● 08.09.14

● Links 9/8/2014: Knoppix 7.4.0, GNU Linux Libre 3.16

Posted in News Roundup at 5:04 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Every year, heck…every month, Linux is adopted by more companies and organizations as an important if not primary component of their enterprise platform. And the more serious the hardware platform, the more likely it is to be running Linux. 60% of servers, 70% of Web servers and 95% of all supercomputers are Linux-based!

• Even if they’re not “Linux shops”, companies realize certain benefits from bringing Linux in for specific purposes. Its reliability, flexibility, scalability and cost of ownership offer huge advantages over other OSes…but I don’t have to tell you that, do I? You probably earn your keep because of these statistics!

Desktop

• The five largest notebook vendors’ combined shipments in July decreased 25% on month while the three largest ODMs’ combined shipments also slipped 17%, according to Digitimes Research.

Kernel Space

• The input subsystem pull request has been submitted for the Linux 3.17 merge window.

• Several new ARM devices will be supported by the in-development Linux 3.17 kernel while some less-than-optimally-supported ARM hardware is also getting stripped from the mainline kernel tree.

• Olof Johansson emailed in the large batch of ARM changes today for the Linux 3.17 merge window. Some highlights for the pull request consisting of around 750 patches include.

• At the end of July AMD launched new Kaveri APU models: the A10-7800, A8-7600, and A6-7400K. AMD graciously sent over review samples on their A10-7800 and A6-7400K Kaveri APUs, which we’ve been benchmarking and have some of the initial Linux performance results to share today.

• The Change.Org website just got a taste of its own medicine after Linus Torvalds started a petition addressed to said website with a simple request.

• Change.Org is a very popular platform and lots of people use it to start petitions. Most of them don’t end up anywhere and there have been very few instances when something posted on Change.org actually made a difference. As it turns out, their scrutiny regarding the people who actually post stuff is lacking, to say it gently.

• It turns out that the website doesn’t actually check who is posting petitions, which means that it’s very possible that some of the materials and initiatives posted online are not from those actual users.

• Linux 3.17-rc1 is still about one week away at least, but already two commits of new functionality were reverted from the Intel DRM driver code for Linux 3.17.

• The first revert yesterday to the Linux Git code was in regards to semaphores support for Broadwell. Semaphores support for Broadwell — a performance-boosting feature — was part of Intel’s big set of changes for this kernel merge window. The DRM pull was just sent in a few days ago but Intel developers decided to end up disabling the semaphores support in a drm-intel-fixes pull request they already submitted to Linus Torvalds.

• Last week I’ve been working on improving the LVM plugin thinpool sharing capabilities. I didn’t explain LVM thin-provisioning before, so I’ll do it now to rationalize what I’m doing.

Graphics Stack

• While we’re still waiting until around the end of the year to see Broadwell processors, Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center is already prepping Linux graphics driver code to begin pushing Skylake support into their driver stack.

• Separate from the new DRM driver to be found in Linux 3.17 that was written about earlier, there’s another new DRM driver published this week that has yet to hit the mainline Linux kernel.

• Raspberry Pi fans can rejoice that the VC4 Gallium3D driver has been merged to mainline Mesa in its early form.

Applications

• Suricata, a high-performance Network IDS, IPS, and Network Security Monitoring engine that is open source and owned by a community-run non-profit organization – the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF) –, is now at version 2.0.3.

Proprietary

• Watching Netflix is possible on Linux however it’s made more difficult by Netflix insisting on using Silverlight from Microsoft. Below is a PPA for an application called netflix-desktop, it will allow you to watch Netflix in a Firefox browser that is being emulated in Wine to trick Netflix into thinking you’re using Windows.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.7.24 is now available.

• What’s new in this release (see below for details): - Beginning of some DirectWrite classes implementation. - Initial wrapper dll for the packet capture library. - Some crypto improvements. - Various bug fixes.

