● 10.10.14

● Links 9/10/2014: Free Software in Germany, Lenovo Tablets With Android

Posted in News Roundup at 2:31 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• While Munich city council’s decision to replace Microsoft software with open-source alternatives made headlines, it is one of a number of municipalities across Germany to make such a move.

• Across Germany at the national and local level authorities are running Linux and open-source software. The German federal employment office has migrated 13,000 public workstations from Windows NT to OpenSuse, and a number of German ubran areas are using or in the process of switching to open-source software on the desktop, including Isernhagen, Leipzig, Schwäbisch Hall and Treuchtlingen.

Server

• Moving to Linux VDI desktops could save you from Windows licensing headaches, but there aren’t many enterprise situations where virtual Linux setups fit. For the most part, Linux VMs only suit a small number of virtual desktop users.

• Today’s Linux feeds brought news of the release of openSUSE 13.2 RC1 and Jiri Eischmann discusses GNOME and Wayland in Fedora 21. Matt Asay says CoreOS is an “existential threat to Linux vendors” and Jack Wallen says Linux users do have reason to be concerned over Adobe’s dropping Linux support. The Linux Voice says “you might be using the wrong Linux distribution” and Linus doesn’t have the time or any interest in Lennart Poettering’s problems.

Kernel Space

• Greg Kroah-Hartman has released a new batch of stable kernels: 3.16.5, 3.14.21, and 3.10.57.

Graphics Stack

• It feels like we’re very close to the Radeon R9 300 series of GPUs, with AMD dropping the price of its Radeon R9 290 and R9 290X GPUs in the last week, but now news is floating around of the Pirate Islands-based architecture, AMD’s next-generation GPU.

• It’s been a while since last hearing anything from Tiago Vignatti out of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center in Brazil but the Wayland-focused developer has recently been working on Ozone-GBM, a new target for this abstraction layer used by Google’s Chrome/Chromium web-browser.

Applications

• cool-retro-term is free and open source terminal emulator developed by the Italian programmer Filippo Scognamiglio which mimics the look and feel of the old cathode tube screens, It has been designed to be eye-candy, customizable, and reasonably lightweight.

Proprietary

• Netflix now runs on Linux without any tweaks or work-around what so ever. I just noticed it when I installed a new Ubuntu system (14.10), with Chrome Beta 39.x and out of curiosity opened Netflix. It worked flawlessly. No agent switcher required anymore

• Ubuntu and Linux users are now able to watch Netflix natively in Google Chrome after the company finally updated their user agent that was inconvenient for so many people.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Unigine Corp has revealed today that Unigine 2.0 has been under development for about one year and with this major revision to their technologically-amazing but seldom adopted engine is OpenGL 4.5 rendering support and other changes.

• Wadjet Eye Games make their first same-day release for Linux with the release of A Golden Wake today. Follow real estate agent Alfie Banks in this retelling of historical events during the Florida land boom in the early 1920s and the following Great Depression.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Cylon runs the classic GNOME 3 desktop on almost any hardware configuration made since 2007, but it is more suited to seasoned Linux users. Newcomers to Linux may not make an easy transition.

• Still, Cylon Linux is highly usable out of the box. With its installed software, there’s little need for supplemental installations. The user experience, however, might be less than appealing for those who are not at home with the GNOME 3 desktop.

• Currently, dependencies and applications are installed into directories in /opt, and Listaller contains some logic to make applications find dependencies, and to talk to the package manager to install missing things. This has some drawbacks, like the need to install an application before using it, the need for applications to be relocatable, and application-installations being non-atomic.

Distributions

New Releases

• Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and Busybox, which make up the terminal. It just hit version 3.0.5.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• BTRFS is already used on OpenSUSE 13.2 Beta and OpenSUSE 13.2 RC and will be used by default on the OpenSUSE systems, starting with the final version of OpenSUSE 13.2. And since SUSE has assigned three developers for making BTRFS work on their system, Fedora can use the BTRFS optimizations already implemented on OpenSUSE.

• Over at the Fedora Project, we recently released the alpha version of Fedora 21. (And if the rest of this is all tl;dr, no problem – skip right to the pre-release download page, and there you are.)

