● 10.22.14

● Links 22/10/2014: Chromebooks Surge, NSA Android Endorsement

Posted in News Roundup at 4:57 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux is a great alternative to Windows for those seeking a more secure and liberty-friendly “Operating System.” Because it is open-source, there are many different “flavors” (called distributions) available. Two of the most popular distributions are Ubuntu and Fedora. They can be downloaded for free from www.ubuntu.com and www.fedoraproject.org. A fairly complete list of Linux distributions can be found at www.distrowatch.com.

Desktop

• Google’s Chromebook is a cheap alternative to a more expensive Windows or Mac PC or laptop, but up until recently it lacked any specific administrative oversight tools for enterprise IT. While IT might have liked the price tag, they may have worried about the lack of an integrated tool suite for managing a fleet of Chromebooks. That’s changed with release of Chromebook for Work, a new program designed to give IT that control they crave for Chromebooks.

• Why are Chromebooks growing while, according to NPD and other analysts, Windows PC sales are declining? ABI Research Analyst Stephanie Van Vactor said in a statement that “Consumers are hungry for a product that is cost effective but also provides the versatility and functionality of a laptop. The growth of the Chromebook market demonstrates a niche that is gaining traction among consumers.”

Server

• Stratus Technologies has partnered with the Linux Warehouse, a pure value-added distributor of enterprise open source software for South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.

• I am giving a talk on Simplified Remote Management of Linux Servers at the upcoming LISA14 conference in Seattle, which runs from November 9-14. My talk is 9:45-10:30am on Friday, November 14. LISA is Large Installation System Administration SIG of Usenix.

• Earlier this year, we made a decision to run every task on IronWorker inside its own Docker container. Since then, we’ve run over 300,000,000 programs inside of their own private Docker containers on cloud infrastructure.

• Now that we’ve been in production for several months, we wanted to take the opportunity to share with the community some of the challenges we faced in running a Docker-based infrastructure, how we overcame them, and why it was worth it.

Kernel Space

• With Linux 3.18-rc1 arriving one week early I didn’t have a chance to write a feature overview of Linux 3.18 prior to this first development release that marked the close of the merge window. For those that didn’t stay up to date with our dozens of Linux 3.18 kernel articles about changes and new features, here’s a concise overview.

• Systemd has long spawned many…er…passionate debates in the Linux community. Most discussions tend to be very polarized between those who support systemd and those who utterly loathe it. A redditor asked an innocent question about systemd and casual Linux users, and then he got far more than he bargained for…ouch!

• Let me illustrate this shift with a very current example. On August 1, 2014, The Linux Foundation launched “Intro to Linux” – formerly a 4-day, instructor-led, classroom-based course designed to develop entry level system administration competency – as a MOOC on the edX platform. The instructor led version typically served a few hundred students a year. In the first 6 months, ‘Intro to Linux’ on edX saw 250,000 registrations, of whom, 80,000 were actively taking the course in the first week after it became available. Registrations have continued at the pace of several thousand a week, from all over the world.

Graphics Stack

• The Nouveau DDX driver now supports the Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 when using its traditional EXA-based acceleration rather than only with GLAMOR.

Benchmarks

• Given yesterday’s story about Ubuntu 16.04 LTS potentially being the last 32-bit release if that proposal goes through, and given the number of people still running 32-bit Linux distributions on Intel/AMD hardware that is 64-bit capable, here’s some fresh x86 vs. x86_64 benchmarks using Ubuntu 14.10.

• With the Btrfs file-system continuing to stabilize while still adding more functionality and is generating continued interest from more Linux distributions and other open-source projects, I’ve found it time to run some fresh Btrfs RAID benchmarks to see how the next-generation Linux file-system is performing with its built-in RAID handling.

Applications

• If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to operate. First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate and various options for each email address. This take a while for every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good job as a list moderator. But there is a quick alternative, the listadmin program. It allow you to check lists for new messages to moderate in a fraction of a second.

