● 08.15.14

● Links 15/8/2014: Reiser4 in Headlines Again, GNOME and KDE Events Finish

Posted in News Roundup at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Officials from Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center announced Wednesday that the base will host a Linux Professional Institute certification training academy, making it the first-ever military installation to offer the program.

• According to a press release sent out from Camp Shelby, Linux — a computer operating system that uses open source software development and distribution model — runs almost 97 percent of supercomputers in the world, including those for scientific research, military, defense intelligence and major corporations.

Desktop

• Linux has progressed quite a bit in recent years to where it has become a better and better alternative for Windows users. If you’re simply tired of Windows, don’t want to pay for new Windows releases, or you’re still running Windows XP, it’s always a good time to take a good look at whether Linux can work for you.

• If you’re still a bit unsure, here are six secrets that Windows users may not know about Linux. Knowing these these six secrets should make you more comfortable trying Linux out. Interested? Let’s get started.

• Finally, Linux needs to take a page from the good ol’ Book Of Jobs and figure out how to convince the consumer that what they truly need is Linux. In their businesses and in their homes — everyone can benefit from using Linux. Honestly, how can the open-source community not pull that off? Linux already has the perfect built-in buzzwords: Stability, reliability, security, cloud, free — plus Linux is already in the hands of an overwhelming amount of users (they just don’t know it). It’s now time to let them know. If you use Android or Chromebooks, you use (in one form or another) Linux.

Server

• When building a public or private cloud, there plenty of options. You can build a cloud stack on almost any operating system, but some Linux-based OSes are ideal for the cloud. It is therefore, no surprise that many cloud systems rely on Linux to power their backends.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Fossetcon is an acronym for Free and Open Source Software Expo and Technology Conference. Fossetcon will be September 11-13th, 2014 in the Rosen Plaza Hotel in Orlando, FL.

Kernel Space

• While the Linux 3.16 kernel is now stable, a few days ago the Reiser4 file-system was finally ported to Linux 3.15.

• Edward Shishkin released Reiser4 for the Linux 3.15.1 kernel last weekend. Besides being ported to the kernel interface changes for Linux 3.15, there’s also two bug-fixes for the out-of-tree file-system. Most of the Reiser4 activity these days continues to just be porting to new kernel versions and bug-fixing. Edward is down to being one of the only main developers left and there’s expected to be no effort to mainline the controversial file-system without the support of a major Linux ISV/IHV.

• A recent announcement was made stating that the Reiser4 file system, successor to the ReiserFS, was ported to the 3.15 Linux kernel. Following the 2006 conviction and incarceration of the mastermind that original conceived this project (Hans Reiser), a few dedicated developers continued supporting this file system despite the odds stacked against them. In the last decade, the Linux kernel has seen newer file systems, most of which are integrated into the mainline kernel tree (i.e. btrfs, ext4, etc.). Reiser4 was rejected for inclusion some time back, and most of its developers moved on (one or more of which are currently working on btrfs).

• Chris Mason at Facebook sent in his Btrfs file-system updates today for the Linux 3.17 merge window but it looks like the pull request is being rejected by Linus Torvalds and held off until Linux 3.18.

• Kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the availability of the first update on top of 3.16.y Linux kernel branch. This is a stable kernel release and the latest version of the kernel as of now given the fact that Linus Torvalds has not opened the merge window for the first release candidate (RC1) of the 3.17 branch yet.

• Ashwin Chaugule of Linaro has announced his experimental kernel implementation of Collaborative Processor Performance Controls (CPPC) that is part of the ACPI 5.1 specification.

• Premier European Open Source Conferences and Co-Located Events Showcase Growth of Linux and Open Source Principles Across Technology Disciplines

Graphics Stack

• With this week’s Catalyst vs. RadeonSI Gallium3D driver comparison for the A10-7800 Kaveri APU with Radeon R7 Graphics, the default driver settings were used since after all it’s what most Linux gamers and desktop users will utilize when running either driver. However, for those wanting to tune their open-source driver to get a bit higher number, enabling HyperZ is still an easy win.

