● 07.19.14

● Links 19/7/2014: CRUX 3.1 is Out, CyanogenMod Competes With Google Now

Posted in News Roundup at 4:54 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• For right now they have ported this unified Linux distribution to an MK808 mini-PC stick. At VolksPC.org isn’t too much more information right now, but the page explains, “Many desktop distributions such as Debian are already available for ARM and x86. But Debian ARM does not support YouTube playback and because of a lack of drivers, HD video playback is just not possible. Android, on the other hand, does this very well and also has many applications not available on Debian. So we created a unified distribution that allows both Android and Debian LXDE/XFCE applications to run simultaneously at native speeds. On ARM, our distribution is based on a modified ARMHF Debian Wheezy rootfs.”

• Tiny, low-powered PCs with ARM-based processors like the MK802 or Tronsmart Vega S89 usually ship with Android software that lets you stream videos, play games, or surf the web on a TV. But many of these little devices can also run other Linux-based operating systems such as Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora.

Server

• Docker is making Linux containers a lightweight alternative to hypervisors; network engineers must be prepared. Find out what you need to know about Docker networking.

Kernel Space

• I was working at McGill University InfoSec at the time, and was also active with Fedora Project — which is how my name showed up on the list of candidates. The Linux Foundation was looking for a systems administrator with a strong background in IT security — who would also be a good fit for a decentralized team of passionate open-source advocates. I’m extremely glad I was a good fit for the position, as I can’t imagine receiving as much satisfaction from any other job.

• Work being done by Samsung and other Linux stakeholders is bringing the Address Sanitizer capabilities found in GCC as being useful for detecting potential memory issues within the Linux kernel.

• Six researchers (including Julia Lawall of the Coccinelle project) have just released a paper [PDF] (abstract) that looks at the faults in the 2.6 kernel.

Graphics Stack

• With the Linux 3.16 kernel just being a few weeks away from its debut, Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center has out another batch of changes being queued up for drm-next to enter with Linux 3.17.

• Intel developers have added support for VP8 video encoding to the open-source Video Acceleration API.

Applications

• Zabbix, an enterprise-class open-source distributed monitoring solution released under the GPL (free of charge for both commercial and non-commercial use), has finally reached version 2.2.5.

• The Zabbix monitoring solution has been separated into multiple branches, and this is the most advanced one that you can find. The developers actually maintain numerous other stable versions as well, but if you want the most features, this is what you need to get.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• At the end of last year, the European Commission told Google and Apple to address issues around in-app purchases (IAP) – particularly as they mislead unsupervised kids into unwittingly racking up huge bills for their parents to pay.

• A forum goer of GOG and occasional GamingOnLinux commenter of the name shmerl has been campaigning for this to happen, starting a wishlist item and a forum thread on GOG for users to vote and comment on the matter.

• Valve pushed down the SteamOS update 123 to their Alchemist Beta channel this week.

• Besides pulling in updated upstream packages from the Debian 7.6 base, there’s a fix for situations where applying updates would require multiple reboots. Additionally, the SteamOS Compositor has been fixed for addressing corruption on the first time a overlay or notification is rendered to the screen. Most of the package updates in alchemist_beta 123 involve security fixes and/or minor upstream package updates.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Previously we had just one class to handle Geogebra files- KigFilterGeogebra class which inherited from both KigFilter and QAbstractXMLReceiver class. The problem that created was that if we extended the class to read tools, a lot of complicacy was introduced in the functions. Then we separated the QAbstractXMLReceiver part of the KigFlterGeogebra class and moved it to a new class – GeogebraTransformer class which reads the transformed XML file and generates the object-tree of the document. Both The GogebraFilter and the GeogebraToolFilter classes use an instance of this Transformer class to get the object-tree. This way the code duplicacy issue was solved and also simplified the Filter classes.

• Barcelona Free Software Users & Hackers are having a Barcelona Free Software Users & Hackers mañana, see you there!

