● 06.26.14

● Links 26/6/2014: Linux is Everywhere; A Lot of Android News

Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for ZDNet, once again reminds us that Linux dominates supercomputers. SJVN linked to the latest Top500 group results, showing Linux makes up for 97% of the five hundred fastest computers in the world. This is the biggest of the big iron, the top supercomputer has 1,024,000 GB of RAM and 3,120,000 Intel Xeon cores, running Kylin Linux.

• With Linux being the clear OS of choice among the hot rod builders, where does proprietary Unix fit into the picture? Increasingly, the answer appears to be that it doesn’t.

Server

• Not only does Linux power all of the top 10 machines on the June 2014 list — including China’s winning Tianhe-2, which stole the show once again with its performance of 33.86 Petaflop/second (Pflop/s) on the Linpack benchmark — but it also now accounts for a full 97 percent of the full set of 500. A mere 15 supercomputers on the list *don’t* use Linux, including 12 using Unix and just two using Windows. (The last one is described simply as “Mixed.”)

• Right now the only operating system that supports this 36 core processors, are the ones based on Linux, though it is not certain which Linux based OS MIT researchers are using.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds conducts an interview with the IEEE Computer Society to explain how he sits today in terms of his thoughts with Linux.

• Torvalds is as humble and genuine as you might expect.

• Over the course of a discussion about the patch, Alan Cox mentioned that there didn’t seem to be anything particularly DRM-specific in David’s code. It easily could exist at a yet more generic layer of the kernel. And although David agreed with this, he said the DRM folks were more amenable to taking his patch and that “I’ve spent enough time trying to get the attention of core maintainers for simple fixes, I really don’t want to waste my time pinging on feature-patches every 5 days to get any attention. If someone outside of DRM wants to use it, I’d be happy to discuss any code-sharing. Until then, I’d like to keep it here as people are willing to take it through their tree.”

Graphics Stack

• Beignet, Intel’s method of supporting OpenCL compute under open-source Linux on the graphics cores within their modern processors, is out with a very significant release today.

• The xf86-video-ati 7.4.0 driver update has an assortment of fixes but most prominently enables tiling by default for “CIK” and “Mullins” GPUs, support for server-managed FDs to use the X.Org Server without root privileges, GLAMOR support for R300/R500 GPUs, and an assortment of other updates.

• Version 0.9.0 of the X.Org’s xf86-video-modesetting driver, which provides a universal DDX for systems with a DRM/KMS display driver, has been updated.

Benchmarks

• Yesterday I published some performance benchmarks indicating Intel ultrabook performance might be a bit slower on Linux 3.16 when comparing a recent Git kernel against Linux 3.15 stable. Today I have some results from a very different system: numbers on the very high-end Intel Core i7 4790K “Devil’s Canyon” desktop rig.

Applications

• Git 2.0.1, a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency, is now available for download.

Instructionals/Technical

• I’ve been quite an avid and exclusive user of Vim for a couple of years now, and in that time I’ve seen quite a lot of misinformation and misguided vitriol (for want of a better word) for what is by far the best text editor I have ever used.

• Recently the Samsung Gear 2 and the Samsung Galaxy Gear (Tizen version) have got rooted. Now this opens up more possibilities, and for the seriously tech experts you can do funky things like installing busy box on your Smartwatch.

Games

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Plasmate’s UI consists of two different views. The first one is the startpage which serves the purpose of creating new packages and loading existing ones and the second one is the main window with the appropriate editor and the various dockwidgets that can be used for the specific package.

• Hello everyone. I have started porting Lokalize to KDE5. Lokalize is computer-aided translation system that can be used to translate KDE and any other open source project into differenet human languages.

• Currently it starts and even loads .po files, as well as adds them to translation memory.

• Just in time before the KDE SC 4.14 string freeze applies, I merged my last AppData patches and as of now: all KDE Edu applications provide AppData meta information. This means, they will be better visible in software centers like Apper or GNOME-Software.

• This article explores where the KDE community currently stands and where it is going. Frameworks, Plasma, KDE e.V., Qt5, KDE Free Qt Foundation, QtAddons – you heard some of these terms and want to know what all the fuss is about? A set of articles on the Dot aims to bring some clarity in the changes and constants of the KDE community in 2014 and further. This is the first article, diving into the technical side of things: Plasma, applications and libraries.

• Qt 5.3 was released back in May (while yesterday marked the Qt 5.3.1 release). Qt 5.4 thus has been an active development target for many weeks now and it’s beginning to show with the development branch locking in early August.

• Heikkinen Jani of Digia reminded Qt developers today the plan is to lock the development branch for Qt 5.4 on 8 August, at which point the features for this next tool-kit update should be ready.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

Distributions

• Parsix GNU/Linux 6.0r1, a live and installation DVD based on Debian, aiming to provide a ready-to-use, easy-to-install desktop and laptop-optimized operating system, has been released for testing.

New Releases

• Grab this new version from our new Neptune Homepage.

• The OpenELEC makers usually follow the XMBC releases, but it’s been a while since the last XBMC version. This doesn’t mean that the devs will stay put and wait for changes to come from upstream. In fact, OpenELEC is a distro and there are other components that need to be updated and fixed, as necessary.

• Alpine Linux is not a distribution designed for beginners. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. Users will need to be well accustomed to use a terminal. For example, you have to work a little just to install a desktop environment.

• “The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.0.1 of its Alpine Linux operating system. This is a bugfix release of the v3.0 musl based branch. This release is based on the 3.14.8 kernel which has some critical security fixes,” said the developers in the shortlog.

• The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.3.0

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• Where might Red Hat be looking next, as it seeks to grow its cloud computing presence, capabilities and community? As has been the case for some time, cloud computing and some adjacent technology trends, such as Big Data, DevOps and storage, are likely to drive Red Hat’s next M&A move. A prominent target might be Docker, whose open source containerization technology features prominently in RHEL 7.

