● 10.04.14

● Links 4/10/2014: WebOS is Back

Posted in News Roundup at 4:58 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The DDOS attack that has rendered the popular Linux site Tux Machines virtually unreachable for nearly two weeks, now seems to be affecting sister site TechRights. Roy Schestowitz, publisher of both sites, told FOSS Force that the attack on TechRights began at about one o’clock Friday afternoon GMT.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• The GeForce GTX 980 dominates as well under OpenCL as it does with OpenGL. While the GTX 980 has just 2048 CUDA cores compared to 2,880 on the GTX 780 Ti, the Maxwell architecture is a heck of a lot more efficient and powerful than Kepler. My earlier GTX 980 Linux review is worth reading if you’re not yet up to speed with NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTX 900 series as the new graphics cards are real winners for Linux users as long as you don’t mind obliging to using proprietary hardware drivers on your systems.

• Rob Clark has released an updated X.Org DDX driver for his Freedreno driver project that continues to strive towards reverse-engineering the Adreno graphics processors found on Qualcomm’s ARM SoCs.

• AMD’s Alex Deucher released a new version of the xf86-video-ati DDX driver for X.Org Servers on Wednesday night.

• Luc Verhaegen has issued his annual call for speakers for those developers wishing to discuss their work on X.Org-related projects, including Wayland, Mir, Mesa, etc.

• I’ve been writing for a while already about the DRM graphics changes coming to Linux 3.18 even with Linux 3.17 not being quite out yet while courtesy of Intel OTC’s Daniel Vetter is a comprehensive list of the i915 DRM changes to be found for the next kernel development cycle.

Applications

• The latest version available is Timeshift 1.6.2, which has been released a while ago, coming with a brand new clone button for cloning the entire system, improved first snapshot size estimation, cleaned terminal output and support for saving backups on LUKS-encrypted partitions.

• While the regular Timeshift works only with the EXT file systems, the developer has forked it to work with BTRFS, under the name of Timeshift BTRFS.

• One of my goals for this year is to become proficient in a cross platform GUI tool kit. The toolkit I’ve chosen to get my hands dirty with is Qt because in addition to being cross platform it also has a fantastic amount of documentation.

• I always find I learn programming easier when I am building some practical instead of going through various tutorials that you just throw away when you are done. So with that, my “learn Qt” project is something I’m calling qAndora.

Proprietary

• Univention Corporate Server can be a cost-effective alternative to upgrading to Microsoft Server 2012.

Instructionals/Technical

• If you are not a fan of using an online source code searching tool like lxr.kde.org, but are still tired of grepping for a particular class or function in the KDE Frameworks (and other projects as well), you might find the GNU Global tool quite useful.

Wine or Emulation

Games

• Valve have released the Steam Hardware Survey results for September and thus, GOL’s first survey comes to an end. 670 people completed the survey, which is quite a nice sample – so thanks all of you who took the time to do it.

• Dreamfall Chapters is a highly anticipated sequel to The Longest Journey and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. The game will finally released on October the 21st.

• The newest game in the Natural Selection series titled NS2: Combat has a new teaser trailer out and it’s looking good!

• Crusader Kings II is a strategy game available on Linux, featuring single and multi-player, and set in various historical periods. Crusader Kings II was launched in 2012 and it received positive reviews.

• For those that have read us for some time you will probably know I am a big space sci-fi fan, so J.U.L.I.A.: Among the Stars ticks literally every single box for me. Here’s my thoughts on the soon to be released Linux version.

• J.U.L.I.A.: Among the Stars was funded on Indiegogo and even though they didn’t hit the goal for Linux they still decided to bring it to our platform, and we have been lucky enough to be able to give it a run.

• Banished is a city-builder from Shining Rock Software LLC that was praised rather a lot when it came out, and the developer noted they planned a Linux version. We caught up with the developer to see when.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In the past months cooperation has increased between Maui, KDE and LXDE developers, not only regarding libraries, but also key components such as SDDM (which has become the new standard for Qt based login managers) or Calamares, a new unified installer framework based on Qt.

• In the meantime, KDE also released their long awaited effort named KDE Frameworks 5. Frameworks 5 is a comprehensive set of technologies for the Qt ecosystem.

• The Maui Project that’s been focusing on a Wayland desktop, their own Wayland compositor, and other tasks has decided to adopt the KDE Frameworks 5.

• After helping with a recent local KDE translation sprint, Andrej Mernik suggested that I should ask for direct commit access to the KDE localisations SVN, so I do not bug him or Andrej Vernekar to commit translations for me.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The release of GNOME 3.14 on September 24 has earned good marks and Elementary OS is still getting positive reviews. Gearhead Mark Gibbs introduces users to Debian GNU/Linux. We have Scott Dowdle and Christian Schaller on Fedora 21 Alpha and Phoronix is reporting Rahul Sundaram suggests using Dash instead of Bash. We have more on Shellshock and its fallout as well as some gaming news from GamingOnLinux.com. And finally today is an opinion on Mark Shuttleworth’s September 30, 2014 post.

