● 08.25.14

● Links 25/8/2014: China’s Linux Revolution Imminent

Posted in News Roundup at 8:08 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• China’s next attempt at a mobile homegrown desktop operating system is slated for an October debut, according to state-run news agency Xinhua. China Operating System, abbreviated COS, will first appear on desktop computers, and later reach smartphones. We already caught a glimpse of the mobile version at the beginning of this year, and noted its strong resemblance to Android. However, Ni Guangnan of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, which makes COS, said it is not another Chinese Android skin. As for the upcoming desktop version, you’d be forgiven for being a bit skeptical. China has failed miserably at making its own operating systems in the past. But several factors have come together that could help Ni realize his dream of replacing domestic operating systems in the next one to two years.

• China hopes to launch a homegrown operating system by October to wean the country from foreign-made OSs like Windows, the government-run Xinhua news agency said Sunday.

• The operating system, which Xinhua did not name, will be initially offered on desktop PCs, with the plan to later extend it to smartphones. The news service cited a report in the People’s Post and Telecommunications News, a trade paper run by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the agency responsible for, among other things, the regulation and development of China’s software industry.

• The 2014 Linux Jobs report showed that the demand for Linux professionals is on the rise throughout Europe, with developers and system administrators most in demand. Such is the demand that 93% of hiring managers reported difficulty finding professionals with the Linux Systems Management skills they require. Of those unable to fill open positions, 25% have delayed projects as a result.

• The “skills gap” reflects the rapid growth of Linux right across the business world. LinuxIT CIO Mike Curtis sees two groups of Linux professionals: the very highly skilled system administrators from corporate computing backgrounds; and then the less skilled employees of smaller organisations or public services who have trained on other operating systems. The second group have learned Linux in their own time and perhaps implemented some systems to handle specific functions for their employer. There is a huge skills gap between the two groups, and it’s not just technical.

Desktop

• Shortly, I will be going to a meeting where one participant has asked me for help with GNU/Linux on a notebook. She doesn’t like what M$ does for her there. I’ve made up a bootable USB-drive with the Debian installer and a repository of stuff the typical desktop user will need, including Synaptic and gksu so she can customize her notebook when she gets home. I will start her off with a basic installation of Debian GNU/Linux and add the XFCE4 desktop environment with a selection of a few typical applications: FireFox browser, VLC media player, GIMP image editor, and Ristretto image viewer. XFCE4 is similar to what she liked from M$: XP. If M$ won’t give her what she wants, I and the FLOSS community will. When random people you meet are interested in desktop GNU/Linux, this is no time to abandon this thriving technology. It works for ordinary people.

• This is the story of a girl named Elisa, and Elisa liked to do girlish things like hang out with her friends, sunbath at the beach, go to riots and protests against the world cup, support the feminism movement and study. Regarding study, she does Psicology class in the Fluminense Federal University ( UFF ) in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro. I’v met Elisa by a friend of a friend that wanted to introduce us beause of our common ideals:

Server

• It’s no secret that open development is the key to rapid and continuous technology innovation. Openly sharing knowledge, skills and technical building blocks is something that we in the Linux community have long been promoting and have recognized as a successful model for breeding technology breakthroughs. Much of The Linux Foundation’s and its peerss efforts to date have been centered on fostering openness at the software level, starting right at the source — the operating system – and building up from there. Traditionally, the agenda has not included a great amount of attention on how to open up at the hardware level. Until now.

• IBM innovation and client centers will now have access to Power Systems Linux and software developers will have access to tools for developing new applications for big data and cloud computing with open source technology.

Kernel Space

• The battle over systemd exposes a fundamental gap between the old Unix guard and a new guard of Linux developers and admins

• In today’s open source roundup: Is the systemd controversy a battle of the old versus the young? Plus: What Linux distros do you consider innovative? And a journalist spends a week using Ubuntu’s Unity desktop

• Of course there’s not a kernel problem. From where I sit, there’s not a GNU problem either. I’ve been using Mint with Xfce for a while now and I find it better than any version of Windows I’ve ever used, many times over. Other than needing a little polishing with some distros, there’s no problem whatsoever with the penguin. Desktop Linux is only the best there is.

• On 25 August, 1991 a 21-year old Finnish programmer named Linus Torvalds sent out an email, titled ‘What would you like to see most in minix?’ to the Minix community. THAT was the beginning of a technology and social revolution called Linux.