• Looking for a silly code name like in previous years? Sorry to disappoint – this is the first release to be just called by its number. That’s not all we’re doing differently, though. Last year, Fedora reached its 10-year anniversary, and as went into our second decade, we decided to take a step back and reflect on what changes it will take to continue to be a leading Free and Open Source Linux distribution over the next ten years.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• There are many Linux distributions available right now that claim to protect the privacy of their users, but very few actually do it properly. Tails is definitively among the top ones, if not the best. Now, a new version has been made available, but it’s just an RC for an upcoming release…

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Back in February, Canonical promised that its phone-centric Ubuntu Touch will be making its way to actual retail smartphones later this year. But Canonical promises many things and with the year coming to a close, it seems that that promise might either be delayed or, worse, broken entirely. But behold, a device bearing the likeness of the Meizu MX4 but also bearing within it Ubuntu’s mobile OS has just been spotted, fanning the flames of hope of a still possible Ubuntu phone soon.

• The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the final beta release of Ubuntu 14.10 Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products.

• Codenamed “Utopic Unicorn”, 14.10 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

• The US Air Force has the drones, but now the US Navy has autonomous boats that can steer themselves, patrol a zone, and take a hostile posture, whatever that means. It was just a matter of time until someone thought of having some kind of drones that could guard a fleet on the water. The US Navy was happy to oblige.

Devices/Embedded

• Axiomtek’s eBOX560-880-FL is a compact embedded PC with a choice of Intel Haswell dual-core SoCs, plus temperature, vibration, and IP40 ingress protection.

• The Pi Vessel is said to be made in Germany, but is available from a Dover, Delaware based startup called MSDGroup, one of many companies of the same name, but apparently not one that has a website. The Pi Vessel is available on Kickstarter through Nov. 5 starting at $89 without a Pi or $129 with either a Raspberry Pi Model B or the newer RPi Model B+.

Phones

Ballnux

• The openSUSE Project has just released openSUSE 13.2 RC1, and the developers are preparing to close the development cycle and get the final version out the door.

Android

• “Apparently we are in violation of the terms and conditions because we are using the word ‘Android’ in our title rather than ‘For Android’,” he said.

• Three new Lenovo tablets land with (depending on your choice) Windows and Android. The Yoga Tablet 2 Pro also has an in-built pico-projector.

• For much of the past few years it’s been tough to argue why anyone should opt for an Android tablet rather than an iPad. Besides lower prices, there simply haven’t been compelling arguments to go recommend Android tablets over Apple’s iPads, which have a much more robust ecosystem. The Yoga 2 Pro changes that and the Android camp has something to truly get excited about. After watching a video on the Yoga 2 Pro’s display at a private Lenovo briefing last week I’ve been yearning to get one of my own.

Free Software/Open Source

• Synaq’s nondescript offices near the Sandton CBD feel laid back and comfortable. A large blackboard near the entrance has scribbles all over it. These offices check all the boxes of a start-up, but this business is far too big, and a few years too old, to fall into the start-up category.

• The good thing about open source projects getting killed off is that there always seems to be another to take its place. Here’s a look at this year’s carnage to date, including some free software and freeware.

Events

• The Industry-Academia Partnership (IAP) conducted a Cloud Workshop at MIT on September 26. Speakers from industry and academia described their R&D efforts to meet the future needs of cloud computing, spanning the full scope of hardware (servers, storage and networking) and software solutions (operating systems, virtualization, cloud orchestration software, and big data analytics).

• The week after next the FOSS world will be brimming with opportunities to find out more about what’s going on in three separate shows around the country. If you are within a day’s drive of any of them — or if you are not adverse to flying — making it to one of them would be well worth the effort.

• In two weeks the All Things Open conference will be taking place in Raleigh, North Carolina. Penguins from all over will be gathering together to share ideas. And as one of the presenters this year, I started wondering, in what ways can you open source a conference presentation?

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Firefox OS is now available on three continents with 12 smartphones offered by 13 operators in 24 countries. As the only truly open mobile operating system, Firefox OS demonstrates the versatility of the Web as a platform, free of the limits and restrictions associated with proprietary mobile operating systems.