Games

• Metro: Last Light on Linux has been amazing penguin gamers with the visual clarity and AAA game-play. Since May we’ve been excited over 4A Games working on a “Redux” game with Linux support. Metro Redux incorporates Metro: 2033 and Metro: Last Light and should be another amazing hit for Linux gamers later this year.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• There are other Window Managers out there and you can try 76 of them out by downloading and trying out LinuxBBQ (although it takes patience).

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I expect these few days to be oriented towards Kdenlive future (some Frameworks 5 porting, some refactoring, some new features)… So before that I’m trying to leave the present things in the best possible state, preparing a v0.9.10 release.

• This is my GSoC project status report. My project aims to design an educational game using marble which will help you learn geography. You can browse maps and enjoy quizzes to test your knowledge.

• You don’t have to remove the KDE 5 packages in order to get logged into your familiar KDE 4 desktop by the way – just choose the appropriate Desktop Environment. As I said, the two environments don’t bite.

• One thing you will notice, is how fast the new desktop is. The Plasma Desktop in KDE 5 uses an all-new, fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack on top of Qt5 and the Frameworks5 libraries, and the effect is amazing. Resource usage is still high but the reason for that is known: it is caused by a design issue in KWin and that is currently being worked on.

• KDE 5 has been my default desktop for the past week (using Plasma 5.0.0 package), and I hope that the update to Plasma 5.0.1 will fix a couple of pesky bugs.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Over a month ago I embarked on my own personal challenge to use GNOME Shell (otherwise just known as GNOME 3) for an entire week. That week happened and went, I wrote some thoughts I had after that initial week, but did not officially end my usage of the Shell. Fast forward to now… I’m still using GNOME Shell and here’s why.

• First of all, it’s worth mentioning that what follows in this article is my personal experience and may not reflect your own such experience, even a prolonged one, with GNOME Shell. Therefore, please do not assume I am trying to convince you that GNOME is all sunshine and rainbows and that you’re completely wrong in all your negative opinions of it, if you happen to be one of those people who do not like the GNOME desktop.

Distributions

• Using the Ice technology in the Peppermint OS is much like launching an app on an Android phone or tablet. For example, I can launch Google Docs, Gmail, Twitter, Yahoo Mail, YouTube, Pandora or Facebook as if they were self-contained apps on a mobile device — but these pseudo apps never need updating. Ice easily creates a menu entry to launch any website or application as if it were installed.

New Releases

• OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, is now at version 4.2 Beta 3, following closely the release of the XBMC base.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Once upon a time in Fedora Core 1 through Fedora Core 3, updates were handled via a manual process involving emails to release engineering. Starting with Fedora Core 4, a private internal updating system that was available only to Red Hat employees.

• This Friday is the third day of Flock, the Fedora Contributor Conference, in Prague, the Czech Republic. As you could on day 1 / Tuesday and day 2 / Wednesday, you still can attend – no matter where in the world you are. If you cannot watch the videos live for whatever reason, you may watch them afterwards at the same links posted below.

• Some people think of GNOME Software as a front end to PackageKit, but that’s not really true, although PackageKit is important. The software installer uses the PackageKit plugin architecture, which although private can be used by anyone who needs it. Problems do occur, Hughes conceded, when you have multiple instances of an application in different repositories, but this can be resolved through application policies (such as “prefer the distribution version”).

• The most visible product of the Fedora community is the Fedora distribution itself. However, there’s much more to Fedora than its distribution, and underneath it all the Fedora infrastructure keeps things humming along. Without it, we’d have no mailing lists, no Web site, no build systems, packages, or (ultimately) distribution.

• Docker, Docker, Docker! Easily one of the most popular topics at this year’s Flock (or in tech in general), Arun S A G of Yahoo gave a Friday morning talk on the state of Docker and Fedora, as well as a brief comparison between Docker and other Linux-based container technologies.

Debian Family

• Knoppix, one of the longest standing Live CD/DVD/USB Linux distributions based off Debian, is out with a new update.

• Knoppix 7.4.0, a bootable Live CD/DVD made up from the most popular and useful free and open source applications, backed up by an automatic hardware detection and support for many video cards, SCSI, and USB devices, has been released and is available for download.

