● 09.06.14

● Links 6/9/2014: Core OS at DigitalOcean, Women in Xorg

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 11:36 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Believe it or not, my dear Linux friends, a lot of IT pros still believe they need Windows servers. They have this goofy idea that Active Directory, SharePoint, Exchange, Windows Server, SQL Server, and all the other members of the lardy malware vector family are the only proper business backends. They have this funny notion that Microsoft servers are easier to run. I must refute this odd notion with reality: they are not. They are expensive, troublesome, less-capable, and pointy-clicky does not equal easier to use, nor does it negate having to possess actual skills and knowledge.

Desktop

• HP has announced two new ultra-thin Chromebooks – the 11-inch HP Chromebook and full-size 14-inch HP Chromebook.

Server

• Providing more evidence of the momentum that Docker has right now, cloud hosting company DigitalOcean is using CoreOS Linux to deliver Docker-powered virtual servers to its customers. The company has put a post up announcing that developers can begin using CoreOS on its cloud platform.

• Docker has emerged in the last year to become one of the most talked about virtualization technologies, but getting it up and running can take some effort. Today, CoreOS announced that its Docker-focused Linux distribution is freely available as an image that can be deployed on the popular DigitalOcean cloud service, lowering the barrier to entry and the cost, for getting up and running.

• Since its launch just a few years ago, DigitalOcean quickly made a name for itself as a hosting platform for affordable virtual servers. The company’s ambition goes far beyond hosting your WordPress blog or test server on a $5/month machine however and today it is taking a next step in this direction by announcing its support for CoreOS, the highly popular container-centric Linux distribution for massive-scale deployments.

• Does the channel need an open source operating system designed to power the next-generation networking hardware that powers the cloud? The company behind Cumulus Linux thinks so, and so too, apparently, do Dell, VMware (VMW) and other partners who have endorsed Cumulus Linux through major reseller and distribution agreements recently.

Kernel Space

• The most popular questions posed to Linux kernel developer Matthew Garrett during his Reddit AMA this week related to kernel hacking and hardware issues. But Garrett, a senior security engineer at Nebula, answered frankly on a variety of subjects that ranged from technical issues in the kernel, to his workstation setup, to how to kill fruit flies and why he likes the movie Hackers. Here is a digest of some of the more kernel-related questions and answers (plus a fruit fly question, for more flavor.)

• Systemd has turned into the Godzilla of Linux controversies. Everywhere you look it’s stomping through blogs, rampaging through online discussion threads, and causing white-hot flames that resemble Godzilla’s own breath of death. TechNewsWorld has a roundup of the systemd hostilities in case you missed any of it and want to savor some of the drama.

• A init process starts serially i.e., one task starts only after the last task startup was successful and it was loaded in the memory. This often resulted into delayed and long booting time. However, systemd was not designed for speed but for getting the things done neatly which in turns avoid all the UN-necessary delay.

Graphics Stack

• The CTO of the United States of America is a woman, CEO of HP, Yahoo! and many tech giants are women – leading these companies towards future.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.7.26 is now available.

• The latest version available is Wine 1.7.26, which has been released a while ago, coming with new DirectWrite functions, improvements to the common File Dialog, a number of C runtime enhancements and a bunch of bug-fixes.

Games

• Firewatch, an FPS adventure game set in the Wyoming wilderness, will be arriving on Linux sometime in 2015.

• The game is being developed by a new studio called Campo Santo, which is formed by a number of veteran developers from other studios, like Telltale Games, Klei Interactive, 2K Marin, and even Double Fine.

• Borderlands 2 is confirmed coming to Linux. Earlier this week a listing for the game was shown in the Steam Database showing that the game was compatible with the Linux operating system. This was news to fans, because in April, the president of Gearbox (the company who develops the Borderlands series) said that porting the game to Linux would cost too much and is not feasible. Additionally, the next Borderlands game due out, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, is also confirmed to be releasing on Linux in addition to PC, Mac. One of the interesting things about Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is that it’s currently not scheduled to be released on the newest consoles, the PS4 and Xbox One. Gearbox says that if there’s enough interest they’ll consider porting the game to the newer consoles.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• One week after Enlightenment’s E19 RC3 release, there’s more improvements that have landed that will warrant another new release in the very near future.

• Posted to the E19 release manager blog is The Septembering — going over the latest changes so far this September. There’s Covery-detected issues fixed, system tray improvements, and more Wayland improvements. The latest Wayland work includes pointer fixes and improved resolution detection.

• E19 features the rewritten Wayland compositor that’s working out great natively on Wayland without depending upon X11 or Weston for that matter. The E19 release is due out soon with a ton of notable changes.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME Shell, a user interface that provides functions for the GNOME desktop environment, has just received its second Beta for the 3.14 development branch.

Distributions

New Releases

• We are happy to announce the release of Calculate Linux 14.

Screenshots

Gentoo Family

• Gentoo is a free operating system based on either Linux or FreeBSD that can be automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or need. Extreme configurability, performance and a top-notch user and developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience.

• On August 26, 2014 Gentoo announced the release of a new LiveDVD, It comes with recent kernel, latest versions of the KDE and Gnome environments and software like Gimp, Chromium and others.

Red Hat Family

• The lid has been lifted on blivet-gui, a new open-source storage tool designed by Red Hat for configuring disks and file-systems.

Fedora

• Fedora 21, the upcoming version of the famous Linux distribution built by Red Hat, has been delayed another week, to the surprise of no one.

• Most of the Fedora releases register all kinds of delays and Fedora 21 is not making an exception from this rule. It’s become somewhat of regular occurrence, so no one is really surprised that the release date has slipped by another week.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A number of Linux kernel vulnerabilities discovered in the Linux kernel affecting the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system have been fixed by Canonical.

