● 07.02.14

● Links 2/7/2014: GNU/Linux up in Steam, New GCHQ Lawuit

Posted in News Roundup at 5:49 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Ten years ago Unix claimed five the top-10 fastest computers on the planet and 44% of the overall supercomputer market. Today? Unix, the once indomitable performance powerhouse, doesn’t make the top-10 list of the world’s fastest computers. Heck, it can’t even crack the top 50. Not since Linux took over, that is.

• Buried in these sobering statistics on the rise of Linux and the fall of Unix is a reminder to proprietary infrastructure software vendors that hope to compete with open source: you can’t win. Not when the community gets involved.

• Like Bitcoin, no one regulates Linux. But since the latter has its ecosystem highly regulated, we wonder whether Bitcoin will follow suit?

Server

• CoreOS, an open source lightweight Linux-based operating system designed for massive server deployments, yesterday announced that it has secured $8 million in venture capital funding in series A round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with follow-on investments from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Fuel Capital.

Kernel Space

• Google’s announcement last week of new work-friendly features in its forthcoming Android L release, along with its big tent foray into the enterprise, underscores just how much businesses are turning to mobile devices and the cloud for operations and communication. Nextiva is right in the thick of this trend as an industry-leading provider of cloud-based business phone services.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing earlier today, July 1, that the third maintenance release for the current stable 3.15 branch of the Linux kernel is available for download, urging users to upgrade as soon as their Linux distributions update the respective packages on the official software repositories.

• The SUSE method for live kernel patching, kGraft, is being proposed for possible inclusion into the linux-next branch in hopes it will be merged into an upcoming Linux kernel release cycle.

• The kGraft patches for live kernel patching continue to be revised and reviewed but at the same time there’s still Kpatch that’s been developed by Red Hat with some different design principles for updating the running kernel in real-time. To date there’s been no general consensus on the superior solution nor any agreement to try to merge Kpatch and kGraft.

Graphics Stack

• The GLX DRI3 GPU offloading support has landed in Mesa with a solution that’s superior to the DRI2 GPU offloading model.

Applications

• A pre-RC test release is out for the QEMU open-source processor emulator.

• QEMU 2.1.0-rc0 was tagged in Git today by Linaro’s Peter Maydell. At the time of writing, a release announcement has yet to be issued for this development milestone.

• Xournal was updated to version 0.4.8 today, bringing new Export to PDF code, a horizontal view mode along with other changes.

Instructionals/Technical

• Fotoxx, a complex and free image manipulation software for GNU/Linux platforms, has reached version 14.07 on June 30 and is now available for download from Softpedia or via the default software repositories of your Linux distribution.

Games

• One of the funniest games around is now fully available and out of beta for Linux. Goat Simulator is pretty popular and for good reason, as it’s just insanely stupid.

• With the start of a new month brings our monthly recap and it also brings Valve’s updated Steam hardware/software survey numbers.

• For June 2014, the overall Linux market-share using this randomly-sampled Steam survey was at 1.20%, an increase over May’s 1.13%. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit continued gaining ground as did Linux Mint 17 Qiana. The 32-bit Linux distributions continue to be (fortunately) declining.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• It’s an interesting day for the KDE community. At one hand they announced the death of two projects – Vivaldi tablet and Improv board, on the other hand Krita (a KDE software) has reached its goal of raising Euro 15,000 on Kickstrater. The project can now hire the developer, designer they need to further improve the sketching and painting software. The campaign is not over yet and there are eight more days left so the project will continue to get more money.

• With 518 backers and 15,157 euros, we’ve passed the target goal and we’re 100% funded. That means that Dmitry can work on Krita for the next six months, adding a dozen hot new features and improvements to Krita. We’re not done with the kickstarter, though, there are still eight days to go! And any extra funding will go straight into Krita development as well. If we reach the 30,000 euro level, we’ll be able to fund Sven Langkamp as well, and that will double the number of features we can work on for Krita 2.9.

• This is the second half of the ‘where KDE is going’ write-up. Last week, I discussed what is happening with KDE’s technologies: Platform is turning modular in Frameworks, Plasma is moving to new technologies and the Applications change their release schedule. In this post, I will discuss the social and organizational aspects: our governance.

• Discussed at the Qt Contributor Summit and now turning into an Internet discussion is that the Qt High-DPI support is on hold.

• The Qt High-DPI support process allows setting a scale factor (via platform plug-ins, a user environment variable, or potential per-screen configuration files), layering changes to accomodate scaling, QWindow and other platform changes, etc. The HiDPI support is of course centered around new monitors that have very high pixel densities (Retina MacBook Pro, many smaller 4K displays, etc) and improving the experience for end-users by avoiding unbearably small text. Qt developers have been working on HiDPI support for several months.

• The team behind the KDE Improv ARM development board that was supposed to run Mer and be a great open-source piece of hardware is no more. The developers have sent out an email to their backers that they’ve thrown in the towel.

• It’s a sad day for free software as one of the most ambitious free software projects, Improv, is officially dead. Along with the board also dies the promising Vivaldi tablet.

