● 10.31.14

● Links 31/10/2014: Rubin Leaves Google, Neelie Kroes Ends EU Career

Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• So, XP is dead, “7” is dying, “8” is a zombie, and “10” is vapourware with nowhere to call home. M$ continues layoffs. POOF! It all falls down. In the meantime Google and the OEMs will crank out many millions of ChromeBooks. Canonical, Linpus, RedHat, Suse… and the OEMs will crank out many millions of GNU/Linux PCs. Several OEMs will crank out many millions of GNU/Linux thin clients. Android/Linux will reverberate with another billion or so units of small cheap computers(tablets, smartphones). This looks like good news to me.

Desktop

• CHINA HAS DISCLOSED plans to move its systems to a state-endorsed version of Linux by 2020.

Server

• Linux Warehouse, a value-added distributor of enterprise open source solutions, is proud to announce its collaboration with Stratus Technologies, a global provider of always-on solutions. The partnership will enable Linux Warehouse to introduce Stratus Technologies’ next-generation software, everRun Enterprise, which has been developed to prevent downtime, to the sub-Sahara African market.

• Container-loving Linux vendor CoreOS has made its on-premises Docker container registry software available as a standalone product.

Kernel Space

• If Linus Torvalds doesn’t have any big issues with the design of systemd, perhaps it’s not all bad. If you’d like a calm look at why a Linux distribution might want to go with systemd, Debian’s systemd discussion document is good reading.

• The Ubuntu kernel team is pleased to announce that we will be providing extended stable support for the Linux 3.16 kernel until April 2016 as a third party effort maintained on our infrastructure. The team will pick up stable maintenance where Greg KH left off with v3.16.7 [1].

• David Airlie at Red Hat spent today looking at DisplayLink USB 3.0 support and froum the sounds of it, it’s going to be a mess to support without some official documentation or development support.

• Wim Tayman added a native Bluetooth HSP headset backend to PulseAudio. This backend allows PulseAudio to output audio to a headset supporting the HSP profile. HSP is short for the Headset Profile and is the most commonly used profile for Bluetooth headsets and mobile phones. Those wishing to learn more about Bluetooth HSP can visit Bluetooth.org.

Graphics Stack

• For those wondering whether there’s ABI breakage with this week’s X.Org Server 1.17 Release Candidate, there is indeed some breakage that will warrant the proprietary driver ABIs to be updated and released.

• Among other things, commit b851ca968b7cce6d1a6438c05d3d5c8832249704 added a NameWindowPixmap function pointer to ScreenRec, shifting some of the fields around.

• In an interesting change of events, Code Aurora on the behalf of the Qualcomm Innovation Center has added Adreno A4xx product support to the Freedreno-spawned DRM/KMS “MSM” driver.

• At yesterday’s X.Org Foundation Board of Directors meeting they approved one project for the Outreach Program for Women.

Applications

• There are quite a few terminals out there, and some of them follow the drop-down style. GNOME has Guake, a GTK-based terminal emulator with lots of features, but there is also Tilda or Final Term, while the KDE de-facto terminal is Yakuake.

• I’m sure many Atom users already know this, but I didn’t get to write an article about it, so here’s a quick update: the Atom developers have started providing 64bit DEB packages for more than a month. Also, 4 days ago, they added official 64bit RPM packages.

• CherryTree is a notes-taking application which organizes your notes into a hierarchical tree, has support for text formatting, and is written in GTK2/Python. Lately this application has got a lot of attention due to rich features and frequent updates. It also comes by default in distributions such as MakuluLinux MATE Edition.

• GSmartControl is an application that allows users to check the health of the drives with the help of the SMART data. It’s not a unique application and there are others that can do this job, but it’s always a good thing to have alternatives.

• Xine is both an open source multimedia playback engine and a video playback application that’s been around for a very long time. The number of people using this application has diminished, and there are few maintained third-party apps that are based on this engine. We’ll take a closer look at the application to see why this is happening.

Instructionals/Technical

• She who rules databases rules the world. Even if you don’t want to rule the world, knowing a good set of database commands will make your life easier.

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.7.30 is now available.

• The newest release, Wine 1.7.30, still lacks the Direct3D command stream multi-threading work or any breakthroughs in better Direct3D 10/11 support, but it continues working on Wine’s recent focus of DirectWrite support, a text layout and glyph rendering API with hardware aceleration that began in the Windows 7 days to replace their GDI(+) interface.