Fedora

• Between the upcoming Fedora 21 release, involvement in Red Hat’s Project Atomic, its planned re-structuring under Fedora.next, and its new leader, Matthew Miller, the Fedora Project has a lot going on lately. All of the upheaval is a sign that the distribution is doing what it must to stay relevant in the new world of distributed, scale-out computing, says Miller who took over as project leader earlier this month after his predecessor Robyn Bergeron announced her departure in May.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical is preparing for the official release of Ubuntu Touch and the company is working to build an RTM version of its mobile operating system. To do that successfully, the devs also need to work on the apps, not only on the OS, so they have announced a new “Core Apps Hack Days” next week.

Devices/Embedded

• OpenELEC has been updated to 4.0.5 in this NOOBS release. In addition to the XBMC update (which is undoubtedly the most important change), there are lots of security fixes and general bugfixes — some of which were specific to the Raspberry Pi version, so this is particularly good news for RPi users. It also includes support for some more WLAN chips, updated Raspberry Pi firmware, and it even updates the Linux kernel to 3.14.7, which is even newer than what is included in the Raspbian distribution. Good stuff.

• Amptek is prepping a uClinux- and Cortex-M3 based “iCon” SBC for IoT, equipped with WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, USB, and CAN, and running on under half a Watt.

• uClinux on a microcontroller represents the simplest expression of the Linux operating system, sort of the flipside to Android or Ubuntu on the high end. Despite this platform’s limitations, however, it draws only a smidgin of electricity, and provides a capable wireless platform while also supplying numerous industrial interfaces. All these attributes are showcased by the iCon single board computer (SBC), which probably deserves more than being stuck in the doldrums on Kickstarter, with nine days left to go.

• Since long past times, when Gugliemo Marconi has amazed the entire World broadcasting his radio signals from the Elettra ship, a subject held dear by electronic engineers has been radio transmission. After these years, the scenario has changed a lot, firstly with the appering of digital technologies (DAB, for instance) and, up to day, with the streaming of radio transmissions on internet network by the TCP/IP protocol. Is this still radio? Or we can just talk of broadcasting radio station programs by TCP/IP network?.

• Enea has unveiled version 4.0 of its networking-oriented Enea Linux embedded distribution, introducing virtualization features and an updated Yocto Project 1.6 foundation. The Swedish telecom software vendor claims version 4.0 is “the most open commercial embedded distribution on the market.” We’ll await further evidence on that score, while also noting that all the major commercial embedded Linux platforms have become more open in recent years.

• Embedded Linux vendors such as Enea, Wind River, MontaVista, and Mentor Graphics promote open source much more than they used to. Not so long ago, the chief pitches were for enterprise support, testing and validation services, and real-time “hardening” of the Linux kernel for deterministic, mission critical applications. These remain prime selling points, but the vendors are also starting to promote their new Yocto-based openness.

Phones

Ballnux

• Virtzilla used to hand full, and fully-supported, SLES licences to some vSphere buyers. As Vmware’s page describing the offering states, the licences came “complete with patches and updates”. Those don’t come free: SUSE’s support pricing page lists prices starting at $US349 per physical server and $529 for a virtual server.

• Samsung Electronics and Google have teamed up to confirm that part of the Samsung KNOX technology will be integrated into the next version of Android.

Android

• Android has been popular in emerging markets for a long time, but Google first expressed explicit interest in this market when it launched Android 4.4 KitKat last year. It was designed specifically so it would run well on the lower-cost hardware that usually finds its way to emerging markets. At its launch last fall, Google’s senior vice president, Sundar Pichai, said: “As we get on our journey to reach the next billion people, we want to do it on the latest version of Android.” And now, with Android One, Google’s showing that Pichai’s vision has legs.

• Google launched today’s event with a 3 hour keynote presentation by unveiling ‘Android Auto’, ‘Android Wear’, ‘Android TV’ and ‘Android One’. With Google already knowing everything you do with your phone, tablet and the introduction of Glass it now seems Google also want control over your TV, your watch and even your car. If these new services are a success than Google will literally know everything you do, wear, go and see.

• At last year’s Google I/O the company revealed it had activated 900 million Android devices, and this year that number has hit the billion mark. Over a 30-day period, 1 billion people now actively use Android devices. Google’s Android and Chrome chief, Sundar Pichai, revealed the latest Android figures on stage at Google I/O in San Francisco today, including the fact that phones are checked 100 billion times each day.

• Google is working to bring Chrome OS and Android closer together, and that’ll eventually mean having Android apps running right on a Chromebook. “We’re in early days,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s Chrome and Android chief, said on stage today at Google’s I/O developer conference. Pichai didn’t say when the feature would arrive, but he demonstrated it already working using Android apps for Evernote, Flipboard, and Vine. The apps can appear in a tall, phone-sized window, or they can be expanded to run as they would on tablets.

• Google on Wednesday kicked off its I/O conference in San Francisco, presenting devs with a dizzying array of possibilities: a new design language for Android L; a boatload of new apps, APIs and SDKs; and expanded support for a variety of architectural and hardware configurations. “If I were a developer, I would feel real good about opportunities today,” said ABI analyst Jeff Orr.

• At Google I/O, Google previewed Android 5.0′s new UI, and also unveiled Android TV and Android Auto, while offering new details on Android Wear.

• Today at Google’s I/O (Input/Output) event Google officially announced the launch of Android TV. For some of you, this might sound familiar as back in 2010 Google launched ‘Google TV’ which quickly was dropped again due to a clear lack of interest.

• I was wondering what was ‘L’ in Android, until someone pointed out “maybe it’s Linux”. In all honestly I don’t think it’s L for Linux, but a wishful thinking doesn’t hurt given the fact that Google is putting Linux ‘everywhere’.

• Linus Torvalds may have never dreamt of this day when he sent out that email back in 1991 and said, “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.”

• Gaming peripherals giant turned PC maker Razer has announced that it will be supporting Google’s Android TV platform with the launch of a microconsole device later this year.

