● 06.04.14

● Links 4/6/2014: More Tizen Devices, Fedora Linux Project Leader Matthew Miller

Posted in News Roundup at 10:38 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Massive open online courses offer IT professionals the opportunity to learn about some of the tech industry’s most in-demand and current topics for free. Available to anyone with a Web connection, MOOCs cover a range of hot tech topics including software defined networking, cloud computing, security, drone development, artificial intelligence and mobile programming.s

• I did a full review of an earlier version of North Korea Linux on Desktop Linux Reviews a while back. There are some interesting and scary videos in the review of what life is like inside of North Korea. I’ll certainly take a pass on running North Korea Linux as my primary distro, but I’m sure it will appeal to somebody out there.

Desktop

• In a blog post constructed as rhythmic verse, Google has confirmed that Chromebooks–portable computers running the Chrome OS platform–are coming to nine new global regions: Norway, Denmark, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Belgium, New Zealand, and the Philippines. As we’ve reported,

Server

• The NUCs run Ubuntu server and are storage hosts and the primary interface to the external world. The system has 8x Parallella boards and a shared gigabit Ethernet switch, giving a peak performance of around 208 GFLOPs.

Kernel Space

• Linux has already transformed data center economics on the server side, and Cumulus Networks is set to do it again – this time through the network. The company behind Cumulus Linux, the first distribution for data center switches and other networking hardware, is part of a broader enterprise movement toward open networking.

• Intel will begin shipping the Core i7 4790K “Devil’s Canyon” processor this month and thanks to Computex now getting underway we’re able to publicly talk about this high-performance chip.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman has sent out his various pull requests for the Linux 3.16 kernel. Of the subsystems maintained by Greg KH, the staging area again represents a bulk of the user-interesting changes.

• The way Linux development has worked for the last several years has been relatively straight forward.

• Every six to 10 weeks there is a new Linux kernel, with each kernel requiring six to eight release candidates. At the end of the release cycle, Linus Torvalds opens up the ‘merge’ window during which new code is pulled in from the various sub-system maintainer developer trees.

• For the Linux 3.16 kernel cycle, that tried and true system will change somewhat.

• Among other pull requests in the past day like the new staging work and the plethora of ARM enhancements, Ingo Molnar sent in his scheduler changes for the Linux 3.16 kernel.

• Of the highlights for the scheduler tree with the Linux 3.16 merge window are NUMA scheduling updates for better performance, CPU idle changes to improve the high level idle scheduling logic, standardized idle polling across architectures, and continued work on preparing better power/energy-aware scheduling. Another change to point out is for using the deepest C-state always when in the “freeze” sleep state.

• With the Linux 3.15 kernel expected for release within the next few days, here is a rundown of the top features that are introduced as part of this big kernel release.

Benchmarks

• I’ve tested over 60 GPUs from the Intel HD Graphics, AMD Radeon, AMD FirePro, and NVIDIA GeForce series to see how their performance is when using the very latest open-source Linux graphics drivers on Ubuntu.

Applications

• 0.27.1 is more than your traditional point release: 0.27.1 is our best release ever. While it doesn’t have major new user features, it has received over 340 improvements.

• Samba 4.1.8, an app that seamlessly integrates Linux/Unix servers and desktops into Active Directory environments using the winbind daemon, is now available for download.

• Psensor, a hardware temperature monitoring tool, was updated recently with an option to display the temperature on the panel (next to its AppIndicator icon), along with other improvements and bug fixes.

Proprietary

• Intel has published a new Linux kernel patch-set that adds Quick Assist Technology support to Linux along with a driver to handle their DH895xxC hardware accelerator. This is a new chip for trying to accelerate cryptography and data compression tasks.

• Quick Assist Technology is a new Intel technology for better accelerating cryptography and data compression operations. The Linux implementation consists of a kernel driver to connect to the Linux kernel crypto framework and a Linux user-space library with a QuickAssist API for application porting. Intel Linux developers have already patched OpenSSL’s libcrypto and Zlib for taking advantage of this Intel technology.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The KDE Applications 4.13 announcement highlighted the delightful new capabilities of Palapeli, the KDE jigsaw puzzle application. What the announcement did not mention is that the Palapeli maintainer, Ian Wadham, is celebrating 50 years of software experience. He’s ready to hand off Palapeli and his other KDE software development responsibilities. Albert Astals Cid called attention to Ian’s achievements and suggested a Dot interview.

• Amarok is the default application installed with openSUSE but I would certainly recommend using Clementine instead.

• Clementine feels lighter, has a nicer interface, the online options work better and there is better support for external audio devices.

