● 06.19.14

● Links 19/6/2014: New Mir, Dalvik Changes, X.org Turns 30

Posted in News Roundup at 7:00 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• A journey from Windows through doubt, frustration and despair to relief and a finally joy. This journey started on 31 May 2014 the day after the release of Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” Cinnamon and finished on the 17 June 2014. I worked on this continually for 8 or more hours a day over this time can’t work at the moment so I had time on my side.

Server

• High-performance computing (HPC) for the past ten years has been dominated by thousands of Linux servers connected by a uniform networking infrastructure. The defining theme for an HPC cluster lies in the uniformity of the cluster. This uniformity is most important at the application level: communication between all systems in the cluster must be the same, the hardware must be the same, and the operating system must be the same. Any differences in any of these features must be presented as a choice to the user. The uniformity and consistency of running software on an HPC cluster is of utmost importance and separates HPC clusters from other Linux clusters.

• HP Helion uses its own version of Linux based on the the open-source Debian Linux operating system at its core, which is a shift away from Ubuntu Linux, the Linux distribution previous iterations of HP’s cloud efforts had been using.

• SOCIAL NETWORK Facebook has introduced some of the fruits of its Open Compute project, revealing a networking switch and a supporting Linux operating system (OS).

• A lot has changed since then. Commodity servers running Linux are the norm, virtualisation and Cloud services are common, but some organisations are still running UNIX or Windows systems because Linux migration seems like a lot of work and a big risk. It didn’t do Amazon any harm though, did it?

• Puppet Labs, a Portland, Ore.-based provider of IT infrastructure automation software, announced today that it had raised $40 million in a Series E round of financing from a pool of backers that reads like a who’s who of the tech and venture capital communities.

Kernel Space

• Writing poems about the Linux kernel has been enlightening in more ways than one for software developer Morgan Phillips.

• Over the past few months she’s begun to teach herself how the Linux kernel works by studying text books, including Understanding the Linux Kernel, Unix Network Programming, and The Unix Programming Environment. But instead of taking notes, she weaves the new terminology and ideas she learns into poetry about system architecture and programming concepts. (See some examples, below, and on her Linux Poetry blog.)

• Ivan Shapovalov is back on track with his Reiser4 file-system contributions.

• Shapovalov has been working on Reiser4 support for TRIM/Discard on SSDs. It’s been some weeks since the last revision but the fourth version of the patches are now out there for this common file-system feature of being able to discard blocks by informing the solid-state drive about blocks that are no longer in use by the file-system. Most mainline Linux file-systems already support SSD discard, which is generally exposed via the discard mount option — which is also the case for Reiser4.

Graphics Stack

• Another set of AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver improvements were committed on Wednesday for Mesa.

• The X.Org Foundation reminds us that the first announcement for the X Window System came out on June 19, 1984.

• The Nouveau X.Org driver (xf86-video-nouveau) now has basic support for NVIDIA’s newest Maxwell graphics processor. Related to that, there’s also GLAMOR 2D acceleration support available within the Nouveau DDX.

Benchmarks

• As it’s been a while since last delivering any “4K” resolution OpenGL benchmarks at Phoronix, out today — now that we’re done with our massive 60+ GPU open-source testing and 35-way proprietary driver comparison — are benchmarks of several NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards when running an assortment of Linux games and other OpenGL tests at the 4K resolution.

Applications

• The Tanglu project is now a proud member (licensee) of the Open Invention Network (OIN), which build a pool of defensive patents to protect the Linux ecosystem from companies who are trying to use patents against Linux. Although the Tanglu community does not fully support the generally positive stance the OIN has about software patents, the OIN effort is very useful and we agree with it’s goal. Therefore, Tanglu joined the OIN as licensee.

• The open-source Docker virtualization technology is one of the most exciting innovations to enter the enterprise IT space in years. Docker is a container virtualization technology that offers the promise of a more efficient, lightweight approach to application deployment than most organizations are currently implementing. With a traditional virtualization hypervisor like VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V or the open-source Xen and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technologies, each virtual machine (VM) needs its own operating system. In contrast, with Docker, applications sit inside a container that resides on a single host operating system, that can serve many containers. Although Docker is a relatively new effort that got under way in March 2013, the project has matured quickly and the Docker 1.0 milestone was released on June 9. Alongside the Docker 1.0 release came the official debut of the Docker Hub, which is a repository for what are known as “dockerized” applications that can be deployed to any Docker host. Some of the world’s largest technology vendors, including IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Red Hat, support Docker. eWEEK examines the world of Docker container virtualization.

Instructionals/Technical

• Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are increasing in their popularity. We’ve seen first hand how much people want to be able to access and learn new information on their own schedule. For example, our Introduction to Linux MOOC, hosted by edX, has received more than 150,000 registrations, and it doesn’t even start until August 1.

• With summer up on us, we’ve done some research for you to surface additional MOOCs that could be useful to the Linux and Linux.com community this summer and early fall.

Games

• Steam Marines an excellent looking squad based procedural death labyrinth set on a space-ship has now arrived on Linux after teasers from the developer.

• Many Linux gamers have written in today with excitement that XCOM: Enemy Unknown is now available via Steam on Linux.

• The mass migration of big-name triple-A games to Linux continues, as publishers rush to have top titles available for the 2015 launch of Valve’s SteamOS operating system. On Thursday, Feral Interactive announced that the blockbuster XCOM: Enemy Unknown is now available for Linux, as is all of its add-on content—including the large XCOM: Enemy Within expansion.

• I don’t game as much as I used to. Although I’ve certainly spent countless hours of my life in front of a Nintendo, SNES, or after that, playing a first-person shooter on my computer (Linux only, thank you), these days, my free time tends to go toward one of the many nongaming hobbies I’ve accumulated. Recently though, I found myself dusting off my Wii console just so I could play an NES and SNES game I re-purchased for it. The thing is, those games require using a somewhat strange controller, and I already have a modified SNES controller that can connect over USB. That was enough to encourage me to search for a better solution. Of course, I simply could connect three or four consoles and stack up games in my living room, but I’ve grown accustomed to ripping my CDs and DVDs and picking what I want to listen to or watch from a central media center. It would be nice if I didn’t have to get up and find a cartridge every time I wanted to switch games. This, of course, means going with emulation, but although in the past I’d had success with a modified classic Xbox, I didn’t have that hardware anymore. I figured someone must have gotten this set up on the Raspberry Pi, and sure enough, after a brief search and a few commands, I had a perfect retro-gaming arcade set up on a spare Raspberry Pi.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The KDE e.V. Quarterly Report for the fourth quarter of 2013 features a brief note of all the activities and events carried out, supported and funded by KDE e.V in this span of time, as well as a short overview of the major events, conferences and mentoring programs. !ll of this in one document that you should not miss out on to know about almost everything that has been KDE in those four months!