• It was on this day in 1991 that Linus Torvalds first announced his new operating system that would go on to become Linux.

• On 25 August 1991 is when Linus Torvalds in Helsinki announced his “free operating system” as a hobby that he had been developing since April. The initial release had GCC 1.40 and Bash 1.08 ported. The work wasn’t originally known as Linux but originally was called Freax before being renamed to Linux. While most Phoronix readers have likely already seen that classic email many times, for those that haven’t you can see the original posting to comp.os.minix. Happy birthday Linux!

• Last week I ran some performance tests that found Sandy Bridge was faster with the Linux 3.17 kernel and these performance gains with the still in-development kernel extended beyond just graphics. Curious, I ran some tests this weekend to see whether Intel Ivy Bridge processors were also running faster with Linux 3.17 compared to Linux 3.16 stable.

• With an eye toward deepening the global Linux talent pool, the Linux Foundation today announced that it will offer two new certifications for engineers and administrators.

• There is a never-ending debate on whether or not Linux is an operating system. Technically, the term “Linux” refers to the kernel, a core component of an operating system. Folks who argue that Linux is not an operating system are operating system purists who think that the kernel alone does not make the whole operating system, or free software ideologists who believe that the largest free operating system should be named “GNU/Linux” to give credit where credit is due (i.e., GNU project). On the other hand, some developers and programmers have a view that Linux qualifies as an operating system in a sense that it implements the POSIX standard.

• A very interesting discussion is taking place in the Haiku mailing list right now. A developer has created a working prototype implementation of the BeOS API layer on top of the Linux kernel, and he is wondering if the project is worth pursuing.

Graphics Stack

• Given our recent updated Sandy Bridge benchmarks on Linux, for those with Ivy Bridge processors curious how the HD Graphics are handling the latest Mesa and kernel, I have some updated benchmarks for you this Sunday.

• AMD has finally managed to publish open-source Unified Video Decoder (UVD) support for the original R600 graphics processors.

• With the Linux 3.17 kernel, Mesa 10.3, and the newest Radeon microcode files, there’s finally working Hawaii GPU support by AMD’s open-source Linux graphics driver. The Radeon R9 290 series launched nearly one year ago and finally now the open-source driver is working right, so we’ve conducted some preliminary tests using the R9 290 compared to AMD’s other Radeon GPUs on the open-source Linux driver.

• Mesa 10.3 represents about three months of development work and is nearing completion with its OpenGL 4.0 support, but that wasn’t completed in time to mark bumping the version number to Mesa 11.0.

Benchmarks

• This week I spoke at LinuxCon North America 2014 in Chicago, which was also my first LinuxCon. I really enjoyed the conference, and it was a privilege to take part and contribute. I’ll be returning to work with some useful ideas from talks and talking with attendees.

Applications

• LiVES 2.2.6, a simple-to-use, powerful video editor and VJ tool that allows users to combine real time and rendered effects, streams, and multiple video/audio files, has been released.

• Reminder: the WebUpd8 Nemo PPA should not be used by Linux Mint / Cinnamon users! Nemo from this PPA uses various Unity patches (it should work with Unity, GNOME Shell, Xfce, etc. but not with Cinnamon!) that make it incompatible with Cinnamon.

• Panamax taught me a lot about Docker, and caused me to publish my first two images to the Docker registry, which is more than I expected to gain from trying it out. I’m not sure I’m the target audience – I don’t think I’d want to run production Docker apps under it on a headless server (at least until it’s more stable), which suggests that its main use is as an easy way to experiment with the development of containerized systems. But the friction introduced by the extra CoreOS host seems too great for it to be an awesome development platform for me. I think it’s a solvable problem – if the team can find a way to make the network port forwarding and the filesystem NFS sharing be automatic, rather than manual, and to work with ecryptfs on Ubuntu, it would make a massive difference.

• CuteReport, a free report solution inspired by eXaro’s project ideas that’s similar to Jasper and Crystal Reports, is now at version 1.0 RC2.

• Vuze, a BitTorrent client previously known as Azureus, which is built on Java, has reached version 5.4.0.1 Beta 4 and is now available for download.

Proprietary

• VueScan 9.4.40, an easy-to-use replacement for the software that usually comes with scanners and that supports most flatbed scanners, printer/scanners, and film scanners, has been released and is now available for download.

