● 07.04.14

● Links 4/7/2014: E19 Alpha 2, KDevelop 4.7.0 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 6:26 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• With collected mumbling on Twitter, Windows XP finally took its final beath. Or at least, its security support stopped. Where to go from there though? Do you stay with Microsoft and risk Windows 8 or do you start a life with Linux and escape the walled garden? We have you covered with our complete guide on making the jump from Windows XP to Linux.

• Already on Linux? Then we have our usual selection of excellent tutorials and features to keep you occupied, as well as a big feature on the amazing Kano. It’s a Raspberry Pi kit and OS that’s designed to teach kids all about computers, computing and coding. We love it, and you can find out why in the magazine.

Desktop

• The Linux desktop is leaps and bounds from where it was 10, five, even two years ago. Desktop environments that many declared unusable or dead have seen a renaissance in usability. But that doesn’t mean that out of the box, every Linux desktop is ready for every type of user. For each user type there may be many ways to make a desktop more usable. Thankfully, this is Linux — so options are never a problem.

• With that in mind, I wanted to highlight my 10 best tips for creating more user-friendly Linux desktops. Not every one of these tips will apply to your particular desktop (be it GNOME, Unity, KDE, XFCE, Deepin Desktop, Cinnamon… the list goes on). But you should find more than one tip that will go a long way toward improving your experience.

• If Windows isn’t your thing and you don’t want to switch to a Mac, give Linux a try. Ian Paul steps you through three Linux variants that are worth checking out. (Hint: It isn’t as hard as you might think.) And once you feel more comfortable with Linux, check out these tools for tweaking the OS so it works better for you.

Server

• CoreOS, a startup with a Linux OS distribution that can update simultaneously across massive server deployments, announced an $8 million Series A funding round and the release of CoreOS Managed Linux, a commercial version of the open source technology that comes with support.

• Firms that use Linux-based cloud servers are overspending on their cloud capacity by more than £1 billion annually for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas).

• According to cloud provider ElasticHosts, the dominant payment model for IaaS is highly inefficient, and even at its best, companies are overpaying by as much as 50 per cent.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Turnkey GNU/Linux is a free Debian based library of system images that pre-integrates and polishes the best free software components into secure, easy to use solutions.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation announced keynote speakers for LinuxCon + CloudOpen + Embedded Linux Conference Europe, to be held Oct. 13-15 in Düsseldorf, Germany.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman has decided to maintain the Linux 3.14 code-base as a long-term stable kernel release.

• By becoming a long-term stable release, the Linux 3.14 kernel will now be supported through August 2016. The previous LTS kernel maintained by Greg KH is Linux 3.10 and is to be supported through September 2015, while Jiri Slaby of SUSE is also maintaining Linux 3.12 as a stable kernel series maintained through some time in 2016.

• Lennart Poettering announced the release of systemd 215 on Thursday afternoon.

• The new systemd 215 release features a new systemd-sysusers command, a new input system group, systemd-networkd has a basic DHCPv4 server, networkd now supports vxLANs, and there’s an assortment of other updates and new features. Lots of the work happening now within the systemd world is about stateless systems and factory reset support.

• Intel’s Linux open-source crew is toying with aggressive down-clocking for current-generation Bay Trail hardware for greater power-savings and lower heat output.

• Con Kolivas has updated his out-of-tree process scheduler for the Linux kernel.

• The Brain Fuck Scheduler has been revised to version 448 and released on Wednesday for the Linux 3.15 stable kernel.

• Besides updating against the kernel interfaces of Linux 3.15, there’s no reports of other changes for the BFS scheduler with the v448 revision. Kolivas continues to have no desire to mainline the Brain Fuck Scheduler.

Graphics Stack

• A DRM-fixes pull request for the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver for the Linux 3.16 kernel is going to enable BAPM by default for some APU systems.

• BAPM is a power management feature that handles power budgeting between the CPU/GPUs on APUs. Up to now BAPM has been disabled by default, but for fixing some power-related bugs, this feature is looking to be turned on post-3.16 merge window for some AMD APU hardware.

Benchmarks

• When running my initial Linux 3.16 file-system tests on an SSD I had to skip over Btrfs due to initial problems with the experimental kernel code. Fortunately, Btrfs has been fixed-up in Linux 3.16 and can now serve for some benchmarking.

Applications

• Are you new to Linux, are you finding it hard to adjust to the Linux environment and are wondering where you can get an application for Linux that is similar to the XYZ program on Windows.

• Make sure you can maintain your hard disks and storage in the best way possible as we look at a selection of partition editors.

• Pragha 1.2.2, a music player written in GTK with a simplistic interface, has been released just a few moments ago. This release brings several bug fixes.

Proprietary

• The Visual Effects Society (VES) has released its Calendar Year 2014 Reference Platform, which specifies versions of different Linux tools and libraries as a target for VFX software. VES said the platform aims to minimize incompatibilities, make it easier to support Linux pipelines, and encourage more software vendors to release tools that run on Linux.

• Anyone who’s done much work on Linux systems knows about the tangles that can arise when different software packages rely on different iterations of crucial libraries. Standardizing a baseline set of tools for installation on a VFX-ready Linux workstation should help, assuming vendors cooperate and users are made aware of the recommendations. To that end, the VES plans to announce the 2015 version of the platform at SIGGRAPH, and is currently inviting industry feedback on its draft version.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• It’s nice to see an increase even something as small as 0.07%. I am still hoping games like Counter Strike: Global Offensive and the SteamOS Steam Machines will help it rise.

• According to a new press release from 2K and Firaxis, Civilization: Beyond Earth will make its way onto Windows, Mac and Linux on Oct. 24; a rare Friday release that should help 2K and Firaxis separate their latest project from the myriad other AAA projects also scheduled to hit this October. And the game’s global release date means there won’t be any extra waiting if you live in a certain region.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• While Xfdashboard was created for use under Xfce, it can be used in any desktop environment however, it has a couple of Xfce dependencies: xfconf and garcon.