• The GNOME desktop has had a rough last few years. The transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 left a bad taste in the mouths of many GNOME users, and some abandoned GNOME for other desktops. But PC World thinks that GNOME 3.14 could be just what the doctor ordered to bring some of those users back to the GNOME desktop.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• For those seeking Scientific’s re-spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0, it should soon be coming with today marking the availability of Scientific Linux 7.0 RC2.

• Pat Riehecky on the behalf of Fermilab and others announced Scientific Linux 7.0 x86_64 Release Candidate 2 as the latest available for testing — months after RHEL 7.0 shipped along with CentOS 7.0, Oracle Linux 7.0, etc.

• With this new system, the CentOS 7.0 x86_64 release didn’t fully support the hardware. The USB mouse didn’t work at all (for what it’s worth was a ROCCAT Lua), the Gigabit Ethernet wasn’t detected, and the installation process crashed for unknown reasons. The installation target was to an Intel 530 Series M.2 SSD.

Fedora

Debian Family

• APT (Advanced Package Tool) is a set of core tools inside Debian that allow users to install, remove, and keep applications up to date. A new version of APT is now out and brings even more improvements.

• Debian GNU/Linux, more usually just called “Debian,” is an operating system distribution or “distro” where the kernel can be either Linux or kFreeBSD (the FreeBSD kernel). Wikipedia notes that “… there are 1,276 times as many Linux users as there are kFreeBSD users.” Adventurous geeks might also like to try the unofficially supported multi-server microkernel called GNU HURD. The distro is free and open source mostly under the GNU General Public License.

• The Debian project began in 1993 and the first release was in 1996. The most recent release, version 7.6, codenamed “Wheezy”, was released on July 12, 2014. The next release, version 8, codenamed “Jessie”, is currently in Beta 1 release.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Ballnux

• At this year’s IFA, Samsung has introduced a new SmartWatch, which goes by the name Gear S. This Smartwatch has a twist, actually a 3G integrated twist, but I’m sure you already know about that.

• In a press release, Samsung have announced that the Gear S will be available in Germany starting on the 17 October. The suggested retail price is Euro 399, which is what we anticipated for a european launch.

• Like Samsung, which offers both Android Wear and Tizen-based smartwatches, LG has apparently decided to have a Plan B in hand, or rather on the wrist. According to The Verge, a developer website hosted by LG teased an upcoming SDK for a WebOS-based LG SmartWatch with a “Coming soon!” tag. An image on one of the screens showed a Bean Bird logo borrowed from LG’s WebOS based smart TVs, as well as a rough sketch of a round-faced watch (see below).

Android

• iOS has long been a popular platform for some developers. But what happens when a longtime iOS developer decides to try his hand at programming for Android? Tom Redman shares how he learned to appreciate Android, and notes some of the differences between Android and iOS development.

• My name is Tom, and I’m Buffer’s Android developer, though you might be surprised to learn that before Buffer I had very little experience developing for Android.

Free Software/Open Source

• A comment like that will draw some fire from IBM. Big Blue has megabucks invested in Linux and is tooting the Eclipse horn to prove its openness in developing software such as Rational Developer for i. Zend Technologies has had success with PHP, as has other application development vendors such as Profound Logic and BCD. And newcomer to the IBM i community, PowerRuby, has joined the app dev party as well.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The proof of concept for this is already out in The Pirate Browser, a product of The Pirate Bay, which offers a Firefox Tor bundle designed to access banned websites, though not specifically to protect anonymity. Tor’s web browser, too, is a version of the open source Firefox web browser.

Funding

• You may have been wondering what has been going on since the 0.93 release and the Pitivi fundraising campaign.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Recently, I had a discussion with RMS about being a speaker for Free Software. In the end I was told simply to record some of my talks and that I would be given some feedback, but during the discussion I explained why I think GNUstep is important to free software and I believe that this is something that I think is important for other people to understand as well:

Public Services/Government

• Myanmar is to build an open source e-government platform with help from Vietnam.

• The first phase of the platform will be launched at the end of the year with functions allowing officials to manage citizen data and exchange information with other ministries and local governments, according to Vietnamese media reports.

• The platform will be upgraded in 2015 with cloud technology, and capabilities to handle more complex datasets and mobile users, it added.

Openness/Sharing

• What does an open source research approach mean for cancer? How will crowdfunding help develop better drugs faster? How will making a research project’s data accessible to anyone open up new avenues for research and innovation? A chemist who’s been writing software since his childhood aims to find out.

Leftovers

• In a video COMPUTER BILD showed how easy it is to bend an iPhone 6 Plus. The reaction from Apple: no more testing devices and no more invites for COMPUTER BILD. It is time for an open letter to Tim Cook.

