● 07.07.14

● Links 7/7/2014: CentOS 7 Released, Linux 3.16 RC4

Posted in News Roundup at 4:17 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• There’s an old quote from Jamie Zawinkski that goes: “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.” Even people like me who like regular expressions laugh at the truth in that quote, because we’ve seen the consequences when someone doesn’t think through the implications of a poorly written pattern. When some people write a bad pattern, they end up with extra lines in a log file. When the NSA does it, they capture and retain Internet traffic on untold numbers of innocent people.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds has done another traditional Sunday afternoon development release of the Linux kernel. We’re now just a few weeks out from seeing the release of Linux 3.16.

• Released just a few minutes ago was Linux 3.16-rc4. Merged over the past week was just the usual assortment of bug/regression fixes with nothing too major standing out from my Git watching of the code; Linus has yet to send out his official 3.16-rc4 announcement with his few remarks. The 3.16 activity to point out though from the past week for Phoronix readers would be Radeon DRM going for BAPM by default.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman announced yesterday, July 6, that a new maintenance release for the Long Term Support 3.4.97 Linux kernel branch of the Linux kernel is available for download, urging users to upgrade to it as soon as possible.

• Linus Torvalds has done another traditional Sunday afternoon development release of the Linux kernel. We’re now just a few weeks out from seeing the release of Linux 3.16.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the immediate availability for download of the Linux 3.10.47 LTS (Long Term Support) kernel, along with the Linux kernels 3.4.97 LTS, 3.14.11 LTS and 3.15.4.

• Samuli Suominen of Gentoo expressed some hesitation about this change, “I’d really hate to be forced to fork (or carry huge patchset) unnecessarily (I’m not a systemd hater, I’m not a eudev lover, I’m simply working on what is provided to me by *you*, udev upstream).” Lennart countered, “Oh god. You know, if you come me like this as blame me that I would ‘force’ you to do something, then you just piss me off and make me ignore you. Anyway, as soon as kdbus is merged this i how we will maintain udev, you have ample time to figure out some solution that works for you, but we will not support the udev-on-netlink case anymore. I see three options: a) fork things, Cool live with systemd, c) if hate systemd that much, but love udev so much, then implement an alternative userspace for kdbus to do initialiuzation/policy/activation. Also note that this will not be a change that is just internal between udev and libudev. We expect that clients will soonishly just start doing normal bus calls to the new udev, like they’d do them to any other system service instead of using libudev. Good luck.”

• “I’m going to be maintaining the 3.14 kernel as a ‘longterm’ kernel for the next two years, so mention that on the kernel.org site,” Greg Kroah-Hartman said in a short email on July 3, 2014…

• Cisco earlier this year unveiled its plans to build smarter routers and switches to help manage the massive flows of data expected between Internet-connected devices and the data center. This re-architecting of the Internet to bring computing capabilities to the edge of the network is what the company calls “fog computing” and it could help alleviate the data center strain that Gartner analysts predict will come from 26 billion installed units in the Internet of Things by 2020.

Benchmarks

• The Deepin Desktop Environment is written using Google’s Go language and makes use of heavy HTML5. DDE also uses Compiz as its compositing window manager. As in the past some desktop environments / window managers have impaired the full-screen Linux gaming performance, I ran some simple Linux gaming benchmarks on Sunday to see if the Deepin 2014 performance differed at all from upstream Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Ubuntu 14.04 was tested with the stock Unity 7.2 desktop using Compiz, GNOME Shell 3.10.4, and Xfce 4.10 all from the stock Trusty Tahr archive.

Applications

• Docker isn’t actually everywhere, but the open source software designed to allow a Linux application (and its dependencies) to be packaged as a container has enjoyed massive success recently.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• ots of reports across the interwebs recently are about Crytek the creators of CRYENGINE being in financial trouble. They are the developers bringing the new Homefront: The Revolution FPS game to Linux.

• I held off writing about this previously as it seemed a bit iffy with rumours coming in about Crytek being in some sort of trouble, but now there are reports of Crytek’s UK based office having workers not being payed for some-time and now around 100 staff members walking out of work and not coming back. This is very sad news and I cannot think of any other reason for staff not getting paid other than Crytek really being in trouble.

• There is no questioning the power of Unreal Engine 4, but Linux users so far had nothing official to test this awesome engine.

• However, the wait is finally over, as Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 has officially received its first batch of demos for the users of Linux.

