● 09.20.14

● Links 20/9/2014: GNOME 3.13.92, Android L

Posted in News Roundup at 3:59 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Please take a few moments to cast your votes in this year’s Readers’ Choice Awards. Be sure to write-in your favorites if you don’t see them listed for any given category.

Kernel Space

• AntiMicro continues to be GPLv3 licensed and works not only on Linux but also modern versions of Windows for mapping keyboard/mouse controls to a gamepad. The Linux support though remains dependent upon an X.Org Server and its libraries.

Graphics Stack

• Now that OpenGL geometry shaders landed for Intel Sandy Bridge hardware in Mesa and the OpenGL version bumped to 3.2, OpenGL 3.3 has arrived.

• Mesa 10.3 has been released! Mesa 10.3 is a feature release that includes many updates and enhancements.

• Marek Olšák has published another big set of fixes/improvements to the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

Applications

• Phabricator is an open source Project Management tool, which is built using PHP language and available under Apache 2.0 open source license for Linux, MacOSX and can be run in any platform, it can even run in windows but it is totally based on Linux support. Phabricator has been used by Facebook before. The first version of phabricator was built by facebook with lots of features such as reviewing and auditing codes, tracking bugs etc.

Proprietary

• In today’s Linux news OMG!Ubuntu! is reporting that Netflix is coming to Linux, this time natively. Jack Germain reviews Opera 12.16. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols talks to Theodore Ts’o about systemd. A preview of new Kmail show radical redesign. And finally today, Fedora 21 Alpha was approved for release!

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.7.27 is now available.

Games

• Tropico 5 is a construction and management simulation video game first released for Windows earlier this year, but today is seeing its first time of having a Tropico title on Linux. Tropico 5 is powered by Haemimont Games’ own in-house game engine and builds on the success of earlier titles in the Tropico series.

• Cannon Brawl has just been released for Linux and quite rightfully deserves a write up, as it’s really quite fun. The game has just moved out of Early Access after the Linux version was released, so time to take a peek at the beast.

• Torment: Tides of Numenera is another game heading to Linux from inXile entertainment that was funded on Kickstarter. They have released a new video to show off just how amazing it looks.

• Everyone has to have some fun after a busy day of working on a computer, I normally post about applications and security and such but I thought we’d have a change for once.

• PlayOnLinux is available for most distributions.

• If you are using Ubuntu or Mint then it will be available in the Software Centre and for other distributions it will be in the equivalent package managers.

• Devolver Digital’s first-person shooter is now available to purchase from the Steam store. The price is currently discounted by 15% until September 25.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE usability team lead Thomas Pfeiffer posted on the future roadmap of the KDE user interface and user experience on his blog. While he acknowledges that the great power and flexibility that comes with KDE Plasma and associated applications is the main reason behind its huge fanbase, in his opinion these are also the reasons why newbies get intimidated by the overwhelming number of features exposed at one place.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• A bit delay but here you have the second GNOME release candidate for syou to test, and your chance to make the “” release the best it can get.

• GNOME Shell’s ability to have extensions is pretty brilliant in my eyes. Some developers have come up with some great extensions to make life easier within GNOME-Shell.

• To install these extensions easily just open the links up within firefox, you will get a message bar asking if you would like to allow extensions.gnome.org to install them. You need to allow this for them to work.

• When you load one of the extension links you will be presented with a page like below, it has a nice easy “On/Off” toggle switch.

• After 2,5 years of development, Wasteland 2, a single player post-apocalyptic RPG developed and published by inXile Entertainment, was released today and is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X on GOG.com, Steam or Humble Bundle Store.

• We’ve released Geary 0.8 and Shotwell 0.20 today and I’m pretty excited about getting these out the door to our users. Both releases include important fixes and some great new features.

• At the release team BoF at this years Guadec, I said I would write a blog post about the whats and hows and ifs of release team work. I’m a little late with this, but here it is: a glimpse into the life of a GNOME release team member.

• GNOME user experience designer Allan Day shared a sneak peek into upcoming features in GNOME 3.14 release in the GNOME blog.

• The 3.14 release is expected around the last week of this September. Though the release notes will has an exhaustive list of features (as if you are going to wait for that!), Alan shares his personal favourites. As we can see, the next release is going to be a big one with respect to overall polish and user experience.

Distributions

New Releases

• Netrunner Rolling 2014.09 – 32bit and 64bit versions have been released.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. (RHT ) announced earnings results for its second quarter of fiscal’15 (2QFY14;ended September 18) after markets closed yesterday. The open source enterprise solution provider posted strong results with an adjusted reported net income of $78.48 million, beating analysts’ estimates of $72.48 million.

• Linux vendor Red Hat is very optimistic about its future growth prospects in the cloud and more specifically with container technology. Red Hat reported its second quarter fiscal 2015 financial results late Thursday, showing continued growth.

