● 08.12.14

● Links 12/8/2014: Chromebooks Surge, OpenGL in the Headlines

Posted in News Roundup at 8:57 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I have tried and enjoyed a number of great Linux distributions over the years. Some were more popular than others. But the one thing they all have in common is each provides the end user with hidden benefits and unexpected disadvantages over proprietary desktop operating systems.

• In this article, I’ll explore what make the Linux desktop a superb fit for some users while providing thoughts on overcoming the challenges had by others.

• When it comes to control systems, a common question has long been: Is Linux inherently more secure than Windows? Being a fan of Linux/Unix systems, I desperately want to answer “yes” to this question. During the 1980s and 1990s, so much of the work I was involved in ran under Unix. These days I run Linux on my home computer, and once a year I boot up a Windows XP virtual machine running under Virtual Box, to run my tax software. In the office, I rant about the lousy Windows operating system (OS) and ask why the world doesn’t switch to Linux. And as much as I hate to admit it, as a system integrator I am mostly locked into dealing with Microsoft’s flavor of the month operating system because of customer standards and the tools available.

• From the appearance of “Brain,” which is recognized as the first computer virus, in 1986, to Stuxnet to the Zotob worm (the virus that knocked 13 of DaimlerChrysler’s U.S. automobile manufacturing plants offline), one thing all these viruses have in common is that they were directed at Microsoft’s operating systems. However, according to Zone-H (an archive of defaced websites), in a statistics report for the period 2005-2007: “In the past the most attacked operating system was Windows, but many servers were migrated from Windows to Linux… Therefore the attacks migrated as well, as Linux is now the most attacked operating system with 1, 485,280 defacements against 815,119 in Windows systems (numbers calculated since 2000).”

• Our top story tonight on this Monday August 11, 2014 is Arstechnica.com’s hands-on review of a Linux-powered AR-15. Elsewhere, Matt Hartley discusses the pros and cons of running Linux; David Anderson attempts to answer the is Linux more secure than Windows question; and Bryan Lunduke posts his opinion of KDE Plasma. And that’s not all.

Desktop

• Google’s Chromebook might not be setting the consumer world on fire yet but its stocks are set to rise, with new research predicting sales of Chromebooks will reach 5.2 million units in 2014, a 79% increase from 2013,

• By 2017, sales of Chromebooks are set to nearly triple to reach 14.4 million units, with the main driver being the US education market, which currently accounts for nearly 85% of all sales.

• David Andrade, the CIO of Bridgeport Public Schools in Connecticut, has deployed 11,000 Chromebooks over the past year and plans to add another 5,000 in the next 12 months. It’s a major deployment, but not unusual.

• The Chromebook 13 is Acer’s newest venture with Google for a Chrome OS laptop. Making this Chromebook attractive to us is its NVIDIA Tegra K1 SoC, which features four 2.1GHz processing cores plus its fifth companion core. I’ve been using the Tegra K1 extensively with the Jetson TK1 ARM development board and the performance is terrific out of the quad-core Cortex-A15 chip with Kepler-grade graphics.

• Nvidia is touting the graphical performance of its K1 processor, which outperforms the Intel and Samsung-equipped Chromebooks in Nvidia’s multitasking and benchmark tests. The company points to the quad-core processor design (most Chromebooks have only dual-core processors) and more powerful graphics processing unit as differentiators in the Chromebook world. Demos of the 3D rendering capabilities were impressive in person, and Nvidia’s multitasking demo (which comprised of four open windows, streaming music, and running a script in a Google Sheet) did show the Chromebook 13 to be faster than an Intel-equipped model. Despite these impressive performance feats, Nvidia is confident that the Chromebook 13 will last longer away from a wall outlet than any other Chromebook on the market. It is also Google Hangouts Optimized, which allows for high definition Hangouts and multitasking at the same time.

• Acer officially pulled the wraps off their latest Chromebook, which features none other than a Nvidia Tegra K1 processor, and boasts a battery life that blows away any other model on the current line-up of Chromebooks. There are three model options for the new Acer Chromebook 13, starting with the $279 model which has a 13.3 inch 1366 x 768 display.