• Debian is the great granddaddy of Linux distributions and it remains a popular choice among Linux users. But there has been some recent controversy over whether or not the upcoming Debian Jessie should stick with GNOME as its default desktop versus moving to Xfce. This has caused some sharp debate in the Debian community as you might imagine, and the Oskuro blog has made a passionate argument in favor of GNOME.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical has just announced that Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS (Precise Pangolin) has been officially released for its Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core flavors.

• Canonical said that a number of OpenSSL vulnerabilities have been found and fixed in its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.

• NASA seems to be a fan of open source operating system Ubuntu. The Linux distribution built by Canonical has been spotted “flying” over an Antarctic region, during NASA’s Operation IceBridge.

• The developers working on the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution have announced the release of Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS, an update to the “Precise Pangolin” version. This update brings “security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility”. It also includes an updated kernel to allow for better installation on x86 architectures.

• The Ubuntu developers have worked a lot lately at Ubuntu Touch and related, due to the fact that they hope to make the first Ubuntu Touch powered available this Autumn.

Devices/Embedded

• UniPi is seeking Indiegogo funding for a Raspberry Pi add-on for building automation with analog and digital I/O, changeover relays, and 1-Wire interfaces.

Phones

• In Q2 2014, the world’s largest smart phone market, mainland China, accounted for 37% of global shipments – some 108.5 million units. Of the top five vendors in China this quarter, all but one were local companies. And perhaps more impressively, that home-grown success continues in the top 10, where eight vendors were Chinese. In little over a year, Xiaomi has risen from being a niche player to become the leading smart phone vendor in the world’s largest market, overtaking Samsung in volume terms in Q2. Xiaomi took a 14% share in China, on the back of 240% year-on-year growth. With Lenovo, Yulong, Huawei, BBK, ZTE, OPPO and K-Touch, the eight Chinese vendors in the top 10 together accounted for a total of 70.7 million units and a 65% market share. Samsung and Apple, the only international vendors in the top 10, together accounted for shipments of 20.0 million units, representing 18% of the overall smart phone market in China.

• MediaTek has reported revenues of NT$19.27 billion (US$641.91 million) for July, up 22.7% sequentially and 45.8% on year. For the first seven months of 2014, revenues amounted to NT$119.41 billion, increasing 69.5% from a year earlier.

Android

• The party has begun. Everyone has arrived. The good ones, the bad ones, the pretty ones and the not-so-pretty ones are already here. Except for one. Yes, and it is the most promising one too. Android and iOS both have reached a level of maturity that has given them a huge stronghold over the mobile OS market space. Both of them have been for years, have millions of apps, and have a formidable presence that has managed to ward of competition even from big companies like Microsoft.

• Neptune’s Android 4.1-based “Pine” smartwatch is shipping to Kickstarter backers with a dual-core Snapdragon, 2.4-inch screen, telephony, and dual cameras.

• Good news for Moto X users under AT&T as the handset will receive the Android 4.4.4 Kitkat OS update by the end of the month.

• Regardless of what your views are on ‘alternative’ methods for getting TV and movie content for viewing, Popcorn Time continues to exist, much to the dismay of the MPAA. The service utilizes BitTorrent technology to get content and streams it to the viewer as it downloads, making for almost instant viewing.

• I’ve been hoping to see this headline for some time now. At the first LibreOffice Conference, the Document Foundation announced its plans to migrate LibreOffice to mobile devices. The plan didn’t include a total rewrite of the code, but repurposing at least 90% of the current code base. That meant the majority of the work was already done. That last remaining 10%? The user interface. The 90% already compiles on Android — so there is a working model. Of course, what good is a working model without an interface to go along with it?

Free Software/Open Source

• Ansible for server automation, open source tools and the different types of network automation were top-of-mind for this week’s SDN bloggers.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• The Beta branch of Google Chrome, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, is now at version 37.0.2062.68.

• The Google Chrome developers have been working around the Beta branch, but now a new release has been made and it packs a few changes and improvements.

Mozilla

• Collabora remains interested in seeing Mozilla’s Firefox web-browser with Gecko layout engine on Wayland.