SaaS/Big Data

• The open-source OpenStack Juno cloud platform is set to become generally available on October 16, bringing with it a long list of new networking capabilities. The new networking features aren’t just limited to the OpenStack Neutron networking project, either. They also include new features in the OpenStack Nova compute project.

• OpenStack has a long way to go before it reaches the nirvana state that one of its founders is claiming it has already attained.

BSD

• The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1.5, the fifth security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 6.1 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons.

• Jean-Sébastien Pédron of the FreeBSD project gave an update at this week’s XDC2014 conference about the state of the graphics stack on FreeBSD.

Public Services/Government

• Government contractors have traditionally been slow to embrace open source software. There’s a handful of reasons why that’s the case, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s why government contractors are embracing open source with increasing frequency…

Openness/Sharing

• Ambient lighting setups are always a good time, but in general these setups are either complex, expensive, or they don’t work with enough things to make the experience worth it. The folks at Antumbra think they have a solution with Glow, which is a $35 LED cube that uses open source software to offer ambient lighting to any desktop setup.

• The term “open source” refers to something that can be modified because its design is publicly accessible. Open source software is computer software with its source code made available for modification or enhancement by anyone. Projects or initiatives that utilize this type of code are those that embrace and foster open exchange, collaborative participation, fast prototyping and community development.

Programming

• D is a general purpose systems and applications programming language. It is a high level language, but retains the ability to write high performance code and interface directly with the operating system API’s and with hardware (dlang.org).

Leftovers

• Another son, Robert Sirleaf, resigned as chairman of Liberia’s state oil company, NOCAL, and stepped down from his role as a senior advisor to his mother last year.

• Johnson Sirleaf said his resignation had nothing to do with accusations of favouritism, stating that he had simply completed his assignment to restructure NOCAL and draft a petroleum law.

Health/Nutrition

• Medical experts further agree that it’s highly unlikely Ebola could mutate into a form that alters its mode of transmission. That type of mutation would be unprecedented according to Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello, who wrote: “We have been studying viruses for over 100 years, and we’ve never seen a human virus change the way it is transmitted,” and that “There is no reason to believe that Ebola virus is any different from any of the viruses that infect humans and have not changed the way that they are spread.”

• The report exposes the many ways in which GM crops threaten the environment and farmers’ livelihood…

Security

• The likelihood that Apple delayed releasing a fix for the recent remotely exploitable vulnerability in Bash due to licensing issues is low, according to the executive director of the Free Software Foundation.

• International Dairy Queen, Inc. today confirmed that the systems of some DQ® locations and one Orange Julius® location in the U.S. had been infected with the widely-reported Backoff malware that is targeting retailers across the country. The company previously indicated that it was investigating a possible malware intrusion that may have affected some payment cards used at certain DQ locations in the U.S. Upon learning of the issue, the company conducted an extensive investigation and retained external forensic experts to help determine the facts.

• Whether you’re a nation or a citizen, cyber security is an ever-growing issue – new hacks or data breaches emerge daily, in which people’s information is exposed or leaked, from bank details to intimate photographs. But is the threat of being hacked something that you or I really need to worry about? And if someone did hack into your computer, what would they be able to do with the information they found?

• Over the summer I decided to put these questions to the test. I got in touch with an ‘ethical hacker’ called John Yeo, who works for cyber security firm Trustwave, and asked him to try and hack me.

• An HP executive told security reporter Brian Krebs that that the certificate itself wasn’t compromised. HP Global Chief Information Security Officer Brett Wahlin said that HP had recently been alerted to the signed malware—a four-year old Windows Trojan—by Symantec. Wahlin said that it appears the malware, which had infected an HP employee’s computer, accidentally got digitally signed as part of a separate software package—and then sent a signed copy of itself back to its point of origin. Though the malware has since been distributed over the Internet while bearing HP’s certificate, Wahlin noted that the Trojan was never shipped to HP customers as part of the software package.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• A desperate battle by progressive Kurdish-led resistance fighters is seeking to defend Kobanê from ISIS fundamentalist forces. Kobanê is in Rojava, or Western Kurdistan, is a predominantly Kurdish area in northern Syria that is a semi-autonomous “liberated zone” experiencing a social revolution.

• A Somerset County woman with a history of political activism faces federal charges after attempting to enter protected National Security Agency property to protest lethal American drone attacks around the world.