• If you’ve paid attention to anything tangentially related to technology news over the past couple of weeks, you’re probably familiar with “bendgate”, the feverish reaction to the realization that Apple’s newest iPhone 6 Plus includes the feature of a bending case if you accidentally sit on it or something. As an Android loyalist, these reports have been an endless source of entertainment thus far, but even that has now been trumped by Apple’s reaction to the issue. Apparently the company has decided that the best response to a technology news organization’s reporting on the bendy Apple phones is to threaten to freeze that publication out of future bendy phones and likely-bendy Apple events.

Security

• Of all the technology companies in the world, Apple is easily the biggest in terms of its cash pile. Yet when it comes to security issues, the company appears to be unwilling to invest enough resources to keep its users safe in a timely fashion.

• Russian security company Dr. Web has discovered a flaw in the Mac OS X, which enables hackers to control infected computers using a search service at Reddit. The company says at least 17,000 unique IPs have been hacked, mostly in the US.

• ​Amidst reports of high-profile hacks targeting major American entities, a top congressional lawmaker said this week that that the United States must act immediately to iron out offensive and defensive rules for the cyber realm.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Does ISIS pose a credible threat to the United States and its interests? And if so, what is the best way to manage that threat? If you had asked any politician in 2003, they most likely would have agreed that Saddam Hussein and Iraq under his reign posed a credible threat to the United States, and a 10-year war was started because of that belief.

• But now, with scarcely a whisper of serious debate, Obama has become the fourth consecutive US president to launch a war in Iraq—and in fact has outdone his predecessors by spreading the war to Syria as well, launching strikes not only on fighters linked to the Islamic State (IS, or ISIS) but also on the Al Qaeda–linked Nusra Front and Khorasan.

• A long-term solution to terrorism will be a comprehensive battle against dangerous ideas that occupy minds of some youths in Middle East

• As Vice President Joe Biden warns it will take a “hell of a long fight” for the United States to stop militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, we speak to Jeremy Scahill, author of the book, “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield.” We talk about how the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that helped create the threat now posed by the Islamic State. We also discuss the role of Baathist forces in ISIS, Obama’s targeting of journalists, and the trial of four former Blackwater operatives involved in the 2007 massacre at Baghdad’s Nisoor Square.

• That’s how the US government has found itself since George W. Bush started a “war on terror” by invading Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, dragging US allies into a “coalition of the willing” that got mired in two wars for over a decade. Barack Obama, vowing to end the long and costly conflicts, withdrew American troops from Iraq (in 2011) and scheduled a wind-down in Afghanistan this year.

• Have you ever considered what life would be like if attack drones were visible over New York, Omaha, Nashville, Chicago, New Orleans, Denver and San Francisco?

• If our government were to deploy drones over American cities with the intent of targeting terrorists, what would our lives be like?

• Would we be comfortable with robot death machines flying through the sky like in a Ray Bradbury novel?

• Oliver’s funny, angry piece is a great summary of the lawlessness of the US’s drone policy, going from President Obama’s ill-advised drone striking the Jonas Brothers joke in 2009, to the fact that “imminent threat” and “civilian casualty” mean whatever the government wants them to mean.

• Two U.S. presidents have authorized the use of drones to carry out attacks beyond armed conflict zones in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. The deaths of all persons from missile strikes is unlawful. The situation in Afghanistan is more complicated because it is the scene of a civil war. Because [ex-]President Karzai has demanded a zero civilian death rate and his policies are the only legitimate ones in the civil war, then civilian deaths are unlawful there, too. As for why international institutions have not done more, the U.S. has a veto that prevents the Security Council from taking up the matter.

• More than 2,000 people marched through London in the driving rain today, Saturday, against the bombing of Iraq.

• “The public won’t like it. They’ll think it’s a police state.”

Transparency Reporting

• The National Security Agency (NSA) is probing an alert from cyber security experts on weaponised surveillance software used by Pakistan and Bangladesh intelligence to spy on computers and mobile phones used by Indian politicians, journalists and security establishments. Several computers and mobile phones have already been exposed. Following the most recent Wikileaks release titled ‘Spyfiles 4’ on surveillance malware FinSpy, cyber security experts here claim that several computers and mobile phones of important people could have been compromised, exposing a huge chink in Indian cyber space.

• On September 15, Wikileaks released previously unseen copies of weaponised German surveillance malware, FinFisher, that had been used by intelligence agencies around the world to spy on journalists, political dissidents and others.Analysing the report in detail, cyber security experts at Cyber Security and Privacy Foundation (CSPF) here isolated records of Pakistan-based users, accessing FinFisher products to spy on Indians. “Several FinFisher products have been sold to a person/organisation in Pakistan.