• These are the 5 Linux distributions that I would recommend to new Linux users and to people who just want to use their computer as a computer and who aren’t that interested in getting too deep and dirty with their operating system.

• This list could easily have been the 10 easiest to use Linux distributions but 5 is a good number because it shows new users just where to begin yet still provides a limited amount of choice.

Server

• Should you deploy Linux on the mainframe?

• There are plenty of positives and negatives that make it clear that a Linux mainframe isn’t right for all IT shops. Two experts go head to head on how to decide what’s right for your data center: Linux workloads on a mainframe or running them in a distributed server environment.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• While the OpenGL 4.5 specification is fresh off the press and we haven’t even seen the Khronos SIGGRAPH announcement yet, NVIDIA has already made public their OpenGL 4.5 beta drivers for Linux and Windows.

• Samuel Pitoiset continues making steady, great progress on his Google Summer of Code project as a student developer reverse-engineering and implementing NVIDIA hardware performance counters within the open-source Nouveau driver.

• For months now he’s had a solid understanding of how NVIDIA’s performance counters operate and has been working towards exposing them in a NVPerfKit-like open-source manner and exposing them to OpenGL developers. Samuel’s latest update revealed his MP counter work was up to a prototype stage while today he has a new blog post concerning the approaches to exposing the performance counters in Nouveau.

• With the recently released AMD A10-7800 Kaveri APU I carried out some new benchmarks comparing the open and closed-source Linux GPU driver performance for AMD with their Catalyst and RadeonSI Gallium3D solutions. When running the open-source Ubuntu driver tests, multiple versions of Mesa and the Linux kernel were used.

• While OpenGL 4.5 was announced today, Mesa developers are still battling for OpenGL 4.0 compliance but at least they are now able to scratch off another GL4 feature.

Applications

• XBMC, an open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media that is available for multiple platforms, has just reached version 13.2 RC1.

• Fotoxx 14.08, a free, open source Linux photo editing and collection management program that’s easy to use and install, is now available for download.

• The Fotoxx developers provide numerous updates for their application, and even if not all of them are very important, it’s a good idea to get the new version of the software.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

Games

• The Witcher 2 was released for Linux earlier this year but the quality of the initial Linux port was very troubling. Since then, the developers have been working to improve the Linux version of The Witcher 2 ahead of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

• A new release of Stunt Rally is out, an open-source racing game powered by VDrift with Bullet physics and uses OGRE for rendering.

• Linux has commonly been known as a platform with a distinct lack of AAA gaming titles, but now, 2K Games fiscal results have leaked that they will make the third game in the series “Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!” available to Linux users on launch day.

• A new Steam Beta update has been released and it brings quite a few changes, but this time it’s not just minor modifications. The developers have actually improved the interface and they’ve implemented an interesting option for the library.

• Garry’s mod is one of the most sold games for Linux on Steam, so I’ve decided to publish this review of the game, first published on devtome.com

• Garry’s Mod, developed by Facepunch is without a doubt one of the most enjoyable and hilarious games that I have ever played. Out of the box, the game is perhaps one of the ultimate sandbox games available anywhere. You spawn in the middle of an open area that you choose and you can spawn in just about any item or NPC that you can think of. This game is also probably one of the best physics simulators available. The entire game revolves around physics. In this game you are able to do whatever you heart desires and although I say that with a lot of different games, I truly mean it with Garry’s Mod. Whatever you want. If you want to build an airplane out of a bathtub and some planks of wood, then be my guest. You can simply spawn in the materials that you want and then use tools to “weld” them together. Using weight tools you can make these items very light, which will allow them to become airborne. This game definitely deserves lots of praise.

• In years past, the problem was far worse than it is today. It used to be that if someone asked you “Should I use Linux for my home computer?” your response required a small mountain of caveats: “Yes, but there’s a big learning curve”, “Yes, but only if there are good drivers in the kernel for your hardware” or, my personal poison ivy, “Yes, as long as you don’t need to play video games.”

• PlayOnLinux, a software that uses Wine (Wine is not an emulator) and that allows users to easily install and use numerous games and apps designed to run with Microsoft Windows, has reached version 4.2.4.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Certainly not for any sensible definition of a project “dying” that I can think of. Now when we go back and look at my previous posts on this subject it is all too easy to think “something is wrong with the way we are now”.