• While browsing a popular computer retailer in Ireland, Jonathon Riddell (the big boss man over at Kubuntu) found a few rather compelling deals, all running the distro we all know him for. The retailer is Adverts.ie, and they are selling more than one model for HP laptop pre-loaded with the trusty (no pun intended) operating system. Here is what they have on offer!

• Kubuntu 13.10 was released in April and it comes with the brand new KDE Plasma workspaces and other KDE technologies. Like any other operating system Kubuntu also needs a little bit of work to get it ready for you. There are a few things which are optional and I have added them here based on my own usage, you may not need them.

• Kubuntu is an example of what is known as “open source software”. The basic idea behind the open source model is that the developer gives away a computer program for free, including the source code used to create that program. Users are free to make any changes they require in the future and share their modifications with others.

• This is an unplanned release. Quicken dropped support for 2011 and banks followed suit, so the online import using Quicken 2011 as ID has stopped working. We added IDs for latest versions, and released a new tarball.

• So look forward to Marble 1.9, bringing previews for geo data files to your filemanager and in the file dialogs! (And do not forget to enable them in Dolphin > Settings > Configure Dolphin… > General > Previews, disabled for all types by default).

• Marble Tours, when they are played from the played from the playlist that is contained in the kml file containing the tour, they follow an order shown as given below. That is, there are basically two types of items that are being played here, just like a “track” is played:

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• In Linux news today, Red Hat released their first quarter financial results today and the markets reacted in kind. WorldofGNOME.org gives users a peek and poke at GNOME 3.14. Newbie Tony Ireland shares his story and Michael Hall shares why he uses Open Source.

• GNOME 3.14 is releasing in September and Ubuntu-GNOME in October, therefore this is an early access to the development versions of both of them. However Ubuntu development releases are quite stable and the same also applies for GNOME, so it should be a very usable system.

• Running GNOME in Ubuntu won’t give a genuine GNOME experience and not all things work as supposed to, but on the other hand Ubuntu will give you the best out of Linux desktop (the term is wrong) in general, meaning easy access to all available software, free and no-free.

• Humanity Colors, an icon theme pack designed by the Ravefinity Project which provides Humanity (the default Ubuntu icon theme) in various colors, was updated with 3 new colors along with other changes and bug fixes.

Distributions

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat reported its first quarter fiscal 2015 revenues on June 18, showing continued demand and momentum for its Linux and open-source technologies. Red Hat has been particularly busy of late, acquiring a pair of companies and launching its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL) flagship platform.

• Red Hat sidestepped typical seasonal slowness, posting Q1 earnings late Wednesday that beat analyst views, led by its Linux unit.

• Red Hat Inc, the world’s largest commercial distributor of the Linux operating system, reported better-than-expected adjusted profit and revenue for the first quarter, helped by growth in subscriptions.

• Red Hat Inc. (RHT: Quote) reported first quarter adjusted EPS of $0.34 after the close Wednesday, compared to $0.32 last year. Analysts expected EPS of $0.33. The stock is now up 2.15 on 455K shares.

Fedora

• The Fedora developers are discussing whether to replace Firefox with Gnome Web as the default browser on Fedora 21, due to the fact that the current Mozilla browser is built with GTK+2 and GNOME 3.14 uses GTK+3.

• Gnome Web (previously name Epiphany) uses GTK+3, has support for HiDPI displays, provides good integration with Gnome Shell and supports hardware acceleration, while Mozilla’s browser doesn’t.

• Due to the fact that Firefox is open-source, some Fedora developers have already started to port Firefox from GTK+2 to GTK+3. If everything goes well, the first GTK+3 based Firefox will be built on the Firefox 32 code base.

Debian Family

• Five years ago Debian and most derivatives switched from the standard GNU C Library (GLIBC) to the Embedded GLIBC (EGLIBC). Debian is now about to take the reverse way switching back to GLIBC, as EGLIBC is now a dead project, the last release being the 2.19 one. At the time of writing the glibc package has been uploaded to experimental and sits in the NEW queue.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• GNOME Shell 3.12 and GTK +3.12 have been added to the proposed repositories of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn. Most likely, they will be soon added to the default repositories so the users will be able to have the latest versions of the Gnome applications, on their system.

• As a reminder, Canonical has announced that Ubuntu Touch has been installed on 10.000 devices, most probably Google Nexus smartphones and tablets, while the first Ubuntu smartphones have not been made available yet. Also worth mentioning, the developers have proposed to create a special RTM (release-to-manufacturer) branch, for bringing stability improvements to Ubuntu Touch.

• As you may know, Canonical has been working a lot at the Mir display server, in order to get it ready for both the desktop and mobile versions of Ubuntu. While the Ubuntu Touch already uses Mir by default, Ubuntu 14.04 runs over the good old X.org.

• Canonical developers have been making progress on allowing GTK+ applications to work natively atop Ubuntu’s Unity 8 desktop with the Mir display server in place of the X.Org Server or even XMir for that matter.

• As you may know, Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn will come with interesting changes. The integration of Qt 5.3 is almost done, but the developers still have to fix some known issues.

• The developers hope to make Qt 5.3 available as default next week, due to the fact it has passed 99% of the tests.

• Canonical software engineers Ryan Lortie and Robert Ancell have shared word on work they’ve been doing to get GTK+ applications up and running on Mir in the Unity 8 preview session that’s available in Ubuntu 14.10.

Flavours and Variants

• If you have read my previous articles then you will know that I started off by listing 5 reasons why Lubuntu is a good replacement for Windows XP and you may have read the alternative reviews that I listed and following on from that you may have tried out the live version of Lubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

• An MIT spinoff is Kickstarter-funding its AllJoyn and OpenWRT Linux based “Q” system, which syncs its smart bulbs to mobile music it streams to a stereo.

• The Q name derives from the system’s Q Station router, “allowing you to both create a Q (queue) of music and send lighting Qs (cues) from the same smartphone app,” says MIT spinoff Belleds Technologies. (And if you also happen to envision hardware hacker hero Q from James Bond, so much the better.)

• If you’ve been following along with our earlier articles on next-gen filesystems like btrfs and zfs, but wanted an easy way to get started without having to learn anything on the command line (or need an easy way to take advantage even though you’re a Windows-only user), you’re in luck. Today, we’re going to look at two ready-to-rock ZFS-enabled network attached storage distributions: FreeNAS and NAS4Free.

• Technologic unveiled a Yocto Linux-ready COM with a single- or quad-core Freescale i.MX6 SoC and optional wireless and industrial temperature support.