• Over the time our website has shown you how to configure various performance tools for Linux and Unix-like operating systems. In this article we have made a list of the most used and most useful tools to monitor the performance for your box. We provided a link for each of them and split them into 2 categories: command lines one and the ones that offer a graphical interface.

• Claws Mail is an open source email client that is fast, easy to use, and full of interesting features and that is gaining some traction in the Linux community. The developers have pushed another big update for this application and it would be a very good idea to upgrade.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• This is the GNOME Minesweeper clone, allowing you to choose from three different pre-defined table sizes (8×8, 16×16, 30×16) or a custom number of rows and columns. It can be ran in fullscreen mode, comes with highscores, elapsed time and hints. The game can be paused and resumed.

• Civilization: Beyond Earth is coming to Linux and the Linux release has been cleared up a bit in terms of when we can expect it.

• Valve has released to stable their SteamOS Update 145 today after the changes were in their alchemist beta testing area since last week.

• We have just updated the released alchemist repository. This is the same content that was pushed to alchemist_beta last week.

• Midora, the top-down adventure game inspired by The Legend of Zelda and Secret of Mana, will be completely DRM-free on PC, Mac and Linux, its developer has promised.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Well, since I started using linux- about the start of this year. And I love them! I like how people work together and it has a sense of community rather than “here’s this stupidly overpriced piece of software and hahaha we don’t care about you or your opinions about it.”

• In a series of articles we illustrate the user centered design process from scratch, based on a still missing application in the KDE world: KTracks, an endurance activity tracker. In this part #3 we present mockups of the application.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Advertising Age: Where did the name Red Hat come from? Ms. Yeaney: Red Hat co-founder Marc Ewing, who developed a Linux operating system distribution product that eventually became Red Hat, attended Carnegie Mellon University. When he was on campus, he used to wear a red cap his grandfather gave him. When people had issues with computer software, they’d say, “Go find the guy with the red hat,” and the name stuck. Except now it’s a fedora.

Fedora

• Makulu Linux Cinnamon Debian Edition. Whew, that’s a mouthfull, isn’t it? I have said before that Makulu is my favorite distribution for the pure joy of Linux. Full of great graphics, bells and whistles galore, and overflowing with pretty much every package, application or utility you can imagine. The final release of this version is due out next Monday, 27 October, barring unexpected obstacles.

• The Fedora developers are thinking at porting Elementary OS’s Pantheon Desktop to Fedora. If this happens, Pantheon will be available via the default repositories of Fedora, starting with Fedora 22, which will be released next year.

Debian Family

• Back in September Debian switched back to the GNOME desktop by default in place of Xfce for the upcoming Debian 8.0 “Jessie” release. However, as of today, the non-x86 versions of Debian have flip-flopped once again back to Xfce.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Today in Linux news, Softpedia.com brings us another Ubuntu spotted-in-the-wild sighting. Hamish Wilson looks at Frictional Games’ body of work and how it changed computer gaming. My Linux Rig talks to Charles Profitt about his Ubuntu setup and The New American says use Linux if you’re “sick of surveillance.”

• The Ubuntu 4.10 release debuted on October 20, 2004. At the time the goal of the project was to succeed where Debian was failing, namely offering users the promise of a steady release cadence.

• Apple may have stopped naming operating systems after cats, but Canonical is not about to drop their trademark animal alliteration. Not even when things get tricky and the alphabetical sequence limits their options.

• With Ubuntu 14.10 due for release tomorrow and the development branch of Mir at nearly 2,000 revisions, here’s some quick Bazaar stats.

• The number of applications has been increased to 50, with 13 more supported programs (11 apps and 2 games), including: CherryTree, Wine (PPA), DigiKam, Emacs, PeaZip and FLARE.

Devices/Embedded

• MEN Micro announced a rugged, industrial temperature “XC15″ carrier board for its Linux-ready Rugged COM Express modules, including a Core-i7 CB70C COM.