• Does the CIA actually believe some sort of irreparable rift in the National Security Complex might occur if this dollar amount from three decades ago (unadjusted for inflation) was made public? Probably not. Aftergood theorizes that it’s a blanket exemption used to redact more sensitive dollar amounts and this innocent cost just became collateral damage during the rush to declassify several dozen documents in response to an FOIA lawsuit court order.

Finance

• The announcement on Wednesday that the paper was slashing hundreds of jobs and retooling its troubled digital products was just the latest in a string of bad news for the Times in 2014.

• Prospective students in the United States who can’t afford to pay for college or don’t want to rack up tens of thousands in student debt should try their luck in Germany. Higher education is now free throughout the country, even for international students. Yesterday, Lower Saxony became the last of seven German states to abolish tuition fees, which were already extremely low compared to those paid in the United States.

• Deputy prime minister attacks his coalition partner’s austerity measures, and says ‘compassionate conservatism’ claim is dead

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Does social media dictate political discourse?

• A growing group of small cable-TV providers are realizing that both they and their customers can live without expensive TV channels.

Censorship

• “I wrote that Snowden’s revelations had damaged US tech companies and their bottom line. Something odd happened. The paragraph I had just written began to self-delete. The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish. When I tried to close my OpenOffice file the keyboard began flashing and bleeping.

• Over the next few weeks these incidents of remote deletion happened several times. There was no fixed pattern but it tended to occur when I wrote disparagingly of the NSA.”

• From an American legal perspective, the recently established European Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF) is a disaster. It’s a confusing, vague, impractical and possibly even dangerous decision. But from a European historical perspective, it makes considerable sense.

Privacy

• All the money being poured into the NSA (under the cover of darkness) over the past several years is paying off. Taxpayers who helped fund the NSA’s programs have the opportunity to pay even more money for the privilege of licensing the non-classified fruits of the agency’s labor.

• Given the government’s technological and legal power, it’s unclear that any social media network could ever really guarantee this first kind of privacy. Presumably there could be a breakthrough in cryptography that would allow for truly anonymous social networking–though this would provide a haven for the antisocial (stalkers, cybercriminals, etc.) as well as those who just don’t want the government to be rummaging through their email. Ideally, privacy-from-government would be restored with a Supreme Court decision that reaffirms that the Fourth Amendment means what it says: that government needs to have a reason to suspect you before it intrudes into your personal space.

• The letter suggests Google’s responsibility to celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Rihanna, Arianna Grande and others goes well beyond the call to scrub search engines. Google is also blamed for how it’s allegedly accommodating those using YouTube and Blogspot to post the offending images.

• “Bad things will be on the Internet, and Google offers a ‘Safe Search’ function if users would rather not be shown that type of content,” Gorup said.

• Interactive NSA Decoded explained implications of the Edward Snowden leaks on mass surveillance by intelligence agencies

• Intelligence service BND failed to protect the private data of German citizens as it handed over internet data collected at a Frankfurt traffic hub to the US, German media report citing secret documents.

• The documents cited by VDR and EDR television and the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which broke the news together, were obtained from the federal government during an ongoing parliamentary investigation into US National Security Service spying on German soil.

• Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency has for years passed data on German citizens to the NSA, according to media reports. All data on Germans was previously said to have been filtered out.

• From 2004 to 2008, raw data was siphoned from an internet exchange point in Frankfurt and forwarded to the NSA, the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and regional public broadcasters NDR and WDR reported on Friday.

• We’ve been told for a few years now that the Internet of Things — common household, industrial and public devices enabled with sensors — will transform how we work, play and interact with the world around us.

• In recent years, the line between the outer world and the one online has become increasingly blurred. Much of cyberspace has come to mirror the outer structures of power. There wouldn’t be anyone who understands the severity of the infiltration of these coercive powers in the digital space better than the man who had to live under constant threat of their force. Even before revelations of NSA mass surveillance, Julian Assange warned the world. In his 2012 book Cypherpunks, he said “the internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen”. He further noted how the internet has become “a threat to human civilization” (p. 1).

• It was a rare and unnerving look at how the NSA really felt about spying on Americans: a smiley face drawn next to a plan to circumvent encryption in Google’s cloud.

• There is good reason to believe then, that the security establishment’s surveillance and monitoring plan, to the extent they even have one, not only isn’t working, but can’t work. If they are running a Panopticon it’s only a byproduct of the impossibility of their true goals, and therefore far less effective than it might be. It’s not difficult to peek behind the curtain to see the flaws in its inner workings and tailor one’s tactics accordingly. That few of us do so is more of a testament to the enormous weight of propaganda and indoctrination imposed by the media and school system than to any actual invulnerability of the surveillance state. When supposedly radical analysts take the propaganda at face value and repeat it the impact is doubled. After all, if one’s friends and one’s enemies are both telling the same story it must be true, right? Not necessarily. The first step in fighting the hopelessness machine is not believing everything it tells you. Or failing that, at least not repeating it…

• Public demand for action on privacy issues led Google to quickly announce that it, too, would offer smartphone users additional protection. The Washington Post notes that this “is part of a broad shift by American technology companies to make their products more resistant to government snooping.”