• The networking focused Enea Linux 4.0 has arrived with new virtualization features including KVM and Open vSwitch support, plus a Yocto 1.6 build.

• Swedish telecom software company Enea announced version 3.0 of its Yocto-based commercial Linux distribution and development platform in May 2013, adding real-time Linux support, among other features. Enea Linux 4.0 instead focuses on virtualization, largely absent from previous versions. The additions bring it up to speed in serving Network Function Virtualization (NFV) solutions, says Enea.

• I have been particularly interested in the subject of device interoperability for a while now, and long thought that to reach our tech visions of the future, we will need cooperation way beyond what we have today. We would need open source, community-driven protocols and platforms, just like what we’ve had for years in various Internet protocols, only a level higher. After discovering AllJoyn, realising that there are others out there who share my vision, and seeing that lots of progress had already been made, I obviously became very excited! After writing a blog post, and getting in contact with a number of people from the AllSeen Alliance, the subject of a sponsored membership was brought up, and of course I was more than happy to get on the bus!

Phones

• Intel created the Modello User Interface as an open source Interface mainly as a proof of concept. It was developed using HTML5, and hopes to show the advantages, and speed of development of HTML5 applications opposed to native apps. This IVI solution is designed for the modern world that Intel sees that we deserve to have, as part of our car IVI system. Modello can also be used to test Tizen web and javascript APIs, and also their performance on various hardware, in this case being the Nexcom VTC-1010 IVI unit.

Ballnux

• There is much hubbub around Amazon’s Fire Phone this week. The newly announced smartphone is Amazon’s first foray into smartphones, and the press is heralding many of the innovative new hardware-driven features in the phone, some of which will make reading and consuming content very easy.

Android

• Amazon have JUST announced their new edition to the Fire family. Today at a special launch event in Seattle Amazon announced what many had been long expecting. The ‘Fire Phone’ is the first Amazon manufactured phone to hit the market and comes with a wealth of features and services.

• Please note this guide is only for officially supported devices. If you are one of the many devices which are not currently supported then don’t worry. In the next couple of days we will post a more in-depth tutorial to help you install CM on your unofficially supported device manually.

• If you’re worried about the NSA listening in on your smartphone, Silent Circle’s “Blackphone” may be the last best hope.

• How is your phone doing? Does it look tired? Are you fed up with its slow performance and lagging features? Well, not to worry. Themukt.com is here to give you a run-down of what we think are the best custom ROM’s available for 2014.

• The next version of Google Android will likely include a major change that average users won’t notice at all… unless they notice that apps generally run more quickly.

• Google has been working on replacing the Dalvik virtual machine that powers Android apps with something called ART since last year. Now it looks like ART is just about ready for prime time.

Free Software/Open Source

• Facebook may create some of the world’s best open-source software, but other companies must rise to support it.

• There are many useful open-source technologies out there. With all of this competition, it’s critical to make it clear why your particular open-source offering should be considered, and for which needs. That’s the reality any builder of an open-source community needs to adopt right from the start: While participation by developers in an active, viable open-source community will undoubtedly improve their projects, as well as your product’s evolution, getting a community up and running can be a challenge.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Thanks to a $3.89 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a Miami-based philanthropic group that focuses on media and the arts, Mozilla is embarking on a project that will help connect some of the world’s top journalists with readers, viewers and content consumers.

• The New York Times and The Washington Post announced on Thursday that they had teamed up with Mozilla to develop a new platform that will allow them to better manage their readers’ online comments and contributions. The platform will be supported by a grant of roughly $3.9 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, an organization that gives substantial money to promote journalism innovation. Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox web browser and a nonprofit that works for open standards on the web, will help The Times and The Post build the technology for a platform tailored to news organizations.

SaaS/Big Data

• OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, is not the most widely deployed private-cloud platform. But it’s a close second, according to a new survey from database vendor Tesora, which also said the rise in OpenStack adoption is helping push organizations toward scalable database and database-as-a-service (DBaaS) solutions.

• Interest in software defined networking continues to grow, and for many, OpenStack and OpenDaylight are the natural tools for transitioning data centers to this new paradigm in network communications. Both are active and growing open source projects backed by a large community of companies and individual developers.

Databases

• Tesora hopes its OpenStack contributions will give it an edge on Amazon, but this may be wishful thinking at best.

Funding

• Today it’s announced a $30 million Series C funding round which they claim was oversubscribed.

BSD

• The FreeBSD “Newcons” effort to provide a new VT console driver continues making progress for its more proper debut in the next major FreeBSD release.

• For years the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developers have been working on frame-buffer compression (FBC) support but never it’s worked out quite good enough to turn it on by default in full. Frame-buffer compression has the ability to reduce power consumption for those using Intel HD Graphics while reducing the amount of memory bandwidth used for screen refreshes. Now though the Intel DRM FBC code has been re-worked and perhaps this time it will be flipped on by default.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• I’m in the process of moving to a new OpenPGP key, and I want to include a small JPEG image of myself in it. The OpenPGP specification describes, in section 5.12.1 of RFC 4880, how an OpenPGP packet can contain an JPEG image. Unfortunately the document does not require or suggest any properties of images, nor does it warn about excessively large images. The GnuPG manual helpfully asserts that “Note that a very large JPEG will make for a very large key.”.

Openness/Sharing

• The man who trained more than 66 countries in open source methods calls for re-invention of intelligence to re-engineer Earth

• In a letter to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate, 75 media organizations — including Tribune Co., the parent corporation of the Los Angeles Times — have called for a floor vote on the bill. The letter was sent to Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) a few days after the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of James Risen, a New York Times reporter who has been contesting a subpoena requiring him to testify at the upcoming trial of a former CIA agent. The agent, Jeffrey Sterling, is accused of revealing classified information about a failed CIA plan to compromise Iran’s nuclear program, an operation described in a book by Risen.

• I am personally responsible for the break in by five CIA employees into the Democratic Natl Hq at the Watergate office complex. Let’s walk this back a bit. Among Pres Nixon’s close aides in the 1970s who went into the slammer for (among other crimes) obstruction of justice were my two UCLA drinking buddies also my political enemies, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. The “third man” at UCLA, also a drinking companion at Westwood’s Glen bar, was Alex Butterfield, another Nixon aide, who spilled the beans with his surprise disclosure that Nixon taped his criminal activities. (Later, when I spoke to Alex, who was never prosecuted, and asked if it was all a CIA plot to dethrone the president, he just smiled at me signaling well yeah maybe but you didn’t hear it from me.)

