medieval plagues. Boils suppurate on the political backside. People rush to find culprits to lynch. Quacks appear on street corners with fake remedies. Reason takes a holiday.

• Thus it was yesterday, as the Today programme’s John Humphrys chided David Cameron for the “housing crisis” and for not building more houses in the Tory shires. It was like curing famine by sending caviar to Africa.

• Meanwhile, everyone from Ed Miliband to the governor of the Bank of England screams crisis. There is a crisis when prices fall and a crisis when prices rise. Almost everywhere house prices are still bouncing along the bottom, but at London dinner parties they are a “bubble”.

• Europe has a special worry about a broken, uncaring economy.

• Things rip apart. More and more people fall into desperation. Some of them decide it’s the fault of immigrants. Or homosexuals.

• The situation is not entirely comparable to that of Europe and Germany of the 1930s and 40s. Nevertheless, the rise of these far-right parties, their ties to the economic hardships and austerity measures imposed by the European Union, and the spread of nationalistic and xenophobic tendencies are alarming.

• Virus ‘could sort out demographic explosion’ and by extension Europe’s ‘immigration problem’, says founder of Front National

Politics

• New York Times columnist and NPR/PBS pundit David Brooks (5/19/14) has a solution to the problem with American democracy: We should have less of it.

• Surveying the evidence around the globe, Brooks is worried that that democracy isn’t up to the task of managing the present. “Democracies tend to have a tough time with long-range planning,” he laments. “Voters tend to want more government services than they are willing to pay for.”

• Former President George W. Bush once said, rather proudly, that he didn’t read newspapers.

Censorship

• Europe’s moves to rein in Google — including a court ruling this month ordering the search giant to give people a say in what pops up when someone searches their name — may be seen in Brussels as striking a blow for the little guy.

• But across the Atlantic, the idea that users should be able to edit Google search results in the name of privacy is being slammed as weird and difficult to enforce at best and a crackdown on free speech at worst.

• In July 2012 Enrique Peña Nieto, candidate of the quasi social-democratic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was elected president of Mexico. Soon after his election and on the inauguration day, massive protests occurred in Mexico, especially the capital, Mexico City, dubbing the election as fraud and, most of all, unfair, as per the Mexican presidential electoral system a candidate which receives most votes, even if not absolute majority, wins a six-year term in the presidential office.

• The censors have asked the makers of the Alia Bhatt Varun Dhawan starrer Humpty Dumpty Sharma ki Dulhaniya to cut the close up of a kiss while allowing a long shot of it on the screen.

• Twenty-four digital television stations have been permitted to resume regular broadcasts, but 14 other local TV channels and international news stations remain off air.

• In Pakistan, apprehensions are rife about Narendra Modi’s flamboyant success. But fervent Modi supporters in the Indian middle classes prefer to place him in the economic governance arena. Dawn recently talked to renowned Indian writer, Arundhati Roy, in Delhi to explore what Modi’s rise means for India.

• A Chinese blogger who called on US Secretary of State John Kerry to push for Internet freedom in China has been fired by his employer, he told AFP on Sunday.

Privacy

• In particular, it described China as a main target of the U.S. clandestine secret surveillance.

• Afghanistan on Sunday expressed anger at the United States for allegedly monitoring almost all the country’s telephone conversations after revelations by the Wikileaks website.

• Wikileaks editor Julian Assange said on Friday that Afghanistan was one of at least two countries where the U.S. National Security Agency “has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic [and international] phone calls.” Earlier last week journalist Glenn Greenwald had revealed that the NSA had been monitoring all the domestic and international phone calls of the Bahamas, but had refused to identify the second country, claiming he believed it could lead to the death of innocent people.

• Since the US Department of Justice announced indictments against 5 Chinese military officers, some US media have reported that the US is conducting spying operations not confined to national security. The claims are based on secret documents leaked by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

• While a welcome first step toward reining in a government with “Big Brother” powers, the House bill falls short of the objective of its original sponsors. Transparency measures intended to guard against secret intrusions on personal privacy were weakened. And there are concerns about an undefined “specific selection term” to theoretically limit the reach of government intrusion into personal records and personal communications.

• …making it easier for government officials to gather information about Canadians’ online activities.

• If not, other countries are ready to offer him shelter, including Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, and possibly even Germany or perhaps also Switzerland as there have been reports of the NSA spying on Swiss banks, he added.If not, other countries are ready to offer him shelter, including Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, and possibly even Germany or perhaps also Switzerland as there have been reports of the NSA spying on Swiss banks, he added.

