● 05.28.14

● Links 28/5/2014: TogetherJS, PHP Next Generation

Posted in News Roundup at 1:55 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The Chinese are seriously considering what the open source movement has been taking about for years and making Linux on the desktop viable. Every year starts with the mantra that [insert year] will be the year of Linux on the desktop and it never really happens. However the Chinese are so miffed with US spying that they are seriously considering imposing it.

Desktop

• When I set out to find a new laptop, I was looking for an ultrabook –a 13-inch powerhouse with plenty of battery life and a gorgeous screen. On top of everything, it had to run Linux.

• That search led me to the System76 Galago UltraPro. Although not technically an ultrabook (it’s too big, doesn’t have ultrabook-level battery life, and doesn’t contain a solid state drive). What it does have is elegance and power to spare…to the tune of besting most currently available ultrabooks. And, like all System76 devices, it runs Ubuntu Linux.

• Let’s take a look at what’s good and bad with the Galago UltraPro.

Server

• It was HP Networking’s Senior Vice President Bethany Mayer who said seven months ago that she couldn’t see why anyone would use an OpenDaylight controller in their SDN. But it was also Bethany Mayer, now senior vice president and general manager of HP’s Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) business, who drove HP to raise its membership investment and participation in OpenDaylight just two weeks ago.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Beignet as the open-source project to provide Intel OpenCL support that works with Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver stack is beginning to show signs of maturity and progress so that Intel Linux desktop users can finally begin exploiting the GPGPU potential of their hardware.

• NVIDIA has made another open-source contribution today by releasing a small set of patches needed to adjust the Nouveau Gallium3D driver to support their “GK20A” graphics.

• In continuation of the story earlier today about NVIDIA contributing Mesa patches to add “GK20A” support to Nouveau’s NVC0 Gallium3D driver, the support has now landed within mainline Mesa.

• Besides Nouveau’s 3D performance being very slow until re-clocking is figured out, the 2D performance of this open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver is also very slow.

• Wayland 1.5, a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol, which can be used as a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, has advanced to version 1.5.

• For those looking for an easy way to play with Wayland/Weston 1.5 along with various Wayland-enabled open-source desktop applications, RebeccaBlackOS has been updated.

• Rebecca Black OS has been updated against Wayland/Weston 1.5, has Wayland-enabled GTK / SDL / EFL / Qt / KDE Frameworks 5 support, and shell support for Weston, Orbital, Hawaii, GNOME Shell Wayland, Enlightenment, and SWC. FreeRDP support is now enabled for Weston with this new ISO release. Systemd 212 has also been added to the operating system’s Ubuntu 14.04 LTS base for better handling of Mutter-Wayland not running as root.

Benchmarks

• After writing yesterday about the BFQ I/O scheduler update with its hopeful intentions of landing within the mainline Linux kernel, some readers wrote in about updated I/O scheduler results… Here they are.

• I had some time yesterday on an idle Intel ultrabook system to run some Linux I/O scheduler benchmarks using the latest daily version of the Linux 3.15 kernel in its latest development stage that will be finalized in the weeks ahead. The I/O scheduler tests with a variety of open-source disk benchmarks were done using the default I/O scheduler options of Noop, Deadline, and CFQ.

Applications

Proprietary

• Flash, the ubiquitous media framework for the Web, soon will no longer work for Linux users of the Chromium browser, the open source version of Google Chrome. Is it time for the Linux world to panic? Not at all.

• Here’s what’s happening: Soon, the means by which Flash support was traditionally implemented in Chromium, via a plugin originally designed for Netscape, will no longer work. Instead, Flash support will come in the form of a new API called Pepper, which Google has created for Chrome.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• While Linux is gathering speed when it comes to game development support, Windows is still the lead platform for PC games. Leadwerks is looking to shift more devs over to Linux, with the launch of its game engine tools on Ubuntu.

• Leadwerks ran a successful Kickstarter campaign last summer to put solid 3D game development tools on Linux, with the aim to allow developers to build their games within the Linux operating system.