Instructionals/Technical

• The full power of digital photography lies in knowing how to manipulate RAW images. When you shoot RAW you get the highest-quality images, and the most editing headroom for repairs and enhancements. Raw Therapee is a wonderful cross-platform RAW image processor. Use it for noise reduction, pulling details out of shadows, fine-grained sharpening, color adjustment, color management, contrast, luminance, brightness, gamma, and hue corrections, convert to black and white, exposure corrections, distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting repairs, apply lens correction profiles, and about a skillion more features.

Wine or Emulation

Games

• If you are a retro gamer, chances are breakout holds a special place in your heart. That simple game of ping pong is perhaps the most iconic of all the games of yore. Though there have been many attempts to clone the game as well as the fun, few were successful. Acky’s Reloaded is a reimagining of Acky’s XP Breakout which was a famous breakout clone. Now, thanks to Kickstarter, the game has crossed the 15% milestone of funding, which means that it will be made available on Linux too!

• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, a superb adventure game with an almost photo-realistic engine, might be getting a Linux release.

• The developers of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter from The Astronauts have been working on this game for quite some time and the results are outstanding. So far, the game has been announced on the PC and PS4 platforms, but the devs are thinking about releasing a Linux version as well.

• Ultimate Edition 4.2 Gamers 32 bit 100% exists today due to TheeMahn O/S Builder (tmosb) 1.8.8, 08/22/2014.

• The Leadwerks Game Engine has officially launched on Steam for Linux.

• Leadwerks had been in beta on Steam for Linux but as of today the official release has taken place. This milestone comes several months after Leadwerks launched in the Ubuntu Store. The Linux port of the game engine came after a successful Kickstarter campaign last year.

• The SteamOS repositories and some of the other resources provided by Valve seem to have some connectivity problems and users can’t perform updates.

• The issues with the SteamOS repositories seem to be intermittent and there are already a number of users on the official forums complaining about this issue. So far, not many users have noticed it, but if it persists, the number of affected people might rise.

• Abyss Odyssey, a side-scrolling action adventure game developed by ACE Team and published ATLUS, will be getting a Linux version on Steam soon.

• Vendetta Online, an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) from Guild Software Inc., has advanced to version 1.8.304.

• The tool can download GOG.com games (including language-specific installers if available), list / download updated files, resume unfinished downloads, repair downloaded installers, download extras such as artwork or manuals and more.

• Hey there! Time for a new Humble Indie Bundle, this time called The Humble Jumbo Bundle 2, featuring 7 games, and well…. Sadly, only 1 of them is available on our favourite operative system.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• With the initial release of Plasma 5.0 behind us I also started to look more in the direction of Wayland again. Now I’m kind of in full flow on Wayland work and kwin_wayland is progressing nicely. Yes, KWin 5.1 will introduce a new binary called kwin_wayland to complement the kwin_x11 binary which got introduced in KWin 5.0.

• Now I do not want to list all the changes as you can hardly express them all in a blog post, but I can point to my Akademy talk. I will provide a small overview of the current state, what is new in KWin 5.0, what will be new in KWin 5.1 and where the journey is going.

Distributions

• I thus tried the GRUB2 tool that is included in KDE. Fortunately, in a matter of three clicks, KDE reinstalled the PicarOS GRUB2 to the distro’s partition. After that, I ran GRUB customizer and it added the missing entry.

• I cannot describe Eimi’s happiness when the computer booted to PicarOS once again. She played a lot with GCompris and drew many pictures.

• PicarOS is a child’s magnet without any doubt. The comfort with which my little daughter uses the computer when booted to that OS is truly notorious…

• Matthew Miller is a little concerned. As the new project leader for the Fedora Linux distribution, he thinks Fedora 20 is great and Fedora 21, when it ships, will be the best release ever. But he worries that to everyone else, Fedora – and Linux distros in general – are getting a little, well … boring.

• Though personally I don’t like Linux operating system resembling Windows (I had really bad experiences with Windows and lost a lot of data in the past at a critical phase in my student life and OS resembling Windows reminds me of the same), but I have seen Zorin OS to be quite popular among the new users, specially those who are converting from Windows to Linux. Even I used Zorin OS for sometime in the past, but once I upgraded Zorin to the next release, it became Ubuntu and all Zorin specific customization are lost. However, the recent Zorin OS release is supported for 5 years (till April 2019) and possibly you don’t need to upgrade it for quite sometime, given the customization I am recommending in this article.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is more proof that operating systems aren’t dead, they’re becoming vessels for containerized applications. RHEL 7 performed well in our testing, but it’s worth noting that this no longer just a simple OS – it’s an increasingly abstracted component in the larger Red Hat ecosystem.