• Open science research and development hybrid development model can protect pharma company profits while reducing costs of medicines for consumers

Programming

• The Freecode site has been moved to a static state effective June 18, 2014 due to low traffic levels and so that folks will focus on more useful endeavors than site upkeep.

Leftovers

• Kerala chief minister Oommen Chandy is apparently okay with the suggestion of converting the massive holding of the treasures, discovered in the cellars of the famous Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple, into a museum.

Health and OBL

• A piglet rests at a farm in southern Spain. Low fertility rates among sows on Spanish pig farms in 2010 were traced to chemicals used to produce plastic semen bags.

• Frank Dörner sees the rise in large scale attacks as a worrying development. He sees the state’s use of medical aid as a political instrument as one contributing factor. Dörner recalls how the US intelligence service CIA organized a fake vaccination campaign in 2011 to cover up the search for Osama bin Laden. As a result, “vaccine activists were killed in Pakistan,” and genuine campaigns had to be stopped.

• For more than a decade, the CIA has deployed drones, satellites, spies, informants and tracking devices to thwart al-Qaeda in Pakistan.

• The spy agency also considered a plan to wage war with toys.

Security

• A security exploit has surfaced that can allow rogue programs to break out of Docker containers and access files on their host OS, but the flaw has been sealed in the latest version of the tech.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• More than a decade after the beginnings of George W. Bush’s two wars, bombs are still falling in the invaded countries.

• The most grotesque spectacle in recent years has been that of an Australian prime minister on tour in the United States. The bib has to be procured to capture the drool. Fawning admiration accompanies unqualified assertions of promise and valour in the face of common enemies and those who do not share the “values” of each country.

• Supporting and arming a brutal dictator in Saddam Hussein and his catastrophic war against Iran, then bombing Iraq and imposing the most murderous sanctions in history, and then newly bombing Iraq and occupying it for 8 years while arming and training death squads and torturers and imposing sectarian segregation, creating 5 million refugees, and killing a half-million to a million-and-a-half people, while devastating the nation’s infrastructure, and then imposing a puppet government loyal to one sect and one neighboring nation. That, plus arming the new government for vicious attacks on its own people, while arming mad killers in neighboring Syria, some of whom want to combine parts of Syria and Iraq: that was all it took, and suddenly, out of nowhere, ignorant Arabs are killing each other, just out of pure irrationality, just like in Palestine.

• If Hillary Clinton had had her way, the US would have armed Syrian rebels “two-plus years ago,” she says. The former secretary of state told CNN that she, the defense secretary, and the head of the CIA sought to arm moderates, but the president disagreed. “We pushed very hard. But as I say in my book, I believe that Harry Truman was right, the buck stops with the president.” Would that have affected the current crisis in Iraq? “It’s very difficult, in retrospect, to say that would have prevented this,” she noted, per Reuters.

• US officials are all set to launch air strikes against ISIS-controlled parts of Iraq, but are warning of a major “intelligence gap” in the CIA regarding where potential targets might conceivably be.

• The Green Party of the United States is calling for no new U.S. military action in Iraq, including on-the-ground troop deployment and airstrikes.

• Greens are urging President Obama to resist demands by belligerent politicians and pundits for a U.S. assault in Iraq against ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria).

• When a fire is raging, firefighters are called – not the arsonist who started it, especially if they return to the scene of the crime dragging a barrel of gasoline behind them. Yet, this is precisely what the US proposes – that they – the geopolitical arsonists – be allowed to return to Iraq to extinguish the threat of heavily armed sectarian militants streaming from NATO territory in Turkey and edging ever closer to Baghdad.

• The United States is flying F-18 surveillance missions over Iraq from an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, officials confirm to Fox News, as President Obama weighs options for “increased security assistance” in the country.

• Although few in the United States dare say it, the U.S. military lost the war in Afghanistan a long time ago. As in Vietnam, if the weaker insurgents don’t lose, they win by just keeping an army in the field and hoping the stronger foreign occupier will tire of the conflict and go home. The American colonists used the same strategy to win their independence from Britain. After the U.S. forces leave Afghanistan at the end of 2016, the Taliban will likely be resurgent, and eventually most U.S. political and economic development efforts in Afghanistan likely will be reversed. Thus, unfortunately, much of what U.S. service personnel died or were wounded for will have been lost.

• President Barack Obama has shifted his focus away from airstrikes in Iraq as an imminent option for slowing a fast-moving Islamic insurgency, in part because there are few clear targets that U.S. could hit, officials said.

• On the face of it, “Pattern of Life” mines predictable territory, going back and forth between an American drone operator and a Pakistani villager, skillfully portrayed by Lewis Wheeler and Nael Nacer. Wheeler’s Carlo starts off as a callow macho man, but becomes more and more wary of what he’s doing.

• British-Iraqi artist Athier Mousawi has fused these natural and man-made phenomena to create pictures that show the helplessness and despair of the countless, nameless people crushed or enmeshed by the tentacles of war.

• Ten years ago today, the first CIA drone strike hit Pakistan, starting a bombing campaign that would span two US presidencies and three Pakistani administrations.

• On the evening of June 17 2004, a drone targeted Nek Mohammed, a senior Taliban figure. But it also killed five other people – two of whom were children. While Nek Mohammed received detailed obituaries in major Pakistani newspapers, the children were not even identified by name. And 10 years after their deaths, details of what happened that evening are only just starting to emerge.

• Nothing has exposed the delusionary disaster of the war on terror like the past week’s eruption of its mutant progeny across Iraq. David Cameron declared today that the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, rejected as too extreme and sectarian by al-Qaida itself, is now the most serious threat to Britain’s security.

• “It’s a walk against drone warfare. The slogan is ‘Ground the Drones.’ We’re here to highlight that the drones kill primarily civilian noncombatants and create enmity among the countries where we’re using them. And if there’s one thing that will create more terrorists, it’s to keep using these drones.”

• An American drone strike killed at least five people in North Waziristan on Wednesday, Pakistani officials said, as the Pakistani military continued its offensive against militants in that tribal district.

• The officials said that two drones fired at least six missiles on a compound near Miram Shah, the main town in North Waziristan, as tens of thousands of civilians fled in anticipation of intense fighting.

• A mining company has ordered 25 Desert Wolf Skunk unmanned aerial vehicles for breaking up riots with pepper spray and “blinding lasers.”

• The supplier, South African-based Desert Wolf, describes the ‘Skunk’ as a “riot control copter” – but there are concerns it breaks international treaties on the use of torture, lasers and even the Geneva Convention.

• American military involvement would inflame, not ease, Iraq’s sectarian divisions.

• President Barak Obama has not yet announced a decision on the shape and extent of US military intervention in Iraq, but he may be considering targeted and selective air strikes.