• Announced at the Google I/O conference late last night, Android TV is aimed at getting the advertising giant’s Linux-based mobile-centric software in set-top boxes and smart TVs. As well as support for streaming from Android-based smartphones, tablets and wearables, Android TV will support apps and games – the latter of which is Razer’s focus for its as-yet unnamed microconsole device.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Along with the Education 2 in 1 tablet, Intel India has also introduced the Classmate PC and Intel ECS TR10CD1 tablet. The Classmate PC features 10-inch display, runs Windows 8.1, Windows 7 , or Linux. Whereas, the Intel ECS TR10CD1 is a 10.1 inch Android 4.2-based tablet, powered by 1.2GHz dual-core Intel Atom Z2520 processor along with 1GB/2GB of RAM.

Free Software/Open Source

• That right there is the beauty of open source and the benefit of ‘paying’ with your time. We get so used to software that forces us to just deal with the menus and settings they provide that we don’t think to suggest new features when we switch to open source, but if you do you might just get what you’d paid for.

• Cisco is open sourcing block cipher technology to, the company hopes, better protect and control traffic privacy in cloud computing systems

• This past year, Stu Bailey, founder and CTO of network management company InfoBlox, led a research team in developing a fully programmable, open source SDN switch that is not ASIC dependent. The LINCX switch runs on any off-the-shelf Linux or Xen server or on a white box switch and is not network ASIC dependent.

• Although many people at this point have heard Sage’s history of where Ceph came from, I am still often asked questions like “what was the original use case for Ceph?”

• So, in honor of the 10th birthday of Ceph, I thought it might be helpful (and hopefully interesting, given how much I love to hear Sage tell the story) to share Ceph’s origin story and the road to where we are today.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• While GTK3 isn’t yet used by default with Mozilla’s Firefox web-browser, the port to the newer version of the GNOME tool-kit is making progress. As a great sign, Firefox is starting to run on Wayland with the Weston compositor!

SaaS/Big Data

• Instead of using SSL for data in motion encryption, PLUMgrid is leveraging a new approach to keep the cloud safe.

• Joyent’s SmartDataCenter 7 package offers on-premises provisioning and management of containers and virtual machines. Watch out, OpenStack?

• ownCloud, the open source file sharing and syncing platform, is aiming to provide a “Dropbox-like” experience, in its own words—as well as to blur the line demarcating private from public clouds by letting users share file between ownCloud instances. That’s all part of ownCloud 7 Community Edition, the latest version of the platform, which has been released in beta form.

Databases

• Delivering out-of-the-box Big Data analytics, with no specialized programming required, is the goal behind the latest version of Pentaho’s business intelligence platform. Announced this week, Pentaho 5.1 offers enhanced MongoDB support, full Hadoop 2.0 YARN compatibility and more.

• We had the chance to attend the opening day of MongoDBWorld in New York. The event, which was the company’s first user conference, was very well attended, with about 2000 attendees and made the Sheraton Time Square in New York look to small a venue for the event.

Education

• Two years ago, when the Raspberry Pi launched, it was with the intention of improving IT education in the UK. Since then more powerful, better connected or cheaper boards have come onto the market, but the Pi retains its position as the white knight of ICT teaching.

• Why? Because of the community of users that has grown up around it. To find out more we travelled west to Manchester, venue for the second annual Jamboree—a festival of educators, makers and messer-abouters focussed on highlighting how engaging the Pi can be. There, we met 75% of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s education team—Ben Nuttall, Clive Beale, and Carrie Anne Philbin—to discuss IT teaching in the UK.

Business

• Stock believes that he is going to be able to distinguish what Zenoss is doing from all of the other competitors. Is he right?

Openness/Sharing

• An ‘open-source’ seed initiative has released 36 varieties of 14 food crops, which the project’s leaders say could help poor farmers get access to better quality seeds.

• The new seed varieties have been available for delivery globally from mid-May, says Irwin Goldman, a vegetable breeder and horticulturalist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was involved in the release.

Open Hardware

Programming

• I’ve always liked PHP’s default syntax highlighting, that is to say the color scheme used by highlight_file(). I’ve often found myself easily grokking code examples on PHP.net when, say, looking up the parameter order for something like imageconvolution(), only to suffer some frustration once going back to Gedit.

• The Eclipse Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of the Luna release, the annual release train from the Eclipse community. This year 76 projects are participating in the release that includes 61 million lines of code and was developed by over 340 Eclipse committers. This is the ninth year the Eclipse community has planned, developed, and delivered a coordinated release that allows users and adopters to update their Eclipse installations at one time.

• Intel’s MIC run-time offload library will likely be added to the GNU Compiler Collection in the very near future.

• This month the GCC steering committee approved adding Intel’s offload library to GCC that provides run-time support for their MIC architecture, which is what makes up their high-end “Xeon Phi” hardware.

Leftovers

• Personally I am very pro-EU. But whatever your stance on the EU, the outright dishonesty of the Cameron approach must be condemned.

• I published a couple of weeks ago that Juncker does not share Barroso’s hostility to Scottish independence: as a former Prime Minister of Luxembourg he does not see the problem with small nations. The British media has been extremely keen to puff up the opposition to Scottish independence by foreign leaders. Cameron and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have invested huge diplomatic capital into persuading Barack Obama and Li Keqiang to make statements against Scottish independence, while standing next to Cameron for the cameras.

Science

• Sharing research results through open access to publications and data is a key priority for EU says EU Commissioner for research Máire Geoghegan-Quinn

Health/Nutrition

• Food companies have spent billions of dollars to cover up the link between sugar consumption and health problems. That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

Security

• At the beginning of the year, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) warned of the dangers of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that were leveraging Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers to amplify attacks. Apparently, that warning did not fall on deaf ears, as most vulnerable NTP servers have been patched in the last six months, according to a new report from NSFOCUS.

• In December 2013, NSFOCUS found that 432,120 NTP servers around the world could potentially be leveraged in a DDoS attack. In a new analysis released today and conducted during the month of May, NSFOCUS only found 17,647 unpatched servers.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The drone industry’s main lobbyist wants lawmakers to think of drones as extensions of humans: The eyes that can rise above the plumes of a forest fire and the airborne sound sensors that can look for victims of an earthquake.