• Facebook is already a hotbed for your hypochondriac and conspiracy theorist friends to post poorly sourced or blatantly false medical information — like the bogus “Johns Hopkins Cancer Update” that pops up every few months — but the social network apparently wants to be more actively involved in the collecting and sharing of healthcare information to its users.

• Facebook is looking at users’ health care information as the new frontier and plans to create illness-based communities and health apps, according to a Reuters exclusive report.

• The ethical question is less what Snowden did than what the U.S. government has been doing.

• The Film Society at Lincoln Center has announced that on October 10, journalist and filmmaker Laura Poitras’ documentary on Edward Snowden will be shown at Alice Tully Hall at 6 p.m. as part of the New York Film Festival. CITIZENFOUR is the third in Poitras’ trilogy about how America and the world have changed since 9/11 and will detail her interactions with Snowden, the man who released confidential security documents from the NSA and fled the country.Poitras was already making a film about the surveillance methods in the United States when Snowden contacted her online, wanting to share his story to the world. With two award-winning nonfiction films already released in the past few years, entitled My Country, My Country on the Iraq War and The Oath about Guantanamo, Poitras is no stranger to released hot-button films. Partnering with Glenn Greenwald, author of No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, The NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, Poitras exchanged encrypted Internet messages with Snowden before meeting him in Hong Kong, the material exchanged there released to the world and erupted in a media and political firestorm in 2013. Her work has landed her film accolades, a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012, and helped her win a Pulitzer. During her reporting on the subjects, Poitras found herself being targeted as a national security risk, her struggles to get the story and keep her sources safe informing her work in this newest film.

• Government data collection is scary for many reasons. But least understood: what it does to our personal creativity

• Edward Snowden is on the run from U.S. authorities after disclosing secret National Security Agency (NSA) programs involving the collection of telephone and email data to media outlets, including The Guardian and The Washington Post.

• Edward Snowden, who leaked thousands of top secret documents including information about two U.S. monitoring programs, is among the nominees for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

• Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy is pushing a bill that would stop the National Security Agency from collecting the phone records of millions of Americans, and he says he has the support of Republicans to pass it this year.

• If the Senate doesn’t pass the USA Freedom Act after the midterm elections, a key section of the Patriot Act could expire

• The USA FREEDOM Act as it stands will make Americans less safe while contributing little or nothing to their privacy. The bulk collection program the bill abolishes grew from a very real intelligence failure. In the run-up to 9/11, NSA intercepted calls to Yemen from a terrorist in San Diego, but in a costly deference to the civil liberties concerns of the 1990s, NSA had never developed a way to track calls back to the United States. The metadata program closed that gap.

• A career MI6 officer has been appointed as the new head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.

• The Tory leader’s eagerness to brand not only miners’ leaders but the Labour party as enemies of democracy was a measure of her extremism and determination for class revenge

• If there was ever a seemingly unflappable group of individuals it is America’s librarians, who take the privacy of their patrons very, very seriously. Since the introduction of the Patriot Act the group representing our nation’s librarians has been fighting to protect its patrons from government intrusion.

• Thanks to Edward Snowden, it’s been revealed that the NSA is currently researching how to create its own quantum computer. Templeton takes solace in that information because it means that they don’t already have one. And, he points out, they may never have one. After all, the machine is only the stuff of theory at this point. If someone were able to build one, Templeton says we’d know of its existence thanks to the legions of panicking Wall Street executives.

• A new independent investigation by Flashpoint Global Partners (FGP) reveals that despite the claims by the National Security Agency (NSA), documents leaked by whistle blower Edward Snowden did not damage America’s National Security by alerting Al Qaida they were being spied on. There have been no real consequences and Al Qaida has not changed the way they communicate because of the leaks. Al Qaida changed the way they communicate long before the revelations by Snowden.

• But imagine for a moment you caught an FBI agent in the act of rummaging through your mail, and he explained to you that he wasn’t going to actually read the letters. He was only planning on making copies of your mail in case the FBI needs to read them at a later date.

• It doesn’t take an NSA spymaster to snoop on your digital doings. Thanks to a free software program, distributed by police departments all around the country, any creep with a basic knowledge of the Internet could be monitoring your children’s online activities.

• For years, local law enforcement agencies around the country have told parents that installing ComputerCOP software is the “first step” in protecting their children online.

• The EFF has put together a rather astounding bit of investigative reporting, digging into a program called “ComputerCOP” that is apparently handed out (in locally branded versions) by various law enforcement agencies — generally local police, but also the US Marshals — claiming to be software to “protect your children” on the computer. What the EFF investigation actually found is that the software is little more than spyware with weak to non-existent security that likely makes kids and your computer a lot less safe. Aren’t you glad your tax dollars are being spent on it?

