● 06.30.14

● Links 30/6/2014: Linux 3.16 RC3, Many New Android Devices

Posted in News Roundup at 3:25 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Google’s Chrome OS was back in the spotlight this week due to its upcoming ability to run Android apps. One of the newest Chrome OS devices is LG’s Chromebase, a low-cost Chrome OS all-in-one PC. Now, the Chromebase is on sale on Amazon for the low price of just $329, making it one of the cheapest full-sized PCs to date.

• The Chromebase doesn’t require hefty internals which cuts down the cost significantly. The specs include a 22-inch 1080p IPS display, 1.4GHz dual-core Intel Celeron processor, 2GB RAM, 16GB SSD, USB 3.0 port, three USB 2.0 ports, HDMI port, and an ethernet port. Before you start bashing the Chromebase for its meager spec list, remember that it uses Chrome OS which requires very little power to run. Cloud storage is also emphasized with a free 100GB of Google Drive storage bundled with the Chromebase. A mouse and keyboard are included.

Server

• How is the device as an HTPC replacement? After doing some research online, I found that video output was supported only after installing the “Local Display,” and that the app only gave access to a Firefox browser inside of the Linux OS. If you wanted to stream any media, you also needed to install XBMC, and figuring out where to get these apps is as difficult as the other apps.

Kernel Space

• We’re back on a Sunday release schedule, and things are looking reasonably normal.

• There’s perhaps relatively less driver updates than usual, with most of them being pretty small, but that is probably just a timing thing (ie Greg didn’t send his USB/staging changes this week, so driver changes are mostly gpu, networking and sound).

• As a result misc architecture updates (mips, powerpc, x86, arm) dominate the diff, and there are various random other updates. We’ve got filesystem updates (aio, nfs and ocfs2), a small batch of mm fixes from Andrew, some networking stuff.etc.

• The shortlog gives a feel for the changes. The most noticeable to actual users are probably the unbreaking of direct block device read accesses on 32-bit targets, and some x86 vdso regression fixes that caused problems. The rest probably didn’t end up affecting very many people, but it’s all proper fixes..

• Linus

Benchmarks

• With the Linux 3.16 kernel coming along nicely, here’s our first tests of this forthcoming major kernel upgrade when it comes to the mainline file-systems and their performance from a solid-state drive.

Applications

• sysstat sar provides command line based monitoring data. Those who are new or migrating from Windows or MAC and used to the graphical output, it might get confusing and boring. Hence the development of kSar sar grapher. kSar sar grapher is a graphing tool that can graph for Linux, MAC and Solaris sar outputs. Using KSar you can output graphs to a pdf file. kSar sar grapher is developed by Alexandre Cherif and uses a BSD license for distribution.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• We’ve got another game to be added to the rapidly-expanding genre of animal simulator games: Catlateral Damage, which started as a game jam project and charmed its way into our hearts back at the beginning of the year with a limited demo build, has met its $40,000 Kickstarter goal. The feline festivities are anticipated to make their way to Mac, Linux, PC and Ouya in Q4 of this year.

• Valve developers have released a new update for the beta Branch of the Steam client and they have implemented a number of important improvements for the In-Home Streaming feature.

• In-Home Streaming is a feature that allows the Steam users to stream games from a Windows-based operating system to a Linux one, thus enabling Linux user to play games that don’t have support for the open source platform.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Maybe you already know that the new version of the desktop by the KDE people, called Plasma 5, is in the makings. I totally believe that this forthcoming release will be amazing, and that’s why Aleix Pol and myself have already started porting KDE Connect to this new Desktop Environment.

• Porting every application in KDE, though, requires a huge amount of work. This is one of the reasons why some of the best hackers in KDE will meet this summer in Randa, Switzerland: to work hard in the next version of the best desktop environment ever!