• The Obama administration’s embrace of targeted killings using armed drones risks putting the United States on a “slippery slope” into perpetual war and sets a dangerous precedent for lethal operations that other countries might adopt in the future, according to a report by a bipartisan panel that includes several former senior intelligence and military officials.

• The group found that more than a decade into the era of armed drones, the American government has yet to carry out a thorough analysis of whether the costs of routine secret killing operations outweigh the benefits. The report urges the administration to conduct such an analysis and to give a public accounting of both militants and civilians killed in drone strikes.

• ISIS seems to be aware of a key aspect of the power of social media: that it is a conversation. Platforms such as Ask.fm, on which users can post questions and give answers anonymously, enable people to have direct conversations with ISIS fighters.

• In Iraq, armed and angry militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are at the gates of Baghdad. In Pakistan, government forces are mounting a ferocious campaign against the Taliban in North Waziristan. In Syria, the civil war drags on. These are “hot wars” involving the clashing of troops and weapons. Having escaped such “hot” conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, these are the sort of war Americans have made it plain they are not prepared to fight.

• The report, released early Thursday by the Stimson Center, concludes that while targeted killing operations might have protected Americans at home, they come at a heavy price abroad: Extremist groups have only grown in influence overseas and “blow back” over civilian casualties is becoming “a potent recruiting tool for terrorist organizations,” in places like Yemen and Pakistan.

• Throughout the 20th century the United States, more than any other country, championed the development of the international law of armed conflict. But in this century many nations accuse the United States of abandoning that leadership by using drones to conduct hundreds of targeting killings of terror suspects in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere, in what they see as a violation of international law. And now, with the world watching, President Obama may decide to expand the use of drones to Iraq to counter the advances of the militant group Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

• America’s reliance on secretive drone missile strikes against terror suspects has set a “dangerous precedent” that could be imitated by other countries and trigger wider wars around the world, former senior US officials said in a report on Thursday.

• The ex-officials acknowledged that the robotic aircraft are a useful tool that is “here to stay,” but urged President Barack Obama to lift the veil of secrecy that surrounds their use, introduce stricter rules for the strikes and take a hard look at whether the bombing raids were genuinely effective.

• Finally, and most troubling of all, there is no mechanism in place for independent testing of whether US practice matches the limits Obama has announced. Why can’t there be an assessment, at a minimum after the fact, as to the validity and consequences of each attack? The Israeli Supreme Court reviews each of Israel’s targeted killings, with appropriate deference to military judgment, to assure that they fall within legal bounds. We have no such review here, by a court or otherwise. Instead, we continue to operate the drone program almost entirely in secret, and have yet to admit that we killed a single innocent bystander, despite widespread reports of such deaths. Without real accountability, it is highly unlikely that the world will believe that the US is operating within the law. Why should it?

• The Obama administration’s once-secret legal justification for killing U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki with a drone strike cites an Israeli court decision that allows the targeted killing of alleged Palestinian militants.

• Better late than never, Americans have been given a redacted version of a Justice Department memo that offers a legal rationale for targeting Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born al-Qaeda figure who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. The document was made public this week, after the Obama Administration decided not to appeal a court order that it be disclosed.

• Since the CIA’s robotic assassination campaign began in earnest in 2008, the skies over Pakistan’s wild tribal zones known as the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Agencies) which have given sanctuary to the Taliban and Al Qaeda have been filled with the buzzing sound of CIA Predator and more advanced Reaper drones hunting terrorists, militants and insurgents.

• Jud was killed in a rocket strike close to the family home on Tuesday night that also injured her sister and cousin. After the attack, there was much speculation over whether a Palestinian rocket or an Israeli drone was to blame. The evidence of both is visible on a dirt track in Beit Lahia, one of Gaza’s poorest neighbourhoods. To Arafat, as he stands near the site just after dawn, it does not matter.

• On Monday, a US court ordered the publication of a secret memo outlining the government’s legal justification for killing an American citizen, Anwar al Awlaki.

• Thus the murder of Awlaki was organized over a protracted period of time. It was a cold-blooded extra-judicial killing by the state.

• But the legal opinion doesn’t – and can’t – explain why Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was killed by a drone strike while Ahmed Abu Khattala, a Libyan suspected of leading the 2012 attacks on our missions in Benghazi, taken alive?

• I was blacklisted by some major US TV networks on the orders of the Bush White House – which claimed to be invading Iraq to bring democracy and free speech to the benighted Arab world! The entire US media was bullied or threatened into following the party line on Iraq. Members of Congress clapped for war like trained circus seals. It was one of the darkest periods in American history.

• If Russia is “preparing to send more,” that implies that it’s already sent some–and that the New York Times has evidence that this is the case. There has been no shortage of coverage attempting to explicitly link Russia to these rebel groups, but the stories have often fallen apart under examination (FAIR Blog, 4/23/14).

• How the White House refused to address the question that Americans need answered on targeted killings.

• A wave of air strikes by the Pakistani military in the country’s tribal northwest has killed at least 291 people, including a minimum 16 civilians, over the past six months.

• Mohana Ravindranath writes the CIA awarded the contract to AWS in 2013 and the cloud computing platform is scheduled for deployment in the summer.

• Once in a while the inconsistencies in American foreign policy become sufficiently clear to reveal the consistency in American foreign policy. Three contemporary inconsistencies in Iraq and Syria, all clearly connected, converge to throw America’s consistent foreign policy into sharp relief.

• When reports surfaced in Washington this month that the Obama administration has been holding secret back-channel talks with Hamas over the last six months, the denials came swiftly. “These assertions are completely untrue,” proclaimed State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf. “As you all know, Hamas is a designated foreign terrorist organization. … Per long-standing U.S. policy, we do not have any contact with Hamas.”