• Make no mistake about it, Red Hat is a Linux power that wants to be a force in the clouds as well. The announcement that Red Hat CloudForms 3.1, its open hybrid cloud management solution, will be available in September 2014 on the opening day of VMworld underlines its cloud intentions.

• CloudForms 3.1 is the first release built from the open source ManageIQ community, introduced in May 2014. Red Hat acquired ManageIQ in December 2012 and fully open sourced the code earlier this year to drive innovation in hybrid cloud management through community-powered innovation.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is more proof that operating systems aren’t dead, they’re becoming vessels for containerized applications. RHEL 7 performed well in our testing, but it’s worth noting that this no longer just a simple OS – it’s an increasingly abstracted component in the larger Red Hat ecosystem. In testing, we found that the RHEL 7 OS stands alone well, plays well with others, and is progressively easier to both deploy and configure.

Debian Family

• Not too many people heard about the new Tanglu operating systems, although the developers are not at their first release. In fact, Tanglu 1.0 (Aequorea Victoria) was made available back in February, 2014. Now, the Tanglu devs have started to work on a second release and everything seems to be going as planned.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• The Linux AIO Team is trying to provide a very simple and obvious service for the users and to gather all the releases for some of the most famous distros and offer them on a single DVD, which might seem like the obvious solution.

Devices/Embedded

• VoIP PBXes, NTP servers, Web-controlled power strips — hack together one of these handy, cheap solutions for the server closet and beyond.

• The 1980s were memorable for many things; the end of the cold war, a carbonated drink called Quatro, the Korg Polysix synthesiser and the Commodore 64. But to a certain teenager, none of these were as potent, or as perhaps familiarly illicit, as the games arcade. Enveloped by cigarette smoke and a barrage of 8-bit sound effects, they were caverns you visited only on borrowed time: 50 pence and a portion of chips to see you through lunchtime while you honed your skills at Galaga, Rampage, Centipede, Asteroids, Ms Pacman, Phoenix, R-Rype, Donkey Kong, Rolling Thunder, Gauntlet, Street Fighter, Outrun, Defender… The list is endless.

Phones

Android

• Last week we began to hear rumors that LG were already working on their 2nd generation smartwatch which came as a bit of a surprise.

• The LG G was only released back in July at Google’s I/O event although details are now coming through that this was simply a ‘proof-of-concept’ release. Behind the scenes LG had already been working on and anticipating a much bigger (and better) smartwatch.

• CyanogenMod (CM) seem to have added a ‘Call recording’ feature to its nightlies list although this is not being offered as a direct feature for legal reasons.

Free Software/Open Source

• Walk into any makerspace around the world and you’ll encounter this infectious optimism. You’ll see people playing with their Raspberry Pis, their Arduinos, their CNC machines, and their 3D printers. You’ll encounter people intently focused on assembling something, their mind so engaged as to be in a state of flow.

• I’m really interested in open source philosophies. I like the camaraderie of the communities and the open collaboration. I like being able to have a direct effect on the development of products that I use. I like the idea of the freedom behind the licensing. I like the idea of supporting the underdog fighting picaresquely against the corporate giants. I like that the whole point of open source is being allowed to see (and modify) the code. In simple terms, with open source as a development model it allows access to a product’s plans/blueprints through using a permissive license.

• In a recent presentation, security professionals unveiled a proposed Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) compliance model that is based on open source technology. The system is designed, they said, to help reduce expenses, enhance scalability and make it easier to manage the technological infrastructure that supports PCI compliance.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• RenderObject and Resource object leak, an unused slider from the user manager tutorial has been removed, the VAAPI encoder flag has been turned into a kill switch, the support for alphaEnabled API has been enabled.

Mozilla

• Finally, Firefox smartphone now arrives in India. Though Mozilla’s Firefox OS as a smartphone operating system has had a negligible impact on the market, but all that could change very soon as the first Firefox smartphone has been announced for India. The Spice Fire One has predictable low-end specifications and a greatly attractive price tag of Rs 2,299.