• Shares of Red Hat Inc., a distributor of the Linux operating system, fell after the company forecast third-quarter revenue below estimates of $449 million to $452 million. Red Hat’s billings growth of 17 percent for the second quarter also disappointed investors. Total revenue rose to $445.9 million from $374.4 million a year earlier. Net income rose to $46.8 million, or 25 cents, from $40.8 million, or 21 cents, a year earlier. Red Hat also said it would buy Ireland’s mobile application service provider FeedHenry for $82 million. FeedHenry operates a Burlington office.

Fedora

• Recently I pushed these packages to various Fedora repositories. Some of them were not in EPEL, some were missing from EPEL-7, one was not built since long time.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Ubuntu project announced a stable build for Ubuntu Touch phones, a week after Meizu tipped an Ubuntu version of the Meizu MX4 phone due in December.

• The Ubuntu for Phones team at the Canonical’s Ubuntu Project announced the arrival of the first image from the Ubuntu-rtm (release to manufacturing) distribution for phones. The announcement followed last week’s tease from Meizu, saying a version of the Android-based Meizu MX4 was on schedule for shipping with Ubuntu in December.

Devices/Embedded

• One of the Pi’s key attributes is its price of around £30. It is the nearest thing we have to a disposable computer and several can be used cost-effectively in a single project.

• A recently publicised use is the creation of a string of Raspberry Pi honeypots for detecting hacker activity on a corporate network.

• Given CW’s enduring preoccupation with the surveillance programs of our Establishment masters, would it be, could it be possible to create a disposable, network-invisible computer?

Phones

• The Linux Foundation have today announced the next round of the Tizen development unit program is now available, with the Intel NUC and Samsung RD-PQ hardware devices being available. The Idea behind this program is to put the required hardware in developers hands so they can develop and test their applications on real hardware. It has to be noted that the Samsung RD-PQ device does not have GSM connectivity, and therefore can not be used as a real world device, which is a pity as developers do need real devices so late in the game.

Ballnux

• The Samsung Gear Manager software that runs on Android devices has been updated to version 2.2.14090599. We now get a lively splash of orange going through the app as well as added support for the Gear Circle bluetooth headset. There is no full change log, so there might be some bug fixes, but we have no information on that at the moment.

Android

• The Android L release details have slowly been emerging more and more over the past few months since being announced back in June, but we’re still waiting for more information. Currently being called the “Android L release” most can expect Google to unveil Android 4.5 or 5.0 “L” sometime in October or November.

• The Google Android L operating system will be the first Android OS version to enable encryption by default. Android has had this feature for some time but it was always up to the user to activate and use it. Earlier this week Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that iOS 8 would be encrypted by default preventing not only the authorities from accessing your device data but Apple as well (iCloud and server data is still accessible to both Apple and authorities).

• Mantis Vision and Flextronics unveiled an Android-based “Aquila” tablet based on Mantis’ MV4D 3D engine that uses a 3D sensing system to recreate 3D scenes.

• So-called 3D tablets, which display 3D video and other content with or without special glasses, never hit it big among consumers. Now Israeli 3D vision technology firm Mantis Vision and manufacturer Flextronics have built a different kind of tablet called the Aquila. It not only displays 3D content, but records, recreates it, and lets you manipulate the image in 3D or integrate it into applications.

Free Software/Open Source

• One of the unanswered questions in the ongoing European-Google antitrust saga is what concrete changes or concessions critics want (or will accept) from Google. One of those things may have just come to light in a Financial Times interview with German justice minister Heiko Maas.

• As an entrepreneur, you always have questions to answer: “How do I efficiently manage my people?” “How can I keep track of my projects?” “Where do I start with my website?”

• It can all feel pretty overwhelming, but luckily, there’s a fantastic resource you can use to solve an abundance of entrepreneurial problems: open-source technology.

• It all began in the ’90s when there was a big push to create operating systems to make using new computer technology more efficient. Companies saw the value in these operating systems and acquired creators such as Linux to write the code.

• There’s the parquet system that they added to Hadoop. That was based on work that Google did on Dremel. Facebook has introduced things like PrestoDB. There’s just a fascinating array, and the biggest thing about this is that these things are truly freely licensed from companies that have incredible depth of knowledge. They’re really going to drive it now, and I think the open source stack is going to be pushed higher and higher. Even commercial vendors will incorporate it. So, it’s definitely going to work itself into the enterprise.

• The first surprise of the Oculus Connect virtual reality (VR) developer conference in Hollywood, California has been revealed. Earlier today event host Oculus VR announced that the first development kit (DK1) of its Oculus Rift head-mounted mounted display (HMD) was now open source. This means that anyone can now download the company’s full list of workings on the device and use them how they see fit.

