● 07.31.14

● Links 31/7/2014: Zorin OS Educational 9, Android Nearing 90% Share

Posted in News Roundup at 3:17 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• When IT employees need to increase their skills quickly, IT boot camps in a variety of subjects can offer educational resources for gaining new knowledge.

• So there are dozens of reasons to use GNU/Linux and few to use that other OS. That’s not what the war is about. It’s about being free to get the best out of IT and the hardware we own. M$ deliberately limits what our hardware can do by the terms of its cursed licences. We have to pay extra for the privilege of being enslaved. That’s not for me. No one chooses to be enslaved when they see they have a choice. Put GNU/Linux on retail shelves and watch what happens. ASUS sold out. Dell is selling it like hotcakes in China and India. Many governments, businesses organizations and individuals are enjoying Freedom. You should too.

• In today’s time, technology is making things easier for everyone and the introduction of automotive grade linux can also be another milestone in the automotive industry. These days you can see open source everywhere. The collaborative nature of open source license makes it the perfect choice to develop a platform, system and application, etc. Due to the technological advancements, linux car is no more just a dream but a reality. According to reports, a new version of Linux is going to be launched in some time that will take the automotive industry on a newer height. Linux car is going to be the best car in terms of use of up-to-date technology.

Server

• Developers can now buy AMD’s first developer kit based around its Seattle 64-bit ARM processor, the Opteron A1100. It will retail for $2,999 (about £1,900, AU$ 3,200).

• Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) server and cloud hosting provider Linode declared its library of guides and tutorials “open source” this week, inviting the community to peruse and contribute to the documentation for deploying cloud applications on the company’s open source-friendly platform.

• Specifically, GoGrid-sponsored OpenOrchestration.org hopes to advance the open data services ecosystem with a free orchestration service, software library and community. Essentially, the effort aims to do for entire clouds what virtualization did for servers by delivering a range of complex, “full-stack” solutions. Users, in turn, can then easily deploy complex applications in a single cloud, across multiple clouds, on-premises or any combination in between.

• Software is provided by Red Hat, using a customised version of the Fedora Linux operating system pre-loaded with an ARM Cortex-A57 GNU toolchain, platform device drivers, Apache, MySQL, PHP and both Java 7 and Java 8.

Kernel Space

• Intro to Linux is normally a $2,400 course from the Linux Foundation, but it’s being offered for free now on edX. If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to use the open source operating system, there’s no better time than now.

• The Linux Foundation has picked up a few more member organizations as July quickly comes to an end.

• linuxjobs.co.uk is a new, dedicated recruitment solution for Linux and Open Source technologists. Lifetime 20% discount for new recruiters

Graphics Stack

• Last month I published some benchmarks where NVIDIA slaughtered AMD’s Catalyst driver in APITest benchmarks, a set of OpenGL 4.x test cases. While these are just micro-benchmarks of modern OpenGL and designed for showing off potential solutions for problems to leading to lower driver overhead, there’s been some improvements within the Catalyst 14.6 Beta on Linux. Up today are some new benchmarks of APITest using the latest AMD and NVIDIA drivers.

Benchmarks

• While AMD was kind enough to send over a review sample in advance of the A10-7800, I don’t yet have the Linux results ready due to still settling down from the recent move, etc. I expect to have the A10-7800 Linux benchmarks out in the days ahead and expect the Linux support to be in line with the other Kaveri APUs, which work on both the open and closed-source Linux graphics drivers.

Applications

• KeyBox is a free, web-based open source application that can be used to manage multiple SSH sessions on multiple systems. It allows you to execute commands on multiple shells, manage keys, share terminal commands, and upload files to multiple systems simultaneously. It will generate a private/public key pair on initial startup, also you can define your own custom key if you like. Moreover, you can add additional system admins, and audit terminal history of them. KeyBox allows you to control the users, so that you can define which users can access which systems. After starting the SSH session, you’ll be able to manage single or multiple systems via a web browser of your choice more easily and effectively.

• SymmetricDS, an open source software for multi-master database replication, filtered synchronization, or transformation across the network in a heterogeneous environment, is now at version 3.6.3

• We’ve seen Terminal Emulators of all sizes and shapes for Linux, but nothing like this yet. ‘cool-old-term’ is one gorgeous looking Terminal emulator.

• Xfburn is an application that allows users to burn CD, DVDs, and Blu-rays, whether it’s just data, ISO files, or music files. We’ll now take a closer look at this minimalistic software that has only a few options.

• FFmpeg 2.3, a complete solution to record, convert, and stream audio and video, has been released and is now available for download.

• The command line can be scary especially at the beginning. You might even experience some command-line-induced nightmare. Over time, however, we all realize that the command line is actually not that scary, but extremely useful. In fact, the lack of shell is what gives me an ulcer every time I have to use Windows. The reason for the change in perception is that the command line tools are actually smart. The basic utilities, what you are given to work with on any Linux terminal, are very powerful. But very powerful is never enough. If you want to make your command line experience even more pleasant, here are a few applications that you can download to replace the default ones, and will provide you with far more features than the originals.

• FFmpeg 2.3.1 is the latest major release of the software, and this current build is only a maintenance version and arrives just a few days after another major release was made available.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Valve has issued a new Steam Beta update for all the supported platforms and it looks like things are quickly advancing towards a stable release.

• Another day, another exciting video for the new Unreal Tournament gets released by Epic Games, with Linux gamers viewing in excitement as it’s been years since an Unreal release for Linux.

• The Fall, a 2D atmospheric platformer inspired by the Asimov universe and developed by the Over The Moon studio, can now be bought on Steam for Linux with a 50% discount.

• This week one of the most prolific makers of custom gaming PCs, Maingear, has let loose the Spark. This device weighs less than a pound and is 2.34 inches tall, 4.23 inches deep, and 4.5 inches wide. That’s a palm-sized high-powered PC.

• The true measure of any great gaming platform is not the number of games available. Nor is it the need to have the same games as other competing platforms (the Playstation 4 doesn’t need Mario games to be considered successful). And it really isn’t even about how many total games are sold, though that certainly helps.