Games

• Humble Bundle’s in-house port team has ported more than 100 games to the Linux platform, the company announced today.

• It’s no longer absurd to build a gaming box around Linux. Sure, there are still far more titles available for Windows, but between solutions like Wine and a growing concerted effort to support the open source platform, the situation is improving at a faster rate than ever before. Valve deserves kudos for promoting Linux through Steam, and surprise, surprise, Humble Bundle is fast becoming a pioneering force with over 100 games having been ported to Linux.

• The Steam Halloween Sale is a new promotion which includes games fit for the Halloween theme, which will last until November 3rd. Tens of titles for Linux are included as well, and come at discounts as high as 90%.

• Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition is a role-playing game which has finally made it to Steam earlier today. The game takes place in a fantasy universe called the Spine of the World and features single-player, multi-player and co-op modes.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Desktop Linux users beware: IT has noticed you and decided it;s time you were properly managed.

• So says VMware, which yesterday at its vForum event in China let it be know that it will deliver a desktop virtualisation (VDI) solution for Linux desktops.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today we did an important change in how KWin will distribute its assets in the upcoming 5.2 release. When we started our thoughts about the Look’n’Feel Package and how we want to have meta themes for the complete Plasma workspace we also wanted to have this for the Window and Desktop switcher provided by KWin. So the structure of the Look’n’Feel Package already has all the pieces for including the Window and Desktop Switcher, but it was not used. Now we finally addressed this for the 5.2 release and moved the default switcher into the Look’n’Feel Package and KWin can locate the switchers from the Look’n’Feel Package.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Earlier this month GTK+ 3.16 development code gained native OpenGL support. This GTK+ OpenGL support involved adding support for wrapping an OpenGL context for native windows with GLX on X11 and EGL on Wayland to use OpenGL to paint everything. A GtkGLArea widget was also added for providing OpenGL drawing access within GTK+ applications. The GtkGLArea has already seen some more improvements to better GTK’s OpenGL support.

• For the past several months, Olivier Crête and I have been working on a project using libnice at Collabora, which is now coming to a close. Through the project we’ve managed to add a number of large, new features to libnice, and implement hundreds (no exaggeration) of cleanups and bug fixes. All of this work was done upstream, and is available in libnice 0.1.8, released recently! GLib has also gained a number of networking fixes, API additions and documentation improvements.

Distributions

Reviews

• Puppy Linux 6.0 is a lightweight Linux distribution that can easily be run off a USB stick, SD card or live disc. This version has been dubbed “Tahrpup” by the Puppy Linux developers, and it is based on Ubuntu 14.04. It also uses Linux kernel 3.14.20.

• It has advanced far beyond the primitive proof of concept demonstrated more than four years ago. Release 2 (beta), which arrived in late September, is a powerful desktop OS.

• Qubes succeeds in seamless integrating security by isolation into the user experience. However, comparing Qubes to a typical Linux distro is akin to comparing the Linux OS to Unix.

New Releases

• There are numerous Linux distributions that are oriented towards education, but you can never have too many in a domain such as this one. It’s based on the Black Lab Professional Desktop, which is a very good and powerful solution. Interestingly enough, Black Lab Linux is actually based on Ubuntu, and the latest one uses the 14.04.1 base (Trusty Tahr).

Arch Family

• The Arch-based Manjaro crew has been developing Calamares, an open-source installation framework they hope will basically lead to being a universal Linux distribution installer.

Red Hat Family

• Adlink released two Linux-ready COM Express Type 2 modules running on Intel 4th Gen. Core and Intel Atom e3800 SoCs, respectively.

• Open source software company Red Hat expects big business in India as the government kick-starts its investment in IT and number of startups in the country grows and also expects to grow its shared-services base in India.

Fedora

• While Fedora 21 Beta was delayed, today it received the go ahead to be released next week Tuesday.

• Jaroslav Reznik of Red Hat shared that at today’s Go/No-Go meeting the F21 Beta was approved by Fedora QA, release engineering, and development teams. Fedora 21 Beta will make it out now on Tuesday, 4 November.

• At the Fedora 21 Beta Go/No-Go Meeting #3 that just occurred, it was agreed to Go with the Fedora 21 Beta by Fedora QA, Release Engineering and Development.

• We arrived at the olf1Drury Friday afternoon and got settled into the room. We then checked on the event and got our registration stuff all taken care off that afternoon. I checked out where we needed to set up. We had the table right next to the Red Hat table. We were in a good location at the end or the isle for easy access for everyone to get to. This weekend the weather was good and there was not a cloud in the sky. We were hoping for a busy day on Saturday.