• Open-source software comes in many different shapes and sizes, and some are better maintained than others. Because of this, organizations need to spend time, money and resources to ensure the quality of source code, and not every company has the ability to do so.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• This week we celebrated the record-breaking 2,513 events in 86 countries that made up Maker Party 2014. The campaign, which officially began on July 15th and ended this week, brought nearly 130,000 adults and children together to learn valuable digital literacy skills in classrooms, libraries, cafes, and living rooms around the world.

Databases

• Another day, another bunch of VCs pour cash into a tech startup. Move along; there’s nothing to see here – or is there?

• Increasingly stiff competition in the database market has claimed another victim, as InfiniDB has ceased operations effective immediately wit plans to file for bankruptcy.

BSD

• Released this past week was the first beta of FreeBSD 10.1. If you haven’t yet had time to explore this development release, there’s a lot of improvements over FreeBSD 10.0.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This Saturday, September 20th, people everywhere are getting together to celebrate free software.

Project Releases

• There are two exploits identified by the developer in this package. One of them allows the disclosure of cookies to the wrong sites and malicious sites being able to set cookies for others. The other vulnerability which has been identified by this developer in the curl package incorrectly allows cookies to be set for Top Level Domains (TLD). According to the Canonical’s security notification this could allow a malicious site to set a cookie that gets sent to other sites.

Public Services/Government

• Newton argues open source is well suited to systems that need to be transparently stable and secure, where a lot of people have an interest in collaborating. He adds it is favoured by intelligence services for exactly these reasons, and if it’s good enough for spooks, it should serve for hospitals.

• Alfresco hit its initial end-of-year download target of 10,000 in the first week, with eventual downloads numbering in the millions for the initial release of its software in 2005. “You want to join the cool party,” Mr Newton said. “That’s what open source is all about.”

• We got a chance to interact with Rushabh Mehta, the founder of Web Notes Technologies, a company based in Mumbai, India. ERPNext is the major product of the company. It is a free and Open Source web based ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution for small and medium sized businesses with its presence in more than 60 countries. In addition to the regular discussions on their Open Source product, strategy, customers etc. we also got a chance to understand how hard it is to thrive in an environment where the “Open Source” philosophy is not a familiar term yet. A software developer by passion and an Industrial Engineer by training, Rushabh also informed us about their imminent product conference in Mumbai he is quite excited about.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Engineer Joshua Pearce and his team of researchers at MTU created an entire digital library of open source designs for a particular medical device, a syringe pump. Each design comes in the form of a printable file that can be 3D printed with a RepRap 3D printer, and each file can be customized by doctors according to their needs. The team posted their findings in a research paper titled Open-Source Syringe Pump Library.

• MORE than 100 Australians died overseas every month over the past year – some in the most extraordinary ­circumstances.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• For the record, I think the president should ask Congress for its approval on his ISIS campaign. I also think the 2002 Authorization For the Use of Military Force against al Qaeda and associates should be declared null and void. These are not political judgments; they are judgments based on my evaluation of what seem to be the most persuasive arguments. And I am open to revising them.

• An axis of evil threatens the liberties of the United States from within: the warfare state; the surveillance state; the bail-out state; and, the welfare state.

• A natural extension of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s 1 percent doctrine, the axis feeds on an effete quest for a risk-free existence — the opposite of the risk-taking philosophy that gave birth to the nation.

• In a matter of months, the Islamic State (IS) has cemented itself as a feared terrorist organization. And with the group’s gruesome beheadings and headline-grabbing expansion into Iraq and Syria, some of America’s politicians are calling for intervention far beyond airstrikes.

• Colbert: “That Is The Type Of In-Depth Reporting You Can Only Get From Fox News”

• Still, it was a surprise to see Noam Chomsky’s name in the Newspaper of Record. In a joint letter from Howard Friel and Chomsky’s longtime co-author Edward Herman, readers were exposed to an argument mostly unheard in the media frenzy for military strikes in Iraq and Syria: Such strikes are illegal under the United Nations charter.

• America’s foreign policy has, in all probability, contributed to creating foreign hatred towards us.

• For years, stone-throwing has been an integral part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – tough to fight on foot and undesirable to fight by tank.

• But fighting it by air: That’s a new idea.

• And that’s precisely what Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat decided to do when rioting broke out this summer along the city’s light-rail train line following the brutal revenge killing of a Palestinian teenager by Jewish extremists.

• An Israeli company called Bladeworx fitted drones with thermal cameras and flew them just ahead of the light-rail trains as they passed near trouble spots. The drones relaying real-time video to the train operators, police, and even City Hall, enabling officials to spot potential attackers and track those who tried to escape.

• No one said anything about privacy concerns.

• A presidential edict issued by Dubya is now preventing Congress from getting briefed — on parts of our looming war

• Drone strikes are acts of terror. The campaign against terrorism is itself a never-ending campaign of terror. The United States is a permanent wartime state — the world’s greatest agent of repression. With each bomb, the world becomes less secure and less safe. With each bomb, the United States, and by default, those of us living within its borders, become more alone and isolated in the world.