• The Konversation team has started porting the application to Frameworks 5 earlier this month, getting things to build and run on top of KDE’s next-generation libraries.

• Yesterday I blogged about why Breeze is not the default window decoration in KWin 5.0. The blog post touched a little bit the problems with our decoration API. In short: it’s QWidget based and that doesn’t fit our needs any more. It uses a QWidget as an X11 window. At the same time KWin intercepts the rendering and also input handling, redirects it and forwards it. So why use a QWidget at all? Also using a QWidget is quite a memory waste in the Qt5 world. The QWindow behind the QWidget uses a QXcbShmImage with the same size as the window. As explained in yesterdays blog post the window has the size of the managed window plus the decoration. So for a maximized window we hold an image of the size of the complete window while we just need the titlebar strip. We can do better

• As I continue to work to kdepim* KF5, I need more scripts.

• This week KDE released updates for its Applications and Development Platform, the third and last in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.13 series. This release also includes an updated Plasma Workspaces 4.11.11. Both releases contain only bugfixes and translation updates, providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Beneath these releases KDE announced the second beta of the 4.14 versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. Your assistance is requested!

• The KDE Project developers have just released a second beta of Applications and Platform 4.14, getting this last version a little closer to the final build.

• In today’s open source roundup: Amazon launches a Netflix for ebooks subscription service. Plus: A KDE skeptic likes the Plasma 5 desktop, and what’s the best Linux distro for game development?

• Savoir-faire Linux is proud to announce the immediate availability of SFLPhone 1.4.0. This release finally enables video by default. We have refactored the video implementation to be much more robust against a variety of conditions and made the configuration more flexible. It is also now possible to stream a variety of file types and even share your screen. Other interesting features include support for the JACK audio system used by audio industry professionals and hobbyists. Thanks to improvements in audio buffering, latency and resampling, audio quality is noticeably better. The KDE client now has much better Akonadi support. It can now act as a KAddressBook replacement for most phone related scenarios. There will probably be one final KDE4 release before officially making the switch to KF5. The SFLPhone-KDE logic backend, libqtsflphone, has been compatible with Qt5 for over a year, some of the UI dialogs have yet to be ported. As for SFLPhone in general, we plan to merge work that has been done in parallel for a while now to make the daemon more modular, easier to build, more secure and more portable to other operating systems.

• Hello, this is my fourth report for my GSoC. This week I have ported the Panel for Plasma Active. The UI of the Active Panel has not changed much. As you can notice some of the Plasmoids are missing because they have not been ported yet (like the Homescreen Plasmoid), but there is no missing functionality from the Panel. Also the notification icons are invisible while they are inactive, as this is the expected behavior.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• In accessibility problem is sometimes (not always, of course) is something the affected user cannot contribute to the solution for themselves. When that happens in a meritoracy this can essentially mean, those users are not in a position to allow them to be able to get their needs heard, unless their views are actively sought, of course.

Distributions

• CRUX, a lightweight and optimized Linux distribution targeted at experienced Linux users, which is reflected in a straightforward tar.gz-based package system, is now at version 3.1.

• It’s been more than a year since the release of CRUX 3.0 and nothing too spectacular has happened in the meantime. The developers have upgraded a number of packages and other components, but the rest is pretty much the same…

• Presenting a nice assortment of lightweight yet fully-functional Linux distros for all occasions. All of these are full distros that do not depend on cloud services; four for x86 and two, count ‘em, two for ARM hardware.

New Releases

• The OpenELEC developers have managed to quickly release a new version of their Linux distribution based on the XBMC Gotham 13.2 Beta 1, which is only a week old. This multimedia hub is used on its own, but it can also be implemented in an operating system.

• The distribution is based on the latest XBMC version, which means that its developers are constantly implementing all the bleeding edge features and changes from that software.