• chelsea-manningUS Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning wrote a remarkable piece for the Sunday edition of the New York Times (6/15/14), one of the most prestigious venues in the corporate media. It represents an extraordinarily clear statement from someone who is certainly one of the country’s most important political prisoners.

• Tony Blair’s deceit over Iraq still contaminates British politics and continues to have the most shocking and lethal consequences. Time to lance this boil says Daily Mail’s Simon Heffer.

• The United States was not “drawn” into Iraq in 2003; it made a conscious decision to launch a war. Thus it cannot be “drawn back” into the conflict either. It is nonetheless quite revealing that journalists employ this language, making US warmaking sound like a reaction–not an action.

• The yearning to intervene, to bomb someone even if just to “send a message”, shows how thin is the veneer of sanity cloaking great power aggression.

• The great command of the Nuremberg Tribunal convened after the Second World War to punish the evil that had shaken Europe was to abolish the “supreme international crime” – the planning and waging of wars of aggression. “War is essentially an evil thing,” the Tribunal held as it passed judgment on German leaders. “Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world.”

• The violent coming to power of a rightist regime in Kyiv, Ukraine in late February 2014 has opened an exceptionally dangerous political period in Europe. For the first time since World War II, a European government has representatives of fascist parties as ministers. These are the ministers of the armed forces, prosecution service and agriculture, and deputy ministers of national security (police), education and anti-corruption.

• The US is keen to take a tighter grip on the Ukrainian energy sector, and the new government in Kiev is eager to help it do so. On Tuesday, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk announced that the country’s gas transportation system was being handed over to US and European partners. Moreover, US Vice-President Joe Biden’s son is now a board director at the Ukrainian private oil and gas company Burisma.

• Born and raised in Ukraine, Igor Kornelyuk worked as a journalist for over 15 years. He went to Ukraine to cover bloodshed there, but never returned home. His colleague sound engineer Anton Voloshin was killed alongside him in Ukraine’s army shelling.

• Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin both worked for Rossiya TV channel. They are the first Russian journalists to have died while on professional duty in Ukraine since the coup in Kiev and the beginning of civil unrest in eastern regions.

Transparency Reporting

• The Trade in Services Agreement document WikiLeaks has obtained is arcane, but it shows that Australia, the US, the European Union and 20 other large and small countries are talking about unprecedented mutual access to their financial service sectors.

• This memorandum provides a preliminary analysis of the leaked financial services chapter of the Trade in Services Agreement dated 14 April 2014. It makes the following points:

• The secrecy of negotiating documents exceeds even the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and runs counter to moves in the WTO towards greater openness. The TISA is being promoted by the same governments that installed the failed model of financial (de)regulation in the WTO and which has been blamed for helping to fuel the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The same states shut down moves by other WTO Members to critically debate these rules following the GFC with a view to reform. They want to expand and deepen the existing regime through TISA, bypassing the stalled Doha round at the WTO and creating a new template for future free trade agreements and ultimately for the WTO. TISA is designed for and in close consultation with the global finance industry, whose greed and recklessness has been blamed for successive crises and who continue to capture rulemaking in global institutions. A sample of provisions from this leaked text show that governments signing on to TISA will: be expected to lock in and extend their current levels of financial deregulation and liberalisation; lose the right to require data to be held onshore; face pressure to authorise potentially toxic insurance products; and risk a legal challenge if they adopt measures to prevent or respond to another crisis.

• Without the full TISA text, any analysis is necessarily tentative. The draft TISA text and the background documents need to be released to enable informed analysis and decision-making.

• “And the quietest room is the women’s bathroom, the only room that’s easy to sleep in. So I thought I’d try and somehow get hold of it and renovate it. Eventually, somewhat reluctantly, the staff relented. They ripped out the toilet. They’ve been very generous.”

• ​Julian Assange, a modern day hero and enemy of state, is preparing to mark two years in captivity inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, with another major leak of state secrets and a fresh challenge to escape legal limbo.

• Two years after he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, lawyers for the controversial Wikileaks honcho rally for another attempt to secure his freedom.

• We remember anniversaries that mark the important events of our era: September 11 (not only the 2001 Twin Towers attack, but also the 1973 military coup against Allende in Chile), D-day, etc. Maybe another date should be added to this list: 19 June.

• Most of us like to take a stroll during the day to get a breath of fresh air. There must be a good reason for those who cannot do it – maybe they have a job that prevents it (miners, submariners), or a strange illness that makes exposure to sunlight a deadly danger. Even prisoners get their daily hour’s walk in fresh air.

• Julian Assange. Well, it’s not happy per se, but tomorrow marks two years that he has spent stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which is surrounded at all hours by police. It is a good day to look back on the accomplishments of his information-leaking organization and reflect on how large an impact Assange has had and continues to have on issues of government, journalism, and whistle-blowing.

• Julian Assange calls for US Attorney General Eric Holder to drop WikiLeaks investigation or resign.

• Julian Assange – the Australian journalist, editor-in-chief and co-founder of WikiLeaks whistle-blower website – has now spent two years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

• He went to live in the embassy after the UK Supreme Court had ordered his extradition to Sweden, where he awaits investigations of sexual assault allegations.

• A room, shower, and the Internet – such is daily life for Julian Assange. For two years, the controversial and enigmatic co-founder of the whistleblower site WikiLeaks has been living at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

• The money spent on policing the embassy would be enough to keep 325 bobbies on the beat for a year, while the £9,000 daily cost is the same as it costs to put a child through state school for a year.

Finance

• Zibechi’s new book forcefully exhibits how the insatiable drive for capital accumulation continues to dispossess and repress Brazil’s marginalized poor.

• The news comes on the first full day of a visit by its leader.

• The BBC understands the projects the state-owned China Development Bank (CDB) wants to invest in include High Speed 2 and the next generation of nuclear power stations.

• A major deal between BP and China National Offshore Oil Corporation is worth about $20bn (£11.8bn).

• Satochi Nakamoto (the nom de guerre of the mind behind Bitcoin) designed this flaw into the software because of one false assumption. What was that assumption? He believed that it was possible to build an open and free economic system built purely on simple self-interest (selfishness). Lots of people make this mistake (famously, Greenspan believed that selfish decision making would prevent the banking crisis of 2008).

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Ever since the Supreme Court removed corporate spending limits on political campaigns via Citizen United, the field of American politics has become overwhelmingly dominated by the messaging of corporate donors and wealthy individuals. And two months ago, the situation got much worse. McCutcheon v. FEC removed limits on the total amount any one person can contribute. Now individuals can give more than $3.5 million over two years, instead of the previous $123,200 limit.