• This week saw a nasty little bug land in rawhide that hit most everyone: bug 1159117

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Specs have been leaked for a 10.1-inch Ubuntu Touch tablet called “UT One” that runs on an Intel Atom Z3735D SoC, with shipments expected in December.

• I thought perhaps it was a one-off mistake made by a marketing department flunky who perhaps had too much Red Bull while writing a press release. Being the responsible company that Canonical/Ubuntu is, and being the good FOSS community member that it portrays itself to be, I assumed they’d fix the error right away and make sure that ludicrous hyperbole was not the order of the day. Would that be asking too much?

• Perhaps. Sadly, a company that claims to be a FOSS leader can’t be bothered with getting simple facts correct. An ad on LinkedIn posted a week ago today makes the same claim for a job in London. You can click on the photo to the right and read, “It is used by over 20 million people in 240 countries in 80 languages.”

• The same Intel Core i7 4770K system used for yesterday’s Windows vs. Linux graphics benchmarks were used when benchmarking the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, 970, and 980 graphics cards. Windows 8.1 Pro x64 had all available system updates at the time and was running the NVIDIA 344.48 WHQL binary driver that was their latest release at the time of testing. When running Ubuntu 14.10 x86_64 on the system with its Linux 3.16 kernel, the NVIDIA 343.22 driver was used. The 343.22 driver was the latest publicly available proprietary Linux driver at the time of testing and their first to support the GTX 970/980 under Linux. All of the same hardware was used under each operating system and each OS was with its software default settings as were the driver settings.

• As I have previously announced, the Ubuntu Touch development branch is based on Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, while the Ubuntu RTM branch is still using Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn as code base, because it has already received stability improvements and will by default on the first Ubuntu powered Meizu phone. Currently, all the new features are implemented on the Ubuntu-Devel branch, the RTM one receiving only fixes.

Devices/Embedded

• Lumera Labs is aiming to Kickstarter an open source Linux camera attachment for one-click transfers to the cloud via WiFi, plus GPS tagging, HDR, and 3D.

Phones

Tizen

• As promised, the Tizen IVI team announced the release of the Tizen IVI 3.0-M3-Oct2014 Release for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI). The major changes are below:

Android

• The Nexus 6 is Google’s biggest phone, and judging by the initial reaction from Android users, it may end up being its best-selling phone ever. Creating the Nexus 6 was a bold move by Google and it has resulted in pandemonium as Google’s initial supplies of the phone were quickly depleted by enthusiastic buyers. However, Google gave no warning about Nexus 6 preorders and that has angered some Android users who tried to buy it.

• Today, the Nexus 6 went up for pre-order on the Google Play Store for a grand total of five minutes by my count. No warning, no announcements, no broadcasts from the Nexus Twitter account, no excitement from Sundar Pichai or any other Android leaders, nothing. I, like many of you, had no idea that pre-orders had even started. And by the time I tried to go order, it was too late. Sold out, gone. Nexus 4 all over again.

• Google Play Downloader is a simple open source application which can be used to download APKs from Google Play to your computer.

• The move is, perhaps, not a total surprise. Last March, Rubin left the Android group and was replaced by Sundar Pichai. His latest project, as detailed in a lengthy New York Times report in December, was creating robots for a project outside of the company’s Google X lab, something that dovetailed with Google’s shopping spree of robotics companies. In 2012, there were also rumors abound that Rubin planned to leave for a stealth-mode startup called CloudCar, though they were vehemently denied.

Free Software/Open Source

• But here’s another, equally salient fact: Every company on the planet must embrace open source to varying degrees, including vendors that make their money selling proprietary software or services.

• In my previous column, I pointed out that free software was now so successful, and in so many fields, that people might wonder whether there’s anything left to do. The question was rhetorical, of course, of course: the ingenuity of the open source community means that people there will always find new and exciting projects. And not just the big one that I suggested of baking strong crypto into all our communication tools. There are countless other novel uses for open source, as these three very different examples below indicate.

Events

• I went to the Ohio Linux Fest this year to give the closing keynote address to somewhere around 300 folks. And trust me…this will show up later so you’ll know what I mean…the last two minutes of my keynote were the best part. Wait for it…soon.

SaaS/Big Data

• Everett is also a core contributor to the Apache jclouds project, an open source tool designed to make it easier for developers to build applications which are able to reap the benefits of cloud computing while being agnostic to which cloud infrastructure project lies underneath.