• In 2008 I joined the KDE Community devoting much of my free time, my paid time, my girlfriend time, gathered friends to help, did hacking sessions, translation sprints, spend in one year more than 3k euro to help free software – And here in brazil 3k euro is what one gain in 9 months of work, so it wasn’t really easy for me to just give away that cash

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The colouring process was improved and sped up quite a bit when I bought an inexpensive USB Wacom graphire tablet a few years ago; I moved away from “cell shading” and achieved smoother results, quicker. Why Wacom? They’re the industry standard, their stylus/pen uses electromagnetic induction (no batteries required), and their hardware works out of the box with GNU/Linux and GNOME.

Distributions

New Releases

• Robolinux uses a piece of technology called Stealth VM Software, which allows users to create a clone of a Windows Operating System with all the installed programs and updates. It should work, in theory, but there isn’t enough feedback to see how good this particular solution really is.

• Besides this important feature that is one of the most important ones implemented in this distribution, the developer has also made a few other major changes and he has added quite a few new packages.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• The latest development version of the Software application (the graphical tool for searching and installing new applications in Fedora) now has support for browsing and installing add-ons.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” was released only a month ago, but in all that time some important issues have been fixed by the developers. In order to make the life of the users a little bit easier, the Linux mint devs have decided to regenerate the ISO images with the new fixes.

• According to the changelog made available today, MDM no longer crashes with non-xrandr compatible GPUs, an option in the installer which stated “Replace $OS and install Linux Mint”has been removed because it was considered ambiguous, and the Driver Manager has been fixed because it assumed the user was running a manually installed driver when in the presence of a device which required the installation of “linux-firmware-nonfree”.

• Linux Mint 17 has been released at first in the two traditional flavors: Linux Mint 17 Mate and Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon, followed by the releases of Linux Mint 17 KDE and Linux Mint 17 XFCE.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Ballnux

• The Samsung Galaxy Z is the wave of the future. It’s Tizen OS is cutting edge and will be the standard for smartphones in the future. It is a quality phone that is worth every penny.

Android

• Android TV is more ambitious than its simple interface lets on; the question is whether it can live up to its goals.

• But Android Wear watches are the first smartwatches to cross the line from awkward to awesome, because they’re the first to completely abandon the smartphone’s icons, menus and widgets paradigm and massively leverage subtle contextual cues, images, icons and colors to present tiny nuggets of information in their most essential and quickly graspable form.

• The best smartphones you can buy today don’t come cheap. The iPhone 5S, the HTC One, and the Samsung Galaxy S5 all cost at least $US600 without a contract from your carrier.

• But there are a few startups trying to disrupt the model of charging a premium for the best smartphone components and features — big and bright screens, gorgeous designs, and zippy processors.

• I’m firing up for a rant, so strap yourselves in kids, it’s Google-bashing time! This week the thing that’s been bugging me revolves around the whole war on SD cards that Google is perpetrating in the latest versions of Android. I get why cost-cutting means the Nexus 5, Nexus 7 etc don’t have a microSD card slot, but Google is now telling us that their microSD vendetta is because SD cards are insecure and corruptable. You know, the exact thing that companies are not.

• Touted as the ‘Apple’ of China, Xiaomi had launched its official website in India earlier this month, announcing its entry into the fiercely competitive Indian smartphone market in the next few weeks.

• Based on some recent experience, I’m of the opinion that smartphones are about as private as a gas station bathroom. They’re full of leaks, prone to surveillance, and what security they do have comes from using really awkward keys. While there are tools available to help improve the security and privacy of smartphones, they’re generally intended for enterprise customers. No one has had a real one-stop solution: a smartphone pre-configured for privacy that anyone can use without being a cypherpunk.

Free Software/Open Source

• identi.ca did not move the needle against Twitter at all. Diaspora still doesn’t show up as even a blip in the social networking audience. Why is this? I think that there are good reasons, and then there are the real reasons.

• The good reasons include network effects (particularly as a late-mover), good-but-not-excellent implementations, few if any “killer features” (for the common person), and a lack of marketing resources. These all contribute in one way or another to preventing open social network alternatives from flourishing.

• [...]