• Who can afford to spend that kind of money on politics other than the very rich? And what, exactly, are they getting in return for their million-dollar donations? A lot more than a campaign t-shirt.

• The Bradley Foundation and its directors have given nearly $18 million to groups that are now connected to individuals involved in the John Doe investigation and the campaign against it. That high-profile probe is examining possible campaign finance violations during the 2011 and 2012 recall elections as Wisconsin Club for Growth and other nonprofit “dark money” groups spent tens of millions trying to protect the seats of Scott Walker and Republican legislators.

Censorship

• At a highly anticipated meeting last week, President Vladimir Putin spoke to Yandex’s Arkady Volozh and Mail.Ru’s Dmitry Grishin, both Internet industry leaders who stand to lose huge sums of money if the Kremlin’s Internet crackdown causes Russian consumers to take their business to foreign competitors like Google.

• The government’s campaign for online censorship has created a backlash, with the number of Russia-based users of anonymous web surfing software Tor more than doubling in the past three weeks.

Privacy

• In the last four hours, over 400 ORG supporters have contacted their ISPs to demand that they stop retaining customers’ email, SMS, web and phone data. It’s crucial that we keep up the pressure.

• When the anonymous authors of the Truecrypt security tool mysteriously yanked their software last month, there was widespread suspicion that they had been ordered by the NSA to secretly compromise their software. A close look at the cryptic message they left behind suggests that they may have encoded a secret clue in the initials of each word of the sentence (“Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues”), the Latin phrase “uti nsa im cu si” which some claim can be translated as a warning that the NSA had pwned Truecrypt.

• When popular security software TrueCrypt closed its doors, many users simply couldn’t believe that the stated reason – that the developers had decided to stop work because Microsoft had rendered their software obsolete – was true.

• For example, the audit raised serious questions about code quality and the antediluvian build environment. But this is a bit like criticising a donkey for not being a horse. The groundwork was laid when Microsoft was only just waking up to the need for a secure development methodology.

• Six additional Internal Revenue Service workers lost emails sought by congressional investigators when their computers crashed, investigators announced Tuesday, escalating Republican suspicions that the employees may have been trying to cover up political targeting of Tea Party organizations.

• Lawmakers on Wednesday voiced concern over the Obama administration’s plans for monitoring individuals who hold security clearances as part of a crackdown in the wake of leaks by former government contractor Edward Snowden.

• Sens. Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) said in a letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that the stated possibility of “continuous evaluation” of legislative officials would raise constitutional questions and that extensive employee monitoring could inhibit people from coming forward to point out fraudulent or illegal activities. These concerns suggest growing worries among lawmakers about the extent to which the government’s monitoring capabilities will be turned on the legislative branch.

• Facebook, the world’s most popular social media website, crashed for a brief while on Thursday. “We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can,” said an message on the website when users tried to log in.

• The so-called “German NSA dossier” leaked on the Internet. According to Edward Snowden, over 50 files in the dossier contain information about the locations, where NSA agents stay in Germany.

• According to new documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the US National Security Agency (NSA) is using third-party countries to gain access to thousands of fibre-optic cables in their jurisdictions.

• Huge volumes of private emails, phone calls, and internet chats are being intercepted by the National Security Agency with the secret cooperation of more foreign governments than previously known, according to newly disclosed documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

• One year ago this month, Americans learned that their government was engaged in secret dragnet surveillance, which contradicted years of assurances to the contrary from senior government officials and intelligence leaders.

• Using documents leaked by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, Der Spiegel reports that the NSA has turned Germany into its most important base of operations in Europe. “NSA is more active in Germany than anywhere else in Europe,” reports the paper, “And data collected here may have helped kill suspected terrorists.”

• Europe’s top court is to rule on a case that seeks to force data protection authorities to investigate allegations that Facebook passes personal data to the US National Security Agency.

• The case, brought by Austrian privacy campaigner Max Schrem, was referred to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg by the high court in Dublin.

• Leaks from the NSA’s Edward Snowden revealed the extent to which US technology companies were cooperating with intelligence agencies. Many at the time claimed that their hands were forced.

• Ireland’s High Court has asked the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to review a European Union-US data protection agreement in light of allegations that Facebook shared data from EU users with the US National Security Agency.

• THE European Court of Justice will be asked to examine the law governing data protection, following a student’s legal challenge over the mass transfer of data by Facebook to the US intelligence services.

• The NSA may seem like an intimidating giant, but it has a serious Achilles’ heel— the enormous budget it claims from taxpayer dollars every year. While change to the actual words of the laws that govern NSA surveillance seems to be a difficult task, a group of representatives have decided to take the battle to the bank.

• A bipartisan group of Congress members have proposed an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2015 Department of Defense Appropriations Act aimed at reining in government surveillance. The amendment would ban the funding of government to either demand or request a “backdoor” into products built by technology companies. It would also ban the funding of searches of the data of US persons under the authority of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

• If you call your Congressional rep today, we can stop NSA mass surveillance in its tracks. Today, Congress will vote on a critical amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill: under this amendment, the NSA will be prohibited from using its prodigious budget to conduct mass, warrantless surveillance and to sabotage security standards and technology. This doesn’t solve all the surveillance problems, but it’s the cleanest, quickest and most plausible way to hamstring NSA spying. The last time this happened, Congress came within seven votes of passing it. The chances are even better now. CALL.

• RADIO hackers have reverse-engineered some of the wireless spying gadgets used by the US National Security Agency. Using documents leaked by Edward Snowden, researchers have built simple but effective tools that can be attached to parts of a computer to gather private information in a host of intrusive ways.

• The NSA’s Advanced Network Technology catalogue was part of the avalanche of classified documents leaked by Snowden, a former agency contractor. The catalogue lists and pictures devices that agents can use to spy on a target’s computer or phone. The technologies include fake base stations for hijacking and monitoring cellphone calls and radio-equipped USB sticks that transmit a computer’s contents.

• The European Union has to rely on antitrust and privacy rules to curb Google’s search-engine dominance and can’t just break up the company, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said.

• One of my primary responsibilities as your representative in Congress is to ensure that the privacy and civil liberties guaranteed in the Constitution for every American remain protected. Revelations that U.S. intelligence agencies have been collecting phone records, e-mails, credit card transactions and other private communications in the name of national security are breathtaking in their potential ramifications for the rights of our citizens. While law enforcement and the intelligence community should have all the resources necessary to combat terrorism, they should be held within the bounds of the Constitution.

• A year after the Snowden revelations, Germany’s domestic spy agency has so little to say about the NSA surveillance scandal it calls into question the intelligence of the intelligence agency, says DW’s Marcel Fürstenau.