Arch Family

Slackware Family

• On July 16 1993, Patrick Volkerding announced the availability of Slackware 1.00 on comp.os.linux usenet and since then, Slackware has become one of the oldest Linux distribution that are still actively maintained up to now.

• Today in Linux news is a belated Happy Birthday to the oldest living Linux distribution. Matt Asay says we’re living in a “post-open source world.” Jack Wallen says KDE Plasma 5 is “fast but not furious” and Carla Schroder shares a list of six lightweight distros.

Red Hat Family

• Two months ago Red Hat Inc. bought a company called Inktank, which makes the Ceph Enterprise open source object and block storage software for public and private clouds.

Fedora

• I looked back in the archives and found out that I’ve been running Fedora on this particular laptop (HP Pavilion g6-2210us) for a year and two months.

• Since this el-cheapo, about-$400 AMD laptop is NOT a top-of-the-line Intel-running Thinkpad, it hasn’t gotten anywhere near the same level of love from the Linux kernel and driver developers.

• Since we deployed Ask Fedora, we’ve seen a healthy rise in its usage. Unfortunately, I haven’t statistics to show for this. I still need to figure out how I can get some. In this post, I’ll introduce Ask Fedora for the benefit of those still unaware of it and then write a little about how you can help us help yourself and our users via this Q&A forum.

Debian Family

• Let’s face reality: I cannot find the time to properly maintain Perl6 related packages for Debian. Given the recent surge of popularity of rakudo, it would be a shame to let these packages rot.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Yes, some may argue that Android is molded from Linux Kernel, but the ability to be able to run bash scripts purely in a Linux environment that is not adulterated and polluted with non-Linux features is truly a tech Shangri-La for hardcore Linux lovers.

• This helplessness in getting our wish fulfilled for a Linux tablet has many of us desperately digging for a solution that could satiate our thirst for Linux.

Flavours and Variants

• Today I am going to be reviewing Linux Mint 17 with the Cinnamon desktop environment which is the best that Linux Mint has to offer.

Devices/Embedded

• “In the last five to six years I began working with 3D printers and CNC machines. I started to build stuff, such as furniture and gadgets, and my first Raspberry Pi project was the Pi Snap Box. It’s the size of a mini-PC and is a box you put on the wall with one button on it. If you press the button, it takes three photos. It posts the first photo to a Facebook account for whoever the box belongs to. So for example, if you hang it up in a hairdresser’s salon and get your hair done all nicely, people could then see the good results on the hairdresser’s Facebook page.

• The Arbor Linux Shield combines a V-Solution COM running Linux on an Atheros AR9331 with a baseboard that can act as a Linux SBC or as an Arduino shield.

• DIY and gadget fans alike love the Raspberry Pi. Now, they’ll have more to love with the new Raspberry Pi B+.

Phones

• Tizen, the follow on Operating System (OS) from MeeGo, is aimed at various profiles, not only mobile, just like MeeGo was. With that in mind a User Interface (UI) must be scalable and themeable to support these diverse profiles. Daniel Juyung Seo, who is a software engineer from Samsung, will be presenting at OSCON at 11:30am 23rd July a session entitled “The Art of Tizen UI Theme Technology in Various Profiles”. There will also be a stand at OSCON with demonstrations about the Tizen SDK.

Ballnux

• New York’s Meatpacking District will soon be the home to a major new Samsung office in the city. Morris Adjmi’s new office block at 837 Washington St. was reportedly the subject of a bidding war between Facebook, Google, Samsung, and Ferrari, but the Korean technology giant won out. The building sits opposite the High Line and just around the corner from startup incubator Betaworks. The 837 Washington building will play “a central role in developing, attracting, and retaining some of the best talent in New York City,” Samsung tells The Wall Street Journal.

• The Tizen Samsung Z (SM-910F) Smartphone did make an appearance at the recent Tizen Developer Summit Russia 2014, and eager Russian developers were able to get their hands on some Tizen Smartphone goodness.