• Currently a KDE Sprint is taking place – which means 43 people meet in Randa (Switzerland) and dedicate 7 days in a row solely to KDE. Some topics are KDE Frameworks 5, gluon and many multimedia related topics like Amarok, kdenlive and KMix. I am attending to work on three main matters.

• Volume controls. Based on PulseAudio. For Plasma 5.

• I’m so happy with what we have so far! The texts are just great, and the code examples will be updated as they are updated in their repositories. So if people planning a booth at a Qt Contributor Conference, for instance, wanted to print up some copies of the book, it will be completely up-to-date. Our goal is committing every part of the book so that it can be auto-fetched for reading as an epub, pdf, text file or printed as a book.

• Some of it was… bigger things, such as the toolbars in KDE’s office suite, Calligra. Specifically, Calligra Words. The toolbars, by default, are on the right hand side. No biggy, they’re movable (and collapsible) after all. But they’re also really…wide, with lots of empty space.

Distributions

New Releases

• DEFT, a Linux distribution based on Linux kernel 3.x and the DART (Digital Advanced Response Toolkit) with the best freeware Computer Forensic tools, is now at version 8.1.

• DEFT developers are usually taking their time when it comes to updating the operating system. This is just a maintenance upgrade, which means that no new features have been added, only various fixes.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat last month released the latest version of Inktank Ceph Enterprise, their object and block storage product based on the upstream open source Ceph project. It’s notable not only as the first release since Red Hat acquired the two-year-old startup, Inktank, in April, but also for two key features that help open up a new market for Ceph.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• The first beta version of Elementary OS 0.3 Freya, based on Ubuntu 14.04.1 Trusty Tahr LTS, has been officially released, using Kernel 3.13 and the drivers and graphics stack of Ubuntu 14.04. Also, it has support for UEFI and the developers say that the Ubiquity installer for Mac computer will be available until the final release of Freya.

• Elementary OS is an open source operating system designed with an emphasis on… well, design. The Linux-based operating system is designed to be fast, versatile and powerful. But what really sets it apart from the crowd is its user interface which is more than a little inspired by Apple’s OS X.

• It’s been exactly one year since the release of the second version of elementary OS. On this, the day of our Lunaversary, we’re proud to make the first beta of elementary OS Freya publicly available for developers and testers.

Devices/Embedded

• The Pineapple is a small-form-factor device that runs on Linux and is loaded with tools to help enable penetration testers to gain access to the WiFi networks of their targets. The new Mark V device improves on the predecessor Mark IV device by including both the Atheros AR9331 and Realtek RTL8187 wireless chipsets.

• Storm Energy has upgraded its “SunSniffer” solar plant monitoring system to a Linux-based platform running on a Raspberry Pi SBC.

Phones

Ballnux

• Reported images were leaked today to GSM Arena and show what the device could quite possibly look like. From the front the device resembles the Note 3 quite closely. However the back and sides do seem to be notably different from previous models.

• Here’s what the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 may look like. While looking very similar to the front of the current Note 3 the back and sides look new.

• The phone appears to retain the plastic back with leather-like texture but the sides look similar to the ones on the yet-unannounced Samsung Galaxy Alpha and appear metal.

Android

• Android-x86, a port of the famous Android operating system for the x86 platform, has reached version 4.4 R1 and is now ready for testing.

• Android is actually using a modified Linux kernel underneath that interface. Some users even go as far as calling it a Linux distribution, although the consensus seems to be that it’s not. In any case, with some tweaking, a few developers managed to port the operating system to the PC, for the X86 platforms.

• Recently we have seen a number of ‘game changer’ moves by smartphone companies all looking to start the new trend. The most recent was the launch of the OnePlus One as the “Flagship Killer” which attempted to offer high spec smartphones at a rock-bottom price. In reality the price was simply half the price you would expect to pay for a Samsung Galaxy S5 or LG G3. So although this did change what users (and probably manufacturers) expect a top of the range smartphone to cost it did not really set the smart world alight.