• As reported on Phoronix a few times, the GTK3 port of Firefox is still being worked on along with the Wayland port. The GTK3 version of Firefox hasn’t yet hit the mainline code-base, but progress is being made and for allowing Firefox/Gecko to avoid its hard dependencies on X11 interfaces.

• While there’s still some work to go, Frederic Plourde of Collabora has reminded us it’s still being worked on and their experimental code continues to allow Firefox to run natively on Wayland’s Weston compositor.

SaaS/Big Data

• As I noted in this post, last week marked the release of ownCloud 7 Community Edition, the new version of the ever popular open source file-sharing and storage platform for building private clouds. Among the benefits you can get from running ownCloud is a unique server-to-server sharing feature, which lets you share files with other users on separate instances, without having to use file sharing links. For many people, ownCloud has become an essential open platform.

• We have good reasons to keep an eye on that. Open Source projects typically have a huge turnover (60%/year is normal), requiring us to keep attracting new contributors. Not only that, ownCloud Inc. has hired many community members and, through its marketing and sales machine, is increasing the number of ownCloud users enormously. We do numbers on our user base internally, and the number we make public (about 1.7 million at the moment) is a rather conservative estimate. And growing quickly: Germany’s upcoming largest-ever cloud deployment will bring ownCloud to half a million users!

CMS

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Equipped with free GNU Radio software, a group of citizen scientists has contacted, controlled, and is attempting to recapture a 1970s-era satellite and bring it back into an orbit close to Earth.

• The Linux 3.16 kernel was released a few days ago with some awesome features while those wishing to run this kernel in an ultra-free mode without support for closed-source firmware blobs or the ability to load non-free kernel modules, the GNU Linux-libre 3.16 release is available.

Public Services/Government

• Turin wants to be the first city in Italy to switch completely to open source and Ubuntu and entirely ditch all the Microsoft products.

• A new online environment to help developers and researchers test their software for security weaknesses and vulnerabilities – and improve them – is open for business, the Homeland Security Department recently announced.

• Open source projects like the National Library of Medicine’s Pillbox show potential of open innovation — including competition with projects started elsewhere.

Licensing

• A few years ago, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst made the prediction that open source software would soon become nearly pervasive in organizations of all sizes. That has essentially become true, and many businesses now use open source components without even knowing that they are doing so.

• So, Oracle is pushing the limits but apparently is legally doing so. Whether FLOSS can legally be embargoed by government is beyond me. After all, the source is out there and can’t be put back in the bottle. Further, if every country in the world had a random set of embargoes against every other country in he world, FLOSS could not be international at all. That would be a crime against humanity. If Java, why not Linux, itself? If such embargoes apply, Russia, Iran, Cuba etc. could just fork everything and go it alone. They certainly have the population to support a thriving FLOSS community behind their own walls.

Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

Security

• BRANDEN GHENA pulls his car up under a traffic light in a city in Michigan. He plugs a radio transmitter into the car’s power adapter, connects it to his laptop and, with a few keyboard strokes, takes control of every traffic light in town.

• A single well-designed cyber weapon could “take down the entire internet,” according to Dan Geer, chief information security officer for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital company.

• OK, so bottom line. Nothing is secure. Who knows, maybe the NSA asked Vivint and other firms to put holes in their systems, just to make its work a little easier.

• During his keynote and a press conference that followed here at the Black Hat information security conference, In-Q-Tel Chief Information Security Officer Dan Geer expressed concern about the growing threat of botnets powered by home and small office routers. The inexpensive Wi-Fi routers commonly used for home Internet access—which are rarely patched by their owners—are an easy target for hackers, Geer said, and could be used to construct a botnet that “could probably take down the Internet.” Asked by Ars if he considered home routers to be the equivalent of critical infrastructure as a security priority, he answered in the affirmative.

• Every security play will tell you to your face that “we’re different.”

• In the case of 6Scan, a small malware outfit that has a unique approach to isolating that unnerving computer threat, the boast may finally be right.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• That raises the question of whether the CIA has begun providing weapons in secret to the Kurds, something U.S. officials will not confirm nor deny. The CIA declined to comment on whether it was sending arms.