• The top story tonight is the sad news that the KDE Plasma tablet project has given up while Krita announces a financial success. Bloody Disgusting has a peek at the upcoming gaming title “Frozen State” and the EFF has 7 things you should probably know about Tor. The Linux Mint guys have announced updated images for the Cinnamon and MATE editions of Mint 17 and the latest review isn’t the love letter the others were.

• Hey KDE people! I’m Claudio and, again, I’m the only student doing GSoC and improving Gluon Project. This does mean there’s a lot to do but often this translates in a lot of fun.

• My project basically consists in mantaining the Gluon Player and all the distribution service in general from the server to player library that handles OCS requests to the actual QML client. This meant in porting the Qt4 player to Qt5, which led to a partial rewrite and rearchitecturing After the porting I started implementing “friends” features. This means that YOU, with a Gluon account, can ask an other Gluon user for friendship and he can accept. This is the basis of the social features we’re introducing.

• This is a typical situation when you program a GUI for an application. You have just created a new control, you start your application and… no control. But now: Is it obscured? Is it misplaced? Is it completely transparent or set to ‘invisible’? Is my custom OpenGL-stuff broken or is the item actually not created for some reason? Checking all these cases manually can be a time-consuming and exhausting task.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The Gulash Programmier Nacht (GPN) took place in Karlsruhe, Germany. The local subsidiary of the Chaos Computer Club organised that event, which apparently took place for the 14th time. So far, I wasn’t able to attend, but this time I made it.

Distributions

New Releases

• The development team behind the HandyLinux operating system had the pleasure of announcing on June 30 that version 1.5.1 has been released and is now available for download. This build introduces several new features, updated packages, and fixes various bugs.

• This is a maintenance release that fixes major bugs discovered and reported by the community from the previous stable version, antiX MX 14.1.1, and updates various packages.

• According to the quite small changelog, antiX MX 14.2 updates the powerful LibreOffice suite to the latest stable version, 4.2.5, updates the documentation, and adds support for Broadcom wireless devices on the CD image.

• We are happy to announce that Calculate Linux 13.19, the last of the 13th, has been released. CL 14 is coming soon after, with many new features such as totally rewritten assemble & compilation utilities, GUI and/or commande line updater, automatic update check, new approach to profiles, etc.

• The stable channel of the Clonezilla Live Linux distribution, an open source operating system designed for hard disk drive cloning operations, has been updated to version 2.2.3-25, as announced by its developer, Steven Shiau.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat (RHT) is introducing a new incentive for enterprises to adopt its open source OpenStack cloud computing solutions. Now, the company will certify cloud-management solutions for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

• Red Hat has followed up the roll out of the latest version of its mainstay Enterprise Linux operating system with the beta release of the Red Hat Satellite 6 management suite.

Fedora

• Matthew Miller just announced that there is to be an election later this month for 3 positions in the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo). FESCo is a fully community elected body and represents the technical leadership in Fedora. The nomination period starts tomorrow (July 2nd), with the election scheduled to be held from July 15th to the 22nd.

• While Fedora 21 remains under heavy development, for some new benchmarks to get July started I ran some tests of a stock Fedora 20 installation versus Fedora 20 with all stable updates versus Fedora 21 in its “Rawhide” state.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• In 2013, Canonical – the company behind Ubuntu – attempted to raise $32m via crowdfunding for its Ubuntu Edge smartphone. It didn’t make it, but the Ubuntu phone isn’t dead. In fact, development is well under way and the Ubuntu phone operating system is very much alive. If you’re brave enough, you can download and install the developer version on certain Android smartphones and tablets by following the instructions here.

• Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) signaled its endorsement of Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux as a platform for deploying the OpenStack cloud operating system with the release this week of a new reference architecture, which provides detailed instructions on setting up an OpenStack cloud using Ubuntu and other tools from Canonical, such as Juju and MAAS.

• While Fedora 21 is planning for open-source OpenCL support “out of the box”, the same can’t be said for Ubuntu 14.10. Ubuntu developers aren’t looking for any stock OpenCL support be made available in the next distribution release.

Flavours and Variants

• Peppermint Five, the latest release of the distribution formerly called Peppermint OS, features a brand new Control Center to manage settings, as well as a rebuilt Ice SSB (Site Specific Browser) manager. Since it’s built on the Ubuntu 14.04 code base, Peppermint Five is also a long term support release.

Devices/Embedded

• The first release of Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) is out today, providing car vendors with an open-source platform on which to embed applications and features. AGL officially started in September 2012 as a collaboration project operated by the Linux Foundation and currently has 32 members, including Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, Jaguar and Intel, on its roster.

• Linux, the open source operating system, shifted gears into a relatively new ecosystem this week with the first release of Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a Linux distribution tailored for cars in the Internet of Things age.

• SolidRun has launched three Linux- and Android-ready, open source “HummingBoard” SBCs based on 1GHz Freescale i.MX6 SoCs, with a Pi-like 26-pin I/O connector.

• A robotic, mechanical reader of printed books that melds together the Raspberry Pi and Lego Mindstorms.

• Chumby, which sold Linux-based tabletop devices that ran Flash-based apps, is back in business under Blue Octy, with an overhauled website and 1,000 apps.

