● 11.02.14

● Links 2/11/2014: Dual-screen Android, OpenBSD 5.6 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 2:04 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Most of the mainstream angst directed towards Windows 8 and 8.1 in the U.S. has to do with the Modern UI and little things like the lack of a Start menu. But while hopes are high that Windows 10 will be the OS everyone wanted Windows 8 to be, China’s concerns run much deeper than the UI. As such, China reportedly plans to undergo a “de-Windowsifying” process in which its systems will be move to a state-endorsed version of Linux by 2020.

Desktop

• China is presently in a situation to completely eradicate Windows from the country. Though this is not immediately possible, the map to wipe-out the Windows operating system from every computer is planned over a period of a few years from now.

• According to a report on SoftPedia, China has planned to move away from Microsoft Windows completely. Recently, China had announced the ban of Windows 8 in the country accusing Microsoft of spying the China government and businesses via the operating system.

• China has made it mandatory to all organizations to switch from the Microsoft Windows operating system to a locally developed operating system based on Linux.

• China believes that by the year 2020, they will successfully eradicate Windows and would have an already switched to a more powerful and secure operating system of their own.

Kernel Space

• News seemed a bit slow on this All Hallows Eve, but there was still plenty to highlight. Folks are questioning Microsoft’s recent claims to “love Linux.” Systemd is back in the headlines with a primer from Chris Hoffman, a Fedora Rawhide systemd warning is in effect, and someone Ask Slashdot if readers could say anything nice about systemd. Jack M. Germain reviews Qubes OS and Larry Cafiero brings “The Wide World of Canonical.”

Graphics Stack

• While Enlightenment E19 has significant Wayland improvements, it looks like E20 will be even better with regard to Wayland support.

• There was a big branch merge yesterday that makes the new Wayland compositor functional (e-comp-wl).

• Published on Friday was a massive set of 72 patches to improve the Freescale iMX DRM driver that’s currently within the Linux kernel’s staging area.

Applications

• I’m not a fan of applications that attempt to manage my music collection, mostly because I have the music arranged, in folders, how I like it. Similarly I’m not interested in ratings systems, fuzzy searches, popularity statistics or tagging, other than making sure the data in the built-in tag matches the file name. Sorry. It’s just not my nature.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this article I will show you how to install Calibre 2.8.0 on Ubuntu, Debian, Elementary OS, Deepin, Peppermint, Pinguy OS, LXLE, Linux Lite, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Mageia, OpenMandriva, Arch Linux, Manjaro and other Linux systems.

Wine or Emulation

Games

• The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizza Boy will be the first Linux game released using the engine, which was made available on GitHub back in February. By using the GODOT to create the game, they are adding the tools necessary to create adventure games on the engine – which will then be made public after its release.

• Here is the latest instalment of Steam’s Hardware Survey, as usual we do our monthly thing and compare it and talk about it and make sure you know not to use it as a hard figure.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Skrooge Team announces the release 1.10.0 version of its popular Personal Finances Manager based on KDE Frameworks.

• From the One-to-watch Department: If you do any graphics work you should take a look at Krita Desktop, a really impressive painting tool that rivals Adobe Photoshop for features and makes some ways of working much easier.

Distributions

New Releases

• Simplicity Linux 14.10 is now available for everyone to download. It uses the 3.15.4 kernel. Netbook and Desktop Editions both use LXDE as the desktop environment, and X Edition uses KDE 4.12.3. The download links are as follows:

Red Hat Family

• Johnny Hughes has revealed that CentOS 6.6, the next version of the famous modular Linux distribution, is now available for download for both the 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

• Jim Whitehurst, who was chief operating officer at Delta Airlines before becoming CEO of Red Hat, has led the open-source software company to new heights.

• Annual revenue, which totaled $523 million when Whitehurst took over the helm at the outset of 2008, is expected to be more than triple that – approaching $1.8 billion – for Red Hat’s fiscal year that ends in February.

• The Raleigh-based company prospered during the recession, and it has continued to thrive as the economy has slowly improved.

• Wall Street has taken notice. Red Hat shares have nearly tripled during Whitehurst’s tenure.

• Amazingly, the company is built on a foundation of free software.

Fedora

• While Fedora 21 Beta is coming next week, if you’re wanting to upgrade early to the Fedora 21 packages, it’s advised right now against using Fedora’s upgrade utility (Fedup) unless you want to potentially trash your system.