• Earlier this week Intel pushed their BPTC texture compression support into mainline Mesa and now following in those foot steps are the R600g and RadeonSI driver enablement.

• Besides looking at how the raw performance was impacted by using the different scaling governors, the AC system power consumption was monitored and the performance-per-Watt also measured using the Phoronix Test Suite as was the CPU frequency states. This testing is very straight forward so let’s get right to the results.

Applications

• Improve and better manage your web downloads for mirroring, mass grabs or just better control over your files

• Xen Orchestra, the increasingly used web user-interface to the Xen Server and XAPI, is now out with its version 3.5 release while Xen Orchestra 4.0 is entering the developers’ sights.

• Rygel, a home media solution (UPnP AV MediaServer) that allows users to easily share audio, video, and pictures to other devices, is now at version 0.22.3.

• With Rygel, users will be able to browse the media collection from the TV or PS3 on a PC running GNOME, and they will have the possibility to play any of said media.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Leszek Godlewski, the developer that presented this week at GDC Europe on advanced Linux game programming, just shared that Darksiders 2 will be coming to Linux.

• Valve just pushed down a big Steam client update that has a number of Linux improvements along with other general improvements.

• Non-platform-specific changes for the Steam Linux client includes updates to the desktop user interface styles, a major updated to the embedded web browser, and various fixes. The embedded browser update betters the performance and reliability along with having other security and functionality updates. There’s also an assortment of other Big Picture mode enhancements and fixes.

• Linux

• Updated Steam Runtime with support for newer compilers

• Added support for entering custom network settings in Big Picture

• Fixed audio being lost when alt-tabbing

• Fixed crash when doing a voice chat if you did not have a network connection

• Fixed launching SteamVR games

• Earlier this week I wrote about The Witcher 2 Linux port being updated with performance improvements and now just a few days later is yet another beta with the performance continuing to be optimized in order to rectify the sour launch of Witcher 2 on Linux.

• Going on for a while now has been work by Mesa developers on a new GLX extension to help out game developers by supplying hard to determine information in a standardized manner about the Linux graphics drivers and the underlying hardware renderer capabilities. That work is addressed by the GLX_MESA_query_renderer extension which to now has just been supported by the Intel Linux driver but soon will be supported by other Mesa drivers.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The reason for this is that I’m going to finally meet at least two guys whom I consider friends by now (Jens Reuterberg and Andrew Lake) in person for the first time ever!

• The last day of KDE’s Randa Sprint 2014 is almost over and boy am I exhausted.

• In the first few days at Randa as a coding task between meetings I took on porting one of the larger core applications to Qt5 + KF5. Having applications on Qt5 is not only important for when we make the wayland move as they can run natively but it also ups the motivation to add new features into Frameworks and move technology forwards.

• I decided to take on Gwenview because the maintainer, Aurélien, is on a break from KDE and requested somebody took over the task. When I started in KDE Aurélien was one of the coders I most looked up to, so I wanted to pay back and make sure his work lived on.

• What follows is a summary by Cristian Oneț about his work on KMyMoney during the Randa Sprint. A big thanks to all those who made this happen.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Tracker, a semantic data storage for desktop and mobile devices, which uses W3C standards for RDF ontologies and Nepomuk with SPARQL to query and update the data, has just reached version 1.1.2.

• We are moving our production GNOME desktop to new physical hardware. After some discussions and reviewing work loads, we decided for now to stay with GNOME 2. The older server was cloned and was finally moved to the new hardware. The server is 100% solid state drives with 80 hyperthreaded cores. This increased capacity was needed for the next project:

Distributions

• 4MLinux Server Edition, a special distribution based on Busybox, Dropbear, OpenSSH, and PuTTY, is now at version 9.1 Beta.

• This is part 3 in a series aimed at making it easier for people to choose the right Linux distribution for them.

• In the first part of the series I listed a number of the best desktop environments and the Linux distributions that use them.