Android

• Blackphone has finally started shipping to consumers who have pre-ordered the device. For those of you who haven’t already heard the name Blackphone, it is a device born out of the partnership between Geeksphone, a Spanish manufacturer, and Silent Circle, a security company. Blackphone runs a special version of Android dubbed PrivatOS. Its manufacturers claim that it is ideal of IT employees, public figures, executives and anyone who does not want to compromise on their privacy and security. However, in reality, the device is primarily aimed at consumers who may not require high-end security.

• Over the past 24 hours early reports have emerged suggesting CyanogenMod (CM) are working on a rival application to Google Now. The so-called ‘CM Home’ looks very similar to Now adopting what appears to be an assortment of card-based information panels which read various snippets of information such as local weather, time, things-to-do and so on.

Free Software/Open Source

• Google announced 1.1 release of LiquidFun, an open-source 2D physics engine including fluid simulation. The engine opens new possibilities to both game developers and UI designers, says Google. LiquidFun now officially supports iOS in addition to Android, Linux, and OS X.

• So what does this mean for the networking world? Open Daylight (run by the Linux Foundation) enables organizations to download an “open source networking platform” to run their networks. This is the Hydrogen release, which comes in basic, virtualization, and service provider editions. I’m sure there have been a lot of downloads to test the software and to play with it in an IT sandbox, but I have not heard of anyone using it in production (but would be happy to talk to anyone who is).

Events

Web Browsers

• Do you ever take a step back and look at how central the web is to your life? For some people, it’s an always connected, ever present adjunct to their actual consciousness. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil even predict that we will eventually effectively merge with the web and other technology tools, giving us almost superhuman abilities to instantly access information.

Chrome

• Android smartphones and tablets are great devices for many tasks, but sometimes you just wish you had a bigger screen to see the videos and other content that you are viewing. Now you can do just that, using Google’s $35 Chromecast dongle, which has just been upgraded to push Android content from your small devices to your television screen.

Mozilla

• Firefox OS has “unlocked the mobile ecosystem” and is quickly expanding across a broad range of devices and product categories in Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific, according to a new post from Mozilla. There are those who have questioned whether Firefox OS is finding an enthusiastic audience, but many people questioned Android when it first arrived, too.

SaaS/Big Data

• The deal could be worth tens of millions of dollars as Oracle digs deeper into the cloud.

Databases

• PhpMyAdmin, the popular tool written in PHP and intended to handle the administration of MySQL databases, is now at version 4.2.6.

• Low overhead, low maintenance technology for geographically distributed databases supports up to 48 nodes

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• BREAKING NEWS: MICROSOFT RELEASES ITS OFFICE SUITE FOR LINUX

• Take a few seconds to consider how you would feel, then maybe be kind enough to hear my view.

• So it’s great? Microsoft’s flagship product now available to those who in the past had only LO, Abiword etc to chose from. Now you can run natively on your Linux box that which Windows users have been for years.

• Bad idea? Yes completely, here’s why. Let me just add before someone mentions it, yes I know Microsoft produces code for the Kernel. Have I an issue? No, because in that respect it is as part of a team of developers who all have various quality checks and testing – kernel devs don’t mindlessly accept all code and say “cheers mate” as they paste it in with a text editor. The process I’d suggest is more complex and even if Microsoft wanted to (which I’m sure it wouldn’t) there’s little chance of anything “naughty” going on there. So for me, Microsoft contributions are welcomed, if with a little surprise at myself saying that.

Funding

• PredictionIO has quietly raised $2.5 million in funding to make machine learning accessible to developers. Dubbing itself “the MySQL of prediction,” the company’s Open Source Machine Learning Server is already empowering hundreds of applications and more than 4,000 developers.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Released the middle of last month was Google’s Go 1.3 programming language. Updated Go 1.3 code is now landing within the GNU Compiler Collection.