• When talking of freewheeling domestic spying, it would behoove us to remember that it’s not just the National Security Agency (NSA) that needs reform and a tight leash. Hell, it’s not even just federal agencies who are disinterested in your Fourth Amendment rights. Like the war toys that move from the Pentagon down to myriad local law enforcement agencies, dragnet spying is happening at the state and city level, too.

• One year ago this month, Americans learned that their government was engaged in secret dragnet surveillance, which contradicted years of assurances to the contrary from senior government officials and intelligence leaders. – See more at: http://www.vindy.com/news/2014/jun/19/time-to-end-nsas-secret-dragnet-surveill/?newswatch#sthash.r1kBLsr4.dpuf

• The impact of Edward Snowden’s leaks about NSA spying have been the single biggest issue that has changed the conversation for VMware’s cloud clients, said Bill Fathers, VMware’s SVP of hybrid cloud services, at Gigaom’s Structure conference on Wednesday. “It’s been absolutely fascinating,” Fathers said in a conversation about making the enterprise comfortable with the public cloud. Currently just two or three percent of work loads are in the public cloud, but Fathers expects that to move to 20 percent over the years.

• U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who cheered Team USA onto victory over Ghana at Monday’s World Cup match in Rio de Janeiro, is on a mission of soccer diplomacy to repair relations with Brazil.

• U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden briefly met with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff on Tuesday in a bid to thaw stalled relations between the two nations

• Biden, speaking to reporters in the U.S. Embassy after the abrupt cancellation of a joint statement he was expected to make with Brazil’s vice-president, said he reassured Rouseff that the U.S. had changed espionage tactics that previously led to direct spying of the Brazilian leader’s communications.

• Speaking to reporters after the abrupt cancellation of a joint statement he was expected to make with Brazil’s vice president, Biden said he reassured Rousseff that the U.S. had changed espionage tactics, since it emerged last year that the NSA had spied on her personal communications.

• The meeting was part of a diplomatic drive to improve relations between the two countries, which were damaged after Brazilian companies and Rousseff herself appeared among the alleged targets of espionage activities conducted by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

• Britain’s GCHQ intelligence agency said on Tuesday it would start to share classified cyber threat information with private companies amid concerns over increasingly sophisticated targeting of businesses by hackers.

• Iain Lobban, the UK spy chief, has defended GCHQ in light of the British media’s publication of the Snowden documents

• Facebook status updates and Twitter posts are being intercepted by the UK Government because they are regarded as external communications from countries based overseas, it has been revealed.

• Local officials in Bluffdale, Utah, have voted to help keep the NSA’s new data center hidden from public view.

• Back in March, we introduced you to Nate Carlisle, a Salt Lake Tribune reporter who was waging war with local officials to learn a simple fact about the NSA’s sprawling data center, just completed in nearby Bluffdale.

• The government is “truly devoted to the elimination of privacy in the digital age,” the lawyer and journalist told a sold-out crowd of 850 at Town Hall Seattle Tuesday night. “That’s not hyperbole.”

• GCHQ has given itself legal justification for sweeping up the Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube data of UK citizens, without warrant, by labelling that kind of information “external communications.”

• A majority of lawmakers in the House of Representatives now support a bill requiring agencies like the National Security Agency to get warrants before accessing private emails.

• Actor and director Ralph Fiennes has described as “profoundly frightening” the idea that internet companies such as Google and Facebook hold data on their users that can be used by governments.

• German magazine Der Spiegel on Wednesday posted a new cache of documents related to National Security Agency surveillance activities within Germany. Among the trove is a report that sheds new light on how the U.S. government may be using games to motivate analysts using XKeyscore, a tool for searching through online data that the agency collects that was revealed last year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

• For quite some time we’ve talked about the importance of ECPA reform. ECPA — the Electronic Communications Privacy Act — is woefully outdated. Passed in the 1980s, when the internet was just a small network that connected a few universities, it has allowed law enforcement and other government officials to snoop on your email based on some very outdated definitions and assumptions. As we’ve discussed in the past, one very obvious example, is the idea that, under the law, emails stored on a server for over 180 days are considered “abandoned” and that there’s no need to get a warrant to view those emails. Of course, that was back when people expected old emails to be either deleted or downloaded. No one predicted “cloud” computing with virtually unlimited storage.

• Britain should grant Germany’s federal prosecutor access to an RAF base which is alleged to have acted as a relay station for data intercepted from Angela Merkel’s mobile phone by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the Labour MP Tom Watson has said.

• Demand for cybersecurity skills in general began rising within the last five years, the report says, not because hackers are attacking networks more but because the defenders of those networks are far more aware of the hackers and are eager to employ someone who can set up ways to detect and stop them. In addition, the rise of state-sponsored stealthy cyber-espionage—and in some cases, even hard-hitting attacks suggestive of cyberwar–is heightening concerns.

• At the front of the room, under a swag of the heavy red draperies and the American flag, sat the panel. The lineup was peculiar. The speakers, waiting for the audience to settle in, included a number of very big names from the intelligence community, including General Michael Hayden, by this time the former director of both the CIA and the NSA; James Woolsey, former CIA director; and Michael Mukasey, former Attorney General for George W. Bush.

• And then there were the others. First among them was the facilitator and director of the Economic Warfare Institute herself. Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld was a relative unknown who, throughout the long afternoon, would aggressively use her academic title at every opportunity, an unusual practice in this company. According to the available brochure, one of the other panelists would argue that jihadists were setting the wildfires ravaging Colorado that summer. Another, a former alternate director for the United States at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), would present a memorable anecdote involving complex terror scenarios not even Hollywood had ever produced.

• Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) pledged on Tuesday to fight against “limited” and “watered down” legislation to reform the spy agency, which they said includes the bill that passed the House last month.

• NSA’s mass surveillance may unfairly implicate the country’€™s courageous reporters for communicating with insurgents

• John Fleming sees plenty of parallels between police departments’ use of automatic license plate scanning technology and widespread electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency.

• Cyber attacks are “not just about trying to paralyze people’s networks,” says senior NATO official Jamie Shea. “It’s also about trying to use cyberspace for propaganda.” Shea recently spoke to Deutsche Welle.

• Germany’s top federal prosecutor has opened a criminal probe into espionage operations by the U.S. National Security Agency, particularly focused on the NSA snooping directed against German Chancellor Angela Merkel (shown).The goal, he said at a press conference, is to bring to justice specific individual U.S. government agents who were allegedly involved in the unlawful snooping operations against German officials. Prosecutions for spying on everyday citizens, while a violation of German law, will not be forthcoming — at least not yet.

• The “Snowden effect” has hit the Show-Me State, and two state lawmakers hope the feds will take notice.