• Valve has just posted an update to the Steam Universe community. Long story short, they’re back to experimenting with wireless controllers and are conducting live play tests with these new controllers. These play tests are generating a lot of useful feedback, but now with the time to incorporate these improvements, “we’re now looking at a release window of 2015, not 2014.” Though it’s a bit unclear whether this will hold back a majority (all?) of the Steam Machines or whether just the top-tier, best units are now a year away.

• The ultimate Linux gaming machine – aka Valve’s Steam Machine won’t be available until 2015. That’s not good news.

• The Steam Machines effort is a Linux powered gaming machine that could revolutionize console gaming and take on Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox, if it ever gets out the door. Valve will have multiple hardware vendors partners building Steam Machines, but that’s not the problem behind the latest delay.

• Valve’s Steam platform now allows users to stream content from Windows PCs to OS X and Linux clients over the home network.

• The games part of this latest two-week game sale are Symphony, Draw a Stickman: EPIC, Galcon Legends + Galcon Fusiom, Skulls of the Shogun, Metal Slug 3, Fieldrunners 2, and Breach & Clear. The Humble Bundle crew also claims that other titles are coming soon, when of course paying more than the floating average (currently at $4.74).

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• My name is Alexandr Akulich and this year I’m accepted for GSoC 2014 to work on Qt-based Telegram Connection Manager for KDE Telepathy.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.10 brought initial work on HiDPI support — displays with very high pixel densities — and that support improved greatly with GNOME 3.12. Most of that work up to now has been about supporting HiDPI displays under the X.Org Server, but now for GNOME 3.14 there’s basic HiDPI support for Mutter on Wayland.

• In the last few days, I’ve been asking people to create and ship AppData files upstream.

Distributions

• “We all have our favorite distro(s), so here’s an opportunity to tell the world about your pick of the bunch,” the Linux Voice article begins.

• “What made you choose it? Did you come across it by accident, or was it recommended to you?” the introduction reads. “Have you been running it since your first forays into the world of Linux, or is it a more recent discovery? And do you plan to stick with it for a while?”

• One last thing about booting Kali Linux. The details of this are beyond the scope of this kind of general Linux blog, but one of the major advances in this release is support for Encrypted USB Persistence. This is specifically for people who will be booting Kali from a USB stick, it gives them the possibility to securely save changes to an encrypted partition on the USB drive. I haven’t had time to look at this in detail yet, much less actually try it out, but at first glance I think it probably removes one of the major reasons for carrying a dedicated laptop around for security analysis, rather than just a Live USB stick.

• So there you have it, short and very sweet. If you are interested in network security, forensic analysis or penetration testing, this is a Linux distribution you need to know about. If you’re already using it, just make sure that you pick up the latest updates so that you get the new kernel and tools.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• Indonesia’s public sector has traditionally promoted Open Source Software adoption, something which was cited by Red Hat as a reason for establishing a presence in Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

Fedora

• Flock Schedule posted, F21 Schedule review, Fedora.next brand design and test planning, and Ruby SCL package review.

• FUDCon APAC 2014 happened over the weekend, and a bunch of photos from the event are now up in a gallery for you you check out!

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• So far, most of the talk about Ubuntu convergence—Canonical’s effort to make Ubuntu Linux run on smartphones and tablets as well as traditional PCs—is about hardware compatibility. But what about building the applications that Ubuntu mobile users will need? That’s a problem Ubuntu developers are now beginning to solve, too.

• Microsoft has made Surface Pro 3 tablet PC available for pre-order from May 21 and it didn’t take long for Linux enthusiasts to try Ubuntu 14.04 on it. And the results are quite promising! Surface pro 3 flaunts a decent hardware spec and it will definitely be a delight for any Linux user to run Ubuntu on it when all the components are supported.

Devices/Embedded

• Many will think of the Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black when considering a DIY project running Linux. But if you want to do some CPU-heavy work in your DIY project, like running some opencv code to give your project some vision, the Radxa Rock might be the right choice. Even if you’re not looking at a DIY project, this machine makes for a nice little Linux server.

• Imagination has joined with Broadcom, Ingenic, Qualcomm, and others to form a non-profit group called “Prpl” to build MIPs-based Linux and Android software.