• Manijeh Saba, a court interpreter, translator and long-time human rights activist from Franklin Township will appear in United States District Court in Baltimore Thursday for protesting on May 3 outside the gate of Fort Meade, MD against NSA surveillance providing targeting information for US drone attacks.

Finance

• Maria lived in the United States for eighteen years. She worked multiple jobs while raising two sons, a daughter, and several grandchildren. On her way home from church one Sunday, she was stopped at a checkpoint outside her trailer park. Lacking the requisite papers to be in the country, her car was seized, and she was thrown into the merciless and well-greased US deportation mill.

• About her forced removal and subsequent separation from her family, she said, “I became so sad I could barely move.”

• Todd Miller, veteran journalist and author of Border Patrol Nation, uses Maria’s tragedy to show the incredible geographic and psychological reach of the Border Patrol and its proxy agencies — which now include local police forces who enforce immigration violations far from the border, and the first-ever state-run Border Patrol, South Carolina’s Immigration Enforcement Unit. The “border,” once a contested hot zone in the Southwest, has become a mobile vacuum, ready to disappear undocumented immigrants and devastate communities from Niagara Falls, New York to Miami, Florida.

Censorship

• The week is highlighted by gatherings where people read from books that have been banned at one time or another. On one side, the annual event celebrates the freedom to read and the freedom of expression. On the other, it shines the spotlight on the bigger and more pervasive problem of censorship, which affects not just books but all means of expression.

• STREETS in Hong Kong have been filled with protesters calling for democratic reform and tweeting their experiences furiously. But in mainland China, people are struggling to discuss the unrest online. Censors have been poring over Weibo, China’s closely controlled version of Twitter, to scrub out even oblique references to it.

• Index is deeply concerned that the UK government has done little to press Bahrain to improve its human rights record. Bahrain’s insistence on the prosecution of Nabeel Rajab underlines the abysmal state of free expression in that country.

• Censorship can only perpetuate suspicion, not provide clarity.

• At the end of the conversation, Nasser was told that he could not board the departing plane, which in any case had already left. The faceless homeland security officer would not disclose the reason Nasser wasn’t allowed into the US.

• “Just like that?” Nasser asked. “Just like that,” the homeland security officer responded.

• Nasser’s talk was still held, via Skype. But Homeland Security did manage to prevent him from the warmth of a personal address, from speaking individually to fans of his work, and from fruitful discussions with other writers.

Privacy

• Former NSA head Keith Alexander — the original Million Dollar (a month) Man and premier cybersecurity consultant to the banking industry — is taking his years of expertise (and several mysteriously non-public patents) on the road, speaking at whatever venue will have him.

• [...]

• This advice is less than useless. Those who actively seek contact with terrorists likely know to stay clear of surveilled channels. Those who aren’t seeking contact have their data (and sometimes communications) agnostically hoovered up by the US government’s various surveillance and investigatory arms.

• EX-NSA DIRECTOR Keith Alexander has defended the PRISM programme he oversaw, and has warned that if members of the public speak to terrorists they are likely to be a target for the agency.

• “When the Senate returns in November, it must pass the USA Freedom Act in order to protect Americans’ civil liberties and to ensure that American tech companies can begin to rebuild trust with their customers and flourish in the global economy,” he said in a statement.

• When it comes to political activism in America, it almost all focuses within the 202 area code. But over the last few years, it’s become clear we cannot count on Washington D.C. to rein in its own surveillance programs.

• We need a different approach that engages activists and concerned Americans outside of the Beltway.

• Longtime reporters who cover the NSA know that any time we ask the obstinate spy agency for information, we’re probably going to hit a brick wall. But who would have thought that trying to obtain information about information the agency has already given us would lead to the same wall?

• It’s an assertion that defies common sense but speaks volumes about how the U.S. intelligence complex dodges accountability: The National Security Agency is arguing that even the secrets it has intentionally disclosed to reporters are still so secret that disclosing their disclosure threatens national security.

• Secrecy News submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on March 10, 2014, for “a copy of any notifications to Congress transmitted in the past 12 months concerning authorized public disclosures of intelligence information.”

• A report to Congress on authorized disclosures of classified intelligence to the media — not unauthorized disclosures — is classified and is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, the National Security Agency said.