• Key members of ISIS it now emerges were trained by US CIA and Special Forces command at a secret camp in Jordan in 2012, according to informed Jordanian officials. The US, Turkish and Jordanian intelligence were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country’s northern desert region, conveniently near the borders to both Syria and Iraq. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the two Gulf monarchies most involved in funding the war against Syria’s Assad, financed the Jordan ISIS training.

• Managing the new Syrian conflict will be a challenge for years to come. The threat of hardened veterans bringing the jihad and their combat skills to the global battlefield is now more likely than has been in the past. Sadly, it seems “bleedout” is back.

Transparency Reporting

• Text messages sent by the two women plaintiffs were seen by defence lawyers in 2010, but copies of the messages were not issued to them.

• The founder of the Wikileaks website Julian Assange says he fears for the safety of his family.

• The day before, the lawyers submitted an official request to the court of Stockholm, asking the latter to provide them with the copies of an SMS-message that “could prove that there was no reason for Assange’s arrest.” Earlier, Assange said that one of his supposed victims sent him SMS-messages, which showed that she didn’t want to sue him and was shocked by his arrest.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Events in Iraq are headline news everywhere, and once again, there is no mention of the issue that underlies much of the violence: control of Iraqi oil. Instead, the media is flooded with debate about, horror over, and extensive analysis of a not-exactly-brand-new terrorist threat, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). There are, in addition, elaborate discussions about the possibility of a civil war that threatens both a new round of ethnic cleansing and the collapse of the embattled government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

• It turns out that there may far more contamination from fracking than once thought. Scientists have found that the oil and gas extraction method known and hydraulic fracturing may contribute more pollutants to groundwater than previous research has suggested.

Finance

• Leonhardt dismisses these concerns over debt as “scare stories.” He seems to think that the proper message to give indebted graduates is: Don’t worry, be happy.

• Open-source bitcoin ATM manufacturer Skyhook has announced that it has shipped 150 units since its May launch, and that 70 units have been sent to customers since the beginning of June alone.

• B.J. Gulliot is a Republican running for Washington State’s 2nd Congressional district, and he wants your Bitcoin.

• Gulliot doesn’t appear to be a run-of-the-mill Republican. First off, he is a Republican in Washington State, which just legalized marijuana. He also drives the 100 % electric Nissan Leaf and loves to travel outside of the country. Not exactly the image that comes to mind when you think of the grand ole party.B.J. Gulliot is a Republican running for Washington State’s 2nd Congressional district, and he wants your Bitcoin.

• Gulliot doesn’t appear to be a run-of-the-mill Republican. First off, he is a Republican in Washington State, which just legalized marijuana. He also drives the 100 % electric Nissan Leaf and loves to travel outside of the country. Not exactly the image that comes to mind when you think of the grand ole party.

• Professor Jane Kelsey of the Faculty of Law, University of Auckland prepared an analysis of the leak that I recommend that everyone read. She, appropriately, emphasizes that any analysis must be tentative because we have only a partial, stale draft through the whistleblower(s).

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Instead, the contract requested help transporting children who have already been apprehended within the U.S., moving the migrants to temporary shelters while they await deportation proceedings.

• Rupert Murdoch’s money washed through the ‘trial of the century’ like a Rolls-Royce. The story behind the News of the World scandal was not about journalists behaving badly, but the power of money and its abuses

Censorship

• Bloomberg’s Hans Nichols reports on Google removing search results following a privacy ruling from the European Union and looks at the excitement in Germany for today’s match between Germany and the United States. He speaks on “Bloomberg Surveillance.”

• US TV network concede online advert to promote Sundance hit had removed the word ‘abortion’

• On the one hand we have racism, with special legal privileges to censor offensive comment.

• On the other we have sexism and homophobia that do not enjoy the same protections.

• Yet even without them the preparedness of Australians to tackle sexism and homophobia has been on full display.

• Encryption software has been enjoying a prolonged day in the sun for about the last year. Thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden about the NSA’s seemingly limitless capabilities, security experts have been pounding the drum about the importance of encrypting not just data in transit, but information stored on laptops, phones and portable drives. But the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court put a dent in that armor on Wednesday, ruling that a criminal defendant could be compelled to decrypt the contents of his laptops.

• The case centers on a lawyer who was arrested in 2009 for allegedly participating in a mortgage fraud scheme. The defendant, Leon I. Gelfgatt, admitted to Massachusetts state police that he had done work with a company called Baylor Holdings and that he encrypted his communications and the hard drives of all of his computers. He said that he could decrypt the computers seized from his home, but refused to do so.

• On June 2nd, the Supreme Court rejected New York Times reporter James Risen’s appeal of a 4th Circuit decision that ruled the government can compel him to reveal his source under oath. The case, one of the most important for reporter’s privilege in decades, means that Risen has exhausted his appeals and must now either testify in the leak trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, or face jail time for being in contempt of court. Risen has admirably vowed to go to prison rather than comply.

Privacy

• At the most dangerous end of the scale, cybercriminals could potentially hijack the technology upon people’s lives depend, such as insulin pumps and pacemakers. Last year, former US Vice President Dick Cheney revealed that his doctor had ordered the wireless functionality of his heart implant disabled, due to fears it might be hacked in an assassination attempt – a scenario depicted in popular TV drama Homeland.

• When it comes to spying, surveillance, and privacy, a simple rule applies to our world: However bad you think it is, it’s worse. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we’ve learned an enormous amount about the global surveillance regime that one of America’s 17 intelligence outfits has created to suck into its maw (and its storage facilities) all communications on the planet, no matter their form. We certainly know a lot more than we did a year ago about what the government is capable of knowing about us. We’ve also recently learned a good deal about “big data” and what corporations can now know about us, as well as how much more they may know once your house is filled with “smart” technology.

• Sir John Sawers is believed to have wanted to leave his post in the shadowy Secret Intelligence Service before next year’s general election.

• The German government has canceled a contract with U.S. telecoms firm Verizon Communications inc as part of an overhaul of its internal communications prompted by the row over United States government spying.