• The Android OS and phone experience wouldn’t be complete without the apps at the Google Play Store. Then there are two classifications of apps, those that you need to pay for, and those that are free to download. Free apps are more popular for obvious reasons.

• Clear Image is your camera on clarity steroids. It’s your camera over 9000. Once you switch on the new Clear Image mode in the Camera app, nothing but awesomeness will be captured. 10 individual photos are stitched together for a final super high-res photo when you snap a shot. Through interlacing and compression algorithms, the camera improves clarity, reduces noise in low light, and adds detail that other cameras cannot. But this is not all. Unlike other photo stitching software, Clear Image minimizes file sizes while maximizing for quality.

• The “Console OS” project to make Android 4.4 dual-boot on x86-based hardware has surpassed its Kickstarter goal, and has added Minnowboard Max SBC support.

• On the eve of the conclusion of its successful Kickstarter funding campaign, project founder Christopher Price announced that the Atom E3800-based Minnowboard Max single board computer had been added to the project’s list of supported devices. This marks a broadening of the ambitious Android-on-x86 dual-boot fork, which initially appeared to be focused on consumer tablets, PCs, laptops, netbooks, and 2-in-1 devices. With support for the Minnowboard Max SBC, the scope widens significantly to include a wide range of DIY projects and non-consumer applications.

• This means that future mobile devices using our 64-bit Tegra K1 chip can offer PC-class performance for standard apps, extended battery life and the best web browsing experience – all while opening new possibilities for gaming, content creation and enterprise apps.

• Selfies are the latest trend around. From Hollywood stars to political leaders, no one is immune to the selfie virus. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are flooded with people posing in front of their smartphone cameras trying to convey that taking a picture of yourself isn’t such a bad thing after all.

• PC owners that would like to add a little Android to their system might be interested to know that the latest release of the Android x86 software now allows the Google Android 4.4 operating system to be installed on desktop PC, notebooks and tablets with ease.

Free Software/Open Source

• For my fellow academics, the question is: Can open source get you a job? My answer is: By itself it probably won’t get you a lectureship, but all my group have been able to get good jobs in the high-tech industry, or science. I think the public exposure of the open source way has helped. I’m very proud of them.

• “FOSS programming is fun — it’s rewarding,” enthused Linux Rants blogger Mike Stone. “If you create something great, people recognize your name, your brilliance.” Documentation, on the other hand, “is none of that. When you’re doing a project for fun, it’s hard to be motivated to do something that’s not fun or rewarding.” As a result, “FOSS documentation will always lag behind FOSS software.”

• A decade ago, OpenStreetMap launched as a free, open-source alternative to the other mapping tools you may encounter on the internet. Turns out that the collaborative experiment worked exceptionally well, and thanks to a new site, you can see for yourself how the Wikipedia of mapping has covered the whole planet.

Events

• If last year’s inaugural All Things Open (ATO) conference in Raleigh was primarily an event for developers and admins, that’ll be even more true when ATO II cranks up on October 22 at the Raleigh Convention Center. At least that’s how it appears when scanning the tentative schedule posted on the ATO website. There’s also much on tap for management types, but the main focus is on developers and system administrators.

• One of the biggest OpenStack conferences of the year is coming up on September 16 in Silicon Valley. The OpenStack Silicon Valley 2014 confab is a community event to be held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has always done interesting conceptual work with the Firefox browser and its other projects, and only some of the concepts actually make it into production. In the spirit of experimenting, a couple of Mozilla developers are playing with concepts for what the future of browsing might be like.

SaaS/Big Data

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

Databases

Education

• I learned a long time ago not to feed the trolls, especially if their purview derives from administration positions in and around education…teachers in the trenches, so to speak.

BSD

• While Broadwell is right around the corner and Intel’s open-source Linux developers are already working on Skylake graphics support, the DragonFlyBSD crew has just managed Haswell graphics support for their DRM driver ported from FreeBSD that in turn was ported from an earlier version of the Linux kernel.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Coreboot is now able to boot the MinnowBoard MAX, the latest x86 mini single-board computer.

Public Services/Government

• Turin’s local authorities have decided to switch to open source and entirely ditch all the Microsoft products, saving alot of money to the local government.