• With Prpl, Imagination Technologies aims to replicate some of the success of rival ARM’s Linaro non-profit firm, which has helped to stabilize and standardize Linux and Android code across a variety of licensed platforms. Just as ARM formed Linaro with many of its licensees, Imagination has tapped MIPS licensees like Broadcom, Cavium, and Ingenic Semiconductor as founding members.

Phones

• Jaguar Land Rover R&D are to opening a state of the art new ‘Open Software Technology Centre’ in Portland Oregon, with an expected 2014 launch date. They are now looking for experienced software engineers to help in its research and product development efforts, on future vehicle infotainment technologies.

Android

• Is Intel doing more than many of the other major vendors when it comes to facilitating Android implementation?

• The answer, quite possibly, is yes.

• Anyone signed up for the Intel developer newsletters will receive a string of alerts from the company we used to know as the “chip giant” — is it now becoming the “software giant”?

• Intel is turning to a Chinese chip maker with a history in ARM processors to help it expand deeper into the highly competitive low-end Android tablet market. Intel officials on May 27 announced a partnership with Rockchip in which the companies will build a new family of mobile SoFIA systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) that will feature Intel’s x86 Atom platform and its 3G wireless modem technology. The Intel-branded processors will help the giant chip maker fill a hole in its planned SoFIA lineup that initially included a dual-core 3G version expected to hit the market later this year, and a quad-core 4G LTE version scheduled for the first half of 2015.

• Toshiba tipped a $110 Android tablet using a quad-core Intel Atom, while Intel revealed plans to license Rockchip to make its own low-cost Atom-based SoCs.

• Ever since Intel’s 22nm, Silvermont core-based Bay Trail and Merrifield system-on-chip families were announced, it seemed that the x86-based Atom would finally draw close to ARM on battery life while also offering competitive performance. Yet it remained to be seen whether Intel could also compete on price. Two announcements today suggest that the company can do just that.

• SlateKit Base is a Linux-based operating system created to help developers create a personalized Qt/JavaScript/HTML5 interface for their tablet.

• Following HP’s lead with its $100 7 Plus Android tablet, Toshiba has launched three new tablets that emphasize price over fancy features.

• At $109.99, the Excite Go (pictured above) is a little pricier than its HP competition, but it offers a couple of key advantages. It ships with the latest version of Android, 4.4 KitKat, while the 7 Plus sticks with the older 4.2.2 Jellybean. The Toshiba also provides twice the amount of built-in storage: 16GB versus the HP’s 8GB.

Free Software/Open Source

• First let’s talk about what ‘open’ is not. Open is not merely publishing an API, it’s not submitting your proprietary way of doing things to a standards body, nor is it throwing some code on GitHub. These things aren’t enough.

• Open isn’t about fundamentally changing the equation for the end user. What end users of technology are looking for is the ability to select technology from multiple vendors and have it work together. The ability to not be dependent on a single vendor and to switch non-disruptively if a vendor chooses to go in a different direction.

• So what is ‘open’? First of all it’s something everyone can see, everyone can access, the community can change and anyone can build on. It’s not easy, it’s hard. Good open source is open. How do you know good open source? Look at the community. If there is diversity, meritocracy and a high level of activity it’s probably ‘open’. Hadoop, MySQL, Linux, and OpenStack all make the grade. Cloud Foundry is getting there; Open vSwitch has really come a long way.

• According to W3Techs’ figures, Nginx runs 38.8 percent of the top 1,000 sites, with Apache Httpd running 33.7 percent and Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) running 9.2 percent. The overall rankings still put Apache at the top, though, with 60.5 percent of all known sites running Apache and only 20.7 percent running Nginx. But the closer one gets to the top of Alexa’s rankings, the greater the odds the site in question is running Nginx.

• 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.

• Blender 2.71 with its Cycles rendering now supports fire and smoke rendering, deformation motion blur, various optimizations, and support for NVIDIA Maxwell cards when it comes to CUDA support. Blender 2.71 also adds OpenGL render options to its UI, animation improvements, multi-threaded animations within the Blender Game Engine, and many improvements within the Freestyle NPR Rendering.