• German Chancellor Angela Merkel can finally hold phone talks with no fear of being tapped by foreign agents, as she now has a secure, German-upgraded Blackberry, Bild reports. Merkel’s contacts now need to install a 2,500 euro crypto-chip to talk to her.

• No surprise there. It was, after all, the paper that initially broke the story that News International’s subsidiary, News Group, had allegedly paid over £1 million to settle cases out of court that might have otherwise revealed the newspaper chain had illegally hacked phones to get stories. And, of course, the Guardian was one of the first points of contact for Edward Snowden who, four years after the News of the World hacking scandal broke, fed the paper an unknown (but allegedly huge) amount of files from the NSA, detailing how it monitors personal metadata for, well, basically everyone.

• Boehner never really challenges the NSA Stasi does he? That is other than the standard lip service that is paid by the pack of thieves, liars, grifters, obstructionists and de-facto lobbyists when it comes to putting an end to bulk collection of metadata (a limited hangout) but not real reform or accountability. He also is one of the many rats in high places who has referred to Snowden as a “traitor” for his act of great service to the American people. Just like the slime-coated Darrell Issa with his abuse of taxpayer funds to conduct his inquisitions into Benghazi and the IRS allegedly targeting right-wing political front groups abusing non-profit status Boehner is all about his own political survival. That is because his survival means a permanent tax payer funded occupation of his congressional seat where he can suckle at the teat of the very big government that he decries for the purpose of his own self-enrichment and aggrandizement. Neither Boehner nor Issa will do one damned thing about the rogue activities of the NSA nor address the executive order that their idol Reagan imposed upon the American people that has led us to the brink of turnkey totalitarianism. No, it is all about sticking it to the BLACK guy in the WHITE House and nothing fires up the rabble in an off year election than some good-old fashioned race baiting, we saw it in 2010 and will see it again in 2014.

• Wickr, an app that lets you securely send self-destructing text, audio, and video messages, announced today that it has raised a second funding round of $30 million. The round was led by Jim Breyer, founder and CEO of Breyer Capital, who’s also joining the company’s board.

• Russian Internet giant Yandex has rolled out a new feature for its cloud storage service Yandex.Disk that allows users to siphon their photos from Facebook, including the ones they’re tagged in, to a safe place in the cloud. In addition to Facebook, users can import photos from popular Russian networks VK.com and Odnoklassniki, while support for Instagram is coming soon, Yandex told TNW.

• Privacy advocates are mounting a campaign against Facebook’s recently announced plans to extend their harvesting of users’ personal data beyond the Facebook site.

• More than 30 privacy and civil-liberties groups are asking the Justice Department to complete a long-promised audit of the FBI’s facial-recognition database.

• The groups argue the database, which the FBI says it uses to identify targets, could pose privacy risks to every American citizen because it has not been properly vetted, possesses dubious accuracy benchmarks, and may sweep up images of ordinary people not suspected of wrongdoing.

• After all, Alexander established the systems that let Snowden download thousands of top secret documents, then closed the barn door after the cows left with a belated two-man rule.

• Nick Clegg has issued a clear warning to the home secretary, Theresa May, that there will be no revival of her “snooper’s charter” legislation this side of the general election despite her claim on Monday that it was “quite simply a matter of life or death”.

• Britain’s Home Secretary is pushing for new spying powers to access social media and email accounts. Theresa May argues that it’s a “matter of life and death,” and has dismissed claims the government wants to spy on citizens.

• At least 20 cases have been dropped by the National Crime Agency (NCA) in six months as a result of missing communications data, according to the Home Secretary.

• Thailand’s censorship regime has grown ever more pervasive since the military took over last month, with punishments aimed at both speakers and consumers of prohibited media. On the streets, Thais have been arrested for wearing the wrong message on a T-shirt, or reading George Orwell’s “1984″ in public. Online, according to the regime’s own reports, hundreds of new websites have been added to the Thai government’s official blacklist including politics and news sites covering the coup. Now the authorities are deceiving Internet users into disclosing their personal details, including email addresses and Facebook profile information, when they try to visit these prohibited sites.

• The Supreme Court brought the constitutional right of personal privacy into the digital era Wednesday, ruling unanimously that police may not search a smartphone or similar device without a warrant from a judge.

• The Home Secretary altered key sections of a speech she gave on Britain’s surveillance powers, The Telegraph discloses

• Police in Massachusetts are luring children to get them to hand over their biometric information in exchange for…I’m not sure what. Officials imply that putting children’s biometric identifiers in the “missing persons” database is a good thing to do. For the life of me I really cannot figure out why.

• Schindler has taught at the college since 2005. He also is a fellow at Boston University, according to its website. His resume says he was a senior intelligence analyst with the NSA from 1996 to 2004.

• No matter how much we say we’re angry about the NSA scandal, we still use all the services that – in some way – are tied up in surveillance. In Europe some are trying to get us to stop.

• Slides leaked by Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), reveal that the NSA has entire factories devoted to installing special bugs in electronics shipped to Americans and foreigners. Skepticism about whether such bugs are technically feasible, much less in widespread uses has raged in recent months, but presentations at DefCon 22, held in Las Vegas, Nev. from Aug. 7-10 may help to demystify the strange and terrifying tools the NSA is using to spy on us.

• There is now an entire generation of people, the so-called Millennials, who have grown up with the internet. These “kids” expect the internet to be there all the time. And not just that, they expect it to be secured and private, using encryption like SSL, so that no one can snoop on their Instragram updates and their Snapchats. Hey there’s nothing wrong with that — I’m older, but I feel exactly the same way. Excuse me while I check my top-secret tweets for mentions of the hottest Millennial today, Edward Snowden. His revelations about the NSA may have gotten him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, yet the actual depth of state surveillance goes beyond even his paranoia.

• While the amendment passed with bipartisan support, a MapLight analysis of campaign contributions from employees and PACs of defense contractors and other defense industry interests indicates it failed to gain the support of lawmakers who received the most contributions from defense contractors. MapLight is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization that reveals money’s influence on politics.