• Is it imaginable to have (truly) decentralized social networks that are not server-centric? Can we imagine ways of delivering some or all of the features of today’s social networks without having everyone talking through server software? Can we imagine a fully decentralized system that not only allows but encourages deep local app integration? Could a system be developed that does not imply the topic in the implementation (e.g. professional networking versus restaurant reviews)?

• Nicole Engard takes that phrase that you Get what you paid for with open source head on at Opensource.com. The phrase is normally used in a derogative fashion, but Nichole accepts the phrase and makes it her own by explaining how everyone benefits when you pay with your time.

• In the world of standard economics, nothing is ever truly free of cost. If something is given to you for nothing, someone had to pay for it at some point along the line. In the modern, advertising based economy, If you are not paying with your money, than you are most likely paying with your personal information. Another example of would be public services, which are normally paid for with taxes. In the world of open source, the phrase is normally meant to imply that the program you are obtaining for free is of such low quality that it has little to no value. “Oh, you are having a problem with that open source app? Well, you get what you paid for!” Laughter ensues.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• He provided links for Windows and OS X builds in his blog, and he said Linux is coming soon. Although only the Oculus Rift is currently supported, other devices, he said, will come soon, including Google’s Cardboard.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Less technical particpants (such as yours truly) had the opportunity to work on the Bern Conference planning, the messaging of the upcoming LibreOffice releases, and explain how the LibreOffice project works to our guests. And of course, food and drinks were not forgotten during the Friday evening…

CMS

• Basle-based open source web content management system (WCMS) company Magnolia International has released the 5.3 version of its core product with functionality now delivered through a series of task-focused apps.

BSD

• The second Release Candidate of FreeBSD 9.3, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures, is now available for download and testing.

Public Services/Government

• As the support for the Microsoft (MS) Windows XP service is terminated this year, the government will try and invigorate open source software in order to solve the problem of dependency on certain software. By 2020 when the support of the Windows 7 service is terminated, it is planning to switch to open OS and minimize damages. Industry insiders pointed out that the standard e-document format must be established and shared as an open source before open source software is invigorated.

• There’s a lot that you can do with £5.5m. You could employ a couple of hundred people for a year for starters, or set up some small businesses. You could be sensible and invest in technologies, or you could pay for lots of operations. Alternatively, you could buy lots of sweets or several million copies of the Adam Sandler movie of your choice.

• A similar suggestion that Korea might embrace more open source (but couched more cautiously, with more “should” and “may”) is reported on the news page of the EU’s program on Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations, based on a workshop presentation earlier this month by Korea’s Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning. (And at a smaller but still huge scale, the capitol city of Seoul appears to be going in for open source software in a big way, too.)

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

Leftovers

Science

• Think about the future of space travel for one moment.

• Chances are Paraguay did not come even remotely to mind.

• But now this little, landlocked South American country is determined to put itself on the intergalactic map.

• When the Paraguayan government announced earlier this year that it was forming a space agency, that got us at GlobalPost thinking: Why, and how, would this poor, isolated country invest in space exploration, of all things?

• It turns out there are all sorts of reasons why developing nations should be looking to the skies to see the future, as we will now explain.

Hardware

• I’m no conspiracy theorist, generally speaking, but I have to admit the apparent systematic militarization of domestic police forces throughout the country scares the hell out of me. You’ve seen it, too. Officers, once clad in powder blue uniforms, are suddenly dressed in blues that are so dark they might as well be black. Small-town police forces are gobbling up military-style equipment for god-knows-why. Regulatory agencies are sending out armed forces to rescue wildlife. Whatever your politics, it’s pretty clear that there is some kind of imbalance on display here.

Health/Nutrition

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The US would not tolerate another country operating with the same scope and secrecy

• …comprehensive research that does exist – albeit not from the government – shows that drones are more effective at creating terrorists than destroying them…

• The Obama administration pledged Friday to stop producing or purchasing landmines, but it stopped short of signing an international treaty that requires countries to destroy their stockpiles, saying it was “diligently pursuing solutions” that would allow it to eventually sign the agreement.