• This year, it is besides the recurring multimedia topics, a lot about improving the new KDE Frameworks, the related documentation and the development experience with IDE’s and such.

• The KDE4 series is still actively developed (in August we will see the release of KDE SC 4.14) but the KDE developers have been working long and hard at the next generation desktop. I wrote some generic phrases in the past about KDE Frameworks 5 (the successor to the KDE Platform aka kdelibs) and Plasma Next (the Qt5 based successor of the Plasma Workspaces of KDE4 which uses Qt4 for its graphical splendor).

• Though the Krita team was one of the first to start the tradition of having sprints, with the first Krita Sprint in Deventer, in 2005, Krita sprints are rather infrequent! But, of course, we also meet each other during the more regular Calligra sprints.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.12 was released on March 26 (2014), but it didn’t start shipping on many distributions until very recently. In this post, I’ll let you in on what I think about it; the cool (good) features and those features I think the developers need to take a closer look at and try to make it better and more user-friendly.

• Initially we were thinking to go with libical ( an open source reference implementation of the icalendar data type and serialization format .) But GTG is not a calender, that’s why we dropped the idea.

Distributions

• There a few reasons why you might want to build your own distribution. You might want to build a custom install CD to match the policy of your organisation. For example, a GNOME desktop with Chrome as the web browser might be the standard desktop where you work. That touches on another motivation for wanting to create a customised installer: sometimes the creator of the distribution makes a decision that you simply don’t like. Canonical’s decision to switch to its own UI, Unity, ranks amongst its most controversial decisions. However, by using some of the methods that we explore here, you could create a distribution that is standard Ubuntu, but with a traditional desktop that you are more comfortable with.

• There are other, niche reasons for wanting to build your own distribution. You might need to put something small and lightweight together for an older computer. You might need to build a live media ISO that you are able to carry around with you and to bring your favourite set of tools to bear when you need them.

New Releases

• SparkyLinux 3.4 “Annagerman” LXDE, Razor-Qt and Enlightenment 18 is out.

Screenshots

Slackware Family

• The latest update to Slackware-current brought us a new kernel (3.14.5) and a new gcc compiler (4.8.3).

• This warranted a build of new multilib gcc packages. Get them from your nearest mirror. I also refreshed the “compat32″ layer of packages – this is the set of converted 32-bit Slackware packages which you’ll need at a minimum, so that you will be able to run most of the 32-bit software that is out there.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has expanded the company’s strategic alliance with SAP AG to make it easier for customers to adopt and run the SAP Data Management portfolio, including the SAP HANA platform, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE), SAP IQ software, and the SAP SQL Anywhere suite on Red Hat’s open source solutions.

• Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat’s announcement that it will support SAP’s HANA is good news for SAP and Red Hat hardware partners like Dell and IBM.

Fedora

• Matthew Miller takes over for Robyn Bergeron to lead the next Red Hat community Linux distribution. Red Hat today announced Matthew Miller as the new leader of its Fedora community Linux project. Miller takes over for Robyn Bergeron, who announced on May 19 that she was stepping down as Fedora Project Leader.

• Last month Robyn Bergeron stepped down as the Fedora Project Leader while now Red Hat has found her replacement.

• The Fedora Project team has selected Matthew Miller to be the new Fedora Project Leader, a long-time Fedora community member, member of Red Hat since 2012, and was the founder of Boston University’s BU Linux distribution.

• I’m proud to have been part of the Fedora community since the early days. I’m grateful to have been given the opportunity to work on Fedora as my full-time job for the past year and a half. And now, I’m excited to be stepping into a new place within the community as Fedora Project Leader. These are incredible times in computing and in free and open source software, and we have incredible things going on in Fedora to match — the next years are full of opportunity and growth for the whole project and community, and I’m thrilled to be in a position to help.

Debian Family

• Six months after the release of the first version, we are pleased to announce the updated of ISOs Tango Studio to version 2.2. This new version has been updated to Wheezy 7.5, contains some new features and bugfixes, as well as an update of the best open-source applications available for sound creation.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The next Ubuntu Linux release, Ubuntu 14.10 “Utopic Unicorn” will likely be powered by the 3.16 kernel.

• Given that Linux 3.15 is being released this week and Linux 3.16 should be christened around the end of July or early August, it makes sense that Canonical developers are focused on shipping the 3.16 kernel for Ubuntu 14.10. Ubuntu 14.10 has a feature freeze on 21 August, the final kernel freeze on 9 October, and the official release on 23 October.

• Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, is strengthening its ties to system-on-a-chip (SoC) manufacturer Cavium through expanded support for the ThunderX family, which could open new doors for Ubuntu and open source on ARM64 devices, OpenStack cloud servers and other enterprise hardware.