• The Ubuntu Touch platform has been receiving incremental improvements and now it looks better than ever. One of the latest additions is a fresh swipe-to-dismiss system for the notifications.

Devices/Embedded

• E3 Embedded Systems built its “Processor Independent Embedded Platform” (aka PIEP) kit to showcase its various microcontroller unit (MCU) and peripheral boards. The modular development kit not only offers a choice of MCU boards, but let’s you choose among 21 peripheral boards, with more on the way. The stackable design enables up to 36 peripherals modules to fit on one motherboard.

• Imagination announced a 64-bit Warrior processor with a MIPS I6400 core that features hardware virtualization, multi-threading, and multi-clustering.

Phones

Ballnux

Android/Google

• The Android Wear that’s shipping on the Motorola Moto 360, LG G Watch, and Samsung Gear Live is a far cry from where Google started when designers sat down to start sketching it out. “It was a long process of really trying to understand what people wanted from these kinds of devices,” says Dave Singleton, Wear’s director of engineering.

• Motorola’s hotly anticipated Moto 360 smartwatch has finally gone on sale. Taking on a circular approach to Android Wear, the watch comes with either a black or limited edition gray leather strap, or two metal straps. The metal editions do not go on sale until later in the year and will be priced at $299.99 where as the leather strap editions which are now selling, sell for $249.99 and customers have the option of buying the metal band seperately for $79.99 or buying the leather band seperately for $29.99. The Moto X and Moto G have also been announced, one for the high end and another for the low end. Both devices will please many Android users (but mainly TouchWiz users) as they come with a pure Android UI.

• Chrome OS is gaining momentum not only in the consumer space, these devices are also becoming popular among businesses. Dell will start selling two Chromeboxes for businesses and individuals later this month.

• Amazon has a list of Android tablets, and also a list of the overall best selling tablets on its site. I highly recommend that you check Amazon’s user reviews before making a final decision on a purchase. I’ve often found important and useful tidbits posted by owners of the product I’m interesting in buying, and it can sometimes help you avoid getting stuck with a lemon.

• Like many mobile devices in their early stages, some people are scoffing at smartwatches, but how many years did it take before we took smartphones and tablets seriously? Smartwatches will get done right, and based on what we’ve seen with Android itself, Android Wear is probably the platform to bet on.

• There is, apparently, a big demand for commercially available encrypted smartphones perhaps impervious to the data demands of spy agencies and cyber criminals worldwide.

• Indeed, Toby Weir-Jones says sales of his new ultra-encrypted smartphone, called the Blackphone, are flying off the shelves since it began officially shipping in June.

Free Software/Open Source

• “Coming from a scientific background, where transparency is a key part of doing repeatable research, makes me very skeptical of anything proprietary,” he said. “How can you trust the analysis if you can’t see the raw data?”

• German developer of open source productivity software, Open Xchange, has launched an email encryption product that can secure messages with a single click.

• Called OX Guard, the new tool is an integral part of the OX App Suite – a carrier-grade cloud platform that includes OX Text, OX Spreadsheet and OX Drive, as well as email server, calendar and social network feeds.

• Open Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna told TechWeek that one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of wider adoption of encryption is complexity, so OX Guard was designed to be as simple to use as possible – users just need to click the padlock icon, set the password and their messages will be protected by AES encryption.

Events

• Each year, the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board seeks an organizing committee for the annual Linux Plumbers Conference. That process has now begun for the 2015 event, which will be held during the week of August 17-21 in Seattle, Washington, alongside the LinuxCon North America event. This is your chance to put your stamp on one of our community’s most important gatherings.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Canonical has published details about quite a few Firefox vulnerabilities in its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems and the company has pushed a version of the software into the repositories.

• When Firefox 32 shipped this week, Mozilla also officially ended its support of 1024-bit certificate authority certificates in its trusted store.

SaaS/Big Data

• So, you think OpenStack is perfect for your company’s cloud-needs, but you just discovered that finding OpenStack-savvy architects, designers, or even just administrators is like looking for the perfect New York style pizza… in San Diego.

CMS

• There are plenty of free and open source content management systems (CMS). But no platform is as big or as common as WordPress. WordPress powers more than 12.7 million websites — an astounding 47.38 percent of the World Wide Web, according to BuiltWith, which monitors such things.

BSD

Leftovers

• Jeremy Leval, the Redditor who got this whole saga started after being sued and harrassed by Toeppen simply for sticking up for a foreign exchange student who a bus driver was mocking, is of course among those Toeppen is re-re-filing against. One begins to get the impression that Toeppen and Suburban Express are masochistic, getting some kind of perverse joy out of getting blasted in the media and online. I’m at a loss as to what other forces could be at work here. Though, judging by some of the other customers’ stories from those being attacked legally by Suburban Express, the simple answer may be that Toeppen is simply a jerk.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• MARTYRED Chilean communist folk singer Victor Jara’s widow Joan Jara welcomed the announcement yesterday that three more people have been charged over his murder during the country’s 1973 CIA-backed military coup.

• Ten days after the Salvador Allende government was overthrown in a Sept. 11, 1973, coup in Chile, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Jack Kubisch told the House Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs: “Gentlemen, I wish to state as flatly and as categorically as I possibly can that we did not have advance knowledge of the coup.”

• [...]

• “Make the economy scream…”

• When the 1970 Chilean presidential election rolled around, Salvador Allende was still a major player and, despite another wave of U.S.-funded propaganda, he was elected president of South America’s longest functioning democracy on Sept. 4, 1970.

• However, he had a new and powerful enemy: Dr. Henry Kissinger.

• The 40 Committee was formed with Kissinger as chair. The goal was not only to save Chile from its irresponsible populace but to yet again stave off the Red Tide™.