• Mozilla has announced that the first smartphone running its Firefox OS mobile operating system is now on sale in India, following earlier reports that a low-cost phone would arrive there in July.

• Slowly but surely, Mozilla is pushing its Firefox OS mobile operating system into new markets. Although the nonprofit had already discussed its approach for India, today it announced it will be launching its first smartphone in the region this week.

SaaS/Big Data

• Ever since 2012, we’ve covered the unsure stance that VMware has displayed toward emerging open source cloud computing platforms, including OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus. In this post, we reported that VMware’s CEO had cited OpenStack in particular as “lacking maturity.”

• VMware has been one of the top contributors to the open-source OpenStack cloud platform over the last several years, and now the company is taking the next logical step by announcing its own OpenStack distribution.

• Developers have been quick to try the Docker open-source project that represents a free alternative to VMware’s core virtualization software for running many apps on each server. Today no less than VMware chief executive Pat Gelsinger announced that it’s working with Docker to make Docker’s containers “enterprise ready.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Here are the highlights of this month’s changes in the GNU Toolchain…

Openness/Sharing

• The room was packed with almost 30 community managers from around the world. We were attending the Community Leadership Summit in Portland, Oregon and I was leading a session called Building programs and other ways to engage your community. During the session, I shared a few of the programs that we’ve implemented here on Opensource.com to foster community engagement. But the session wasn’t just about our community, it was an opportunity to hear from other community managers in open source out there in the trenches.

Open Hardware

Programming

• Improved debugging for CUDA Fortran applications (preview) is also here; this includes new debugging support for Fortran arrays (Linux only), improved source-to-assembly code correlation, and improved documentation.

• Ages and ages I wrote about letting Emacs code access the notification area. I have more to say about it now, but first I want to bore you with some rambling thoughts and some history.

• The “notification area” is also called the “status icon area” or the “systray” — it is a spot that holds some icons that are under control of various applications.

• Basically, all the site’s image effects are stored by a community of developers, much like any other open source software. Anyone can not only use these effects, but build their own and share them with the community by way of the code hosting and collaboration site GitHub. “Since everyone likes glitch art and animated GIFs, it’s a creative outlet for developers to create something new that’s outside their usual field,” say Jen Fong-Adwent, the creator of revisit.link. “But it’s also a way for new people to learn basics.”

• Discover Rust, the systems programming language developed by Mozilla that’s fast, and wants to be better than C and C++!

Leftovers

Security

• ABOUT four months after the discovery of the Heartbleed bug, the group overseeing the widely used OpenSSL software has added a new full-time staffer and is preparing for a comprehensive code audit.

• Steve Marquess, co-founder and president of the OpenSSL Software Foundation, said the organisation’s team of 14 now had two full-time employees — one started this week — and planned to add two more by the end of the year.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Last week, Turkish media reported that “the former employee at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), Edward Snowden, has revealed that British and American intelligence and Mossad worked together to create the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).” Snowden said intelligence services of three countries created a terrorist organization that is able to attract all extremists of the world to one place, using a strategy called “the hornet’s nest.”

• NSA documents refer to recent implementation of the hornet’s nest to protect the Zionist entity by creating religious and Islamic slogans.

• According to documents released by Snowden, “The only solution for the protection of the Jewish state “is to create an enemy near its borders.” Leaks revealed that ISIS leader and cleric Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi received intensive military training for a whole year at the hands of Mossad, besides courses in theology and the art of speech.”

• Indeed, this is a scandalous claim, one that has been seen on numerous Turkish news websites worded differently. Daily Sabah first reported it with a small news article, and later Daily Sabah columnist Haşmet Babaoğlu wrote about it in the first paragraph of one of his articles. The first paragraph of his article titled “Who benefits from ISIS’s existence in the Middle East?” stated, “Regardless of whether you are enthusiastic about conspiracy theories or not, Global Research’s claim that ‘former National Security Agency (NSA) systems analyst Edward Snowden recently revealed that the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was trained by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence and spy agency’ is a topic worthy of debate.”

• It seems to me that the current phenomena gives more striking signals than conspiracy theories, however.

• [...]

• The news first appeared in French on July 9 on a Hezbollah website with Lebanon’s Hezbollah-sponsored channel, Al Manar, claimed as the source. After a short while, the news was translated into English, but, the source was now claimed to be Iran’s Fars News Agency. According to the news article, former analyst of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), Edward Snowden, proved with leaked documents that ISIS was a MI6, CIA and Mossad joint project. However, there were no indications of when and where Snowden made those remarks.

