● 07.22.14

● Links 22/7/2014: Linux 3.16 RC 6, New UberStudent

Posted in News Roundup at 5:47 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Russia’s parliament is preparing new rules in a bid to cut its reliance on foreign technology suppliers after U.S. sanctions against some of the country’s largest companies, a move that could hurt sales at vendors such as Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)

• The State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, is drafting a bill to require government agencies and state-run enterprises to give preference to local providers of software and hardware, according to a document from the commission for strategic information systems obtained by Bloomberg News. The paper addresses criteria for tender processes such as favoring products that don’t have imported, licensed components.

• GNU/Linux has been in the pipe for a while but US sanctions on Russia may bring GNU/Linux to the front burner. I can see them also accelerating trade I can see them also accelerating trade with China. If China ramps up production of computers with GNU/Linux to serve the Russian market, China will be better positioned to help out every other country squirming under the weight of Wintel and NSA probing the world’s IT.

• As long as there have been jobs, there have been people sitting in pubs complaining about them. The Linux Format team had been meeting in The Salamander in Bath to do just that since long before I joined. It was a safe place that served good ale, and it provided a safe, warm place to moan over a pint. But there’s only so much moaning you can do before you have to quit, which, being men of action, is what we did.

Desktop

• NPD reveals that Chromebook sales are exploding and Microsoft is starting to get worried.

• Google has shown off a candidate for a new Chrome OS user interface.

• Dubbed “Athena”, the new UI appeared fully grown from the head, and Google+ page, of Googler François Beaufort.

• If Google have not had their hands full with the official announcement of the soon-to-be released Android L, as well as Android TV, Auto and Wear it now seems Chrome OS is also on the agenda to receive a full overhaul.

Server

• The latest TOP500 List of the fastest supercomputers in the world helped many in the technology community understand what open-source aficionados have known for years: Linux has quickly become the operating system of choice in the high-performance computing (HPC) market, growing from relative obscurity 15 years ago to powering 97 percent of the fastest computers in the world. But its appeal is found in more than cost or choice. Here are a few of the main reasons Linux has grown to own the lion’s share of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Although the United States remains the top country in terms of overall systems, with 233, this is down from 265 on the November 2013 list. The number of Chinese systems on the list rose from 63 to 76, giving the Asian nation nearly as many supercomputers as the United Kingdom, with 30; France, with 27; and Germany, with 23—combined. Japan also increased its showing, up to 30 from 28 on the previous list. HP has the lead in systems and now has 182 systems (36 percent), compared to IBM, with 176 systems (35 percent). HP had 196 systems (39 percent) six months ago, and IBM had 164 systems (33 percent) six months ago. In the system category, Cray remains third with 10 percent (50 systems).

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds has released Linux 3.16-rc6, which is a ‘bigger’ than rc5, with a note that he will start getting grumpy if he notices that people aren’t serious about trying to calm things down this late in the release cycle.

• The latest version of the stable Linux kernel, 3.14.13, has been announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman, marking the release of another update in this branch.

• Clint Savage is a system administrator for the Linux Foundation’s Collaborative Projects. Here he discusses the new technologies he’s been digging into lately, his favorite part of the job, and fond memories of a weeklong hackfest with his coworkers.

• The Bang-bang thermal governor remains under discussion on the kernel mailing list after patches for it originally appeared a few months back. Bang-bang will hopefully be ready for an upcoming kernel release (Linux 3.17?) and the latest technical discussion about it can be found via the LKML archives.

Graphics Stack

• Mesa, an open source implementation of the OpenGL specification and a system for rendering interactive 3D graphics, is now at version 10.2.4.

• Mesa 10.2.4 is the next iteration in the series and implements the OpenGL 3.3 API. This means that some drivers might not support the specifications for the latest Mesa. This build integrates quite a few fixes and changes and it’s one of the biggest releases in the last few months.

• Aside from upstream work to the GLAMOR acceleration code itself that’s now part of the X.Org Server, Keith Packard has been working on the GLAMOR hook-up for the xf86-video-intel DDX driver.

• Earlier this month AMD published an open-source HSA Linux driver for exploiting the potential of their much-promoted Heterogeneous System Architecture. This driver, now known as the “AMDKFD” driver, is up to its second revision and continues being analyzed by developers on the mailing list.

• Sebastian Dröge has announced the immediate release of the GStreamer 1.4 stable series that adds on new features over the existing GStreamer 1.x stable branches while still keeping up to its promise of 1.x API/ABI stability.

Benchmarks

• Those wishing to see the Raspberry Pi B+ performance benchmarks with a Debian Linux host, the results are available from 1407220-BY-1407183GL47. To see how the results compare against your own Linux systems, with the Phoronix Test Suite you simply need to run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1407220-BY-1407183GL47 to conduct a quick, fully-automated, side-by-side performance comparison.

Applications

• The Xen Project has announced the release of Mirage OS 2.0, which they describe as “the industry’s first software framework that unifies cloud and embedded deployments behind a safe, secure programming language, allowing developers to seamlessly build systems that span both embedded devices and public cloud services.”

• In addition, GnuTLS is now offered as an alternative to OpenSSL, persistent camera configuration has been implemented, and users can now switch video sources during a call.

• With so many flavors of Linux and the awesome apps in their repositories, finding the right app for getting things done can be tough. In our annual Lifehacker Pack for Linux, we’re highlighting the must-have downloads for better productivity, communication, media management, and more.

• Vuze, a BitTorrent client previously known as Azureus, which is built on Java, has been upgraded to version 5.3.0.1 Beta 46 and is now ready for testing.

• VueScan 9.4.35, an easy-to-use replacement for the software that usually comes with scanners and that supports most flatbed scanners, printer/scanners, and film scanners, has been released and is now available for download.