• For example, the Linux operating system is pervasive and open source tools such as the GCC compiler collection are widely used. I even have a copy of Linux running the refrigerator in my kitchen.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google considers that GTK+ is no longer meeting its requirements and decided to push its own solution for Google Chrome, in the form of Aura. The heralded GTK+x replacement for the Chrome browser has a downside for the Linux users, which are now forced to downgrade to an older version.

Mozilla

• As you may know, Pale Moon is an open-source, cross-platform browser based on Mozilla Firefox, being up to 25% faster then the original. The latest version available is Pale Moon 24.5.0, which has been recently released, coming with a bunch of optimizations, better support for third party extensions from Mozilla, and some bug-fixes.

• If you want to test Firefox OS but you don’t have a phone running it, you can install the Firefox OS simulator.

• Mozilla has begun taking preorders for the Firefox OS Flame, a new developer handset that’s a reference design for what the not-for-profit browser maker calls “mid-tier hardware” for its open source mobile OS.

SaaS/Big Data

• Can you name all of the OpenStack releases? It’s harder than you think, even for some of the core members of the development team.

• During OpenStack Summit, a sampling of attendees were surveyed to see if they could. The results were, well, mixed.

Databases

• Oracle is aiming to make it easier for open-source users of its MySQL database to scale.

• Today Oracle announced the new MySQL Fabric technology as an open-source tool that is available in the MySQL Utilities 1.4 release.

• “If you want to build a high-availability MySQL database, you typically have to setup replication, manage the failover and write some scripts to manage the failover,” Tomas Ulin, vice president, MySQL Engineering explained toDatabaseJournal. “MySQL Fabric hides most of that and will manage the high-availability for you.”

• The Met Office has selected PostgreSQL specialists 2ndQuadrant to provide training, support and consultancy as the weather service bids to shift from proprietary database solutions that require a licence fee to other alternatives.

• The selection of 2ndQuadrant comes after two pilot projects went into production in April when the Met Office’s locations management database (Strabo) and LIDAR (light detector) data capture system were implemented again into object-relational database management system PostgreSQL and open source software program PostGIS.

CMS

• The creators of open source CMS project Tendenci want to free up time to focus on developing the platform, so they’ve launched the Web Alliance Marketing Program to partner with service providers to help organizations with their post-deployment needs.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• More than twenty years ago, Linux began wending its way out of the primordial soup that was the early Internet and ensconcing itself in servers and workstations around the world.

• After its creation in 1991 it took another eight years or so to be widely recognized, but during that period, arguments arose as to what Linux really was. Could Red Hat, a company founded in 1993, sell services around it? Who made money when you sold a CD containing the latest version of Mandrake Linux? Who owned code written on top of Linux for specific purposes? To the open source community, the answers to all those questions was “No one. The community owned Linux.”

Programming

• Want to add real-time collaboration to your Web application? Mozilla’s TogetherJS is worth a look.

• Over the last year, some research into the possibility of introducing JIT compilation capabilities to PHP has been conducted.

• During this research, the realization was made that in order to achieve optimal performance from PHP, some internal API’s should be changed.

• This necessitated the birth of the phpng branch, initially authored by Dmitry Stogov, Xinchen Hui, and Nikita Popov. This branch does not include JIT capabilities, but rather seeks to solve those problems that prohibit the current, and any future implementation of a JIT capable executor achieving optimal performance by improving memory usage and cleaning up some core API’s.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Two California counties sued five of the world’s largest narcotics manufacturers on Wednesday, accusing the companies of causing the nation’s prescription drug epidemic by waging a “campaign of deception” aimed at boosting sales of potent painkillers such as OxyContin.

Security

• It is a strange series of events that link two Armenian software engineers; a Shenzen, China-based webcam company; two sets of new parents in the U.S.; and an unknown creep who likes to hack baby monitors to yell obscenities at children. “Wake up, you little slut,” the hacker screamed at the top of his digital lungs last summer when a two-year-old in Houston wouldn’t stir; she happened to be deaf. A year later, a baby monitor hacker struck again yelling obscenities at a 10-month-old in Ohio.