• Brace yourselves, because this update is hotter than the sand and bigger than the ocean. The second step in the only release process that will be longer than E17 and Duke Nukem 3D combined, The E19 Release Cycle, improves upon the glory of the momentous first step in a number of ways.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Finally, after months of work, the KDevelop team is happy to release a first beta of the 4.7 version. It comes packed with new features, lots of bug fixes as well as many performance improvements.

• just a quick announcement: KDevelop 4.7.0 Beta 1 was released!

• As I started to port KDEPIM* to KF5, I started to create script perl to help us to port to KF5.

• Finally, hours of hard work paid off. Kanagram has now a brand new interface which uses QtQuick framework instead of the previous SVG/QPainter based code. The entire interface has been written in QML. The whole process saw a lots of new developments. Previously, Kanagram had multiple interfaces separate for desktop and harmattan devices. There was also a plasma-active interface which had a bit of issues but helped me a lot as a reference, thanks to Laszlo Papp for that. The initial stages included a thorough clean up, which saw all the previous interfaces being replaced by the new qml one. Currently, only a single interface is maintained with the background and other images being kept isolated from the code, so that versatile themes could be implemented for the application in future.

• In 4.13, we moved away from a monolithic Nepomuk based system to a far more decentralized approach. Some parts of this are called Baloo, but to be honest, Baloo is not really responsible for managing your tags.

• Some changes took place to the GUI, I decided to separate the Tags and labels tabs into two left sidebar widgets like this:

• A couple of days ago I received an email from Cristian, with two screenshots of KMyMoney running on KDE Frameworks 5.

• Did you know that for the 5th year, KDE is planning a Developer Sprint which is going to be held in Randa, Switzerland from the 9th to 15th of August this year?

GNOME Desktop/GTK

Distributions

• How are the Operating System U team planning to create the ultimate operating system ever.

• Operating System U will use Arch Linux as the base distribution and the desktop will be a customised version of MATE with less bugs and more features.

• In addition, Operating System U will be dispensing with the XOrg system and will instead be using Wayland which is apparently less clunky and it directly renders with applications.

• OSu (A shorter name for Operating System U) will also have something called Startlight which is akin to the Windows Start button fused with Apple’s Spotlight. According to the website this will make the system easy to use and familiar to most users.

• OSu will be a partial rolling release and the main concept appears to be around consistency. The look and feel won’t ever change based on the developer’s whims unlike certain other operating systems such as Windows.

• Possibly the most ambitious plan is that the developers plan to have OSu pre-installed on laptops and available for sale in shops.

New Releases

• The last release before Calculate Linux 14 is now available with various updates to the Gentoo-based Linux distribution.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• One of the Scientific Linux developers sent out an announcement to the SL-devel mailing list just a couple of hours ago about SL 7 Alpha being released. They have a netinstall CD iso and a 6GB DVD. I got the entire tree downloaded in about 30-ish minutes… and got to work building a LiveDVD as well as OpenVZ OS Templates… using the scripts I had used for CentOS and Oracle… again with a tiny bit of editing.

• If you happen to manage a Red Hat Enpterprise Linux (RHEL) envronment, you may want to download Red Hat’s new Satellite 6 beta version of its management solution. It’s now available here. You can also find an informational video on it here.

• Redhat has recently released RHEL7 Operating system. Some of the Changes in RHEL7 are listed below as compare with RHEL 6 .

Fedora

• As we are approaching Fedora Workstation 21 we held a meeting to review our Wayland efforts for Fedora Workstation inside Red Hat recently. Switching to a new core technology like Wayland is a major undertaking and there are always big and small surprises that comes along the way. So the summary is that while we expect to have a version of Wayland in Fedora Workstation 21 that will be able to run a fully functional desktop, there are some missing pieces we now know that will not make it. Which means that since we want to ship at least one Fedora release with a feature complete Wayland as an option before making it default, that means that Fedora Workstation 23 is the earliest Wayland can be the default.

• As you may know, the Fedora developers have officially announced that Fedora 21 will be using Wayland as the default system compositor. They wanted to make the switch even earlier, but GNOME 3.14 (which will be used on Fedora 21) is the first iteration of the desktop environment with Wayland support.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• HP has been emerging as more and more of a partner to Canonical in the OpenStack arena. Canonical announced the opening of its Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL) late last year, and it features some really heavy-hitting tech partners, including HP.

• Now, HP has vouched for Ubuntu Linux as a platform for deploying OpenStack with the release of a complete reference architecture providing detailed instructions on setting up an OpenStack cloud using Ubuntu and other tools from Canonical, including Juju and MAAS.

• Geary is a lightweight email client also developed by the Yorba team, Geary 0.6.1 is the latest stable release, announced on July 1 , 2014. It is highly recommend all users upgrade to this release.

• It was less than a month that we announced crossing the 10,000 users milestone for Ubuntu phones and tablets, and we’ve already reached another: 100,000 app downloads!

• Not long after they have announced that Ubuntu Touch has been installed on 10.000 devices already, the Ubuntu Developers bring us another interesting statistic: The number of downloaded Ubuntu Touch applications has passed 100.000.

Devices/Embedded

• Long before people were talking about the Internet of Things, Linux-based home automation systems were available. Here are some of today’s most interesting Linux-powered home gadgets.

• It already powers the hardware behind some set-top boxes and in-car infotainment solutions, but few realise that some development work on Wayland, the proposed display server replacement for X, is thanks in part to the Raspberry Pi…

• The flood of Linux-based home automation hubs that has arrived over the last two years is now being joined by a wave of intermediary solutions that integrate multiple ecosystems. One of the most promising is Wink, a spinoff from crowd-investment firm Quirky. A week after announcing its Linux-based Wink home automation hub and mobile app, the well-heeled startup demonstrated the technology in a model smart home launch event in New York City, and announced 15 partners and 60 compatible devices.