Phones

• The speed of change and level of innovation in mobile is mind-boggling. One thing is for sure: mobile is, and will continue to be, the communication platform of choice for people across the globe. But what will a mobile device look like and how will people use it?

Ballnux

• Samsung enthusiasts who are eagerly waiting for the next Samsung device have some news in store. Samsung has announced the Galaxy S5 mini, the mini version of its 2014 flagship smartphone. While the pricing of the device has not been revealed yet, the specifications surely tell a story.

• Google hasn’t yet released details on what specific handsets will work with Android Auto — but it seems like a safe bet that LG’s future smartphones will work with the new system. And if the company keeps putting out phones as good as the G3 we reviewed last month, Android Auto support will be another point in favor of LG.

Android

• At the recent Google I/O conference, Android was the star of the show, and, in particular, Android Wear devices were all the rage. Google even handed out prototype smartwatches running Android Wear, purportedly to encourage developers to begin creating apps for the wearable computing platform.

• I used to believe that in the next stage of evolution we’d grow a third arm. That would be a sign that our bodies have adapted to one of the greatest physical impediments in human history: constantly having to pull out our smartphones to see if we have important messages.

• But there’s a less genetically drastic solution. A smartwatch can now deliver the most important and timely information straight to one of your existing wrists. And where Samsung 005930.SE +1.53% and some smartwatch startups have failed to gain momentum, Google’s new Android Wear may be the first viable wrist-top platform.

• Blackphone, the much-ballyhooed collaboration between anti-NSA encryption powerhouse Silent Circle, and Geeksphone, a company owned by a former tech prodigy, has begun shipping around the world. The initial inventory has already sold out.

• While security-conscious phones have been sold in the past, the idea took off after the revelations of global NSA surveillance leaked by former security agent Edward Snowden.

• VLC is the most popular Open Source video player which can play virtually any video and audio formats on the desktop PCs. It beats every video player out there whether it be QuickTime or Windows Media Player. When we talk about Android, the situation is not much different as due to ARM’s mess, its really tricky to get all videos to play. There are some apps but they are either paid, proprietary or they just don’t work that well. In a nutshell, we need VLC for Android.

• Over the last week all the news has revolved around L with early leaks of its features and images. This morning we also reported of L’s source code released as a developer preview. This immediately led to many news articles incorrectly reporting that third party ROM builders will be able to soon offer L based ROM builds.

Free Software/Open Source

• At Kaltura, we took the open source road partly because of curiosity and passion, and partly because we entered a market where competition was already getting fierce and there was a clear lack of an open source and standards oriented solution.

• Plans for an open-source NFV platform are moving forward, as leading carriers and vendors in the NFV movement were scheduled to hold an “inception meeting” Monday and Tuesday.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Folks from Collabora and Red Hat have been working on making Firefox on Gtk+ 3 a thing. See Emilio’s blog post for some recent update. But getting Firefox to build and run locally is unfortunately not the whole story.

• I’ve been working on getting Gtk+ 3 Firefox builds going on Mozilla build infrastructure, and I’m proud to announce today that those builds are now going through Mozilla continuous integration on a project branch: Elm, and receive the same automated testing as mozilla-central.

SaaS/Big Data

• Looking for a guide to walk you through the creation, care and upkeep of your open source cloud running OpenStack? We’ve collected some of our favorite tutorials and technical how-tos from the past month all here in one place. Be sure to visit the official documentation for OpenStack if you need further guidance.

• Rackspace’s involvement with OpenStack and CERN at the Large Hadron Collider surfaced again late last month when the cloud hosting provider staged a London-based gathering to discuss what, when and where its cloud hosting intelligence is being deployed.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Love them or hate them, presentations are a major part of life in both academia and business. Traditionally, creating a presentation meant using Microsoft’s PowerPoint, but Apple’s Keynote and LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org’s Impress are solid alternatives. The problem with all those applications (aside from the closed source nature of the first two) is that you need those applications installed in order to view the presentations you’ve created. You can try your luck opening the file in Google Drive or the like, but your success will vary.

Funding

• $110 million funding round underscores high-value potential for Big Data applications.

• Apache Hadoop vendor MapR has received the blessing—and financial backing—of Google (GOOG), whose investment fund, Google Capital, led the latest, $110 million financing round for the Big Data company.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Greets, and welcome back to the solipsism! I’ve been wandering the wilderness with my Guile hackings lately, but I’m finally ready to come back to civilization. Hopefully you will enjoy my harvest of forest fruit.

• The Seattle GNU/Linux Conference (SeaGL) has just announced Karen Sandler, executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy, as a keynote speaker and opened its Call for Participation. SeaGL is a free software conference in downtown Seattle, taking place on October 24 and 25, 2014. The Seattle Central Community College is hosting the event, so expect plenty of opportunities for students, as well as professionals and free software enthusiasts.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• ARM Semiconductors announced last week it would jump into the open-source sensor hubs game by teaming with sensor algorithm company Sensor Platforms to produce an open-source software for sensor hub applications. Sensor Platform’s Open Sensor Platform (OSP) is designed to simplify the use of sensors in applications and hardware by providing a flexible framework for more sophisticated interpretation and analysis of sensor data.