• Sen. Rob Schaaf and Rep. Paul Curtman, both Republicans, have added a ballot to the August 5 primary that will allow Missourians to vote on whether the government shall be allowed to access their electronic communications without a search warrant.

• Is there a benefit to understanding how your users, suppliers or employees relate to and influence one another? It’s hard to imagine that there is a business that couldn’t benefit from more detailed insight and analysis, let alone prediction, of its significant relationships.

• The mainstream U.S. media prefers personalities over substance, so it was perhaps not a surprise that its focus at the first anniversary of Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks was on his alleged peculiarities, not the frightening prospect of a Big Brother state, says ex-State Department official William R. Polk.

• A coalition of more than two dozen privacy and digital rights groups is asking President Obama not to renew a contested National Security Agency program when its legal authority expires this week.

• Mary Barra, the embattled CEO of General Motors, currently embroiled in a recall scandal, is also on the Board of NSA surveillance contractor General Dynamics. Specifically, General Dynamics is the contractor helping the NSA process recorded phone calls going in and out of the Bahamas…

• The London-based asset manager has already made its first two investments, investing US$ 8 million (£5 million) in Balabit, a Luxembourg-based company which specialises in detecting insider threats. The company does this with its technology which monitors normal and unusual behaviour, using algorithms to discover the latter.

• The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has ruled against terrorism suspect Adel Daoud, saying that he and his attorneys cannot access the evidence gathered against him. The Monday ruling overturns an earlier lower district court ruling that had allowed Daoud and his lawyers to review the legality of digital surveillance warrants used against him.

• The Bank of England’s CIO has advised businesses to be aware that partnering with US-based cloud suppliers could result in confidential data being accessed by government agencies such as the FBI and CIA.

• The FBI released its 83-page “Twitter Shorthand” dictionary this week in order to give you a laugh or perhaps finally discern what that person you follow was getting on about in their last tweet.

Civil Rights

• While Islamabad’s authority does not extend to the tribal areas, Taliban’s unofficial court in Waziristan rules on cases in Karachi

• Weeks after he started working quietly as an FBI informant, Hector Xavier Monsegur, known by his online alias “Sabu,” led a cyber attack against one of the bureau’s very own IT contractors.

• Len Padilla, Vice President Product Strategy, NTT Communications Europe discusses how ICT decision-makers have responded to PRISM allegations

• A White House badly in need of some good news on the international front got some today with the capture of Ahmed Abu Khattala, a senior leader of the militant group Ansar al-Sharia and one of the primary suspects in the 2012 Benghazi attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Abu Khattala’s capture may also show that the administration, which has been criticized for its reliance on lethal drone strikes and its failure to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, has settled on a preferred method for dealing with senior terrorist leaders.

• An Iraqi detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was arraigned Wednesday on war-crimes charges before a military commission, setting in motion a case that could help determine whether the tribunals system will be used extensively in the future or wither away after the handful of cases before it are completed.

• Britain must renegotiate the deal which allows a key American military base on Diego Garcia to demand that any use of the Indian Ocean island for “extraordinary rendition” can only take place with London’s prior approval, MPs warn today.

• Detainee and combat operations by US on Chagos island must have cooperation of Britain, says Commons defence committee

• The Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said public confidence had been “dented” by the disclosure in 2008 that the US had secretly used the island as part of its “extraordinary rendition” programme without informing British ministers – in contravention of previous assurances.

• A PANEL OF TDs and senators have pledged to consider a petition asking for the Government to set up an investigation into US Military and CIA use of Irish airspace and Shannon Airport in particular.

• Shannonwatch made a number of recommendations to the Oireachtas Committee, including that the government should establish an independent and impartial inquiry into the possible use of Shannon in the CIA’s illegal renditions programme.

• Within hours of the Pentagon’s announcement that the key suspect in the Benghazi attack on the U.S. mission had been apprehended, the usual suspects came out to denounce the Obama administration.

• While the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind control research, and associated experimental programs concerned with interrogation, torture, and use of incapacitating agents and lethal weapons, involved many dozens, if not hundreds of top U.S. researchers, and cost many millions of dollars, actual testimony from its victims is extremely difficult to find.

• Publishers, news agencies, and mainstream bloggers have shunned such stories, while most victims have been either too psychologically and physically damaged, or too frightened, to come forward. Others have been written off as “crazy.” Indeed, CIA stories about “mind control” have sometimes brought out persecutory delusions in the purely mentally ill.

• Born just before the big crash of 1929, the brutal, charismatic James “Whitey” Bulger worked his way up through Beantown’s notorious Winter Hill Gang. This was after stints in juvenile hall, army stockades, and Alcatraz. The movie doesn’t mention it, but Bulger claims he was also forced into a CIA experiment with LSD. If so, his mind didn’t expand much past murder, mayhem, and vast extortion rackets. He was sharp enough to take advantage of the early-’60s crackdown on the Italian Mafia—something FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover once claimed did not exist.

• The eagerly awaited autobiography of ‘Freeway’ Rick Ross has just been released. A notorious drug kingpin reigning over Los Angeles, California and operating across numerous other states, Rick was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996. But following the discovery his drug source was linked to the CIA and he had been used as a pawn in the Iran-Contra scandal, he received a reduced sentence.

• A British parliamentarian can sue the CIA, Pentagon and other intelligence agencies for information on the United Kingdom’s complicity in the extraordinary rendition of terrorism suspects, the D.C. Circuit ruled.

• Cody Marrone, a Hernando County cop, was taken into custody over the weekend after it was discovered that he used the hot end of a hairdryer to repeatedly scorch the body of a 3-yr-old toddler.

• The parents of a 19-month-old severely injured when police threw a flash bang grenade into his playpen during a raid met with federal authorities in Georgia Tuesday to plead for justice.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• I and many others recently met to discuss the future of global Internet governance at the NETmundial conference in Brazil. Next week is the next milestone in the roadmap we set out there: the 50th meeting of ICANN, and the High Level Governmental Meeting of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee on Monday 23rd. I thank the UK government and Minister Ed Vaizey for hosting such significant events in Europe, and would like to remind you all – colleagues, friends, stakeholders and Internet users of all kinds – why this is important.

• Democratic lawmakers will unveil a piece of bicameral legislation Tuesday that would force the Federal Communications Commission to ban fast lanes on the Internet.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Starting today, “The Internet’s Own Boy,” Brian Knappenberger’s award-winning, acclaimed documentary about Aaron Swartz, is available to pre-order as a Creative Commons-licensed (CC-BY-NC-SA) video download. You can stream the movie for $7 from most platforms, and for $10, you can buy it from Vimeo as a shareable, remixable download.

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