• It is not a coincidence that Cavium, a maker of MIPS processors aimed at networking equipment and other embedded uses chose the Computex 2014 conference in Taipei, Taiwan to announce its entry into the ARM server chip space. Many of Cavium’s customers for its ThunderX processors will come from Taiwan, where a large percentage of the world’s servers are designed and manufactured these days – and usually for the hyperscale datacenter operators who will be on the cutting edge of the ARM adoption curve for servers.

• Canonical, Microsoft, and Apple want the same thing from their operating systems, but they go about it in different ways. It’s only possible to estimate for Canonical how long it will take them to achieve their goal because their product is open source, but it’s much harder to do this for the other companies.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint is among the most popular Linux desktop distributions in use today, thanks in large part to its core focus on improving the desktop experience for users. It’s a focus that has been in place for Linux Mint since day one. When Clement Lefebvre developed Linux Mint in 2006, he did so with the goal of creating a user-friendly desktop version of Linux. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu Linux, adding new desktop, setting and configuration elements. The latest version of Linux Mint, version 17 (code-named Qiana), is based on the recent Ubuntu 14.04 “Trusty Tahr” release, which is what is known as a Long Term Support (LTS) release. Lefebvre has pledged that Linux Mint 17 will also be an LTS release and will continue to receive security updates for five years, until 2019. Lefebvre has also pledged that until 2016, the core package base will remain the same, which is intended to make it easier for users to upgrade to new versions of Linux Mint. As is the case with other Linux distributions, there are multiple desktop user interfaces that are available to users. With Linux Mint, however, there is a particular focus on the Cinnamon desktop, which was created by the Linux Mint distribution itself. In this slide show, eWEEK examines some of the key features of the Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon release.

Devices/Embedded

• The $130 Linux-based Crock-Pot WeMo Smart Slow Cooker was unveiled at CES earlier this year, and will be available in stores soon. I got to spend some time with one this week and thought I’d share some early impressions ahead of the full review. Belkin and Jarden Home Brands’ app-controlled slow cooker struck me as an unlikely smart home contender at first. Slow cookers are about as low maintenance as possible, so how much value could WeMo integration add to something already so straightforward?

Phones

• There are a lot of headlines being generated about open phone platforms this week. Apple CEO took a shot at Android at the company’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, even as he announced that many APIs and platform-level features in iOS are going to be opened up for developers for the first time.

Ballnux

• Dell has added two new Android-based models to its Venue lineup of tablets. Both the Venue 7 and the Venue 8 tablets now run Android 4.4 KitKat and come with budget specifications.

• Two releases from Samsung are making the headlines this week. And the headlines are centered around the Samsung Z Tizen OS smartphone and the Samsung Tizen OS TV SDK (Software Development Kit).

• The Korean electronics company, which earlier this week unveiled a new smartphone running the open-source operating system, on Tuesday showed off Tizen-based TVs, cameras, and wearables — some of these devices for the first time. The gadgets, displayed at the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco, all are part of Samsung’s efforts to create a broad ecosystem for Tizen, its alternative to Android.

Free Software/Open Source

• Zettaset has expanded its Big Data security offerings with the announcement of support for Hortonworks and other open source Hadoop 2.x distributions in its Orchestrator management and security platform.

• With fewer defects being found in major open source projects than in large proprietary software packages, what are the security strengths and weaknesses of open source development?

• 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.

• In today’s Linux news, a new project manager is named for Fedora. Nick Heath says Open Source is more secure because of a “heightened focus on quality controls.” And a team of developers are trying to save TrueCrypt one way or another.

• Perforce Software todayannounced it has released open source versions of P4CLI, its core command line interface to the company’s powerful versioning engine, and P4Web, its popular web-based versioning client. The newly released source code will allow developers to further customize these popular clients for their specific needs, giving them the power to adapt the clients to their evolving environments. All open source projects are available immediately on Perforce Workshop, an open source community built and hosted by Perforce.

Events

• Kaltura Connect is a conference all about open source video. From June 13-18 in New York City, 1,000+ attendees including developers, experts, thoughts leaders and executives from small businesses to global enterprises, universities and educational organizations, healthcare, media broadcasters and new-media publishers.

Web Browsers

• In 2013 the browser wars sprouted a new rendering engine: Blink. When Blink forked in April 2013, Webkit had a total of 1.8 million lines of C++, 2,500 commits per month and was the most popular browser engine. On mobile, Webkit backed the top 3 browsers (Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Android Browser), accounting for the majority of mobile eyeballs. This post is a look at the Blink/Webkit fork one year later: how have the projects diverged, who is driving them, and what are they up to?