• The UAV experienced a malfunction during a patrol along the border, according to the IDF.

• Not long after 9/11, the Patriot Act was passed and it continues to infringe the individual freedoms of US citizens. The practices supported by the Patriot Act were then expanded overseas, not only to civilian populations but also to foreign leaders, until the Edward Snowden case erupted and brought chaos and shame to Washington.

• Ryan Baker says that Laos is, per capita, the most heavily bombed nation in the world. During the Vietnam war the US flew more than half a million bombing missions and delivered more than two million tons of explosive ordnance.

• It has now become a question of when, not if, the U.S.-led air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) will expand into Syria. As I wrote at the beginning of August, the Islamic State has enjoyed a strong and unmolested base of operations from which to coordinate its offensive in Iraq. If not attacked on that turf, the terrorist organization will continue grow and strengthen. Effective military operations against ISIS—even those short term efforts to stop ISIS momentum—must include operations in Syria to eliminate ISIS sanctuaries.

• “[The Khmer Rouge] was born at a time when covert American bombing of Cambodia and overt American aid to the Cambodian government brought devastation to the countryside,” said Professor Ashley Thompson, chair of Southeast Asian art at SOAS, Univeristy of London. “With pre-drone-style random massacres in the countryside, refugees from the bombings filling the capital, and a freewheeling, highly corrupt militarized government contributing further to societal breakdown, there was a lot to be angry about.”

• Behind the scenes of the U.S. military preparations for airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against the al Qaeda offshoot terrorist group Islamic State, the CIA is gearing up for new drone strikes and a surge in intelligence-gathering operations to support it, according to U.S. officials.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Rail is by far the greenest way to travel, so why on earth are Europe’s sleeper services being cut?

Finance

• Buyers young and old are being squeezed and that will lead to one of three outcomes, says Richard Dyson

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• What Fox News failed to note is that Georgia law requires all applications — even those the New Georgia Project thought were incomplete or inaccurate — to be turned in by the organization. As Stacey Abrams, head of the New Georgia Project, told The Washington Post, her organization flagged the forms before submitting them to the secretary of state…

Censorship

• Global Voices Advocacy’s Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in Internet rights around the world. This week’s report begins in Turkey, where the Parliament adopted an amendment to the country’s Internet law that will endow the Telecommunications Directorate with an ostensibly absolute degree of power over online content. Now approved by President Erdogan, the amendment charges the telecom agency with evaluating the political nature of all online content. It is now authorized to instantly block any site that it deems threatening to national security or public order—without oversight by a court or any other government body. The amendment removes from the current (already-restrictive) online content policy a requirement for post-facto judicial approval on content removal requests.

• For first time in poll’s history, American students are more in favour of the first amendment than adults

Privacy

• According to a report in Der Standard, which cites documents leaked by former US intelligence employee, Edward Snowden, Austrian telecommunications networks may also have been used by the US intelligence service for espionage activities.

• Documents provided to German newspaper Der Spiegel by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the NSA and GCHQ breached Deutsche Telekom and local telecommunications provider Netcologne, the paper reported Sunday. Deutsche Telekom responded quickly, saying that its investigation has discovered no breach so far.

• A former high-ranking Customs lawyer says he resigned from his job after allegedly being told to bury information that could embarrass the Government.

• US journalist Glenn Greenwald says the Government’s stance has continually shifted since he arrived in New Zealand last week, and particularly after he took his evidence to the US National Security Agency on Sunday.

• The public debate that erupted in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations about the very private collection of metadata and even more detailed records has not been limited to discussion of the activities of the U.S. National Security Agency: they have been a feature in Australia and New Zealand also. In Australia, it has been the current government’s policy on the retention of metadata, supposedly to combat homegrown terrorism, that has drawn criticism, especially because both the prime minister and the attorney general have had significant trouble explaining what metadata actually is.

• Prime Minister John Key cannot rule out that the United States National Security Agency is undertaking mass surveillance of New Zealanders’ data but has rejected claims New Zealand spies would have access to such information.

• Some of National’s potential coalition partners say party leader John Key has handled the allegations of mass spying on New Zealanders poorly.

• Congress is scheduled to leave town for its fall recess by the end of this week, with the USA Freedom Act still awaiting action in the Senate. Members of Congress will head back to their home districts to campaign for November’s elections, with all members of the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate on the ballot.

• It’s unlikely that Congress will have time to address cybersecurity legislation as the end of the fiscal year rapidly approaches, according to Former National Security Agency Director and retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden.