• “Chile is a fairly big place, with a lot of natural resources,” explains Noam Chomsky, “but the United States wasn’t going to collapse if Chile became independent. Why were we so concerned about it? According to Kissinger, Chile was a ‘virus’ that would ‘infect’ the region.”

• At a Sept. 15, 1970, meeting called to halt the spread of infection, Kissinger and President Nixon told CIA Director Richard Helms it would be necessary to “make the [Chilean] economy scream.” While allocating at least $10 million to assist in sabotaging Allende’s presidency, outright assassination was also considered a serious and welcome option.

• The respect held by the Chilean military for the democratic process led Kissinger to pick as his first assassination target not Allende himself, but General Rene Schneider, head of the Chilean Armed Forces. Schneider, it seems, had long believed that politics and the military should remain discrete. Despite warnings from Helms that a coup might not be possible in such a stable democracy, Kissinger urged the plan to proceed.

• When the killing of Schneider only served to solidify Allende’s support, a CIA-sponsored media blitz similar to that of 1964 commenced. Citizens were faced with daily “reports” of Marxist atrocities and Soviet bases supposedly being built in Chile. U.S. threats to sever economic and military aid were also used to help cultivate a “coup climate” among those in the military. These two approaches represented the hard and soft lines outlined by Nixon and Kissinger.

• In Andrew Niccol’s devastating character study, Hawke plays a drone pilot who’s ordered by the CIA to off terrorists—as well as civilians—in a series of targeted strikes.

• Washington is public enemy No. 1. It’s the real evil empire. It’s a longstanding serial aggressor. Rogue Western partners share blame.

• On September 2, Wall Street Journal editors echoed the same narrative. They headlined “Deterring a European War.”

• They called this week’s NATO summit meeting “one of the most important in its 65-year

• Southeastern Ukraine’s conflict is Obama’s war. Behind the scenes US manipulation controls things. Kiev is infested with CIA and FBI operatives. Blackwater USA (now Academi) type mercenaries operate in Southeastern Ukraine. Perhaps alongside covert US special forces.

• Since conflict erupted in April, Russia went all-out for diplomatic resolution. It has no ongoing military campaign.

• It didn’t invade Ukraine. It’s not shelling cross-border. Or from inside Ukrainian territory.

• Its troops aren’t involved in fighting. It’s not out to seize Ukrainian territory. Western sources lie claiming otherwise.

• Several mysterious night bombings attacks were launched on Islamist positions in Libya while they were in the process of defeating Haftar allies there and driving them out of the city.

• Haftar claimed these attacks were joint operations with the international community.

• After multiple investigations concluded that no “stand down” order was given to security personnel responding to the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Fox News alleged that the delay security personnel took to enlist support amounted to a “stand down” order.

• On the September 5 edition of Special Report, host Bret Baier once again hyped the asked-and-answered question from his Fox News special, “13 Hours at Benghazi,” based on the accounts of three CIA security personnel who alleged they were delayed in responding to the diplomatic facility under attack in Benghazi, Libya. Baier criticized the “semantics” used by deputy State Department spokesperson Marie Harf, who during a press briefing explained that “there was no stand-down order” but there was a short delay “for very good security reasons to get additional backup and additional weapons” for the security personnel before responding to the attack.

• The media is selling fear of beheadings to the public.

• An occasional misconception of history is the contention that geo-political outcomes are the result of rational calculation. Or put differently, local rationalities don’t always, or even most of the time, aggregate to global rationalities. The Obama administration used the CIA to organize a neo-nazi putsch in Ukraine after NATO spent the last twenty years squeezing (heavily) nuclear-armed Russia and immediately involved the IMF and Western oil company executives in Ukrainian ‘government’ affairs? At about the same time part of the Syrian ‘opposition’ that the U.S. had armed and financed morphed into IS (Islamic State) and promptly marched into Iraq to confiscate and use the weapons the U.S. had supplied leading Mr. Obama to once again bomb the country while re-committing combat troops. Given that there is no conceivable ‘good’ outcome to any of this, just what local ‘rationalities’ could be driving the serial disasters of U.S. foreign policy?

• The murder, following that of James Foley last month, is a further demonstration of both the reactionary character of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the terrible consequences of a half-century of intervention in the Middle East by US imperialism.

• So what, then, is the “more nuanced picture”? Kershner writes that the legal documents “depict the plot as more of a family affair, a local initiative organized and carried out by members of a clan in Hebron.” That was what many analysts had been saying all along, offering a very different interpretation than the one being put forth by Israel–though it was the Israeli line, not the one offered by independent analysts, that made its way into US media (FAIR Blog, 7/2/14, 7/28/14). Kershner speaks to one Israeli source who, she reports, still thinks it “was fair to blame Hamas, as an organization, for the kidnappings.” The source added that “it is still possible that we will find evidence of a direct connection.”

• After terrorists kidnapped and beheaded two American journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, while releasing gruesome videos of the act, Fox News focused much of its ire on President Obama, portraying him as a source of troubling weakness.

• CENTCOM has been helpfully posting declassified footage to YouTube for the past three weeks.

• Don’t be fooled. Unmanned aerial vehicles have changed the way wars are fought, turning some forms of combat into a computer game with flesh-and-blood victims.

• The legal basis for the recent introduction of more than 1,000 US ground troops in Iraq was called into question on Friday, after the White House confirmed that it does not consider itself bound by time limits that usually constrain such deployments.

• The first movie examining the morality of drone warfare has arrived and it’s sure to add fuel to the debate over the growing use of the controversial technology by the Obama administration and the concern that too many innocent civilians are being killed.

• Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill, starring Ethan Hawke as a troubled U.S. Air Force pilot grappling with the ethical consequences of attacking from afar, makes its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival Sept. 5 before playing at the Toronto Film Festival Sept. 9.