SaaS/Big Data

• Want a fully open source Platform-as-a-Service cloud framework? Apache’s just made Stratos a top-level project.

Education

• At Opensource.com, we love sharing stories about the ways open source tools and principles are changing the nature of teaching and learning today. Over and over, we’ve seen how approaching education the open source way can transform classrooms all over the world.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This year’s GNU Tools Cauldron is taking place next month at the University of Cambridge where some very interesting compiler-related discussions will be taking place.

• His talk was quite how I expected it to be. He was idealist – Aditya and I discussed that he had to be it, as the face and primary driver of Free software. Richard spoke of the advantages of Free software, where he pointed out the numerous back doors that have been found in proprietary software to spy on users. He spoke of the GNU time line, how he had started it, how Emacs and other things came about. At some point of time, he expressed his annoyance to the fact that people confuse GNU and Linux, and free software and open source software. He spoke of how people think Linus is the father of free software etc. I quite enjoyed his talk. At some points, though, I couldn’t help but think that he didn’t really need to use negativeness to put his point across. He didn’t just differentiate between free and open source software, and he didn’t just say how free software is better than the open source philosophy, he went on to stress on why open source wasn’t good enough. If you’ve seen his sessions, you’ll probably understand what I mean.

Openness/Sharing

• When one thinks of Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) technology, they probably think of the large industrial level printers by 3D Systems, that cost in the $XXX,XXX range. These certainly are not 3D printers that an ordinary person would have in their home or garage. They aren’t even printers that the ordinary person has direct access to.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Given this ASUS ultrabook is only a few months old, hopefully the ultrabook will be able to work out fine until the mobile Broadwell processors hit the market when I decide on my next laptop/ultrabook or end up back with a MacBook Pro.

Health/Nutrition

Security

• Microsoft’s decision to end support for Windows XP in April was met with a collective gulp by the IT community. For good reason: Approximately 30 percent of all desktop systems continue to run XP despite Microsoft’s decision to stop offering security updates. Furthermore, a critical security flaw in Internet Explorer 8 disclosed recently by HP’s TippingPoint Division opens the door to remote attacks on XP systems that use IE8.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• There is a tendency to believe that Russian president Vladimir Putin is orchestrating the unrest in eastern Ukraine, sending in irregular Russian forces to stir up pro-Russian separatist sentiment.

• As guesses go, this might not be a bad one–but journalism is supposed to be about presenting evidence to confirm such speculation. The New York Times clearly has a hunch about deep Russian involvement in Ukraine. The ways it tries to confirm this hunch are curious.

• [...]

• What you’re left with from the Times is the suggestion that the lack of direct evidence is probably proof that Russia is up to something– i.e., “leaving no fingerprints.”

• During the days of the Soviet Union, Kremlinologists spent their time poring over state propaganda in an attempt to understand what was really going on in the USSR. It bears some resemblance to what one might be seeing in the New York Times now.

• The multi-decade, trillion dollar waste that we call the drug war has become increasingly unpopular, with everyone from Nobel Prize winning economists to leaders from the religious and civil rights communities calling for its end. Those who defend arresting, incarcerating and militarizing our way into even more disaster, often claim that it’s all in the name of protecting children. Yet, the war on drugs is waged with a shocking disregard for human rights, and even babies and children are not spared.

• The California State Senator, Leland Yee, has been charged with the conspiracy to deal firearms, as well as wire fraud. Yee was arrested for promising shoulder-fired automatic weapons and missiles from a Muslim separatist group to an undercover FBI-agent in exchange for donations towards his campaign. The allegations towards Yee outlined in an affidavit from an FBI agent were not only pointed towards the Senator, but to twenty-five other people as well. According to the court documents, the allegations against Yee included a number of favors that he had requested in exchange for campaign donations. He also performed “official acts” in exchange for donations to get himself out of a $70,000 debt that he acquired during a failed San Francisco mayoral bid.

• The Country Ratings Poll asked more than 24,500 people from 24 nations whether they felt positive or negative about 16 countries and the EU. The UK finished third, with 56 per cent of those surveyed saying they thought it was having a good influence internationally.

• On Saturday, Donald Trump took a break from retweeting delusional sycophants begging him to run for president to comment on the successful rescue of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the United States’ last (and only) prisoner of war in Afghanistan.

• The Fierce Take: There is no doubt that Skype Translate could be an invaluable business tool, though the skeptic can’t help but wonder if the NSA would also utilize this to bolster its various wiretapping efforts.