• The Intercept this week released a new investigative report on New Zealand and its own mass surveillance program which the US’s National Security Agency (NSA) routinely shared data with. The report, based on documents by whistleblower Edward Snowden, contradicts assurances made by New Zealand Prime Minister John Key that the country has no mass spying program. The report, authored by journalist Glenn Greenwald, who is also the founding editor of the Intercept, is just the latest in a series of revelations made possible by Snowden’s leak.

• Participation on Facebook could prove very dangerous to your future well-being. There is a reason that Facebook is aligned with both the CIA and the NSA. I have several credible sources who tell me that all data posted on Facebook goes into series of cataloged files which culminates with each person being assigned a “Threat Matrix Score”. The mere existence of a Threat Matrix Score should send chills up and down the collective spines of every American.

• Today people worry about NSA spying. Fifty years ago it was intelligence tests. The conversation hasn’t changed.

• Smartphones are becoming increasingly popular amongst backcountry types, as a decent option for communication when the shit hits the fan. However, if you just want to chat to your partner a mile away, you still need a two-way radio — or at least you did.

• BitTorrent have announced an alpha release of their Bleep software that allows users to have private calls and text based conversations. The app is unique as it sends end to end encrypted messages in a p2p fashion rather than utilising a centralised server as is common with alternatives such as WhatsApp.

• Bleep, the BitTorrent peer-to-peer chat client, is now out in the wild in the form of a public Alpha version.

• First released to registered pre-alpha users in July, Bleep was then in Windows versions only. Now it’s gone to release, the organisation has added Android and Mac versions.

• The ease by which mass surveillance can be conducted is not a feature of digital networks; it’s a bug in our current infrastructure caused by a lack of pervasive encryption. It’s a bug we have to fix. Having the data of our lives sent across the world in such a way that distant strangers can (inexpensively and undetectably) collect, inspect and interfere with it, undermines the trust any of us can have in any of our communications. It breaks our faith not only with the organizations that carry that data for us, but the trust we have with each other. On a spied-upon network, we hold back from speaking, reading, trading and organizing together. The more we learn about the level of surveillance institutions like the NSA impose on the Net, the more we lose trust in the technology, protocols, institutions and opportunities of the Net.

• Tim Berners-Lee has publicly called for programmers to develop better, more user-friendly cryptography. That way, he says, we can all get back to living private lives again.

• You can buy encryption tools to prevent people from reading the contents of your e-mails should they intercept them. But what about those who have NSA-caliber resources and skills?

• The National Security Agency has some of the brightest minds working on its sophisticated surveillance programs, including its metadata collection efforts. But a new chat program designed by a middle-school dropout in his spare time may turn out to be one of the best solutions to thwart those efforts.

• The world found out that Germans were being recruited by the CIA. According to Der Spiegel, one agent from Germany’s foreign intelligence service sold “documents pertaining to the special parliamentary committee” in Germany that is “investigating spying by the NSA in Germany.” The CIA station chief in Berlin was booted out of the country.

• So, without a doubt, no, the CIA was not careful enough. That’s what this secret review, which will likely remain secret for a very, very long time (unless it’s leaked) should conclude. In fact, a review should probably instead examine how reckless CIA agents are being in the field.

• The CIA has curbed spying on friendly governments in Western Europe in response to the furor over a German caught selling secrets to the United States and the Edward Snowden revelations of classified information held by the National Security Agency, according to current and former U.S. officials.

• The pause in decades of espionage, which remains partially in effect, was designed to give CIA officers time to examine whether they were being careful enough and to evaluate whether spying on allies is worth running the risk of discovery, said a U.S. official who has been briefed on the situation.

• Among his most shocking discoveries, he told me, was the fact that the N.S.A. was routinely passing along the private communications of Americans to a large and very secretive Israeli military organization known as Unit 8200. This transfer of intercepts, he said, included the contents of the communications as well as metadata such as who was calling whom.

• “The dissenters are citizen heroes,” exclaimed former Knesset Speaker and former Jewish Agency head Avraham Burg. “One would have expected the military establishment to respond to this claim by committing to look into it and fix what needs fixing,” explained popular columnist Nahum Bernea in Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest daily newspaper. “The occupation corrupts,” he claimed. “The Israeli policy is a disaster.”

• National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden has accused the US of regularly sharing personal information about its citizens of Arab and Palestinian descent with Israel.

• Here’s a shocking story we’ve missed that deserves to be up in lights. Intelligence reporter James Bamford had a piece on the New York Times op-ed page two days back relaying conversations with Edward Snowden in Russia in which the 31-year-old whistle-blower suggests that the U.S. special relationship with Israel was a central motivator for him in leaving the country so as to blow the cover on US surveillance of its citizens. There is even the suggestion here that Snowden was aware that secrets the U.S. shared with Israel were being used to sexually blackmail gay Palestinians to collaborate; you may recall that the sexual blackmail story broke last week in the Israeli and English press (and the Times described the sexual information as “tidbits,” diminishing its significance).

• Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is back again. This time he’s here to tell us that the NSA routinely shares data of United States citizens with Israel. This should come as no surprise to anyone, as it was previously revealed that the NSA shared citizen’s information with Great Britain.

• This week, iOS forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski published a sobering reminder that iOS 8 is not infallible to intruders, especially government-funded intruders. Zdziarski has actually trained police on how to access data on iPhones in the past and didn’t have any trouble pulling almost all third party data off of a locked iPhone in a recent test. That includes everything from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, banking apps and so forth. “I can do it. I’m sure the guys in suits in the governments can do it,” Zdziarski told Wired. “And I’m sure that there are at least three or four commercial tools that can still do this too.”

• The internet was in a tizzy this week following the disappearance of what’s assumed to be a warrant canary in Apple’s latest report on governments demanding users’ private data.

• Apple CEO Tim Cook announced an updated privacy policy this week to reassure people about the company’s security and vigilance. But the company’s latest transparency report is missing language from previous versions that Internet freedom activists recognized as a clue about NSA spying.

• On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked to join in arguments set to be held in November on the government’s appeal of the first and only judicial ruling disputing the constitutionality of the NSA’s program sweeping up information on billions of telephone calls to, from, and within the United States.

• Edward Snowden is still living in Russia, hidden away from the US authorities looking for the whistleblower, who revealed information about the NSA, PRISM and other secret mass surveillance information.

• They already knew they were being spied on

• [...]

• In fact it appears that Snowden is being blamed for every intelligence failure in the US from the rise of ISIS to Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.

• Fresh off of the release of a new report showing no evidence that al-Qaeda or other Islamist groups changed their tactics in any meaningful way after the Edward Snowden NSA leaks, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is once again harping on about the “threats” Snowden is to blame for.

• Did Edward Snowden’s revelations on NSA surveillance compromise the ability of intelligence agencies to monitor terrorist groups? Contrary to lurid claims made by U.S. officials, a new independent analysis of the subject says no.

• Good news for whistleblowers, journalists, and everyone who likes to browse the Internet with an added cloak of privacy: the Tor network got a little stronger. Tor—software that lets you mask your IP address—relies on an international network of committed volunteers to run relays to help mask traffic. And that network is stronger now, thanks to the 1,000+ volunteers who participated in our second-ever Tor Challenge.

• The FBI wants greater authority to hack overseas computers, according to a law professor.

• A Department of Justice proposal to amend Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure would make it easier for domestic law enforcement to hack into the computers of people attempting to protect their anonymity on the internet.

• In addition, as you will see below, advertising companies are starting to use Minority Report-style face scanners in their billboards and many large corporations see facial recognition technology as a tool that they can use to serve their customers better. Someday soon it may become virtually impossible to go out in public in a major U.S. city without having your face recorded. Is that the kind of society that we want?

• Documentary from filmmaker Laura Poitras, who met Snowden and reported on NSA leaks, to receive UK premiere in London.

• “Citizenfour,” a documentary about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden by Oscar-nominated director Laura Poitras, has been added to the lineup of the 2014 New York Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced on Tuesday.

• A documentary about Edward Snowden is a late addition to the New York Film Festival.

• The perplexing mystery of a new breed of suspicious cell towers cropping up across the country may have been solved — at least partially.

• Whistleblower Edward Snowden has maintained that he would prefer to find asylum in a democratic country. Could Switzerland secure his passage out of Russian exile?

• Allegations that state-sponsored surveillance agencies have sought the creation of so-called ‘backdoors’ in certain public communications devices have been joined by claims that some vendors have been complicit in obliging them. Conspiracy theories – or concrete evidence?

• [...]

• Switching to a ‘shell’ (an interface for access to an operating system’s services) command, he then coded a script to gain access to admin mode – without the password – and published the script on to the Github software development service, at which stage other Linksys and Netgear users reported the script also worked on their modems.

• Indeed, propaganda, terrorism and mass surveillance were the very same components critical to the power of the totalitarian super-state, Oceania, depicted in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four. In this fully referenced feature, Snoopman goes beyond the Bubble Gum TV News History of the United States to investigate how and why this has happened.

• An NSA employee wearing name tag “Neal Z.” recently attended the the University of New Mexico’s Engineering and Science Career Fair.

• The NSA rep was trying to recruit college students to work at the controversial agency, which collects tons of metadata, emails, phone calls and various other information on American citizens.

• University of New Mexico grad Andy Beale and student Sean Potter asked Neal Z. about the massive collection of information by the NSA, reports The Intercept.

• If you downloaded the privacy software Tor in 2011, you may have been flagged to be spied on by the National Security Agency.

• It was an assembly of three of the US’ most wanted cyber-fugitives, brought together via video-link in the Town Hall of New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland.

• Sitting on the panel was the ringmaster and the money-man behind the whole show, dubbed “The Moment of Truth”, an event that Kim Dotcom said would change the course of the general election on Saturday.