• US is the only member of Nato not to have signed an international treaty banning the use of anti-personnel landmines, a cause championed by Princess Diana

• It is unthinkable that a news agency would bestow any credibility on Cheney concerning the Iraq War. His comments were ignorant and illusory. In addition, a letter-writer writes that former President George W. Bush and Cheney did not lie to us. They were merely “incorrectly informed by the prevailing intelligence.” (“Iraq War received bipartisan support,” June 23.)

• The Iraq crisis will dominate most of Sunday’s political talk shows, featuring interviews with lawmakers on key committees and others, including James Jeffrey, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

• As the exploding crisis in Iraq spotlights once again the tragic record of American policy in the Middle East, Bill speaks with investigative journalist Charles Lewis, whose new book, 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity details the many government falsehoods that have led us into the current nightmare.

• The Iraqi army on Saturday drove Islamic extremists from the center of a major city in central Iraq, for the first time mounting a concerted assault against insurgents who had charged to within 50 miles of Baghdad.

• Iraqi forces pressed a campaign yesterday to retake militant-held Tikrit, clashing with Sunni fighters nearby and pounding positions inside the city with air strikes in their biggest counter-offensive so far.

• The justices — every last one of them, in a seldom-seen 9-0 ruling — recognized that in the 21st century, a cell phone, iPad or other tablet is not just a form of communication, but a storage place.

• First Verizon got the boot, now the German government is considering pulling the plug on foreign companies that provide hardware for official communication networks.

• An Interior Ministry spokesman says Germany is examining which devices can be used if it wants to keep critical IT infrastructure safe from cyberthreats.

• Yesterday, shortly after three o’clock local time, two men were killed in their car. Two missiles struck it only about 100 meters from former prime minister Ismail Haniyeh’s residence in Shati (“Beach”) refugee camp. Ambulances soon arrived and took the two men to al-Shifa hospital, where both were immediately pronounced dead.

• The West has accused Russia of violating a 1994 pledge to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for its surrender of Soviet-era nuclear weapons. But the West’s political and economic interference might also represent a violation, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

• …CIA sent twelve planes to drop bombs and propaganda on towns in Guatemala in support of a coup…

• The US top diplomat headed for talks with the Syrian opposition and its key backer Saudi Arabia Friday after the White House asked lawmakers for $500 million to train and equip vetted rebels.

• The move would mark a significant escalation of US involvement in the three-year-old civil war in Syria, which is now increasingly interlinked with a jihadist-led Sunni Arab insurgency in neighbouring Iraq.

• Secretary of State John Kerry arrived here Friday as part of a delicate attempt to enlist the support of the Saudi monarch for the formation of a multisect government in Iraq.

• Kerry also met with Ahmad Assi al-Jarba, the head of the moderate Syrian opposition, at the start of his visit here. That meeting came one day after the White House announced that it was seeking $500 million from Congress so the Pentagon could train and arm “vetted elements” of the Syrian opposition.

• The threat posed to Jordan by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) which has already taken over wide swathes of Iraq and Syria, is of deep concern to the Obama administration and was the subject of a confidential briefing by administration officials to senators last week, according to the online news site.

• The chief concern is that an attack on Jordan would inevitably drag Israel and possibly the United States into the fighting.

• Iraq received the first batch of Sukhoi warplanes from Russia as it pressed a counter-attack on Sunday against a Sunni militant onslaught that threatens to tear the country apart.

• Witnesses reported waves of government air strikes Sunday on the city of Tikrit, overrun by the insurgents when they swept across vast areas of north and west Iraq earlier this month.

• In an analysis in the British Independent daily on Friday, Fisk wrote: Well, God bless Barack Obama – he’s found some “moderate” rebels in Syria. Enough to supply them with weapons and training worth $500mln. Congress wants to arm these brave freedom fighters, you see. And Obama, having sent his 300 elite Spartan lads to Iraq to help Nouri al-Maliki fight the rebels there, needs to send help to the rebels in Syria – even though most of them are on the side of the rebels in Iraq whom Obama wants Maliki to defeat.