• This week, PLUMgrid, which specializes in virtual network infrastructure for OpenStack cloud deployments, announced the availability of its Open Networking Suite (ONS) version 2.0 with expanded support for OpenStack distributions and network functions. The company claims that “PLUMgrid ONS for OpenStack is the industry’s first software-only virtual networking suite that provides terabits of scale out performance, production-grade resiliency, and secure multi-tenancy for businesses to build agile cloud networks.”

CMS

• The top story tonight is a highly critical flaw in Drupal 7 that may have allowed a lot of compromised websites. At tonight’s Go/No-Go meeting, Fedora 21 Beta was approved for next week. The folks at ROSA have released an LXDE version and LibreOffices 4.3.3 and 4.2.7 were released. Red Hat Software Collections 1.2 was released and Jack Wallen looks at the “science behind Ubuntu Unity’s popularity.”

• The current situation being faced by Drupal users is evidence of just how determined the black hats are in their quest to find vulnerable sites and exploit them. According to Drupal, “Automated attacks began compromising Drupal 7 websites that were not patched or updated to Drupal 7.32 within hours of the announcement of” the vulnerability. On any site on any platform, paying attention to security is just as important as paying attention to content.

• For those that fall into the affected category we’re looking at 264,265 live sites that are currently running Drupal version 7, as a CMS at least, as of this writing. The advisory outlining this problem was originally posted on October 15th, 2014. Within 7 hours there were multiple exploits circulating in the wild. A safe assumption that if you are running an affected version that you were compromised unless you managed to have your site updated or patched before Oct 15th, 11pm UTC.

• Whenever a security exploit is fixed, users are advised to patch quickly to reduce the risk of attack. In the case of a recent open-source Drupal content management system (CMS) vulnerability, the window in which users needed to patch before being exploited has been quantified as being only seven hours.

Healthcare

• The federal hospitals are running a system that was released in to the public domain called VistA, written in MUMPS. This is the same language that the $100 million software is written in! Except there is a huge difference in price. OSEHRA was founded to protect this software.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This is the latest installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.

• …Eric Mack thinks it might be time for a “GNU” political party.

Openness/Sharing

• In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at Ubuntu at 10 years, open source for patent-free cancer drugs, Berlin backsliding on open source, and more!

• On October 13, the Linux Foundation launched Dronecode, an open-source project to unite coders working on a software standard for unmanned aerial vehicles.

Programming

• Google’s Go language implementation is now in beta for the upcoming 1.4 major release.

• Go 1.4 is bringing Android ARM support, NaCL on ARM support, big changes to the Go runtime, minor performance improvements, changes to Go’s existing libraries, and a ton of other improvements.

• Rocker is hosted on GitHub, with three containers already available in the repository – r-base, r-devel and rstudio. The last container (rstudio) provides R and an instance of RStudio Server. RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R.

Standards/Consortia

• More than four years ago, Steve Jobs declared war on Flash and heralded HTML5 as the way to go. You could be forgiven if you thought the HTML5 standard — the follow-up to 1997’s HTML 4 — has long been set in stone, given that developers, browser vendors and the press have been talking about it for years now. In reality, however, HTML5 was still in flux — until today. The W3C today published its Recommendation of HTML5 — the final version of the standard after years of adding features and making changes to it.

Leftovers

• Today is my last day in office at the European Commission.

• Over the years, I have met a lot of people – people who have inspired, encouraged, and energised.

• In fact over 5 years in digital policy there have almost been too many to thank. But that is what I would like to today.

Security

• People who use Gmail and other Google services now have an extra layer of security available when logging into Google accounts. The company today incorporated into these services the open Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) standard, a physical USB-based second factor sign-in component that only works after verifying the login site is truly a Google site.

• Of course, this damage could have been mitigated by promptly patching when M$ releases their “Patch Tuesday” updates or sooner in an emergency. That’s the point. Consumers are not IT-people. They don’t know about this stuff. They just know about the speed and convenience of PCs on the web. That other OS is supposed to be “easy to use” but that’s just PR in the ads. It’s also easy to lose all security, have the system slow to a halt or crash. Sometimes, M$ gets it wrong and the patches don’t work. Consumers eventually buy another machine or take the box in for repairs to get it working again.

• [...]