• The German-born internet entrepreneur had a beaming smile spread across his face throughout the long speeches on Monday, and could be heard chuckling constantly as guest speakers fired shot after shot at the New Zealand government.

• Met with rapturous applause from a jam-packed Auckland Town Hall, Kim Dotcom’s ‘Moment of Truth’ event last night has sent shockwaves across the country.

• The Internet Mana Party says it would push for the next Government to give NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden safe passage and residency in New Zealand.

• Anyone following the fortunes of the world’s biggest technology companies will have noticed a trend: every one of them has gone potty for privacy.

• [...]

• Indeed, one of the material outcomes of Snowden’s leaks has already been realised: inspired by renewed consumer and business interest in privacy, technology is becoming more secure.

• Houston police officer James Taylor really wants you to know one thing about local cops: HPD is not the National Security Agency, “nor are we the federal government.”

• Taylor repeated the mantra several times in testimony before the Texas Senate’s State Affairs Committee this week, insisting efforts to limit cops’ access to cell-phone location data will – and, in fact, already has – fatally hamstrung the efforts of local police. Whether you believe that depends on how you read a dizzying, hatchet-job law that lawmakers updated last session and whether you think such “metadata” – call log information, location data, and other records – is inherently sensitive and deserving of strict safeguards against police snooping.

• During the Stockholm Internet Forum this year, a State Department representative was quick to flaunt reforms put in place by the US Government to ‘counter US mass surveillance programmes.’ However, he was unwilling to respond when faced with the simple question “If you are willing to reform laws and mend things, why not honor the man who triggered it, why not bring Edward Snowden home?”

• Sen. Patrick Leahy’s reformed USA Freedom Act, a bill that would begin to rein in the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, is the best chance we have to make surveillance reform a reality in 2014. It has undergone multiple changes since it was first proposed a year ago. In its current compromise form, the bill still only begins to protect the many privacy rights that have been compromised by excessive surveillance. Nonetheless, if passed, it will be a crucial first step towards upholding Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches, while simultaneously reinforcing our counterterrorism efforts by making surveillance more strategic and evidence-based.

• Under the guise of accusing David Kolbe of hypocrisy, the writer exposed his own ignorance and hypocrisy. The proposition was that complaining about candidate Nisly having an open source to a government website operated by his wife was somehow wrong, because the Obama administration’s NSA intercepts private calls and emails and somehow a candidate for the state legislature should be equally critical of the federal government as of Nisly.

• A large government contracting firm that appears to be doing or seeking business with the National Security Agency employs the spouse of one of the most powerful officials at the agency, according to corporate records, press releases, and company websites. But the NSA has declined to address whether there is a potential conflict of interest or to disclose any information about contracts or the official’s financial holdings.

• The head of the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate may be involved in a serious conflict of interest with a major defense contractor.

• Aram Roston at Buzzfeed has seemingly uncovered a very cozy link between an NSA official and a government contracting firm.

• Former State Department official says your communications are being collected without court oversight.

• Nobody is exempt from Big Brother’s peering eyes, as a leading computer security expert explains.

• In his speech at the 2014 ITWeb Security Summit, Jacob Appelbaum describes the nature of ubitiquous surveillance, and it is worse than we think.

Civil Rights

• It’s a problem when the director of National Intelligence can’t seem to get his story straight.

• “The Burglary,” the book by Betty Medsger, tells the story of the discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s secret FBI by a group of eight nonviolent peace activists who suspected that the FBI was spying on the peace community during the Vietnam war. They devised a plan to break into an FBI office in Media, Penn., steal their files to get the hard evidence and then release it to the national newspapers so as to alert the citizenry. They successfully did so and found that spying was the least of the illegal activities that the FBI was engaged in — at Hoover’s behest this “law enforcement agency” was actively engaged in stifling dissent, intimidating people who disagreed with government policy, fabricating evidence against people (sending some innocent people to prison). And, the FBI had emergency plans, in the event of martial law being declared, to summarily round up and imprison people who had opposed the government (Pete Seeger was on this list; Medsger does not say if his banjo was to be included). In short: the FBI was America’s KGB.

• In any sort of criminal investigation, FBI agents must act responsibly—and legally—when collecting evidence on their suspect. If they don’t, the evidence might not be admissible in court.

• The US needs another Edward Snowden, and many more whistleblowers, to inform Congresses what the country is being asked to get into, as America is on a verge of a “large” war in the Middle East, Daniel Ellsberg, former military analyst, told RT

• Your Search Engine Is Watching

• Yahoo Inc., as it turns out, has cared about privacy since 2007. It just couldn’t tell anyone.

• The company posted a note last week saying it was “pleased to announce” that it had gotten thousands of pages of court documents released that detail its battle to prevent the National Security Agency from collecting data about some of its users.