• Want to run Android apps on your TV but don’t want to wait for the official Android TV launch? No problem — Chinese companies have been offering pocket-sized sticks with HDMI ports and ARM processors that lets you run Android on a TV for the past few years.

Phones

Android

• Since the official introduction of Android L last week at I/O, the news about the new operating system keeps on rolling in. Last week we reported the official launch of Android L and this was followed by a stream of leaked L features which were quickly modified for use by third party developers. Now it seems we are here again.

• The new secure Android phone has arrived, but what does it say about Android itself and what can security-conscious individuals do to get the same security today? The world needs a secure Android phone like the Blackphone. Not only will it protect users against privacy violations, but it potentially will always be fully patched, too.

• A pleasure that I indulge in which other people might conceivably describe as “guilty” is to sit up late watching the QVC shopping channel. Not to buy anything, you understand – merely to watch people doing free-form verbal improvisation around, say, a diamonique bracelet.

• After releasing its Android-powered Shield portable console last summer, Nvidia is now all set to announce a new device called the Nvidia Shield Tablet.

• After the official unveiling of Android Wear devices last week Google have now finally uploaded a selection of Wear Apps to the Play Store. In total there are currently 33 apps available to download to your wear device although Google do insist more will follow soon.

• With the latest I/O conference, Google has finally publicly announced its plans for its new runtime on Android. The Android RunTime, ART, is the successor and replacement for Dalvik, the virtual machine on which Android Java code is executed on. We’ve had traces and previews of it available with KitKat devices since last fall, but there wasn’t much information in terms of technical details and the direction Google was heading with it.

• Linaro announces Android Open Source Project port for ARMv8-A Architecture is ready and running on a 64-bit multi-core SoC

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• A “Spoken Tutorial” is a ten minute audio-video tutorial for K – 12 lessons and modules on “Aakash” (meaning Sky in Sanskrit), the world’s lowest cost device at $50. The spoken part of Tutorials is dubbed in all Indian languages, to help kids weak in English.

Free Software/Open Source

• Here in the Linux community, there’s never any shortage of opportunities to wax philosophical about the success of our favorite operating system. After all, the traditional (read: proprietary) model had nothing to do with it, strictly speaking, so FOSS fans can’t be blamed for wanting to extol the virtues of the free and open source model instead.

• Known as one of the biggest customers of Amazon Web Server (AWS), Netflix’s use of custom tools aimed at enhancing its AWS capabilities – known as the Simian Army – are well-known, and now they’re going open-source with one aimed at security monitoring.

• At this point, I have more usernames and passwords to juggle than any person should ever have to deal with. I know I’m not alone, either. We have a surfeit of passwords to manage, and we need a good way to manage them so we have easy access without doing something silly like writing them down where others might find them. Being a fan of simple apps, I prefer using pass, a command line password manager.

• Hall’s “PD-DOS” project eventually became FreeDOS, which today supports an ecosystem of developers, retro gamers, and diehards who will give up their WordStar when you pry the floppies from their cold, dead fingers.

• New Hampsire-based Lamassu — the manufacturer of one of the leading bitcoin ATMs available today — has announced the release of something they are calling Rakía, a brand-spanking-new open source back-end system that will redefine how the company’s network of ATMs in use around the world are utilized by customers.

Events

• One thing unique about this work week is we also took some time to participate in Open Source Bridge a local conference that Mozilla happened to be sponsoring at The Eliot Center and that Lukas Blakk from our team was speaking at. Lukas used her keynote talk to introduce her awesome project she is working on called the Ascend Project which she will be piloting soon in Portland.

• To promote this influential open source conference, put on by Tim O’Reilly and O’Reilly Media since 1999, Opensource.com is interviewing some of the speakers from the line-up prior to the event.

• Cyber Security EXPO, part of IP EXPO Europe, is calling for contributors to the Cyber Hack, a live open source security lab arriving at the show this October.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• At this year’s Great Wide Open conference, Steve Klabnik gave a talk about Mozilla’s Rust programming language. Klabnik previously authored an introductory Rust tutorial entitled Rust for Rubyists, and this talk serves a similar purpose. However, instead of being Ruby focused, this talk was aimed at programmers in general. Hence the talk’s title: Rust for $LANGUAGE-ists.

SaaS/Big Data

• At June 2014′s Linux Enterprise User Summit on Wall Street, Alan Clark, SUSE’s director of industry initiatives and open source and chairman of the OpenStack Foundation, explained why and how to deploy open-source clouds in your business.

• The problem with Big Data today is not its scope, but rather the diverse forms it takes. That’s according to a survey out this week from database vendor Paradigm4, which also said Hadoop may not be as useful as all the hype suggests.

• The Map-Reduce batch jobs take time. Hadoop works best with long-running batch jobs – a 20 second start-up time on a 5 hour batch run is immaterial, but a 20 second start-up time on a 5 second query is a serious disadvantage. Hadoop really is not the right technology for real-time analysis.

• Learning is easier with a community of practice. For some in the open source world, community is something that takes only a virtual form, but there’s still a lot of value in good old fashioned face-to-face communities to share and learn together. Taking a page out of the book of Linux User Groups (LUGs), several advocates for open source projects have found the population of interested users in their area to have reached the critical mass necessary to build and sustain local user groups of their own.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Despite significant delays, Oracle is once again moving forward with Project Jigsaw, a major undertaking that aims to allow Java developers to break their programs down into independent, interoperable modules.

CMS

BSD

• While adoption of the Linux x32 ABI hasn’t really taken off with most developers and end-users doing just fine with x86_64-compiled software, Intel is trying to get things back on track for supporting x32 by LLVM and Clang.