• Of course, one should patch GNU/Linux systems too, but they do very well unpatched. The great beauty of GNU/Linux for consumers is that there are hundreds of distros and the typical malware-artist can’t hack them all simultaneously whereas “the monopoly” is a single big fat target. So, better code, fewer malwares and diversity all work together to protect consumers whereas the salesmen running M$ seek to make life “easy” for both consumers and malware-writers. I choose freedom. I use Debian GNU/Linux.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Yes­ter­day I was asked to do an inter­view on RT in the imme­di­ate after­math of the Ott­awa shoot­ings. As I said, there needs to be a full forensic invest­ig­a­tion, and I would hope that the gov­ern­ment does not use this ter­rible crime as a pre­text for yet fur­ther erosion of con­sti­tu­tional rights and civil liber­ties. Calm heads and the rule of law need to pre­vail.

• Here is a short excerpt from a panel dis­cus­sion I took part in after the Lon­don première of the new cult anti-prohibition film, “The Cul­ture High”. This is an amaz­ing film that pulls together so many big issues around the failed global 50 year policy of the war on drugs. I ser­i­ously recom­mend watch­ing it.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• On November 4, Wisconsin voters will decide if the state constitution should be amended to require that “revenues generated by use of the state transportation system be deposited into a transportation fund administered by a department of transportation for the exclusive purpose of funding Wisconsin’s transportation systems and to prohibit any transfers or lapses from this fund.” The ballot measure reflects model legislation pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that is intended to prioritize road funding over all other types of transportation spending.

• epublicans are accusing Democrats of race-baiting? It sounds like the Times’ Jeremy Peters is making that accusation–isn’t that what “race-baiting” means, to “play on fears” with “racially charged messages”?

• Rick Berman, the king of corporate front groups and propaganda, has been caught on tape detailing his attacks on public interest groups in the labor and environmental movements, including on efforts to increase the minimum wage for workers.

• As noted in a new story by Eric Lipton at The New York Times, Berman met with energy company executives at the posh Broadmoor Hotel earlier this year to raise money from them to attack groups representing citizens concerned about clean water, clean air, and the future of the planet. But Berman’s “win ugly” tactics apparently did not persuade all of his prospective clients for his lucrative business of creating tax-exempt non-profit front groups that then contract with his for-profit PR firm to give corporations cover for his attacks on their opponents. The way Berman profits from this arrangement has spawned a legal complaint to the IRS.

• An audio tape of Berman and his associate, Jack Hubbard, has been provided by a person at the Broadmoor event to the Center for Media and Democracy, which publishes PRWatch and has long tracked Berman’s deceptive PR operations.

• If extreme polarization is now an enduring feature of American politics — not just a bug — how does that change the game for journalists? I have some ideas, but mainly I want to put that question on the table. “Conflict makes news,” it is often said. But when gridlock becomes the norm the conflicts are endless, infinite, predictable and just plain dull: in a way, the opposite of news. This dynamic has already ruined the Sunday talk shows. Who can stand that spectacle anymore?

• How many of you are reading this because of a link you clicked on Facebook? In the online publishing industry (which WIRED obviously is part of), Facebook’s influence on site traffic—and therefore ad revenue—is difficult to overstate. Over the past year especially, “the homepage is dead” has become a standard line among media pundits. And more than anything else, it’s Facebook that killed it.

• Given that links appear to be more clickable when shared on Facebook, online publishers have scrambled to become savvy gamers of Facebook’s News Feed, seeking to divine the secret rules that push some stories higher than others. But all this genuflection at the altar of Facebook’s algorithms may be but a prelude to a more fundamental shift in how content is produced, shared, and consumed online. Instead of going to all this trouble to get people to click a link on Facebook that takes them somewhere else, the future of Internet content may be a world in which no video, article, or cat GIF gallery lives outside of Facebook at all.

Censorship

• The BBC has rejected a demand from the Green party to be included in the proposed TV leader election debates, saying that it, unlike Ukip, has not demonstrated any substantial increase in support.

• The broadcasters have proposed three debates, one including Ukip, the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Conservatives, a second involving the Lib Dems, Labour and the Conservatives, and finally one between Ed Miliband and David Cameron.

• The Green Party was infuriated that they had been excluded and won support in online petitions.

Privacy

• British intelligence services can access raw material collected in bulk by the NSA and other foreign spy agencies without a warrant, the government has confirmed for the first time.

• GCHQ’s secret “arrangements” for accessing bulk material are revealed in documents submitted to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the UK surveillance watchdog, in response to a joint legal challenge by Privacy International, Liberty and Amnesty International. The legal action was launched in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations published by the Guardian and other news organisations last year.