• The mission of this move is to get rid of proprietary software, make Turin one of the first Italian open source city and save six million euros. Six million euros!!! Yes, it is a very high amount, isn’t it?

Openness/Sharing

• Brother team Jared and JR Nielsen are the puppet masters behind The Hello World Program, a video and tutorial series hosted by a penguin, a snake, a fox, and a robot. They bring to life the learning and fun of open source programming, web development, and computer science. Plus, all of the content is licensed under Creative Commons—so if you have kids or young friends, or if you are an educator, you are encouraged to share and use this material to teach others.

Open Data

• A decade ago, OpenStreetMap launched as a free, open-source alternative to the other mapping tools you may encounter on the internet. Turns out that the collaborative experiment worked exceptionally well, and thanks to a new site, you can see for yourself how the Wikipedia of mapping has covered the whole planet.

Programming

• McSema has been officially open-sourced as an advanced program for translating x86 machine code into LLVM bitcode.

• McSema is the latest program trying to allow taking x86 binaries and turning them back into LLVM bitcode. When the program is back into an LLVM bitcode state, it’s theoretically possible to then re-target the code to another architecture or apply various program analysis tools and other utilities that are written to run against LLVM bitcode. Another advantage is it’s easier to most in manually reading LLVM bitcode than x86 machine code.

• The beauty of open sourcing development resources is that a single library or wrapper, once released to the world, can be integrated and built out by thousands of other people. And because the future of any new platform depends on what people can do with it, over the past few months Leap Motion has released a steady stream of open source assets and examples to help devs get started with our v2 tracking beta.

Standards/Consortia

• Graphics standards body the Khronos Group has called on industry players to help draft the next generation of the OpenGL spec, a major rewrite that’s expected to help unify the OpenGL development model for desktop PCs, mobile devices, and the web.

Leftovers

Security

• Chip makers are adding more security layers to protect mobile device users from malicious attacks and code injection

• Nearly a century ago, the advent of commercial radio broadcasts gave birth to the first generation of hackers.

• [...]

• Silvio Cesare, whose day job is at information-security firm Qualys, showed that anyone with a laptop, a device such as a USB TV tuner and software such as GNU Radio can “capture” transmissions between a wireless key fob that disables a home alarm system as the homeowner arrives.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• With a series of air strikes beginning Friday and continuing through the weekend, the United States has gone to war again in Iraq. This new imperialist military adventure has been launched in defiance of overwhelming popular opposition and without a shred of legal or constitutional authority.

• The decision to launch a new war was made by a handful of strategists of US imperialist policy within the military/intelligence apparatus, in league with the corporate and financial elite. It was made behind the backs of the American people, who have absolutely no say in the policies, including going to war, that impact their lives.

• Yemen, Aug 11: The wedding party goof up by USA drones in Yemen last year continues to chart the top headlines of news channels even now, especially when the secrets of the airstrike are out. It was a goof-up for sure and that was re-instated when the US government did not retract on its statement that they hit the right convoy and killed the right person, including a terrorist Shawqi al-Badani. If the wedding attire of the members of the ill-fated convoy is not wnough, US top officials should have seen the Yemeni tribes (to which the dead belonged to) ravage the local municipalty office.

• President Obama may want us to sympathize with patriotic torturers, he may turn on whistleblowers like a flesh-eating zombie, he may have lost all ability to think an authentic thought, but I will say this for him: He knows how to mark the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin fraud like a champion.

• It’s back in Iraq, Jack! Yackety yack! Obama says the United States has fired missiles and dropped food in Iraq — enough food to feed 8,000, enough missiles to kill an unknown number (presumably 7,500 or fewer keeps this a “humanitarian” effort). The White House told reporters on a phone call following the President’s Thursday night speech that it is expediting weapons to Iraq, producing Hellfire missiles and ammunition around the clock, and shipping those off to a nation where Obama swears there is no military solution and only reconciliation can help. Hellfire missiles are famous for helping people reconcile.

• On August 5, The New York Times published a highly problematic article “Civilian or Not? New Fight in Tallying the Dead from Gaza Conflict”, that presented information supporting dubious Israeli government claims that 900 Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza, or around half of all Palestinian killed in Gaza in Israel’s current offensive, were “terrorists.” This assertion flies in the face of consensus reporting over the last month indicating much higher Palestinian civilian casualty figures.