• Last week, Ars reported on the story of Anonabox, an effort by a California developer to create an affordable privacy-protecting device based on the open source OpenWRT wireless router software and the Tor Project’s eponymous Internet traffic encryption and anonymization software. Anonabox was pulled from Kickstarter after accusations that the project misrepresented its product and failed to meet some basic security concerns—though its developers still plan to release their project for sale through their own website.

• The Jacinto 6, which ships with Linux, Android, and QNX SDKs, has been a popular choice among next-generation GENIVI and Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) based designs. It’s running on GlobalLogic’s AGL-based Nautilus in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and telematics platform, which currently uses Android and will soon offer Tizen Linux, as well.

Phones

Android

• The list of allowed smartphones, which US officials may share confidential information has become a bit longer. The National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) – a product tester under the supervision of the NSA – announced Tuesday the green light for the S5 Galaxy, Galaxy Note 4 and the tablet Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 Edition).

• The development comes as Samsung continues to work slowly but persistently to boost its appeal in the enterprise market by clearing the technological hurdles to ready Galaxy devices for corporate and government customers with high-security needs. The company has long believed that winning certifications from top security authorities will help persuade corporate clients to switch to Samsung phones from those made by rivals like BlackBerry Ltd.

• Blizzard Entertainment’s digital collectible card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft won’t make its way to mobile phones until next year, the developer confirmed today, saying the iPhone and Android phone versions of the game need more time.

Free Software/Open Source

• This column has often explored ways in which some of the key ideas underlying free software and open source are being applied in other fields. But that equivalence can flow in both directions: developments in fields outside the digital world may well have useful lessons for computing. A case in point is a fascinating post by James Love, Director of Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), a non-governmental organisation concerned with public health and other important issues.

• It is called “The value of an open source dividend”, and is a discussion of the problems the world of pharma faces because of the distorting effect of patents – problems it shares with the world of computing…

• Looking for a new set of icons? In an effort to spread the Material Design look, Google on Tuesday released a set of cool new icons that anyone can download for free. Need icons for your app, website, or just curious to see what they look like? You can head on over to Github and download the full package. There are 750 in total, and they’re protected under a CC-BY-SA Creative Commons license, which means you can use them for whatever you want.

• We have 200 active projects at Facebook, with 10 million lines of code. Many hundreds of engineers working on these, with over 100,000 followers and 20,000 forks.

• A group of independent developers have launched a project to develop a free, open source implementation of Apple’s Swift programming language.

• Dubbed Phoenix, the project is being developed under the auspices of Ind.ie, a group that claims to want to develop “consumer products that are beautiful, free, social, accessible, secure, and distributed” and that eschew business models based on “corporate surveillance.”

• Apple unveiled the Swift programming language at this year’s WWDC event but sadly it’s still not clear whether Apple will “open up” the language to let it appear on non-Apple platforms. Swift is built atop LLVM and designed to be Apple’s successor to Objective-C in many regards while suppoorting C/Obj-C/Obj-C++ all within a single program. With non-Apple folks being interested in the language, it didn’t take long before an open-source project started up around it.

• The problem here is that this lack of civility, this absence of open-mindedness, and this departure from decent behavior scales in an enormous way in FOSS: from the new user warmed in the glow of their new-found FOSS enlightenment thinking their first distro is “the Holy Grail,” to some of those who got the ball rolling back in the day and are responsible for the world-altering digital movement in which we now find ourselves.

Events

• The so-called “shared economy” is just replacing the existing and often inefficient and/or ineffective intermediaries, with a new set of powerful intermediaries. While the companies backing all the share-central initiatives are somehow failing to see their true social potential, they introduced many people to the collaborative economy.

• The GStreamer Conference 2014 took place last week in Düsseldorf alongside other Linux Foundation events. For those that missed out on being there in person, Ubicast has once again provided wonderful video recordings of each of the sessions.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure to take a look. The articles are interesting, the production values are high, and the editorial mission is to cover open source, open standards, and the open web.

