● 06.13.14

● Links 13/6/2014: Docker Hype, Manjaro 0.8.10

Posted in News Roundup at 5:50 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I’m not a big hardware guy. At all. Specs mean very little to me. However, Sean’s hardware is interesting, as it’s a Novena, something he developed himself. And of course, because he’s working with Linux, he’s able to get things to run pretty well. I have no idea what the future of the Novena is, but I love that people can make new devices that will be able to access familiar software and interfaces. Microsoft is making Windows cost-free for certain devices. It’s a smarter strategy than charging manufacturers, but until they let people get under the hood of the code, they’re going to have a hard time reaching new, experimental devices. Which is actually OK with me, since I’m happy to have Linux in as many places as possible.

Desktop

• Last year, the Sioux Falls, South Dakota school district in the U.S. purchased a fleet of Chromebooks–portable computers runnng Google’s Chrome OS–for use by students, and now, a year later, school district officials are out with a review of the experience. Specifically, the Sioux Falls School District spent over $4.5 million on Chromebooks to arm students in third through twelfth grades with, and the School Board is heralding the program’s success.

• Retail giant Woolworths has announced a massive IT transformation program, confirming it will phase out its huge collection of Microsoft Windows desktops in favour of 8000 Google Chrome OS machines.

• The HP Chromebook 14, with its 14-inch screen, 1.4-GHz Intel Celeron 2955U processor with 2GB of RAM and 16GB SSD, is a capable companion. It offers an inexpensive means of computing well in virtually any Wi-Fi environment. However, the Chrome OS isn’t for everyone. Costing $299, you can turn a Chromebook into an inexpensive PC running Linux.

• Looking around the BIOS let me set the Secure Boot to boot other OSes. It wouldn’t let me just disable it completely. I set the boot order to boot the DVD drive first and tried to run those Linux live disks. Mageia 4 wasn’t going to let me change the video driver from VESA no matter what. Cinnamon crashed once loading NVIDIA drivers in Mint 17. openSUSE behaved the best in giving me nice video support. I figured I’d install openSUSE and use it until Mint 17 came out in the KDE version.

Server

• Should Intel Relevant Products/Services Xeon-based system manufacturers be worried? IBM just started shipping the next generation of Power Systems services with its Power8 processor Relevant Products/Services. The processor can be licensed and is open for development through the OpenPower Foundation — and Big Blue is making some big claims.

• This morning, Google also unveiled new tools that make it easier to merely run Docker containers on its cloud services, and other cloud companies–such as Amazon and Rackspace–have embraced Docker in similar fashion. Docker is one step towards a world where we can treat all cloud services like one giant computer, and a tool like Kubernetes is the next.

Kernel Space

• The heart and soul of science is collecting data and finding patterns in it. The heart and soul of mathematics is manipulating symbols for the purposes of analyzing data and solving problems. The revised curricula in K-12 education in mathematics, science, and technology education all emphasize the ability to solve problems using IT, including some hardware and programming. See for example, Manitoba’s Grade 9 Mathematics Curriculum. Programming is like being able to read and to write and to do basic maths. I was overjoyed when the curriculum was revised in the late 1990s. Students who used to drop out of highschool over an inability to do “traditional” maths could finally excel at solving problems because they could edit and revise spreadsheets in seconds and get the spreadsheet itself to verify solutions. There was no longer an easy way to get the wrong answer. There was an easy way to get the right answer, like brute force/trying every reasonable value until the right one was found… Even weak students could understand the concept and some of them were better at that kind of maths than the “smart” kids.

• The developers have made quite a few changes to the software and, as usual, it’s difficult to list them all. Unlike a few of the previous releases, this is actually safe to use and users have been advised to upgrade to the new version, although it’s more likely that the distro makers will take care of that.

Graphics Stack

• David Airlie of Red Hat sent in the DRM pull request for the 3.16 merge window with a plethora of changes this time around:

• - The Nouveau driver has initial support for the GK20A Kepler graphics core found within the Tegra K1 ARM SoC.

• - The other big Nouveau change is initial support for re-clocking on certain generations of NVIDIA chipsets. The support is limited to a few series where it should be working, is static, and can be rather buggy.

• Roy Spliet, an existing contributor to Nouveau, has managed to secure EVoC funding to reverse-engineer and implement NVA3/5/8 voltage and frequency scaling support within the open-source Nouveau driver. “For this project, I aim to tie these loose ends together for NVIDIAs NVA3/5/8 GPUs. His “REclock” proposal states, “I intend to fully reverse engineer several subcomponents related to voltage and frequency scaling, try to get a full understanding of the clock tree and use this gained knowledge to further improve the nouveau voltage and frequency scaling implementation for said GPUs.”