• The human-rights group reports the U.S. military systematically ignored evidence of torture and unlawful killings in Afghanistan as recently as last year.

• [JURIST] The US military systematically covered up or disregarded “abundant and compelling evidence” of war crimes in Afghanistan, Amnesty International (AI) [advocay website] reported [PDF] Monday. The report, entitled “Afghanistan: Left in the dark: Failures of accountability for civilian casualties caused by international military operations in Afghanistan,” examines the record of accountability for civilian deaths caused by international military operations in the five-year period from 2009 to 2013. The report focuses, in particular, on the poor performance of the US government in investigating possible war crimes and in prosecuting those suspected of criminal responsibility for such crimes.

• Thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed by United States and NATO military forces since 2001, but, according to Amnesty International, there have been only six cases in which the US military has “criminally prosecuted” officers for “unlawfully killing civilians.”

• Amnesty International has accused the US military of a lack of accountability for Afghan civilian deaths. A newly released report finds that thousands of civilians have been left without justice. DW examines the issue.

• The US military fails to hold its soldiers accountable for unlawful killings and other abuses in Afghanistan, an Amnesty International report finds. The rights group’s Horia Mosadiq discusses the issue with DW.

• [...]

• In a DW interview, Horia Mosadiq, Amnesty International’s Afghanistan Researcher, explains why she believes the US military justice system – which mainly relies on soldiers or commanders to report possible human rights violations – is flawed.

• The Obama administration has begun directly providing weapons to Kurdish forces who have started to make gains against Islamic militants in northern Iraq, senior U.S. officials said Monday, but the aid has so far been limited to automatic rifles and ammunition.

• Previously, the U.S. sold arms in Iraq only to the government in Baghdad, some of which would be transferred to the Kurdish forces in the north. The Kurdish peshmerga fighters had been losing ground to Islamic State militants in recent weeks, however.

• “We were sitting at the dinner table last autumn, and my kids started telling me about this game they wanted to play, the latest Call of Duty game, and told me about the guns and missions,” Helgegren told The Local on Friday.

• The U.S. government lends its support and trust to the political leader of a strategic ally only to see that friend turn foe.

• The U.S. government began directly arming Kurdish forces in Iraq who are battling the militant group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), sometimes called ISIL, according to The Associated Press.

• The countries of Europe that are still part of the anachronistic, Cold War-era North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) should listen to the growing voices of anger and alarm among their citizens who recognize that the United States, far from providing them with security, is stirring up conflict all around the globe (not to mention spying on, and probably extorting, their compromised leaders). Particularly in Ukraine, along Russia’s southern border, and in Palestine, these actions pose threats that could ultimately drag Europe into violent conflagrations that have not been seen since the end of World War II, nearly 70 years ago.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Few places in the country are so warm and bright as Mary Wilkerson’s property on the beach near St. Petersburg, Fla., a city once noted in the Guinness Book of World Records for a 768-day stretch of sunny days.

Finance

• It’s long been recognized that the NCAA sports setup is a bit of a scam, in which “student” athletes make various colleges a ridiculous amount of money — none of which actually makes it to the athletes themselves. In many cases, these are barely actually “students” at all. And while some of the athletes may later cash in by going pro, many do not. A few years ago, we wrote about a class action lawsuit brought by basketball player Ed O’Bannon over the fact that his likeness was appearing in an EA video game, and that the NCAA had basically violated antitrust laws in effectively forcing him (and all NCAA athletes) to sign away all such rights for no compensation. The case has gone back and forth over the years, but on Friday Judge Claudia Wilken sided strongly with the players, finding the NCAA had clearly violated antitrust laws.

Privacy

• This is where we are headed – every electronic transaction and every electronic message included in the Government’s data retention plans.

• The US National Security Agency (NSA) has access to virtually all online and mobile communications, as well as most credit card transactions, conducted in or through the US.