• Yet more evidence has come to light to show that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) is woefully out of date.

• It has been revealed that GCHQ, has the ability to request large amounts of un-analysed communications from foreign intelligence agencies without first obtaining a warrant. The documents, obtained in the course of a case brought before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), show that the use of a warrant was not necessary if it is “not technically feasible” for GCHQ to obtain one.

• If you are using a Sony Xperia device running either Android 4.4.2 or 4.4.4 it’s advised (by me) that you install a custom ROM on your device. Several reports have appeared online that the stock firmware on these devices contains Baidu spyware that is discreetly sending data back to servers in China, you do not need to have installed any software on your phone as it’s bundled into the firmware.

• Adequate oversight is impossible when even diligent members of the Senate Intelligence Committee can’t get basic facts about surveillance.

• Congress should quickly restore whistleblower rights for government contractors who work in the intelligence community (IC), 49 ideologically diverse organizations and the Make It Safe Coalition told lawmakers in a letter today.

• The National Security Agency might not have only collected personal information belonging to millions of Americans. It may very well have shared it too – with at least one foreign government.

• A report released yesterday by the U.K.-based human rights organization Liberty reveals Britain’s intelligence agencies can access information which the NSA has already collected whenever and wherever it wants – and without a warrant.

• Brazil is planning a $185 million project to lay fiber-optic cable across the Atlantic Ocean, which could entail buying gear from multiple vendors. What it won’t need: U.S.-made technology.

• Brazil is moving ahead with plans to build an “anti-NSA” internet cable to Europe, even though it won’t make the slightest difference to spying efforts.

• Francisco Ziober Filho, president of state-run telecoms company Telebras, announced earlier this week that the company will form a joint venture with Spain’s IslaLink to run the submarine connection between Fortaleza at the northern tip of Brazil and Lisbon, Portugal. Filho also strongly suggested that the cable will not include any equipment from US manufacturers – take that, NSA.

• Despite the rhetoric, however, one expert in cable infrastructure told The Register that not only does the cable not make economic sense but it amounts to little more than “a $185m propaganda statement” on the part of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.

• Admiral Michael Rogers is preparing a coalition of government, military and commercial interests to fight a global cyber war if necessary.

• In two speeches this month, US National Security Agency (NSA) Director Admiral Mike Rogers called for a further integration between the NSA and major technology and communications companies.

• No serious defense of the surveillance state can ignores its anti-democratic abuses, its lawbreaking, and its record of punishing whistleblowers.

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is seeking more powers to hack into a suspect computer no matter where it is located, and carry out surveillance.

• Today, we’re releasing a new set of documents concerning Executive Order 12333 that we — alongside the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School — obtained in an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. EO 12333 hasn’t received much public attention to date, but the government’s prior disclosures in our suit have shown that the executive order in fact governs most of the NSA’s surveillance. In the NSA’s own words, EO 12333 is “the primary source of the NSA’s foreign intelligence-gathering authority.”

• A few weeks ago, we wrote about how VPN company Golden Frog had quietly revealed in an FCC filing that an unnamed mobile broadband provider had been (even more) quietly blocking people from sending encrypted emails — basically blocking users from making use of STARTTLS encryption. The Washington Post has now revealed that the mobile operator in question was Cricket — a subsidiary of AT&T, and that it stopped blocking such encryption a few days after our post was published.

• Some customers of popular prepaid-mobile company Cricket were unable to send or receive encrypted e-mails for many months, according to security researchers, raising concerns that consumers may find that protecting their privacy is not always in their hands.

• The Swedish Telecoms Regulator PTS has threatened Kista-based ISP Bahnhof to continue storing records of its customer communications, even though the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled the 2006 Data Retention Directive invalid [PDF] in April of this year.

• The sales pitch for automatic license plate readers is how great they are at helping cops solve crimes. From hunting down stolen cars to tracking pedophiles across jurisdictions, ALPRs supposedly make policing a breeze by gathering millions of time/date/location records every single day and making it all available to any law enforcement agency willing to buy the software and pay the licensing fees.

• Over the past five years, law enforcement agencies in Vermont have invested more than $1 million in technology that gathers millions of data points every year about the whereabouts of vehicles across the state.

• A billboard challenging Amazon to fully disclose the terms of its $600 million contract to provide cloud computing services for the Central Intelligence Agency has been unveiled at a busy intersection near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

• Another tool supposedly “crucial” to the War on Terror is just another lowly footsoldier in the War on Drugs. Some long-delayed reports on Section 213 “sneak and peek” warrants have finally been released by the US government, providing more detail on the constantly-expanding use of delayed-notification warrants by the FBI.