• Add Mozilla to the ranks of companies coming out with editorial products, though in Mozilla’s case, The Open Standard is much more than another way to hawk Firefox. Its founding editor, Anthony Duignan-Cabrera, lays out his vision for the publication and reflects back on his own career.

Funding

• Yesterday, I covered the announcement from OpenStack player Mirantis that it has nailed down a massive $100 million Series B funding round led by Insight Venture Partners. The financing is being billed as the largest Series B open source investment in history.

BSD

• A recent thread on the freeipa-users mailing list highlighted one user’s experience with setting up FreeBSD as a FreeIPA client, complete with SSSD and Sudo integration. GNU+Linux systems have ipa-client-install, but the lack of an equivalent on FreeBSD means that much of the configuration must be done manually. There is a lot of room for error, and this user encountered several “gotchas” and caveats.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• AutoFDO is the Automatic Feedback Directed Optimizer. AutoFDO relies on the Linux kernel’s perf framework for profiling with performance counters. AutoFDO interprets the perf output and attempts to use the FDO infrastructure to produce better optimized code generation. AutoFDO according to its Google engineers is said to be noticeably faster than traditional FDO for GCC.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• Amundsen says the centre and its board were not notified in advance of the funding cut. The plan had not been mentioned in meetings with the Ministry of Local Government and Modernization, he explains. “We’ve always told them to warn us in advance. So, their announcement came as a shock.”

• In its 2015 budget, the Norwegian government writes that its funding for Friprog had always been a start-up grant, and that the centre has had since 2007 to find alternative sources of income.

• The United States’ National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has made some of its internally-developed gamification software available for free on GitHub under the MIT free software license.

• Developers may find it useful as a tool for configuring a server to track “gamification” systems like points or badges against user accounts on apps or websites; at the very least, it offers interesting insight into how the NGA is using game design tenets in its training programs.

• The move to Linux and other open source solutions has helped the city save some 11 million euro over the past years, Reiter writes. He points to a 2012 report by the city’s IT department. Their cost comparison includes savings on proprietary licences for operating system and office productivity tools and on PC hardware.

Openness/Sharing

• For us, an open cloud embraces a wide range of open source languages, databases and services. This is why we support thousands of open source technologies and open standards. Industry, open communities and government need to work together to develop the open source code and open standards needed to reach the goal of fluid interoperability.

Open Access/Content

• In February 2014, the Government of India declared the South Asian language Odia as the 6th classical language of India which is one among 22 scheduled languages of India and has a literary heritage of more than 5,000 years. There are documents for more than 3,500 years, and the rest are undocumented oral histories. The native Odia speakers became hopeful of getting a lot of language related projects implemented to grow the lineage of this long literary heritage and see the language used and spoken globally, not just in literature but in computer and mobile games, interactive computer applications and in other digital media—and to reach the masses as a communicative language.

Open Hardware

• “Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design. The hardware’s source, the design from which it is made, is available in the preferred format for making modifications to it. Ideally, open source hardware uses readily-available components and materials, standard processes, open infrastructure, unrestricted content, and open-source design tools to maximize the ability of individuals to make and use hardware. Open source hardware gives people the freedom to control their technology while sharing knowledge and encouraging commerce through the open exchange of designs.”

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan hit record levels in 2013 despite counter-narcotics efforts by Washington, a US report says.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The Ukraine Army, backed by both the U.S. and NATO throughout its military campaign against rebel factions in eastern regions of the country over recent months, appears to have fired cluster munitions on the city of Donetsk earlier this month, according to a Human Rights Watch investigation and independent reporting by the New York Times.

• Bowen’s friend was George W. Bush, and the job was to investigate corruption and waste in Iraq, where his buddy George had launched a misguided and very costly war, as well as an effort to reconstruct that country’s fractured economy. The watchdog soon learned that Air Force transport planes had been airlifting whole pallets of shrink-wrapped $100 bills from the U.S. to Baghdad – totaling some $14 billion!