Public Services/Government

• Auckland consulting company Sosnoski Software Associates Limited is please to announce the completion of enhancements to ApacheTM CXFTM open source software as commissioned by the government of the Netherlands. These enhancements have fixed several errors in the Apache CXF implementation of Web Services Reliable Messaging (WSRM), brought it into compliance with the latest WSRM 1.2 version, and also corrected long-standing problems in how the Apache CXF implementation combines WS-Security with WSRM. The changes provide greatly enhanced interoperability for exchanging messages with other software packages.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• Journalism is one profession that has embraced open source. Open source enables smaller organizations with little or no budget to effectively extend their news gathering capabilities. It’s not just smaller news organizations who’ve been adopting open source—The New York Times recently unveiled a new open source content management system.

• Open data has been discussed here on Open Enterprise for years, and it’s probably true to say that it has entered the mainstream, at least as far as the readership of Computerworld UK is concerned. Nonetheless, it’s always good to have more studies of its impact, and of its potential for wider use in the future. A new report commissioned by the Omidyar Network from Australian researchers is particularly welcome because it focuses not on the wishy-washy virtues of sharing, or even its efficiency, but on the economic benefits of open data.

Open Access/Content

• Six years ago, Dr. James Heilman was working a night shift in the ER when he came across an error-ridden article on Wikipedia. Someone else might have used the article to dismiss the online encyclopedia, which was then less than half the size it is now. Instead, Heilman decided to improve the article.

Open Hardware

• That said, the Novena laptop’s experimental technology has the potential to offer new options to a sluggish computer industry. Novena is an open-hardware computing platform that is flexible and powerful. It is designed for use as a desktop, laptop or standalone board.

• Two engineers cofounded Sutajio Ko-usagi, an operations-oriented company focused on the manufacturing and sales of hardware to OEMs and hobbyists.

• Since Sutajio Ko-usagi is difficult to pronounce in English, the Novena developers shortened it to “Kosagi,” noted cofounder Andrew “Bunnie” Huang. Huang also runs the IP-oriented Bunniestudios…

Programming

• By relaxing its rather constrictive membership process, The Python Software Foundation is starting to uncoil. And Nick Coghlan, Provisioning Architect in Red Hat Engineering Operations, couldn’t be happier.

Leftovers

• That the Prime Minister of the UK cannot fill a hall, at least to not embarrassingly empty, at an event billed as a “rally” to “save” his country, at which he stated that to lose the referendum would “break his heart”, is astonishing.

Health/Nutrition

• What’s worrying is that there’s already been one attempt to water down these requirements. Der Tagesspiegel suggests this may have been as a result of pressure from the European Commission, concerned about US reaction to them. It will be interesting to see how the Commission reconciles any US demands during the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations to remove the requirement to publish drug safety information with the new EU regulation that requires it.

• Domino’s Pizza staff have been caught buying potato wedges from Aldi and fobbing them off as their own.

• A worker at the Domino’s branch in Linlithgow, West Lothian, was photographed buying bags of wedges for 59p each from a nearby branch of the budget supermarket.

• Domino’s then sold these to their customers for a massively marked-up £3.49 a portion

Security

• Cisco Systems has released a security update that closes a backdoor allowing attackers to control software that large organizations use to manage voice over IP (VoIP) calls and messaging over their networks.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The publication of Radoslav Sikorski’s comments in the Polish weekly magazine Wprost will not help his bid to become the European Union’s foreign policy chief, but there are senior foreign policy officials elsewhere who might be tempted to make similar remarks (though perhaps not in alcohol-fuelled conversations in well-known restaurants where they might be overheard). And there are those in Washington who are saying the same thing.

• A bipartisan panel of high-profile figures from the national security establishment recently completed its report on the United States’ policy surrounding drones. Of the panel’s several conclusions, the one that understandably received the most attention in the media was the concern that the ease with which the U.S. is able to conduct drone operations creates a “slippery slope” that could lead to a state of permanent war. In this scenario, no longer will there be clearly defined periods of war and peace, but rather a vague, endless conflict, whereby the U.S. Government can and will assert the right to target and kill anyone, anywhere, with virtually no meaningful legal, political, or ethical constraints. The panel also criticized the “secret rationales” behind this “long-term killing” and the “lack of any cost-benefit analysis” conducted by the government regarding the entire enterprise.

• One camera operator gave a chronically nervous pilot of a predator drone a helpful piece of advice while the pilot was waiting to take off: “Stop saying ‘uh oh’ while you’re flying. It’s never good. Like going to the dentist or a doctor. . .oops. What the f—you mean oops?” According to the Post report, shortly after this exchange the drone “rammed a runway barrier and guardhouse. “Whoa” the pilot said. “I don’t know what the hell just happened.”

• It would be interesting to know what the pilots who have accidentally killed civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and other places say when they realize their mistakes. Probably something more than “oops” or “I don’t know what the hell just happened.” We will probably find out as the number of drones continues to climb and kill.

• Interesting. Seems Obama’s forgotten Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the teenager and US citizen on his Kill List, incinerated in a CIA-led drone strike. Obama can’t imagine the indescribable pain that this young man’s parent (singular) feels. That’s singular because the boy’s father, Anwar al-Awlaki also was on Obama’s Kill List and droned two weeks before the death of his son. The attack in Yemen on Oct 14, 2011 that killed the young al-Awalaki also killed his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians as they sat in a restaurant. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was 16, the same age as two of the Israelis, but the murder of al-Awlaki was, well, sensible, to Obama.

• These children have seen beheadings, target killings, drone attacks, bombings, shelling and the closure of their schools. I pondered upon how these innocent children have spent their entire lives witnessing terrible violence that adults my age have not seen.

• An American soldier charged by the military with the murder of a 26-year-old woman in Panama will be tried in the United States, sparking protests by women’s groups and outraged family members.

• A Chilean court issued a ruling Monday that the commander of US military forces in Chile played a pivotal role in the murder of two US citizens following the September 1973 coup that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende and installed General Augusto Pinochet as dictator.