• Go 1.3 offers many changes and improvements throughout, Godoc static analysis support, GC supports Native Client execution sandbox on 32-bit/64-bit x86 architectures, and experimental support for new operating systems. Those unfamiliar with last month’s release of Go 1.3 can read more via the release notes. There’s also other commentary about the Go 1.3 language update via the Go Blog.

Public Services/Government

• The Kerala Legislative Assembly (Niyamsabha) has shifted to free and open software, following the expiry of support period to Windows XP.

• It has also started producing all its documentation, both digital and printed materials, using the free and open source office suite LibreOffice from yesterday (July 17, 2014).

Licensing

• We’ve been watching with great interest this week as the travails of FOSS organizations with the US Internal Revenue Service have become a hot topic. When our client, Jim Nelson of Yorba, discussed blogging about the IRS rejection of Yorba’s application for 501c3 status with us, we hoped but did not expect that the situation, to which we had discreetly called community and company attention for years, would finally receive some. We’re very glad that’s now happening. Unfortunately, it’s really too late. Because of the long delays in determination imposed by the IRS in its increasingly anti-FOSS positioning, neither the full consequences of the IRS’s present position nor the state of our legal technology in response can be seen from the materials currently under discussion.

Openness/Sharing

• New Jersey’s WFMU.FM is a legendary freeform non-commercial radio station that embodies community from its supportive listeners to its wide-ranging programming. WFMU recently embarked on a new community adventure with their decision to develop an open source version of their currently proprietary CMS (content management system). The new CMS is called Audience Engine and its designed not only to manage content and build community, but to support fundraising.

Open Data

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Why should law enforcement agencies do their own footwork when they can simply threaten others into doing it for them? Specifically, why should the United States government trouble itself with enforcing its silly rules against you and I purchasing our medicine over the Internet when it can hold package delivery services liable for delivering our orders from point A to point B. It’s deputization, the hard way, and cargo delivery giant FedEx is on the receiving end as Uncle Sam looks to conscript assistance for its prohibition efforts.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Some Russian officials blame the United States for everything. Earlier this year Vladimir Putin, stung by online criticism of his policies, said the whole internet was an ongoing CIA project. His underlings see US money behind any criticism they face from Russian non-government organisations, and as the driver behind revolutions that reduced their influence in Ukraine and Georgia.

• When a New York Times article cast doubt on the accusation Usama bin Laden had a hand in the 1998 bombings of African embassies, President Clinton questioned his own CIA, according to a note he scrawled to his national security adviser.

• President Bill Clinton’s advisers carefully considered how to explain the president’s military action against Iraq in 1998 as the House was debating his impeachment, according to records from the Clinton White House that were released Friday.

• The latest batch shows Clinton asked his national security aides whether the CIA overstated bin Laden’s role in the August 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Clinton made the query after reading a The New York Times story.

• Fifteen militants were killed early Saturday morning when an American drone struck a compound in the Pakistani tribal region of North Waziristan, according to local residents and a security official. It was the fourth known drone strike in the region since Pakistan launched a military operation there last month.

• This is the second major US drone strike in three days, after a Wednesday strike killed 20 people, mostly ethnic Uzbeks, who Pakistan claimed were likely members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

• According to sources, the attack took place at around 3 a.m. when an unmanned aircraft targeted a compound with eight missiles in Dattakhel area of the tribal region, killing all the 11people inside.

• A United States citizen was briefly arrested at Islamabad airport on Friday for attempting to board a plane carrying ammunition, Pakistan officials said, in the second such case since May.

• A US Army major was stopped from boarding a flight on the charge of having a magazine loaded with 15 bullets at Benazir Bhutto Islamabad International Airport (BBIIAP) on Friday.

• The United States has begun building a case linking pro-Russian separatists to the shocking downing of the Malaysia Airlines jet in Ukraine.