• No matter how much I love Plex, there’s still nothing that comes close to XBMC for usability when it comes to watching your network media on a television. I’ve probably written a dozen articles on Plex during the last few years, so you know that’s tough for me to admit. Still, no matter how many Plex-enabled devices I might buy (Roku, Amazon Fire TV, phones, tablets, Web browsers), I run XBMC on all my televisions. The interface, when coupled with a back-end MySQL database, is just unbeatable.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• We’ve never been shy about our love for open source games. But, we recognize that explaining how open source principles like sharing, transparency, and rapid prototyping apply to both digital and non-digital gaming activities can be difficult.

• Out There is like a Choose Your Own Adventure version of FTL. Originally developed for iOS and Android, it sees you drifting in a spaceship in an unexplored galaxy which changes with every playthrough. Your fuel and oxygen supplies are finite, your hull is not particularly strong and you have to travel from solar system to solar system attempting to find your way home.

• I’m a begrudging Linux user, specifically Ubuntu. It’s the result of being too cheap to buy software like Photoshop and too ethical to just steal it like everybody else. As a result I get to enjoy all the benefits of free software, including the attempts to develop the “perfect” portable console, like the DragonBox Pyra.

• Toxic Bunny HD, a 2D platformer developed and published by Celestial Games on Steam, will receive a Linux version soon.

• The game was released on the Steam for Windows service a few days ago, and now the developers are considering a port for the Linux platform as well. The information about a Linux version hasn’t been confirmed, but it’s still interesting to see it pop up so soon after the official launch.

• Today in Linux news, Geary 0.7.0 was recently released despite the programmers’ troubles with the IRS. Debian released an update the 6.0 branch of their old stable Linux distribution. A new Duke Nukem enhanced compilation game has hit beta. “GCC 5.0 is expected next year” and Linus is getting grumpy! And finally today, two new Mint 17 reviews round out the Linux news on this Monday July 21.

• CRYENGINE, a game engine developed by Crytek, was announced for Linux a short while ago and it looks like the activity in the Steam database is picking up, but the future of this great technology hangs in the balance.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The developer of Evolve OS, Ikey Doherty, has made a new desktop environment called Budgie Desktop and released a new version of it.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Qt is already a dominant technology in may industries such as IVI systems in cars, recently we covered Dropbox’s switch to Qt. Google has also joined the Qtness (cuteness). The company published VoltAir, a single and multi-player game, on Google Play Store. It’s an open source game which is built using Qt.

• From ratpoison to Unity, I must have tried just about every Linux desktop environment available. The best Linux desktop, in my view: my main computer continues to run KDE’s Plasma. No other alternative can match its design philosophy, configurability, or its innovations on the classical desktop.

• Nor am I alone in my preferences. At a time when the Linux desktop offers six main alternatives (Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE Plasma, LXDE, Mate, Unity and Xfce), KDE Plasma consistently tops reader polls with an average of 35-40 percent. In such a diverse market, these figures indicate a broad appeal that other Linux desktop alternatives can’t match.

• Let’s picture the scenario we had a few days ago where there were lots of projects with three “live” branches, i.e. KDE/4.13, KDE/4.14 and master.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME developers behind the Nautilus project (now known as Files) have announced that version 3.13.2 is now available for download and testing.

Distributions

• All the 4MLinux operating systems have really small sizes, but the Rescue Edition is actually bigger than most of the other flavors. There is a very good reason for that size and it all has to do with the integrated packages. The OS could have been a little bit smaller, but the developer would have been forced to remove some important applications.

• I think Zorin OS 9 Core is a decent system, and those who it is aimed for, literally Windows migrants, will find everything they want in this operating system.

• As this is an LTS edition, it will be supported for a long time. It means you can install it on your computer and forget about upgrade problems, as well as forget about the Microsoft empire.

New Releases

• “UberStudent is developed by a professional educator who specializes in academic success strategies, post-secondary literacy instruction, and educational technology. It has been designed around a core academic skills approach to student success—the research and writing, reading, studying, and self-management skills that are essential to all students,” reads the official website.

Slackware Family

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 delivers new levels of flexibility and cost advantages through powerful features such as erasure coding and cache tiering

• This article is based on a talk I gave at DockerCon this year. It will discuss Docker container security, where we are currently, and where we are headed.

Fedora

• The Anaconda OS installer used by Fedora, RHEL and their derivatives have been many times criticized for its memory requirements being bigger than memory requirements of the installed OS. Maybe a big surprise for users who don’t see too deep into the issue, no surprise for people who really understand what’s going on in the OS installation and how it all works. The basic truth (some call it an issue) about OS installation is that the installer cannot write to physical storage of the machine before user tells it to do so. However, since the OS installation is quite a complex process and since it has to be based on the components from the OS itself there are many things that have to be stored somewhere for the installer to work. The only space for data that for sure doesn’t contain any data the installer shouldn’t overwrite or leave some garbage in is RAM.

Debian Family

• I keep Debian stable at work for my desktop and servers (well, some of them are still in oldstable, thanks LTS team!!), and I have testing in a laptop that I use as clonezilla/drbl server (but I had issues, next week I’ll put some time on them and I’ll write here my findings, and report bugs, if any).

• A new Linux distribution is looking to overcome the limitations of Debian on ARM, by running both Linux apps and Android apps in native mode.