• A new African student developer from Cameroon, Nyah Check, has proposed working on Shatter with financing provided by the Endless Vacation of Code. Here’s the synopsis for what he hopes to accomplish, “This project seeks to support shatter rendering in a multi-head Xephyr by dividing rendering between multiple Xephyr GPUs screens by using the impedance layer to the X server. This will comprise of polishing the current implementation of the impedance layer and testing for shatter rendering on two Xephyr GPU screens. This would be the scope of this summer’s project which will eventually continue to completely add shatter and replace Xinerama by splitting the protocol objects from the driver objects modularizing the acceleration architectures and framebuffer layers under the driver rending layer and the damage, protocol decode layers under the protocol layer interface, communicating through the impedance layer interface. This removes duplicate protocol processing and storage of information lowering Xinerama multiplexing to the impedance layer boundary. This would enable multiplexing below the protocol screen.”

Benchmarks

• After carrying out all of the PCI Express graphics cards at my disposal for last week’s open-source tests, I then immediately turned to testing all of the supported GPUs by the proprietary AMD and NVIDIA graphics drivers. Today’s comparison is still large (35 graphics cards) but smaller than the earlier comparison because the latest mainline drivers don’t support the diverse selection of Radeon and GeForce GPUs going back as many years as the open-source drivers. NVIDIA does maintain multiple legacy drivers that work well with updated Linux distributions, but for the Radeon HD 4000 series and older hardware, AMD doesn’t really maintain their legacy Catalyst Linux driver for new Linux kernel and X.Org Server releases. As a result, just the latest mainline AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA driver releases were testing, which gives us support for the GeForce 8 series and newer and on the AMD side is the Radeon HD 5000 series and newer.

Applications

• Docker has spun off a key open source component of its Linux Containerization tech, making it possible for Google, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Parallels to collaborate on its development and make Linux Containerization the successor to traditional hypervisor-based virtualization.

• Docker, the open source container virtualization platform, released software version 1.0, signaling that it is officially ready for prime time. And the Docker team has launched an enterprise support program and a system integrator initiative to accompany it.

• Start up ttyload and you’ll see hints of things like tload, nload and even htop, in a way.

• trn claims to be an improvement upon the ancient rn newsreader, but I’m bewildered and discombobulated by this one. By all rights it should work, but it’s seriously playing hardball.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Kevin VanDine of Canonical has announced his work on Bacon2D… a 2D game engine designed in part to push gaming for Ubuntu Touch/Phone.

• Right now Linux gamers only have OpenGL renderers to exploit and recently OpenGL has come under a lot of scrutiny with one of the complaints being that it’s too high-level compared to Mantle, DirectX 12, or even Apple’s Metal. In terms of Mantle support on Linux, AMD has said in the past that it could come and they would like to see it come, but there are no active plans with no engineering resources being devoted to the process of actually porting it over to their Catalyst Linux driver but its feasibility is still being determined. This latest AMD Gaming blog post gives a bit more of a renewed hope that we could see Mantle on Linux given the reference and AMD’s continued investment into this proprietary graphics API.

• Sid Meier’s Civilization V, that stalwart of the 4X genre, is now available on Linux, thanks to Aspyr Media. Designed to work with SteamOS, the Linux port has all of the same features and options available on the Windows and Mac versions, including Steam Play support, achievements, and support for the incoming Steam Controller.

• Several 1990′s era videogames created by the founders of Richardson, Texas-based id Software–John Carmack, John Romero, and Adrian Carmack–have just been made available via open source, by the company that owns the rights to those games. The old, classic games–which include HOvertank3D, Catacomb, TheCatacomb, Catacomb3D, and other titles–were created by the founders of id Software at Softdisk, in Shreveport, Louisiana, before the three founded id Software. The games have all been open sourced under the Gnu Public License (GPL) by current owner Flat Rock Software.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• I recently updated xfce4-power-manager to release 1.3.0 on my COPR repo. Here are screenshots from the latest releas, which has had a significant makeover. Smile

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Despite my involvement in KDE and free software operating systems, one of the features I’ve always loved from Qt is how we can use it to develop an application that can be used on any platform. Since I got my first /programmable/ phone, I’ve wanted to get my projects to work there, especially through all Nokia approaches to the issue, and I’ve managed to do so with relative success.