• The Nigerian-American novelist discusses the pitfalls of hashtag activism, the destructiveness of U.S. foreign policy, and that time he dreamed about meeting Obama at a Brooklyn house party.

• -One effect of the rise of remote-controlled warfare will be that moral injury will assume an increased share of war’s psychological injuries. Remote-control warriors do not suffer life-threatening duress in combat, and they don’t vicariously experience extreme stress via the experiences of individuals they know and love (such as their witnessing a fellow platoon member being shot and killed). This means they’re immune from most forms of PTSD, as this condition is currently defined. They’re also immune from Traumatic Brain Injury (unless they spill their coffee and slip on it). They’re not immune, however, from moral injury. The potential for moral injury in combat veterans will only grow as sensors on “drones” and other remote-controlled machines improve. Soon, there will be little subjective difference between a WWI infantryman bayoneting an enemy soldier and what a drone pilot/sensor operator experiences when they kill someone.

• The American definition of “murder” in the midst of war now seems to depend upon the technical methodology for the homicide, not the deliberate intentions of the killers. Beheading is barbaric. High-tech bombing picking off individual “bad guys” is okay. In fact, US leaders claim to be conscientiously selective, though the innocent bystanders killed by drones are dismissed as “collateral damage.”

• The Convention’s other goal is nonproliferation. The danger here is that a “Geneva Convention” for drones may turn drone proliferation into a distraction. Yes, drone proliferation is real. We’ve already remarked that some 80 countries now have drones. And according to Medea Benjamin of CODE PINK, 10 to 15 countries are working to produce drones that can kill. Naturally, we should be concerned about this. But shouldn’t our first concern be states which already possess killer drones? Medea Benjamin writes that there have been 350 lethal drone strikes on Pakistan since 2004 which have killed from 2,500 to 3,500 people. Those strikes weren’t launched by Burundi.

• Ethan Hawke stars as a drone pilot near Las Vegas who has a mental breakdown while killing targets 7,000 miles away (11,000 km) in “Good Kill,” a Venice Film Festival entry shown yesterday and meant to spark debate.

• A prominent national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times routinely submitted drafts and detailed summaries of his stories to CIA press handlers prior to publication, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.

• The reporter, Ken Dilanian, appears to compromise any honest representation in the stories, even submitting revised drafts to appease the CIA.

• Recently released emails indicate that prominent national security reporter Ken Dilanian — formerly with the Los Angeles Times, currently with the Associated Press (and from 1997-2007 the Philadelphia Inquirer) — shared stories prior to publication with CIA press office seeking their approval, according to a story up on The Intercept. Now, it is not uncommon for national security reporters to vet facts with government functionaries, but the emails indicate Dilanian went much further than that, not only sharing stories prior to publication (a big no-no in almost every newsroom) but he also entered into discussions about how the CIA could bend public opinion of drone strikes their way.

• A website cofounded by journalist Glenn Greenwald has published emails suggesting that a former Tribune Washington bureau national security reporter submitted some of his work to CIA officials prior to publication, a practice banned by many media outlets, including Tribune.

• Email exchanges between CIA public affairs officers and Ken Dilanian, now an Associated Press intelligence reporter who previously covered the CIA for the Times, show that Dilanian enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship with the agency, explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication. In at least one instance, the CIA’s reaction appears to have led to significant changes in the story that was eventually published in the Times.

• For the people of Roboski it does not matter that the deadly 2011 Turkish air attack may have been due to bad US intelligence. It still does not absolve the Turkish government, whose planes killed the 34 Kurdish villagers, they said.

• “The United States shares responsibility in the massacre, but we also hold Turkey responsible because in the end it was they who bombed us,” said Ferhat Encu, who lost his 15-year-old brother in the attack.

• As Senior Editor Jacob Sullum notes below, there has been a lot of chatter this week about the apparent flip-floppery, or at least slipperiness, of Sen. Rand Paul’s ideas about what the United States should do to the Islamic State. (In addition to Sullum’s strong critique, see Leon H. Wolf, Steve Benen, and the indefatigable Jennifer Rubin, as well as the senator himself.)

• Polls showing Rand Paul as the frontrunner in the GOP presidential sweepstakes have the neocons in a lather, with their online media phalanx frantically attacking him at every opportunity. It’s kind of funny to watch: the first fusillades were aimed at labeling him an “isolationist,” while more recently they’ve pointed out how he deviates from his father’s more angular policy positions. If you can’t smear and marginalize, then there’s always the strategy of cutting him off from his base.

• Ismail Haniya, the top Hamas leader in Gaza, worked the crowd in what used to be the Boura neighborhood of this battered northern border town, kissing the cheeks of elders and the foreheads of masked fighters. He waved at the women standing in front of makeshift huts next to the homes flattened in Israeli attacks, as children watched from atop concrete piles where green Hamas flags were planted as though on conquered lands.

• Ukraine has retracted an earlier claim to have reached a ceasefire with Russia. The office of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko initially said he agreed with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on steps toward a ceasefire with pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine. But the Kremlin then denied a ceasefire agreement, saying it is not in a position to make a deal because it’s not a party to the fighting. Ukraine has accused Russia of direct involvement in the violence amidst a recent escalation. The confusion comes as President Obama visits the former Soviet Republic of Estonia ahead of a major NATO summit in Wales. More than 2,600 people have been killed in eastern Ukraine since April, the majority by Ukrainian forces. The United Nations says more than one million people have been displaced, over a quarter of them internally.

• Did you know that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Isis, was trained by Mossad and the CIA? Were you aware that his real name isn’t Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai but Simon Elliot? Or that he’s a Jewish actor who was recruited by the Israelis to play the part of the world’s most wanted terrorist?