• The demos introduced to the operating system include the Elemental Demo, Effects Cave Demo, Realistic Rendering Demo, Reflections Subway Demo, Mobile Temple Demo, Sci-Fi Hallway Demo, Stylized Demo and Blueprint Examples Demo.

• Linux seems to be finally becoming a viable gaming platform. That brings us into uncharted territories and we start to discover some deficiencies which were solved on other platforms a long time ago. One of those is GPU-based screen scaling.

• Linux developers and fans of Unreal Engine 4 have started offering compiled builds of several UE4 tech demos and some simple games for 64-bit Linux.

• Lets’ be honest, there’s a hidden child in every one of us that love Dinosaurs, be it the formidable Tyrannosaurus Rex or the mild Brontosaurus, we all have a dinosaur that we would love to have. Developers 800 North seems to have heard just that wish of us and brought it to reality with their Multiplayer shooter Dino D-Day. What’s more, Bundlestars have teamed up with PC Gamers to give away a million copies of the game on Steam for free!

Desktop Environments/WMs

• This weekend marked the release of Deepin Linux 2014 along with the Deepin Desktop Environment 2.0 release that’s powered using HTML5. In my testing of the release today, it’s been working fairly well and is proving to be quite interesting.

• Deepin, a Linux distribution that tries to provide users with a unique, stable, fast, safe, and user-friendly desktop experience based on the latest HTML5 technologies, has reached version 2014 and is available for download from Softpedia.

• Key features of Deepin 2014 include support for multiple languages, 10 in total, which are fully integrated in the ISO image, the brand new Deepin Desktop Environment 2.0 with its amazing theme, starter Chinese phonetic search, intuitive hot zone settings, and a user guide, Deepin Control Center app, and new in-house built applications, such as Deepin Movie, Deepin Boot Maker, and Deepin Translator.

• Generally speaking, I enjoyed my time with LXLE. The distribution got off to a good start with a smooth installation process and the project features clear documentation and release notes, letting people know exactly what to expect from the distribution. I like the LXDE desktop as I feel it does an excellent job of balancing user friendliness, performance and features. The LXLE feature which allows us to change the look of our desktop session is a nice bonus and may make it easier for Linux newcomers to navigate the LXDE interface. The distribution ships with a lot of great desktop applications, almost all of them worked well for me. I feel that most people will be able to sit down and just start using this distribution without worrying about configuring software or downloading additional applications. The interface was responsive, the distribution doesn’t use a lot of memory (even with preload enabled) and all of my hardware was handled properly.

• Moonlight v0.5 Alpha is the first release and its aimed at hackers and developers wishing to forward their dream of “a simple, lightweight, functional and beautiful desktop environment.” Moonlight is written against the Qt5 tool-kit and the desktop environment is designed to be very modular. Moonlight shares some goals and code with the LXQt lightweight desktop project.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I’ve been wondering for quite some time though how the state of Plasma Next is when it comes to accessibility. In this case accessibility is mostly how the applications and desktop shell expose semantics to the accessibility framework via an API (on Linux the beast is called AT-SPI, a DBus API). The goal is that assistive technology such as a screen readers (Orca), the screen magnifier, or Simon can pick up what’s going on and assist the user. This allows for example blind people to use the software. The big thing here is that while Qt never had good support for QGraphicsView accessibility, we plowed away at making things work well with Qt Quick. This afternoon I finally got around to looking at the next iteration of the KDE desktop for real. In fact I’m writing this in a running Plasma Next session on top of the frameworks 5 libraries. It feels a bit like the porting from KDE 3 to 4, except that most things seem to just work so far.

• The first feature is function call-tips, that display the signature of the current function (or functions, if they are nested) as you type. This way, you can see the name and the type of the arguments, which can be very useful. This feature is available in Javascript and QML, and my example is, in fact, a QML code snippet.

• KDE Frameworks 5 is due out today, the most exciting clean-up of libraries KDE has seen in years. Use KDE classes without brining in the rest of kdelibs. Packaging for Kubuntu is almost all green and Rohan should be uploading it to Utopic this week.

• KDE Frameworks 5, the next-generation version of the KDE Platform that is more modularized than the former kdelibs, is expected to be released on Tuesday after it was originally scheduled for release back on 1 July. The official release of KDE Plasma 5 is meanwhile expected around the middle of the month (15 July). Details on some of the KDE Frameworks 5 changes can be found via the KDE Wiki.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Today I reached a new milestone. The last animations has been finished and I can now render out a full-fledged video about GNOME’s documentation efforts.