• Remember People behind KDE? It was an interview series with members of the community. I always enjoyed reading it because it showed, that KDE is software produced by dedicated and enthusiastic people and that it is possible to become one of them. So eventually I did.

• KDE 4.13.2 is shipping today with more than 40 known bug-fixes with many of the fixes involving the Kontact, Umbrello, Konqueror, and Dolphin applications. There’s also important fixes for Kopete.

• Last summer, while looking for a new mail client, I stumbled upon Trojitá, a lightweight IMAP client based on Qt. The largest drawback from my point of view was the missing support for PGP and S/MIME. After looking at the code I figured I could try to implement the missing features.

• Also, I’ve finished up the KAuth support when adding/removing repos (already pushed to the master of Muon). Most importantly, I’ve started integrating apt-listbugs a most important component of Debian. What does this mean and how it will affect the end-user? Well, having apt-listbugs integrated means that the user will be warned when installing packages if the packages have some serious/grave/critical bugs!

• Five years ago, the Krita team decided raise funds to raise Krita to the level of a professional applications . That fundraiser was successful beyond all expectations and enabled us to release Krita 2.4, the first version of Krita ready for professional artists!

• Having a standard tool for mockups within KDE would have the benefit that everyone could learn to use it and mockups could be shared or collaboratively edited in its format.

• On our Plasma 5 build status page most of the packages are now a pleasing green colour. For the first time today I installed them all and logged in and… it worked! It took a bit of removing old caches and obsolete installs that’d I’d been making in the months previously and that nice temporary Next wallpaper everyone uses doesn’t really get shipped so I had to add that and the icons sometimes work and sometimes don’t and there’s no plasma-nm release yet so I had to grab a copy and build that before I could use the network. But with some fiddle and wee bit ay faff, it works!

• Recently, we ran a study on the reorganization of the KDE system settings (Re-sort KDE control modules and Results of Card Sorting the KDE System Settings). Both the number of participants as well as the discussion in the forum proved the huge interest in this topic.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Most of the work I’ve being doing since last report is improving the TVDB source in Grilo Plugins in order to have a cache for all data that you have once downloaded from thetvdb.com.

Distributions

New Releases

• GParted is a free partition manager that enables you to resize, copy, and move partitions without data loss. The latest stable release is GParted Live 0.19.0-1 announced on June 11, 2014.

• Clonezilla Live 2.2.3-19, a Linux distribution based on DRBL, Partclone, and udpcast that allows users to do bare metal backup and recovery, has been released and is now available for download.

• Emmabuntüs, a distribution created for reconditioning old computers that relies on the robustness of Xubuntu 14.04 LTS, is now at version 3 Beta.

• The Emmabuntüs 3 distribution is intended to be sleek, accessible, and equitable, and this latest version of the OS is just as light as the previous ones, despite the fact that it is using another base, which is more advanced.

• Michael Tremer, a developer for the ipfire.org team, has announced that IPFire 2.13 Core 78, a new stable build of the popular Linux-based firewall distribution, has been released to implement the latest OpenSSL fixes.

• KaOS is a very interesting operating system because the developers are choosing their own path. This is one of the few Linux distributions out there that are not based on another OS and everything is built from scratch.

Gentoo Family

• Same as Arch Linux, Gentoo is an Open Source meta-distribution build from sources, based on Linux Kernel, embracing the same rolling release model, aimed for speed and complete customizable for different hardware architectures which compiles software sources locally for best performance using an advanced package management – Portage.

Arch Family

• Manjaro Linux has reached the version 0.8.10, bringing many new features, updated translations, lots of fixes and the latest software packages such as LibreOffice 4.2.4. According to the official announcement the followings are included in this release of this linux distribution that is becoming very popular:

• Manjaro KDE is the KDE edition of Manjaro Linux, a desktop distribution based on Arch Linux. Manjaro 0.8.10 KDE is the latest edition, released at the same time as the Xfce and Openbox editions.

Red Hat Family

• RHEL 7 “marks Red Hat’s embrace of cloud computing in a couple of ways, along with the operating system’s usual dedication to enterprise stability and predictability,” said Jay Lyman, a senior analyst at 451 Research. Red Hat seeks to do for enterprise applications “what we’ve seen with mostly Web and mobile applications thus far — that is, make them more lightweight, portable and standardized.”