• In the second part I listed the 5 Linux distributions I would recommend for modern hardware based on their ease of use.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• I am familiar with the KDE desktop. Before I gravitated to the Cinnamon desktop, I was an avid KDE fan. To my surprise, OpenMandriva’s implementation of KDE was much different than I had expected. KDE can be all over the place — or utterly stark. Setting up desktop animation options can be frustrating and time consuming. The KDE desktop default settings are balanced and sensible.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Linux New Media has published a special edition magazine called Free From XP, which features a DVD with Fedora 20 Desktop Edition and the LXDE Spin, and includes articles from Fedora contributors about getting started with our favorite distro.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• After a few extremely frustrating hours trying to install Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, the latest version of the Ubuntu operating system for desktop PCs and laptops, on an older netbook style laptop (one with only USB ports) I finally succeeded.

• There was one crucial piece of information missing which, if I’d had it, would have made the whole process take perhaps half an hour. But I didn’t have that piece of information and, as a result, there was a lot of tearing out of hair and profane utterances …

• A number of OpenJDK 6 vulnerabilities have been identified and repaired in the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems by Canonical developers.

Devices/Embedded

• A startup called Savioke has unveiled a Linux- and ROS-based SaviOne hospitality robot, currently being tested at a California hotel for room service duty.

• Savioke’s “SaviOne” stands three feet tall, weighs less than 100 pounds, and can roll along at a typical human walking pace of 4 mph. The touchscreen-equipped robot lacks arms or legs, but can operate a smart elevator on its own via a wireless signal.

• A non-profit company is developing an open source, 64-bit “lowRISC” SoC that will enable fully open hardware, “from the CPU core to the development board.”

Phones

• There used to be a time when GNU/Linux was kept under mysterious 1% market share. Today mobile Linux Android owns over 85% of the market share leaving the once market leading iOS behind. But its not a tragedy for iOS that it’s market share has shrunk, the real tragedy is for Microsoft whose Windows Phone market share has gone down to mere 2.5%; just 1.5% ahead of what Linux used to have on desktops.

Android

• HTC’s been making Android skins and apps for a long time, but now the company wants its home-grown software to conquer more devices — even those made by other manufacturers. According to Recode, the Taiwanese phonemaker has started developing apps for Android phones in general, courtesy of a new business unit called HTC Creative Labs. The Creative Labs team’s first product is called Zoe (originally available on the One M7), which has the power to stitch together up to 16 videos or images. You merely need to select a theme along with the images/videos, as well as a soundtrack, and it can automatically create a highlight reel.

• This morning reports are coming in Motorola have issued invites to their official launch event entitled Moto Launch Experience. It is highly expected the Moto 360′s official release will be announced at the event which will be held in Chicago on September 4th.

• Open source has been very good to Google’s Android operating system. Unlike previous mobile operating systems like iOS (available only to Apple) or Windows (available for a fee and on Microsoft’s terms), Android was free to use (or, as venture capitalist Bill Gurley pointed out in 2011, sometimes under generous subsidies).

• The ubiquity and convenience of smartphones has been a real boon for getting information on the go. I love being able to jump on a Wi-Fi hotspot, catch up on my mail, check my banking balance or read the latest tech news—all without having to bring along or boot up a laptop. Now that mobile development is mainstream, most of this access is done via specialized apps, instead of via a Web browser.

• The world’s largest PC maker, Lenovo, now sells more smartphones than PCs. In an earnings report issued today, Lenovo revealed the swing to smartphones thanks to sales more than doubling between April and June. Lenovo sold 15.8 million smartphones in the recent quarter, compared to 14.5 million PC sales. Lenovo says its rise in smartphone sales can be attributed to the market shifting from premium handsets to the mainstream, and increasing demand from emerging markets.

• Fragmentation has been a big problem for Android for a long time, and it’s caused quite a bit of frustration among users who have been unable to update their devices to the latest version of Android. Google is aware of this, and back in July Dazeinfo looked at how Android L might affect problems with fragmentation (including wearables).