• Developers at TurnKey Linux have come out with a new Debian based distro for Bitcoin lovers. Named as BitKey, this distro boots from a read-only CD or a USB drive and allows you to check your bitcoin wallet, sign and do transactions over a secure network.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• While we maybe living in a post-PC era, there is no denying the fact that the desktop OS still matters. Mac OS X is an operating system that is still ahead of Ubuntu when it comes to the race towards the number one desktop. Apple knows that, and that is why they seem to have put a lot of work in making Mac OS X 10.10 “Yosemite” as good as their mobile operating system, which is iOS. The goal here is convergence. Apple wants to build an ecosystem in which the desktop, the mobile, and the wearable operating systems work seamlessly together in harmony. This is the same thing Microsoft is aiming for and so is Google. And yes, Shuttleworth’s brainchild Ubuntu is shooting for the same thing by working really hard on the next iteration of the open-source OS. But, with all these efforts, can Canonical match up with its competition?

• Canonical’s Rick Spencer, the VP of Engineering, has done away with the “Community Manager” role in favor of a new “Community Team Manager” position that’s now filled by Canonical’s David Planella. Additionally, the rest of the community team (Michael Hall, Daniel Holback, and Nicholas Skaggs) now all carry the title as community managers.

• Ubuntu Touch – also known as Ubuntu for devices or Ubuntu Phone – is a mobile operating system which is currently in beta. However, if you own a supported Android device, you can try it out right now. Here’s how to install Ubuntu for devices.

Flavours and Variants

• There are features (on the installer) that need to be implemented and several rough edges on the desktop that calls for more polishing, but in general, this is one desktop distribution that I think you should, at least, take for a test drive.

Devices/Embedded

• The open-source software revolution is coming to the car. Most in-vehicle infotainment systems sold today use proprietary software, with the underlying code tightly controlled by automakers and by a few major software providers, such as Microsoft Corp. and Ottawa-based QNX Software Systems. Now the auto industry is exploring open-source operating systems such as Linux more seriously than ever, hoping that sharing the work and making code available to all will lead to more rapid development cycles, lower costs and happier drivers.

Phones

• Mobile devices have edged out PCs when it comes to Chinese online browsing, an official government agency in the People’s Republic said on Monday.

• For the first time more Chinese folk are plugging into the internet using phones or tablets, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said (PDF in Chinese), according to a Reuters report here.

Ballnux

• Android 4.4.2 KitKat update continues for a number of Samsung devices including Galaxy Note 2. Samsung Galaxy Note 2 was launched in August of 2012 and was initially powered by Android 4.1 Jelly Bean

• They say all good things come to those who wait and it seems like the G3 was quite worth the wait after all. With a launch price of Rs 47,990 for the 16GB version, the G3 is here for to satiate your flagship hunger. Here’s our review of LG’s flagship after a week’s usage.

Android

• NVIDIA announced this morning their new Shield Tablet and Shield Controller. The new Shield Tablet is a $299 Android tablet that’s great for gaming and is mighty powerful with using the Tegra K1 SoC.

• With being powered by the Tegra K1, the CPU and graphics performance is mighty powerful for the tablet with its Kepler-based GPU and four Cortex-A15 processor cores. The Shield Tablet has an 8-inch, 1920 x 1200 display and the WiFi version with 16GB of storage is going to sell for $299 USD.

• Smartwatches are still a fairly new category. Google revealed its big Android Wear initiative at its I/O developer conference in June. The company is hoping to do for smartwatches what Android proper did for smartphones. Rumors suggest Apple is also working on a smartwatch of its own, but the company hasn’t announced anything yet.

• As businesses look beyond BlackBerry for smartphone security, Samsung and Google step up to the plate. Knox integration is coming in Android L.

• Electric Objects has achieved Kickstarter funding for its Android-based EO1, a wall-mounted, 23-inch HD signage computer for displaying digital art.

• New York City based Electric Objects is one of several companies reinvigorating the wall-mounted digital picture frame form-factor with more affordable prices, smartphone access, and other modern amenities. Like Framed, which is based on Windows Embedded, Electric Objects’s EO1 picture frame has easily surpassed its Kickstarter funding goals. There are still 17 days left, however, to get in on discounted pricing, including $299 for a May 2015 release, or $499 (the eventual retail price) for a wooden-framed version, or a beta test model due in Jan. 2015.

Free Software/Open Source

• Linux.com is teaming up with The New Stack to do a survey about what you think are the most popular open source cloud projects.

• The next-generation of the enterprise is being built now with open cloud technologies. Your choices will help identify and recognize the most popular open source projects that are defining the new way to build and manage applications and systems.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced the release of Privacy Badger beta. This comes roughly three months after the alpha version was released.

• Privacy Badger is a browser add-on for Firefox and Chrome that’s designed to stop “advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web.” And it’s designed to require zero configuration to use. Just install and forget it!

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an organization fighting against illegal surveillance programs in the courts. It also contributes to a open and secure internet by funding the development of software like HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation is today announcing a new Open Wireless Router initiative today at the HOPE X conference.

• Scott Wilson agrees that open source matters because of open code, but just as important is the process in which the code is made. Open development of code is in the social nature of many programmers, hackers, documentors, and project managers. So, what is it about open development?

• The active talk of Open Source Technologies took root in Uganda during the mid 90s when a few enthusiasts started experimenting with the use of software like Linux which was in its infancy back then.

• Fans of the typewriter remain a vehement group. They view the typewriter as something really special, a tool which makes the connection between languages. One of the attractions of a typewriter is that it offers a distraction-free alternative of modern day methods for producing a document. They challenge the writer to concentrate on what really matters – the content. They force the writer to think.

• But open source has of course progressed and been adopted widely albeit in more ‘back office’ circles. It is hard to talk about the growth of big data analytics applications without mentioning Hadoop, while the rise of NoSQL databases has flourished such that even Facebook recently announced its own Paxos algorithm-based project called Apollo.

• It was such a challenge for the initial Open Source promoters to break through onto the corporate scene and later the Government. The rampant piracy of software that existed then (and still exists) made most software consumers disregard the issues that were being raised by the Open Source Software community against the blind adoption of proprietary systems.