• FOUR years ago, Valerie D’Orazio was writing a story about a character who knows too much. Whom people want silenced. And who ultimately delivers all her files to the media, via email, so the whole world shall know these dark secrets. Little could D’Orazio have known then that this Marvel Comics story, titled Punisher MAX: Butterfly, was professional prologue to another big assignment: Writing about the life and exploits of NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

• NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is “considering’ returning to the United States if certain conditions are met, his lawyer told Germany’s Der Spiegel.

• “There are negotiations,” Snowden’s German lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck said, according to a translation on RT.com, a news agency based in Russia. “Those who know the case are aware that an amicable agreement with the U.S. authorities will be most reasonable,” Kaleck said.

• Snowden is not involved in the negotations, Kaleck told Der Spiegel.

• The US Congress has passed a bill that removes the NSA’s direct input into encryption standards.

• According to a report at ProPublica, an amendment to the National Institute of Standards and Technology act removes the requirement that NIST consult with the NSA in setting new encryption standards.

• The U.S. Department of Justice last week announced the criminal indictments of five Chinese army officers, claiming that they helped Chinese companies steal American corporate business information, and that all five are from “Unit 61398″ of the People’s Liberation Army. Since February last year, the U.S. government has accused the unit “headquartered in Shanghai” of being part of a “hacker army” involved in the long-term theft of U.S. trade secrets.

• Scottish supporters of Edward Snowden say an independent Scotland should offer political asylum to the man whose disclosure of classified NSA documents revealed pervasive U.S. surveillance around the world.

• Members of the Scottish parliament (MSPs) have considered a call for the former NSA contractor, who is currently being sheltered in Russia, to be given political asylum in Scotland if voters opt for independence in September’s referendum.

• China has told its state-owned enterprises to sever links with American consulting firms just days after the US charged five Chinese military officers with hacking US companies, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

• China’s action, which targets companies like McKinsey & Company and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), stems from fears the firms are providing trade secrets to the US government, the FT reported, citing unnamed sources close to senior Chinese leaders.

• The United States has accused some Chinese of hacking into American companies’ computers but the US itself has been engaging in massive spying of foreign companies and trade officials.

• [...]

• But in fact the US does spy on companies and trade policy makers and negotiators of other countries, presumably in order to obtain a commercial advantage.

• In January, after the disclosures by Edward Snowden about the scale of the US intelligence apparatus’s cyber snooping capabilities, President Barack Obama acknowledged the need to curtail the National Security Agency’s damaging practices and to begin a conversation on how a balance between national security and civil liberties could be struck. If it was clear then that downsizing the surveillance state would be a difficult task, the version of the USA Freedom Act that passed the House of Representatives last week underscored that fact.

• An investigation committee set up by German parliamentarians to look into the NSA’s bulk collection of Europe’s telecommunications data may call several prominent U.S. tech company executives to testify, including Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Tim Cook, reports The Wall Street Journal. Other witnesses that the committee may call include Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) executive chairman Eric Schmidt, Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) CEO Dick Costolo, and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) executive vice

• When National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden was working to convince journalists to cover NSA documents he taken with him to expose evidence of dragnet warrantless surveillance, he was especially frustrated with one media organization, which has actually received recognition for its work on the NSA files: The Washington Post.

• The story of how the Post became involved and, in many ways, let a whistleblower down is a testament to why future whistleblowers should be cautious when approaching such establishment media outlets. What happened is detailed in journalist Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA & the US Surveillance State.

• The Bahamas government officials want their US counterparts to explain why the National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting and recording every cell phone call taking place on the island nation.

• NBC anchor Brian Williams has landed an exclusive interview with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. It will be Snowden’s first American television interview. Williams traveled to Moscow this week to speak with both Snowden and Glenn Greenwald for an hour-long special that will air during primetime on May 28th.

• The U.S.’ escalating feud with China over hacking charges could end up hurting IT suppliers in both countries, as suspicions and eroding trust threaten to dampen the tech exchange between the two nations.

• On the 2004 campaign trail, President Bush denied the existence of an American warrantless surveillance program. But inside the Department of Justice, an attorney leaked information to The New York Times explaining the National Security Agency did indeed eavesdrop on phones around the country.