• The U.S. drone strike killed three suspected al-Qaida men in Yemen’s central province of Marib on Saturday, Yemeni security officials said.

• The strike targeted a house in Wadi Abida area in Marib province, killing three men and injuring two women, the officials said on condition of anonymity.

• December 12, 2013, began on a happy note for members of two Yemeni tribes as they celebrated the union of a young couple. After the wedding, a convoy of men took off to escort the bride to her new home. Twelve of them never made it.

• The bombing of wedding parties revealed much about the directionless and aimless war in Afghanistan.

• This is important because the exclusion of Palestinians from public opinion polling in Israel is actually quite common–though it’s not always reported clearly. A recent Washington Post article (7/29/14) ran with a headline proclaiming, “Israelis Support Netanyahu and Gaza War, Despite Rising Deaths on Both Sides.” The Post cited various polls demonstrating support for the Israeli government’s current campaign in Gaza:

• The brutal Hannibal procedure seems to me to break all rules of war. It should be thrown out of the window and never used again in Gaza.

• Israel says Hamas has fired six rockets across the border since the 72-hour ceasefire ended on Friday morning.

• Prior to Russian President Vladimir Putin and China blocking Obama’s wish to send NATO planes into the Syria conflict, relations between Obama and Putin were pretty good.

• U.S. forces launched a second wave of air strikes against Islamic extremists near Arbil in northern Iraq on Friday, destroying a militant convoy and killing a mortar team, the Pentagon said.

• Obama has authorized targeted air strikes on Islamic State to protect US personnel. He also authorized air drops of humanitarian aid to members of the Yazidi minority who fled to the mountains and Christians as well.

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday told visiting US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel that India would like to work with US defence majors on a joint development and co-production model as part of Delhi’s efforts to achieve self-reliance and reduce arms import.

• Most historians and military experts have since concluded that the second attack on American warships did not occur, many blaming misread sonar pings. “Review of action makes many recorded contacts and torpedoes appear doubtful,” the Maddox commanding officer reportedly communicated after evading the alleged torpedo attacks. “Freak weather effects and overeager sonar men many have accounted for many reports.”

• I assume, in jest, that at least a tiny part of the media blackout over the “anti-terrorist” wonton brutalities against civilians in southeastern Ukraine (Novorossya) may be the result of the decidedly unsexy quality of the fascist cohort participating in the Kiev junta’s campaign there. Foot soldiers of Svoboda and Right Sector paramilitary army (the Kiev junta’s so-called National Guard, formed as a volunteer army after the coup) look comically lumpen. Moreover, they feel like a postmodern pastiche of the original Nazis—and so does their cult, a virtual fan club, of Stepan Bandera, the Galician butcher who notoriously collaborated with the Axis forces in the extermination of Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, and other undesirables in the East. Ideologically, they seem unreal, as though they had just crawled out of a deep bomb hole in history, which had not been quite repaired in the post war, absurdly calling out for “Glory to Ukraine.” A glimpse at fascist-parade photographs and videos of their subterranean, wormy faces set in the bully’s obstinate scowl, their heads shaven kapo style, hobnail-booted and pudgily stuffed in fascist-regulation black, makes one think of hastily rounded up layabouts as extras for an implausible B-movie about an improbable skin-head warfare in a high school anywhere in the USA. Despite their obvious fantasies, Aryan warriors headed for Valhalla they are not. So, if they can’t be advertised as shining knights in America’s democracy armor or as specimen of a superior brand of military men, why were these retrogrades recruited to lead the Western-backed “pro-democracy” crusade in the Kiev Maidan and its aftermath?

• Western influence on conflict resolution processes in Africa and other parts of the world is usually associated with anarchy and regime change. According to the grapevine, US foreign relations agenda is driven by the CIA whose main aim is to puppetise political leaders in the world to embrace and advance American interests. Where such efforts are rejected, the US cunningly orchestrates regime change to either cause total chaos in a country or ensure a leader of their choice gets to the helm of political power. The modus operandi involves luring targets with cash handouts and/or pledges of donor funding.