Distributions

• It appears that DistroWatch went down because of some kind of account issue with its web-hosting provider. This would not be the first, nor last, time an important site went down because of a simple payment problem. The website’s last update, a listing for the new version of Scientific Linux, was posted on July 4th.

New Releases

• François Dupoux had the pleasure of announcing on July 7 that a major release of his popular SystemRescueCd Linux operating system designed for rescue and recovery tasks has been made available for download.

• Zbigniew Konojacki announced the stable release of the 4MLinux 9.0 Allinone Edition operating system, which includes the 4MLinux 9.0 Media Edition, 4MLinux 9.0 Game Edition, 4MLinux 9.0 Rescue Edition, and 4MLinux 9.0 Server Edition distributions.

• Today we are pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux for Enterprise 5.0.3 and Black Lab Linux for Education 5.0.3.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• The first Alpha version of the upcoming Scientific Linux 7 operating system was announced by Pat Riehecky a few days ago on the mailing list for Scientific Linux developers worldwide. The release is based on the publicly available sources of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 distribution.

• Just announced in the last few hours, CentOS 7 for x86-64 has arrived. This is the first release under the new arrangements since Red Hat reversed into CentOS, leaving the distro independent but hiring a number of key players. Apart from this being a rapid arrival for a major new release, the announcement notes that they aim to get future updates heading out within 24-48 hours of release. There’s a new versioning system too, so this is Cento 7.0-1406,14/06 being June 2014, when Red Hat released RHEL 7.0 and the code base that this release of CentOS was built on. There’s torrents available for the DVD ISO, “Everything”, GNOME Live (the announcement has a malformed link for that.

• As expected, CentOS, the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone, which now works hand-in-golve with Red Hat, will be releasing CentOS 7 on Monday — less than a month after RHEL 7 was released.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Ubuntu development team announced a couple of days ago, on July 5, in a security notice that they have updated the Linux kernel packages on the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx), Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating systems, fixing a security issue that was found recently in the upstream Linux kernel packages.

• Operating System U, the newest distribution out there that plans for commercial opportunities with laptop pre-loads and is powered by Arch Linux and Wayland, is now soliciting development ideas from the community.

• Now this is definitely an interesting statistic no matter how you look at it – Ubuntu Touch, a mobile operating system platform that is ready, technically speaking, for a commercial release, has already hit the 100,000 app downloads mark. While this is far too small compared to the 1 billion downloads that Temple Run has achieved earlier this year, one ought to take into consideration that Ubuntu Touch itself has yet to ship on any other devices to date.

• Dubbed Ultimate Edition 4.2 Lite, the brand new release of this Linux-based operating system is now derived from the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) distribution and uses MATE 1.8.0 as its default desktop environment.

• The good news is that Ultimate Edition 4.2 is now an LTS (Long Term Support) release and will be supported with security patches and software updates until year 2019.

• Trust in government is not exactly at an all-time high. Sure, there are oppressive governments such as Iran and China that filter and block web content, but even the USA has a spotty record. With all the news of PRISM and other spying programs, it is hard to tell which way is up anymore.

• One way to solve this dilemma is through transparency and honesty. Unfortunately, as long as governments use closed-source software, it is hard to audit and trust the actions. Today, Canonical announces that not only has Munich taken an open approach to computing with Ubuntu, but the city is saving millions of euros too. Using open-source software and saving money? Hell, maybe all governments should make the switch to Linux.

• Canonical’s Mir display server for Ubuntu Linux has cleared Mir 0.4.0 for Ubuntu 14.10 “Utopic” while Mir 0.5 is immediately under development.

Devices/Embedded

• When it comes to operating systems, Linux® is perhaps the world’s most popular open source OS. Linux has been running on thousands of MIPS devices that have shipped in very large volume (north of several billions of units).

• Let’s face it: most automakers are notoriously bad at creating competent infotainment and navigation systems. This really is the case, with the few good ones out there representing the exception. A number of factors make this true, and in short, it’s basically down to costs, allocated development budgets and a general lack of deep knowledge and experience in the field on their part.