• Facebook just got a little more up in your business. Starting today, the ‘book will fully implement a new ad network called Atlas. In a spin it’s calling “people-based marketing,” Atlas will serve ads targeted to you based on your Facebook data. And, while it’s a Facebook property, Atlas will also serve up ads on non-Facebook sites.

• These installations can be used for a variety of crowd control tactics, including impersonation of lead officials within the group, as well as broadcasted statements that could fool less informed users into thinking that negotiations have been a fruitless endeavor, encouraging them to leave the front lines or even head back home.

• Former CIA intelligence analyst Ray McGovern spoke at Shasta College to a packed auditorium the evening of September 16. McGovern served for 27 years as an intelligence analyst in the CIA. He has now grown quite concerned about the overreach of our security apparatus as reflected in the title of his talk, “The surveillance state: Are freedom and security compatible?”

• Following its software-as-a-service rival Salesforce, Oracle has announced plans to open two new cloud datacentres in Germany which should be available for government and enterprise customers by the end of the year.

• Oracle already announced late last year that one new datacentre in Germany would be operational by the second half of 2014, and while that hasn’t happened yet, the database giant — whose execs have been talking up its cloud credentials this week — announced that the number of facilities in Germany would be bumped up to two. One will be located in Frankfurt and another in Munich.

• The two new facilities, located in Frankfurt and Munich, will go live in the next few weeks and will be completely operational before the end of the year. They join the two other European countries that already have their own data centres, the UK and the Netherlands.

• Administration officials say they are sympathetic to U.S. cloud service providers’ concerns that data-localization requirements, other restrictive policies and the fallout from Edward Snowden’s revelations cut off access to foreign markets.

• Before Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency and Prism made headlines, a group of technologists was dedicated to making the Internet more anonymous.

• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit soon will hear argument over the merits of the government’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records.

• Even if there were evidence that a domestic spying program was unconstitutional, interference by the courts could cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security, the government told a federal judge.

• Urging U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White to deny the plaintiffs partial summary judgment and instead rule for the government, the Monday filing from the Department of Justice says that the National Security Administration’s information-collecting techniques do not violate the Fourth Amendment.

• Gov. Brown signed into law Tuesday bipartisan legislation which bans the state from aiding the federal government in spying on Californians. The Senate Bill 828 was proposed by Senator Ted Lieu, D-Redondo Beach. It will take effect January 1, 2015.

• California Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday signed a bill prohibiting the state from supplying “material support, participation, or assistance” in response to certain federal requests for metadata and electronic communications.

• Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the web (sidebar: that was 25 years ago, can you believe it?!), wants to ensure that the internet is free from government (or corporate) intrusion.

• A recent news release advises us that the National Security Agency, in its infinite wisdom, has just appointed Anne Neuberger as the agency’s new “risk officer.”

• Apple is truly ramping up the PR machine and has even managed to get a few people in government to make some rather outrageous statements on the new phone and iOS 8. One of the new stories going around is about how the new iPhone and iOS8 are suddenly “NSA Proof” because they have added data encryption. The fallacy of this claim is almost beyond belief and shows once again that most in the technical press have absolutely no memory.

• Kill switch is a built in OS that gives companies like Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) or Google (GOOGL) the power to access user data to get rid of malicious software. The companies can also access data stored on mobile devices through kill switch. Although this feature was created for security reasons, it is unclear whether the new encryption will prevent its access or not.

• Social network Ello is capitalizing on discontent with online advertising.

• Last week longtime local publisher Howard Owens, founder of the online news site the Batavian, launched a new publication covering Wyoming County in upstate New York. Buried in a parenthetical within his welcome message to readers was a fascinating promise: “We’ll also respect your privacy by not gathering personal data to distribute to multinational media conglomerates for so-called ‘targeted advertising.’”

• Ulbricht attorney Joshua Horowitz, in a new legal filing, wrote that the “explanation of how the FBI discovered the server’s IP address is implausible.” [PDF]

• For starters, he said, the government has maintained no record of packet logs [PDF] of the FBI actually capturing leakage from the CAPTCHA.

• Federal authorities are pushing for new rules to force American-owned internet companies to open all electronic data to intelligence agencies regardless of geography, sparking privacy concerns for consumers abroad.

• Theo Sommer: Ten years ago relations between Germany and the United States were rather strained because of divergent views over the Iraq War. And we thought that we should try to make the Americans understand our point of view and vice versa make the Germans understand the American point of view. And our whole aim was to convince people that the German-American, and the European-American relationship for that matter, is far too important to be sacrificed to the vagaries of the one or the other difference we might have.