Transparency Reporting

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Thursday urged US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden to watch his “physical security” if he travels abroad after Russia gave him a residence permit.

Finance

• The group, named CIA Project, claims evidence that the cryptocurrency is made by the NSA or the CIA.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The American Legislative Exchange Council, or “ALEC,” met in Dallas on July 30 for its annual meeting. ALEC brings together state legislators and corporate lobbyists to vote on “model” legislation behind closed doors, before those bills are introduced in state houses across the country, stripped of their ALEC origins. As the Kansas City Star has noted, what happens at ALEC meetings “provides a preview for the next state sessions” in legislatures around the country.

Censorship

• Vietnam strongly objects to a censorship order issued by Australia’s Victoria State Supreme Court concerning the Australian-style polymer note printing case, Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Hai Binh said on Friday.

• Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales has revealed new details about what he describes as the site’s “censorship” under the EU’s “right to be forgotten” laws.

• Why would the FCC even contemplate allowing such a thing? In January, a Washington appeals court handed a big victory to Verizon, which had sued over FCC rules requiring providers to handle all Internet traffic equally.

Privacy

• The US National Security Agency is struggling to attract top technology workers after revelations of widespread eavesdropping practices damaged its reputation.

• In the cyber age, no website is completely secure and our data is open for everyone to pry upon. Whether it’s a hacking incident or the case of the NSA snooping on our mails – nothing is confidential. In such an era, it just makes sense to build a more secure Web.

• How hard is it to hack into satellite communications? Not that hard, according to researcher Ruben Santamarta of Seattle-based security company IOActive. He’s found a number of flaws in several widely-used satellite communication (SATCOM) terminals, the ground-based devices that communicate with orbiting satellites.

• Speaking at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas yesterday (August 7), Santamarta showed how SATCOM devices work and what kinds of flaws, including hard-coded credentials, backdoors and insecure and undocumented protocols, are present in them.

• The National Security Agency (NSA) now has access to virtually all online and mobile communications, as well as most credit card transactions, conducted in or through the U.S. The NSA is also tapping into the most popular smartphone applications, including Angry Birds, Google Maps, and Twitter. However, the NSA is far from the only entity treading on personal privacy to achieve its objectives; the private sector is teeming with examples of companies obtaining personal user data through questionable means and deploying it in even more questionable ways.

• A killer combination of rapidly advancing technology and a desire for greater privacy among the public should condemn current surveillance state to an historical anachronism, according to PGP creator Phil Zimmermann.

• In an extended talk at Defcon 22 in Las Vegas, Zimmermann said it might seem as though the intelligence agencies have the whip hand at the moment but mankind had faced this situation before. He also said the abolition of slavery and absolute monarchy, and the achievement for civil rights, also once looked unlikely but were achieved.

• Berlin has asked all foreign diplomatic missions to provide names of secret service agents working in Germany, news weekly Der Spiegel reported on Friday, amid a rift with Washington over allegations of US spying.

• Whistle-blowers come in packs, so it’s a wonder no one followed the example of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden for so long. Now, there seems to be a second leaker, and he or she is, like Snowden, feeding information to the press rather than peddling it to foreign intelligence services. It’s a sign that there’s a flaw in the U.S. approach to national security.

• After WikiLeaks published its trove of U.S. military and diplomatic documents in 2010, copycat sites sprang up throughout the world. Even established media outlets set up their own. The information released on these Web pages was not always sent in by whistle-blowers. I was present at the birth of YanukovychLeaks, the Ukrainian site where documentation plundered from former president Viktor Yanukovych’s abandoned residence was published. The “leaks” component in the names, however, pointed to the original project spearheaded by Julian Assange.

• Earlier this week on the social news and media aggregation website Reddit, the user “PhineasFisher” revealed that he had hacked into the central servers of the spying software company FinFisher, and discovered they had been assisting oppressive Middle Eastern regimes in Egypt and Bahrain to spy on journalists and activists since the first Arab Spring.