• [...]

• The best way to prevent this is to present the source. When we read Babaoğlu’s column, we see that he mentioned a website called www.globalresearch.ca. The site belongs to an organization called The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). They identify themselves as “an independent research and media organization based in Montreal. The CRG is a registered non-profit organization in the province of Quebec, Canada.” They claim that their mission is to uncover “the unspoken truth.”

• Babaoğlu presented the news article of Global Research as a source, but what about their source? The claim was not based on evidence; however, this does not render his article worthless. After all, in his article, he speaks of who benefited from recent developments in the Middle East after ISIS’s appearance with actual events. There are views mentioned of several experts as well. Not to mention, there are no inconsistencies and factual errors in the article.

• In a Sunday-morning post, Daily Kos blogger Mark Sumner argued that the “threat ISIS represents to the United States” is “[e]xactly none” and urged us not to overreact now the way we supposedly did after 9/11 and consequently “hand over freedoms for an illusion of safety. The NSA reading your email and listening in on your phone, idiots mistaking a dropped t-shirt at the Mexican border for the prayer rug of invading Muslims, TSA workers who know you more intimately than your spouse. Those are bin Laden’s victories.”

• One of the movies that tackles these topics is “Good Kill”, from the U.S. director Andrew Niccol. This film explores the guilt of a man that controls militar drones to kill Taliban people.

• The Israeli army has released what it says is a page from a seized Hamas training manual that would appear to support its case that Palestinian militants deliberately use the cover of residential areas for combat operations.

• Israeli Army says it has found manual showing Hamas tactic of using civilians as shields

• Tehran will “accelerate” arming Palestinians in retaliation for Israel deploying a spy drone over Iran, which was shot down, a military commander said on Monday.

• “We will accelerate the arming of the West Bank and we reserve the right to give any response,” said General Amir-Ali Hajizadeh, commander of aerial forces of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, in a statement on their official website sepahnews.com.

• Two prisoners were beheaded and another one died after being thrown off the roof in a riot that erupted in a jail in southern Brazil.

• U.S. freelance writer Peter Theo Curtis, who was abducted in Syria and held by militants from al Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front, was unexpectedly freed Sunday. Curtis went missing in October 2012 after crossing into northern Syria from Turkey. Negotiations for his release were mediated by Qatar, and the United Nations facilitated his handover in the Golan Heights Sunday evening. Curtis’s release came just days after the Islamic State posted a video online showing the execution of U.S. journalist James Foley. After the video was released, reports emerged that European countries and organizations had paid ransoms averaging over $2.5 million to negotiate the release of more than a dozen citizens held with Foley. The terms of Curtis’s release are unclear, but U.S. officials denied paying a ransom. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said, “The U.S. government does not make concessions to terrorists.”

• A block of residential apartments in Gaza City has collapsed following an Israeli airstrike on Saturday night. An Israeli military spokeswoman said the building was being used as a command centre by Hamas, but local residents say it was purely residential.

• Any US air strikes against Islamist militants in Syria must be coordinated with the country’s government, according to the Syrian foreign minister.

• Revenge of the realists. “It is not in our interest to defeat Assad as long as groups like ISIS will be winners.”

Finance

• British rail fares, already the highest in Europe, are set to become higher still. This is a poll tax on wheels

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Brian Kilmeade Replies: “Hard For Me” To Imagine “Another Candidate In The Country That Cares More” Than Brown

Privacy

• American and Chinese companies are getting caught in the crossfire of the brewing cyber war.

• German foreign intelligence agency has been tapping Turkey for almost four decades, reports Focus amid the ongoing spy scandal between Berlin and Ankara. Some German officials defend the practice, saying that not all NATO allies can be treated as friends.

• A new Facebook Messenger hoax claims that illegal conversations being held over private messenger conversations are being analyzed and automatically sent to police. The hoax specifically targets users of the new Facebook Messenger app, and it claims that 250 have already been arrested for their illegal conversations.