• Thanks to the recent Linux support provided by DRM-free classic games provider, GOG.com, getting that nostalgic kick on Linux has never been easier. In this article I’ll also detail a few of my favourite classic games that are now available to play in Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Akademy 2014 will kick off on September 6 in Brno, Czech Republic; our keynote speakers will be opening the first two days. Continuing a tradition, the first keynote speaker is from outside the KDE community, while the second is somebody you all know. On Saturday, Sascha Meinrath will speak about the dangerous waters he sees our society sailing into, and what is being done to help us steer clear of the cliffs. Outgoing KDE e.V. Board President, Cornelius Schumacher, will open Sunday’s sessions with a talk about what it is to be KDE and why it matters.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Besides updates on Wayland support at this week’s GUADEC conference in France was also an update on the work being done for implementing a scene graph within GTK+ itself and exposing a canvas API.

• GNOME Builder is a new integrated development environment (IDE) being developed for building GNOME applications faster and better.

• The fourth day of GUADEC was mostly devoted to hardware. Attendees learned what it takes to integrate hardware with the desktop, how GNOME does continuous performance testing, how sandboxed apps may access hardware. Builder, a new IDE for GNOME, was introduced and the host city of GUADEC 2015 announced!

Distributions

• Zorin OS Educational, an Ubuntu-based operating system aimed at Windows users who are switching over to Linux, is now at version 9.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat JBoss Middleware is a full portfolio of open source enterprise-grade solutions for creating, integrating, deploying and managing applications across the full spectrum of today’s infrastructures, whether on premise or in public, private or hybrid clouds.

• Red Hat, the Linux king today and the would-be OpenStack cloud king tomorrow, is putting its money and resources on the line by betting — with its ARM Partner Early Access Program — that the 64-bit ARM architecture is ready for the data center.

• The great thing about Linux is that it runs on nearly everything, and if ARM servers ever take off, they will do so because Linux workloads are ported from X86 and other architectures to run on 64-bit ARM processors. The classic chicken and egg problem is making it difficult for an ARM server ecosystem to develop, and Red Hat is going to help this along with an effort it calls the ARM Partner Early Access Program.

• Red Hat has developed a version of the Linux operating system that can be used to test chips and associated hardware based on the ARMv8-A 64-bit architecture for servers with the aim of standardizing that market.

• Red Hat (RHT) dove a little deeper into the ARM world this week with the announcement of a new Partner Early Access Program (PEAP), which it said will help promote Red Hat’s open source software on 64-bit ARMv8-A servers and other ARM devices.

• When I began, Open source had only meant publishing code online, but as I worked at Red Hat I realized that the community behind a project is what gives open source the advantage. I was assigned early in my internship to try to figure out what programming languages where being used in each country, and at what rate. Within two days, I was able to cobble together two open source projects; one that tracked GitHub commits, and the other, a geocoding library. When a bug came up in the code, a contributor had a patch posted within fifteen minutes, and when I was done with my project, the source was added to the GitHub project to benefit others in the future. This powerful community-building ability is what has driven Red Hat to success, with thousands of people supporting products like RHEL and JBoss. Building a community is not limited to just software, as sites like Reddit have shown. The Reddit community has rapidly evolved like a community around open source software, providing everything from dating advice to graphics design on its ‘boards’.

• This summer I started my first ever internship. It’s certainly a culture-shock to transition from school to the workplace, but I generally like to pride myself on being a quick learner. At Red Hat, as a Systems Management intern, I learned a lot in just the first week.

Fedora

• This is a simple story about a logo design process for an open source project in case it might be informative or entertaining to you. Smile

• Copr is an easy build service for Fedora which can make you your own repo very easily. I have been contributing to this project since March 2014 and this month has been the best in terms of new features: you can track your builds much better, it is bit easier to use and also got much faster in some cases.

Debian Family

• The Debian Linux kernel team has discussed and chosen the kernel version to use as a basis for Debian 8 ‘jessie’.

• This will be Linux 3.16, due to be released in early August. Release candidates for Linux 3.16 are already packaged and available in the experimental suite.

• If you maintain a package that is closely bound to the kernel version – a kernel module or a userland application that depends on an unstable API – please ensure that it is compatible with Linux 3.16 prior to the freeze date (5th November, 2014). Incompatible packages are very likely to be removed from testing and not included in ‘jessie’.

• There are 2600 packages installed in the main file-system and the chroot for thin clients. It even installs LDAP and xrdp, much more than a minimal installation. I fear this is bloat for a lot of schools who just need a lab running… Without a fast local mirror, this installation takes many hours and I can see teachers taking up much of a weekend to do it.

• I recommend doing a minimal installation of Debian GNU/Linux and adding the LTSP parts manually to avoid the bloat. That way you can get XFCE4, turn off encryption and use a local mirror or cache of packages. That will save downloading packages twice, once for the file-system and once again for the chroot and if you need to repeat the installation, the second try will be much faster.

Derivatives

• The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for schools, Debian Edu / Skolelinux, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust the setup. I managed to interview him this summer.

• SolydX and SolydK, two Debian-based distributions that feature the Xfce and the KDE desktops, have been updated with the latest security fixes and they are now at version 201407.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Reliability – Ubuntu provides the reliability that Windows could not. The operating system speed has at least tripled in comparison with using Windows 7. We are not pulling our hair out waiting for a program to load, experiencing hang-ups or delays when switching screens or shutting-down. All actions are instantaneous.

• We all know Google is the darling of the mapping world. If you are going on a trip, the search-giant’s navigation solutions are arguably the best. However, it is dangerous to allow one company to essentially own an entire aspect of technology. Luckily, there are additional solutions like Apple Maps and Nokia HERE, to at least offer some semblance of competition. As a Windows Phone user, I have learned to love Nokia HERE as an excellent alternative to Google Maps and navigation. While HERE is lacking in some areas, it has the potential to be great.

Flavours and Variants

• That is where my time with Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” MATE ended. I’m slightly disappointed to see the dependency issue crop up with M64Py, considering that the issue seems exclusive to Ubuntu and its derivatives; I’m just as disappointed to see Mupen64Plus not work even in its CLI form despite the absence of any indication of what the problem actually is. These issues of course may well be more the fault of those programs than of this distribution, but I can’t deny that the experience was very slightly marred. Those are more personal opinions, though, and I still think that otherwise overall, Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” MATE continues to deliver a solid and reliable experience that is suitable for total newbies to Linux. You can get it here.

• Bio-Linux, a fully-featured, powerful, configurable, and easy to maintain bioinformatics workstation built on the Ubuntu operating system, is now at version 8.0.2.