Transparency Reporting

• “The Wikileaks founder will reportedly model for Ben Westwood, son of Dame Vivienne, at a fashion show at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London – where he has been holed up for two years,” reports Yahoo News.

• A trove of more than 100 of the leaked Wikileaks diplomatic cables in 2010 provides an unvarnished view of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dan Sullivan’s career at the U.S. Department of State, where he spent two-and-a-half years holding high-level meetings on oil and gas, climate change, and a host of other issues, even lobbying a head of state on a secret surveillance program.

• Sarah Harrison: In the United States they are aggressively going after whistleblowers and truth tellers. When you look at the Jeremy Hammond case, he exposed abuses by the private intelligence organization, Stratfor, that was spying on Bhopal activists. He was aggressively prosecuted by U.S. courts and sentenced to ten years in prison. You see persecution against individual journalists and publishers as well. Anyone that is speaking truth to power in any real manner is being come down upon by the US government to try and set examples and to stop the truth from being exposed in the future.

• A WikiLeaks exposé has revealed the true intent behind secret 50-country negotiations on a new “financial services” chapter of the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) at the WTO in Geneva. The draft agreement being discussed by government officials is aimed at weakening financial regulation and giving extra market access to hedge funds, banks, insurers and other providers.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Senior Tories have called on David Cameron to increase NHS spending significantly as a former coalition health minister forecasts a collapse in the service.

• A slew of bad news over the NHS has raised Tory fears that the health service could again prove to be a toxic issue just 10 months before a general election.

Finance

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• News Corporation chief Rupert Murdoch directed his editors to “kill Whitlam” some 10 months before the downfall of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government, according to a newly released United States diplomatic report.

• The US National Archives has just declassified a secret diplomatic telegram dated January 20, 1975 that sheds new light on Murdoch’s involvement in the tumultuous events of Australia’s 1975 constitutional crisis.

• A probe of media mogul Rupert Murdoch might soon take shape in the United States upon reports that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has 80,000 emails in its possession seized from the servers of the tycoon’s News Corp headquarters.

• The Daily Beast reported on Wednesday this week that “the FBI has copies of at least 80,000 emails taken from the servers at News Corp in New York,” prompting Britain’s Daily Mail to allege that new hacking allegations could be lobbed at Murdoch in the US as matters on the other side of the Atlantic near wrapping up.

• According to reporters Nico Hines and Peter Jukes at the Beast, this correspondence is contained on a single compact disc and was obtained by the FBI during the just resolved, high-profile phone hacking case in the UK surrounding journalists employed by Murdoch’s since-shuttered News of the World paper. The journalists also allege that the message include communications sent up the chain of command by Murdoch protégée Rebekah Brooks, who was spared by a jury in London this week of involvement in the NOTW hacking scam.

• More than a year after asking for and receiving emails from News Corp’s U.S. operation related to allegations of phone hacking and bribery, the FBI is still investigating whether British-based representatives of the media company may have broken U.S. law…

• 1,600 people attended British Armed Forces Day in Stirling. 20,000 attended Bannockburn Live, 1 mile away. Guess which the BBC covered?

• [...]

• So today the BBC News lead item was the Stirling Armed Forces Day commemoration, with David Cameron parading about with his soldiers in front of every Tory in Scotland (1,800 people). The BBBC had three crews at the Armed Forces Day plus two radio crews. Not one of them managed even a mention of the ten times larger Bannockburn commemoration just down the road.

• Various unionist nutters have tried to claim that the outrageous BBC/MOD propaganda lie of 35,000 people at Armed Forces Day in Stirling is true. This picture was taken at 1.30pm when the crowd was largest.

• There is a lot to give scale in this photo. Look at the vehicles. Look at the marquees.