• It basically boils down to the fact that in the open source world, the majority of work is done on open source UNIX-like operating systems such as GNU/Linux, *BSD, and somewhat recently in the IllumOS space. Each of these options are solid choices for server-side use, with varying preferences on which is the best. I think the server market share in recent years is evidence of this. However, the desktop has kind of been the peak of the mountaintop that we’ve yet reached. In the past few years there’s been an influx of people who I think have given up on the desktop, have put down their distro of choice, and picked up a Mac because it offers a UNIX-like work environment with a nice polished “out of box” experience. I don’t think this is inherently wrong or evil, but I do think that we all owe it to ourselves, and to our community, to sit back and ask: “What is this $thing lacking that makes me not want to use it?” (Though most often that $thing is GNOME3, Unity, Cinnamon, MATE, KDE, or some distro that ships with the desktop by default.)

• Red Hat has unveiled the latest version of its open-source operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, promoting it as the foundation of an “open hybrid cloud” that delivers emerging new capabilities like application containers.

• The big news while I was offline was the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 yesterday. Another topic grabbing lots of headlines is the release of Sid Meier’s Civilization V on Steam for Linux. Fedora 21 may be delayed and Linux 3.15 was released. And finally today, www.makeuseof.com takes a look at Gnome Flashback, another GNOME 2 clone.

• For some companies, the first question after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 was: “When will CentOS 7 be out?” The answer is soon.

• Enterprise Linux users, awake! Red Hat has finally released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, and it looks like it’s going to run on everything, from the server in the back-room, to datacenters and the cloud.

• Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 for all customers and partners, marking the beginning of a new branch for one of the most used Linux operating systems in the world.

Fedora

• This week in Fedora I wanted to go over some of the new badges that have come out and show how to get them. With the upcoming release of Fedora 21 there is a lot of chances to earn some pretty cool badges and show off your Fedora! As always, if you have an awesome idea for a badge you can submit your idea and if it gets approved then you can say “Yeah I thought of the idea for that badge” oh did I mention you get a badge for that!

• DNF was forked from Yum in January 2012 and available for experimenting…

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• In a blog post to Ubuntu One users, the organization said that its role as an open platform was to promote third-party services. However, the increasing amounts of free storage provided by top competitors such as Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox made it unfeasible for the organization to continue competing effectively.

• When booting up the Ubuntu 14.10 latest image with systemd 204, the system (to some surprise) booted fine and I encountered no immediate issues. The laptop has been running fine since today and was pleased it was a trouble-free experience. Coming up soon I’ll run some boot speed tests, etc. Still though it’s worth reiterating that it’s not yet clear when systemd will become the default on Ubuntu Linux, just sometime before the 16.04 LTS release.

• It’s interesting too seen how such an old video can still get people riled up and some users have even suggested that this was a report paid by Microsoft to smear a Linux distribution.

• Creating a base of user advocates from existing “fans” of Meizu and Ubuntu will be key to driving the early success of Ubuntu in the mobile market, Cristian Parrino, VP of mobile and online services for Canonical, told Mobile Asia Daily.

• We wrote a while back about this interesting collection of Ubuntu operating systems from the 14.04 LTS release and numerous users expressed their interest in downloading and trying Ubuntu AIO DVD.

Flavours and Variants

• Bodhi, a minimalistic Linux operating system based on Ubuntu and that has really low requirements, has reached version 3.0.0 RC1.

• Canonical’s Unity interface in Ubuntu has fiercely polarized Linux users ever since it was released. Now some are calling for a MATE version of Ubuntu, which would provide a more traditional desktop interface that resembles what Ubuntu looked like before Unity. The VAR Guy thinks it might be good for Ubuntu and for the MATE project if such a release happened.

Devices/Embedded

• Suddenly, consumer-oriented private cloud storage devices are everywhere, with many — if not most — running Linux. The market segment has blossomed thanks to growing concerns over government cyber-spying, notably in the case of the U.S. National Security Agency and the Chinese military. There is also growing unease about sharing of user data by mobile carriers, financial firms, and high-tech companies, as well as fears about cyber-criminals.

• Parrot is prepping two Linux-based mini-drones: a $160 “Jumping Sumo” wheeled robot and a $100 “Rolling Spider” quadrocopter that can fly, roll, or climb.

• THE RASPBERRY PI FOUNDATION has announced hardware sales of three million and a casual visit with the Queen for a bit of show and tell.

• The Raspberry Pi computer has been a solid mover since its release and its sales have grown from one million to two million, and now three million.