• Now we know… at least partially. The app used is called RCS/Galileo by an Italian company, The Hacking Team. The app allows for full control of the data on the phone and allows users to activate the microphone on Android, iOS, and Blackberry devices. In short, this is what Snowden feared.

• The National Security Agency says it has not been able to find a single recorded case where former contractor Edward Snowen raised complaints about the agency’s operations.

• The claim, revealed in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from investigative reporter Jason Leopold, undercuts Snowden’s claim that he raised concerns with his superiors before leaking top-secret spy agency documents to the press.

• Singlehandedly, Snowden has changed how people regard their phones, tablets, and laptops, and sparked a public debate about the protection of personal data. What his revelations have not done is bring about significant reforms.

• It is understood that leaking information such as troop movements or counter terrorism tactics can be harmful to the country and its citizens and anyone who perpetuates such a leak, needs to be held responsible. However, if the leaked information talks about how a government is lying to its citizens under the guise of “protecting” them, then the source needs to applauded and more importantly, protected. This calls for changes in the existing Whistleblower Protection Act.

• The National Security Agency (NSA), the US technical intelligence organisation, used private corporations to snoop on India and several other countries, reveal the latest documents released by journalist Glen Greenwald. Marked “Top Secret”, these are documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden to Greenwald.

• The quote originally came from Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), whose beef with Amash is longstanding. Ellis has received big bucks from his party’s establishment donors, and Amash’s Republican colleagues in the Michigan delegation have left him out to dry. But Amash, a charismatic disciple of former Rep. Ron Paul, has access to a rich grassroots fundraising network of his own, as well the generous support of the Club for Growth and the DeVos family, one of Michigan’s most powerful political families.

• The defendants have filed their motion to dismiss in a lawsuit that alleges the National Security Agency conducted surveillance and intelligence-gathering programs that collected data from American citizens.

• A healthy democracy demands transparency from its government and privacy for its citizenry. Only if we know what our government is up to can we exercise our responsibility as citizens to ratify or veto their actions at the ballot box. And only if we can be assured that our conversations are not being monitored by government officials will we have the space to develop our critical faculties, pursue intimate associations, try out new political ideas and flourish as human beings.

• Greenwald found time during his current book tour to speak with YES! Executive Editor Dean Paton—about government threats to his reporting, as well as what citizens can do to protect and bolster civil liberties in the digital age. Their conversation has been lightly edited.

• The quotes: “[The alliance] is downright harmful because it creates a false sense of security. … Complete bullshit. We’ll get in conflict with the Germans, Russians and we’ll think that everything is super because we gave the Americans a blow job. Losers. Complete losers.” This TMZ-worthy quote came from one of Poland’s top officials.

• Already, the amended USA FREEDOM Act would increase the number of calls the government has access to because the bill would apply to all U.S. telcos and to both wire and wireless calls. Inserting a data retention mandate would further increase the amount of information subject to government orders.

• Is New Zealand an independent global citizen, or a US ally in all but name? Answering that question has been the task of journalists and commentators as John Key visited New York and Washington last week. The visit was overshadowed to a degree by the domestic agenda – notably the Donghua Liu donations issue. But Key’s visit was fascinating because it provided a contrast of an apparent New Zealand independence in New York, at the United Nations, and a seemingly new alignment with the United States in its position on the crisis in Iraq.

• How regional networks may replace the World Wide Web

• Facebook is giving itself permission to snoop a little further into your web browsing.

• The social media platform announced on its company blog recently that it’s making changes to the way it manages advertising on the site and its apps by offering your web browsing history to advertisers for targeted advertising.

• Read more: http://www.choice.com.au/media-and-news/consumer-news/news/facebook-snooping-on-your-browsing-27062014.aspx#ixzz35k7j6rWl

• People who wear the $1,500 wearable camera called the Google Glass are fighting back against the businesses that don’t allow them inside their establishments.

• “If they’re not going to accept me as I am with my prescription glasses that happen to have this piece of technology on them I’m not going to spend my money there,” said Nick Starr, who said he’s been asked to leave at several businesses on Capitol Hill because he was wearing the Glass.

• NSA WHISTLEBLOWER Edward Snowden isn’t a fan of living in Russia, and has said that he wants his right to travel restored.

• Speaking to the human rights parliamentary assembly in Strassbourg on Tuesday via a video link from Moscow, Snowden coughed on his true feelings for his present location.

• “I didn’t choose to be in Russia,” he said. “If the Russian government had a choice I’m sure they’d prefer me not to be here. Since I came here I’ve been very open in saying I want to restore my right to travel… live a normal life.”

• Revelations about the National Security Agency’s widespread surveillance of online activity has roused the ire of social media firms, but it also reveals the extent to which these companies are at least partially to blame. How much of this personal data would be available if these companies weren’t collecting and mining it for profit in the first place?

• The intelligence services are merely obedient arms of the executive branch, which itself in turn dutifully heeds the call of corporate mandates [7]. Or perhaps you haven’t noticed that our financial elite are essentially above the law [8]? After all, the large banking houses have the resources necessary to reward government leaders who serve their interests while in office.

• When you think about your personal tax information, where do you assume it’s being stored?

• With the Canadian government — or with a foreign corporation?

• We’ve discovered our information is actually being stored by an American company, and a local privacy association says that is a concern.

• The Canada Revenue Agency has confirmed a contract was awarded in May of last year to Mobilshred Incorporated, operating as Recall.

• Our information has been stored there since January.

• Proposed legislation would open the door for those in Europe to sue in the US over the release of personal data.

• U.S. attorney general Eric Holder promised at a U.S.-EU meeting of home affairs and justice ministers in Athens on Wednesday that legislation would be sent to Congress to extend the U.S. Privacy Act to EU citizens.