• Currently Fedora 21 has a build of systemd that includes a new feature that was added upstream after the release of 216, which is intended to time out system startup if it’s not complete after 15 minutes – the idea being to avoid things like your laptop melting / starting a fire in your bag if it gets accidentally powered on, stuff like that.

• Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has announced the election schedule meant to fill the two new “at large” slots on Fedora’s upcoming Fedora Council governance body.

• Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything that goes on. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for October 31st, 2014:

• Did you ever wonder whether the packages you have installed are still maintained or will be available when you update to the next release? I might have a solution to answer this question for you. Recently I wrote a little script that reports packages that are orphaned, retired or missing from your current Fedora/EPEL release or any newer release. It is still only in a proof-of-concept status, but I hope to get it into Fedora eventually together with a useful cron job (or systemd timer) to get regular status reports.

Debian Family

• My significant other is running Debian stable on her laptop, and it has worked fine for quite a while. But since a week or two, she could not access her University IMAP account via Evolution. Obviously quite a showstopper!

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I haven’t done a review of Ubuntu in a while, so the release of Ubuntu 14.10 last week game me a good excuse to do just that.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Tizen

• It looks like we will be getting the first Tizen Smartphone being released VERY soon, as a dual SIM Samsung SM-Z130H/DS, which is Samsung’s first budget Tizen Smartphone, has just been listed as undergoing certification at the FCC. Generally speaking devices do tend to be launched / released soon after FCC approval. It was announced that we could get a Tizen Smartphone in India for November, so this maybe the prophecy coming true.

Android

• Poynt launched a portable, Android-based PoS device with 7- and 4.3-inch touchscreens, plus WiFi, BLE, 4G, NFC, and EMV, plus a printer and card scanner.

• Under Google, Motorola has been one of the more exciting OEMs out there. It produced the first round Andorid Wear device, the Moto 360, and great flagships like the Moto X. It made best-in-class low-end phones with the Moto G and Moto E, and now with Google it produced the Nexus 6.

Free Software/Open Source

• ExecutiveBiz: Where can Open Source help agencies manage some of those budget challenges?

• Jonathan Moneymaker: In our National Security market Open Source is an idea whose time has come. Gone are the days of questions around quality, scalability, or security. The value is really in speed and flexibility. In many cases deploying open source solutions enable us to start at a 80-90% or higher solution then integrate or customize that framework to a specific mission set that is able to adapt as fast as the threats our customers are combatting.

• In terms of scalability or security, we designed in parallel to our customer’s roadmaps building on Accumulo, the AWS infrastructure and ensuring capabilities such as our big data and visualization platform, Lumify, are fully ICITE compliant. By doing so, it gives our customers the speed to mission required and every dollar spent goes directly into mission capability delivering budgetary relief that they have been looking for from costly traditional proprietary licensing models.

• TIBCO stages its annual global convention next week – what used to be called TUCON is now called TIBCO NOW.

Events

Web Browsers

• Google plans to disable support for SSL 3.0 in an upcoming Chrome release. Mozilla has similar intentions.

SaaS/Big Data

• A lot of people back up their data to the cloud. But how do you back up the cloud itself? Convirture, the company that until now has specialized in cloud and virtualization management solutions, hopes to answer this question with a new backup and disaster recovery solution for the OpenStack open source cloud operating system running on the KVM hypverisor.

• Mirantis, the “pure-play” OpenStack vendor, is gearing up for the release of version 6.0 of its open source cloud computing platform, which will be based on OpenStack Juno and include the latest Hadoop big data and network functions virtualization (NFV) features, the company said in details of the new release.

CMS

• Up to 12 million websites may have been compromised by attackers who took advantage of a bug in the widely used Drupal software.

BSD

• We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 5.6. This is our 36th release on CD-ROM (and 37th via FTP/HTTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD’s record of more than ten years with only two remote holes in the default install.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• When it comes to code that runs a computer or a program, Richard Stallman believes it should be free.

• Not only at no cost to the user, but unshackled and independent. To Stallman, it is a matter of liberty, not price.

• “We say free software as in ‘free speech’ not ‘free beer,’” Stallman said.

• The computer programmer and activist shared his views, which earned him the MacArthur “Genius Grant,” during a presentation at Weber State University on Thursday.

• Red Hat’s David Malcolm remains committed to landing his just-in-time (JIT) compiler support for GCC.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• To those who are only marginally familiar with bitcoin, the world’s leading digital cryptocurrency, the idea of adapting the tech into a type of globally accessible passport may seem odd. But Christopher Ellis, a hacker that specializes in privacy and decentralized security, sees them as a natural fit.