• Priced at just £5, the kit comes with everything you need to have fun with basic electronics projects, including a tin to keep it all in. If it is successful, there will be more CamJam EduKits, the first of which will use sensors to detect temperature, light levels and movement. Profits from the kits will be donated to the Cambridge Raspberry Jam to continue both its educational and community work.

Phones

Ballnux

• sAndroid is best known for its customizability. By installing a simple app, you can completely change the look of your smartphone. When compared to its competitor iOS, Android is miles ahead in this department. Despite the fact that the new iOS 7 offers a look that one finds hard not to drool over, Android users can imitate the flat-looking UI in a matter of seconds. In fact, we even wrote a whole article in helping you get that clean iOS 7 look.

Android

• All the talk recently has been around Google’s new Android L operating system and when it will be released. We recently reported on some of the features of L which had been leaked and made available to download. We also advised last week of an L based Keyboard app which was also available to download which emulated the L keyboard expected sometime later in the year.

• It has barely been two weeks since I/O and L’s official introduction and we have seen a crazy influx of ported L features. Today though we are able to bring you the very first (that we know of) working prototype of L. This was created by some of the developers over at xda and (as of print) seems to be on the whole working to a good degree.

• At or around the time the Android L release comes out this fall, this means your phone and your Chromebook are going to be able to share even more stuff than they already do. If you have your phone with you, it can unlock your Chromebook (and if you have your smartwatch with you, it can unlock your phone). If you get a call or a text or your battery is running low, you’ll be told about it on your Chromebook. Some Android apps are even going to be able to run in Chrome OS, though Google didn’t talk much about the technical details.

• When Android itself first arrived, it took some time succeed as well, as I noted in a post on OStatic back in 2009. Then, almost no phones shown at Mobile World Congress ran the platform. Since then, Google has shown that it can create strong markets for open mobile platforms.

• In all likelihood, we’ll see Google offer incentives for developers to rally around Android Wear, and incentives for buyers. There, too, Google has prior experience, as it has incentivized users and developers surrounding both Android and Chrome OS.

Free Software/Open Source

• Lamassu which has revolutionized the in-person acquisition of Bitcoin via a streamlined thirty-second process earlier introduced a modular two-Bitcoin ATM system; has now brought in Rakía, a brand-spanking-new open source back-end system for its ATMs. The decision is aimed to continue providing A better experience for its clients.

• Recent reports from Facebook and Google confirmed what we’ve known all along: the giants of tech have a diversity problem. But in the world of open source, the problem is even worse.

• According to a survey conducted last year, only about 11 percent of open source contributors are women. Meanwhile, women account for 23 percent of all computer programmers and 39.5 percent of web developers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

• We’re thrilled to announce Oculus Connect, a developer conference that brings together engineers, designers, and creatives from around the world to share and collaborate in the interest of creating the best virtual reality experiences possible.

• The company announced today that it is acquiring RakNet, which specializes in a software-development engine for connecting games across an online network. RakNet, which is also the name of the technology, enables studios to quickly add voice chat, network patching, and secure connections to their products. Oculus VR, which is building its Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset, notes that thousands of indie developers and major companies like Everquest developer Sony Online Entertainment and Minecraft studio Mojang licensed the tech for their games. Oculus isn’t just purchasing RakNet, it is also making it open source, which means other developers can see the code, add to it, and use it for free.

• Mellanox® Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ:MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced that Ethernet Switch MLAG functionality is now available as open source as part of the community driven Open Ethernet program. MLAG provides the ability for a host to connect to two standalone switches with a pair of load balanced bonded interfaces. Now open and freely available, the MLAG functionality allows for faster failure recovery. The open source code is available at https://github.com/open-ethernet/mlag and can be installed and run on a Linux host.

• Open Xchange acts as an open-source rival to Microsoft’s Office 365. With more companies moving to open source, we ask Mr Laguna if he believes that Microsoft’s proprietary system is viable.

• Georgia Tech researchers enlist owners of websites — and website users — via Encore project

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• While Mozilla was mostly in the headlines during the early part of this year for news related to Brendan Eich and for the company’s newfound focus on smartphones and Firefox OS, another piece of meaningful news regarding the company is largely being ignored: In April, Google Chrome moved past Firefox to take second place in desktop browser market share, according to web traffic stats from Net Applications.

Funding

• As for open source, I think that the electronics world has been proprietary for a very long time, but open source is taking its hold, and will eventually play a huge role, just like it does in software. The Internet is built on open source underpinnings like GNU/Linux, and I hope that soon the hardware world will be too.