• The entire community has been talking about “Multistakeholder Model” for long that would help address IG issues, but no substantial work on it has been done so far. All the stakeholders appear tied to each pole vertex of polygon, shouting out their view point, without listening to other set of stakeholders. If issues have to be addressed, and bottom up consensus driven decision making is to be realized, we need to follow Mahatma Gandhi’s principle – “Placing ourselves in other’s position and understand their viewpoint”. Without it, discussions will continue to happen, not decisions!

• Having successfully challenged the US power structure in returning to America despite implied threats of his arrest and imprisonment – where he likely would have been tortured – Glenn Greenwald has been hitting the media circuit to speak and promote his book “No Place to Hide”. This really must burn the Obama regime to no end although due to their own arrogance and foolhardy recklessness they have other fish to fry with percolating foreign spats with Russia, Syria and now Iraq and having Greenwald hauled in by government thugs and disappeared into the bowels of our massive prison system would have just been too much bad publicity – especially in an election year.

Civil Rights

• I guess it’s no surprise that the CIA would be institutionally against things like transparency and freedom of information. However, in the last couple weeks there have been two separate lawsuits filed by well known Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) activists over the CIA’s general bad behavior in response to FOIA requests. First up is Michael Morisy and Muckrock, who have sued over a variety of failures by the CIA to adequately respond to a long list of FOIA requests that really should not be problematic at all.

• Six to 18 hours later you arrive at a military base and are water boarded, sensory deprived, and stress positioned at the very least. You are held indefinitely and without due process. Being stripped of due process can include:

• No formal charges will likely ever be filed against you. No right to call a lawyer, your family, or your pastor. No judge or magistrate will ever see you. No right to remain silent.

• And best of all, as the law reads, you are held, “until the end of hostilities.”

• How a former CIA officer’s efforts to get Congress to investigate the rendition and torture of a CIA captive failed

• Water boarding was one of the six CIA’s approved torture methods during Bush’s administration.

• A military judge isn’t backing down from his order to the U.S. government to give defense lawyers details of the accused USS Cole bomber’s odyssey through the CIA’s secret prisons, but may let prosecutors shield the identities of some agents, according to people who have seen a secret Guantánamo war court order.

• US government loses attempt to keep accounts of torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri secret

• Today Jason Leopold and Ryan Shapiro, commonly known as Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) warriors, upped the ante in their fight for more transparency from the CIA relating to its Bush-era torture and rendition program. Leopold, a freelance investigative journalist, and Shapiro, a researcher at MIT, have filed a lawsuit against the CIA compelling the agency to release documents about their spying on Senate lawmakers who were tasked with investigating CIA torture.

• Fried chicken chain KFC said two different investigations have not found any evidence that an employee asked a 3-year-old girl and family members to leave because injuries she suffered in a pit bull mauling disturbed customers.

• KFC spokesman Rick Maynard said Tuesday the company considered the matter closed after an internal investigation by the franchise restaurant in Jackson and an independent probe. Maynard said the company would honor its commitment to donate $30,000 to help with medical bills for Victoria Wilcher.

• On Monday, the White House memo used to justify drone attacks on U.S. citizens was released, and it appears to confirm the worst suspicions of its libertarian critics. The Obama administration had sought to keep the memo secret, and now we know why: Because there are no checks and balances; there are no classified courts. Indeed, the memo reveals that the president of the United States ordered the targeting killing of U.S. citizens overseas — in violation of their constitutional right to due process — sans any type of oversight outside of the executive.

• Julian Assange, the Wikileaks publisher, has begun his third year confined in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. He fled there, receiving political asylum, when Sweden sought his extradition to answer sexual assault allegations. Although both Assange and Ecuador are on record that he was willing to go to Sweden, he feared Sweden would hand him over to the United States. A US grand jury has been investigating him for four years in relation to the case against Chelsea Manning, who was convicted in July 2013 for leaking a massive trove of secret diplomatic documents to Wikileaks.

• Last Saturday night I attended one of the most invigorating talks combining my two passions – politics and film – with Hollywood film legend Oliver Stone, the man behind some of the most seminal American films like JFK, Platoon, Born On The 4th of July, Salvador and On Any Given Sunday! Stone is a complete package – a great, firebrand filmmaker, a man of the world, a former Vietnam war veteran who’s turned anti-war and a fierce critic of American imperialism and exceptional ism seeped in bloodshed and killing of innocents around the world!

• His removal – which followed a treaty between Britain and Jordan guaranteeing his right to a fair and open retrial – won widespread plaudits for Theresa May, the Home Secretary.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• In order to restrict what you can do and where you can go online, ISPs would need to watch what you do online.

• So when mere months after his death Edward Snowden released his cache of internal NSA files, and we the public and the media all struggled to understand it and figure out what to do, it was hard not to miss Aaron immensely. It was a surprise of sorts seeing that I wasn’t the only one who looked to Aaron for guidance, and that I wasn’t the only one having a hard time without him. Remember when Wikipedia blacked out to protest SOPA/PIPA? A lot of people wondered why something similar didn’t happen in protest of the NSA, why something similar didn’t happen more recently in the fight for net neutrality. The answer, in large part, is because Aaron isn’t around anymore to do these things. To motivate and guide us.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Aereo, a TV-over-the-Internet startup whose legal battles have been closely watched, has been ruled illegal by the Supreme Court today. If the company survives at all, its business model will have to change drastically, and it will have to pay fees to the television companies it has been fighting in court for more than two years.

• In a 6-3 opinion (PDF) written by Justice Stephen Breyer, Aereo was found to violate copyright law. According to the opinion, the company is the equivalent of a cable company, which must pay licensing fees when broadcasting over-the-air content. “Viewed in terms of Congress’ regulatory objectives, these behind-the-scenes technological differences do not distinguish Aereo’s system from cable systems, which do perform publicly,” reads the opinion.

• The fight between a movie studio and an Australian ISP has today taken another odd turn. Village Roadshow’s co-CEO now suggests that iiNet must take responsibility for piracy in the same way a car manufacturer apparently would if one of its vehicles killed someone while being driven by a customer. Except they don’t, of course.

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