• In that sense, we as a country are paying another price as a consequence of the Republican clown show. Blind trust in government is never a good thing for a civilized and free society. But when the opposition is so blinded by its own ideology that it is deaf to the facts and mute to a constructive discussion to prevent mishaps from occurring again, it means they cannot be trusted to hold the government accountable.

• Richard Clarke served as the nation’s top counterterrorism official under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before resigning in 2003 in protest of the Iraq War. A year before the Sept. 11 attacks, Clarke pushed for the Air Force to begin arming drones as part of the U.S. effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden. According to Clarke, the CIA and the Pentagon initially opposed the mission. Then Sept. 11 happened. Two months later, on November 12, 2001, Mohammed Atef, the head of al-Qaeda’s military forces, became the first person killed by a Predator drone. According to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, U.S. drones have since killed at least 2,600 people in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Clarke has just written a novel about drone warfare called, Sting of the Drone. We talk to Clarke about the book and his concerns about President Obama’s escalation of the drone war. “I think the [drone] program got out of hand,” Clarke says. “The excessive secrecy is as counterproductive as some of the strikes are.”

• Richard Clarke, the nation’s former top counterterrorism official, tells Democracy Now! he believes President George W. Bush is guilty of war crimes for launching the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Clarke served as national coordinator for security and counterterrorism during Bush’s first year in office. He resigned in 2003 following the Iraq invasion and later made headlines by accusing Bush officials of ignoring pre-9/11 warnings about an imminent attack by al-Qaeda. “I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes,” Clarke says. “Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have. But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried. So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing. And I think we need to ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that in the case of members of the Bush administration. It’s clear that things that the Bush administration did — in my mind, at least — were war crimes.”

• The relatives of three United States citizens killed in American drone strikes without trial, including Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric, have decided not to appeal a federal judge’s dismissal of a lawsuit they filed against Obama administration officials.

• Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has quite rightly called on the Obama administration to publicly disclose its legal justifications for the claimed power to order the killing, without trial or hearing, of U.S. citizens abroad who are suspected of being terrorist leaders planning attacks against the United States. The dispute came up, most recently, in the context of David Barron’s successful nomination to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. As a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel, Barron reportedly co-authored at least two memos providing the legal rationale for the administration’s decision to order the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and propagandist for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

• Wherever there is the threat of war there are always people banging the drum—and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) is among the worst.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Alberta artist, Peter von Tiesenhausen, has effectively stopped oil corporations from putting a pipeline through his 800 acre property by covering it with artwork and copyrighting the top six inches of his land as an artwork.

• The corporate media silence on Fukushima has been deafening even though the melted-down nuclear power plant’s seaborne radiation is now washing up on American beaches.

• Ever more radioactive water continues to pour into the Pacific.

• Charity calls on EU to end reliance on imported and domestic fossil fuels and increase energy efficiency and boost renewables

• Emergency action is needed on carbon emissions, but Obama’s plan announced Monday is not a move to action, but more talk about potentially taking action. Critical time continues to be lost as the Earth heats up and the oceans acidify. As critical time is lost, if the proposal is even adopted, it could be overturned by any president who follows Obama within a little over a year of being adopted. To say this appears to be far too little too late is an understatement. Had Obama been serious about climate change he would have taken action as soon as he took power.

Finance

• Class and ethnicity, rather than ability, will probably determine the adult lives of Channel 4′s 11-year-old dinner guests

• I found I had the brain imaging pattern and genetic make up of a full-blown psychopath while conducting research – and yet, I turned out to be a successful scientist and family man

• It’s well-established by now (Extra!, 7/06) that political reporters prefer to talk and write about Democrats who stay close to the “center” instead of placating the left-wing party base. This is simply smart politics, these observers note, since it’s always better to be in the middle, because that’s where most people are.

• The problem is that pundits’ idea of the “middle” doesn’t seem to correspond to reality.

• [...]

• How opposing a minimum wage increase and keeping taxes low for corporations and the wealthy centrist? These are not popular policies in general, and certainly not among Democrats in the state Cuomo governs. Nonetheless, Bruni is keenly worried that Cuomo may be promising too much to other Democrats, who might tug him away from this “middle” and “hijack his legacy.”

• Yesterday afternoon, the Seattle City Council unanimously passed legislation enacting a phased-in $15 minimum wage in Seattle, the highest minimum wage in the country. Mayor Ed Murray is expected to sign the bill into law this afternoon, just after 1 p.m. in Cal Anderson Park. The first phase of the wage raise is scheduled to start April 1, 2015, and headlines around the country seem to be asking if Seattle, the progressive urban utopia, is just the beginning of a nationwide trend.