• Unfortunately, the bill passed by the House on Thursday falls far short of those promises, and does not live up to its title, the USA Freedom Act. Because of last-minute pressure from a recalcitrant Obama administration, the bill contains loopholes that dilute the strong restrictions in an earlier version, potentially allowing the spy agencies to continue much of their phone-data collection.

• Civil libertarians who say the House didn’t go far enough to reform the National Security Agency are mounting a renewed effort in the Senate to shift momentum in their direction.

• An amendment adopted by a House committee would, if enacted, take a step toward removing the National Security Agency from the business of meddling with encryption standards that protect security on the Internet.

• “While it represents a slight improvement from the status quo, it isn’t the reform bill that Americans deserve,” says a staff attorney with the ACLU.

• In the digital world, you never know who is spying on you. There’s hackers, nosy neighbors, a vengeful ex, the NSA, and that’s just a handful of the possibilities.

• Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to keep your messages safe from prying eyes? Now there is.

• Take a look at PQChat, an unhackable – yes, I said unhackable – secure instant messaging app.

• As it turns out, people really don’t want the government reading their email. Scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, have launched a new email service featuring end-to-end encryption to ensure complete privacy for users.

• Dubbed ProtonMail, the service claims to be fully anonymous. “Because of our end-to-end encryption, your data is already encrypted by the time it reaches our servers,” the site says. “We have no access to your messages, and since we cannot decrypt them, we cannot share them with third parties.”

• According to Jason Stockman, a co-developer of ProtonMail, the service was inspired by the revelations of the massive citizen surveillance programs by the US National Security Agency (NSA) made public by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last year.

• A new push to encrypt email, keeping messages free from government snooping, is gaining momentum. One new email service promising “end-to-end” encryption launched last Friday, and others are being developed while major services such as Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail have stepped up security measures.

• A major catalyst for email encryption were revelations about widespread online surveillance in documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor. “A lot of people were upset with those revelations, and that coalesced into this effort,” said Jason Stockman, a co-developer of ProtonMail, a new encrypted email service which launched last Friday with collaboration of scientists from Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the European research lab CERN.

• Meanwhile, US is engaged in massive electronic surveillance

• In the journalist Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden found a perfect match. I don’t mean to slight the contributions of Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman, the other two journalists who first dug into Snowden’s amazing and unprecedented trove of National Security Agency (NSA) documents.

• One characteristic of a totalitarian state is that it is as determined to subjugate its own citizens as it is to conquer foreigners. That’s why Edward Snowden could tell the National Press Club by live video link from his Russian exile that when he was a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) he was appalled to see NSA “collecting more information about Americans in America than it is about Russians in Russia.”

• HOLYROOD has triggered a major diplomatic row with the US over a proposal to grant asylum to the “traitor” Edward Snowden in the event of independence.

• Leading Conservative elder statesman Stockwell Day has joined the growing chorus of Canadians speaking out about how Bill C-13 would expose law-abiding Canadians to warrantless government spying. If passed, the controversial bill would grant immunity to telecom companies who hand our private information to the government without a warrant.

• “Play by the rules” seems to be Washington’s sacrosanct motto on international interaction. But time and again rules are just a lump of clay in Uncle Sam’s hands.

• In a recent farce about cyber-security, the United States slapped some fabricated charges against five Chinese military officers, accusing them of hacking into the systems of U.S. companies to steal trade secrets.

• NSA defenders still won’t tell the whole truth, but a newly revealed damage assessment offers a window into government damage control – not any actual damage done by Snowden

• It is twenty five years since Tim Berners-Lee had the germ of an idea that became the World Wide Web. Smartphones for everyone have been with us less than a decade. Technology is transformative and world changing. 150 years ago we didn’t have the electric light or the phonograph. Photography was a new and rare technology, and everything we take for granted in our lives today – central heating, hot and cold running water, flushing toilets, fridges, cars, radio, and TV – had yet to be invented, or was at the very least out of the reach of the average citizen.

Civil Rights

• The US House of Representatives approved an annual defense spending bill early Thursday after rejecting a proposed amendment that would have prevented the United States government from indefinitely detaining American citizens.

• A day celebrating Black liberation utilized for white supremacy

• Obama’s timeline to open trove unmet; Agencies can block declassification

• The deadly Tuesday confrontation between police and 44-year-old Carlos Mejia, which came 11 days after a fatal police shooting of lettuce worker Osman Hernandez outside an East Alisal Street market, was captured on video and spread like a whirlwind on social media.