• The Patriot Act continues to wreak its havoc on civil liberties. Section 213 was included in the Patriot Act over the protests of privacy advocates and granted law enforcement the power to conduct a search while delaying notice to the suspect of the search. Known as a “sneak and peek” warrant, law enforcement was adamant Section 213 was needed to protect against terrorism. But the latest government report detailing the numbers of “sneak and peek” warrants reveals that out of a total of over 11,000 sneak and peek requests, only 51 were used for terrorism. Yet again, terrorism concerns appear to be trampling our civil liberties.

Civil Rights

• Republicans stand to gain as many as eight seats in the Senate this election. But America’s spies stand to gain much, much more.

• If the Nov. 4 elections deliver a GOP-controlled Senate, the chairmanship of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee is likely to go to a North Carolinian whose unwavering support for the CIA and NSA could radically transform the committee’s oversight agenda.

• One of the numerous issues being carefully avoided by the political establishment in the US midterm elections, now less than one week away, is the constitutional crisis surrounding the plot to cover up torture carried out by the CIA.

• All of the institutions of government are complicit in the cover-up, which is centered on preventing the publication of a Senate Intelligence Committee summary detailing US torture practices far exceeding in scope and brutality those made public so far. The logic behind the cover-up is simple: the report details crimes so harrowing that its publication would prove politically explosive.

• When Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) took to the Senate floor earlier this year to allege that the CIA had spied on the U.S. Senate, she confirmed the existence of a secret document.

• That document, she said, could further validate a scathing report on the spy agency’s torture practices that is expected to be unveiled in the next few weeks.

• A soon-to-be released report of the US Senate criticises the CIA under President George W. Bush of conducting torture of Al Qaeda suspects. However, it doesn’t assess the responsibility of Bush himself nor his vice president, Dick Cheney.

• According to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s chairwoman Dianne Feinstein the 6,000 page report is “one of the most significant oversight efforts in the history of the US.”

• The report shows that the CIA did not provide accurate information to Congress and also provided misleading information. The report also concludes that the CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making. While the report was being prepared the CIA penetrated the Senate Committee’s computers, arousing the fury of its members.

• Months after President Obama frankly admitted that the United States had “tortured some folks” as part of the War on Terror, a new report submitted to the United Nations Committee Against Torture has been released that excoriates his administration for shielding the officials responsible from prosecution.

• The Central Intelligence Agency is firing back at allegations that it is responsible for delaying the release of the Senate report on the controversial post-9/11 interrogation program, insisting that lawmakers themselves are to blame.

• The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday for the fourth time asked a court to delay the release of a 500-page summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into a Bush-era CIA rendition, detention and interrogation program.

• Valerie Plame says former Vice President Dick Cheney is a traitor for allegedly having outed her in 2003 as an undercover CIA operative overseas.

• It’s now been more than a decade since Plame found herself in the center of a political firestorm.

• The incident began when Plame’s husband, former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, was sent to Niger by the George W. Bush administration to investigate claims that Iraq had arranged to buy and import uranium from Niger. Wilson reported to Bush that Iraq had no such program.

• For decades, the CIA and the FBI reportedly employed and protected at least 1,000 Nazis, using them as spies and later shielding them from prosecution, the New York Times reports.

• According to Eric Lichtblau,who reviewed declassified reports and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the two intelligence agencies recruited at least 1,000 Nazis to operate as spies and informants—a number experts say is probably a lowball estimate.

• Historians say they were recruited under a “cold war mentality” that the Nazis’ ability to gather intel on the Russians outweighed their war crimes.

• One such spy was involved in the Lithuanian massacre of tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust; another worked closely with Adolf Eichmann, according to the book.

• The CIA and other U.S. agencies hired at least 1,000 ex-Nazis to serve as spies during the Cold War and took pains to conceal the suspected war crimes of those informants living in America, according to a New York Times report published Monday.

• One serious shortcoming of American democracy is our perennial failure to properly police the CIA. Over the decades, no federal agency has been caught up in more scandals: democratically elected governments overthrown, the rendition of prisoners, torture, spying on Congress.

• Recently disclosed government records and interviews reveal that after World War II, the FBI and CIA recruited 1,000 ex-Nazis as informants during the Cold War.