• While confident beyond her years in front of a crowd Yousafzai’s journey began a long way from the city of brotherly (and sisterly) love’s massive convention center. She was born in 1997 in Mingora, a district in northwest Pakistan. Her father ran a local school and held the locally radical belief that girls should be educated too. Even though Malala’s mother is illiterate her father consults her before making any decisions. This has helped the eldest of their three children and only daughter feel emboldened. Of course, it helps that Malala is smart. She thrives in school and has always been motivated by competition with her classmates.

• [...]

• A drone attack may kill two or three terrorists but it will not kill terrorism. If the drones continue terrorism will spread.

• Words like ‘precision’, ‘necessity’, ‘cure’ and ‘excision’ dominated the semantics of the drone project. The drones were operated from several oceans away, everyone knew, but some trust could be put in the American superpower’s ability to know of threats and to eliminate them from the hapless and diseased soil of its ally.

• [...]

• The bureau’s project, Naming the Dead, collects available data on the people killed by drone attacks (to the extent it is made available). As per these statistics, they say that of 2,379 people killed, only 704 have been named, and only 295 of the total named have been reported to be members of some armed group. Only 84 (4pc) have actually been identified as members of Al Qaeda. Furthermore, nearly 30pc of those killed by drone attacks were not linked to any militant group at all.

• A movement is coalescing around reforming police procedures and taking away their military weapons.

• As Imal grew up, he kept asking his mother where his father was. His mother finally told Imal that his father had been killed by a drone when he was still a baby.

• Those who kill for a living employ similar terms. Israeli military commanders described the massacre of 2,100 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians (including 500 children), in Gaza this summer as “mowing the lawn”. It’s not original. Seeking to justify Barack Obama’s drone war in Pakistan (which has so far killed 2,300 people, only 4% of whom have since been named as members of al-Qaida), Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser Bruce Riedel explained that “you’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.” The director of the CIA, John Brennan, claimed that with “surgical precision” his drones “eliminate the cancerous tumour called an al-Qaida terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it”. Those who operate the drones describe their victims as bug splats.

• For years now, Israel has been appearing in world media mainly as a country that occupies the Palestinian lands. Press photos of Israelis almost always show heavily armed and armored soldiers confronting protesting Palestinians, often children. Few of these pictures have had an immediate dramatic impact, but the cumulative, incremental effect should not have been underestimated.

• Four six-by-six quilts are on display for the next month throughout the Capital District as part of an exhibit to make the general public aware of military drones and their civilian casualties.

• The quilt squares represent dozens of drone casualties, said Maureen Aumand with Women Against War, which is sponsoring the local exhibition currently in the concourse of Empire State Plaza. There are 144 squares in the quilts.

• One child dies every five minutes as a result of violence, but only a minority die in war zones, according to a report by the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF.

• President Barack Obama, scorned by his Republican critics as an “isolationist” who wants to “withdraw from the world,” is waging the longest war in U.S. history in Afghanistan, boasts of toppling the Muammar Gaddafi regime in Libya, launches airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against Islamic State and picks targets for drones to attack in as many as eight countries, while dispatching planes to the Russian border in reaction to its machinations in Ukraine, and a fleet to the South China Sea as the conflict over control of islands and waters escalates between China and its neighbors.

• [...]

• But endless war undermines the Constitution.

• British military and intelligence personnel working at US Air Force bases on the controversial drones programme could be at risk of breaking international law, according to a new report from the former director of GCHQ.

• Washington’s “remotely piloted aircraft” (RPA) programme has killed terrorists and civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, drawing the condemnation of human rights organisations.

• The most important question to ask of the Global War on Terror should be the most simple to answer. Instead, it is a perennial shadow cast over US counter-terror operations since 9/11.

• We still don’t know, and still must ask: Who exactly is the enemy?

• [...]