• If the messages in my email in-box and my Twitter timeline and on my Facebook page are anything to go by, plenty of Muslims are not only willing to believe this nonsensical drivel but are super-keen to share it with their friends. The bizarre claim that NSA documents released by Edward Snowden “prove” the US and Israel are behind al-Baghdadi’s actions has gone viral.

• There’s only one problem. “It’s utter BS,” Glenn Greenwald, the investigative journalist who helped break the NSA story, told me. “Snowden never said anything like that and no [NSA] documents suggest it.” Snowden’s lawyer, Ben Wizner, has called the story a hoax.

• The peace president is clearly on war footing. US bombs are also going off in Africa and Pakistan. No one at home is talking about NSA spying anymore. NATO has a new mission.

Finance

• It wasn’t only eBay that got off scandalously light for such anticompetitive collusion. In a separate class-action suit against Adobe, Apple, Google, and Intel, the four companies agreed to a collective settlement of $324 million.

• That might sound like a reasonable numbers until you do a little math. The class-action suit represented 64,000 workers, which means each would receive the munificent sum of $5,062; subtracting lawyers’ fees shrinks that amount further. Plaintiffs had sought $3 billion in damages in lost wages, which under antitrust laws could have tripled to a $9 billion reward had they won in court — $140,625 each, or about $102,780 after the lawyers’ cut.

• Leaked audio from the latest Koch summit shows Charles Koch’s “intellectual sounding board,” Richard Fink, drawing a direct line between increasing the minimum wage and the rise of fascism, totalitarianism, and terrorist suicide bombers.

• Roughly 25% of those with bachelor’s degrees in the US derive no economic benefit from their diplomas.

• Fast food workers across the U.S. went on strike Thursday, staging sit-ins and walk-outs to bring attention to a years-long campaign to raise industry wages to $15 an hour and allow workers to join unions. The demonstrations spurred several arrests and the disruption of business at fast food restaurants in many major cities. Ashley Westerman reports from Washington, D.C.

• More than 400 fast-food workers and their supporters have been arrested in a national day of action for a $15-an-hour minimum wage. Workers staged a one-day strike in 150 cities across the country Thursday, from Las Vegas to Chicago and Detroit, to Little Rock, Arkansas, and here in New York City.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Ayyadurai has waged an incredibly bizarre public relations campaign, and the more you look at it, the more bizarre it becomes. However, anyone who looks over any of the primary documentation (much of which we’ve linked to in our previous posts) can only conclude that while Ayyadurai may have independently come up with some ideas, he most certainly did not invent email. It was widely in use. The key arguments in his claim are obviously false, and prey on (1) a misunderstanding or misrepresetation of copyright law and (2) an almost fraudulent misquoting of Dave Crocker, a guy who really was heavily involved in early email efforts. Again, all of that is discussed in the earlier posts.

• What I still cannot fathom is how the Huffington Post can stand behind this “reporting.” I’ve now heard from three different HuffPost reporters on the news side who all say that they’re horrified that no one at the company has done anything about this. The only official response I got stood by the stories, but actual reporters at the company recognize that their own credibility has been absolutely destroyed by this. It’s been pointed out that the five part series is on HuffPo’s “blogging” side — which gives a platform to PR folks with no editorial oversight.

Censorship

• The “spiral of silence” is a theory that people hesitate to say things they believe others in their group won’t agree with. It predates the Internet age.

• Let me add that the “spiral of silence” disproportionately affects the shy, the thoughtful and the female.

• Social media were supposed to free these cooped-up opinions by offering new venues for speaking one’s piece. But this high-minded promise of a vast online town hall for pensive argument has fallen flat, according to a new report by Pew Research Center and Rutgers University.

• As you can clearly see that’s using a photo of Jackson’s famous “wardrobe malfunction” from the Superbowl many years ago, and applying the Things Tim Howard Could Save meme to it. Marginally funny. But not copyright infringement. Not only does Jackson not hold the copyright on that image, it’s obvious fair use for whoever does hold the copyright.

• Let me be clear, while Turkey has made good progress in some areas of digital development and education, and done more in recent years to integrate the Kurdish community and language into the Turkish nation, there are still too many worrying steps with regard to freedom of speech. That freedom must exist equally online and offline. Not only are around 51,000 websites blocked at the moment, but dozens of journalists are in jail or on trial: one female journalist I met, Fusun Erdogan, was sentenced to 789 years in jail!

• Following the horrific actions of ISIS/ISIL, in which the group beheaded American journalist James Foley and plastered the video in online forums like Twitter and YouTube, I argued that it is important that the American Public be given the chance to repudiate the aim of the video: paralyzing us with fear. Adding to that thought, Glenn Greenwald argued that the reason one must fight against censorship in the most egregious of speech cases is that such cases are often where the limitation of speech is legitimized. While this may not be a First Amendment consideration, since those sites are not affiliated with the government, it would be a mistake to suggest that free speech is limited as a concept to that narrow legal definition. Free and open speech is an ideal, one that is codified into law in some places, and one which enjoys a more relaxed but important status within societal norms.

• Furthermore, the industry seems to believe that everyone else has a legal responsibility to carry out its wishes once it declares a site as bad. It thinks hosts should take down sites, search engines should stop linking to them, advertisers should block ads, registrars should pull domain names and ISPs should block access. You’d think that maybe actually adapting to new technologies and giving people more of what they want might be a more compelling strategy, but the legacy entertainment industry prefers demanding that everyone else go out of their way to protect the legacy industry’s obsolete business model, without the industry itself doing anything more than pointing at sites (often incorrectly).