• Use of surface-to-air missiles by extra-military personnel to shoot down civilian aircraft may be an emerging threat to the United States, a terrorism expert said.

• CIA and U.S. Special Forces helping train Somali army

• But that was before information was everywhere and people couldn’t just tap a phone and get the real dope. Really? Then get this: today, the percentage of Americans who believe in a deep JFK assassination conspiracy is not lower, but higher, at 62%.

• Japan is becoming similarly frustrated with the U.S. It is rearming like crazy to confront an aggressive China. Both Asian powers apparently assume that Obama won’t guarantee the security of the Japanese as America had in the past.

• Five years after the Soviets shot down Korean Air Flight 007, the US Navy created an international incident of its own. On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes destroyed an Iranian Airbus A300 that was on its way from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. Nearly 300 people — most of whom were Iranian and on their way to Mecca — were killed in the crash, including 66 children.

• As usual, the mainstream U.S. media is rushing to judgment over the crash of a Malaysian airliner in war-torn eastern Ukraine, but the history of U.S. government’s deceptions might be reason to pause and let a careful investigation uncover the facts, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

• President Barack Obama delivered an unmistakable warning to Russia and Moscow-backed Ukrainian separatists on Thursday not to tamper with the crash site of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet apparently shot down over rebel-controlled territory.

• Gazans have been building tunnels to the Sinai desert for years for smuggling. In this war, they dug out new tunnels to send fighters into Israel. That’s what the Israelis are trying to destroy.

• Hamas seized control of Gaza seven years ago. Its reign has been disastrous. Unemployment and poverty are around 40 percent. The government is bankrupt. Israel’s control of Gaza’s borders has played a huge role in that. But Hamas has done everything possible to tighten Israel’s grip and delegitimize Palestinian resistance.

• Nine members of a single family, including four children, were buried in the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday, killed by an Israeli artillery shell that hit their home Friday night, as artillery and small arms fire echoed nearby from clashes between Hamas militants and Israeli forces, reports The New York Times.

• “Evacuate,” said the voice at the other end the line. It was 8.50pm, just over 90 minutes before Israel would confirm it had launched a ground operation in the Gaza Strip. The hospital was at risk.

• The Israeli military destroys el-Wafa hospital in the Gaza Strip, Foreign Affairs Correspondent Jonathan Miller hears, as he witnesses another strike on a 4-storey block elsewhere in Gaza.

• Yet many Western governments, with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott joining in, are exploiting this tragedy and using it to escalate rhetoric and tensions with Russia, raising the prospect of the war expanding.

Finance

• Latin America’s ties with China are far more recent than those with Russia. They are also much more important (see chart). Chinese trade with the region has grown more than 20-fold in this century; China has become a big investor and lender. There are some tensions. Brazil frets that China imports only raw materials while undercutting its often-uncompetitive manufacturers in third markets. Chinese mining and oil firms are slowly adapting to social and environmental concerns.

• “This is good news for Lithuania, Baltic states and the stability of Europe,” said parliamentary rapporteur Werner Langen [official profile] who praised Lithuania’s improving economy which meets all criteria for euro eligibility. Lithuania joins fellow Baltic States Latvia (2014) and Estonia (2011) in adopting the euro.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

Censorship

• Buzzing through the social media sphere yesterday was the story about how a proposed new bill would see potential whistleblowers facing up to 10 years in prison for leaks.

• It’s not clear why NBC’s talented foreign correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin, who witnessed the killing of four Palestinian cousins in Gaza on Wednesday, was removed from his post later that day, then reinstated tonight.