• Mikronaut launched a “RoboPi” robot controller for the Raspberry Pi, while Emlid tapped Indiegogo for its Pi-ready “Navio” shield for drone autopilots.

Phones

• A “Console OS” Kickstarter project is building an Android 4.4 fork for Intel CPUs on everything from PCs to tablets, complete with a dual-boot option.

• Intel is hoping to spur a new wave of dual-boot Android/Windows 2-and-1s and tablets with its Atom Z3000 and upcoming, newly announced Core M processors. So far, however, Android has yet to make much of dent in the PC market, either as a standalone or dual-boot OS.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla is working diligently to offer $25 smartphones to customers in India this year, which likely would hasten the end of the feature phone. The open source Firefox mobile operating system will be featured, along with a list of modest entry-level specs. Key to the success of the endeavor will be attracting developers to create apps for devices that aren’t likely to generate much revenue.

• Mozilla said that Spreadtrum’s $25 Firefox OS phone will soon be carried by Intex and Spice in India, and it also signed up Taiwan-based Chunghwa Telecom.

• It seems Mozilla is targeting emerging markets and developing nations with $25 cell phones. This is tremendous news, and an admirable focus for Mozilla, but it is not without risk.

• The Science Lab was created to serve as a neutral broker and hub for the open science community—a means of bridging the gap between the early adopters and the many scientists who understand the value of open science, but who have not yet (for a number of reasons) mapped that understanding onto their day-to-day workflow. We strive to connect and support the activity of the open research community and its diverse stakeholders (researchers, coders, funders, publishers) to work towards the common goal of making research more like the web: open, collaborative and accessible.

• Mozilla has released Firefox 30.0 FINAL for desktop, with Firefox for Android 30.0 also imminent.

SaaS/Big Data

• I’ve been following the Designate project, which provide OpenStack DesignateDNS-as-a-Service for OpenStack for some time. It’s a project that seems painfully obvious to me, enabling DNS features within an OpenStack cloud deployment.

Databases

• Percona Server 5.6.17-66.0, an enhanced drop-in replacement for MySQL that will allow queries to run faster and more consistently and to consolidate servers on powerful hardware, is now available for download.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The University where I worked determined that it was in the best interests of the institution (and the students) to migrate to LibreOffice. This happened in 2011, but the process was slow.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This is the announcement of a new bug-fix release of GNU gettext.

Public Services/Government

• The desktop computer systems of government healthcare organisations in the Spanish region of Extremadura all rely on free and open source software solutions. Over the past year, close to 10,000 computer workstations in public health care organisations have migrated to a customised version of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.

Licensing

• Unified collaboration software vendor Zimbra announced the release of a beta version of Zimbra Collaboration 8.5 to the open source community under the GNU Public License V2 license. Calling it a “commitment to community-powered open source innovation,” company officials say the move is part of an overall plan to distribute future versions of the Zimbra Collaboration Open Source Edition under Open Source Initiative-approved licenses.

Openness/Sharing

• Back in April, I noted that we had potentially a big win in the form of the opening up of drug safety data in the light of recent scandals that have seen big pharma companies hiding adverse effects of their products, often with fatal results. As I warned, we weren’t there yet, since the drug companies really don’t want their dirty washing for all to see, and they have been lobbying extremely hard to water down the provisions.

• One of the most striking and important developments in the world of technology over the last two decades or so has been the rise of an alternative mode of production that is open, collaborative and global. This began in the world of software, with Richard Stallman’s GNU project, but has now been extended to the realms of text, data, science and hardware, among others. The free sharing of information to form a kind of digital commons, which lies at the heart of these projects, has also been applied to business, albeit in the modified form of collaborative consumption — things like Airbnb. These different manifestations of fundamentally similar ideas have sprung up in a largely uncoordinated way, but an interesting question is whether they could be drawn together into a unified approach, applied to a whole country, say. That’s what Ecuador’s FLOK Society (original in Spanish) has been exploring. “FLOK” is derived from “free”, “libre” and “open knowledge”; here’s how David Bollier, an expert on the commons, describes the project:

Leftovers

• Bad things have been happening in some Birmingham schools: children have been taught things that are hard to reconcile with the broader culture and values of the country in which they live and which provides them with that education. That’s the consensus at Westminster, and Politicians will spend the day arguing about who is to blame, how this happened and how it can be stopped from happening again. Was it Michael Gove? Or Ofsted? Or Birmingham council? Or the governors? Or a whole political class that tacitly endorses a doctrine of multiculturalism, while turning a blind eye to its more troubling consequences? Everyone will have their preferred mixture of answers, so I don’t intend to offer you mine here. Instead, there’s one group that’s curiously absent from the conversation here: parents.