Censorship

• When you look at film history, whether it’s McCarthyism, Stalinism or religious fundamentalism, in the struggle with all adversaries, film-makers were forced to find new forms of storytelling to communicate with the audience, which brought out the best in their creativity. Film-makers like Howard Hawks, John Huston, Andrei Tarkovsky, Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf were able to smuggle their ideals without compromising their vision. Fred Zinnemann replied to McCarthy’s witch-hunt by making a film about his era in the form of a western called High Noon.

• Under the First Amendment, the U.S. government cannot outright ban literature in the United States, but as Mark Crispin Miller, author and professor of media studies at New York University, explained, books can be hidden from public view or written off as conspiracy theory in order to prevent people from reading them.

• While censorship is often conducted by corporations and governments to prevent words, images or ideas from entering the mainstream, censorship of literature has been around as early as 399 B.C. and has affected intellectuals and philosophers such as Socrates.

• If the City of Toronto silences street preachers because they make him feel uncomfortable, he may be among the next group silenced for making others feel uncomfortable.

• Falun Gong, a spiritual movement with Buddhist and Daoist influences, has been banned in China since 1999.

• Oh that wacky MPAA. Earlier this week, TorrentFreak noted that the MPAA issued a massively overbroad DMCA takedown to Google, asking it to remove an entire subreddit from its search results. The subreddit in question was r/FullLengthFilms, which really wasn’t that popular.

Privacy

• Users of Facebook have reacted angrily to a “creepy” experiment carried out by the social network and two American universities to manipulate their emotions. The US technology giant secretly altered almost 700,000 users’ news feeds to study the impact of “emotional contagion”.

• As part of a psychology experiment, the news feeds of over 600,000 people were “manipulated”. Researchers tweaked the content of thousands of news feeds to give them a more positive or more negative slant. Perhaps unsurprisingly it was found that people exposed to more upbeat content were themselves more positive, and vice versa. An interesting experiment, most would agree, but in an age where honesty and transparency are so highly valued, the fact that the chosen thousands were not informed about what was happening is a little underhanded — to put it mildly.

• Facebook manipulated the emotions of hundreds of thousands of its users, and found that they would pass on happy or sad emotions, it has said. The experiment, for which researchers did not gain specific consent, has provoked criticism from users with privacy and ethical concerns.

• ON YOUR last trip to the supermarket, where did you walk, what did you look at, and which products did you ultimately buy? Proximus, a start-up based in Madrid, Spain, wants to know.

• Talking up the power of big data is a real trend at the moment and Google founder Larry Page took it to new levels this week by proclaiming that 100,000 lives could be saved next year alone if we did more to open up healthcare information.

• Germany became the NSA’s “number one” spying zone after the 2001 attacks by al Qaeda on New York, says a former NSA staffer. Thomas Drake told the news magazine Spiegel that the US saw it could no longer rely on Germany.

• The National Security Agency was interested in the phone data of fewer than 250 people believed to be in the United States in 2013, despite collecting the phone records of nearly every American.

• The National Security Agency has password-cracking software that is capable of guessing at 1 billion passwords a second, according to documents pilfered and made public by Snowden. Every day, according to those documents, the NSA and other federal agencies intercept, read or listen to up to 20 billion emails, phone calls and other communications, many of them sent by or to Americans.

• A probe by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and computer security firm Kaspersky Lab has uncovered a massive network of mobile malware for all phone types that is sold by an Italian firm to police forces around the world.

• The malware, dubbed Remote Control System (RCS), was produced by a company called Hacking Team. It can subvert Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Symbian and BlackBerry devices. The study found 320 command-and-control (C&C) servers for RCS running in over 40 countries, presumably by law enforcement agencies.

• Kaspersky has developed a fingerprinting system to identify the IP addresses of RCS C&C servers and found the biggest host is here in the Land of the Free, with 64 discovered. Next on the list was Kazakhstan with 49, Ecuador has 35, just beating the UK which hosts 32 control systems.

• A coalition of 22 organizations from across the political spectrum today launched StandAgainstSpying.org, an interactive website that grades members of Congress on what they have done, or often not done, to rein in the NSA.