• A Chilean court ruled this week that the U.S. national-security state conspired to murder American citizens Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi in Chile in 1973. The brutal act occurred during the violent military coup in which the Chilean military, with the full support of the U.S. government, ousted the democratically elected president of the country, Salvador Allende, and replaced him with an unelected brutal military dictatorship headed by Chilean General Augusto Pinochet.

• In 2000, terrorism – at least as we know it today – didn’t exist in the Middle East, particularly not in Iraq and Syria. However, the American invasion of ancient Mesopotamia absolutely changed the existing order. In addition to its introduction into the region, it has transformed into a radicalizing cross-border scourge. That was only possible, and is this really a paradox? – through the logistical and strategic support of the United States, to what would become al-Qaeda, to Islamist movements operating in Afghanistan from 1980-1990, and for movements trained by the CIA and financed by Saudi Arabia. If we don’t go back to the origins of what is now a global scourge, and if we fail to properly define this phenomenon, we can neither understand its international expansion let alone eradicate it.

• You do not fix history with a drone. What we are witnessing today in Iraq is the slow collapse of a century-long geopolitical partition drawn up in a secret document by United Kingdom and France, in one of their last acts as imperial powers.

• Declassified portions of both National Intelligence Estimates on Iraq in 2007 highlighted concerns about stability, violence and the Iraqi army. In November, the intelligence community noted, “However, the level of overall violence, including attacks on and casualties among civilians, remains high; Iraq’s sectarian groups remain unreconciled; AQI retains the ability to conduct high-profile attacks; and to date, Iraqi political leaders remain unable to govern effectively.”

• It should go without saying that the killings of the Israeli youths do not justify the killing of innocent Palestinians, any more than the six Palestinian children killed by the Israeli military so far this year legitimize the murder of the Israeli teens.

• The Washington Post misleadingly described the timeline of the Obama administration’s response to the 2012 Benghazi attacks by privileging the conservative media myth that President Obama did not immediately identify the attacks as an act of terror.

• Procurement of so-called fighter drones to protect German armed forces remains controversial, but Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen has finally disclosed her plans for the aircraft: The German military should receive drones, she said, but these can only be deployed with parliamentary approval. EurActiv Germany reports.

• Interested readers can access the report and the executive summary from the NYC Bar Association’s website. The press release accompanying the report’s release is also copied below the fold.

• Now he’s advising the Egyptian dictatorship, his removal as Middle East peace envoy is a moral and democratic necessity

• Almost 5,000 American troops were killed in the Iraq War, and it’s estimated that from 100,000 to more than 600,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, died. Many more combatants and noncombatants alike were physically or emotionally wounded.

• In 8 days, on July 10th Mary Ann Grady-Flores, a grandmother from Ithaca, NY, is scheduled to be sentenced to up to one year in prison. Her crime is violating an order of protection, which is a legal tool to protect a particular person from the violence of another particular person. In this case, the commander of Hancock Air Base has been legally protected from dedicated nonviolent protesters, despite the protection of commanding his own military base, and despite the protesters having no idea who the guy is. That’s how badly the people in charge of the flying killer robots we call drones want to avoid any questioning of their activity entering the minds of the drone pilots.

• An independent Kurdistan is a difficult sell because it is supported by such horrible people – Benjamin Netanyahu and every far right Republican in the US you can think of. Tony Blair is probably holding back on his endorsement until offered a huge consultancy fee or preferential access to “commercial opportunities” in the country.

• In a rush to sensationalize growing violence in Iraq at the hands of religious extremists, media have circulated dubiously sourced maps which purport to illustrate plans for a future Islamic caliphate that extends from Spain to the southern and easternmost reaches of India.

• The Washington Post recently ran some amazing articles on the safety record of drones. The three-part series focuses on the more than 400 large U.S. military drones that have crashed overseas, domestic U.S. crashes of military drones inside and outside military airspace, and the record of incidents of small drones coming dangerously close to civilian aircraft within the United States. Fortunately nobody has been killed in any crashes yet, but it all makes for gripping reading.

• Omar Khadr was only 15 years old when he was captured by American forces in Afghanistan in 2002 and taken to the Bagram Air Base, then Guantanamo, where he later pleaded guilty to murder in violation of the laws of war — according to military prosecutors, Khadr tossed a grenade that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer.

• A previously secret memo on CIA involvement in drone killings is casting new doubt on whether the American government had any legal basis to prosecute Canada’s Omar Khadr for war crimes.

• In fact, Khadr’s lawyers argue in new filings to the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review, the document by the Dept. of Justice emphatically rejects any such legal foundation, and say his convictions at Guantanamo Bay should be set aside immediately.

• A new report on the consequences of America’s increasing use of drones as a counter-terrorism tool caused quite a stir in US national security circles last week, largely because it was written by a task force made up of many individuals who formerly reported to the Obama Administration.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• India’s intelligence agency has targeted an adviser to the Prince of Wales as well as British environmental activists in a campaign against foreign groups that it claims are a threat to its economy.

Finance

• First of all, there are some advantages to living in the U.K. that people at all income levels share. One can be outside in the summer time without getting eaten alive by mosquitoes (but bring an umbrella!). Restrictions on architecture and building mean that a lot of towns are beautiful and/or charming. Consider the value of a stroll around Paris compared to a stroll around a typical U.S. city. Due to a more or less free market in air travel and short distances, flights to interesting locations in Europe are affordable to everyone.

• Fox Business host Charles Payne tried to put a negative spin on the news that the unemployment rate fell in June, tweeting that it might be “too good for the stock market.”

• You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I’m no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Multiple homes, my own plane, etc., etc. You know what I’m talking about. In 1992, I was selling pillows made by my family’s business, Pacific Coast Feather Co., to retail stores across the country, and the Internet was a clunky novelty to which one hooked up with a loud squawk at 300 baud. But I saw pretty quickly, even back then, that many of my customers, the big department store chains, were already doomed. I knew that as soon as the Internet became fast and trustworthy enough—and that time wasn’t far off—people were going to shop online like crazy. Goodbye, Caldor. And Filene’s. And Borders. And on and on.