• A researcher has demonstrated that it’s possible for malicious attackers to create an Android app that will surreptitiously take pictures and upload them to a remote server without the user being aware of or noticing it.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• We note with great concern that UK and US troops will participate alongside Ukrainian troops in joint military exercises on Ukrainian territory in July as part of NATO’s Rapid Trident manoeuvres. Ukraine is not a member of NATO. Its participation in military exercises by a nuclear-armed alliance with a first-strike policy can only further destabilise the situation in the Ukraine, making it more difficult to achieve a political resolution to the crisis.

• One year ago last Friday, President Barack Obama gave a major address on drones, targeted killing and terrorism. The president and administration officials promised that the drone program would operate within limits protecting civilians, control would be transferred from the CIA to the Pentagon, and a new era of transparency would begin.

• The number of drone strikes has fallen since then, but it is far from clear that the drop was a result of a shift in administration policy. Frustrated in part by Congress and the facts on the ground in Pakistan and Yemen, when it comes to drones, Obama has fulfilled few of his promises.

• While unmanned aircraft could offer outstanding benefits to both the NYPD and the city’s fire department, these benefits may not outweigh the concerns of citizens and civil liberties groups.

• With the increasing use of drones in military operations, it is perhaps only a matter of time before robots replace soldiers. Whether fully automated war is on the immediate horizon, one researcher says it’s not too early to start examining the ethical issues that robot armies raise. In her recent thesis on the ethics of automation in war, Linda Johansson, a researcher in robot ethics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, suggests that it is necessary to reconsider the international laws of war, and to begin examining whether advanced robots should be held accountable for their actions.

• One of the most controversial decisions of the Obama presidency has been his authorization to target and kill Americans overseas who decide to take up arms against the United States. In 2011, a drone strike killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who moved to Yemen and became a high level cleric within al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate, which has been deemed by the United States to be al-Qaeda’s most dangerous branch. According to US officials, Awlaki was too dangerous to be left alive as his work and teachings were radicalizing others to join in jihad.

• The stories previewing President Obama’s upcoming foreign-policy address at West Point leaves the impression that the president might somehow just verbalize a word cloud of catchphrases instead of an actual speech. The New York Times story over the weekend, for example, explains that the president will seek to “chart a middle course between isolationism and military intervention.” It quotes national-security aide Ben Rhodes as saying the speech, at tomorrow’s commencement ceremony, is “a case for interventionism but not overreach.”

• At the most superficial level, Judge David Barron, who the Senate confirmed last week to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, is easy to compare to the infamous Bush Administration attorney John Yoo. Yoo authored several infamous memos while he was a senior attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which argued that it was perfectly legal to torture so-called “enemy combatants” captured during the Bush Administration’s efforts to fight terrorism. Barron, also as a senior attorney in the same Justice Department office, authored several memos concerning the use of drones to target suspected terrorists during the Obama Administration — including at least two concerning whether the president may order a senior enemy combatant who is also an American citizen killed without trial.

• The Justice Department plans to ask a federal appeals court to delete additional material from a drone-related legal opinion before it’s made public—redactions that would go beyond those the court approved last month, a government lawyer said in a legal filing Tuesday night.

• Last week, officials speaking on condititon of anonymity said the Obama Administration had decided not to appeal the pro-disclosure ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. Word of the decision to acquiesce in the the appeals court ruling and release the Office of Legal Counsel memo in redacted form came on the eve of a Senate vote on the confirmation of former DOJ official David Barron to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit. Indeed, word of the decision to make some of the legal opinion public may have helped clear the way for Barron’s confirmation by the Senate, 53-45.

• The legal charity Reprieve has threatened legal action against the British government over its failure to investigate the role of UK telecoms giant BT in facilitating covert US drone strikes in Yemen.

• BT has earned an estimated $23 million from a US government contract to supply key communications infrastructure between RAF Croughton – a US military base in Northamptonshire – and Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the secret base from which armed drones reportedly carry out lethal strikes in Yemen. According to the US military, American forces stationed at RAF Croughton provide “global strike operations.”

• Legal investigations have begun on behalf of Mohammed al-Qawli, a Yemeni civil servant who lost his brother, a primary school teacher, and cousin, a 20-year-old student, in a drone strike in January 2013. They follow a July 2013 complaint by Reprieve to the UK government watchdog, the National Contact Point (NCP) for the Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) Guidelines. That complaint was rejected after the NCP said it had no duty to “conduct research or interrogate” BT.