• The Bureau found that fewer than 4 percent of the people killed by drone fire in Pakistan have been identified by available records as named members of al Qaeda. This doesn’t mean, to be sure, that only 4 percent of drone deaths were named members of al Qaeda. Rather, of the killed individuals identified using a variety of sources, only 4 percent matched with already named al Qaeda members. The Bureau spent more than a year looking into 2,379 deaths, using multiple sources including “both Pakistani government records leaked to the Bureau, and hundreds of open source reports in English, Pashtun, and Urdu.”

• If we are to learn anything from the attempt to remake Iraq and promote democracy through methods that emphasize brute force, more war is not the answer for Afghanistan. It is time to put US intellectual and material resources into developing another way.

• In the counterterrorism realm, “imminence” is the magic word these days. The government need only utter it to hand itself a virtual license to kill.

• Understanding how language can be marshaled for controversial and even bloody purposes requires the ear of a linguist and the mind of a contracts lawyer.

• But the time to go back to school is now—with “imminence” seemingly exploding everywhere.

• In the past few years, the term has been invoked again and again in reference to the thousands targeted by the United States drone program. And it pops up just about every time the U.S. plans another drone attack or military commitment.

• According to a security source in Baghdad, an Iraqi General among with eight soldiers were killed on Sunday after an army patrol from the Baghdad Operations Command was targeted in a US bombing in Duwayliba, west of the capital.

• New statistics were released on October 16 by the UK Bureau of Investigative Journalism, claiming that fewer than 4 percent of the victims of US drone strikes in Pakistan had been identified as members of Al Qaeda. A greater number of casualties were described as militants, but with little corroborating evidence.

• The present series of drone attacks, which raised the death toll to 35 within a week, concentrated around areas where Pakistan is presently conducting the military Operation Zarb-e-Azb, launched on June 15, 2014, in the aftermath of the attack on Karachi Airport on June 8-9, 2014. At least 33 persons, including all ten attackers, were killed in the Karachi attack. Operation Zarb-e-Azb has, according to Pakistan Army sources, thus far killed more than 1,200 terrorists and 86 soldiers (no independent verification of fatalities of identities of those killed is available, as media access to the areas of conflict if severely limited).

Transparency Reporting

• Former CIA director Leon Panetta clashed with the agency over the contents of his recently published memoir and allowed his publisher to begin editing and making copies of the book before he had received final approval from the CIA, according to former U.S. officials and others familiar with the project.

Finance

• Armed with its latest funding round, OpenStack specialist Mirantis is positioning itself for an IPO in 2016.

Censorship

• This is not the first time there has been an attempt to silence Abu-Jamal. In 1994, NPR abruptly cancelled plans to air commentaries by him it had commissioned to air on All Things Considered.

• And the fact that Democracy Now! is covering this story now brings to mind what happened in 1997, when the show was set to begin airing a series of Abu-Jamal commentaries. The radio station at Philadelphia’s Temple University, KRTI, abruptly canceled its contract with Pacifica and Democracy Now! (Extra!Update, 4/97) right before the pieces were to air.

• In both cases, there were questions raised about what kinds of pressure were brought to bear on the media outlets. The controversy over NPR led lawmakers like Sen. Bob Dole to muse about the need for “closer oversight.” In the case of KRTI, there were suggestions that state funding could be at risk.

Privacy

• Techdirt took a look at a 100 page report on the spy agency’s activities and discovered the following paragraph buried in it: “ASIO intercepted, without warrant, calls made from one of its own regional offices due to a technical error. The data was deleted and processes put in place to ensure it does not happen again.”

• The Chinese government has been accused of allegedly hacking Apple in an effort to collect user data from its iCloud service.

• Swiss cable operator UPC Cablecom reacted with an email to its business clients over “unjustified claims in the course of the NSA spying scandal”, after having been ruled out as a supplier of data communication and network connections for the federal administration in October, Netzwoche.ch reports. “Because wrong conjectures have circulated, we would like to give you first-hand facts,” the email said, noting that the exclusion of UPC is still subject to legal appeals before the Federal Administrative Court. “As a company with headquarters in Zurich, we are 100 percent subject to Swiss law and abide by all statutory requirements for the services ordered by the authorities without exception,” the company said.