Events

• I’ll be presenting an updated version of my Crash Course on Open Source Cloud Computing presentation at OSCON 2014. I have some new material on Docker and SDN along with the latest updates on cloud software. Here’s the official excerpt:

• Hadoop is steadily making its way into many enterprises, thanks to its ability to surface unique insights from very large data sets. It power and success as an open source platform are a direct result of the fact that it can perform analytics that go beyond what traditional analytics platforms are capable of. All of this came to the fore at the Hadoop Summit held recently in San Jose, California.

Web Browsers

• Choosing the best Linux browser for your needs requires just a bit of homework: Web browsers for the Linux desktop have evolved over the years, just as they have for other popular desktop platforms. With this evolution, both good and bad revelations have been discovered. Revelations from new functionality, to broken extensions, and so forth. In this article, I’ll serve as your guide through these murky waters to help you discover the best in Linux browsers.

Chrome

• If you’ve been wondering why the battery life on your Windows laptop or tablet seems so lousy, your Chrome web browser might be to blame – and it may have been sapping your system’s juice for years.

• A documented bug in the source code for the Chromium open source project seems to account for the mysterious power drain that some users of Google’s web browser have been experiencing.

• If you’re a regular user of the Google Chrome browser, you probably know that the nightly builds and beta channel versions often incorporate cutting-edge features that you can’t get in the stable release. These features also often foreshadow what will soon arrive in the stable release.

Mozilla

• Mozilla has officially released Thunderbird 31.0, an email and RSS client, for all the available platforms, and the developers have actually made a number of improvements to the application.

• The first version has been released in the Thunderbird 31.x branch, but unlike some of the previous updates, this one actually brings something interesting. It’s been a while since Thunderbird received any real improvements, but that’s not exactly Mozilla’s fault.

• The Firefox 31 web-browser is out this morning with new features.

• New to Firefox 31 is improved download security by trying to block known malware (based upon Google’s functionality in Chrome), a search box has been added to the new tab page, a new certificate verification library, HTML5 WebVTT support for video playback with subtitles, and various developer-focused improvements.

SaaS/Big Data

• Two recent, excellent, blog posts have touched on a topic I’ve been wrestling with since May’s OpenStack Summit: What is the role of the Product Management function, if any, in the OpenStack development process?

Databases

• Firebird 2.5.3, a relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms, has been released after a long hiatus.

BSD

• We’ve known for a while that LLVM 3.5 has been under plans for a release in August now with just being days away from the start of the month, we have a better idea for the release schedule.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Hello. I am a rising Third Year law student at SMU Dedman School of Law in Dallas, TX. I am working hard to master the technical aspects of law, electronics, and software. My current interests involve protecting individuals and investigating new technology, particularly in the communications field by utilizing licenses for authorship, art, and inventions. Prior to law school, I attained a bachelor’s degree in History at the University of Texas at Dallas.

• This release contains a major change in central parts of the code and should be considered beta quality. As always it passes the testsuite, so most functionality clearly works.

Public Services/Government

• Over 170 primary schools and secondary schools in Geneva are switching to Ubuntu for PCs used by teachers and students, which were earlier using a proprietary software. The move has been successfully completed for all the primary schools. For the rest 20 secondary schools, the migration is expected to be completed by the next academic year.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• Big data. It’s one of the most pervasive buzzwords in today’s technology world. But it’s impossible to deny how deeply data touches all aspects of not just our lives but also business and industry. The amount of data collected about everything is staggering—a typical transatlantic flight generates 30 terabytes of data about the engines alone!

Open Access/Content

• Colleges and faculty seeking a streamlined way to develop higher education syllabi may want to become test pilots in an open source project under development at Utah State University’s Center for Innovative Design & Instruction. A team led by Product Development Manager George Joeckel III is creating Salsa, a Web-based application that instructors can use to create “styled & accessible learning service agreements.”

Programming

• Debate is currently raging in the open-source PHP community over what the number will be for the version of PHP that will succeed the current PHP 5.x series.

• Recently I was updating my dotfiles, because I wanted to ensure that media-players were “always on top”, when launched, as this suits the way I work.

• GNU Compiler Collection developers are beginning to come to a consensus that GCC 5.0 will be released in 2015.

• While GCC 4.10 is the current release under development since the GCC 4.9 debut this spring, GCC 4.10 will likely be relabeled as GCC 5.0. There’s a fresh thread on the GCC mailing list that talks about GCC version bikeshedding.

• Recently I’ve been looking over the Zooniverse citizen science project and its source code on github, partly because it’s interesting as a user and partly because I thought writing an Android app for Galaxy Zoo would be a good learning exercise and something useful to open source.

Leftovers

Science

• We’re at a particularly hyper-partisan moment in our country. As such, one would think the existence of a scientific consensus on a policy issue would offer the mainstream media a welcome oasis from the mirage of social media myths and the desert of dueling soundbites that all too often crowd out informed comment. Using such a consensus as a no bullshit baseline, an objective journalist could more honestly explore opposing arguments, measure them against evidence, and judge their veracity. This is no small thing, because if modern journalism is to continue to live up to its Constitutional promise, it can’t merely be about telling the who, what,whenand where of the world anymore, it must go beyond that to explain the how and why.

• Recently declassified documents from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) present a clearer picture of the all-encompassing and wide reaching efforts to win the Cold War’s Space Race.