BSD

• The third RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.

• This is expected to be the final RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE cycle.

• Glen Barber has announced the immediate availability for download of the third and probably the last RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming FreeBSD 9.3 operating system.

• A Linux kernel developer is working on porting FreeBSD’s CAPSICUM security framework over to the Linux kernel.

• In announcing his work at the end of June that’s now being discussed amongst kernel stakeholders, David Drysdale wrote, “The last couple of versions of FreeBSD (9.x/10.x) have included the Capsicum security framework, which allows security-aware applications to sandbox themselves in a very fine-grained way. For example, OpenSSH now uses Capsicum in its FreeBSD version to restrict sshd’s credentials checking process, to reduce the chances of credential leakage. It would be good to have equivalent functionality in Linux, so I’ve been working on getting the Capsicum framework running in the kernel, and I’d appreciate some feedback/opinions on the general design approach.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Following last month’s release of Unicode 7.0, the GNU Unifont project is out with an open-source glyph for each printable code point in the Unicode 7.0 Plane 0 standard.

• Free and open source software is a way of life for thousands of people. Yet, as we trudge the endless treadmill of release upon release, there’s one question you don’t hear much any more: where is open source heading? Or, perhaps, should it have a purpose at all?

• Not too long ago, the answer to either question was obvious. The goal was to provide a free alternative to proprietary systems. But progress got stalled at a good-enough ninety percent or so, and looks likely to stay there for the foreseeable future.

Licensing

• For Karen Sandler, software freedom isn’t simply a technical matter. Nor is it a purely ideological one.

• It’s a matter of life and death.

• Sandler, Executive Director of the non-profit Software Freedom Conservancy, says software freedom became personal when she realized her pacemaker/defibrillator was running code she couldn’t analyze. For nearly a decade—first at the Software Feedom Law Center, then at the GNOME Foundation before Conservancy—she’s been an advocate for the right to examine the software on which our lives depend.

• Should open source software projects that give their products away freely have to pay taxes? Although the answer to that question traditionally has been “no,” the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) may be changing its mind, if the case of the Yorba desktop Linux software project is an indication.

Openness/Sharing

• Interested in keeping track of what’s happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what’s happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

• Intel wants to drive big-data analytics toward open-source software accelerated on its processors.

• In a first step in that direction, it is working on an upgrade of its version of Hadoop that blends in features from the distribution provided by Cloudera, a leading open-source supplier of the code. Meanwhile it has already started working with customers to determine what sort of analytics apps they want on top of Hadoop and how to accelerate them on x86 chips.

• PRISMicide, the first security solution based on open source smart cards, protects the privacy of its users… starting with their Bitcoin wallet.

Programming

• First, Europe needs the human capital. Today, around 90% of jobs need digital skills. Yet, there are a million ICT jobs about to go unfilled for lack of them. Programming is the “new literacy”, with countless creative applications.

Leftovers

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• These statements are reminiscent of Cold War propaganda and show how North Korea is neutralized in American eyes: North American media interprets their responses as madness.

• Even if the republic’s response to this film is threatening, they haven’t threatened war, something which The Huffington Post and several other prominent media outlets reported. The Huffington Post even quotes The Christian Science Monitor, saying that Kim himself threatens “all-out war” upon release of the movie, though there aren’t any sources cited to prove this.

• When DHS releases details to the worried public, it also releases them to jihadists.

• I’m sorry Moniem and fellow Iraqis participate in this farce. They are hoodwinked. There will be no justice, merely damage control. And what of countless other unjustified killings, which will not even see the semblance of prosecution? Blackwater on one hand, Obama, with his hit list and targeted assassination on the other, and in between, CIA-JSOC paramilitary operations geared to regime change, together constitute the package of Obama’s liberal humanitarianism, bringing democracy to the ignorant at gunpoint.

• The United Kingdom Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR) has trained the Nigerian security forces on crisis response strategies.

• 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.

• So much for promises.

• An authoritative, bipartisan report released recently by the Stimson Center charged that the U.S. use of drones threatens to destabilize legal and moral norms worldwide. It also chastised the Obama administration’s failure to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of drone use and questioned drones’ effectiveness.

• Targeted killings by drones may be justified at times against terrorist threats to the United States, but the “blow back” from unintended civilian killings in places like Pakistan and Yemen is becoming “a potent recruiting tool for terrorist organizations,” the report noted. The panel, which had experienced specialists from the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations, concluded that there was no indication that drone attacks on suspected terrorists had advanced “long-term U.S. security interests.”