• This is the type of political corruption we would expect from a banana republic

• And what about the workers who are shown the door? Well, there’s no nightly newscast report about them.

• The US Marshals Service doesn’t normally make economic policy but this week they apparently did so by auctioning 30,000 Bitcoins, a crypto currency I have written about before. This auction effectively legitimizes Bitcoins as part of the world economy. Am I the only one to notice this?

• My first column on this subject was a cautionary tale pointing out the two great areas of vulnerability for Bitcoin: 1) the US Government might declare Bitcoins illegal, and; 2) someone might gain control of a majority of Bitcoins in which case their value could be manipulated. While number two is still theoretically possible it becomes less likely every day. And number one seems to have been put to rest by the U.S. Marshals.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• I had an impeccable source that Obama’s anti-Scottish statement was orchestrated not only with him, but with the BBC who planted the question. I have no doubt it is true. I want to take this further with the Electoral Commission and the BBC Trust, but to do that I need confirmation of my whistleblower’s account.

• There never was a liquid bomb plot. It was proven in court not to exist. It was a fabrication of the minds governing a Pakistani torture chamber.

Censorship

• The New York Times ran a story the other day about a dilemma facing the Obama administration: whether to pursue its efforts to force Times reporter James Risen to testify in its prosecution of a former CIA agent suspected of leaking classified material.

• Who could have predicted that strong-arming ISPs into hastily implementing content filters intended to stamp out pornography would be a disaster? Well actually, pretty much everyone could except for the architects of the policy itself — one of whom, ironically, was just charged with allegedly possessing child pornography. Now The Guardian is reporting that “nearly one in five of the most visited sites on the Internet are being blocked by the adult content filters installed on Britain’s broadband and mobile networks.”

• A new tool released by the Open Rights Group today reveals that 20% of the 100,000 most-visited websites on the Internet are blocked by the parental filters of UK ISPs. With the newly launched website the group makes it easier to expose false positives and show that the blocking efforts ban many legitimate sites, TorrentFreak included.

• Yesterday’s launch of blocked.org.uk has had an excellent response. Over 10,000 sites have been tested for blocks, and no doubt many problems have been found and reported. However, we will need to change the way we calculate results for talkTalk.

• Three years ago we wrote about how Austrian police had seized computers from someone running a Tor exit node. This kind of thing happens from time to time, but it appears that folks in Austria have taken it up a notch by… effectively now making it illegal to run a Tor exit node. According to the report, which was confirmed by the accused, the court found that running the node violated §12 of the Austrian penal code…

• A free speech crackdown in modern day America: We expect to hear stories on repressing freedom of speech in countries like Russia, not in the U.S. But right here in the land of the free, American universities, the pillars of protest movements and open dialogue, are suppressing free speech.

• College campuses ought to be — but often aren’t — bastions of free speech. Sometimes it’s students who choke off debate, as occurred last year when hecklers at Brown University drowned out a speech by New York City’s police commissioner. But some college officials also suppress speech. According to a lawsuit filed this week, that was the case at Citrus College in Glendora.

Privacy

• A former NSA technical chief has told Germany’s parliament that the US agency has become a “totalitarian” mass collector of data. German public broadcasters say the NSA targets individuals who use encryption services.

• Alleged leaked documents about the NSA’s XKeyscore snooping software appear to show the paranoid agency is targeting Tor and Tails users, Linux Journal readers – and anyone else interested in online privacy.

• We learnt about the NSA’s XKeyscore program a year ago, and about its incredibly wide reach. But now the German TV stations NDR and WDR claim to have excerpts from its source code. We already knew that the NSA and GCHQ have been targeting Tor and its users, but the latest leak reveals some details about which Tor exit nodes were selected for surveillance — including at least one in Germany, which is likely to increase public anger there. It also shows that Tor users are explicitly regarded as “extremists”…

• It’s hard to tell how extensive this is. It’s possible that anyone who clicked on this link — with the embedded torproject.org URL above — is currently being monitored by the NSA. It’s possible that this only will happen to people who receive the link in e-mail, which will mean every Crypto-Gram subscriber in a couple of weeks. And I don’t know what else the NSA harvests about people who it selects in this manner.

• The investigation discloses the following:

• Two servers in Germany – in Berlin and Nuremberg – are under surveillance by the NSA.

• Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search. Not only are German privacy software users tracked, but the source code shows that privacy software users worldwide are tracked by the NSA.

• America’s National Security Agency gathers unfathomable mountains of Internet communications from fiber optic taps and other means, but it says it only retains and searches the communications of “targeted” individuals who’ve done something suspicious. Guess what? If you read Boing Boing, you’ve been targeted. Cory Doctorow digs into Xkeyscore and the NSA’s deep packet inspection rules.

• A new story published on the German site Tagesschau and followed up by BoingBoing and DasErste.de has uncovered some shocking details about who the NSA targets for surveillance including visitors to Linux Journal itself.

• Yikes, our top story tonight is we are all on the NSA watchlist.

• The U.S. has assumed the role of a self-appointed human rights champion of planet earth and arrogates to itself the right to keep vigil over nations of its choice, especially those that have fallen out of favour with it for one reason or other (“Government to seek U.S. explanation after reports of snooping on BJP,” July 2).

• Recent revelations by American whistleblower Edward Snowden are casting a pall over nascent U.S. efforts to reenergize relations with India. On Wednesday, the Indian government summoned a top American diplomat in response to reports that the U.S. National Security Agency had conducted surveillance on the Bharatiya Janata Party, led by new Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi .

• The Edward Snowden effect has infiltrated India-U.S. relations. News reports citing documents from the former NSA contractor have prompted Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party to demand explanations from Barack Obama’s White House. Coming just the U.S. seeks closer ties with India’s new leader amid China’s meteoric rise, this latest spying scandal deserves a prominent mention In the annals of bad timing.