• The director of the CIA is openly frustrated with the media and the Senate for their criticism of the agency. This comes just ahead of the release of an upper house report on torture and follows Langley’s alleged hacking into committee emails.

• I was at the National Security Agency yesterday giving a Constitution Day speech and I learned details of a shocking collection program: The government is bulk collecting all traffic on Twitter. Under a program menacingly called “Bulk Data in Social Media” and abbreviated—appropriately enough—as BDSM, Twitter has been providing all public traffic since 2010 for a massive government database that, as of early last year, contained 170 billion tweets. The goal of this program? To “collect the story of America” and to “acquire collections that will have research value” to analysts and others. Believe it or not, Twitter has been cooperating with the BDSM program since its inception in 2010 without any court order or FISA Court review. Even tweets you delete from accounts and from accounts that have been deactivated have been collected. And what’s more, the government appears to use no minimization procedures in processing this material; U.S. person data and that of non-U.S. persons are intermixed. Even worse, the government is actively contemplating the use of the BDSM database to examine activity that is clearly protected by the First Amendment: “broad topics of interest . . . run from patterns in the rise of citizen journalism and elected officials’ communications to tracking vaccination rates and predicting stock market activity.”

• Women of a certain age are thrilled by the prospect of a possible President Hillary. Over-50 females are so overjoyed that one of their own might finally achieve the nation’s top political post — better two centuries late than never — that they’re willing to overlook the former first lady/senator/secretary of state’s not-so-minor defects.

• [...]

• Because, let’s face it, there is no universe in which a President Hillary kicks ass. There is no chance, not even a remote one, that she is interested in decisive action on climate change (her “plan”: hope for young people to form a “movement”), bold moves to reduce unemployment or raise wages, putting an end to NSA spying on Americans (she’s in favor of it), or slamming the breaks on Washington’s kneejerk reaction to anything that happens overseas: Blow it up (she’s really in favor of war).

• The idea that the United States is being forced to suspend any “longtime concerns” about Egyptian human rights is hard to square with reality. For several decades, the United States considered brutal dictator Hosni Mubarak an ally; the initial US government response to the 2011 uprisings that would remove him from power was supportive (FAIR Media Advisory, 2/1/11). The New York Times noted (1/27/11) that “Mr. Obama praised Mr. Mubarak as a partner but said he needed to undertake political and economic reforms,” while Vice President Joe Biden challenged the notion that Mubarak was a dictator at all (FAIR Blog, 1/28/11).

• [...]

• Of course, the Egypt story didn’t end with Mubarak’s ouster. Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi won presidential elections in 2012, only to be removed by a military coup a year later. It is believed that as many as 2,500 were killed by Egyptian forces following the coup (The Nation, 5/8/14). The United States did not condemn the coup, and would eventually welcome former military leader Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, who in elections staged by the coup regime this year won an incredible, Mubarak-like 96 percent of the vote.

• We now have official confirmation that the Garda cops accused of brutality towards Corrib Gas Project protestors were working for Shell.

• Students and Ann Arborites lined East Liberty Street Thursday night to see two members from Pussy Riot, a Russian punk rock protest group that’s made international headlines since their 2011 inception.

• On Monday, the White House released this year’s list of problem countries in the area of drug trafficking and production, based on information tracked by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). In the memo, US president Barack Obama accused the governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Myanmar of having “failed demonstrably” to cooperate with international anti-drug efforts.

• The full list of countries considered problematic by the DEA include Afghanistan, Bahamas, Belize, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Laos, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, and Peru. However, Venezuela, Bolivia and Myanmar were singled out by Obama as unable to “adhere to their obligations under international counternarcotics agreements.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• AT&T plan for ‘user-driven paid prioritization’ as an alternative to fast lanes is meant to quiet demands for tighter regulation

• Sir Tim Berners-Lee has never been one to hide his opinions. Now the father of the World Wide Web is up in arms about the state of net neutrality in the United States.

• In a chat with the Washington Post Sir Tim railed against the telecommunications companies’ push to introduce differential pricing for internet content – such as charging subscribers more to watch YouTube. Such practices were counter-intuitive to the idea of an open internet, and would mean internet firms would shun the US as a market, he warned.

• The head of the Federal Communications Commission was quick to reassure lawmakers on Wednesday that his agency is seriously considering using the authority it has to regulate phone lines on Internet service providers.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Following anger at the news that Peter Sunde would have to attend his father’s funeral while handcuffed, humanity has prevailed. Mats Kolmisoppi says that following all the attention focused on his brother’s predicament, Peter was allowed to pay his final respects with dignity.

• A new report which brands Mega.co.nz a “shadowy cyberlocker” has drawn a fierce response from the cloud storage site. CEO Graham Gaylard informs TorrentFreak that should the Digital Citizens Alliance refuse to remove Mega from its entire report and issue a public apology, further action will be taken.

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