Programming

• Revolution Analytics supports the R community and the ever-growing needs of commercial users. Recently named a top 10 influencer on the topic of Big Data, I asked David Smith, the Chief Community Officer at Revolution Analytics, to share with me what keeps this programming language ticking. Though R has been around since the 90s, released in 1995 as under GPLv2 by two statistics professors looking to develop a new language for statistical computing, a new breath of life has energized a rowdy team of innovators around R.

• SparkR is an R package that enables the R programming language to run inside of the Spark framework in order to manipulate the data for analytics.

• This is a fairly quick post, though I previously considered making it longer and more trollish. A handful of my friends have told me about Julia, the amazing programming language made for numerical computations and other scientific computing uses.

Standards/Consortia

• Around a year ago, in WebRTC without a signaling server, I presented an simple app that can start a chat session with another browser without involving a local file server (i.e. you just browse to file:///) and without involving a signaling server (instead of both going to the same web page to share “offers”, you share them manually, perhaps via IM).

Leftovers

• The Azov Battalion was formed on May 5th, 4 days later they were involved in still one of the most shocking actions of this Ukraine crisis, the Mariupol massacre. They were the battalion sent out of the Mariupol police hq first, into the streets, shooting, killing unarmed civilians. Since then, involvement in further atrocities across the former east of Ukraine has had them labelled ‘men in black’ (their uniform is all black, unmarked), even a ‘death squad‘. Part of their funding reportedly comes from oligarch Igor Kolomoisky. How many of them are there? Some have reported 70, but the group itself are secretive about exact numbers, with speculation it could be in the hundreds. Their official Facebook page has over 8000 ‘likes’.

• Pressured by neocons and the mainstream U.S. media, the Obama administration is charting a dangerous course by seeking a military solution to Ukraine’s political crisis and possibly provoking Moscow to intervene to protect ethnic Russians, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern warns.

• Kreuzberg, the heart of countercultural Berlin, is no stranger to protests. But a tense standoff between police and protesters over the past six days has set a new standard.

• Since last Wednesday, hundreds of police officers have been surrounding a former school building in which a group of mainly African asylum seekers are protesting against their treatment in Germany.

• On Monday morning, around 20 officers lined up behind barricades on the junction of Ohlauer and Reichenberger Strasse, some of them deep in conversation with locals who wanted to get trolleys full of food and medicine through to the protesters.

• The press are refused entry to the school building, allegedly because of a fire hazard.

• While some local politicians are trying to negotiate an agreement that would allow the asylum seekers to permanently remain in the building while their cases are being processed, Germany’s police union is advocating an evacuation of the building.

• In a call from the roof of the building, a 32-year-old Sudanese refugee who would only give his name as Adam said: “The police try to give the impression that we are criminals and crazy people, but we only want to fight for our rights.”

• Call, text and data charges in more than 40 EU countries are slashed by European leaders

Science

Health/Nutrition

• The New York Post loves a good villain, but you’d think it would be hard to cast a bad light on the group of people profiled in an April 19 story: moms who feed their kids organic food.

Security

• JPMorgan Chase & Co, PepsiCo Inc, Cardinal Health Inc, Deere & Co and The United Services Automobile Association (USAA) are among the Fortune 500 companies seeking chief information security officers (CISOs) and other security personnel to shore up their cyber defenses, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Even the mightiest have their come-uppance when their internal logic spews out destructiveness returning on the self—“blowback” in a way perhaps not seen before. I refer to James Risen’s extraordinary article in the New York Times, “Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater,” (June 30), in which the customary meaning of “blowback” refers to policies, e.g., the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, the “pivot” of military power to the Pacific intent on the encirclement, containment, isolation of China, produce unintended, or if intended, still unwelcome, consequences for the initiator of the policy or action.

• Back in 2004, US troops in Iraq raided Chalabi’s headquarters. The accusation: he had leaked classified US intelligence to the Iranians, letting them in on the secret that we had cracked Tehran’s interagency code. For years, Chalabi had been on the CIA payroll, but now it looked like he was in reality a double-agent acting on behalf of Iran. The real shocker, however, was that Chalabi had access to this kind of closely-guarded intelligence in the first place. The FBI wanted to know how the wily Iranian exile leader got his hands on the information.

• US Secretary of State John Kerry has admitted that the US-led invasion of Iraq eleven years ago was a serious mistake.

• To President Carter and Brzezinski, the end justified the means. The end goal was the collapse of the Soviet Union, and to achieve it, Islamist fundamentalists had to be used. Osama bin Laden and people like him were dispatched to Afghanistan to fight the “godless” communists. It was during this time that the Quran’s surah on jihad attracted attention.

• Such is the absence of quality in the current debate on Iraq, that absent is the presence of British observers in the first elections, to nominate a Government for the Kurdish Autonomous Region, after the 1991 failed US/UK backed uprising to remove Saddam Hussain from power.

• The clear absence of such minor details, which any self respecting sociologist or politician would describe as vital, to the “cause and affect” of the current situation, has now resulted in a political narrative, which has excluded the internal and external Iraqi community.