• Israel has arrested a group of Jewish extremists suspected of kidnapping and murdering a Palestinian teenager in a revenge killing, triggering violent clashes spreading from east Jerusalem throughout Israel.

• Tensions were already peaking early Monday in the south after two Israeli strikes on Gaza left five militants dead, following continuous mortar and rocket fire at southern Israel.

• Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is gearing up to dissolve the Likud-Beitrinu ruling partnership in Israel, local media reported on Monday.

• Lieberman is scheduled to hold a press conference at 12pm local time (10am GMT) at which he is widely expected to officially terminate the political deal.

Transparency Reporting

• While Americans celebrated the adoption of the Declaration of Independence over the weekend, there were people around the globe, including in the United States, celebrating the birth of a man who is fighting for his freedom and the freedom of information: Julian Assange, who turned 43 years old on July 3.

• Widely known for his roles as co-founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Assange sought to create an organization that aligns with his belief that a transparent government reduces corruption and in turn creates a stronger democracy, which explains why WikiLeaks has released more classified intelligence documents than all other media organizations around the world combined.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Diesel drivers in rural America have been modifying their trucks to spew out black soot, then posting pics to the Internet. They hate you and your Prius

Finance

• Thomas Piketty, writing from France, is the latest person to sound an alarm about the growing inequality of income and wealth. But his ideas have distinctly American roots that date to the country’s formation.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

Censorship

• The “right to be forgotten” in European law has now taken the place of what people in the past used to call “the forgiveness of sins”. Formerly it was believed that old offenses, especially when these did not result in prosecution or suit, were somehow effaced by the passage of time. “Long dormant claims have often more of cruelty than of justice in them”, says Halsbury’s Laws of England.

• Last week, of course, there was a lot of attention around Google alerting publications that some of their stories had been removed from its index over “right to be forgotten” requests, following a dangerous European Court of Justice ruling. Various publications in the UK complained about some of the removals, and requested if there was any sort of appeals process. The BBC was initially told that there was no such process, though the Guardian claimed it was looking for ways to appeal.

• We just wrote about the UK’s filtering systems blocking access to 20% of the world’s top 100,000 sites, even though only about 4% of those host the porn Prime Minister David Cameron seems so obsessed with blocking. Also noted in that story was the fact that many “pirate sites” are being blocked at ISP level via secret court orders.

Privacy

• Critics have targeted a recent study on how emotions spread on the popular social network site Facebook, complaining that some 600,000 Facebook users did not know that they were taking part in an experiment. Somewhat more disturbing, the researchers deliberately manipulated users’ feelings to measure an effect called emotional contagion.

• There are two interesting lessons to be drawn from the row about Facebook’s “emotional contagion” study. The first is what it tells us about Facebook’s users. The second is what it tells us about corporations such as Facebook.

• In case you missed it, here’s the gist of the story. The first thing users of Facebook see when they log in is their news feed, a list of status updates, messages and photographs posted by friends. The list that is displayed to each individual user is not comprehensive (it doesn’t include all the possibly relevant information from all of that person’s friends). But nor is it random: Facebook’s proprietary algorithms choose which items to display in a process that is sometimes called “curation”. Nobody knows the criteria used by the algorithms – that’s as much of a trade secret as those used by Google’s page-ranking algorithm. All we know is that an algorithm decides what Facebook users see in their news feeds.

• The government knows they are at high risk of legal action from ORG, Privacy International, Liberty and others, and of that legal action succeeding. ORG wrote to the government to ask them to stop trying to enforce EU data retention laws, as they had been invalidated. Thousands of ORG supporters wrote to ISPs to ask them to stop retaining their data illegally. One way or another, this law is likely to be struck down, and the government knows it.

• Open Rights Group (ORG) has responded to government calls for emergency legislation that would require ISPs and telecoms companies to keep records of our phone calls, texts and internet usage as ‘spin’. The digital rights organisation believes that it is the threat of legal action from organisations like ORG, not the threat of terrorism, that are behind the calls for legislation.

• If you think we’re exaggerating the threat to privacy from the NSA, remember that the Department of Homeland Security called DHS’ own privacy office “terrorists”.

• Facebook’s failure to communicate about its mood experiment is the least of the things Internet companies do to us.