• We’ve heard some folks claim that all these bogus takedown notices we write about are just “anomalies” rather than a pattern of abuse of the law for the purpose of censorship. And yet, there are more and more examples every day. The latest one is particularly bizarre. IFPI (the international version of the RIAA) has apparently been issuing a series of bogus takedown notices to get Kim Dotcom’s album “Good Times” taken down off of his own site, Mega. That’s… quite incredible. This does not appear to be a strange attempt to hide Dotcom’s music, but it looks to just be pure sloppiness on the part of the IFPI issuing misguided takedowns. That is, the IFPI takedown notice lists a totally different song (and it turns out this is the second time this has happened to Dotcom’s album in the past month). As short-sighted as the IFPI is, it would take an other wordly level of stupidity to directly target Dotcom’s music with a bogus takedown. Even the IFPI must know that that would backfire badly. The story that it’s an “accident” makes much more sense.

Privacy

• Two weeks ago, the DOJ Inspector General released a report on the FBI’s use of National Security Letters (NSLs)—the controversial (and unconstitutional) surveillance instruments used to gather personal information of Americans without any prior oversight from a judge. In a little-noticed passage buried in the report, the IG describes how NSLs have been used on journalists in the past, and indicates that the FBI can currently circumvent the Justice Department’s media guidelines to do so in the future.

• Scotland Yard investigating police mole in Plebgate saga seized records of Sun political editor without consent

• The line between “not prepared” and “oh fuck, we don’t have to reveal that, do we?” appears to be fairly blurry.

• It is the most recent of Edward Snowden’s released documents published by The Intercept, where Glenn Greenwald criticizes the report’s clear and descriptive plans for international corporate espionage. The QICR Final Report details multiple “safe bets” and “strategic hedges” against perceived threats to US sovereignty in not only political but also commercial environments.

• Throughout the last year, the U.S. government has repeatedly insisted that it does not engage in economic and industrial espionage, in an effort to distinguish its own spying from China’s infiltrations of Google, Nortel, and other corporate targets. So critical is this denial to the U.S. government that last August, an NSA spokesperson emailed The Washington Post to say (emphasis in original): “The department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.”

• After that categorical statement to the Post, the NSA was caught spying on plainly financial targets such as the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras; economic summits; international credit card and banking systems; the EU antitrust commissioner investigating Google, Microsoft, and Intel; and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. In response, the U.S. modified its denial to acknowledge that it does engage in economic spying, but unlike China, the spying is never done to benefit American corporations.

• Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, responded to the Petrobras revelations by claiming: “It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters…. What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of—or give intelligence we collect to—U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.”

• But a secret 2009 report issued by Clapper’s own office explicitly contemplates doing exactly that. The document, the 2009 Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review—provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden—is a fascinating window into the mindset of America’s spies as they identify future threats to the U.S. and lay out the actions the U.S. intelligence community should take in response. It anticipates a series of potential scenarios the U.S. may face in 2025, from a “China/Russia/India/Iran centered bloc [that] challenges U.S. supremacy” to a world in which “identity-based groups supplant nation-states,” and games out how the U.S. intelligence community should operate in those alternative futures—the idea being to assess “the most challenging issues [the U.S.] could face beyond the standard planning cycle.”

• Politico Magazine’s Michael Hirsh has written a hit piece on Glenn Greenwald. It is terrible, in precisely seven ways.

• Politico Magazine is a magazine edition of The Politico—America’s worst publication—whose mission is “to pull back from the flood to understand what it’s all about.” The flood, in that metaphor, is supposed to be the tremendous churning hourly volume of vacuous meta- and meta-meta-political Narrative and Controversy that sustains The Politico and is sustained by The Politico.

• Politico is known as the snarky DC-based publication that seems to thrive on considering itself part of the infamous “church of the savvy,” where reporting on the play-by-play of the horse race of politics is more important than exposing the truth. However, it apparently has a bit of an inferiority complex when it comes to Glenn Greenwald. A bizarre “profile” of Greenwald by Michael Hirsh tries to make the argument that Greenwald has “peaked” mainly because Politico appears to really, really, really want that to be true. Of course, as Jay Rosen pointed out, this is hardly the first time that Politico has asserted that Glenn Greenwald was over as a story. The site did so back in July of 2013, just a month after the first Snowden revelations, claiming “the new cycle has moved on” and “Greenwald doesn’t seem to have any more big revelations up his sleeve.”

• After our collective freakout over Google Glass, society shifted its focus to the police.

• It’s good to see such a key project both identifying problems and coming up with possible ways to tackle them. The post contains further details of future plans, the people and organizations involved — and even an offer of funding for those who want to help ensure that The Onion Router’s stink continues to make the people at the NSA and GCHQ cry.

• A trio of judges Tuesday heard the American Civil Liberties Union’s challenge that the federal government’s mass collection of telephone metadata is unconstitutional.

• Second Circuit one of three appellate courts judging phone surveillance program.

• Oregon Senator Ron Wyden says he’ll hold a hearing on the financial impact of recent hacking activity by the U.S. government.

• Earlier this summer, the CIA admitted it had conducted an unauthorized search of computers used by the Senate Intelligence Committee. This was after director John Brennan said, “We wouldn’t do that.”

• Not every Internet provider can handle the demands of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant or law enforcement subpoena for data. For those companies, Zack Whittaker reports on ZDNet, the answer is to turn to a shadowy class of companies known as “trusted third parties” to do the black bag work of complying with the demands of the feds.

• Under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), phone companies and Internet providers can charge back the government for their efforts in responding to warrants. AT&T charges the CIA more than $10 million per year for access to its phone call metadata. But smaller ISPs who aren’t frequently hit with warrants can’t afford to keep the infrastructure or manpower on-hand to respond to requests—so they sign up with a “trusted third party” capable of doing the work as an insurance policy against such requests.