• On June 25, the US Supreme Court handed down a resounding landmark ruling in two separate high profile criminal cases, requiring police to first get a warrant to search a person’s cell phone. The ruling is a major victory for the privacy rights& for millions of cell phone users, with the Supreme Court working to update Fourth Amendment search and seizure law to keep pace with technological advances.

• Mobile devices were the epitome of personal devices, and users trusted them with everything from personal data to private communications. Is that perception changing, and if so, what does that mean for mobility?

• The United States government does not want peace in cyberspace, contends cyber-conflict historian Jason Healey…

• A former Amtrak employee has been giving passenger information to the Drug Enforcement Administration in exchange for money for nearly two decades, according to reports from the Whittier Daily News. A total of over $854,460 changed hands over the last 20 years, despite the fact that information relevant to the DEA’s work could have been obtained from Amtrak for free.

• The National Security Agency worked behind the scenes to remove a section of a court transcript after suspecting one of its lawyers inadvertently disclosed secret information in a court case over alleged illegal surveillance.

• It is the world’s third most switched-on nation. But young Swedes say kids should have a choice about their photos being posted online. Do they have a point?

• To many Americans, online eavesdropping by the U.S. National Security Agency is an outrage, a threat to privacy and freedom.

• The creator of an ultra-secure email service once said to be used by Edward Snowden unveiled his next project at a major hacker conference Friday: he and others like him want to change the very nature of email forever.

• Germany is asking foreign diplomatic missions to reveal the names of secret service agents working in the country, a report states. It comes amid the spy row between Berlin and Washington, following revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

• Smartphones from Chinese vendor Xiaomi are collecting and sending their users’ information to a server in China, according to research from F-Secure.

• The security company uncovered the Xiaomi phone’s data collection while investigating widespread concerns about the handsets, it said in a blog post.

• Anonymous is calling on all members to join a global event on 5 November to protest against war crimes, abuse of power and infringement of civil liberties.

• Launched last year, the Million Mask March was organised by the hacktivist group Anonymous to protest at a huge range of issues from government corruption to NSA spying and war crimes.

• Police want the right to access medical records and other confidential data without the need for an individual’s consent, a senior police chief has said.

• Controversially, the data would also include information on domestic violence and abuse towards women.

• It’s been pitched as the most secure smartphone available. But the Blackphone’s security features crumbled at the hands of hackers at the BlackHat security conference, who managed to gain root access without unlocking the handset’s bootloader in less than five minutes.

Civil Rights

• While in Poland, the ECHR concludes, the CIA’s treatment of Zubayah “amounted to torture.” In other words, the precise techniques analyzed and approved by John Yoo and Jay Bybee and used by the CIA in Poland on Zubaydah, amounted to torture.

• California’s U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is right to pressure the Obama administration over its heavy-handed redactions of a report examining “enhanced interrogation” techniques used by the CIA after 9/11.

• Worse, the C.I.A. has delayed release of the report with unreasonable redactions of important and relevant parts that could provide critical details on illegal torture techniques and agency mismanagement of an ill-conceived interrogation program.

• They are calling it the vacation from hell — a trip to Atlantic City that was supposed to include pool-side fun, boardwalk entertainment, and maybe some poker winnings, instead the Binns family from Florida said they were left battered and bruised at the hands of Harrah’s Resort hotel security officers.

• The woman whose videotaped beating by a California Highway Patrol officer sparked outrage says she believes the officer was trying to kill her.

• Allen E. Smith and I are sitting in his black Chevy Avalanche with tinted windows, staring out at a small deli in northwest Fort Lauderdale. It was 1976, Smith tells me. He was 28, an officer in the Fort Lauderdale Police Department working a detail that involved watching certain vulnerable stores for robberies. Sure enough, one night while he was crouching under a tree across the way, a robber overpowered the elderly clerk. Smith caught him coming out the door. The guy had a gun in his waistband. Smith had a shotgun. He pumped it and said, “Freeze!” The guy made like he was reaching for his gun. “So I shot him.”

• The fatal shooting of a black teenager by police sent hundreds of angry residents out of their apartments Saturday in a St. Louis suburb, igniting shouts of “kill the police” during a confrontation that lasted several hours.

• A St. Louis County chapter of the NAACP called for the FBI to look into the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, a predominantly black suburb a few miles north of downtown St. Louis.