Devices/Embedded

• It’s not enough to offer just another straight-ahead pico projector these days. Sprint’s recent, ZTE-built LivePro, for example, doubles as a mobile hotspot and features an embedded display, and Promate’s LumiTab is also a tablet. Now a startup called TouchPico offers a similarly Android-based TouchPico device that adds touch input to projected images.

• Time was, if you had a hankering for a nice Raspberry Pi, you had but one choice: the Raspberry Pi Model B. You plunked down your $35, and like millions of other Pi-heads, you liked it. Then came the stripped-down $25 Model A, followed this year by the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. Now they’ve got this gussied up Raspberry Pi Model B+ with four USB ports and a backward-compatible 40-pin expansion connector. What’s the world coming to?

Phones

• As players in the technology arena look for global regions poised for growth, they are increasingly focused on India. In fact, Mozilla officials have recently noted that India is going to have a big impact on everyone’s use of digital technology.

• The number of fixed-line and mobile Internet surfers in China increased to an estimated 632 million as of the end of June 2014, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

• The number of Internet users in China reached 632 million in June, with 46.9 percent of the population covered by the Web, and smartphones are the most frequently used tool to access the Internet, according to the China Internet Network Information Center. A smartphone may be the most convenient medium to reach the “virtual world”, but by using it a netizen exposes his/her personal information to theft.

Ballnux

• Samsung has delayed the launch of its Samsung Z smartphone running the Tizen OS, which was scheduled for Q3 release in Russia.

• The move, just short of two months after the Samsung Z’s launch at the Tizen Developers Conference, sparked a death watch for the device.

• However, Samsung reportedly said it needed to further enhance the Tizen ecosystem.

• And that takes us to the most annoying part about the Fire Phone — its main purpose is to spur more Amazon sales. The Fire Phone’s interface is designed so that it is constantly recommending more things for you to buy. Swipe to a recently used app, and you’ll find app suggestions. Go to a recently heard song, and the device will offer other songs it thinks you’ll like and should buy. Amazon makes similar recommendations on its Fire TV streaming player and its Fire tablets, but they don’t feel so invasive on those devices because you have a lot of real estate to work with. On the Fire Phone, you’re only looking at 4.7 inches of screen, and though it is a crystal clear screen, it feels cramped. The recommendations are on by default, but fortunately, users can go turn them off in their settings, giving their home screen some breathing room.

Android

• Magellan unveiled an Android-based navigation tablet for RVs with a 7-inch, 800 x 480 touchscreen, WiFi and Bluetooth, and real-time traffic updates.

• The RoadMate RV9490T-LMB appears to be Magellan’s first Android-based automotive GPS, and it’s specifically aimed at recreational vehicle owners. Magellan still uses Windows Mobile in many of its navigation devices.

• Although the official Android platform isn’t open source (nor is the majority of the apps found on the Google Play Store), there are plenty of open-source apps available for you to install and enjoy. These apps range from silly games to everyday tools. One category that benefits from open source is productivity. You’ll find apps to fit many of your productivity needs. If you don’t like the way these apps look or behave (or even if you want to add new features) and you have the skills to do so, you can get their source and rework them to better fit your needs.

• Android’s march to the top of the smartphone field has been much faster than many people realize. It was only back in 2008 that analysts were bemoaning the fact that nearly no Android phones were seen at Mobile World Congress. This week, Strategy Analytics researchers delivered their latest smartphone market share numbers, which show Android reaching new highs at a record 84.6 percent share of global smartphone shipments.

• According to the latest research from Strategy Analytics, global smartphone shipments reached 295 million units in the second quarter of 2014. The Android operating system captured a new record of 85 percent global marketshare, mainly at the expense of BlackBerry, Apple iOS and Microsoft Windows Phone.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Friday afternoon I received an offer for an internship at Red Hat was hands down one of the most important days of my career. Every time people asked me where I was working and I saw their reactions when I told them, I knew I was in a fortunate position.

• Just look at all the headlines surrounding open source today: Facebook is opening its hardware, Tesla is opening its patents, even Apple has a page on its website dedicated to the open source projects it implements and contributes to.

• Google have today released the source code for their I/O app as a means of providing a glimpse into what Google expect from their open-source developers.

• Executives have traditionally viewed proprietary systems as safer, lower-risk options. However in recent times increased scrutiny of capital expenditure has forced corporations to consider alternative technologies in an effort to extract maximum value from their IT budgets.

• General Dynamics C4 Systems and Australia’s Information and Communications Technology Research Centre (NICTA) today open sourced the code-base of a secure microkernel project known as seL4. Touted as “the most trustworthy general purpose microkernel in the world,” seL4 has previously been adapted by organizations like DARPA as high-assurance systems used onboard military unmanned aerial vehicles and for similar defense and commercial uses.

• Critics are laying siege to open source, but their arguments both mistake what open source is and how companies benefit from it

• This week we learn about a collaboration to build an open-source commenting and discussion platform for news organizations, and we explore how the Verification Handbook can help inform the use of citizen-generated materials.

• People in the Big Data and Hadoop communities are becoming increasingly interested in Apache Spark, an open source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley. According to Apache, Spark can run programs up to 100 times faster than Hadoop MapReduce in memory, and ten times faster on disk. When crunching large data sets, those are big performance differences.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mobile privacy concerns are at a fever pitch right now with all the NSA spying, tracking by advertisers and other privacy violations happening on the Internet. I came across an interesting video that demos a new mobile operating system called OrFoxOS. OrFoxOS combines Firefox OS and Tor to help protect your privacy.

• It is not the best smartphone in the market, I know. In fact, I read lots of reviews before buying this phone. The most interesting point was that it was labeled a “developer” device, not an end-user phone. Even with its many “flaws,” I made up my mind and bought this smart thingie because it has everything I want on a cellphone: Firefox OS

SaaS/Big Data

• The end of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is near, so I wanted to share with you how things worked out for me as an intern with OpenStack. Precisely, I wanted to let you know my perception about what it takes to participate in GSoC,

• the blockers you may encounter and how to overcome them, what to expect after the internship, and a brief description of what I have been doing during my internship.

Databases

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Today was quite the busy news day here in Linuxville and the top story must have been the release of LibreOffice 4.3. Seems it brought significant changes and got lots of coverage. SiliconIndia.com has a list of the top eight alternative operating systems and Bruce Byfield looks at KDE’s continually confusing callings. We have 10 reasons to try Zorin OS and 10 easy steps to changing Manjaro back to Arch. Heartbleed is still reeking havoc and Tor issues an advisory. And even that’s not all.