• As the market for Android/Linux smartphones matures, they get bigger and more powerful.

• LINUX USERS will be left out in the cold following Microsoft’s announcement that it will retire older versions of Skype for Android.

Free Software/Open Source

• Classroom is, of course, a free and open platform that will improve over time, and Google has the opportunity to add many of its open source tools to the Classroom ecosystem.

• Those working with Docker containers can now try out the Flocker open-source, data-focused Docker management framework from ClusterHQ.

• ClusterHQ’s Flocker leverages the ZFS file system to tackle the container storage challenge.

• Adoption of open source software in the enterprise continues to grow, with research suggesting the two largest factors fueling this growth are security and quality. Surprising, perhaps, given revelations of the much-publicised Heartbleed vulnerability discovered in a widely used open source cryptography library earlier this year.

• When a WhoaVerse user deletes their account, all voting history is deleted from the database. Any comments that the user has made and their author tag get overwritten with the keyword “deleted,” as well as all of their text and link submissions.

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 37.0.2062.76 and it’s moving fast towards becoming the next Stable release.

SaaS/Big Data

• While we’re eventually going to see a lot of consolidation on the OpenStack scene, for now, the number of competitors remains large. Witness SUSE’s newest OpenStack distribution, SUSE Cloud 4, which is out now and targeted at building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• Like anything related to Web development these days, there are a number of options available for including map features to your applications. What you decide to use often comes down to personal preferences – one of my requirements is simplicity and Leaflet does not disappoint. As its documentation states, it works across all major desktop and mobile platforms. Leaflet utilizes HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript for modern platforms while remaining accessible and usable on older platforms.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Standards/Consortia

• Those still using Intel Sandy Bridge hardware on Linux will be ecstatic to learn this morning that geometry shaders support has been implemented in Mesa by a new patch-set for this older Intel hardware and thereby allowing OpenGL 3.2 support to be exposed for this “Gen6″ hardware.

Leftovers

Security

• Grothoff and his students at TUM have developed the “TCP Stealth” defense software, which can inhibit the identification of systems through both Hacienda and similar cyberattack software and, as a result, the undirected and massive takeover of computers worldwide, as Grothoff explains. “TCP Stealth” is free software that has as its prerequisites particular system requirements and computer expertise, for example, use of the GNU/Linux operating system. In order to make broader usage possible in the future, the software will need further development.

• Hundreds of thousands of hashed corporate passwords have been cracked within minutes by penetration testers using graphics processing units.

• The 626,718 passwords were harvested during penetration tests over the last two years conducted across corporate America by Trustwave infosec geeks.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Fifteen months after its completion, the Pentagon inspector general on Wednesday released a report that found the former head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency violated ethics laws by endorsing a product she developed while in the private sector.

• Regina Dugan, now an executive with Google, ran DARPA from July 2009 to March 2012. Prior to that she founded and served as president and CEO of RedXDefense, which received DARPA funding.

• The Department of Justice must release a previously classified index of withheld records related to the government’s targeted-killing programs, the 2nd Circuit ruled.

• Victoria police said officers were deployed to monitor about 20 protesters in total, with the seven people on the roof arrested and then released with a court summons for trespass.

• Anti-war activists stormed a factory in Port Melbourne this morning to protest against the Australian government’s support for Israeli’s war in Gaza. They raided the manufacturing compound which, they said, supplies arms and drones for Israel.

• This isn’t a war between Israel and Hamas. I am a secular university professor who remembers the time before Israel hermetically locked all the entrances and exits to Gaza. The 398 children that have been killed were not Hamas fighters, the three UN schools that Israel bombed were not Hamas facilities. This isn’t even a war against the population of Gaza, for the majority of those living in Gaza are refugees displaced by Israel in 1948. This isn’t even against the Palestinian people, this is a war against humanity itself.