Censorship

• Given the many porn stars on Twitter, it’s unclear why Pakistan went with Knox; perhaps the fairly widespread national dislike of Duke* is international. “Dear Twitter Team,” writes Abdul Batin of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority in his request, which was posted on Chilling Effects by Twitter. “Please block the following unethical links.” In the list that follows is the “videos and photos” portion of Knox’s account: https://twitter.com/belle_knox/media, which is thoroughly NSFW (not safe for work) as well as NSFP (not safe for Pakistan). Apparently, Batin doesn’t mind her tweets; he just doesn’t want his country to see her photos and videos. The same request asks for the removal of a url that would perform a search on Twitter for “Burn Quran” photos, calling it blasphemous.

• Google and other internet companies find themselves in a quandary over how to strike a balance between privacy and freedom of information as the top world search engine took a first step towards upholding an EU privacy ruling.

• State claims Mordechai Vanunu is still a threat to security a decade after his release from prison.

Privacy

• The move came just hours after Google called out email providers, including Comcast, for not using encryption. Google Tuesday publicized for the first time the share of its email traffic with other providers that remains encrypted. According to Google, fewer than 1% of Gmail messages sent to Comcast.net addresses remained encrypted on a sample day last month.

• The new director of the National Security Agency says he believes whistleblower Edward Snowden was “probably not” working for a foreign intelligence agency, despite frequent speculation and assertion by the NSA’s allies to the contrary.

• Says lying does more harm than good

• The National Security Agency hasn’t exactly stopped spying on Americans en masse just yet, but a new court filing accuses the NSA of unlawfully destroying the evidence it collected against United States citizens for years.

• With the tap of a finger, iPhone users will soon be able to lock their doors, turn off appliances and even use a baby monitor, all thanks to Apple’s new software “Homekit.” However, not everyone is convinced creating a smartphone with your smartphone is entirely secure.

• “What I would really be concerned about is that data. The secure data that is opening your doors and turning your lights on and watching your baby, where is that being stored?” said Christian Argie, owner of Top Notch Computers in Charlottesville.

• Edward Snowden’s latest revelation about the NSA’s snooping inspired an extra dose of shock and disbelief when he said the agency’s hackers can use a mobile phone as a bug even after it’s been turned off. The whistleblower made that eye-opening claim when Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News, holding his iPhone aloft during last Wednesday’s interview, asked, “What can the NSA do with this device if they want to get into my life? Can anyone turn it on remotely if it’s off? Can they turn on apps?

• A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit an Idaho woman filed against President Barack Obama and other federal officials over the National Security Agency’s collection of cellphone information.

• A federal judge in Idaho urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to rule against the National Security Agency’s surveillance program of telephone records while saying his own hands are tied by legal precedent.

• However, Rogers insisted the agency was not collecting such images of U.S. citizens, unless they were linked with an investigation of a foreign subject, and then only after taking the appropriate legal steps.

• The Snowden revelations hit like a bomb, sending out shrapnel which risked severing US ties with friendly and not-so-friendly states alike. Here are the top eight bilateral debacles sparked by NSA spying, whose fallout could be felt for years to come.

• Germany’s Federal Prosecutor General Harald Range has decided to launch a criminal investigation into alleged hacking of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone by the US National Security Agency (NSA), a German daily reported Tuesday.

• The mass spying on German citizens by the NSA, however, will at least provisionally not be placed under formal investigations, Xinhua reported citing German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

• Foreign technology services providers such as Google and Apple can become cybersecurity threats to Chinese users, security analysts said, one week after China announced that it will put in place a security review on imported technology equipment.

• A Bahamas foreign service team will travel to Paraguay this week to address the Organization of American States (OAS) on the controversial allegations that the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States is recording and storing audio from every cell phone conversation in The Bahamas.

• A new organization for whistleblowing will launch on Wednesday morning when the ExposeFacts.org website goes live and the group begins its first day with a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington.

• Over the past year, as the Snowden revelations have rolled out, the government and its apologists have developed a set of talking points about mass spying that the public has now heard over and over again. From the President, to Hilary Clinton to Rep. Mike Rogers, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and many others, the arguments are often eerily similar.

• Australia “pleaded” with the US security agency to extend their partnership and subject Australian citizens to greater surveillance, a new book on whistleblower Edward Snowden claims.

• Most Australians want their government to spy on other countries, including allies like the United States and New Zealand, the 2014 Lowy Institute poll has found.

• In the near future, companies, hell even the NSA could be mining our brainwaves for data. It’s bad enough that private details about our lives revealed in hoovered up in emails and phone calls; imagine if Big Brother was literally reading our minds? That’s some dystopian shit.