• The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.3, the 8th major release of the free office suite since the birth of the project in September 2010. The application includes the combined effort of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of developers, and has reached a point of maturity that makes it suitable for every kind of deployment, if backed by value added services by the growing LibreOffice ecosystem.

• Ever since LibreOffice split off from the troubled OpenOffice in 2010, this open-source office suite has gotten better and better. With this new release from The Document Foundation, LibreOffice 4.3 has established itself as the best non-Microsoft office suite.

• By any measure, LibreOffice is a great office suite.“According to the Coverity Scan service, joined by LibreOffice in October 2012, the quality of LibreOffice source code has improved dramatically during the last two years, with a reduction of the defect density per 1,000 lines of code from an above the average 1.11 to an industry leading 0.08″ Today’s release takes it another step closer to perfection. If you can’t do something with it, you probably don’t need to do it or it’s just silly. I can do everything I want with it. It lacks only one small feature for me, styles in charts/graphs, but that’s in the pipe.

• The Document Foundation has announced that the final version for LibreOffice 4.3 is now available for all platforms, making this the most advanced release for the office suite.

• THE DOCUMENT FOUNDATION has announced a major upgrade to the Libreoffice productivity suite.

CMS

• Every so often, people who don’t really understand the importance of anonymity or how it enables free speech (especially among marginalized people), think they have a brilliant idea: “just end real anonymity online.” They don’t seem to understand just how shortsighted such an idea is. It’s one that stems from the privilege of being in power. And who knows that particular privilege better than members of the House of Lords in the UK — a group that is more or less defined by excess privilege? The Communications Committee of the House of Lords has now issued a report concerning “social media and criminal offenses” in which they basically recommend scrapping anonymity online. It’s not a true “real names” proposal — as the idea is that web services would be required to collect real names at signup, but then could allow those users to do things pseudonymously or anonymously. But, still, their actions could then easily be traced back to a real person if the “powers that be” deemed it necessary.

• A new website making it easier for government in New Zealand to deliver information and services was designed and developed in-house by the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), using the Common Web Platform. The templates are written in PHP, which DIA runs on the Silverstripe CMS.

• Govt.nz is based on the open source code available through Gov.UK. Its design and content was tested with users on a publicly available beta site, and content fact checking was undertaken in collaboration with more than 40 government agencies.

Business

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Version 7.8 of the GNU Debugger is now available with a variety of enhancements.

• GDB 7.8 notably brings Guile scripting support, improvements to Python scripting, a variety of new options, PowerPC64 litt-endian target configuration, BTrace enhancements, ISO C99 variable length automatic arrays support, and a variety of other new features.

Public Services/Government

• The Department of Homeland Security is funding a project aimed at protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure and networks by providing tools that test for defects in open source and commercial software.

Openness/Sharing

• I have synthesized, manufactured, tested, and fully validated a collection of open source plasmids [small circular DNA strands] coding for some of the very basic building blocks of biotechnology. I do charge an initial purchase price to pay for storage, ongoing quality control, and the provision of a reliable source of these molecules. But there is no proprietary barrier of any type on their use. You may grow them on your own, modify them, give them to others, sell them, sell products derived from them, and do whatever you (legally) want to do with them.

• What’s fascinating here is to see the application of the business model commonly found in the world of open-source software — whereby the code is freely available, and customers effectively pay for a service that provides quality control — in the world of DNA. Given the easy profits that will be put at risk by this new offering, we can probably expect the same kind of scaremongering and lobbying from the incumbents that free software experienced when it became clear that it posed a serious threat to the traditional, high-margin world of closed-source code.

• A team of Whitehead Institute researchers is bringing new levels of efficiency and accuracy to one of the most essential albeit tedious tasks of bench science: pipetting. And, in an effort to aid the scientific community at large, the group has established an open source system that enables anyone to benefit from this development free of charge.

Open Data

• In this podcast, we talk to Chris Albon, director of the global crisis data arm of Ushahidi, an open-source data mapping organisation that originated in Nairobi, Kenya.

Open Hardware

Programming

• In the past 4 months during this years Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for open source software projects, Christian Bruckmayer collaborated with other students and mentors to code a dashboard for the Open Source Event Manager (OSEM). In this series of three posts Christian will tell you about his project and what he has learned from this experience.

• The wxWidgets library for designing cross-platform GUIs now has support by the PHP programming language.

Leftovers

• Finnish firm Nokia will buy part of Panasonic’s network business to grow its operations in Japan and strengthen the mobile broadband portfolio for an undisclosed amount.

Health/Nutrition

• Farm lobby group calls on Monsanto and other biotech companies to reimburse for additional pesticide treatments

Security

• “I’ll tell you as much as I can.” It’s an intriguing opening remark from Rodney Joffe, a top cyber security adviser to the White House and a senior VP and technologist at analytics firm Neustar. Joffe has met President Obama and is in regular contact with various US government agencies, including the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

• Joffe’s accomplishments include leading the Conficker Working Group (a coalition of security experts working to defeat the Conficker worm) sitting on the US government’s cyber security intelligence panel, and in 2013 receiving the FBI director’s award for outstanding cyber investigation for his role in uncovering and taking down the Butterfly Botnet.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• A German army general has for the first time been appointed chief of staff to work with the commander of US ground forces in Europe, both countries’ militaries said Thursday.

• A few days back the Economist published an essay which dismissed the idea of fascists in Kiev as an illusory product of Russian propaganda. This is a narrative which the editors at the Economist have put forth on a number of occasions. Of course, they’re not alone. A less flagrant article published by the New York Times editorial board used a weird double negative to assert that “Russian leaders prefer not to accept that the C.I.A. did not engineer the preference of many Ukrainians for what they see in the West.”

• In a memorandum to President Barack Obama, a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) has demanded that any actual evidence of Russian involvement in the downing of Malaysia flight MH17 over Ukraine is made public.

• Global airlines will push to get “neutral information” on whether to use or avoid airspace over conflict zones at Tuesday’s meeting of the UN aviation agency and other airline bodies, a European-based airline industry source said.

• Russia has already lost most of Eastern Europe, and in the last six months, they lost the loyalty of most of the Ukraine. There are few pockets and slivers on the Russian boarder that are still loyal to Russia. Give these small bits of land a decentralized status. No doubt, within a few years, they will rethink the wisdom of their decision.