• The fighting is barely over in the latest Gaza war, with a five-day cease-fire taking hold on Thursday, but attention has already shifted to the legal battlefield as Israel gears up to defend itself against international allegations of possible war crimes in the monthlong conflict.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A game of chicken is shaping up over the Obama administration’s decision to let the oil industry collect fresh data on energy supplies off the Atlantic Coast.

• The Interior Department, over the protests of environmentalists, said in July that it would allow the oil industry to use seismic air cannons to search for oil and gas underneath federal waters in the Atlantic.

• Several big industry groups have come out with guns blazing against the Environmental Protection Agency’s draft plan to slash carbon emissions from the nation’s coal-fired power plants.

• But some companies see opportunity in the regulation at the center of the White House climate-change agenda. Case in point: Opower, the software and data company that works with utilities to help customers save energy.

Finance

• When the term “culture of poverty” was first used by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis in 1959, it was seized upon as “evidence” that poverty is not caused primarily by an absence of material resources. This was never Lewis’s intention. In a 1966 essay for Scientific American, he wrote: “A culture of poverty is not just a matter of deprivation or disorganisation – a term signifying the absence of something. It is a culture in the traditional anthropological sense in that it provides human beings with a design for living, a ready-made set of solutions for human problems, and so serves a significant adaptive function.”

• This was wilfully misinterpreted by those who believed poverty could not be abated by throwing money at it (that sole remedy for all other social ills); it was absorbed into an ancient moral critique of the poor; identified in modern industrial society with chaotic, disorganised lives, absence of parental ambition for children, aversion to hard labour and a tendency to addiction.

• Apple shareholders have joined forces and filed a class-action lawsuit, suing Steve Jobs’ estate over claims that Apple eroded its own value by striking an illegal recruitment agreement with its rivals.

• The case has been filed by R. Andre Klein, an Apple shareholder, on behalf of all the other shareholders in the Cupertino-based company.

Privacy

• James Clapper’s office (ODNI) has released a large batch of declassified documents, most of which deal with the NSA’s discontinued Section 402 program. What this program did was re-read pen register/trap and trace (PR/TT) statutes to cover internet metadata, including sender/receiver information contained in email and instant messages. (Not to be confused with the Section 702 program, which is still active and harvests internet communications.)

• As we’ve been covering for the past few months, there seems to be an emboldened set of magistrate judges willing to push back against broad electronic search requests by the government. While it would be nice to see a stronger pushback originate somewhere closer to the top, it is (or was, it seems…) refreshing to see those on the lower rungs defend citizens’ rights by rejecting what can only be termed “general warrants,” the very thing that prompted the Fourth Amendment in the first place.

• Magistrate Judge John Facciola had denied the warrant application, which sought the information from Apple Inc., the suspect’s email provider, on grounds that it was too broad and would allow the Justice Department access to heaps of irrelevant, private information. The details of the underlying investigation remain secret, though public court records show it involves potential kickbacks and a defense contractor.

• New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office continues to do everything it can to prevent its emails from being accessed by FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) requests.

• New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration — which the governor pledged would be the most transparent in state history — has quietly adopted policies that allow it to purge the emails of tens of thousands of state employees, cutting off a key avenue for understanding and investigating state government.

• According to Pew Research Center, which analyzed recently released data in a 2013 wiretap report from the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, Nevada had 38 wiretaps authorized for every 500,000 people — the most-wiretapped state by a large margin. Colorado and New York follow with around 12 each. The most wiretaps requested in Nevada were in the home of Las Vegas, Clark County, which only has a population of around 2 million.

• Google Glass Alastair StevensonGovernment departments and regulatory bodies have been espousing the benefits of cloud computing for years now, and for good reason. The benefits of cloud computing are huge and have the potential not only to streamline most businesses’ existing work processes, but fundamentally to change the way we do commerce.

• Then I came across another story in Wired that Stanford University researchers and Israel’s defense research group Rafael plan to present a technique at a conference next week for using a smartphone’s gyroscope to eavesdrop on nearby conversations in a room. In case you don’t know the gyroscope are sensors that tell the phone whether its in horizontal or vertical position.