• On June 4, 2014, one day before the anniversary of the Snowden revelations, Poland celebrates 25 years since the fall of an authoritarian regime. On this occasion, President Obama is visiting Poland and meeting with many heads of states—including officials who were affected by the mass surveillance scandal carried out by the NSA. The United States and Poland have a long tradition of official visits between their leaders. These visits symbolize a close, allied relationship between the two countries and “help advance many political and economic issues.” Since October 2013, the Panoptykon Foundation, a Polish NGO, has tried to understand the relationship between the Polish and United States’ secret service organizations. Panoptykon believes that the Polish government, by accepting mass and pre-emptive surveillance, is reverting back to the much contested practices of the former, authoritarian regime—practices that triggered the revolution 25 years ago. Thus, the NGO has organized a user-generated campaign for June 4, urging people to welcome President Obama to Poland by vocalizing their thoughts on mass surveillance.

• The U.S. National Security Agency has accredited Lockheed Martin for its Cyber Incident Response Assistance program to help users of national security systems respond to cyber attacks.

• Last Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed something called the USA Freedom Act. The bill was intended by its authors to end the National Security Agency’s broad and privacy-shredding bulk data collection program, but the final version that passed is so weak that bulk data collection will still be permitted.

• A year ago tonight, the world confirmed what most people already suspected. Privacy is dead and the Big Brother of George Orwell’s 1984 is alive. An obscure technician, Edward Snowden, began releasing documents stolen during his work on behalf of America’s most shadowy intelligence group. He proved the US National Security Agency (NSA) routinely spies on hundreds of millions of people.

• Almost a year after Edward Snowden revealed himself as the man who blew the whistle on the National Security Agency, some people are still wondering how he had access to so many classified intelligence documents.

• Posted at 7am on Tuesday on the website Change.org by French daily L’Express, the petition had garnered over 33,000 signatures and counting by 5:30pm.

• Back in December of 2012, we wrote about (and agreed with) Julian Sanchez’s suggestion that Google should do end-to-end encryption of emails, even if it (only slightly) mucked with its advertising business model. The impact on overall security would be great (and this was before the Snowden revelations had even come out). As Sanchez pointed out, not only would this (finally) drive more widespread adoption for email encryption, it would create enormous goodwill among privacy advocates. About six weeks ago, we mentioned this again, when it was rumored that Google was trying to make encrypted email easier, though it was said that it wouldn’t go “site-wide” on end-to-end encryption.

• In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency.

• The source of the instruction, of course, is the trove of documents about the National Security Agency surveillance system released by the courageous fighter for freedom Edward J. Snowden, expertly summarized and analyzed by his collaborator Glenn Greenwald in his new book, ” No Place to Hide.”

• Apparently, the UK government worked very hard to get the Guardian and others not to publish certain details about how GCHQ (and NSA) tap certain underwater cables that connect the internet around the globe, as it turns out that they get lots of help from BT and Vodafone Cable (via its purchase of Cable & Wireless). Those two companies apparently get paid handsomely for helping the government tap into these undersea cables.

• Greenwald responded with a column that included a statement from Snowden saying he had not worked with Campbell and speculating the documents were actually by the British government as part of an attempt to make the case his leaks were “harmful.”

• Above-top-secret details of Britain’s covert surveillance programme – including the location of a clandestine British base tapping undersea cables in the Middle East – have so far remained secret, despite being leaked by fugitive NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden. Government pressure has meant that some media organisations, despite being in possession of these facts, have declined to reveal them. Today, however, the Register publishes them in full.

• The secret British spy base is part of a programme codenamed “CIRCUIT” and also referred to as Overseas Processing Centre 1 (OPC-1). It is located at Seeb, on the northern coast of Oman, where it taps in to various undersea cables passing through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Seeb is one of a three site GCHQ network in Oman, at locations codenamed “TIMPANI”, “GUITAR” and “CLARINET”. TIMPANI, near the Strait of Hormuz, can monitor Iraqi communications. CLARINET, in the south of Oman, is strategically close to Yemen.

• British national telco BT, referred to within GCHQ and the American NSA under the ultra-classified codename “REMEDY”, and Vodafone Cable (which owns the former Cable & Wireless company, aka “GERONTIC”) are the two top earners of secret GCHQ payments running into tens of millions of pounds annually.

• Last month, ConnectEDU, a popular college and career planning portal in Boston that had collected personal details on millions of high school and college students, filed for bankruptcy.

• Now federal regulators want to stop the company from selling off students’ names, email addresses, birth dates and other intimate information as assets.