• Back in April, we wrote about the travesty of the very best reporters on everything Supreme Court related, SCOTUSblog, still not having a press pass to the Supreme Court. The issue is somewhat complicated, in part because of the seriously arcane credentialing process involved. Basically, the Supreme Court looks kindly on reporters who already are credentialed by the Senate. But the Senate credentialing process involves the “Standing Committee of Correspondents” who get to decide who else to let in. The committee, basically, are journalists who have already been let into the club deciding who else can join them. When you set up a guild that lets you exclude innovative and disruptive players, guess what happens?

• Issues seem to have begun this morning, as several users noted an inability to download the Skype app following its release. Some users attempting to download the app received a message indicating the app was no longer available for download.

Science

• So, this weekend’s news in the tech world was flooded with a “story” about how a “chatbot” passed the Turing Test for “the first time,” with lots of publications buying every point in the story and talking about what a big deal it was. Except, almost everything about the story is bogus and a bunch of gullible reporters ran with it, because that’s what they do. First, here’s the press release from the University of Reading,

Health/Nutrition

• This report, co-published by DPA and MAPS, illustrates a decades-long pattern of behavior that demonstrates the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) inability to exercise its responsibilities in a fair and impartial manner or to act in accord with the scientific evidence. The report’s case studies reveal a number of DEA practices that maintain the existing, scientifically unsupported drug scheduling system and obstruct research that might alter current drug schedules. In addition to marijuana, the report also examines the DEA’s speed in moving to ban MDMA, synthetic cannabinoids, and synthetic stimulants. In contrast to the DEA’s failure to act in a timely fashion when confronted with evidence for scheduling certain drugs less severely, the agency has shown repeatedly that it can move quickly when it wants to prohibit a substance. The report recommends that responsibility for determining drug classifications and other health determinations should be completely removed from the DEA and transferred to another agency, perhaps even a non-governmental entity such as the National Academy of Sciences. The report also recommends the DEA should be ordered to end the federal government’s unjustifiable monopoly on the supply of research-grade marijuana available for federally approved research. No other drug is available from only a single governmental source for research purposes.

• Hawai’i has become “ground zero” in the controversy over genetically modified (GMO) crops and pesticides. With the seed crop industry (including conventional as well as GMO crops) reaping $146.3 million a year in sales resulting from its activities in Hawai’i, the out-of-state pesticide and GMO firms Syngenta, Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, Dow Chemical, BASF, and Bayer CropScience have brought substantial sums of corporate cash into the state’s relatively small political arena.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• In early 2012, members of the hacking collective Anonymous carried out a series of cyber attacks on government and corporate websites in Brazil. They did so under the direction of a hacker who, unbeknownst to them, was wearing another hat: helping the Federal Bureau of Investigation carry out one of its biggest cybercrime investigations to date.

• Sitting inside a medium-security federal prison in Kentucky, Jeremy Hammond looks defiant and frustrated.

• It is now extremely difficult for the media to pretend that everything is OK in Iraq, bar the odd car bomb. The AL-Maliki regime has been in the remarkable position of being both pro-Iranian and supported by the West with masses of military hardware – substantial quantities of which is now in the hands of ISIS. I don’t expect Al-Maliki to fall soon, but his area of control is decreasing by the hour. Whether the Al-Maliki regime has been any less vicious than that of Saddam Hussein is arguable. Certainly there has been a great deal less social freedom in Iraq.

• Raddatz went on to talk about ab out how more than 200 Americans had “given their lives to secure this city,” and that Mosul “is just the latest city to spiral out of control after the US pulled out”–which might suggest that Iraqi cities were in fine shape when they were occupied by US troops.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• BP Plc (BP/) must pay potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in claims after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to halt disputed payments stemming from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

• In a one-sentence order issued today, the justices said they wouldn’t put a hold on lower court rulings that require the oil company to begin making the payments, part of a $9.2 billion accord.