• Does your 13-year-old need something to do next summer? Here’s a novel idea: Send her to a special cybersecurity camp run by the NSA.

• The beleaguered agency’s new program tries to catch the youngest computer-savvy recruits and inculcate loyalty before they become exposed to the libertarian ideals of Reddit or read the manifestos of Aaron Swartz.

• Kids across America no longer have to wait until college to plan on being a part of the National Security Agency. In fact, they could start preparing for their NSA careers as early as age 13.

• The NSA has begun sponsoring cybersecurity camps for middle and high school students, agency recruiter Steven LaFountain told CNBC’s Eamon Javers in a recent interview. Six prototype camps launched this past summer, and the NSA hopes to eventually have a presence in schools in all 50 states.

• Against a backdrop of Snowden/NSA revelations and growing consumer concern about massive data breaches on the Internet, participants in the gathering (which was organized and hosted by Intel) seemed to echo a common refrain: written privacy policies aren’t getting the job done. “There’s a huge gap between a company’s privacy policy and what happens in systems,” said Danny Weitzner, co-founder of TrustLayers and the former Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Internet Policy in the White House.

• Call it “privacy nihilism.” Whether you’re reading about the latest security breaches across the Net, or the jaw-dropping details of the latest NSA leak, or you’re explaining the importance of crypto to your blank-faced family, or struggling to stop your own government’s plans on burning your right to privacy, it’s sometimes easy to just throw up your hands in despair and give it all up.

• Twitter is suing the FBI and the Department of Justice to be able to release more information about government surveillance of its users.

• The social media company filed a lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco to publish its full “transparency report,” which documents government requests for user information. Twitter published a surveillance report in July but couldn’t include the exact number of national security requests it received because Internet companies are prohibited from disclosing that information, even if they didn’t get any requests.

• The pervasive dragnet surveillance of Americans revealed by the Edward Snowden documents has caused serious damage to the trust that enterprises and citizens had in the United States government and unless that trust is repaired, it could have serious effects on the Internet economy, a panel of prominent technology executives said.

• Speaking at the gym at the high school where he used to play basketball in the 1960s, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) gave a dire warning to a group of students and locals on Wednesday about the effects of government spying on Silicon Valley: “There is a clear and present danger to the Internet economy.”

• Here’s one that took place a couple of weeks ago at Georgetown on “The NSA, Privacy & the Global Internet: Perspectives on EO 12333.” Participants included law professors Nathan Sales, Laura Donohue, DNI General Counsel Bob Litt, and former State Department official John Tyre.

• Experts say ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden is a favorite for the Nobel Peace Prize, set to be announced Friday. But such a decision would cause huge complications for Norway with one of its closest allies, the US.

• The race for the Nobel peace prize, to be announced on Friday, has rarely been as open or unpredictable, experts say, with the pope and Edward Snowden tipped as possible winners. Snowden, the former intelligence analyst who revealed the extent of US global eavesdropping, was one of the joint winners of the “alternative Nobel peace prize” in September. A hero to some and a traitor to others, he would be a highly controversial choice for the 878,000-euro ($1.11-million) award. The Pakistani girls’ education campaigner Malala Yousafzai who was also a favourite in 2013 is also said to be in the running along with Pope Francis for his defence of the poor, and a Japanese pacifist group.

• NSA whistleblower Snowden will talk via videolink from Moscow this weekend about the future of privacy, surveillance technology and democratic oversight

• The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is expected to make a public appearance in a UK event this Sunday, speaking via video link from Moscow, The Guardian reported on Thursday.

• “I’m tired of people endlessly rehashing the history of Mr Snowden’s revelations, and I’m sure he is too,” the Observer technology columnist John Naughton, who will lead the discussion with Snowden, was quoted as saying.

• In 1995, the US government tried – and failed – to categorise encryption as a weapon. Today, the same lines are being drawn and the same tactics repeated as the FBI wants to do the same. Here’s why they are wrong, and why they must fail again

• The USA Freedom Act certainly has its shortcomings, but it is important to weigh the options, consider the effects of not passing this measure and realize that in a sea of unsure government options, this is truly the best choice we have.