• Would you sit still if you saw women and children murdered every day? Murdered by a government that calls you a terrorist and blames another country for the murders they themselves commit. Your own government has been taken over by a greedy and tyrannical empire. They claim to help you but they bomb you and your people to extinction. They smile while blaming Russia and ignore genocide. Death is your fate. Will you accept it? The Ukrainians in the southeast say no.

• Pro-Russian separatists fighting against the Ukrainian military for control of provinces in the eastern portion of the country have been trained, financed, supported and defended by the Russian government, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials.

• Saying that the recent shift in opinion is further proof that women have access to more opportunities than ever before, sources within the CIA confirmed this week that the U.S. intelligence agency may finally be ready to install its first female world leader.

• The map of Latin America is in full flux. The reconfiguration of territories primarily affects the 670 indigenous communities that stretch from the Rio Grande to Patagonia, according to statistics from the Economic Commission of Latin America and the Caribbean. This political, social and economic remodeling of territory has been accompanied by seemingly endless conflict and social upheaval across the continent.

• Since 2001, the U.S. has undertaken regime change in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

• All 3 countries are now in chaos … and extremists are more in control than ever.

• Bolivia on Wednesday renounced a visa exemption agreement with Israel in protest over its offensive in Gaza, and declared it a terrorist state.

• Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s anti-Semitism is getting the better of him. Once again, the Turkish prime minister has trotted out the Adolf Hitler analogy in relation to Israel and what it has done in Gaza. “They curse Hitler morning and night,” he said of the Israelis. “However, now their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”

• Erdogan’s Hitler fetish is both revolting and inaccurate. Hitler murdered an estimated 6 million Jews, not to mention millions of Poles, Russians, Gypsies and, as a group, homosexuals; the Israelis have killed in the current Gaza operation over 1,000 Palestinians. The difference between murdered and killed — the former on purpose, the latter mostly what’s called “collateral damage” — ought to be clear to anyone whose mind is not addled by anti-Semitism.

• [...]

• For Erdogan, the handier and closer to home reference would have been what the Turks did to the Armenians. This genocide — the very word was coined by Raphael Lemkin to encompass what happened to 1.5 million Armenians during and after World War I — has been roundly denied by the Turkish government. In a dizzying feat of irrationality, the head of that government brushes past the crimes of his own nation to point an accusatory finger at the victims of another nation. Erdogan’s remarks are merely the reductio ad absurdum of the anti-Israel argument. Some accuse Israel of a hideous lack of proportionality without pausing to say what the proper proportion of death and destruction should be. Would Hamas have ceased firing rockets into Israel if Israel had bombed less? Somehow, I think not. Would Hamas have blown up its own tunnels if Israel had ceased its attack after, say, a week? Again, no. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, did the United States go into Afghanistan to kill exactly 2,977 al-Qaida and Taliban, an eye for every eye extinguished on that infamous day? Israel is a small nation of only about 8 million people, more than a fifth of them Arabs. Proportionality is a luxury beyond its reach.

• The Arab Spring brought about regime change, but did not bring about peace—only a quagmire in these Arab states. The U.S. believed that new leadership would bring about better governance and improved living conditions for the people. However without an endgame plan, the changes in these countries only led to chaos. Without leaders who can unify the differing religious, ethnic and cultural factions it will be difficult to ever find peace. The recent gains made by Islamists have also emboldened Hamas in Gaza, which is supported by Arab financiers. The Arab Spring has been high jacked by Islamists who are using the instability to create an Islamic caliphate–which may prove to be difficult to reverse.

• Overall, almost 1,400 people have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces with missiles and military equipment supplied by the US. After the latest UN school attack, it was announced that the US will send more ammunition to Israel. The conclusion is: “Let’s sanction Russia!”

• The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s Naming the Dead project has now recorded the names of more than 700 people reportedly killed by CIA drones in Pakistan.

• Nearly half – 323 – of the people identified are reported to be civilians, including 99 children. The database of names has grown since its launch last year, but those identified still make up fewer than one in three of the 2,342 reportedly killed in drone attacks.

• If you don’t think war is Big Business, just ask multibillion-dollar companies like Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman, whose war machines end up in battlefields all over the world. In fact, just today the Pentagon cleared Lockheed to sell 5,000 Hellfire missiles to the embattled Iraqi government for a cool $700 million.

• A former Blackwater security guard testified Wednesday that he and two colleagues shot their weapons into a car in Nisoor Square in Baghdad, part of a barrage of gunfire that claimed the lives of a mother and her son and led to the shootings of 30 other Iraqis. In a calm voice, Jeremy Ridgeway told a jury that what started as “just another day at the office” in Baghdad suddenly erupted in fire from automatic weapons aimed at a car moving toward the heavily armored convoy of Blackwater guards. Ridgeway is the prosecution’s chief cooperating witness in the case focusing on the 2007 shootings. Four Blackwater guard defendants say they were taking incoming gunfire from insurgents and they fired in self-defense. Federal prosecutors say the guards were unprovoked.

• Ten hours before the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, Bill Clinton allegedly told a group of businessmen in Australia that he had a chance to kill Osama Bin Laden, but passed because it would have meant killing hundreds of innocent civilians. That’s according to never-before-released audio of remarks made public by Australian media on Wednesday.

Transparency Reporting

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has revealed in a new book that his organization managed to stay afloat thanks to “strategic investments” in bitcoin that helped the organization cover piling costs in financial and legal areas, The Daily Dot reports.

• United States military whistleblower Chelsea Manning was convicted of offenses related to her disclosures to WikiLeaks one year ago. In this time, Manning’s case has become a clear example to future whistleblowers of what the US government will do to military officers or federal government employees, who follow their conscience. And her case seems to have only emboldened President Barack Obama and his administration to continue to wage a war to control information that includes a clampdown on leaks, a campaign against national security whistleblowers and a concerted attack on press freedom.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Finnish energy conservation firm Eniram has been selected as one of the best European clean technology companies of the decade by the Cleantech Group. The Finnish firm’s software is in high demand to help ships cut fuel use and emissions.

• Fracking licences can only be issued for beauty spots in “exceptional circumstances”, according to new rules issued by the government.

• It said the regulations for the new bidding round for licences – the first in six years – are stricter than before.