• Last week we reported on a former Navy SEAL chief named David Cooper who was hired by the nonprofit group NextGen Climate to determine how vulnerable the controversial final leg of the Keystone pipeline network might be to terrorism. In a 14-page report, Cooper determined that it would be “easy to execute a catastrophic attack” on the fourth segment of the pipeline system, based on a mock attack he carried out on the completed Keystone I, or Gulf Coast Pipeline, which came online in January. He went on to describe multiple scenarios for spills ranging from 1.02 to 7.24 million gallons of diluted bitumen, the viscous, toxic, low quality oil derived from Alberta’s tar sands.

Finance

• The moment to hoard cheap coffee beans has passed. The price of coffee futures peaked in April, and those higher commodity costs are now trickling down to grocery stores. J.M. Smucker (SJM) on Tuesday announced that it has increased the price of its packaged coffee, including the country’s best-selling brand, Folgers, as well as packaged Dunkin’ Donuts beans, by an average 9 percent.

• According to its filing with the SEC, the web-hosting company had revenues of more than $1.1bn in 2013

• Or consult the 2012 State of Working America report from the Economic Policy Institute, which features a number of distressing statistics on black unemployment (consistently about twice as high for blacks as for whites, though it would be hard to say that there are “plenty” of jobs for anyone, with overall unemployment at 6.9 percent) and racial disparities in median family income.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Guardian has just published its eighth article in three days pushing Gordon Brown’s views on independence. This one warns Scots they would not be able to watch the BBC after independence.

• The description of alleged “raids” of private homes in Wisconsin’s John Doe criminal dark money investigation has captured the imagination of Republicans across the country as supposed evidence of the investigation’s political motivations.

Privacy

• A federal appeals court has for the first time said law enforcement can’t snoop on phone location records without a warrant

• Here is an inter­view I did on 5th June, the anniversary of the start of Edward Snowden’s dis­clos­ures about the global sur­veil­lance infra­struc­ture that is being built.

• The government and police regularly use location data pulled off of cell phone towers to put criminals at the scenes of crimes—often without a warrant. Well, an appeals court ruled today that the practice is unconstitutional, in one of the strongest judicial defenses of technology privacy rights we’ve seen in a while.

• US pushing local police departments to keep quiet on cell-phone surveillance technology

• Marc Andrews wrote Hidden Persuasion to highlight the various methods advertisers use to lure us in. Here the World Wildlife Fund uses anthropomorphism to establish an emotional connection with users. The lion is experiencing secondary emotions (shame, disbelief), which are thought to be distinctly human. This make us feel closer to the animal, thus more likely to donate.

• You know, you’d think that the “intelligence community” would be a bit more intelligent. As we’ve discussed many, many times, nearly all of the estimates of “harm” concerning Ed Snowden’s actions were based on the faulty assumption that he “took” (and revealed) every document he ever “touched” while at NSA — somewhere around 1.7 million (sometimes referred to as 1.5 million, but then upped to 1.7 million). Except that two of the reporters who got the documents, Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill, have both said from the very beginning that it was about 60,000.

• Facebook Inc.’s photo-sharing application Instagram will add advertising in Canada, the U.K. and Australia later this year.

• Most of you have probably used Tor before, but I2P may be unfamiliar. Both are anonymization networks that allow people to obfuscate where their traffic is coming from, and also host services (web sites for example) without it being tied back to them. This talk will give an overview of both, but will focus on real world stories of how people were deanonymized. Example cases like Eldo Kim & the Harvard Bomb Threat, Hector Xavier Monsegur (Sabu)/Jeremy Hammond (sup_g) & LulzSec, Freedom Hosting & Eric Eoin Marques and finally Ross William Ulbricht/“Dread Pirate Roberts” of the SilkRoad, will be used to explain how people have been caught and how it could have been avoided.

• On a bright April morning in Menlo Park, California, I became an Internet spy.

• This was easier than it sounds because I had a willing target. I had partnered with National Public Radio (NPR) tech correspondent Steve Henn for an experiment in Internet surveillance. For one week, while Henn researched a story, he allowed himself to be watched—acting as a stand-in, in effect, for everyone who uses Internet-connected devices. How much of our lives do we really reveal simply by going online?

• [...]

• The experiment unfolded in two phases. In the first, we simply observed Henn’s normal Internet traffic. In the second, Henn, Porcello, and I stopped the broad surveillance of Henn and turned our tools on specific traffic created by leading Web applications and services. Here’s what we found.