• NSA documents released by Edward Snowden show that the feds seriously deceived Congress and the courts in an effort to spy upon all of us and to use the gathered materials in criminal prosecutions, even though they told federal judges they would not. Among the more nefarious procedures the feds have engaged in is something called “parallel reconstruction.” This procedure seeks to hide the true and original source of information about a criminal defendant when it was obtained unlawfully.

• Sir Tim Berners-Lee, widely-recognised as the inventor of the World Wide Web, has claimed that the UK’s electronic surveillance and oversight body GCHQ is trying to become more transparent on spying.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has challenged assurances by the Australian government that communications interception in the country was a matter of “strict oversight.”

• Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and other Silicon Valley executives say controversial government spying programs are undercutting the Internet economy and want Congress to step up stalled reform.

• [...]

• Schmidt and executives from Facebook Inc, Microsoft Corp. and other firms said revelations of extensive NSA surveillance are prompting governments in Europe and elsewhere to consider laws requiring that their citizens’ online data be stored within their national borders.

• At the Government Accountability Project (GAP), we began working with whistleblowers in the wake of Washington’s Watergate scandal, an episode that showed what our public officials were capable of when left to their own devices. In the years since then, as the U.S. adopted sweeping privatization and deregulation policies, GAP has come to provide legal help to whistleblowers from both public agencies and private firms.

• When the first whistleblowers from the National Security Agency (NSA) came forward — before Edward Snowden — they reported not only violations of privacy and the Constitution, but fraud. After all, NSA cyberspying, cyberattacking and cyberdefending are largely done by private companies which are, by the way, paid lavishly. We can’t be sure exactly how lavishly, because although we’re the people paying them, we have no right to know what we’re paying for. It’s the black budget; it’s secret.

• It has been said that we are living in a post-NSA world. What this really amounts to is that we are now slightly more aware of the level of snooping that has been going on in the background for many years. There has been widespread outrage at the revelations made by Edward Snowden, and there have been similar concerns raised outside of the US. In the UK, the FBI-like National Crime Agency, wants greater powers to monitor emails and phone calls — and it wants the public to agree to this.

• Director General of the NCA, Keith Bristow, spoke with the Guardian and said that the biggest threats to public safety are to be found online. He said that more powers to monitor online data is needed, and suggested that public resistance to this was down to the fact that he had thus far failed to properly explain why such powers are needed.

• Alarmingly, Keith Bristow, Director of the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), also known as Britain’s FBI, made a call to the public on Monday to obtain their consent to increase the surveillance capabilities of the state, and thus reduce their digital freedoms in return for more robust protections from organized cybercrime and terrorism.

• Foreign intelligence agencies and private companies collecting personal data online are the greatest threats to freedom in Germany, according to an annual poll.

• Chinese hacker unit PLA 61398 is hacking US companies harder than ever after bilateral talks between Beijing and Washington were interrupted by Snowden leaks, according to Mandiant boss Kevin Mandia.

• Beijing has lashed out at an allegation by FBI Director that Chinese hackers were guilty of causing billions of dollars of damage to the US economy. China accused the US of using such statements “to divert attention” from its own massive cyber-spying.

• The U.S. Justice Department said in a federal court filing on Monday that the government has the legal authority to hack into servers outside of the country without a warrant.

• The claim came as part of the ongoing trial of the alleged operator of the Silk Road illicit drug website. The suspect, Ross Ulbricht, claimed that the government’s explanation for how they located the server of the anonymous website was “implausible,” claiming that it’s possible the FBI may have instead unlawfully colluded with the NSA to hack into the site – a technique known as parallel construction.

• Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA intercepts huge amounts of electronic data warrantlessly without our permission. However, that is not the only way the surveillance state violates our rights. The NSA uses other underhanded schemes behind-the-scenes to exploit us. One of them is known as ‘parallel construction.’

• I’m honored to be here to discuss the mass collection of Americans’ phone records by the NSA. Before getting into that program, though, it’s critical to recognize that this debate is not just about phone records, and it is not just about the NSA. This is a debate about the kind of society we want to live in. Do we want to live in a country in which the government routinely spies on hundreds of millions of people who have done absolutely nothing wrong? Or do we want to be true to the vision of our nation’s founders, who believed that the government should — as a general matter — leave us alone unless it has cause to invade our privacy. I think our founders got it right, and I hope you’ll agree, which is why you should vote for the resolution: Mass collection of our phone records violates the Fourth Amendment.