• Just because the initial collection of intelligence is legal doesn’t mean it should be if it catches American citizens’ communications. A bill in Congress would fix that.

• Seven Internet service providers and non-profit groups from various countries have filed a legal complaint against the British spy agency GCHQ. Their issue: that the clandestine organization broke the law by hacking the computers of Internet companies to access their networks.

• A coalition of ISPs and communication providers from around the world filed a legal complaint against the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), calling for an end to its alleged attacking and exploitation of network infrastructure to gain access to potentially millions of people’s private communications.

• The ISPs claim that alleged network attacks, outlined in a series of articles in Der Spiegel and the Intercept, were illegal and “undermine the goodwill the organisations rely on”.

• We posted last week about the Tor Challenge and why everyone should use Tor. Since we started our Tor Challenge two weeks ago we have signed up over 1000 new Tor relays. But it appears that there are still some popular misconceptions about Tor. We would like to take this opportunity to dispel some of these common myths and misconceptions.

• Even as US Senator John McCain’s two-day trip to Delhi being overshadowed by India’s protest against the NSA snooping on BJP, the former American Presidential nominee sought to expand Indo-US defence and strategic partnership ahead of the bilateral strategic dialogue end July and PM’s Washington trip.

• Senior US military officials Wednesday confirmed reports that American military advisors have been clandestinely operating in Somalia since 2007.

• Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic is not surprised by the fact that Serbia is on the list of countries where the US National Security Agency (NSA) could have carried out a tapping mission, the B92 TV and radio company reports on Wednesday.

• AMERICA’s top intelligence agency has been spying on the Bahraini government – one of its closest allies in the region – along with 192 other countries, it has emerged.

• A document marked Top Secret reveals that a US surveillance court approved the snooping.

• Pakistan condemned on Thursday the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programme for spying on the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in 2010, calling it a violation of international laws.

• Foreign Office (FO) spokesperson Tasneem Aslam said that the matter was being taken up with the US administration.

• Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists with access to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, will soon expose massive NSA spying on American Muslims, the ACLU has announced.

• The leaked data indicate that in public life American Muslims were “subject to the kind of surveillance that Hoover did on Martin Luther King,” ACLU executive director Anthony Romero told an Aspen Ideas Festival panel Wednesday.

• The Campaign for the Accountabilty of America Baes – CAAB is holding a peaceful outside the Menwith base on 4 July 2014.

• The event will see a number of speakers at the event including former GCHQ intelligence office and whistle blower, Annie Machon who will be travelling from Berlin.

• On Monday, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald let the news slip via Twitter that his long-awaited NSA story was to be published on The Intercept at midnight. By Tuesday morning, much to the dismay of myself and many others it appeared that the site – which since its rollout has been disappointly devoid of new material – has caved to government pressure tactics did not post the story. According to a rather cryptic Tweet by Greenwald later on Monday, “After 3 months working on our story, USG today suddenly began making new last-minute claims which we intend to investigate before publishing”. Might any of those claims be based on trumped up charges that publication would play right into the hands of the “terrorists” and could a permanent delay be in the works?

• Supreme Court justices found more common ground than usual this year, and nowhere was their unanimity more surprising than in a ruling that police must get a judge’s approval before searching the cellphones of people they’ve arrested.

• A letter to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden revealed that last year, thousands of Americans became targets for government spying through “backdoor” warrantless electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies.

• The social media giant is once again under fire for a recent experiment on its users to see how the tailoring of the feed could sway their moods. While the Facebook’s little emotional manipulation study might be legal, according to their terms and services, it might not be entirely scientific. Shadows of doubt have been cast both on the methodology and the significance of its outcome. Perhaps all the fear and anxiety have been wasted on a flawed study.

• Start typing in the letters “dele” into Google and you’ll see “delete Facebook account” as a top suggestion. Whether it’s to alleviate privacy concerns or avoid digital distractions, more people are trying to figure out how to fully disconnect themselves from the social network giant that we live and breathe.

• On Wednesday, Facebook’s second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg, expressed regret over how the company communicated its 2012 mood manipulation study of 700,000 unwitting users, but she did not apologize for conducting the controversial experiment. It’s just what companies do, she said.

• British journalist and WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison, who helped NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden get to safety on his flight from Hong Kong to Moscow, discusses the “Battle against unaccountable power.”

• Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told an Aspen Ideas Festival panel Wednesday that forthcoming revelations about the NSA will provoke new debate about the propriety of government spying. According to Romero, Glenn Greenwald will reveal that Muslim Americans in public life were “subject to the kind of surveillance that Hoover did on Martin Luther King.” In a question-and-answer session, I asked for details.

• The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday that Glenn Greenwald will reveal that the National Security Agency spied on American Muslims. The group represents Edward Snowden, whose documents Greenwald is using, but the ACLU not working on the story. Nevertheless, Anthony D. Romero said Muslims were “subject to the kind of surveillance that Hoover did on Martin Luther King.” Romero had few details to share regarding the story, such as why Muslims were targeted and how deep the surveillance went. Greenwald said he was going to publish a major NSA story a few days ago but paused to report on additional claims made by the government.

• I’m not a great believer in the ‘special relationship’, a concept that exists almost entirely in the mind of British journalists, especially during those occasional moments when the English-speaking nations have to bomb some awful former colony.

• Forensics and industry experts have cast doubt on an alleged National Security Agency capability to locate whistle blowers appearing in televised interviews based on how the captured background hum of electrical devices affects energy grids.

Civil Rights

• As we face tightened security at airports, it is questionable whether mass screening is a sensible use of resources

• Increase in security measures are not a ‘blip’ but reflect the evolving threat of terrorists and extremist groups from around the world, says Deputy Prime Minister

• A video has recorded a violent altercation erupting between a man on a New York City subway and police officers, who apparently arrested him for the crime of nodding off while commuting home for work.

• Airport security is being increased at British airports after the United States called for heightened precautions amid reports two terror networks are working together on a bomb that could evade existing measures.