• Tensions are high in Ferguson, Missouri and a large police presence is on hand after a teenager was shot to death by a police officer.

• Apparently, the NYPD can’t take a joke.

• Migrant mothers and their young children detained at the border are being denied an opportunity to be released on bond, because of 9/11.

• Department of Justice prosectors are citing a 2003 ruling from former Attorney General John Ashcroft to deny bond to undocumented immigrant mothers and children — many of whom have valid asylum claims — held at a remote detention facility in Artesia, New Mexico that advocates say is ill-equipped to care for children.

• More than 42,000 people signed a petition of the progressive group CREDO addressed to President Barack Obama, asking the Department of Justice to press charges against people involved in spying on Congress.

• The CIA’s admission that a bunch of officials spied on Senate staffers is a prove that the White House has lost control over intelligence agencies, said the critics as quoted by The Hill on-line newspaper.

• President can’t use the lame excuse that fear drove some people to violate the law and torture “folks.” The Geneva Convention Against Torture, to which the Untied States is a signatory, is absolutely clear on this matter. Article Two, Section One reads: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability of any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture.” It seems crystal clear, and one might think a Harvard Law School graduate would get that right. Those who accept the President’s argument that fear made people torture others, should then be expected to understand the fear that drove North Vietnamese to torture American pilots – including Senator John McCain – as a result of years of trauma from relentless and criminal U.S. bombing over years that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and left millions refugees.

• Of course, the response to McLaughlin ought to be “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you release a report like this, it might embarrass folks like John McLaughlin for his role in the torture program. It’s blindingly obvious.” And, really, if McLaughlin is so concerned about how folks might react to this program, perhaps he should have, you know, stopped it.

• Given the way the Obama administration has treated journalists, they might be better off getting celebrities to speak out. Nevertheless, the Freedom of the Press Foundation has gotten 14 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists to speak out against the administration’s terrible treatment of New York Times reporter and author James Risen. The Department of Justice has been trying to force Risen to give the name of a leaker who provided information to him that detailed the government’s effort to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program for a book. The government believes the source to be Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA official, and he’s one of the guys the administration has targeted under the Espionage Act.

• Fourteen Pulitzer Prize winners released statements on Monday in support of New York Times reporter James Risen, who is refusing to testify in the prosecution of a CIA officer accused of leaking classified information about U.S. efforts to undermine Iran’s nuclear program.

• Today, fourteen Pulitzer Prize winners have issued statements in support of journalist James Risen and in protest of the Justice Department’s attempt to force Risen to testify against his sources. Risen has vowed to go to jail rather than give up his source, but the Justice Department has steadfastly refused to drop its pursuit. On Thursday, many of the major US press freedom organizations will hold a press conference in Washington DC and deliver a petition with over 100,000 signatures to the Justice Department, calling on them to do the same.

• A New York Times reporter who could go to jail for not revealing the source of classified information is being honored by a Maine college for courageous journalism.

• The U.S. government, with help from the CIA, is currently looking to obtain biometric data of some 1.1 million known or suspected terrorists, according to secret U.S. government documents obtained by online magazine The Intercept.

• On his blog, he writes how he wants to establish whites-only towns, employing individuals from other cultures and races as spies in an agenda to shape America in his image.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• On Friday, the FCC announced plans to host a bunch of “open internet roundtable discussions” as it continues to explore the rules that it will put in place. That’s a good idea… until you realize that all of the meetings will be held in Washington DC. And, of course, by doing that, it more or less guarantees that the space will be filled by lobbyists and friends, rather than the actual public. EFF is asking the FCC to get out of Washington DC and to talk to real people, rather than just telco insiders — pointing out that it’s done so before and can easily do so again.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is regularly used to remove copyright infringing content from the Internet. In some cases the take-down is legitimate, but in other cases the DMCA is misused and things that are legitimately protected by “fair use” are taken down. Content creators can fight a take down, but doing so is usually a laborious process. Conversely, some content creators and consumers attempt to redefine or expand “fair use” to include any use they wish so they can use source materials without getting permission or complying with the law. But were things always the way they are now?

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