• The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security has said it will need additional resources to oversee new powers planned for Australian intelligence agencies to access computers and networks during investigations.

• Edward Snowden says dishonest comments to Congress by the US intelligence chief were the final straw that prompted him to flee the country and reveal a trove of national security documents.

• Twitter vows to “improve our policies” after Robin Williams’ daughter is bullied off the network. “Internet trolls bullied Robin Williams’s daughter off of Twitter and Instagram just days after her father’s death,” the Switch’s Hayley Tsukayama reports. Now Twitter has vowed to take abuse on its service more seriously — but Zelda Williams is far from the only person who has faced serious levels of vitriol on the platform.

• Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who exposed mass cybersurveillance by American and British spy agencies, says the US government fears the most damaging leaks are yet to come.

• It was about a month ago that Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. CEO Ralph Shrader talked to me about Edward Snowden. And this week we found out what Edward Snowden had to say about Booz Allen.

• NSA has done more to undermine US banking, commercial communications and computer products than any foreign power could ever have dreamed of, Robert Steele, former CIA case officer and co-founder of the US Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, told RT.

• They say good things come in small packages. In this case, the good thing is a healthy layer of Internet privacy protection. The package is a TP-Link pocket router flashed with open source firmware from the PORTAL project.

• The project itself isn’t new — the code has been available on GitHub for more than a year. What’s different now is that Cloudflare’s Ryan Lackey and Lookout Security’s Marc Rogers went on stage at DefCon to announce plans to make PORTAL more accessible. They want to make it much, much easier for “ordinary” Internet users to take a page from the OPSEC handbook.

• The terms of the debate over NSA reform between Dickinson College professor H.L. Pohlman and the ACLU’s Gabe Rottman are too limited. Pohlman claims the version of the USA Freedom Act sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) still permits the government to collect call-detail records prospectively (he suggests, but does not specifically say, that it permits the government to do so in bulk). Rottman claims that new language limiting the specific selection terms used in queries and mandating minimization procedures would limit that.

• Both men miss the one thing in Leahy’s bill that should limit bulk call-detail records: prohibitions on using the name of an electronic communications service provider as a specific selection term (unless that provider is the target of an investigation). Thus, whereas now the government uses “Verizon” as a selection term, it shouldn’t be able to do this going forward. The government will surely still be able to collect more limited sets of call-detail records — targeting, for example, everyone within 2 degrees of Julian Assange as part of a counterintelligence investigation — and even do so prospectively. That’s bulky collection, but not bulk.

• Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers defended his plan to cut 6,000 jobs, calling it a necessary response to a changing market for networking gear and shifting demands in markets around the world.

• In an interview with Re/code following the company’s quarterly earnings report Wednesday, Chambers said he expects Cisco’s total head count to be about the same at this time next year as it is now — about 74,000 — despite the cuts. And though the cuts will be painful for those who lose their jobs, they’re necessary, he says, if Cisco is to exploit new, faster-growing markets like cloud computing, security and software while keepings its costs about where they are now.

• The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), a U.S. group campaigning for digital consumer rights, has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate 30 companies for non-compliance with the Safe Harbor agreement between the U.S. and the European Union. The companies include Salesforce.com, AOL and Adobe, as well as a bunch of data brokers like Acxiom and Datalogix.

• Would you want Dr. Dick Pic and those like him having access to all your private personal information?

• A growing number of smartphone apps are tracking your location — even when they’re not being used. Foursquare released a revamped app last Wednesday that joins a list of those tracking location persistently, including Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB), Google, and a number of shopping apps that access location data all the time, even when they’re off.

• Apps use location information to enhance their service to users. Foursquare, for example, sends helpful tips based on where you happen to be. REI’s app sends deals when you happen to be near a store. The tracking is opt-in, but that doesn’t mean the data is safe. The Target breach is one example of how a large-scale corporation could be susceptible to outside security threats. Meanwhile, tech companies like Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Facebook are sometimes forced to hand information over to government agencies like the NSA.