• On the other hand, the currency of the anti-surveillance movement is distrust: it sees governments as adversaries, and thus it fights not just for greater disclosure of what the surveillance state is doing, but rallies the public to fight back by hardening themselves against spies. The problem is that we actually appear to have two governments under one roof. There is the one we elect and the one that does its best to ignore elections.

• Then the government shot itself in the foot when it surreptitiously released a portion of its secret memo to NBC News. This infuriated the panel of federal appellate judges hearing the Times’ appeal, and they ordered the entire memo released. Either it is secret or it is not, the court thundered—and the government, which is bound by the transparency commanded by the First Amendment, cannot pick and choose which parts of its work to reveal to its favorite reporters and which to conceal from the rest of us.

• My high school textbooks totally ignored the real histories of the conquistadores, the genocide of Native Americans and their cultures, and the truth about the actual brutality of the enslavement of Black Africans. My history books glorified America’s wars, and never mentioned America’s use of propaganda or how it was involved in fascist movements world-wide. The cold realities of sexism, militarism, poverty, corporate abuse, the banking system, etc. were glossed over. Sadly, my relative ignorance about the (obviously censored out of our consciousness) painful and unwelcome truths about what really happened in history is probably the norm.

• The mainstream media and opportunistic politicians have turned Independence Day into the opposite of what was intended.

• The Obama administration had successfully resisted the efforts of The New York Times and others to induce a judge to order the release of the memo by claiming that it contained state secrets. The judge who reviewed the memo concluded that it was merely a legal opinion, and yet she referred to herself as being in “Alice in Wonderland”: The laws are public, and the judicial opinions interpreting them are public, so how could a legal opinion be secret? Notwithstanding her dilemma, she accepted the government’s absurd claims, and The New York Times appealed.

• For his part, Brooks praised a Sailer article in the American Conservative (12/20/04) promoting a movement that saw white people, as Brooks would have it, flouting Western trends toward declining birth rates by having lots of children and leaving behind the “disorder, vulgarity and danger” of cities to move to “clean, orderly” suburban and exurban settings where they can “protect their children from bad influences.”

• But what are we celebrating, exactly? We’re living in a time when the government spies on us without abandon. They listen to our calls, read our emails and watch us with drones. We’ve got our NSA, your DHS, your NDAA and your Patriot Act nudging us toward a police state and what lies beyond. Your government, the one you celebrate with firecrackers and 12-packs of beer, can jail you any time, without reason and for as long as they’d like, thanks to the mother of all un-American laws passed quietly, with very little protest or discussion, at the start of 2012.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• For years, the EFF has pushed back against the FCC’s attempts to preserve net neutrality, reasonably worrying that it might open the door to the FCC further meddling in the internet where it had no real mandate. We here at Techdirt have been similarly concerned. As we’ve noted, net neutrality itself is important, but we were wary of FCC attempts to regulate it creating serious unintended consequences. However, over the past few years, the growth in power of the key broadband internet access providers, and their ability to degrade the internet for profit, has made it quite clear that other options aren’t working.

Intellectual Monopolies

• As the current European Commission sees out its last days following the European elections, it has just published an “Action Plan to address infringements of intellectual property rights in the EU” reusing some of the major concepts of the ACTA agreement that was rejected by the European Parliament in 2012 following an important citizen mobilisation. Its contents are also inspired by proposals pushed by France at the European level1, letting fear an increased implication of technical intermediaries in the enforcement of copyright and their progressive transformation into a private copyright police force.

• By reusing the objective of fighting against “commercial scale” counterfeiting, the Commission has chosen to reactivate one of the worst mechanisms of the anti-counterfeiting agreement ACTA. This vague expression threatens to include non-commercial online sharing activities and introduces the same legal uncertainty which was at the heart of the citizen mobilisation against ACTA, right up to its final rejection by the elected representatives of the Parliament.

• The same commissioners who pushed ACTA, Karel de Gucht and Michel Barnier, now seem to be considering bypassing the European Parliament to implement this fight against “commercial scale” counterfeiting. They are in fact planning to introduce “non-legislative measures” implying the signature of simple agreements between representatives of the cultural industries and technical providers, like advertising agencies and online payment services.

• These measures are directly inspired from the May 2013 Lescure Report and from the Imbert-Quaretta Report [fr] recently published in France, which La Quadrature has already denounced as potentially leading to an exra-judicial application of copyright law, converting these intermediaries in a private copyright law police force [fr]. The Commission wishes that such a system be generalized in the European Union through “Memoranda of Understanding”, providing a framework for contractual agreements negociated by private players.

• Such methods will lead to the bypass of democratic procedures of control. But the Commission also proposes to reinforce the protection of intellectual property at an international level with multilateral negociations. Such statements give good reason to fear that, once again, as with the ACTA agreement, or as foreseen for the CETA and TAFTA agreements, “intellectual property” questions will be treated in an opaque way during free trade agreements, leaving elected representatives with hardly any leeway.

• An article published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer yesterday evening describes a patent application from European aerospace company Airbus in which pilots fly aircraft entirely through electronic means. The patent application, number US20140180508 A1, is titled “Aircraft with a cockpit including a viewing surface for piloting which is at least partially virtual” and notes that while an aircraft’s cockpit must be located in its nose to afford its pilot forward visibility, the physical requirements of the cockpit’s shape and the amount of glass required are aerodynamically and structurally non-optimal.

Copyrights

• Amazon is not boycotting anyone. All books by all Hachette authors are available in the Amazon store. In the face of this, to claim there’s a “boycott” is either ignorance or propaganda.

• We’ve written a few times in the past about the movie and TV industries irrationally freaking out over fans in other countries providing subtitles for works that aren’t being released locally in that language. These are always labor-of-love efforts by fans who want to share the work more widely by providing the subtitles that the studios themselves refuse to offer. And yet, because of standard copyright maximalism, these efforts almost always end up leading to legal action.

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