• Before Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency and Prism made headlines, a group of technologists was dedicated to making the internet more anonymous.

• They were viewed mostly as paranoid, weird and potentially criminal.

• This week on Four Corners, Frontline producer Martin Smith explores the secret relationship between Silicon Valley and the National Security Agency, investigating how the Government and tech companies worked together to gather and warehouse data. That data includes the communication of Americans and anyone else who communicates via US data systems.

• While the newest Apple Inc. (AAPL:US) and Google Inc. (GOOGL:US) smartphones will automatically encrypt data stored on them, that won’t keep U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies from obtaining evidence linked to the devices.

• The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed on Monday that the U.S. government has released new documents that showed a 1981 Executive Order (EO) as a basis for the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs.

• According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and discussed at length in a new post on the ACLU’s official blog by Alex Abdo (a staff attorney in the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project), most of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) authority to collect data and spy on both international and domestic targets is derived from Executive Order 12333 – signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

• If Americans want to understand how their government justifies sweeping intelligence-gathering measures, they need to familiarize themselves with a little-known executive order from the Reagan era: E.O. 12333.

• Neustar’s lobbying effort to stop a key federal number-portability contract from slipping away to Ericsson’s (NASDAQ: ERIC) Telcordia unit took another turn via a report sent to the FCC from Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security. The report, from Chertoff’s security consulting firm, the Chertoff Group, concluded that the bidding terms for the contract related to national security were “insufficient in both scope and specificity when compared with widely accepted national and international standards.”

• Thanks to some financial prompting and aligned priorities, the Chertoff Group (home of former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and former NSA boss Michael Hayden) is sending a letter [pdf link] to the FCC in hopes of preventing control of a crucial cellphone number database from ending up in the hands of a foreign company.

• “Put money, national interest, and ego together, and now you’re talking about shaping the world writ large.”

• Today, our social media identities are deeply intertwined with our non-digital one, and the rise of social media has bred new kinds of problems. For Internet-goers, issues such as online privacy, Internet surveillance and data collecting have now become pertinent in their daily lives. It is in this climate of NSA snooping, data collecting and social media experimenting, that a new form of social networking has formed, an anonymous one.

• [...]

• The second is the awareness on behalf of users that the information they are sharing online does not belong to them. There is a realization on the side of users that their online information is valuable to the government, data marketers and big corporations like Facebook. The latest examples are the online experiments conducted on behalf of Facebook in which the company tracked users’ emotions based on Facebook statuses. The same violation of privacy was seen with OkCupid where the dating site purposely set up bad matches in order to see how users would react to being mismatched.

• What are the odds? You put about $68 billion annually into a maze of 17 major intelligence outfits. You build them glorious headquarters. You create a global surveillance state for the ages. You listen in on your citizenry and gather their communications in staggering quantities. Your employees even morph into avatars and enter video-game landscapes, lest any Americans betray a penchant for evil deeds while in entertainment mode. You collect information on visits to porn sites just in case, one day, blackmail might be useful. You pass around naked photos of them just for… well, the salacious hell of it. Your employees even use aspects of the system you’ve created to stalk former lovers and, within your arcane world, that act of “spycraft” gains its own name: LOVEINT.

• Secure collaboration firm Intralinks has launched new capabilities designed to allow its customers to unilaterally manage their own encryption keys, ensuring that any cloud-based data can’t be accessed without their permission.

• The Obama Administration might have to start letting people know when they’ve been flagged for terrorist connections based on information picked up from secret NSA spying programs.

• That could potentially affect the tens of thousands of individuals on the government’s no fly list, as well as those people and groups that the Treasury Department designates as foreign terrorists, The New York Times reported yesterday.

• The National Security Agency is working to repair its fractured relationship with major tech companies following disclosures by former agency contractor Edward Snowden that the NSA had been secretly pulling data from company servers for surveillance purposes.

• Boiseans will be able to weigh in this evening on one of the most controversial issues of our times—the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities—when an attorney currently representing fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden comes to the Treasure Valley.

• Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) will host a “Chairman’s Roundtable” on Oct. 8 to discuss the impact of mass surveillance by the government (through agencies like the NSA) on the digital economy.

• On Sept. 18, a San Diego judge denied technological entrepreneur Michael Robertson’s request to access his own license plate data from police scanners.

• The campaign aimed to raise $70.000 from their international community and privacy enthusiasts worldwide and €50.000 from their German supporters.

Civil Rights

• Outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder is perpetuating a bipartisan raid on privacy, reports The Washington Post. He’s calling on tech makers to provide “backdoors” to products and services so that law enforcement can route around encryption and get bad guys such as “kidnappers and sexual predators.”

• Democratic Governor Jerry Brown rejected a bill on Sunday that would have required law enforcement authorities to secure a court-issued warrant before they can fly unmanned aerial vehicles in most cases.