• American tech companies could end up losing tens of billions of dollars in foreign sales stemming from the NSA spying scandal. Then there’s the potential revenue hit from Russia, which is pushing to reduce its reliance on some of the same companies amid heightened tensions with the U.S.

• U.S. technology companies have dominated the global cloud computing scene, particularly cloud giants like Amazon Web Services and Google. But China’s cloud computing market is slowly building momentum, and Chinese tech giants are making headway into a market that they have the power to significantly change.

• A senior cryptographer has sparked debate after calling time on PGP – the gold standard for email and document encryption.

• Matthew Green is an assistant research professor who lectures in computer science and cryptography at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, US. This week, on his personal blog, he argued that it’s “time for PGP to die”, describing it as “downright unpleasant”.

• Which is why the release in the U.S. of newly declassified court documents are so interesting. It’s a decision by Judge John Bates of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a closed-door court that has no Canadian equivalent for approving electronic surveillance for any communications involving a U.S. resident and foreign powers.

• The decision “offers a scathing assessment of the NSA (National Security Agency) ability to manage its own top-secret electronic surveillance of Internet metadata—a program the NSA scrapped after a 2011 review found it wasn’t fulfilling its mission,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

• Tor May Have Been Compromised, Linux Based OS’s Like Tails Offer The Best Supplement

• Deleting Facebook, Twitter accounts leaves old conversations in their place

• The NSA program dubbed MonsterMind is dangerous in that it would enable automated retaliation against machines that launch cyber attacks with no human intervention, meaning that such counterattacks could hit innocent parties.

• MonsterMind came to light through a Wired magazine interview with former NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden, who stole and publicly released thousands of NSA documents.

• More than 30 big US tech firms are breaking international agreed-upon US-EU Safe Harbor commitments to safeguard Europeans’ data, according to a complaint filed with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Thursday.

• In these days of NSA spying, net neutrality, and internet companies messing with streaming services, a virtual private network, or a VPN, has become an integral part of many people’s internet experience. Though VPNs are becoming more mainstream, there are still people who do not know what a VPN is, or how one is used or what they do.

• Edward Snowden–endorsed cloud storage provider SpiderOak has added an additional safeguard to ensure that its users’ data doesn’t fall into the hands of law enforcement without their knowledge, in the form of a “warrant canary.”

Civil Rights

• The local community of Ferguson, Missouri, may not look like a war zone, but the Pentagon has helped the police treat it like one.

• According to Michelle McCaskill, media relations chief at the Defense Logistics Agency, the Ferguson Police Department is part of a federal program called 1033, in which the Department of Defense distributes hundreds of millions of dollars of surplus military equipment to civilian police forces across the U.S.

• Fox News hosts baselessly accused Obama of inflaming racial tensions and stoking discord by speaking out on the issue.

• By most accounts, Ferguson, Missouri is wracked by chaos, while many have taken to calling it a police state. At the very least, things are more than a little tense right now, after police shot an killed Mike Brown, an unarmed, 18-year-old black man. Resulting protests have been quashed by force and journalists arrested, with all-important live feeds shut down by the police. Know what would help the country get a handle on what’s going on? A drone.

• “I just wanted to know if I was going to be gassed again like I was on Monday night,” Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal said to Jackson at a press conference. “I was peaceful and I am your state senator.”

• Camera-shy cops were reminded that they can’t legally take action to stop someone from filming them, unless that person is interfering with police operations. The memo states that blocking or obstructing cameras, or ordering a person to stop filming, ‘violates the First Amendment.’

• The general consensus here: if this is militarization, it’s the shittiest, least-trained, least professional military in the world, using weapons far beyond what they need, or what the military would use when doing crowd control.

• Whoever, except in cases and undercircumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or im-prisoned not more than two years, or both. Title 18, U.S. Code, Section 1385

• Michael Brown’s shooting was one thing. The protests are another. But military might does not belong on Main Street

• The surprise, then, has been the extent to which some media seem to be taking the outcry seriously, talking about the militarization of police–brought home by the rough treatment given to reporters covering the story–and the criminalization of black people.