• President Barack Obama has employed the limitless executive power defended by Mr. McCarthy…

• It’s clear that when journalists and activists have been prevented by the governments of Yemen and the US from covering conflicts in Yemen — or persecuted for challenging official versions of events — the goal of authorities has repeatedly been to conceal atrocities against civilians. As the Yemeni military, backed by the US, continues both its fight against al Qaeda and its persecution of journalists, we must continue to ask: What are they trying to hide this time?

• Consider the most extremist act President Barack Obama has taken: he put an American on a secret kill list, sent a drone to find the man, and blew him up. No judge. No jury. Just a summary execution. The target might have deserved to die. But he had a right to a trial, even in absentia. The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no one will be deprived of life without due process.

• What do we aim at? Houses! Who do we kill? Everyone inside the houses!

• President Obama revealed his long-awaited plan for Afghanistan on Tuesday, announcing that a residual force of 9,800 U.S. troops will remain there for one year after the end of combat operations in December. That number will be cut in half at the end of 2015 and reduced at the end of 2016 to a small military presence at the U.S. Embassy.

• The phrase “close-embrace” to describe the incestuous relationship between business and government in advanced capitalism is by Masao Maryuma, a Japanese political scientist to describe corporate concentration under the blessing and encouragement of government. This is, along with the centrality of war and market expansion, among the most salient integral features of capitalist development in its progression to monopolism, hierarchical class structure, and establishing a full-blown partnership with government: the Corporate and National-Security States merging, with national security concerned as much with protecting the market share and freedom from adverse regulation of the dominant firms in the industrial and financial sectors, as with putatively repelling a foreign foe and protecting the “homeland”. The upshot, fascism without, necessarily, the concentration camp—fascism predicated on the internalized repression of the populace, conditioned to look to the business system as the genius of the nation, its arbiter of taste, its salvation. The trickle-down paradigm follows, as does the moral superiority of those at the top AND the enterprises they lead—conversely, justified class-stratification where the lazy and/or subversive (i.e., those maladapted to the incentives offered by capitalism) fall deservedly into an underclass.

• The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been granted the legal authority to refuse to release an historical report on the failed Bay of Pigs invasion more than 50 years ago.

• The matter arose after the National Security Archive, a nonprofit historical organization at George Washington University, sued the CIA to obtain the last portion of an internal history about the April 1961 mission to overthrow Fidel Castro of Cuba.

• The first four volumes of the report, written by CIA staff historian Jack Pfeiffer, have been released over the years. But the CIA refused to release the Volume V draft, claiming it was authorized under an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act to withhold the information. A final version of the report has not been produced.

Finance

• Bank of England governor Mark Carney says capitalism is doomed if ethics vanish

• Cornel West, Richard D. Wolff and I, along with moderator Laura Flanders, next Sunday will inaugurate “The Anatomy of Revolution,” a series of panel discussions focusing on modern revolutionary theorists. This first event will be part of a two-day conference in New York City sponsored by the Left Forum, and nine other discussions by West, Wolff and me will follow in other venues later this year.

• Sunday’s event will be about Thomas Paine, the author of “Common Sense,” “The Rights of Man” and “The Age of Reason”—the most widely read political essays of the 18th century, works that established the standards by which rebellion is morally and legally permissible. We will ask whether the conditions for revolt set by Paine have been met with the rise of the corporate state. Should Paine’s call for the overthrow of British tyranny inspire our own call for revolution? And if it should, to echo Vladimir Lenin, what must be done?

• Thomas Paine is America’s one great revolutionary theorist. We have produced a slew of admirable anarchists—Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day and Noam Chomsky—and radical leaders have arisen out of oppressed groups—Sitting Bull, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Cornel West and bell hooks—but we don’t have a tradition of revolutionists. This makes Paine unique.

• The “charitable” wing of David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity has dropped nearly $900,000 on ads to boost Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s reelection campaign, just days after polls showed Walker tied with his Democratic challenger, Mary Burke.