• According to the New York Times report, which was adapted from Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, not only did the government agencies recruit ex-Nazis of all ranks as anti-Soviet “assets,” but the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and CIA’s Allen Dulles also helped these spies immigrate to the U.S. This was done in a bid to conceal their participation in the war or their “moral lapses,” so that they could be shielded from the U.S. Justice Department’s Nazi pursuers.

• The U.S. government often went to great lengths to protect its use of former Nazis in the global fight against communism. Times reporter Eric Lichtblau notes that, as recently as the 1990s, spy agencies “concealed the government’s ties” to Nazi war criminals still living in America.

• The U.S. government used about 1,000 Nazis as spies during the Cold War, according to a new report, including one who was among the highest-ranking members of the Hitler’s Third Reich.

• In the decades after World War II, the CIA and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.

• At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI and Allen Dulles at the CIA aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.

• The Times piece also revealed that the CIA hid their precious assets from Nazi hunters and prosecutors trying to deport then-old men in the 1980s and even into the ‘90s. Most disturbing, one of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann’s little buddies, Otto von Bolschwing, was protected until 1982, when he conveniently died of a brain disorder before he could be deported or prosecuted.

• [...]

• More alarming still is the description of von Bolschwing’s panic when Mossad agents snatched Eichmann from Argentina, to bring him to trial in Israel in 1961. The CIA, it seems, assured him he would be safe in America. No Nazi hunters would come make him pay for his crimes – or “embarrass the US” – not while the agency could use Bolschwing to presumably win the Cold War.

• In the waning days of World War II, Waffen SS general Karl Wolff, made a deal with the American intelligence operative Allen Dulles that he would surrender his men in Northern Italy in exchange for immunity from war crimes. With the imminent collapse of the Third Reich, Wolff had more to gain from this understanding than Washington, but Dulles kept his promise, protecting Wolff from prosecutors at Nuremberg.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Who doesn’t want to have their own tech site these days? According to the Daily Dot, Verizon’s recently launched SugarString will have two very conspicuous holes in its tech coverage: U.S. government surveillance and net neutrality. What a big fat coincidence that Verizon is embroiled in both.

• They’re positioning the new site “Sugar String” as a well-funded competitor to Wired, but reporters are not allowed to mention NSA spying (in which Verizon was an enthusiastic partner) or net neutrality (which Verizon has devoted itself to killing, with campaigns of overt lobbying and covert dirty tricks).

• Cole Stryker, Sugar String’s editor-in-chief, sent recruiting letters to reporters last week offering them jobs at the site on the condition that they pretend that the major investor’s major embarrassments — which have made headlines all over the world on a virtually daily basis — didn’t exist.

• Reporters are, however, permitted to write about net neutrality violations and mass surveillance by governments not allied to the US, particularly China.

• A couple of years ago, we wrote about an effort by the big broadband players to push the FCC away from using M-Lab to measure basic network diagnostics on the internet. M-Lab is a very interesting project, focused on collecting a huge amount of data about internet performance, and making that data widely available. In the past, for example, we’ve highlighted an M-Lab project showing which ISPs were throttling BitTorrent.

Intellectual Monopolies

• A couple years ago, then US Trade Representative Ron Kirk explained why the negotiating text of trade agreements like the TPP needed to be kept secret: because if the public debated it, the agreement probably wouldn’t be approved. He used, as an example, a failed trade agreement where the text had been public. Beyond the “small sample size” problem of this explanation, the much more troubling aspect is the obvious question of recognizing that if public debate would kill the agreement, perhaps it’s the agreement that’s the problem and not the public.

• The EU Ombudsman is running a consultation on how to improve the transparency of the TTIP negotiations. This shouldn’t be hard, since there is currently vanishingly small openness about these secret talks.

Trademarks

• Trademark, while generally one of the better forms of intellectual property as used in practice and in purpose, can certainly still be abused. It can also fall victim to an ever-growing ownership culture that seems to have invaded the American mind like some kind of brain-eating amoeba. And that’s how we’ve arrived here today, a day in which I get to tell you about how there is currently a trademark dispute over the flavor of pizza.

Copyrights

• Gottfrid Svartholm has today been found guilty of hacking crimes by a Danish court. The Swedish Pirate Bay founder and his 21-year-old accomplice were found to have been involved in illegally accessing systems operated by IT company CSC. It was the biggest hacking case ever conducted in Denmark.

• One of the co-founders of the notorious Pirate Bay website was convicted (Google Translate) Thursday in a major hacking case in Denmark, and could face up to six years in prison.

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