• Royal backing lets NCPO general tighten his grip on country as more activists and academics detained amid protests

• Calls grow for release of Meriam Yahya Ibrahim and her toddler son and for her sentence, including 100 lashes, to be rescinded

• A man who dressed up in a pig mask, toy bobby’s helmet and hi-vis jacket was arrested on suspicion of impersonating a police officer.

• Steven Peers said he has often donned the mock outfit to perform ‘comical parodies’ of Greater Manchester Police after becoming unhappy with how officers behaved during the Barton Moss anti-fracking protests.

• He wore it around Manchester city centre while filming sketches yesterday but was stopped by an officer near Bootle Street police station.

• Over the years, seven journalists were imprisoned for publishing an account of Sellis’ death.

• The FBI isn’t investigating any lawyers defending accused Sept. 11 plotters on trial at the Guantanamo military detention camp and has closed a probe of a non-attorney member of a defense team, the government said Wednesday.

• Before heading home this Memorial Day weekend to honor those Americans who fought and died for the principle of liberty, Congress did a number on the basic rights that define that liberty: Guantanamo remains open, Americans are still subject to indefinite detention, our endless wars abroad still have an open-ended legal basis, the NSA will keep spying on us, and the lawyer who said U.S. citizens are legitimate drone targets was just confirmed to a lifetime federal judgeship.

• A lack of political will to let law enforcement agencies function independently within their mandate is the main reason for the deterioration of law and order situation in the country, former inspector general of police (IGP) Nurul Huda said yesterday.

DRM

• Only a week after the International Day Against DRM, Mozilla has announced that it will support Digital Restrictions Management in its Firefox Browser. The browser will have a built-in utility that automatically fetches and installs DRM from Adobe.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

Copyrights

• As of 18:00 on Election Day, it is clear that the Pirate Party remains in the European Parliament for another term. The German exit polls predict that at least Julia Reda from Germany has just been elected as Member of European Parliament, securing a pirate seat for the coming term. More results as they come in (developing story).

• Most notably, the copyright industry is known for using child porn as an argument for introducing mass surveillance, so that the mass surveillance can be expanded in the next step to targeting people who share knowledge and culture in violation of that industry’s distribution monopolies. This is a case study in taking corporate cynicism to the next level.

• This mass surveillance is also what feeds the NSA, the GCHQ, and its other European counterparts (like the Swedish FRA). It is continuously argued, along the precise same lines, that so-called “metadata” – whom you’re calling, from where, for how long – is not sensitive and therefore not protected by privacy safeguards. This was the argument that the European Court of Justice struck down with the force of a sledgehammer, followed by about two metric tons of bricks: it’s more than a little private if you’re talking to a sex service for 19 minutes at 2am, or if you’re making a call to the suicide hotline from the top of a bridge. This is the kind of data that the spy services wanted to have logged, eagerly cheered on by the copyright industry.

• The latest evidence: Amazon has escalated its battle against book publisher Hachette. Now Amazon won’t allow you to pre-order any Hachette books, the publisher confirmed to The Huffington Post on Friday. That means you cannot buy the paperback version of Brad Stone’s Amazon exposé “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.”

• Amazon appears to be trying to pressure a book publisher into agreeing to more favorable terms for the online retail giant by refusing to offer pre-orders of some of the publisher’s titles. Books for which Amazon is no longer taking orders include a new novel by J.K. Rowling and the paperback version of “The Everything Store,” an inside look at the operations of Amazon.

• Kim Dotcom has lost his bid to have evidence held by the FBI against him kept a secret. The information , a 200-page document which includes a sampling of 22 million emails relevant to his extradition case, may now be made public. Efforts by Dotcom to gain access to government held documentation against him were also rejected.

• The three largest BitTorrent trackers have banned the IP-ranges of several major hosting companies. The move aims to make it harder for anti-piracy outfits and other information gathering outfits to snoop on file-sharers. Unfortunately, the changes also mean that users of some VPNs, proxies and seedboxes can no longer connect.

• Every day cafes, airports, libraries, laundromats, schools and individuals operate “open” Wi-Fi routers, sharing their connection with neighbors and passers-by at no charge. The City of San Francisco recently deployed a free, public Wi-Fi network along a three-mile stretch of Market Street. Sometimes people use those connections for unauthorized activities. Most of the time they don’t, and the world gets a valuable public service of simple, ubiquitous Internet access.

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