Censorship

• We’ve written many times about the importance of protection against secondary liability for websites, such that they’re not held liable for what their users do. In the US, thankfully, we have Section 230 of the CDA, which clearly states that websites cannot be held liable for speech made by their users. Frankly, we shouldn’t need such a law, because it should be obvious: you don’t blame the site for the comments made by others. That’s just a basic question of properly placing liability on those responsible. But, in a world of Steve Dallas lawsuits, in which people will always sue companies with deep pockets, it makes sense to have explicit safe harbors to stop bogus litigation.

• OSCE representative in charge of media freedom, Dunja Mijatovic, criticized today Serbian authorities over a disturbing trend of efforts to censor media content on the Internet.

• Filmmakers and importers will soon have to dip deeper into their pockets to have their film certified by the Film Censorship Board.

• Since the surprise Arab uprisings of 2011, the Saudi government has worked assiduously to ensure it has all the tools of censorship it needs to control dissent. These tools — a combination of special courts, laws, and regulatory authorities — are starting to fire on all cylinders. The result has been a string of arrests and prosecutions in recent months of independent and dissident voices.

• The Kansas Board of Regents gave final approval Wednesday to a strict new policy on what employees may say on social media. Critics say the policy violates both the First Amendment and academic freedom, but school officials say providing faculty with more specific guidelines will actually bolster academic freedom on campus.

Privacy

• No, that’s not a typo. The FBI has finally reached the 20th century when it comes to advancements in recording technology. No longer will records of custodial questionings be limited to agents’ handwritten notes — the sort of thing that’s impossible to independently verify and prone to “spin” by the transcriptionist. (via emptywheel)

• Since the FBI began under President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, agents have not only shunned the use of tape recorders, they’ve been prohibited by policy from making audio records of statements by criminal suspects without special approval.

• He said the NSA aims to have utter surveillance of everything it wants, and there is no boundary or limit to what it wants to do.

• DEPUTY Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis suggested yesterday that the former government “was aware of” an arrangement to accommodate alleged cell phone spying conducted by the United State’s National Security Agency (NSA) on the Bahamas.

• He stabbed three men to death in his apartment and shot the others as he opened fire on bystanders on the crowded streets of Isla Vista, California. Rodger then killed himself. Three semi automatic handguns, along with 41 loaded ten-round magazines— all bought at local gun stores— were found in his car. There could have been many more dead.

• Just over a year ago, only the most paranoid would have worried about the fact that the GCHQ sent two people to destroy these seemingly trivial components. But in the wake of Snowden’s revelations about the astonishing range of technologies that the NSA has developed in order to infiltrate hardware systems — things like radio transmitters built into USB leads — the GCHQ’s actions immediately raise a troubling thought: that most or all mainstream computers routinely contain various components that can be used to spy on us.

• Ever since the revelations from Edward Snowden regarding the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) mass interception of online communications, many individuals have taken measures to secure their data connections. Use of services designed to improve personal privacy has spiked, and many companies – like Google and Facebook – have begun fully encrypting traffic on their networks to try and avoid the prying eyes of spooks.

• The Chinese government is reviewing whether domestic banks’ reliance on high-end servers from International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) compromises the nation’s financial security, people familiar with the matter said, in an escalation of the dispute with the U.S. over spying claims.

• Government agencies, including the People’s Bank of China and the Ministry of Finance, are asking banks to remove the IBM servers and replace them with a local brand as part of a trial program, said the four people, who asked not to be identified because the review hasn’t been made public.

• Onstage at Code Conference, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that recent revelations of National Security Agency surveillance were “a huge disappointment, certainly to me and obviously to the world as a whole.”

• He suggested that some level of surveillance for national security may be appropriate, but that limited spying on a few foreign generals to prevent “total nuclear annihilation” during the Cold War is not the same as mass surveillance of Internet traffic in the modern age.

• Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know the apparatus of repression has been covertly attached to the democratic state. However, our struggle to retain privacy is far from hopeless

• Edward Snowden, former contractor at the US National Security Agency who leaked top secret documents about massive surveillance programmes conducted by the US government, said he “was trained as a spy” and rejected claims that he was a low-level analyst.