Health/Nutrition

• If your kid was born in Indiana after 1991, chances are his or her blood and DNA is one of an estimated 2.25-million specimens currently stored in an undisclosed state warehouse.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• We are still reeling today. Territory that was once within the multi-ethnic, multi-state, multi-religious Ottoman Empire is again engulfed in conflict and war, stretching from Libya to Palestine-Israel, Syria, and Iraq. The Balkan region remains sullen and politically divided, with Bosnia and Herzegovina unable to institute an effective central government and Serbia deeply jolted by the 1999 NATO bombing and the contentious independence of Kosovo in 2008, over its bitter opposition.

• The former Russian Empire is in growing turmoil as well, a kind of delayed reaction to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, with Russia attacking Ukraine and violence continuing to erupt in Georgia, Moldova, and elsewhere. In East Asia, tensions between China and Japan ― echoes of the last century ― are a growing danger.

• It is probably safe to assume that most Americans do not think of their country as an empire. As a conservative in my younger years, I might have even labeled the suggestion as anti-American, rationalizing to myself: Sure, we may have strategic military bases around the world and we may use force at times, but it is only for benevolent purposes. We get the bad guys, give the country back to the good guys, and we leave. The US does not try to rule the world.

• The increasing use in recent years of unmanned aerial vehicles, known as UAVs or drones, has spurred innovation and provoked concern. UAVs, which the U.S. Air Force now calls RPAs, or remotely piloted aircraft — a reminder that humans control them — can fly in places where the risk to a pilot would be too great to justify a manned mission. It is the use of armed UAVs to carry out what the U.S. government calls “targeted killings” on foreign soil of individuals believed to pose a serious terrorist threat to the United States that has spurred criticism, concern and debate, in the U.S. and abroad.

• The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is using armed drones to search out and kill people considered enemies of the United States. This operation is being carried out without any congressional oversight — but one congressman plans to do something about that.

• Representative Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) has introduced the Drone Reform Act (H.R. 5091). The bill is aimed at returning authority for the deadly unmanned aerial devices to the Pentagon.

• Why are so many children dying in Gaza? The answer is surprisingly simple.

• According to the CIA World Factbook, about half of the Strip’s population is under the age of 18. The median age in Gaza is just 18 and a few months. With the elder population amounting to an almost-negligible percentage, young children are easily the most vulnerable.

• With hundreds of largely civilian Palestinians dead, Israel’s attempts at crippling Hamas in the Gaza Strip have resulted in grim headlines and news broadcasts around the world. Regardless of whether or not Israel is winning on the ground in Gaza, it is slipping in its worldwide battle for hearts and minds.

• It stands to reason, then, that friendly intellectuals are stepping forward to present their justifications for Israel’s actions. Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, for example, toured a Hamas tunnel and dined with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu before describing him as “a reluctant warrior,” echoing Israel’s official position that Hamas is forcing the Israeli Defense Forces to bomb civilian areas.

• Unfortunately, some of these defenses invite rather unflattering comparisons.

• In today’s Wall Street Journal, Thane Rosenbaum, a senior fellow at New York University’s law school, outlines what he sees as Israel’s “moral dilemma” of whether or not to strike suspected Hamas targets also populated by civilians.

• The horrors of war and conflict have been overwhelming this past week. Four boys, aged 9 to 12, all cousins, were killed in Israeli bombings in Gaza just minutes after they were playing on the beach, thinking that the sandy shores were safer than their streets.

• The video emerged on Monday. It appears to show a man searching for his family amid the rubble of Gaza, apparently during a ceasefire. He is shot by a sniper. For a while he lies there, moving awkwardly. Then he is shot again.

• The drones usually deliver targeted assassination ordnance; small rockets that explode in confined spaces – like front rooms or cars. If they hit cars, they can kill the occupants in the front seats while leaving the back-seat passengers with minor injuries and burst eardrums. Drones also deliver the ‘knocks on the roof’.

• More than 560 Palestinians have been killed in the 14-day battle with Israel. Burying the bodies has become more difficult and dangerous with each passing day.

• The Israeli campaign is “legally and morally legitimate, and they probably need a couple more days to achieve that which they set out to accomplish,” Hayden, a retired Air Force general, said Tuesday.

• The mayhem began in the early hours of Sunday morning in Shejaiya, an eastern neighborhood of Gaza City, where Israeli forces battled with Hamas militants. Terrified civilians fled, sometimes past the bodies of those struck down in earlier artillery barrages. By dusk it was clear that Sunday was the deadliest single day for the Palestinians in the latest conflict and the deadliest for the Israeli military in years.

• Massive demonstrations have taken place all over the UK against the continuing massacre in Gaza. There appears for the last three decades, to be a massive gulf between the attitude of the population of the United Kingdom towards the continuing genocide of the Palestinians, and the attitude of the political class across all mainstream political parties.

• After leaving the British diplomatic service because of my commitment to Human Rights, and horror at their abuse by the US and UK in the “War on Terror”, I applied for a job at Human Rights Watch. I travelled to New York for a job interview, which was chaired by Kenneth Roth. Rather to my surprise, it revolved almost entirely around Israel, and whether I would agree with the proposition that Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israelis were a major threat to human rights, which HRW should work against.

• 33,000 feet is 1000 feet above the restricted flight altitude (see image below). The request of the Ukrainian air traffic control authorities was implemented.

• The U.S. media’s Ukraine bias has been obvious, siding with the Kiev regime and bashing ethnic Russian rebels and Russia’s President Putin. But now – with the scramble to blame Putin for the Malaysia Airlines shoot-down – the shoddy journalism has grown truly dangerous, says Robert Parry.

• The footage shows that one of the members of self-defense troops suddenly saw a teddy bear which apparently belonged to a child who was among the 298 passenger on board the Malaysian jet.

• “We want those bastards to see whom they shot down,” the man said, “Do you see?” meaning that there were innocent children who died in the crash.

• Then he carefully put the toy back to a heap of other items that used to belong to the passengers. After that he took off his cap and marked himself with a sign of the cross paying the tribute to the memory of the victims of the catastrophe.