• The news out of Ferguson, Missouri, has been grim and outrageous. After the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, US television viewers have watched a heavily armed and militarized local police force attack and threaten protesters and arrest journalists. As NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams (8/12/14) put it, Ferguson “looked like a police state, using the same tactical getup and the same weaponry we’ve come to expect in urban warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

• Ingraham’s disdain extended to the protestors, whom she grotesquely equated to a “lynch mob.”

• Taylor D. August, of the Dept. of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, is also a FOIA Denial Officer. Considering the government’s general antipathy towards transparency, you’d think several agencies would have a full-time request denier on staff. But while many agencies spend more time stonewalling and denying requests, only the Dept. of Education actually has designated employees on hand solely to reject requests.

• It seems inevitable that NYPD officers will be wearing body cameras in the near future. As part of the remedies ordered by Judge Scheindlin in her stop-and-frisk decision, a trial program for body cameras is due to roll out, along with additional oversight.

• Sri Lanka has been only one of Navi Pillay’s many battlefields during her six years in office; she has briefed the UN Security Council more times than all her predecessors combined. But it is perhaps the one that has evoked most strongly her courage and determination. She has also incurred volcanic fury from both sides in the Gaza wars and been described by the Syrian ambassador to the UN as “a lunatic”. The US has never agreed to her requests to look into what she calls “the many issues that trouble us” in that country, in particular drone strikes and targeted killings, while somehow the Chinese could never find a suitable date for her to pay a visit.

• Lots of people when they think of journalism have in mind the mum-and-pop variety — car crashes and the latest gossip, local politics, sports, all the little details about “the time the doorknob broke,” to trot out an old Bob Dylan lyric. A step up from this layer of short and punchy news bits is that more ‘literate’ class of journalism traditionally associated with the New York Times and Washington Post, the so-called newspapers of record, which publish only the most polished, scrupulous pieces by the most ethical journalists. Or so the story goes.

• The Obama administration’s espionage case against alleged CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling is expected to come to trial soon, six years after he was indicted. In addition to Sterling, also on trial will be a central pillar of our democratic society: press freedom.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Google has had to reinforce its fragile undersea cables with Kevlar – the same material used in bulletproof vests – in order to protect against shark attacks

• What Crawford is describing is parallel conduct, which is when companies that would otherwise compete create a monopoly-like setting without having to merge or coordinate operations. Parallel conduct in the broadband industry is not hypothetical. In 2011, Comcast and Time-Warner Cable sold parts of the wireless spectrum they owned in exchange for an agreement that Verizon would stop expanding its fiber optic network. Essentially, Comcast and Time-Warner Cable paid Verizon to stop offering new high-speed broadband service. (As part of the deal, Comcast and Time-Warner Cable also further divided up the United States geographically, foreshadowing the merger between the two companies.)

DRM

• Amazon is under fire from George Orwell’s estate for referencing the Nineteen Eighty-Four author in its legal battle with publishers.

• The web bazaar, while mired in a war of words with Hachette over book prices, invoked Orwell’s name and cited comments made by the author at the dawn of paperback books.

• According to Amazon, Orwell had suggested in the 1940s that publishers should collude in order to suppress the sale of the less expensive paperbacks. This, Amazon said, was a sentiment now repeated by Hachette – which is accused of unfairly inflating e-book prices.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Julia Reda, Member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party, will be visiting Peter Sunde in prison later today. According to Reda the Pirate Bay founder’s imprisonment is a failure of a justice system that lost touch with digital culture. “The tactic of draconian deterrence against file sharing has failed,” she says.

• Switzerland is in the process of revising its copyright laws, and you might expect that by now it has been “persuaded” by the US to change its mind about allowing people to download files freely and share them in this way, but to its credit, that doesn’t seem to be the case (pdf).

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