• Using inappropriately vague and misleading questions, polls have found an American public evenly divided in their support of NSA domestic espionage — and on whether Edward Snowden’s role in revealing the breadth and depth of it makes him a patriot or a traitor. Closer scrutiny indicates these divisions are more likely the result of systemic methodological biases in the polls than an expression of genuine opinion. This points to a far more troubling problem: Bad polls subvert a fair and balanced public debate on mass government spying, resulting in potentially anti-democratic remedies.

• A little more than a year after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the federal government was collecting and storing the telephone records of millions of Americans, Congress is poised to end the program and provide significant protection for a broad range of personal information sought by government investigators.

• Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has proposed a version of the bill that is significantly more protective of privacy than one passed by the House in May. Like the House bill, Leahy’s proposal would end the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone “metadata” — information about the source, destination and duration of phone calls that investigators can “query” in search of possible connections to foreign terrorism.

• The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.

• The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants.

• ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing. Details about its existence are contained in the archive of materials provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

• Earlier revelations sourced to the Snowden documents have exposed a multitude of NSA programs for collecting large volumes of communications. The NSA has acknowledged that it shares some of its collected data with domestic agencies like the FBI, but details about the method and scope of its sharing have remained shrouded in secrecy.

• Here’s a dirty little secret you won’t see in the daily papers: Corporations conduct espionage against U.S. nonprofit organizations without fear of being brought to justice.

• Yes, that means using a great array of spycraft and snoopery, including planned electronic surveillance, wiretapping, information warfare, infiltration, dumpster diving and so much more.

• The evidence abounds.

• For example, six years ago, based on extensive documentary evidence, James Ridgeway reported in Mother Jones on a major corporate espionage scheme by Dow Chemical focused on Greenpeace and other environmental and food activists.

• Greenpeace was running a potent campaign against Dow’s use of chlorine to manufacture paper and plastics. Dow grew worried and eventually desperate.

• Ridgeway’s article and subsequent revelations produced jaw-dropping information about how Dow’s private investigators, from the firm Beckett Brown International (BBI), hired:

• • An off-duty DC police officer who gained access to Greenpeace trash dumpsters at least 55 times;

• • a company called NetSafe Inc., staffed by former National Security Agency (NSA) employees expert in computer intrusion and electronic surveillance; and,

• • a company called TriWest Investigations, which obtained phone records of Greenpeace employees or contractors. BBI’s notes to its clients contain verbatim quotes that they attribute to specific Greenpeace employees.

• Using this information, Greenpeace filed a lawsuit against Dow Chemical, Dow’s PR firms Ketchum and Dezenhall Resources, and others, alleging trespass on Greenpeace’s property, invasion of privacy by intrusion, and theft of confidential documents.

• In the face of multiple vendor protests, the FBI has cancelled plans to hand industry giant Motorola Solutions Inc. a sole-source contract worth up to $500 million, saying that it will reassess how to upgrade the bureau’s antiquated nationwide two-way radio network.

• The FBI had argued, in a justification for skirting competitive bidding requirements, that switching to another vendor would force the purchase of a complete new system costing $1.2 billion. The existing Motorola network has proprietary features that can’t interact with non-Motorola equipment, so the FBI said, sticking with Motorola would extend the use of equipment worth $300 million.

• Makers of surveillance systems are offering governments across the world the ability to track the movements of almost anybody who carries a cellphone, whether they are blocks away or on another continent.

Civil Rights

• It seems the worst thing that can befall a liberal is to actually win an election for public office. Just ask President Obama or, better still, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.

• Each man’s election was hailed by liberals as a kind of Second Coming, the arrival of Nirvana, the ultimate rejection, even repudiation, of their predecessors, George W. Bush and Michael Bloomberg, and of conservatism itself.

• Torture ConceptTorture is making a comeback. Not the practice, at least in this country, but the word. For a decade, politicians and the media fenced the term off to keep it from contaminating their description of American behavior. But gradually, the word is being reclaimed. We should pay close attention to this development, for as we rediscover words that were once taboo, we define anew what it means to be an American.

• Friday July 25 will not make history as the first time a war criminal was greeted at the White House. Nevertheless, this was the day that Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina, who has been condemned for his role in the torture and murder of civilians by the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission as well as journalists and academics, sat down with President Obama. Along with the Presidents of El Salvador and Honduras, the Heads of State gathered to discuss the causes of the massive northern exodus from Central America, as well as the 50,000 migrants—largely women and children—that have already been detained by the US government for crossing the border. The silence about the literal skeletons in Molina’s closet reveals a much larger historical legacy that has been ignored in the discourse around the border crisis.