• Snowden said that US intelligence missed the attack and that the investigation didn’t yield any tangible results because the US government has the strategy of collecting too much information at once

• National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden says the Boston Marathon bombings are an example of how threats can be missed even under blanket surveillance.

• Snowden, who leaked millions of documents to journalists, talked to Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig on Monday online from Russia, where he is in exile.

• The Boston Globe reports that Snowden referenced the suspected marathon bombers, saying “we knew who these guys were” but “we didn’t follow up or watch these guys.”

• Former National Security Agency director Keith Alexander has ended a deal with a senior U.S. intelligence official allowing the official to work part-time for his firm, an arrangement current and former officials said risked a conflict of interest.

• A Senate committee and an outspoken U.S. Congressman are seeking further information about a deal under which a top National Security Agency official is being permitted to work part-time for a private company run by the spy agency’s former director.

• But at least three other examples the FBI director has cited are not so cut and dry. They are cases in which the authorities were tipped off — or even solved the crime — through means other than examining data they took from victims or suspects. While digital evidence may have aided those investigations, authorities nonetheless relied upon evidence beyond what was stored on a cell phone to nab a criminal or secure a conviction.

• The outgoing director of GCHQ has used his farewell speech to praise the UK surveillance agency’s practices. In the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations, Sir Iain Lobban called the agency’s work a “mission of liberty, not erosion of it.”

• In videoconference, U.S. contractor who leaked surveillance data defends actions

• A technical expert who helped The Washington Post decipher complex National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden is now going to join the government.

• With an uncommon view of history in action, a new documentary captures Edward Snowden’s leak of NSA documents as it unfolded in a Hong Kong hotel room.

• In the first of a two-part interview, the director of this year’s most daring non-fiction achievement explains how she pulled it off.

• Veteran appellate lawyer H. Thomas Byron III will defend the government’s bulk collection of phone records next month at argument in a Washington federal appeals court, according to court papers filed Monday.

• We’ve filed our reply brief in the appeal of Smith v. Obama, our case challenging the NSA’s mass telephone records collection on behalf of Idaho nurse Anna Smith. The case will be argued before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal on December 8, 2014 in Seattle, and the public is welcome to attend.

• The Wikileaks co-founder says the internet can be both a tool of political empowerment and the road to dystopia

• Open Source: Ideally, an encrypted chat app (or any software, for that matter) will be completely open source. This means that all the code used in the program is published and available for review and even improvement. This is also the only way to ensure that a given program really does what it claims to do and nothing more. It’s the only way to ensure that there are no “backdoors” in the software. Backdoors are pieces of code that would allow the developers to access your private information without your knowledge.

• Facebook has sent a warning to US Drug Enforcement Administration in a letter which revealed that the DEA snatched a woman’s phone, copied personal data and later created a Facebook account in her name.

• A year and a half into the release of classified documents by Edward Snowden, the existence of far-reaching National Security Agency surveillance is common if controversial knowledge.

• In the shadow of hacking scandals like Snapchat’s massive photo leak and a world still processing the news that came from Edward Snowden’s NSA data dump, the question “Is privacy dead” desperately needs an answer.

• [...]

• “We have to reinvent our democracies and reinvent our systems and that is the challenge you guys have,” Jonsdottir said. “And that is incredibly, I really envy you.”

• On Friday, Oct. 24, Glenn Greenwald is coming to Concordia. For the uninitiated—or those living under a rock for the last year and a bit—Greenwald is one of the two journalists who brought the Edward Snowden leaks to the world and proved that America’s NSA was engaged in a massive, worldwide data-dragnet, scooping up every bit of information they could eavesdrop, buy, coerce, wiretap, or hack their way into.