• Phineas released his 40GB cache of plundered files to the open Internet, which revealed that the company had installed their spyware on close to 80 machines within both countries, including those belonging to several prominent human rights lawyers, as well as leaders of the opposition forces who have been jailed since 2010.

• Last year’s Defcon event saw blatant anger directed at the feds after Edward Snowden’s revelatory leaks about the National Security Agency’s metadata collection efforts ignited a global firestorm. But this year is different. The relationship between Defcon organizers and the feds has entered a cooling off period.

• The Australian government announced new anti-terrorism measures this week, in response to the alleged involvement of Australian citizens with extremist groups in countries including Syria and Iraq. Quietly omitted from the briefing at which those changes were announced, but separately leaked to the press this week, were the government’s plans to introduce mandatory data retention requirements for Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

• In the post-Snowden era, many people have come to believe that the only way to maintain privacy is through encrypting everything. (Well, as long as your encryption doesn’t use the flawed RSA algorithm that gave the NSA a backdoor.) A fast-moving session at the Black Hat 2014 conference challenged the assumption that encryption equals safety. Thomas Ptacek, co-founder of Matasano Security, noted that “nobody who implements cryptography gets it completely right,” and went on to demonstrate that fact in detail.

• And in the United Kingdom, wiretaps are approved by the Home Secretary — an executive official. It would be as if our own attorney general could approve the FBI’s wiretap requests. Perhaps even more notably, the Netherlands has the highest rate of wiretapping of any European country — Dutch police can tap any phone they like, so long as the crime under investigation carries at least a three-year jail term.

• Perhaps a whispered conversation between two people might still be private in the U.S., but little else – not even kids playing “Angry Birds” — escapes the monitors at the National Security Agency, according to both a new report from a private data firm and a prominent U.S. Senator.

• Russia is changing the way people use internet in the country. In a recent round of preventive measures taken by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, a new law requires Russians to identify themselves before logging on to public Wi-Fi hotspots. The decree was signed by Medvedev on July 31 but was publicly announced Friday, according to Reuters.

• Russia further tightened its control of the internet, requiring people using public Wi-Fi hotspots provide identification, a policy that prompted anger from bloggers and confusion among telecom operators on how it would work.

• Most terrorists and spy agencies are aware not to use cell or Internet communication for their devious plots. They know cell phones can be turned on remotely.

• The National Security Agency secretly tried to delete part of a public court transcript after believing one of its lawyers may have accidentally revealed classified information in a court case over alleged illegal surveillance.

• Following a recent hearing in the ongoing Jewel v. NSA case, in which the Electronic Frontier Foundation is challenging NSA’s ability to surveil foreign citizen’s U.S.-based email and social media accounts, the government informed U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White it believed one of its attorneys mistakenly revealed classified information.

• Maybe Keith “Haystack” Alexander, who sold this country the pipe dream of mass surveillance and is now raking in the profits of fear and incompetence in the private sector. A modest man, he refuses to confirm his World Record Revolving Door fees of a million a month. “That number was inflated from the beginning,” he said.

• Of course, why would any self-respecting Russian hacker want to work for Haystack? Especially after Alexander’s old gang at the NSA got wiped out by a team of American techies in a friendly game of cyberwar.

• For those who tend to worry about the fate of their identities in small town Russia, the Times has some tips on re-thinking your password(s).

• The chat and instant-messaging service Goldman Sachs and five other banks are close to adopting has CIA-like encryption powers that could make life difficult for regulators, The Post has learned.

• The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court on Friday ordered the release of a partially declassified court opinion, which explains the government’s justification for the collection and surveillance of bulk telephone records by the National Security Agency.

• Brazil is considering a law that would force U.S. companies like Google to store and keep data on its citizens only within Brazil’s borders – not at Google’s U.S. servers. Let’s call that data protectionism. Pandora, meet the NSA. This isn’t a story about Brazil. It’s a story about the future of technology, and about a lot of money.

Civil Rights

• Ahead of the delayed release of a US Senate report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) torture system, in place under the previous George W. Bush administration, the Observer revealed that the UK government has approached its US counterparts to censor information regarding Britain’s involvement in rendition and torture through the use of the Indian Ocean air base of Diego Garcia.