• Pro-Russian forces have removed large parts of MH17, and then substituted or altered them before returning to the site. This is extraordinarily important.

• The immediate cause of the MH17 disaster was a missile shot by pro-Russian forces who mistook it for one of the military aircraft they had been regularly shooting down. It is a terrible tragedy – and tragically not unique. There have been several such events in my lifetime, including the USS Vincennes incident and the Soviet downing of a Korean airliner.

Finance

• New Labour has officially voted to support austerity, benefit cuts, government spending cuts, Trident missiles and rail privatisation, and done so without serious internal opposition.

• The Blairs seem to crave money because it is there. As the gap between the wealthy few and the rest widens, their fortune is hard to justify

• After noting that “in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 63 percent of respondents said the US is on the wrong track,” Altman insists that “despite the pessimistic mood, America is experiencing a profound comeback.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Newly-obtained documents show that the billionaire Koch brothers’ political giving is much more expansive than has previously been known.

• Social media and policy are both fields in which great promises provoke even greater fears. Every claim that the Web 2.0 is a voice for democratic levelling of hierarchies is countered by alarm over unwarranted governmental surveillance; with every use of social media for grassroots political change comes yet another revelation about the NSA. The moral ambiguity inherent in those situations isn’t helped by the sheer information overload and multitude of ‘experts’ confronting new entrants to any debate.

Censorship

• Last year, the website Extortion Letter Info (ELI) was slapped with an extraordinary “gag order” forcing it to remove more than 2,000 posts related to Linda Ellis, a writer who has a long record of sending copyright demand letters over “The Dash,” a poem Ellis claims she composed in 1996.

Privacy

• A presentation on a low-budget method to unmask users of a popular online privacy tool, TOR, will no longer go ahead at the Black Hat security conference early next month.

• The talk was nixed by the legal counsel with Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute after a finding that materials from researcher Alexander Volynkin were not approved for public release, according to a notice on the conference’s website.

• There’s some buzz in security circles today after it came out that a session at the upcoming Black Hat Conference entitled “You Don’t Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget” by Michael McCord and Alexander Volynkin (both of whom work for Carnegie-Mellon University and CERT) had been pulled from the conference at the request of CMU.

• All the critical material in an 81-page 2011 FISC opinion on NSA surveillance has been declassified and made public, a federal judge ruled, rejecting the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s request for an unredacted copy.

• Boring Carnegie-Mellon University lawyers have scuppered one of the most hotly anticipated talks at the Black Hat conference – which would have explained how $3,000 of kit could unmask Tor hidden services and user IP addresses.

• On 10 July 2014, the UK Government announced emergency legislation in the form of the Data Retention and Investigations Powers Bill (“the Bill”), which would require communications service providers (“CSPs”) to retain communications data for up to 12 months. This was the result of a European Court of Justice decision declaring European Directive 2006/24/EC incompatible with Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The Directive was introduced in the wake of the 2004 and 2005 terrorist attacks to allow governments to prevent future attacks.

• Bill Binney worked at the National Security Agency nearly three decades as one of its leading crypto-mathematicians. He then became one of its leading whistleblowers.

• Last October, President Dilma Rousseff was to be the first Brazilian leader to attend a White House state dinner in two decades. Instead, angered by revelations that her phone calls and email had been intercepted by the National Security Agency (NSA), she became the first leader to cancel a state dinner hosted by a U.S. president, lambasting U.S. surveillance as a violation of international law and a “totally unacceptable” infringement of Brazil’s sovereignty.

• A new chapter in the U.S.-Germany spying scandal drastically threatens the United States’ relationship with Germany. As U.S. and German leaders bicker over intelligence collection practices, they are ignoring the most costly casualty — a landmark U.S.-EU trade deal slated to boost the transatlantic economy out of its post-recession doldrums.

• After two German officials were arrested on charges of spying for the United States, Germany ordered the CIA station chief in Berlin to leave the country. This story ripped open painful wounds from the NSA-spying scandal that had barely begun to scab over, when leaked documents revealed that the United States had spied on German citizens and tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal phone.

• We’ve written a few times about Executive Order 12333, which we’ve described as “the NSA’s biggest loophole.” It’s the unchecked power, created entirely via executive order, for the NSA to do anything it wants to spy on anyone — including Americans — so long as that data is collected overseas. Remember how the NSA had hacked into Google and Yahoo’s datacenters? That was done overseas under EO 12333, allowing them to do whatever they wanted with that information — content and metadata — with no oversight at all. For all the talk about how the NSA is bounded by oversight from “all three branches” of government, that’s clearly not the case. Everything happening under EO 12333 is mostly considered to be only controlled by the Executive branch, which created the order in the first place. There are no reports to Congress about it, and even Dianne Feinstein has admitted that the Intelligence Committee doesn’t touch any of the surveillance done under EO 12333.

• Stingrays and other cell surveillance tools have been used in the U.S. for years without the knowledge of the public or even defense attorneys and judges.

• A federal judge in New York has ordered a search warrant that allows law enforcement to search through a Gmail account as part of a criminal investigation.

• The court decision is likely to spark a new chapter of debate in the saga of privacy rights and data collection of individual Internet users. The judge allowed the search of email from users under investigation of crimes that include money laundering.

• Other judges reportedly hold a different point of view than Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein regarding the issue. Up until this point, warrants haven’t been issued for a search through private citizens’ email to collect data in a criminal investigation.

• Prompted by Snowden leaks, the office of the director of national intelligence is attempting damage control by promising new programs meant to promote “diversity and tolerance.”