• In the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s, and numerous other credible whistleblowers‘ irrefutable revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies are capturing and indefinitely storing millions of innocent Americans’ phone calls, emails, internet transactions, and even movements and whereabouts at any given time—Apple and other tech companies are rightfully responding to their customers’ demands for enhanced encryption to protect their privacy rights.

• Brands are slowly finding ways to make sense of image-based social networks such as Instagram and Tumblr, mining user photos for insight into how their products are used.

• The rise of the ‘visual economy’ poses several challenges for marketers. One is understanding how consumers like to share post-production edits of their lives. Another challenge for brands is finding a way to participate in that activity with authenticity. And the final one is how to parse this visual data for insight.

• The bad news is that Americans are at far greater risk of having their phones hacked by their government than by Russian malware hackers.

• Consider, however, the reality of your relationship with your phone. First of all, it knows everything about you. It reads all your emails, sees all your pictures, learns your favorite websites, and even remembers the unsent texts you draft in the middle of the night. It tracks where you’ve been and when, who you’ve talked to and for how long — and if you have a particularly smart new phone, it also knows your resting heart rate and level of physical activity. The jobs that NSA and KGB spies would train for decades to master are now being handled by the little computer in your pocket. In its spare time. As a sideline entertainment. And what do you know about your phone, other than the megapixels of its camera or the gigabytes of its storage?

• Your phone records, your credit-card bills, your internet trail – the government has the power to summon it all on-demand, without telling you. Until now

• The integrity of the Internet could be at risk if Congress does not act to rein in the National Security Agency, Google head Eric Schmidt warned on Wednesday.

Civil Rights

• Former NYPD police chief Ray Kelly is still telling his stop-and-frisk story to whoever will listen. The story is — and always has been — that if the NYPC isn’t allowed to make hundreds of thousands of unconstitutional stops every year, the city will slide back into lawlessness. The supporting evidence offered for this pending apocalypse never added up. Kelly claimed stop-and-frisk kept guns off the street but statistics maintained by the NYPD itself showed that the difference between stop-and-frisk-free 2003 and 2012′s 500,000+ stops was a grand total of 96 guns — a difference of .02%.

• “Last Week Tonight’s” John Oliver is again taking an entertaining swing at a subject that has made its way into Techdirt’s pages: asset seizure and forfeiture. Going beyond the “robbery at badgepoint” (Cory Doctorow’s term) to civil asset forfeiture (in which the government files suit against property that is presumed guilty of criminal ties), Oliver is his usual entertaining self while still managing to highlight the obscene depths these programs — started with the intent of breaking up criminal enterprises and returning assets to those defrauded, etc. — have sunk, thanks to the perversion of incentives.

• “Lets just say, homecoming this weekend is gonna go out with a bang,” it read, according to a statement from the Utah attorney general’s office.

• The bulletin has since been deleted from the site, but still can be found through a Google search. It continued: “And the football game is gonna be one no one is ever gonna forget.”

• Presumably, the student was fully cleared of any potential wrongdoing and mocked gently for his use of the phrase “going out with a bang” by an officer drawing the shape of square with his opposing index fingers.

• The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2014 is to be awarded to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzay for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• President Barack Obama yesterday said he is still “unequivocally committed to net neutrality” and that he wants the Federal Communications Commission to issue rules that prevent Internet service providers from creating paid fast lanes.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, has called on the Council of the European Union to publish the EU negotiating directives for the on-going Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations with the US. She has also proposed to the European Commission a range of practical measures to enable timely public access to TTIP documents, and to details of meetings with stakeholders. She has opened investigations involving both institutions.

Copyrights

• As we’ve reported, France’s “three strikes and you’re out” law, known officially as Hadopi, has been a joke from start to finish. For example, the law’s first victim was convicted because his wife had downloaded some songs, while the law’s first suspension was cancelled for technical reasons. Despite these setbacks, and a change of government, France is persisting with this benighted scheme, and Numerama brings us the latest installment of this uniquely French farce (original in French.)

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