• A legal filing prosecutors submitted in advance of a hearing set in federal court in Washington on Wednesday for Libyan militia leader Ahmed Abu Khatallah is vague about his role in the 2012 attack that killed four Americans at a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi.

• Abu Khatallah was captured in Benghazi last month by U.S. military special forces and FBI personnel. He was brought across the Atlantic in a Navy ship before being helicoptered into Washington on Saturday morning for an arraignment in federal court on an indictment charging him with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists in connection with the assault on the U.S. compound two years ago.

• A suspected ringleader of the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans was ordered held without bond during a Wednesday hearing in D.C. federal court.

• The only other possibility is that ABC is being forced to comply with a law that requires Bill Kristol appear on national television. If that’s not the excuse, then what is?

• Why “Establishment figures endorse status quo” is news beats me. The only news is that the estrangement of ordinary people from the moribund political establishment means nobody cares what these old troughers and sycophants think. In Scotland the referendum has given an impetus to a popular will to take back the power kidnaped by an unrepresentative political class. These old fogeys may need to have the power (with American permission) to kill billions of their human beings, in order to feel potent and important. But if they want to keep these appalling devices, they are going to have to look for somewhere new to keep them. The Pool of London?

• Last week, we wrote about how the DOJ finally released (a heavily redacted) copy of its memo authorizing drone use for killing Americans (though, some have pointed out that the memo was written well after the US started trying to kill Americans with drones). More importantly, we noted that the memo actually pointed to another secret memo as part of the justification. It’s secret memo on top of secret memo, all the way down. The ACLU went back to court to see about getting its hands on that other memo, and the court has now ordered the DOJ to cough up any such memos related to killing people with drones. Specifically, the judge has ordered the DOJ to provide…

• Despite promises from the Bush-43 administration that the Iraq War would pay for itself, the price tag keeps soaring with the predictable impact on V.A. hospitals struggling to care for wounded warriors. But the political solution has been to make a change at the top, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar notes.

• Currently, several hundred U.S. troops are providing security in Baghdad and assessing Iraq’s security needs, Dempsey said on NPR on June 28. The military is preparing “additional options” including the targeting of “high-value individuals,” he said.

• Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) pressed for increasing aid to moderate rebel groups after meeting Syrian opposition leaders in Turkey Wednesday, warning that delays would “fuel the growing danger” to U.S. security.

• McCain said pro-Western Syrian forces were fighting a “two-front war” against both Syrian strongman Bashar Assad and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a Sunni militant group that has captured huge swaths of both countries.

• The US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Monday that the parents of Sergio Hernandez, a 15-year-old Mexican teenager who was shot and killed by Border Patrol Agent Jesus Mesa on June 7, 2010, could sue Mesa in U.S. civil court for alleged excessive use of force. This was a reversal of the initial judgment made in Mesa’s favor in the lower Western District Court in El Paso, TX.

• However, though America has only deemed the UK fit to buy their UAVs, others, including Iran, whose drones patrol the same Iraqi skies as their US counterparts, have reverse engineered the unmanned aerial vehicle with relative ease.

• Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said al Qaeda affiliated fighters targeting the U.S. should not be handled by the court system, regardless of whether they are American citizens.

• Americans are troubled by the lack of accountability surrounding US use of targeted strikes far from traditional battlefields

• The London-based Bureau of Investigating Journalism quoting a source close to peace talks between the government and TTP said Islamabad had asked the US to stop drone strikes during the peace deal.

• 7. We are still lost. The gates of hell are still wide open. You now understand what is happening. You are ahead of our leaders, of both parties, who in attempting to protect economic interests have lost any sense of foreign policy direction, or of the costs to America in blood and dollars. It is hard to believe that future U.S. leaders could make it worse, but it is possible.

• Unless the end goal is to foment Islamic terrorism from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, what exactly is this administration hoping to achieve? It’s getting its backside handed to it by the jihadist version of a startup, and Obama risks becoming its venture capitalist in chief.

• The US is reportedly planning to overhaul security at its airports and to demand its overseas partners do the same, after receiving intelligence that militant groups in the Middle East are preparing a new generation of non-metallic explosives that could be carried undetected on to commercial flights.

• Human rights activists marched from the New York Times offices to the Empire State Building — which houses Human Rights Watch — to protest both institutions as tools of the CIA, specifically in their role attacking the Bolivarian government of Venezuela.

• Starting 1998, the Cuban government provided the United States with intelligence to help it track down US citizens who had disappeared in the field during the Cold War, a former CIA agent revealed.

• Chip Beck, a retired CIA agent and former Department of State official, revealed that, between 1998 and 2001, he traveled to Cuba officially on five separate occasions to look for information on US citizens who had disappeared during missions in Indochina, Africa and Central America during the years of confrontation between the West and the communist bloc headed by the Soviet Union.

• The US still does not have formal diplomatic relations with Cuba and maintains an embargo that makes it illegal for US corporations to do business with Cuba.

• Earlier this year, the CIA blocked the release of a decades-old internal report on the Bay of Pigs. It is hard to imagine why such information on a 1960s operation would not be public information now.