• The US manufacturer of a super secure mobile phone recently discovered 19 fake mobile base stations set up across the US that are quietly intercepting calls, SMS text messages and data from users’ phones.

• As reported last month in BiometricUpdate.com, Boston surreptitiously spied and used facial recognition on concertgoers last year. According to Dig Boston, a local alternative news daily, a new and sophisticated event monitoring platform supplied by IBM was tested at the Boston Calling Music Festival in 2013. The system gave authorities “a live and detailed birdseye view of concertgoers, pedestrians and vehicles in the vicinity” of the event.

• EFF, joined by Access, filed public comments last week urging the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) to tackle the unknown spying activities occurring under Executive Order 12333 (EO 12333). The Executive Order is supposed to protect Americans from presidentially-directed spying; however, despite the protections, EO 12333 is being used for mass spying that collects Americans’ communications, address books, and other information.

• The software reportedly responsible for this week’s iCloud attacks on famous female celebrities is meant for government institutions, this according to the CEO of the company behind the software, Vladimir Katalov.

• A Russian federal lawmaker says Google is anti-Russian and possibly spying for Ukraine, and he wants local authorities to investigate, Izvestia reported Thursday.

• By cross-referencing information from a massive data leak in mid-August with the results of a recent parliamentary inquiry in Germany, we’ve come to suspect that the majority of surveillance technologies produced by German companies have been bought and sold under the table – in other words, without a license. The German government requires licenses for the sale of technologies that are considered to be “dual use” – products that can be used for both good and ill.

• Senior Turkish Cypriot lawyer Baris Mamali warned that American, British and Israeli surveillance operations in Cyprus puts the island under the threat of attacks by external forces.

• At the root of the chaos in the Middle East and here at home are governments that respect no limits on their exercise of power. Public officials—who are supposed to be our public servants—routinely behave as if they are our masters. They reject the confines of the Constitution, they don’t believe that our rights are inalienable, and they fail to see the dangerous path down which they are leading us.

• The Facebook Messenger for mobile devices has caused outrage among users regarding concern for their privacy settings. In their defense, the social network claims it will give the user increased control over the settings. Now anyone who attempts to access the “Chat with Friends” feature on their cellular device is greeted with the message “We’ve moved over to Messenger.”

• From time to time we hear these kinds of arguments, which convey the message, “when it comes to privacy invasion, companies are far scarier than the government, so all this fuss about the government invading privacy is overblown and it’s the companies we should be paying attention to.” (Occasionally we hear the reverse as well.)

• In some leaked documents the NSA/5-Eyes have talked of being ‘greatly interested’ in expanding these capabilities to the cameras of gaming systems like the Playstation 4 and XBOX 360, which for me at least, brings about the question of what kind of terrorist prevention is involved in watching my child play Lego Marvel Heroes?

• In India too, the State seems to be using similar tactics in the name of security. A report by the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC) revealed that Indian authorities have installed a number of surveillance systems in the communication networks used by private citizens. Over 100,000 telephone interception orders are issued by the central government every year, besides the staggering number of surveillance orders issued by the State governments, the report said.

• Camp and O’Donnell ridicule NSA surveillance while accurately describing the OffNow campaign to thwart unwarranted surveillance through state action.

Civil Rights

• The U.S. Justice Department is getting ready to launch an investigation into the practices and training of the Ferguson, Missouri, police department, a Missouri official and a federal official told CNN.

• Dozens of students, workers, and youth attended a meeting at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor Thursday night to discuss the significance of the August 9 police killing and subsequent repression of protests in Ferguson, Missouri.

• Titled “Military-police violence in Ferguson, Missouri: The war comes home” and hosted by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), the meeting took up the interconnections between increasing police brutality and attacks on living conditions and democratic rights in the US and the escalating geopolitical tensions and military predations of American imperialism internationally.

• So, apparently White, with his hands cuffed behind him, shot himself in the chest.

• Authorities claim that a man committed suicide via gunshot while handcuffed and unattended in the back of a police cruiser. However, an autopsy report states that the man — who had his handcuffed behind his back, and was already searched for weapons — was shot in the chest.

• Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson lied when he said he had received “many” specific requests for the videotape that allegedly shows Michael Brown robbing a convenience store, according to a new report.

• “All I did — what I did was — was release the videotape to you, because I had to,” Jackson told reporters on Aug. 15 when asked why he released the robbery footage. “I’d been sitting on it, but I — too many people put in a [Freedom of Information Act] request for that thing, and I had to release that tape to you.”

• Writing for The Blot, Matthew Keys reports that the police department did not receive any specific requests for the videotape.

• “A review of open records requests sent to the Ferguson Police Department found that no news organization, reporter or individual specifically sought the release of the surveillance tape before police distributed it on Aug. 15,” Keys writes.

• Witness says he saw cruiser run over man twice; bicycle and police car moved from scene by officers

• Over at The Intercept, there’s an article claiming that the AP’s national security reporter Ken Dilanian had a too cozy relationship with the CIA while he was at the Tribune Company. It’s an interesting read, based on pages upon pages of emails between reporters and the CIA that were released under a FOIA request. However, what caught my attention, more than the full story, was something in all of those emails, spotted by Katherine Hawkins. And it’s that, on page 363, it seems clear that the CIA, when releasing these emails, redacted the line “Off the record, no comment.” It’s rather obvious, because Dilanian immediately repeats that line right back, somewhat angrily at the ridiculousness of it.

• In the San Francisco Bay Area, the answer is yes. A coalition of community groups has come together to call attention to Urban Shield, a four-day long “preparedness” exercise for law enforcement and other agencies that will take place from September 4-8. They’ve organized a week of education, including a march and demonstration outside of the event on Friday, September 5. To these community groups, Urban Shield represents state violence and political repression, not public safety.