• A bunch of this would not be admissible in trial, but this was a probable-cause hearing, and the rules are different for those. CNN writes: “a prosecutor insisted that the testimony helped portray the defendant’s state of mind and spoke to the negligence angle and helped establish motive.”

• In a SPIEGEL interview, Edward Snowden’s lawyer, Jesselyn Radack, and former NSA contractor Thomas Drake discuss the reasons behind the American spying agency’s obssession with collecting data.

• The German intelligence “double agent” who allegedly sold hundreds of top secret documents to the Americans was caught by his own country’s counter espionage agents while trying to broker an additional spying deal with the Russian secret services, according to intelligence sources in Berlin.

• On Monday, Merkel spoke at a news conference in Beijing and said that if the German man did indeed work as a double agent for the US, it would be a clear opposite of how partner countries are supposed to treat each other, Reuters reported.

• German Chancellor Angela Merkel has voiced concern about an alleged US spy in German intelligence, in her first comments on the affair.

• Speaking on a visit to China, Ms Merkel said that if the allegations about a double agent were true, it would constitute a serious breach of trust.

• German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday allegations that a German man worked as a “double agent” for US intelligence were serious and, if true, were a clear contradiction of what cooperation between partners is supposed to be about. Merkel made the comments at a news conference while on a visit to Beijing, Reuters reports.

• The arrest of a German intelligence employee for allegedly spying for the US has caused an uproar among German politicians. The country’s foreign minister has demanded an immediate clarification of the situation from Washington.

• Germany’s Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière has said that an explanation has been sought from the US intelligence services over its contact with a German man arrested last week on suspicion of being a double agent, the media reported Sunday.

• “I expect everyone to cooperate promptly to clear up these allegations – with quick and clear comments from the US as well,” Thomas de Maizière was quoted as saying by German tabloid Bild.

• Relations between Germany and the US are being strained by a new scandal after the arrest of a German spy who was allegedly also working for the American intelligence services.

• Ever since Edward Snowden’s revelations about the international spying done by the NSA, it has open a flood gate of information, knowledge and investigations. And the chance that you have been targeted or placed on the NSA’s watch list is pretty good.

• The Obama administration on Sunday sought to play down new disclosures that the National Security Agency has swept up innocent and often personal emails from ordinary Internet users as it targets suspected terrorists in its global surveillance for potential threats.

• Heaps of baby photos, fitness selfies, medical records and resumes are among thousands of private communications scooped up and stored by NSA spy programs.

• That’s according to new disclosures based on documents Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, gave to The Washington Post — disclosures that show just how easy it is for Americans’ private conversations to be swept into the spy agency’s traps.

• Thousands of baby photos, selfies, medical records and CVs – all these private data appeared among communications vacuumed and stored by NSA spy programs, a recent Snowden disclosure says.

• Looking at 22,000 surveillance reports, the Washington Post has reported that only 11 percent of people’s communications collected by the agency in its digital surveillance activities are targets of the NSA.

• Creepy doesn’t begin to describe Facebook’s 2012 psychological experiment on 700,000 of its unwitting users. Any attempt to manipulate the emotional state of consumers is unconscionable. It reflects poorly on the entire tech community, confirming privacy activists’ worst fears.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to gain access to documents that will reveal how intelligence agencies handle sharing information about security holes in software and hardware that they discover or purchase. This process will help reveal if these intelligence agencies allow computers, intentionally to be vulnerable so that they can exploit these vulnerabilites both in thier country and worldwide.

• That bulk collection, revealed by former government contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks, has raised questions about whether the exponential explosion of data — and the power to collect it — has made some of those 20th century decisions irrelevant.

• A group of privacy organizations has written a letter to Congress saying that a newly released draft version of a bill, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2014 (CISA), which aims to improve private and public sector sharing of cyber threat information, could pose a major risk to individuals’ privacy.

• A large proportion of the data classified as “useless” by analysts contained “startlingly intimate” material. This included “stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes.” The NSA also gathered around 5,000 personal photos.

• “In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risque poses in shorts and bikini tops.”

• Even though these files were branded as “useless” by intelligence analysts, they were still retained by the NSA and can be accessed at any time by analysts should the need arise. In spite of criticism that the NSA’s intelligence practices are almost “Orwellian in nature,” the US government has yet to address the issue of ordinary user data that is inadvertently picked up by the NSA’s dragnet spy programs.