• While the Contras claimed responsibility, to the Sandinistas such actions bore all the hallmarks of the CIA. Immediately, they lodged a formal complaint before the International Court of Justice.

• For its part, the State Department assured it had “no further information on the incident,” adding: “We have received a protest from the Soviet Union charging U.S. responsibility, and we reject that charge.”

• On April 8, unauthorized leaks revealed that the CIA (specifically, its so-called Unilaterally Controlled Latino Assets or UCLAs) had in fact been directly involved in laying these mines. As shown by a March 2, 1984 secret memorandum written by Oliver North, the agency had made prior arrangements asking the Contras to “take credit for the operation” to cover up its involvement.

• Thirteen months ago, during a speech at the National Defense University, President Barack Obama promised greater transparency and new guidelines for drone use as part of his counterterrorism strategy.

• Thailand deported a former ethnic Hmong resistance leader whose group fought for the US in Laos in the 1960s, Thai officials and rights groups said Wednesday, raising concerns that he will face persecution in his homeland.

• Moua Toua Ter and fellow Hmong led a desperate existence on the run in the jungles of Laos for more than two decades. He had been sheltering in Thailand for eight years while seeking resettlement in a third country.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Refusing to act on climate change will be bad for business, according to a major recent report assessing the alarming risks of unchecked global warming on the U.S. economy. But while some top business media outlets recognize global warming as a serious issue for their audience, others are still stuck in denial.

Finance

• Journalistic earnings stories can feel robotic, even when written by a news organization as prestigious as the Associated Press. Acknowledging this fact, the AP has decided that it will just have robots produce stories on companies’ earning reports.

• The young boy smiles and looks into the eyes of the homeless man with bent shoulders and worn shoes.

• He carefully places a scoop of potato salad next to the grilled hot dog and beans on the man’s plate.

• Even the most sequestered suburbanite visiting downtown Detroit can see that cuts in mental health services have pushed mentally ill people onto the street. During the day, more and more of them share the sidewalks with nicely dressed people who walk by them, often without a glance, on their way to the offices, lofts, condos, restaurants and clubs that signal Detroit’s downtown revival.

• Freidman, as one of the founders of neoliberal thought, and theory, in the late 1940s, became synonymous with “monetarism” and eventually with “neoliberalism,” and as follows, significantly, very significantly, his theory spread all across the earth from the shores of Melbourne to Sri Lanka to Cape Town to Cape Horn to Tokyo; it’s a neoliberal world.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case might not have been surprising, but there’s at least one aspect of the media coverage of the company that fails in a big way: Few outlets note that the company was providing the very type of health coverage it finds impossible to reconcile with its religious beliefs before the Affordable Care Act existed.

Censorship

• Publishers must fight back against this indirect challenge to press freedom, which allows articles to be ‘disappeared’. Editorial decisions belong with them, not Google

• Almost one in five websites are being blocked by overzealous filters, a project has found.

• Open Rights Group’s Blocked project has created a free checking tool, which returns information on whether a site is being blocked by filters.

• Four lawsuits were filed Tuesday, challenging free speech restrictions at college campuses. The lawsuits were spearheaded by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a Philadelphia-based group that promotes free speech and due process rights at colleges and universities. FIRE aims to eliminate campus policies that restrict expression.

• These are just a few of the cases that comprise the 17th Annual Muzzle Awards — a Fourth of July round-up of outrages against free speech and personal liberties in New England during the past year.

• On July 5, 2005, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller made an honorable sacrifice by accepting a jail sentence rather than exposing her confidential source through testifying before a grand jury. Miller’s story is a stark reminder of the nation’s own war on press freedom and a chilling foreshadowing of the United States’ own struggles of respecting and obeying the rights of journalists.

Privacy

• Hayden’s analysis is mistaken.

• The resulting relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, is remarkable for its longevity and depth. For example, the database software giant Oracle has been rumored to maintain close ties with the CIA. Similarly, the partly CIA-funded Keyhole, Inc., was among the acquisitions that produced Google Maps. The CIA’s Silicon Valley venture-capital operation, In-Q-Tel is meant to ensure that the interests of America’s national security apparatus are implanted in technology startups.

• New York-based site Cryptome says it will publish the remaining NSA documents that Edward Snowden swiped

• Virtually no foreign government is off-limits for the National Security Agency, which has been authorized to intercept information “concerning” all but four countries, according to top-secret documents.

• We previously looked at the huge demand for ProtonMail, an easy-to-use and free NSA-proof email service created by CERN and MIT scientists. It is based in Switzerland, meaning the U.S. government can’t just hoover it up without an enforceable Swiss court order, which is hard to come by since the Swiss legal system has “strong privacy protections.” The demand for the end-to-end encrypted email service was so high that ProtonMail ran out of a month’s worth of server capacity in three days.

• A GROUP of seven internet service providers (ISPs) from around the globe are looking to take the UK’s GCHQ to court over its alleged use of “malicious software” to attack their respective network infrastructures.