Civil Rights

• The Telegraph has obtained documents that raise questions on US treatment of John Stewart, a key campaigner against Heathrow’s third runway, who the US said had threatened Barak Obama

• Much of this is the kind of activity carried out in the form of attacks sponsored by governments outside the UK — or, as in the case of the NSA, directly by those governments. Despite the recent grandstanding by the US when it filed criminal charges against members of the Chinese military whom it accuses of espionage, there is little hope of ever persuading the main players to hand over their citizens for trial, so the new UK law will be largely ineffectual against the most serious threats.

• London mayor justifies the speed of the £218,000 purchase by saying the machines are needed in case of disorder this summer

• Up to 12,000 black-cab drivers expected to block traffic in central London with cabbies in Europe staging similar protests

• [...]

• The streets of half a dozen European capitals will be jammed by strikes on Wednesday, as licensed cabbies in Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Milan and Lisbon join their London colleagues in demonstrating against a technology that threatens their livelihood.

• Uber is one of a wave of new apps, which also include Hailo and Kabbee, that allows users to see the nearest registered cars and hail them from their smartphone. The services are particularly popular with private-hire drivers, who now have an advantage over licensed drivers.

• This is a heartrending documentary from Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC. The terrible fate of the Palestinians at the hands of a world which has accepted the ludicrous claim to a religious Israeli right to their land is incomprehensible in a rational world. The brutality of Israeli soldiers, motivated by views of racial and religious superiority, towards children is sickening.

• There is just one problem with demanding an apology over this: The West Bank is currently under Israeli occupation. This was true whenever Clinton made her first visit. So the CNN host is demanding to know whether Clinton will apologize for saying something perfectly accurate.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Netflix will keep telling customers that ISPs are to blame for bad video.

• Last week, it transpired that the big cable companies were bankrolling fake consumer groups like Broadband for America and The American Consumer Institute. These “independent consumer advocacy groups” are, in truth, nothing of the sort, and instead represent the interests of its benefactors, in the fight against net neutrality. If that wasn’t bad enough, VICE is now reporting that several of the real community groups (oh, and an Ohio bed-and-breakfast) that were signed up as supporters of Broadband for America were either duped into joining, or were signed up to the cause without their consent or knowledge.

• Some time on Tuesday afternoon, about 50,000 Comcast Internet customers in Houston will become part of a massive public Wi-Fi hotspot network, a number that will swell to 150,000 by the end of June.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The RIAA’s latest tax filings reveal that the anti-piracy group’s revenue has hit a record low as membership dues from record labels continue to decline. But despite the downward trend RIAA CEO Cary Sherman received nearly $500,000 in bonuses in addition to his million dollar salary.

• A United States District Court Judge has just granted Kim Dotcom’s request to put the MPAA and RIAA civil actions against him on hold . The reprieve, which will last seven weeks, expressly allows the entertainment companies the freedom to freeze Dotcom’s assets anywhere in the world if that is deemed necessary.

• His real “crime” as far as the Hollywood moguls are concerned is for doing something he hasn’t yet been convicted of any crime for – establishing Megaupload Ltd. Wikipedia describes it as follows: “Megaupload was a file hosting and sharing online service in which users could share links to files for viewing or editing….. The company was successful. However, millions of people from across the globe used Megaupload to store and access copies of TV shows, feature films, songs, porn, and software. Eventually it had over 150 employees, US$175 million revenues, and 50 million daily visitors. At its peak Megaupload was estimated to be the 13th most popular site on the internet and responsible for 4% of all internet traffic.”

• Fair use enjoyed a major victory in court today. In Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision that strongly underscores a fair use justification for a major book scanning program. For those counting along at home, today’s decision marks another in a serious streak of judicial findings of fair use for mass book digitization, including Authors Guild v. Google, Cambridge University Press v. Becker, and the district court opinion in the HathiTrust case itself.

• An ISP that won a prolonged legal battle against a Hollywood-affiliated anti-piracy group has rejected plans to introduce three strikes and site blocking. Today, ISP iiNet is also urging citizens to pressure the government and fight back against the “foreign interests” attempting to dictate Australian policy.

• Growing copyright cop Rightscorp hopes to be a profitable alternative to “six strikes.”

• An announcement later this week will confirm Google as a member of a new coalition to cut off “pirate” sites from their ad revenue. Following similar initiatives in the U.S. and UK, a Memorandum of Understanding between the online advertising industry and the music and movie industries in Italy will signal a creation of a central body to tackle the piracy issue.

• The MPAA is concerned that innovation in the film industry will be ruined if consumers get the right to resell movies and other media purchased online. Responding to discussions in a congressional hearing this week, the MPAA warns that this move would limit consumer choices and kill innovation.

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.