• Germany has a moratorium on the use of fracking technology to extract unconventional fossil fuels but the method is not banned, something the country’s Federal Environment Agency (UBA) hopes to change with swift regulation. EurActiv Germany reports.

• Maria Krautzberger, the President of the Germany’s Federal Environment Agency (UBA), presented the organisation’s new Fracking-II assessment in Berlin on Wednesday (30 July).

Finance

• Crusaders know they’re nothing without something to crusade against. That’s undoubtedly why hedge fund billionaire Peter G. Peterson keeps harping on the federal debt.

• The 85 richest people globally have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest in the world, the United Nations said, citing Oxfam figures, in a report that highlights ways to help the 1.2 billion people who live on less than $1.25 a day.

• The economic crisis in Europe and North America led to more than 10,000 extra suicides, according to figures from UK researchers.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• But the real issue here is that O’Reilly has edited the Times editorial in order to make it easier for him to debunk.

• Right-wing media reacted to an ad depicting gun-based domestic violence with the dangerous claim that keeping guns in the home would prevent such attacks. In fact, the presence of a firearm in a home where domestic abuse occurs increases the risk a woman will be murdered.

Censorship

• Social media users in Australia could be charged with a crime for sharing any details of a gag order published by Wikileaks this week on Facebook or Twitter. The gag order bans journalists from mentioning a number of officials with relation to an international corruption probe.

• The anti-secrecy group has this morning published a Victorian Supreme Court suppression order that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange describes as “unprecedented” in scope.

• Wikileaks has exposed a secretive suppression order issued by a Victorian court that relates to an international political corruption case.

• The whistleblower website on Wednesday published the full text of the Victorian Supreme Court order made on June 19.

• Australian media organisations cannot legally publish the contents of the order, which was made to prevent damage to the country’s international relations.

• The ban applies to a massive corruption case involving officials in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam

• To astonishment in Australia, but pretty much a resounding “huh?” in the United States, Wikileaks yesterday published a censorship order issued by the Supreme Court of the Australian state of Victoria on June 19 of this year. The order imposes a five-year ban on publication of any material in Australia about a corruption case involving high officials of Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Australian government itself.

• Congress members and their staffers are blocked from accessing the website for the annual Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference, according to a screen shot Firedoglake obtained.

• Today, 29 July 2014, WikiLeaks releases an unprecedented Australian censorship order concerning a multi-million dollar corruption case explicitly naming the current and past heads of state of Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, their relatives and other senior officials. The super-injunction invokes “national security” grounds to prevent reporting about the case, by anyone, in order to “prevent damage to Australia’s international relations”. The court-issued gag order follows the secret 19 June 2014 indictment of seven senior executives from subsidiaries of Australia’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). The case concerns allegations of multi-million dollar inducements made by agents of the RBA subsidiaries Securency and Note Printing Australia in order to secure contracts for the supply of Australian-style polymer bank notes to the governments of Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and other countries.

Privacy

• Since then, the Snowden story has unfolded in dramatic ways for a nonstop 12 months — as the world reacted to the vast amount of information that his files contained — sparking revelation after revelation about some of the nation’s most cherished secrets. It has also sparked a fierce policy debate over how to make intelligence organizations more accountable.

• This morning, Senator Patrick Leahy released a new version of the USA Freedom Act, a bill intended to reform NSA surveillance following Edward Snowden’s revelations that the intelligence agency collects Americans’ calling records in bulk. USA Freedom Act has a disappointing history. While initially proposing much for Americans, if not our friends overseas, to like, the version that eventually passed the House in May was, at best, utterly neutered. Today’s version, hashed out between Sen. Leahy, Obama Administration officials, and civil liberties proponents, moves the needle much closer to the original version.

• Last year he presented research at Black Hat on breakthrough methods for remotely attacking SIM cards on mobile phones. In December, documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden demonstrated that the U.S. spy agency was using a similar technique for surveillance, which it called “Monkey Calendar.”

• Apple’s legendary iPod ads have been nothing less than iconic, but a California street artists has turned the famous marketing campaign into an anti-Obama parody ahead of the President’s visit to area.

• The U.S government is helping foot the bill for the Tor Project, even as new attacks against the anonymous network platform are disclosed. The open-source Tor Project provides a technology platform that helps enable user privacy on the Internet. While the effort is open-source, it does have financial backers that are helping fund development and operations.

• Tor reported its 2013 financial statements on July 26, providing transparency into the costs and sources of funding for the anonymous networking technology.

• The Tor encryption service is a high-profile bastion of computer security, but the project appears to have been compromised earlier this year. Today, the Tor Project blog announced that an unknown party likely managed to gather information about people who were looking up hidden services — websites that users can operate and visit anonymously, like Silk Road — and could theoretically have compromised other parts of the network.

• Former NSA Director Keith Alexander’s lucrative entrance into the private sector has raised a heap of ethical questions about the spy chief’s intentions.

• The Keith Alexander story just keeps getting more and more bizarre. Almost immediately after retiring from the top position at the NSA, where he oversaw the total failure of the NSA’s supposed “100% auditing” system, allowing Ed Snowden (and who knows how many others) to escape with all sorts of documents, Alexander announced that he had set up a cybersecurity firm — with the ridiculously Hollywood-ish name of IronNet Cybersecurity. A month ago, it was revealed that he’s going around asking banks to pay him $1 million per month for his “expertise.” That caused a few to wonder if he’s selling classified info, because really, what else could he offer?

• Now that it’s been over a year since the Snowden leaks, you might’ve thought that all of the insane NSA revelations had been revealed. Not so! Foreign Policy just published a fascinating and exhaustive list of every patent ever awarded to the spy agency. And one of its latest inventions is all about your SIM card.

• Electronic eavesdropping is the National Security Agency’s forte, but it seems it also has a special interest in children’s car seats, Foreign Policy magazine reported Wednesday.

• The “integrated child seat for vehicle” is among more than 270 patents issued since 1979 to the super-secretive spy agency at the center of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations.

• Among the matters on the discussion table are trade, nuclear energy, defence, security and counter-terrorism. India hopes to raise the issue of snooping by the US’ National Security Agency (NSA) on BJP leaders, among others.