• Seven international web providers lodge formal complaint to court alleging breach of privacy and breaking into their networks

• While the external affairs ministry has done what is expected of it in such circumstances — summon a senior US diplomat to express outrage, and say that spying on an Indian entity is unacceptable — it is evident that the ruling BJP is not frothing at the mouth following the revelation that America’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had permitted the National Security Agency in 2010 to spy on the saffron party.

• India summoned the top diplomat from the US embassy Wednesday to complain for the third time about spying following new allegations that the National Security Agency targeted the ruling party.

• Amid the latest revelation about the US National Security Agency NSA spied the BJP; party has lodged its protest and criticized the move. On the whole episode, Narendra Modi-led NDA govt today summoned a top US diplomat in this regards and said that it can’t be accepted.

• Two years ago, I broke up with Facebook. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done. Like any big break up, I had complex reasons, but the biggest was that I simply did not trust Facebook. The relationship started out with the euphoria of new love, but over the years turned to something resembling abuse.

• Facebook eerily insists on invading your life.

• The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) issued a legally flawed and factually incomplete report late Tuesday that endorses Section 702 surveillance. Hiding behind the “complexity” of the technology, it gives short shrift to the very serious privacy concerns that the surveillance has rightly raised for millions of Americans. The board also deferred considering whether the surveillance infringed the privacy of many millions more foreigners abroad.

• The board skips over the essential privacy problem with the 702 “upstream” program: that the government has access to or is acquiring nearly all communications that travel over the Internet. The board focuses only on the government’s methods for searching and filtering out unwanted information. This ignores the fact that the government is collecting and searching through the content of millions of emails, social networking posts, and other Internet communications, steps that occur before the PCLOB analysis starts. This content collection is the centerpiece of EFF’s Jewel v. NSA case, a lawsuit battling government spying filed back in 2008.

• Intelligence agencies are among the most prolific buyers of zero-day computer security flaws that can be used to spy on enemies foreign and domestic, or so it’s claimed – and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a lawsuit to find out what exactly they are doing with them.

• “Since these vulnerabilities potentially affect the security of users all over the world, the public has a strong interest in knowing how these agencies are weighing the risks and benefits of using zero days instead of disclosing them to vendors,” said EFF global policy analyst Eva Galperin.

• Congressman Alan Grayson made waves last week when he sent letters to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association(SIFMA), the Consumer Bankers Association, and the Financial Services Roundtable assailing former head of the NSA, Keith Alexander. In each letter Grayson cited a Bloomberg article that revealed that Alexander’s new consulting firm was commanding hefty fees of anywhere from $600K to $1 million per month.

• United States (US)-based digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

• The group hopes to gain access to documents showing how American intelligence agencies made use of “zero day attacks” to gain access to a target’s computer.

• Zero days are exploits that have been discovered by researchers but have not yet been patched by developers and can provide backdoor access into a user’s computer.

• Last night, the Russian State Duma (parliament) passed the first bill requiring that the personal data of all Russians should be stored inside the country.

• The effects of the bill, if passed, would be wide-ranging, touching just about every international service used by Russians. Essentially, it would mean that Facebook, Google or any other international online service – including apps – used by people in Russia would need to have physical servers inside Russia’s borders.

• Facebook’s emotion study reveals it is hopelessly disconnected from emotional reality: that people get upset when people they care about are unhappy

• Cloud computing has been an industry buzzword for some time now, but has continued to evolve at quite a pace. Despite this, one of the predominant themes of discussion that remains is how to take advantage while still avoiding the risks of ‘the cloud’.

• The Senate Intelligence Committee recently introduced the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2014. It’s the fourth time in four years that Congress has tried to pass “cybersecurity” legislation. Unfortunately, the newest Senate bill is one of the worst yet. Cybersecurity bills aim to facilitate information sharing between companies and the government, but they always seem to come with broad immunity clauses for companies, vague definitions, and aggressive spying powers. Given such calculated violence to users’ privacy rights, it’s no surprise that these bills fail every year.

• That hint sent the webs atwitter, especially since the NSA-centric Intercept—a fledgling media startup that’s published in fits and starts—hasn’t put out a new story since June 18.

• If it wasn’t for last minute US government intervention, occurring last night just before the clock hit midnight, we would know the names American’s being spied on by the National Security Agency.

• [...]

• Greenwald’s release of the names of US citizens – including controversial political activists – who the NSA was targeting was halted for reasons still not fully explained. The announcement came on Greenwald’s Twitter feed hours before the scheduled release when he said “After 3 months working on our story, USG (US Government) today suddenly began making new last-minute claims which we intend to investigate before publishing.”

• The US National Security Agency has been authorized to intercept information “concerning” all but four countries worldwide, top-secret documents say, according to The Washington Post.

• CIA has received approval for collection of intelligence information in 193 countries.

• Documents obtained by a Danish broadcasting company show that American officials put “significant pressure” on the European country to allow for communication surveillance, according to The Local, an English-language European news outlet. The documents also show that the Danish Defense Intelligence Service cooperated with the NSA to tap undersea internet cables.