• Towards the end of his tenure, ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak resisted pressures from Washington to cede Egyptian territory in the Sinai Peninsula to help create a Palestinian state, former senior members of Mubarak’s ruling party told Asharq Al-Awsat.

• Official Washington’s war-hysteria machine is running at full speed again after Russia unilaterally dispatched a convoy of trucks carrying humanitarian supplies to the blockaded Ukrainian city of Luhansk, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

• Boosting US military involvement in Iraq will make matters worse.

• As part of the American Civil Liberties Union’s recent report on police militarization, the Massachusetts chapter of the organization sent open records requests to SWAT teams across that state. It received an interesting response.

• Cornel West is a professor at Union Theological Seminary and one of my favorite public intellectuals, a man who deals in penetrating analyses of current events, expressed in a pithy and highly quotable way.

• [...]

• And we ended up with a brown-faced Clinton. Another opportunist. Another neoliberal opportunist. It’s like, “Oh, no, don’t tell me that!” I tell you this, because I got hit hard years ago, but everywhere I go now, it’s “Brother West, I see what you were saying. Brother West, you were right. Your language was harsh and it was difficult to take, but you turned out to be absolutely right.” And, of course with Ferguson, you get it reconfirmed even among the people within his own circle now, you see. It’s a sad thing. It’s like you’re looking for John Coltrane and you get Kenny G in brown skin.

• “AG Holder is in St. Louis Today. I should go in early and punch him in the nose for so many different reasons.” – Tweet by Sgt. Mike Weston, Velda City Police

• It would appear that Stone was only “disturbing” school officials who seemed intent on finding some evidence of his desire to shoot people and was understandably frustrated that they wouldn’t believe it wasn’t some sort of threat. Whatever disturbance Stone caused was limited to a single office. There was no reason for anyone to claim, much less believe, that his written assignment, or his behavior inside that office, was “disturbing” his classmates, other classes or anyone else not directly involved.

• Imagine the scenario. You meet someone and, from the outset, the attraction is mutual: silently shared smiles, lingering glances. You bond over shared interests and worldviews, and exchange telephone numbers. You start sleeping together and – as your pulse quickens every time the phone rings – you realise you are falling for each other. Days are spent together, walking in parks, trips to the cinema, romantic meals; time apart becomes difficult. Eventually, your partner moves in, and for years you share everything. Maybe you even have a child together. Then – suddenly – they appear depressed and become distant. One day, they are gone, leaving only an apologetic note on the kitchen table. You then discover everything you knew about them was false. They have invented a fake identity; their backstory, opinions, entire life, all a lie. They are undercover police officers, and were sent to spy on you and your friends.

• A coroner’s report obtained exclusively by NBC News directly contradicts the police version of how a 22-year-old black man died in the back seat of a Louisiana police cruiser earlier this year — but still says the man, whose hands were cuffed behind his back, shot himself.

• In a press release issued March 3, the day he died, the Louisiana State Police said Victor White III apparently shot himself in an Iberia Parish police car. According to the police statement, White had his hands cuffed behind his back when he shot himself in the back.

• Police withdrew statements that ambulance personnel were attacked at the anti-Nazi demonstrations on Saturday, and reported themselves for investigation after trampling protesters.

• The message of a New York Times piece by Michael Wines and Frances Robles (8/22/14) was clear: Police officers who shoot unarmed civilians need to be be given the benefit of the doubt.

• Cam Edwards, host of the National Rifle Association’s news show, claimed that after Hurricane Katrina residents of the New Orleans neighborhood Algiers “were looking out for each other by walking the streets armed with firearms.” But according to a federal hate crimes indictment and numerous media reports, after Katrina white gun-toting vigilantes in Algiers targeted African-Americans with racially motivated violence.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• New Zealand authorities have placed 18.8% of the Kim Dotcom-founded cloud hosting service Mega under restraining order. The actions involve multi-millionaire William Yan, one of Mega’s largest shareholders, who is alleged to be involved in money laundering. Mega itself is not suspected of wrong-doing.

• Witnesses are being summoned to appear in the trial of Gottfrid Svartholm set to take place in September. A Cambodia-based former colleague of the Pirate Bay founder has been offered $3.50 per hour to attend, but heated emails with Danish authorities indicate he will not be traveling.

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