• It almost seems as if President Obama has run into nothing but trouble overseas, facing criticism over electronic eavesdropping, drone strikes and his handling of regional conflicts. Yet the image of the president, and of the United States, have suffered little harm, according to a Pew Global Attitudes survey.

• John Napier Tye, a former State Department section chief for Internet freedom, is calling on the government to answer questions related to a recent op-ed published by the Washington Post.

• Tye specifically calls the NSA’s surveillance operations abroad conducted under Executive Order 12333, a threat to American democracy, saying that the executive order in question “authorizes collection of the content of communications, not just metadata, even for U.S. persons.” Executive Order 12333 was signed by President Ronald Reagan on December 4, 1981 and established guidelines for intelligence community activities taken abroad, including the collection of signals intelligence for surveillance purposes.

• #NIMROD Kamer, a London-based satirist and journalist, brought his individual reporting style to Nassau this month to investigate the story that the United States National Security Agency (NSA) is listening and recording all cellular phone calls made in the Bahamas.

• Yo is surprisingly popular and growing fast; last week the company received another $1.5 million in venture capital after getting an initial $1m last month. The ultimate goal is to build out an entire Yo network to try and rethink how notifications work. It’s a particularly good example of the tech industry building a seemingly-ridiculous solution to a small problem that contains the germ of a much bigger idea within it. Yo might succeed or it might fail, but for the moment it’s pretty fun to play with.

• In October 1998 in a bid to gain the release of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, an Israeli team led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to blackmail President Bill Clinton with tapes of Clinton and then-intern Monica Lewinsky. When Clinton brought Israel’s request for Pollard’s release to CIA Director George Tenet, Tenet threatened to resign on the spot should Clinton cave and release Pollard. Clinton ultimately declined the Israeli request, though he would consider it once again before the end of his term.

• Former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden has asked a Swiss lawyer to explore the possibility of the United States fugitive coming to Switzerland.

• Time for many professionals to upgrade their information security

• British intelligence is permitted to go further in surveillance than similar agencies in other Western countries, according to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who spoke of GCHQ’s lack of oversight in a recent interview to the Guardian.

• One of the architects of the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping technology told a radio host today the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, has “direct access” to the NSA’s domestic spying data and was likely using it to target the tea party.

• Edward Snowden says that U.S. surveillance failed to stop the men suspected of planting bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon even though Russia provided them with intelligence.

• Chinese telecom and smartphone manufacturer Huawei has reported revenue rising 19 per cent in the first half of the year with sales jumping to 135.8bn yuan (£12.8bn or $21.9bn).

• A former Obama administration official calls attention to unaccountable mass surveillance conducted under a 1981 executive order.

• With Australian Security Intelligence Organisation chief David Irvine this morning insisting to a Senate committee that data retention — under “active consideration” by the government — was crucial to intelligence-gathering and Australians had nothing to fear from it, it’s time for a clarifier on exactly what data retention is and the concerns it raises.

• Over the weekend, two of the most famous whistleblowers in U.S. history, Edward Snowden and Pentagon papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, sat down at the HopeX hacker conference in New York to discuss how technology can empower dissent and protect your privacy.

• Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, whose leaks of classified documents rocked the public and exposed the US government’s illegal activities four decades apart, both appealed to hackers and security pros attending the HOPE X hackers conference in New York on Saturday to continue to thwart government access to citizen data and create a safer environment for whistleblowers to make their revelations.

• A former State Department executive came forward on July 18 to warn against how the United States government is using an executive order issued by President Ronald Reagan to collect data from Americans, especially when they are located outside US borders. And, even though President Barack Obama’s administration has waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, he does not believe he will be one of the victims. But is he already?

• It is crucial in today’s security climate to begin classifying data and networks in a new way, based not just on levels of sensitivity but on shelf life and the realities of our evolving computing landscape.

• But fingerprints are unusually hard to block: They can’t be prevented by using standard Web browser privacy settings or using anti-tracking tools such as AdBlock Plus.

• The researchers found canvas fingerprinting computer code, primarily written by a company called AddThis, on 5 percent of the top 100,000 websites. Most of the code was on websites that use AddThis’ social media sharing tools. Other fingerprinters include the German digital marketer Ligatus and the Canadian dating site Plentyoffish. (A list of all the websites on which researchers found the code is here).

• In a world of always-on connectivity, Internet of Everything and Internet of Things, where most devices now have an embedded computer, the risk posed by hackers tampering with them cannot be overlooked.

• During a nearly 90-minute discussion at the Hackers on Planet Earth Conference (HOPE) on Saturday, in which Snowden participated via Google Hangouts, the whistle blower said he wants to work on tools that help people better protect their privacy.

• apt-transport-tor 0.2.1 should now be on your preferred unstable Debian mirror. It will let you download Debian packages through Tor.

• Why is it critical to have a close watch and what is so outrageous about this agenda?

• The data flow debate relates to the recent surveillance scandals, and the post-snowden world. Having your data on European servers won’t help against criminal actions of partner countries. What it does achieve is data governance by your jurisdiction and preventing undesirable lawful access of a foreign government – as in the SWIFT scandal. There the US government dared to spy on the most toxic European data you could imagine, financial and stock market transaction data collected by the SWIFT processing agency, data mirrored on US servers. The US President B. Obama openly discussed the data flow topic with the Export Council and we hear from IBM that thankfully “Froman got it tied down in the trade agreement.”, that is TTIP.

• But don’t panic – Apple’s backdoor is not totally open for all, guru tells us

• A SECURITY EXPERT has bravely revealed that Apple has purposefully included backdoors in its iOS mobile operating system that could be exploited by law enforcement and intelligence agencies such as the US National Security Agency (NSA).