• US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Delhi on Wednesday to hold the 5th Indo-US Strategic Dialogue on Thursday during which India will be raising issues of snooping by the US’ NSA and terrorism even as the two sides will explore “transformative initiatives” in key areas such as defence and energy

• Trust stands alone in the glass menagerie of fragile personal and national virtues. Without trust, individual, commercial, and civic relationships are impossible. Children must trust parents, couples must trust each other, and families must be able to trust the state. Indeed, all the estates of society are bound by trust in one form or other; family, government, commerce, and religion. A deficit of trust is like an open wound, not necessarily fatal immediately, but surely a potential agent for permanent disability or death.

• The lawyers of whistleblower Edward Snowden in an interview with Australian ABC channel on Wednesday denied reports that former NSA contractor, who was granted a temporary asylum in Russia, was preparing to go back to the United States to face charges.

• What will happen to Edward Snowden after a year of asylum in Russia? He is apparently negotiating his return. But the Ukraine crisis is decreasing Obama’s room to maneuver while US media interest is waning.

• The social sciences in America have been militarized to produce tools that assist the government in understanding and suppressing dissent. Anthropology, linguistic analysis and sociology now serve the police state.

• Technology used to gain access to cellphone data is under review at the Michigan statehouse.

• Indiana, Maine, Montana, Tennessee and Utah already impose rules on cellphone eavesdropping. A Minnesota law is set to take effect Oct. 1. In November, Missouri voters will decide on the issue of warrantless cellphone searches.

• If current polling is any indication, liberty-friendly Rep. Justin Amash will coast to victory over his establishment-supported challenger in the Michigan Republican primary next week. An Amash victory would be a win for libertarian candidates everywhere, and a clear sign that independent and conservative voters prefer the limited government message to the pro-war, pro-corporate platitudes of Republican Party leadership.

• Are you a U.S. citizen living in the greater Washington, D.C. area looking for a new gig? Do you have impeccable oral and written communication skills? Or strong analytical and critical thinking skills?

• Five days before the Supreme Court ruled that an arts and crafts chain deserves greater protection under the law than the women it employs, the gang of nine actually got one right. Preceding the inexplicable 5-4 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby split-decision, which made clear that old men in black robes increasingly lose their marbles when the discussion turns toward babies and ovaries and baby Jesus, the judges unanimously—and somewhat stunningly—agreed on June 25 to advance civil rights into the digital age.

• [...]

• “Indeed,” Roberts wrote, “a cell phone search would typically expose to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house: A phone not only contains in digital form many sensitive records previously found in the home; it also contains a broad array of private information never found in a home in any form unless the phone is.”

• On Tuesday, Senator Patrick Leahy introduced the revised USA Freedom Act, a bipartisan bill to rein in the National Security Agency’s collection of telephone and Internet records. If Congress enacts Senator Leahy’s bill in its current form, it will mark the most significant reform of US intelligence gathering since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, enacted in the 1970s in response to the Church Committee’s revelations of abusive spying practices on political dissidents and activists.

• We must never be surprised when we learn once again that our lawmakers and law interpreters are in bed with the country’s largest corporations—this is how the American government now operates. A July 25 article in Vice includes documentation that shows three judges from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, the tribunal that evaluates the legality of the NSA’s practices, own stock in Verizon. Although there doesn’t seem to be a direct financial incentive for judges to allow the NSA to rifle through the data (our data) of a company in which they have invested, it does show the intimate relationship the NSA, the FISA Court and Verizon share.

• The National Security Agency’s top lawyer said the disclosures from former contractor Edward Snowden not only hurt U.S. intelligence gathering capabilities, but they also created a gap in the trust relationship between the agency and Congress.

• Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, Raj De, the NSA’s general counsel, argued strenuously that each of the programs Snowden disclosed in his leaks to reporters was legal and that the agency has done nothing improper. But he said aside from the damage the disclosures did to the NSA’s ability to collect signals intelligence on legitimate overseas targets, they also may have damaged the nation’s ability to move the ball forward on improving its own cybersecurity posture.

• As a matter of faith, some people believe that God can see and hear everything. But as a matter of fact, the U.S. government now has the kind of surveillance powers formerly attributed only to a supreme being.

• Recently, a Redmi Note (the sub $150 Phablet from Xiaomi, scheduled to sell in India soon) user from Hong Kong identified unusual data traffic from his Smartphone when connected to any WiFi network. Upon closer inspection, the owner of the device found out that his phone was sending personal info – text messages and photos – to an unknown IP address that is located in China.

• American foreign policy has long been an exercise of divided labor. For more than fifty years, we have parceled out responsibility for guiding America’s path in the world among the Departments of State and Defense, the CIA, the NSA, and other smaller agencies. This arrangement has always presented challenges, but has come to a head with the latest wave of embarrassing revelations regarding our nation’s espionage activities in Europe. Recently, in a stunning turn, the German government expelled our top intelligence officer in Berlin, boiling the already hot waters of transatlantic relations.

• Until this week, Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto-based data analytics company, wasn’t much of an acquirer. Despite having raised $896 million in venture capital, at a $9 billion valuation, and generating more than $500 million in revenue, Palantir has only made one acquisition in all of its ten years: VoiceGem, a young, Y-Combinator-backed messaging app, in 2013.

• Though agency actively recruits security engineers and experts, NSA chiefs won’t speak at Black Hat or Def Con this year

• On June 30, 2013, Wikileaks legal advisor Sarah Harrison handed over political asylum applications on behalf of Snowden to the consulate at Sheremetyevo Airport. The applications were addressed to 21 countries, including Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Cuba, Finland, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland and Venezuela.

• A committee is asking if the time is right for drones to take off, and will explore safety, privacy and the potential of the European industry

• It is an economic development prize nearly unparalleled in the Washington region: the chance to pour 11,000 federal employees into a single neighborhood in one stroke.

Civil Rights

• The US State Department has endorsed the broad conclusions of a harshly critical Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation and detention practices after the 9/11 attacks that accuses the agency of brutally treating terror suspects and misleading Congress, according to a White House document.

• No, none of the Senate’s 6,000-page report on torture and brutal interrogation techniques performed by the CIA during the War on Terror has been declassified yet. But we know how the White House is going to respond and what kind of questions they think the media is going to ask because somebody accidentally (or perhaps “accidentally”) leaked a four-page memo to an Associated Press reporter.

• A White House staff member ‘accidentally emailed’ non-classified talking points about a classified torture report to an Associated Press reporter.