• NBC is facing questions over its decision to pull veteran news correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin out of Gaza just after he personally witnessed the Israeli military’s killing of four Palestinian boys on a Gaza beach. Mohyeldin was kicking a soccer ball around with the boys just minutes before they died. He is a longtime reporter in the region. In his coverage, he reports on the Gaza conflict in the context of the Israeli occupation, sparking criticism from some supporters of the Israeli offensive. Back in 2008 and 2009, when he worked for Al Jazeera, Mohyeldin and his colleague Sherine Tadros were the only foreign journalists on the ground in Gaza as Israel killed 1,400 people in what it called “Operation Cast Lead.” We speak to Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, who has revealed that the decision to pull Mohyeldin from Gaza and remove him from reporting on the situation came from NBC executive David Verdi. Greenwald also comments on the broader picture of the coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict in the U.S. media.

Privacy

• Recently we’ve seen a number of disturbing stories come to light that underline just how important this campaign is. It can sometimes be difficult for everyday Canadians to see privacy as an issue that impacts their everyday lives — when in fact the human consequences of privacy breaches can be immense.

• Eighty-three percent of Americans believe police should obtain a warrant before searching the contents of a suspect’s cell phone, according to the results of a recent survey.

• It seems then that latest ‘emergency’ national security legislation, the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers or DRIP (If people are actually spending time putting these acronyms together they should probably stop now…), lives up to and exceeds its namesake. Yes it’s annoying, and like the slow passage of water erodes what it is passing through. With DRIP it is both trust and our liberties.

• Measures to significantly reform the National Security Agency have the support of Ohio’s senators.

• Both Sens. Sherrod Brown (D) and Rob Portman (R) said they favor reform of the spy agency, which has been criticized for collecting information on millions of Americans.

• The Senate Appropriations Committee passed a defense spending bill Thursday that would cut defense IT funding by a half-billion dollars and reduce President Obama’s military budget requests by $1.4 billion overall.

• America’s brand is especially important, especially now. And yet it’s taken a self-inflicted hit in at least two key areas — surveillance and drones — according to a new Pew Research Center report released this week.

• EFF has filed the final brief in its dispute with the government over evidence preservation in Jewel v. NSA, one of our ongoing lawsuits against mass surveillance. As the brief explains, the government has admitted to destroying years of evidence of its mass spying, and this destruction continues today. In fact, at an emergency hearing in June, the government claimed that it was incapable of complying with a court order to preserve evidence relating to the mass interception of Internet communications it is conducting under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act.

• Why stop at spying and the NSA? This particular sentence fits just about any situation. Any question will do. For instance, why does the United States spend more on “defense” than the rest of the world combined? Answer: See above.

• The question of whether the oversight of the federal government’s surveillance activities is effective came to a head on Capitol Hill on Friday as former National Security Agency general counsel Stewart Baker and representatives of technology industry and civil liberties interests butted heads.

• Read more: http://www.nationallawjournal.com/legaltimes/id=1202663815775/Debating-the-Efficacy-of-NSA-Surveillance-Oversight#ixzz37v3f4wEE

• In his latest interview with the Guardian, Edward Snowden says that professionals with obligations of confidentiality, such as doctors, lawyers, accountants and journalists, should take the extra step to keep their communications safe.

• Apple’s new futuristic $5 billion headquarters, now under construction in Cupertino, California, bears a serious resemblance to the headquarters of Britain’s top spy agency, GCHQ.

• In a lengthy interview with the Guardian, NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden spoke with editor Alan Rusbridger about his extraordinary rise to infamy. Currently in exile in Russia, he talked about how he disseminated documents about the activities of the NSA to numerous countries: “Once you start splitting them over jurisdictions and things like that it becomes much more difficult to subvert their intentions. Nobody could stop it”. He remains defiant. He may be an outlaw but “it’s been vindicating to see the reaction from lawmakers, judges, public bodies around the world, civil liberties activists who have said it’s true that we have a right to at least know the broad outlines of what our government’s doing in our name and what it’s doing against us”.

• Speaking in a video interview with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, Snowden said that while Google can’t “task a drone to drop a bomb on your house”, some form of protection should be in place for those who interact with the company.

• But the U.S. also needs to learn a larger lesson: Alliances, even long-standing ones, need careful tending. They can’t be taken for granted.