• Lib Dems and Labour warn they will not allow any new law to become backdoor route to reinstate wider ‘snooper’s charter’

• US cartoonist and journalist Ted Rall in a recent article wonders why 6,000 journalists agreed to keep secret the identity of the CIA station chief whose name was inadvertently revealed in an email to more than 6,000 plus reporters.

• There are roughly five million plus people with active security clearances currently in the US, granted by a variety of different US agencies. Of these about 1.5 million have top secret clearances – which seem an excessive number when you compare it with say the number off all employees currently working for all the intelligence agencies in the U.S.

• Since former CIA contractor Edward Snowden began revealing the NSA’s surveillance activities, web users have been self-censoring their posts for keywords that would be considered worthy of surveillance, a new study suggests.

• The agency collected and stored intimate chats, photos, and emails belonging to innocent Americans—and secured them so poorly that reporters can now browse them at will.

• David Truong, a Vietnamese antiwar activist whose conviction on espionage charges in the United States in 1978 raised alarms about the federal government’s use of wiretaps without court orders and spurred passage of the 1978 Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act prohibiting such practices, died on June 26 in Penang, Malaysia. He was 68.

• The recent leak of the XKeyscore source code has raised an interesting question. Is there a second leaker? The report written by Jacob Appelbaum and others for DasErste.de detailed the NSA’s targeting of Tor users (and even those who just read about Tor) and the harvesting of their communications, but very explicitly did not state that Snowden was the source of this code snippet.

Civil Rights

• To understand why U.S. drone strikes outside traditional battlefields make so many people so uneasy, look to the past and look to the future.

• Start with the past. In 1976, exiled Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier was driving to work in Washington when a car bomb planted by Chilean agents ripped through his vehicle, killing Letelier and his young American assistant. From the viewpoint of Chile’s ruling military junta, the killing was justifiable: Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s regime considered itself at war with leftist insurgents and viewed Letelier as a security threat.

• U.S. authorities saw things differently, of course: They condemned the bombing as an assassination. The FBI opened a murder investigation, and a Senate committee launched an inquiry into illegal foreign intelligence activities on U.S. soil.

• Muslims the world over must introspect. There were no Americans, US State Department or CIA when the spread of Islam took place violently with the core mission to ‘kill infidels” or non-believers. Islam via sword cut across entire continents and destroyed entire civilizations. These natives did not even have time to defend against the attacks. Undeniably, the acts were not in self-defense and the use of sword were inspired by the Quran. It is these factors that raise the existential fears of non-Muslims once more. The fear of history repeating itself prevails when 95% of violent conflicts around the world involve Muslims even if these conflicts are mischievously ignited by Western Christian countries. These conflicts are drawn using Koranic verses by numerous Islamic groups. That Islamic groups/Islamic leaders uses verses from the Koran to instill mayhem and draw Muslims into their fold raises the question of how far Islam is being manipulated by Islamic leaders as well as how far the West is manipulating this weakness. That these groups have no shortage of followers and these groups are heavily funded and are able to easily manipulate moderate Muslims makes any to wonder how many Muslims are able to go against the tide without submitting themselves to their religion and those who are leading them. What needs to be said is that Muslims leaders and the West are manipulating Islam’s Koranic verses because there are verses that can be manipulated. Herein lies the core issue and root cause for the violence. With no central authority to control doctrine in Islam, a proliferation of bizarre religious edicts has resulted in chaos the world over.

• Passengers hoping to fly to the US this summer will be turned away at airport security checkpoints if they have forgotten to put their mobile phone on to charge the night before.

• THE UNITED STATES Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has announced security measures that might cause serious problems for air travellers who forget their chargers.

• Don’t bring dead phones or laptops to those overseas airports for flights heading to the USA.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• A research report published by the Pew Research Center revealed that among 1,400 experts, 65 percent believe that the Internet will be more open by the year 2025.

• The respondents hope that, more than 10 years from now, there will be no major changes that will negatively affect how people obtain and share content on the Internet.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Our duty as lawmakers is to find a balance between creators and the justified interests of society. Yet that balance is changing. Transforming technology is changing how people use and re-use information. And disrupting a longstanding legal framework.

• For years Norway was pressured to do something drastic against pirates and 12 months ago this week the country introduced tough new legislation. But one year on and not a single file-sharer has been inquired about nor has a single site blocking request been filed. What’s going on in Scandinavia?

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