• A Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation and detention practices after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the U.S. concludes that the agency initially kept the secretary of state and some American ambassadors uninformed about harsh techniques and secret prisons, according to a document circulating among White House staff.

• The still-classified report also says some ambassadors who were informed about interrogations of al-Qaida detainees at so-called black sites in their countries were instructed not to tell their superiors at the State Department, says the document, which the White House accidentally emailed to an Associated Press reporter.

• Early in his presidency, John F. Kennedy approved an ill-planned and poorly executed invasion of Cuba by a group of ex-patriots with the help of the CIA. It was a disaster. President Kennedy learned more from making that mistake than he ever did from any success in his life.

• On July 24, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, unanimously found Poland in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights for consenting to the presence of C.I.A. prisons on its territory in 2002 and 2003. Included among the prisoners held there was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, considered the main architect of the attack on the World Trade Center; during his time in Poland, he was subjected to waterboarding about 180 times.

• [...]

• Mr. Pinior hid the money with Archbishop Henryk Gulbinowicz, who concealed the cash in his private apartments in the Bishop’s Palace and, despite being interrogated, did not give it to the secret police. This successful mission enabled the financing of Solidarity’s underground activities during martial law and became the stuff of legend — and even a recent thriller, “80 Million,” by the writer and director Waldemar Krzystek.

• Through the irony of history, it was Mr. Pinior, the intellectual, who tried to found a true workers’ party, the Polish Socialist Party, known as the P.P.S., in 1987, and it was Mr. Frasyniuk who became the leader of the intelligentsia party, the Freedom Union, in 2001.

• Unfortunately, it fell to both of them to turn the lights out in their respective organizations. P.P.S. was disbanded by the Communist secret police, and the Freedom Union by the electorate. The two men drifted apart, too: Mr. Pinior remained a man of the left, but Mr. Frasyniuk became one of Poland’s most diehard neoliberals — a perfectly concise personalization of Eastern Europe’s transition from communism to capitalism.

• If you think that democracies can harmlessly forfeit human rights in the fight against terrorism, you should think twice.

• Just recently, for example, the Supreme Court refused to hear Hedges v. Obama, a legal challenge to the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), thereby affirming that the president and the U.S. military can arrest and indefinitely detain individuals, including American citizens, based on a suspicion that they might be associated with or aiding terrorist organizations.

• [...]

• The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the NDAA indefinite detention case — which challenged whether the government can lawfully lock up American citizens who might be deemed extremists or terrorists (the government likes to use these words interchangeably) for criticizing the government — is one such warning sign that we would do well to heed.

• Taff asked to go home. Her supervisor refused, unless Taff found someone to cover her shift. He advised her to “just switch shirts” to hide the puke stains.

• The government has dismissed MPs’ concerns about British use of armed drones, and said it plans to expand their deployment while redoubling efforts to “promote” them to the public and MPs.

• Poland is the first European Union member state to be found complicit in the USA’s rendition, secret detention and torture of alleged terrorism suspects, Amnesty International said as it applauded two landmark human rights judgments handed down today.

• Former congressman and libertarian leader Ron Paul is calling for the abolishment of the CIA, citing “horrific torture practices” and interrogation policies that have been continuously denied by the government while creating “unprecedented” international resentment toward the U.S.

• Let us be plain, there is no good reason — and certainly no reason compatible with a functioning democracy — for the CIA’s report on how the United States abandoned its principles and tortured people to remain classified. There’s no good reason — and certainly no reason compatible with a functioning democracy – for this White House to continue to be an accessory after the fact in the crimes of the preceding administration. This, by the way, is not a good reason.

• The White House in the next few days is expected to declassify the long-awaited summary of a U.S. Senate committee study of a CIA program that used “enhanced interrogations” and secret prisons to extract information from captured militants, several officials familiar with the matter said.

• Over the last two weeks, former directors and deputy directors of the CIA have been invited by the Obama administration to review a still-secret version of the 600-page Senate Intelligence Committee summary at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

• Utah lawyer suing the FBI over its alleged inadequate search under the federal Freedom of Information Act…

• More FOIA-related nonsense, this time from the CIA. Michael Morisy, co-founder of MuckRock, sent a request for internal emails discussing (rather ironically) the fact that the CIA’s “FOIA Portal” seems to suffer from extended periods of downtime.

• Independence Party candidate Kevin Terrell, of Minneapolis, said he wants to bring transparency, accountability and the voice of the citizens back to Washington.

• The Obama administration has expanded the national terrorist watchlist system by approving broad guidelines over who can be targeted. A leaked copy of the secret government guidebook reveals that to be deemed a “terrorist” target, “irrefutable evidence or concrete facts are not necessary.” Both “known” and “suspected” suspects are tracked, and terrorism is so broadly defined that it includes people accused of damaging property belonging to the government or financial institutions. Other factors that can justify inclusion on the watchlist include postings on social media or having a relative already deemed a terrorist. We are joined by investigative reporters Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux of The Intercept. Last week they published the secret U.S. document along with their new article, “The Secret Government Rulebook for Labeling You a Terrorist.”

• Six officers in Philadelphia’s Narcotics Field Unit were among the biggest crooks in the city over a six-year period in which they used violence and threats to steal more than $500,000 in cash and drugs, according to a federal indictment.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• FCC’s Tom Wheeler says in a letter he’s “deeply troubled” by Verizon’s move to single out unlimited data customers, which could slow their access to the Internet.

• Earlier this week, we wrote about the ridiculousness of Verizon Wireless refering to its new plans to throttle heavy users of its LTE mobile data network as “network optimization” while denying that it was “throttling.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins of the Center of the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School have recognized what many people have: the academic publishing world is insane. Textbook pricing is generally insane, in part because the people who make the decision (the professors) are not the people doing the buying (the students), meaning that the buyers have little to no choice in what they buy. That enables the publishers to jack up the prices to absolutely insane rates. This even includes legal “casebooks” and “statutory supplements,” which are often composed of mostly public domain material (or, legal filings where the person who put together the book had no authorship). So Boyle and Jenkins are working on an open coursebook for intellectual property, which looks like it’s going to be fantastic.

Copyrights

• Kim Dotcom is dealing with a multi-pronged attack on his assets. While the governments of both the U.S. and New Zealand work to keep already seized assets frozen, a High Court judge has just ordered the millionaire to reveal where all of his remaining assets are. Meanwhile, all U.S. civil action has been frozen until 2015.

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