• The documents reveal a series of secret meetings that took place in hotels, airport lounges and restaurants from New York to Paris to Guadalajara and involved intermediaries like the chairman of Coca-Cola, who served as President Jimmy Carter’s representative, to Carter himself.

• The portraits also include NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden and the late South African leader Nelson Mandela. It also feature less prominent people in global struggles for freedom — people Ai says have been “forgotten by society.”

• Systemic issues might be too much for any one person

• Human rights abuses entrenched in legal system, with women facing flogging or jail for going about their daily lives

• It is, of course, very difficult to choose the single most extreme episode of misleading American media propaganda, but if forced to do so, coverage of the February, 2011 Tahrir Square demonstrations in Egypt would be an excellent candidate. For weeks, U.S. media outlets openly positioned themselves on the side of the demonstrators, depicting the upheaval as a Manichean battle between the evil despot Hosni Mubarak’s “three decades of iron rule” and the hordes of ordinary, oppressed Egyptians inspirationally yearning for American-style freedom and democracy.

• Say what you want, but one thing has become abundantly clear since the whole Ferguson debacle began: the people running and policing that city aren’t interested in your concerns. Throughout this entire process, the city and its police force have obfuscated the facts and people involved in the shooting of a civilian, they have cynically released information and videos when it suits them, and they’ve treated journalists covering the story with the kind of contempt they normally reserve for their own constituents. And now, utilizing a method previously beta-tested by both local and federal law enforcement agencies, they’ve decided the best way to respond to the ongoing outcry is to try to charge insane amounts for FOIA requests.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Marriott will cough up $600,000 in penalties after being caught blocking mobile hotspots so that guests would have to pay for its own WiFi services, the FCC has confirmed today. The fine comes after staff at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee were found to be jamming individual hotspots and then charging people up to $1,000 per device to get online.

• Hotel WiFi sucks. If you do any traveling, you’re aware of this. Though, from what I’ve seen, the higher end the hotel, the worse the WiFi is and the more insane its prices are. Cheap discount hotels often offer free WiFi, and it’s generally pretty reliable. High end hotels? I’ve seen prices of $30 per day or higher, and it’s dreadfully low bandwidth. These days, when traveling, I often pick hotels based on reviews of the WiFi quality, because nothing can be more frustrating than a crappy internet connection when it’s needed. But, even worse than the WiFi in your room, if you’re using the WiFi for a business meeting or event — the hotels love to price gouge. And, it appears that’s exactly what the Marriott-operated Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville did. Except, the company went one step further. Thanks to things like tethering on phones and MiFi devices that allow you to set up your own WiFi hotspot using wireless broadband, Marriott realized that some smart business folks were getting around its (absolutely insane) $1,000 per device WiFi charges, and just using MiFi’s. So, Marriott then broke FCC regulations and started jamming the devices to force business folks to pay its extortionate fees.

DRM

• Apple will soon have to face a trial over accusations it used digital rights management, or DRM, to unlawfully maintain a lead in the iPod market, a federal judge has ruled. The plaintiffs’ lawyers, representing a class of consumers who bought iPods between 2006 and 2009, are asking for $350 million.

Intellectual Monopolies

• For many years, we’ve written about questionable activities by the Olympics, usually focusing on the organization’s insanely aggressive approach to intellectual property, which could be summed up as “we own and control everything.” Yes, the Olympics requires countries to pass special laws that protect its trademarks and copyrights beyond what standard laws allow. Of course, this is really much more about control and money

Copyrights

• Under a new exception to copyright law, anyone will be able to make creative montage from existing material – as long as it is funny

• Mainstream Kiwi journalism in the wake of Dotcom, Assange, Snowden & Greenwald’s pre-election ‘Moment of Truth‘ event has fallen squarely along ideological lines.

• The media have yet to give any serious consideration to the possibility of any new political paradigm outside of the left-right sphere in which they remain firmly entrenched. The results are predictable and must be challenged.

• Earlier this year, we noted a somewhat ridiculous and cynical attempt by some German newspapers to demand payment from Google for sending them traffic via Google News — and not just a little bit, but 11% of gross worldwide revenue on any search that showed one of their snippets. There were a few issues that we noted here: first, anyone not wanting to appear in Google News can quite easily opt-out. Second, Google News in Germany doesn’t show any ads. Third, those very same newspapers were using Google’s own tools to appear higher in search, suggesting that they certainly believed they were getting value out of being in Google’s index.

• A year ago, Techdirt wrote about a new unit set up by the City of London Police to tackle crimes involving intellectual monopolies. Since then, there have been a flood of posts about its increasingly disproportionate actions, including seizing domain names, shutting down websites, inserting ads on websites, and arresting someone for running an anti-censorship proxy. This makes a PCPro interview with the head of that unit, Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Andy Fyfe, particularly valuable, since it helps shed a little light on the unit’s mindset.

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