• Edward Snowden wants the world to know he was more than the “low-level systems administrator” US authorities have described him as—he was a trained spy and technical expert. In an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, the National Security Agency leaker says he was a spy “in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas—pretending to work in a job that I’m not—and even being assigned a name that was not mine.” He says he has worked for the CIA as well as the NSA, and as a lecturer at a counterintelligence academy for the Defense Intelligence Agency and for the CIA as well as the NSA..

• Fugitive leaker disputes US government claims he was a low-level administrator

• The past year has not been a great one for computer security. Last summer, Edward Snowden revealed how the NSA has been exploiting vulnerabilities to spy on people, Target suffered a massive security breach that exposed the credit card information for as much as a third of the American population, the Heartbleed bug was a major vulnerability found in the Internet’s most common encryption standard, and eBay just asked all 145 million of its customers to change their passwords after a security breach. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

• [...]

• She argues that every computer and every piece of software we use is vulnerable to hackers because of terrible security flaws. The reason for all these flaws, Norton says, it that these programs are being written by developers who face immense pressure to ship software quickly. Security is simply not a top priority in this context. Even the people who focus on computer security struggle to keep track of every vulnerability.

• Glenn Greenwald, one of the main journalists behind the exposé of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)’s global mass surveillance of Internet and telephone communications, said that the “biggest yet” revelations were yet to come in days ahead — the names of numerous U.S. persons and organisations who were the targets of the automated mega-snooping.

• Eight months after an explosive revelation that encryption standards developed and evaluated by the National Security Agency were allegedly subverted by the intelligence outfit, a House committee has moved to sever the NSA’s involvement in the standards process.

• An amendment to the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology Act, or FIRST Act, was passed by the House Science and Technology Committee late last week that strikes a requirement that the NSA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) work hand-in-hand on encryption standards.

Civil Rights

• Fox News contributor Karl Rove exploited the Obama administration’s accidental exposure of a CIA operative’s identity to absolve his own culpability in deliberately leaking former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity during the Bush administration.

• The resultant chaos in the wake of Arab Spring, however, tops the chart. In other words, it is very rare to read anything positive about the CIA in any US paper. So, from where does these sleuths receive positive reports about their achievements to satisfy the US Senate Intelligence Committee or the White House?

• After the deception was revealed by the British newspaper, however, the ruse had an unexpected outcome. Angry villagers in several tribal areas on the Afghan border chased away legitimate health workers. They accused those workers of being spies who wanted to gather information on the people living in that region.

• Pohl ordered prosecutors last month to turn over never-revealed details about al-Nashiri’s treatment. A CIA inspector general’s report says he was waterboarded and threatened with a gun and power drill.

• It’s been quite a while since we’ve had much news about the TSA’s nudie scanners, other than the admission by one TSA employee that they, you know, don’t work to do anything other than show people being naked. Yes, the federal government’s oddly belated overreaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which they don’t think will be attempted again, required a massive influx of taxpayer cash to pay for all this uselessness. That would be your money, my money, all of our money going into a program that didn’t work, wasn’t needed, and violated our rights. But a story of this kind of futility and waste needs a nice little bow put on it for an ending. The federal government never seems to fail us in this kind of request.

DRM

• Amazon was the target of some well-deserved criticism this past week for making the anti-customer move of suspending sales of books published by Hachette, reportedly as a hardball tactic in its ongoing negotiations over ebook revenue splits. In an excellent article, Mathew Ingram connects this with other recent bad behavior by Internet giants leveraging their monopolies. Others have made the connection between this move and a similar one in 2010, when Amazon pulled Macmillan books off its digital shelves.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• For years, Disney was notoriously heavy-handed in defense of its intellectual property. Then along came “Frozen”

• Striking a crushing blow against a legal linchpin of the copyright troll business model, a federal appeals court held today that copyright holders may not abuse the legal process to obtain the identities of thousands of Internet users.

• In April 2013 the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act was passed which allow use of ‘orphaned works’, which is to say if you can’t find the owner of an image after a ‘diligent search’, then you may now use the work where as previously you typically could not legally do so. This marked a fundamental shift in the UK government’s approach to content sharing from presumption of copyright, to proof of copyright being required. Whilst this move has opened a market more amenable to sharing in the internet age, serious concerns from photographer’s groups have been raised that this legalisation fundamentally undermines the rights to their works.

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