• Mr. Wides tells Paul Jay the Watergate scandal exposed a pattern of a White House above the law and paved the way to exposure of CIA assassinations plots and illegal actions

• The silliest legacy of the Watergate affair was the habit of attaching the suffix “gate” to any action anyone wanted to inflate into something terrible. Silly and unfortunate, because even the term “Watergate” diminished the seriousness of President Richard Nixon’s crimes.

• With the president’s blessing, the CIA has put itself in charge of determining whether the materials cited in the SSCI report can be declassified. As is Obama’s default leadership mode, he is absent from this battlefield, having expressed his full confidence in Brennan, who is orchestrating the PR campaign to discredit the unreleased report. In Humpty Dumpty’s power narrative, the CIA comes out on top.

• Whether it’s Democrats raising money from their base over the threat of impeachment or Republicans suing the president, the parties have this much in common: They’re both more interested in pursuing partisan, short-term advantage than they are in building consensus and solving national problems that require immediate attention.

• In an article released on August 4, the Associated Press (AP) revealed a plan financed by USAID (United States Agency for International Development) to recruit Cuban youths and organize them to act against the government.

• The agency repeatedly has refused to release certain records even though information is not classified, arguing that it needs to be treated as classified anyway, experts said. In reaction to the ongoing CIA-Senate spat, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the redactions include material already published in the Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse in 2009.

• I think the American people would expect nothing less of their government. These events took place. I am a witness. However many black lines President Obama or his editors try to draw over this report, the truth will not go away.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Only one portion of the FCC’s network neutrality rules survived a federal appeals court decision in January, and all four major US carriers have just been accused of violating it.

• Just as the FCC released more than 1.4GB worth of net neutrality comments, President Barack Obama clarified his own thoughts on the proposed rules.

• During Tuesday’s U.S.-Africa business forum, the president took a strong stance against net neutrality.

• The FCC is slated to close the written comment window for the net neutrality proceeding on September 10th, but that doesn’t mean that the FCC is going to make up its mind anytime soon. In fact, it doesn’t even mean that the FCC will be done hearing from the public. Technically, the public can continue to comment, and the FCC, if it decides to do so, can continue to listen to Americans who speak out against proposed rules that would allow Internet providers to discriminate against how we access parts of the Net.

DRM

• Netflix has surpassed HBO in subscriber revenue, according to a status update from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Wednesday. The company is now pulling in $1.146 billion compared to HBO’s $1.141 billion, and it boasts 50.05 million subscribers, according to its second-quarter earnings reported in July.

• Readers of the New York Times will have to steel themselves this weekend, as the unseemly brawl between Hachette and Amazon erupts on to the tranquil pages of the Grey Lady. Perhaps the most incendiary item in Sunday’s edition is due to be a full-page ad paid for by a group of bestselling authors – and backed by over 900 other writers – calling on Amazon “in the strongest possible terms to stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business”.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Another day, another abuse of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions to stop things that have nothing whatsoever to do with copyright. As pointed out by Slashdot, the Hackaday site recently had a post about how to clone some Tektronix application modules for its MSO2000 line of oscilloscopes. The post explained a simple hack to enable the application module to do a lot more.

• Senator Joe Biden plagiarized a campaign speech and became Vice President of the United States. Senator John Walsh, D-Mont., plagiarized a final paper and may have ended his political career. What’s the difference?

• On Thursday, Walsh dropped his bid to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Montana. He has served in the Senate since February, when he was appointed to replace Max Baucus, who was named ambassador to China. His campaign was already doing badly against that of his Republican challenger, Representative Steve Daines, when two weeks ago the New York Times reported that he plagiarized much of the final paper for his master’s degree at the U.S. Army War College.

• Old wounds were reopened this week when Wikipedia released its first-ever transparency report, which cited a monkey selfie among its recent takedown requests.

• Community’s decision on whether to keep or remove the photo could have ramifications as to who holds copyright to pictures posted online

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