• He doesn’t drink, he’s reading Dostoevsky and, no, he doesn’t wear a disguise. A year after blowing the whistle on the NSA, America’s most wanted talks frankly about his life as a hero-pariah – and why the world remains ‘more dangerous than Orwell imagined’.

• Dropbox is a very popular cloud storage service, but NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is no fan. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Snowden called Dropbox a “targeted, wannabe PRISM partner” that is “very hostile to privacy.”

• Snowden also isn’t happy about Dropbox’s decision in April to add former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to its Board of Directors. Snowden called Rice “probably the most anti-privacy official you can imagine.”

• The justice system would never allow Snowden to present a real defense at trial. That’s just one reason to give him amnesty

• An 85-year-old photographer in California is claiming in a lawsuit against the Obama Administration that he was falsely targeted by the FBI after taking pictures of the Rainbow Swash, a piece of artwork on a 140-foot tall storage tank in Boston. To the average person, the idea that the FBI or any federal agency would so carelessly classify people as exhibiting ‘suspicious behavior’ is probably pretty crazy. But to anyone who knows the history of the Suspicious Activity Reporting program, it’s just another example of the Orwellian nature of United States counter-terrorism efforts.

• According to newly revealed documents, British spy agency GCHQ is manipulating online discussions, infiltrating the computers of specific targets, purposely destroying reputations, altering the results of online polls, and using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for propaganda and espionage purposes. If people don’t start getting outraged about this now, the governments of the western world are going to see it as a green light to do even more. Eventually, it might get so bad that we won’t be able to trust much of anything that we see on the Internet.

• Russian media outlets reported this week that education officials had asked teachers in the central region of Kirov to avoid using Gmail or any foreign-based cloud service at school. They also told students not to use foreign search engines on school computers.

Civil Rights

• As tens of thousands of children cross the U.S. border fleeing violence in their native Central American home countries, we look at the historical roots of the crisis. The United States has a long and sadly bloody history of destabilizing democratic governments in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — the very countries that are now the sources of this latest migration wave. This week saw the first planeload of children deported to Honduras since President Obama vowed to speed up the removal of more than 57,000 youth who have fled to the United States from Central America in recent months. The group of 38 deportees included 21 children between the ages of 18 months and 15 years, along with 17 female family members. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the experience of Cordova and others should demonstrate to Central Americans that “they will not be welcomed to this country with open arms.”

• No one’s immune from careless document handling, not when a government’s in charge! The ongoing war of words over the Internal Revenue Service’s lackluster data retention continues, with the agency claiming emails relevant to a House investigation all simply vanished during a series of coincidental computer crashes. That these should have been backed up to hard copy (as IRS policy dictates) and backed up further by servers elsewhere has been the topic of conversation for a few weeks now, but all the posturing in the world isn’t going to bring these emails back.

• The Foreign Office was accused of a cover-up after ministers admitted there were ”limited records” of flights landing and taking off on Diego Garcia in 2002, adding they understood they were ”incomplete due to water damage”.

• ZunZuneo’s organizers wanted the social network to grow slowly to avoid detection by the Cuban government. They hoped the network would reach critical mass so that dissidents could organize “smart mobs” — mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice — that could trigger political demonstrations, or “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.” At its peak, ZunZuneo drew in more than 68,000 Cubans, according to USAID, before it mysteriously disappeared in 2012.

• Eric Garner, 43, had just broken up a fight in the borough’s Tompkinsville neighborhood when he was approached by several police officers, said two witnesses in telephone interviews with The Times. Police said the officers approached Garner on Thursday afternoon to question him about the possible sale of illegal cigarettes.

• The military can arrest and detain American citizens. In refusing to hear Hedges v. Obama (2014), a legal challenge to the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), the Supreme Court affirmed that the president and the U.S. military can arrest and indefinitely detain individuals, including American citizens.

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