• A recently released open-source software, created in response to the controversy surrounding Edward Snowden’s release of classified NSA documents, claims to allow users to securely send large files over the internet with complete anonymity.

• What started out as an interview to champion John Boehner’s lawsuit against Obama turned into an act of sabotage with one sentence from Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace.

• The Wilmington Police Department’s use of Stingray surveillance equipment is causing concern for local attorneys. The technology can track a person’s location by acting as a cell phone tower.

• The New Hanover County Public Defender’s Office recently said it would be probing the surveillance methods.

• Shades of the Stasi. The German Government is not renewing its contracts with giant US telco Verizon because it doesn’t trust its data with a US company.

• “To me Edward Snowden is a hero”

• The newly installed director of the National Security Agency says that while he has seen some terrorist groups alter their communications to avoid surveillance techniques revealed by Edward J. Snowden, the damage done over all by a year of revelations does not lead him to the conclusion that “the sky is falling.”

Civil Rights

• This week Americans will enjoy Independence Day with family cookouts and fireworks. Flags will be displayed in abundance. Sadly, however, what should be a celebration of the courage of those who risked so much to oppose tyranny will instead be turned into a celebration of government, not liberty. The mainstream media and opportunistic politicians have turned Independence Day into the opposite of what was intended.

• [...]

• The evidence is all around us.

• There are now 5,000 laws on annoying behavior in statutes in the US, the Wall Street Journal reported.

• Does all drunken sex constitute rape? Obviously not, but that’s the argument Occidental College administrators must make in their zeal to prosecute a male student for sexual assault—even after police acquitted him.

• Forget Officer Friendly. A new report finds that local police departments are becoming excessively militarized, equipped with weapons, uniforms and even vehicles formerly used by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan

• However, the focus on torture and other ill-treatment in what the US authorities then called the “war on terror” at the beginning of the century may have skewed the global picture. What our research also clearly shows is that most victims of torture and other ill-treatment worldwide are not dangerous terrorists but rather poor, marginalized and disempowered criminal suspects who unfortunately seldom draw the attention of the media and public opinion, either nationally or globally.

• Human Rights Watch on Friday demanded a clarification from Saudi Arabia over allegations from security researchers that the kingdom is infecting and monitoring dissidents’ mobile phones with surveillance malware.

• In a profound win for digital privacy rights, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that police officers must obtain a warrant before searching your phone. If they don’t, the search is illegal—a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

• I bow to few in my admiration for Peter Hitchens’s unerring determination to grasp wrong ends of sticks, too often persuading himself that the end grasped represents the bravely unpopulist when both meanings could better be reversed. But I have to say he made a wonderful fist of a fierce, lucid, timely programme on US-UK relations. The Special Relationship: Uncovered was scripted and voiced with clarity, the perfect pace for radio, some great interviewees and the minimum of intrusive noise – apart from a bizarre but briefly welcome horned-up version of Funky Nassau.

• Regarding war and civil rights, Hillary Rodham and HRC share scant common ground. The heart of the 22 year-old liberal lies buried deep beneath the travel-worn head of the 66 year-old pragmatist. In 2008 Barack Obama promised Hope and Change. But he failed to deliver. As would Hillary.

• But Swartz was within the system’s grasp, and it appears the DOJ was determined to make an example of him. Faced with economic ruin and imprisonment for years by a vengeful administration — the Obama regime has been extraordinarily vindictive toward whistleblowers, charging more people with the Espionage Act than all previous U.S. administrations combined — the free-spirited Aaron appears to have been pushed over the edge on January 11, 2013. But on March 6, an unrepentant Attorney General Holder defended Swartz’s prosecution before a Senate committee.

• Another American town has decided its citizens will not be denied due process by the president of the United States.

• The timing and contents of the I.B. report naming select NGOs and individuals as working against the national interest exposes the Narendra Modi government’s pro-corporate plan to target organisations championing people’s causes that have not been taken up adequately by the political class.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Awarding Snowden the Nobel Peace Prize would be an extremely bold and very controversial, but in our opinion also a correct choice.

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