• Using the hidden services that bypass the encrypted backup protection don’t require the use of developer mode and many of them have been present in iOS for five years. Zdziarski, who designed many of the initial methods for acquiring forensic data from iOS devices, said there also is a packet capture tool present on every iOS device that has the ability to dump all of the inbound and outbound HTTP data and runs in the background without and notification to the user.

• Snowden is not sitting silently on the sidelines in Russia and continues to participate actively in the debate about privacy in the modern world.

• When it comes to same-sex marriage, last year’s Supreme Court ruling that the federal government must recognize legally married gay and lesbian couples has led to a string of lower court decisions striking down state marriage bans.

• It’s “the gift that keeps on giving,” says Roberta Kaplan, the lawyer who won the case on behalf of New York widow Edie Windsor.

• However, in a landmark decision by Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, in a case filed by Freedom Watch Inc. for me and my clients Charles and Mary Strange, the court found that the NSA’s surveillance programs have proven essentially worthless in combating terrorism. Instead, their “almost Orwellian” tyranny over American citizens appears to be the real purpose, at least in practice. The Stranges had a family member, an NSA cryptologist, who, among 30 others, died at the hands of Taliban terrorists in a mysteriously unexplained helicopter crash with 17 Navy SEALs shortly after the capture and assassination of Osama bin Laden.

Civil Rights

• A Libyan dissident is to appeal to three of Britain’s most senior judges to reject a high court ruling in favour of the government that he cannot sue MI6 for its role in abducting and secretly flying him to Tripoli, where Muammar Gaddafi’s security forces tortured him.

• A former Libyan Islamist commander who says he suffered years of torture by Muammar Gaddafi’s henchmen after British and US spies handed him over to Libya appealed on Monday against a ruling blocking legal action against the British government.

• Government is seeking ‘impunity from its own courts,’ says lawyer of victims.

• Ahead of a legal intervention by Amnesty International and others in the rendition case of the Libyan national Abdul-Hakim Belhaj, Amnesty International is warning that the UK government is “scraping the legal barrel” with its arguments in the case.

• Today’s demonstration of post-brutality scrambling is brought to you by the California Highway Patrol. First off, we’ll take a look at the “alleged” brutality, which looks incredibly similar to non-alleged brutality. (Apologies for the watermark the person who recorded the incident slapped all over the video.)

• The official in the United Kingdom, who is tasked with reviewing terrorism legislation, has released a report warning about the breadth of terrorism laws and how they could be used to criminalize journalism.

• Citing the case of David Miranda, journalist Glenn Greenwald’s husband who was detained at Heathrow Airport under the UK’s Terrorism Act of 2000 last year, David Anderson QC recommended changing the definition of terrorism in the law.

• The definition of terrorism in current UK law is too broad and should be narrowed to avoid “catching” journalists, bloggers and hate criminals, a top lawyer said today.

• David Anderson QC, who is Britain’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, argued during an interview on the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme this morning that the word “influence” should be removed to prevent the wrong type of offences being caught up in terror law.

• UK anti-terrorism laws are so broadly drawn they are in danger of catching journalists, bloggers, and those it was “never intended to cover” the counter-terrorism watchdog has said.

• David Anderson QC has called on the Government to revisit its definition of terrorism in his annual report published today as the UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation.

• When news recently broke of NSA spying on prominent Muslim Americans, most people were far from shocked. If anything, it was expected. After all, these individuals have Muslim names, either advocate on behalf of the Muslim community or speak on Islamic-related issues, and have some sort of connection to ‘that part of the world.’ Unlike previous NSA spying revelations that generated extreme outrage across the board, this latest development appeared to impact only, you know, ‘those people’ (though the larger implications are much greater).

• Criminal prosecution is likely to be expanded on Americans involved in recruiting and supervising activities of German officials spying for the US intelligence, Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas told Welt am Sonntag.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Microsoft was tying up PC companies as partners, making it a condition of receiving Windows that they also swallow IE. If it owned the PC makers, it owned the web, or so Microsoft believed. Netscape was trying to figure out how to get around Microsoft while also attempting to become more than “just” a browser-maker.

• If you think your company has nothing to fear from ‘slow lane’ Internet, think again

• Activists and tech companies fended off efforts in the U.S. in the 1990s to ban Internet encryption or give the government ways around it, but an even bigger battle over cryptography is brewing now, according to Sascha Meinrath, director of X-Lab, a digital civil-rights think tank launched earlier this year. One of the most contested issues in that battle will be net neutrality, Meinrath said.

• The net neutrality debate has been underway for many years now, but more recently it has entered the mainstream. The main arguments in favor of preserving net neutrality — that it creates a level playing field that allows innovation, and prevents deep-pocketed incumbents from using their financial resources to relegate less well-endowed startups to the Internet slow lane — are familiar enough. But PC World points us to a fascinating paper by Sascha D. Meinrath and Sean Vitka in the journal “Critical Studies in Media Communication” that offers a new and extremely important reason for defending net neutrality: that without it, it will be hard to fight back against blanket surveillance through the wider use of encryption (pdf).

DRM

• While cloud computing platforms make headlines every day now, including leading open source platforms such as OpenStack, it’s still true that cloud computing is a young science. There is a premium on reliable, mature tools for the cloud, and a real need for tools that can usher in better security. Also, it’s true that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The “Digital Economy Act lite” programme of sending spam “education” emails announced under a voluntary agreement between copyright industry bodies and ISPs is to roll out.

• The four big ISPs – BT, TalkTalk, Virgin and Sky – are set to surveil their customers and send out emails under the scheme called Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme (Vcap).

• The controversial Digital Economy Act, forced through in the dying days of the Gordon Brown Government set out a similar scheme, but it has not been enacted.

• One of the most common (and false) arguments against sharing culture is that “the artist has a right to get paid when you enjoy something”. This is totally false.

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