• As he fearlessly recounts here once again, however, the Times spiked his stories on the NSA misdeeds. This time around, he writes, he wasn’t going to be dissuaded. Indeed, the closing paragraphs of “Pay Any Price” amounts to a bitter “J’Accuse” against the paper’s editors, who so often set the news agenda for the rest of the American media.

• The FBI has long said that the use of strong encryption software hampers the bureau’s investigations and makes life easier for criminals. Current FBI Director James Comey continued this line of reasoning in a speech on Oct. 17, saying that the use of crypto could lead the country to a dark place, and the EFF and others said Monday that the FBI’s notions about encryption are outdated and naive.

• This latest fumble just goes to show that even though Apple may have been one of the most vocal opponents to the NSA spying tactics and the reveals of the Snowden scandal, they’re still a long way off from being a viable option for anyone who values their personal privacy while using a computer online or otherwise.

• While Clinton did not throw her support behind any specific NSA reform proposals on Tuesday, her remarks suggest that she’ll make a concerted effort to woo civil liberties advocates ahead of 2016.

• Hillary Clinton praised Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), a leading critic of the National Security Agency, for his work on intelligence reform during a campaign stop Tuesday.

• Speaking at a rally for Udall, Clinton praised him for “leading the Senate in asking the hard questions about intelligence and the tradeoff between liberty and security.”

• Earlier in the day, Valery Seleznev, the father of the alleged cybercriminal and a Russian lawmaker, told reporters that the US secret services falsified the accusations against Roman in order to be able to exchange him for Snowden.

Civil Rights

• Since the release of the film Kill the Messenger, there has been renewed focus on Webb’s story, which documented how CIA-linked drug traffickers were supplying US drug dealers with cheap cocaine that helped fuel the crack epidemic in the 1980s. For the Post, this means it’s time to argue once again that Webb got the story wrong.

• There are many like Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan whom the West chose to ignore

• Usually, fascism is described as a form of authoritarian nationalism in which a dictator has complete power and violently suppresses opposition and criticism while emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and racism. (If you want to read a 14 point characterization of fascism, see Professor Lawrence Britt’s ‘Fascism Anyone?‘

• Weisman’s new documentary, “The Hacker Wars,” is frightening and a must-see. Why? Because the movie makes clear that we Americans should be screaming at our government for trampling our rights. Aside from spying on us, they are punishing those who exercise their right to free speech. The U.S. Constitution is becoming a bad joke. The U.S. government is arresting people left and right for telling the truth.

• NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake makes a powerful statement in the film, “The United States has unchained from the constitution, this is an alien form of government.”

• Though you would never know it from reading The New York Times obit of former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who passed away yesterday at the age of 98, the CIA likely played a central role in the effective coup that removed Whitlam from office in 1975. In today’s post Snowden world, it wouldn’t shock anyone perhaps–but it’s important to remember that the spying, dishonesty, illegality and crimes perpetuated by the government’s intelligence agencies, usually at the behest of the White House, stretch back decades. Two key words are missing from the obit: Pine Gap.

• So far the Justice Department has not charged Snowden with murder, or even hinted in that direction. Pursuing a murder count would raise the stakes significantly, both for the United States and, naturally, Snowden himself. It’s also totally unclear what basis, if any, Rogers may have for suggesting this. Who exactly is Snowden supposed to have killed, when, and where? If Rogers has any grounds—factual or legal—for this rather dramatic statement, he should make them clear.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Now, significant change is in the air. That contract expires in September, 2015. NTIA said in March that it may move ICANN to multinational stewardship. The details aren’t set yet, but needless to say, the matter is steeped in controversy. The group held a meeting, ICANN 51, last week in Los Angeles.

• Bloomberg TV co-host Cory Johnson called out the hypocrisy of activist telecommunications investor Jeff Pulver who misleadingly stoked fears that proponents of net neutrality advocate for regulations that would hamper telecommunications innovations in. Johnson pointed out that without an open internet, the CEO might have been unable to create his own business.

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