• In a letter sent Thursday to the bankruptcy judge in the case, Jessica L. Rich, the director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, argued that such a sale would violate ConnectEDU’s own privacy policy, a potentially deceptive practice.

• We followed the back and forth situation earlier this year, in which there were some legal questions over whether or not the NSA needed to hang onto surveillance data at issue in various lawsuits, or destroy it as per the laws concerning retention of data. Unfortunately, in the process, it became clear that the DOJ misled FISA court Judge Reggie Walton, withholding key information. In response, the DOJ apologized, insisting that it didn’t think the data was relevant — but also very strongly hinting that it used that opportunity to destroy a ton of evidence. However, this appeared to be just the latest in a long history of the NSA/DOJ willfully destroying evidence that was under a preservation order.

Civil Rights

• Hundreds of Amazon chiefs clashed with police in Brazil last week as the 2014 FIFA World Cup, which begins on June 12, draws closer.

• According to The Week, protestors said that the cup’s copy1 billion budget should have been used to support the country’s poorest regions through government funded programs.

• The government may not mean to kill people with mental disabilities but it’s deeds, not motives, that matter, and when the coalition subtracted political cost from economic gain, it found those with disabilities were the easiest people in Britain to dispose of.

• Mental health is the NHS’s Cinderella service, even in good times. In recession, it’s hammered. Simon Stevens, the new chief executive as NHS England, has given us his priorities. He gabbles that he wants to “future proof” the NHS “against challenges ahead”.

• Weinstock, who reportedly felt pressure from the judge to convince his client into waiving his right to a speedy trial, snapped back in defense. Then Murphy challenged Weinstock to a fist fight outside.

• “You know, if I had a rock, I would throw it at you right now,” Murphy says in the video above. “Stop pissing me off … If you want to fight, let’s go out back and I’ll just beat your ass.”

• He blew the whistle on CIA waterboarding, but the government keeps trying to sweep the issue, and him, out of sight. From prison, John Kiriakou says it’s time for a special prosecutor.

• Maybe if schools stop handing misbehaving students over to police officers, aggrieved parents won’t be nearly as aggrieved… or so likely to sue. Schools are publicly funded already, but that’s no reason to keep dipping into homeowners’ wallets to pay out settlements for schools’ bad decisions.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Rep. Bob Latta achieved an impressive feat last week in introducing some legislation, which he claims is to make sure the internet remains “open and free.” While we’re big supporters of an “open and free” internet, what’s most amazing here is that almost everything that Latta claims about the bill is not true — including the whole “open and free” bits.

• If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the whole net neutrality fight, you’d know that the key issue is whether or not broadband services should be reclassified under Title II of the Telecom Act. In the early to mid-2000s, the FCC declared both cable and DSL broadband to be information services under Title I, rather than telecommunications services under Title II. This basically means they are not subject to common carrier rules, including non-discriminatory rules that are the key issue around net neutrality. And, of course, the telcos are putting up a big fight over this, listing out a supposed parade of horribles that would happen if they were reclassified under Title II.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Possibly one of the last bits of cultural detritus from the extremely bizarre Flappy Bird story makes its way to us via chiptune artist Ben Landis, who spotted a rather audacious claim from an entity calling itself “Samuel David Entertainment.”

• Over the past few days, an IP battle has erupted at print-on-demand service Zazzle over a 3,000-year-old Greek letter. New York artist Paul Ingrisano was granted a trademark for the following symbol, apparently in reference to his initials.

• This may be the biggest legal controversy to engulf the mathematical constant pi since that time in 1897 when the Indiana legislature tried to declare it equal to 3.2: A Brooklyn artist is claiming a broad trademark in T-shirts, jackets, caps, and other apparel featuring the Greek letter, resulting in the mass, temporary removal of thousands of products from the custom t-shirt printing site Zazzle.

Copyrights

• A coalition of advocacy groups wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), urging the Senate to push back on an amendment to the House’s recently-passed defense funding bill that would keep the Obama administration from going forward with its plans to shift Internet oversight.

• We’ve written a few times about Spanish company Ares Rights, which presents itself as an “anti-piracy” firm, but rather than searching the internet for unauthorized movies and music, has a long history of working for Latin American governments, using questionable copyright claims to censor the internet and take down content those governments don’t like. The latest example may be the most extreme, as Ares Rights used a DMCA claim in the US to block the website of Ecuadorian newspaper La Republica for a period of four hours last week.

• As the discussion over the EU’s decision to force Google to uphold a “right to be forgotten” continues, various industry heads have begun to weigh in on the subject, pointing to this as evidence that Google could do more to combat piracy.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.