• Amnesty International also calls attention to how wrong Obama was to characterize torture as an understandable error of judgment in the immediate wake of 9/11, by people who meant well. (“He even called us patriots!” John Rizzo, former CIA acting general counsel, kvelled afterwards.)

• By contrast, the extensive paper trail that has emerged over the years is clear: The Bush/Cheney torture regime was “a chillingly detailed, planned and resourced operation incorporating systematic unlawful and criminal conduct stretching over years.”

• If Obama really wants to prevent this from happening again some other time, Amnesty says, he needs to start by releasing the full Senate intelligence committee report on torture — not just the executive summary, but the whole thing, and without the redactions the White House proposed in early August.

• As I wrote on Wednesday, Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein expects that she will be able to release the approximately 500-page executive summary of the 6,000-plus page report within two to four weeks — redacted, but not so redacted it isn’t “readable and understandable.”

• Risen fought the subpoena all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices declined to review a lower court’s ruling affirming the subpoena’s legality. Having exhausted his options, Risen’s day of judgment may be coming soon, forcing him either to be jailed for his convictions or to tell the government what it wants to hear.

• During a press conference to announce a broadened probe of the Ferguson, Mo. police department, Holder was asked whether he stood by statements he has reportedly made in private meetings insisting that Risen is not at risk of being jailed for contempt despite prosecutors’ success in defeating his legal effort to avoid testifying against his alleged source, Jeffrey Sterling.

• Would the release of 10-year-old detainee abuse photographs, such as one depicting US soldiers pointing a broom handle at a hooded detainee’s rectum, incite terrorist organizations and threaten national security?

• That’s a question government attorneys will have to answer next week when they explain to a federal court judge why as many as 2,100 unclassified photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqi and Afghan captives should continue to be concealed from the public.

• Last month, FCO Minister Mark Simmonds told MPs that records of flights passing through Diego Garcia had suffered “water damage” as a result of “extremely heavy weather in June 2014.”

• However, weather records for Diego Garcia obtained from the FCO under Freedom of Information have cast doubt on this explanation: official logs for the island show that the total rainfall for June 2014 was just 3.25 inches (83mm). This is a low figure, considering the average annual rainfall is 102 inches (2591mm) – or 8.5 inches (216mm) per month.

• Ministers have previously admitted that Diego Garcia, part of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), was used by CIA planes carrying detainees as part of the ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme, which saw prisoners flown to countries where they could be subjected to torture. However, the UK Government has so far refused to make documents relating to such flights public.

• The inmates at Guantanamo are treated no differently from the way suspects are treated in North Korea. As most everyone knows, some of the prisoners at Gitmo have been there for 12 years, without charges, trials, or even the semblance of due process of law. If they were ever to be given trials, the proceedings would be kangaroo in nature, in that the outcomes of the trials would be preordained by the president and Pentagon officials. Much of the trials would be in secret and evidence acquired by torture and hearsay evidence could be used to buttress the preordained verdict, just like in North Korea. Meanwhile, prisoners at Gitmo have been brutally tortured and have no hope of ever securing justice. It’s not surprising that many of them have gone on hunger strikes in the hopes of killing themselves.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The big broadband providers have all been spinning a yarn for a while now pretending that there’s widespread competition. A key partner in this has been the FCC, which for years has helped spread this myth by pushing out totally bogus broadband data. If you want a good laugh, go over to BroadbandMap.gov and type in your address — and discover a bunch of bogus claims about broadband which you really don’t have. The speeds are inflated. The services are inflated. It includes mobile data broadband, despite it being priced much, much higher and with very low caps and limits — and speeds that no one truly considers to be broadband but, that doesn’t stop the big broadband players from using that bogus data to claim there’s tons of competition.

• There’s no question that Net Neutrality has been this year’s most hotly debated and passionately defended political issue regarding the internet. It has often been painted as the next no-brainer that every internet user should hop on the bandwagon in support of—the next SOPA, PIPA, or NSA scandal. Opposition to shocking revelations such to these controversies sent a shockwave through the status quo of corporate government power. It was a signpost that the millennial generation can and will rise up to resist the oppression of personal liberties—at least when the fabric of their daily lives are at risk.

Intellectual Monopolies

• As Techdirt has reported, so far corporate sovereignty has emerged as the most contentious issue in the TTIP/TAFTA negotiations. In response to the growing public concern in Europe, the European Commission held a consultation on Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), although that proved largely a sham, with the desired outcome clearly signalled by the choice of questions and how they were framed. Indeed, Karel De Gucht, the EU Commissioner with overall responsibility for TTIP, even went so far as to call the unprecedented 150,000 public responses an “outright attack” — which is an interesting way to characterize democracy in action.

Copyrights

• In late December 2009, Wikileaks, the website that publishes secret government information, posted a copy of the draft intellectual property chapter of the Canada – European Trade Agreement (CETA). The CETA deal was still years from completion, but the leaked document revealed that the European Union envisioned using the agreement to mandate a massive overhaul of Canadian law.

• As we wrote back in July, it seems that the trade agreement between Canada and the EU, generally known as CETA, is finally nearing completion, after premature claims to that effect. One reason why we might believe so is that thanks to some public-spirited whistleblower(s), we now have both CETA’s main text (pdf) and the annexes (zip). This has permitted Michael Geist to perform an analysis of how the copyright provisions in CETA have evolved since the first leak of the chapter covering intellectual monopolies, posted by Wikileaks back in 2009.

• The U.S. Government is going after Kim Dotcom’s bank accounts, cars, art and other property. In a complaint filed at a Virginia federal court the Department of Justice argues that the property of the Megaupload and its founder should be forfeited as it was obtained through criminal means.

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