• This report was compiled by 4 former senior NSA staff:

• – William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of the SIGINT Automation Research Center. – Thomas Drake, former Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service, NSA – Edward Loomis, former Chief, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA – J. Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA

• Ever since stories about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) spying began pouring out last year, courtesy of Edward Snowden’s release of classified information about the secretive intelligence agency, speculation has been rife about the extent of domestic surveillance, the legal parameters within which the NSA operates, and the degree to which it respects those parameters. Newly released documents suggest that limits on the NSA’s authority to intercept communications are few, and the executive branch’s interpretation of the NSA’s jurisdiction doesn’t limit surveillance to the far side of the nation’s borders.

• The FBI doesn’t track the number of US searches it does on data collected for foreign intelligence purposes

• PCLOB Chairman David Medine and member Patricia Wald — a former D.C. Circuit judge appointed by President Jimmy Carter — said the FBI should generally have to get approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before searching the 702 data for information about an American, except in emergencies. Medine and Wald also recommended that CIA or NSA personnel seeking to search 702 data using an identifier related to a U.S. person be required to get advance court approval in most instances.

• The FBI and the CIA admit they spied on countless emails and phone calls of private U.S. citizens.

• The director’s office sent the disclosure to Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden in response to a question asked during an intelligence committee hearing on the USA FREEDOM Act NSA reform bill. The office went on to explain such surveillance was not justified by exploiting a legal “loophole,” which the House voted to close last week.

• Baku-APA. The two US citizens arrested in North Korea may be CIA agents doing espionage activities in the Asian country, an American geopolitical analyst says, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

Civil Rights

• This Independence Day, Americans will celebrate the nation’s core values, especially freedom. But according to a new international poll, Americans have become significantly “less satisfied with the freedom to choose what they want to do with their lives.”

• Seventy-nine percent of US residents are satisfied with their level of freedom, down from 91 percent in 2006, according to the Gallup survey, released Tuesday.

• That 12 point drop pushes the US from among the highest in the world in terms of perceived freedom to 36th place, outside the top quartile of the 120 countries sampled, trailing Paraguay, Rwanda, and the autonomous region of Nagarno-Karabakh.

• Have a look at the unsigned editorials in left-of-center newspapers, or essays by columnists whose politics are mostly progressive. Listen to speeches by liberal public officials. On any of the controversial issues of our day, from tax policy to civil rights, you’ll find approximately what you’d expect.

• September 17 last year was a pretty bad day for the Constitution on our campuses. Robert Van Tuinen of Modesto Junior College in California was prevented from passing out copies of the Constitution outside of his college’s tiny “free speech zone.” Near Los Angeles, Citrus College student Vinny Sinapi-Riddle was threatened with removal from campus for the “offense” of collecting signatures for a petition against NSA domestic surveillance outside his college’s tiny free speech area.

• In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Ted Cruz accused the president of breaking the law by claiming, “Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the president’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat.” Unfortunately for Sen. Cruz and like-minded citizens, there’s nothing unprecedented about Obama’s recent activities. According to C-Span’s Congressional Glossary, an executive order is defined as, “a presidential directive with the force of law. It does not need congressional approval.” While many conservatives have labeled Obama’s unilateral decisions as imperial, or the actions of a “monarch,” the truth is that U.S. history is filled with Republican presidents who have been far more willing to take matters into their own hands.

• Partly as a result, relations between the CIA and Congress are more fraught than at any point in the past decade. The source of the tension is the Senate intelligence committee’s classified report on the CIA’s controversial post-9/11 interrogation program—and the agency’s response to it.

• [...]

• Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and chairman of the committee, was angry. The document was part of the committee’s investigation of the CIA interrogation program. Mr. Brennan’s investigation, she felt, was an affront to the Constitution’s separation of powers. She wanted an apology.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• John Oliver told us that “If you want to do something evil, put it inside something that sounds incredibly boring,” and there’s no domain in which that is more true than the world of Internet governance.

• EFF has taken a U-turn from its stand on giving FCC too much power to regulate the internet services. Now EFF is recommending that FCC reclassify internet services as Title II services which will give the commission more power to regulate the industry.

• EFF has long been critical of the Federal Communications Commission’s efforts to regulate digital technologies and services. We’ve warned against FCC rules and strategies that threatened to (or actually did) give the agency too much power over innovation and user choice. And with good reason: the FCC has a sad history of being captured by the very industries it’s supposed to regulate. It also has a history of ignoring grassroots public opinion. In the early 2000s, for example, the commission essentially ignored the comments of hundreds of thousands of Americans who opposed media consolidation.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• In 2012, New Zealand police seized computer drives belonging to Kim Dotcom, copies of which were unlawfully given to the FBI. Dotcom wants access to the seized content but the drives are encrypted. A judge has now ruled that even if the Megaupload founder supplies the passwords, they cannot subsequently be forwarded to the FBI.

• Argentina has become the first country in Latin America to block The Pirate Bay on copyright grounds. A court order obtained by the country’s leading recording labels compels eleven ISPs to block 256 Pirate Bay IP addresses and 12 domains. According to early reports from the region, some ISPs have already implemented the ban.

• It’s not always easy to spot the compromises in the technology we use, where we’ve allowed corporate interests to trump public ideals like privacy and press freedom. But sometimes new developments can cast those uneasy bargains into relief—and show that the public may not have even been at the table when they were made.

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