• VistA is the electronic health records system created by the Veterans Administration, which became open source because as the result of taxpayer funded work it was covered under the Freedom of Information Act and was obtained by outside companies seeking to leverage it for their own projects. The VA and the DoD flirted with using VistA as part of a common open source EHR that would cover members of the military from the first day of active duty into their lives as veterans. But whether because of organizational or technical reasons, that joint technical project broke down.

Leftovers

• This year sees the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. From 1961 to 1989, the city of Berlin was divided by the most visible sign of the Cold War: a barrier more than 140km (87 miles) long.

• A 15-year-old Army cadet who was selling poppies for Remembrance Day suffered burns to his face in an attack with a lit aerosol can.

• The boy, who was wearing his uniform, was at a bus stop near Manchester Art Gallery at 18:00 GMT on Saturday when he was attacked.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Once again making open mockery of the territorial integrity of Pakistan , the American CIA operated planes struck in the North Waziristan agency Thursday morning killing at least four people. The foreign office has strongly condemned the fresh drone hit in NWA where the Pakistan Army led security forces are already conducting an effective surgery against the insurgents for the last more than four months and made substantial gains in curbing the terrorism. Unconfirmed reports say those kill in Thursday’s missiles hit, include two foreign militants.

• Mamana’s son, Rafiq ur Rehman, is a 39-year-old primary-school teacher. He and his two children, Zubair, 13, and Nabila, 9, were the first family members of a U.S. drone strike victim ever to speak to Members of Congress. Rafiq explained that he and his family were educators, not terrorists. He wanted to know why his family was targeted by the U.S. military. Zubair, a teenager, recalled how he “watched a U.S. drone kill my grandmother.” He described why he now fears blue skies: “Because drones do not fly when the skies are gray.” Nabila was picking okra with her grandmother for a religious holiday meal, when day became night. “I saw from the sky a drone and I hear a dum-dum noise. Everything was dark and I couldn’t see anything, but I heard a scream.”

• The lesson for me from the play and the quilts is that there are many different victims of drone warfare – and that it’s time for the US to reconsider this policy. Congress needs to reassert its control over US war-making and insist on ending this drone program. Of those who speak for us in Congress, Senator Schumer is only one who has not acted to demand that Congress be the decider over what is now becoming an undeclared and endless war policy – in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen.

• Islamabad- Pakistan has strongly condemned the recent US drone attack in South Waziristan.

• The Peshawar High Court (PHC) on Thursday directed a petitioner to help it determine whether the judiciary had the authority to deliberate on a case against US drone strikes. The court issued these instructions in light of a Supreme Court judgment last year which declared the apex court could not decide on matters of foreign affairs.

• The current surge in drone strikes in FATA has reignited the infamous ‘drone debate’ and ‘Pakistan’s tacit agreement’ on intelligence sharing with the United States.

• Drone attacks are widely unpopular across Pakistan and the country has opposed the strikes several times in past considering it a violation of their territorial sovereignty. (end) sbk.ibi

• It was a familiar and warm exchange of greetings and spirited talk. The small group of activists I was with had called out to the military gate guards with a question concerning the spider web like substance that seemed to be everywhere around the base; on cars, vegetation telephone poles, fences, floating in the air and across the land. Men with sidearms and radios in camo fatigues approached us.

• It was just then getting dark with the officer-in-charge and us each on our legal side of the white line that marked base property and certain arrest should we cross it. With U2s and fighter jets flying around overhead, the officer in charge cheerfully insisted we were looking at spider webs. He then asked if we intended to cross the line at which we answered “not tonight”

• Peace protesters placed photographs of children injured in drone attacks in the Middle East on the fence of a Gwynedd airfield.

• Cymdeithas y Cymod (Fellowship of Reconciliation) members were responding to news that Llanbedr Airfield will start flight tests of Remotely Piloted Aircraft or drones in early 2015.

• Around 25 people took part in the protest yesterday.

• Peace campaigner Anna Jane Evans said: “We are worried Wales is being used more and more as a practice ground for killing.

• Last year, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London embarked upon an ambitious effort to record the names of people reportedly killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan. The project, called Naming the Dead, aims to acknowledge those who have lost their lives in the strikes and to create more transparency about a counterterrorism program shrouded in secrecy.

• The CIA has conducted hundreds of drone strikes targeting militants in Pakistan’s tribal regions since June 2004. U.S. officials have lauded the program for its effectiveness and precision, and it has become an essential pillar of the administration’s counterterrorism policy. Yet despite promises by President Barack Obama to make the program more transparent and apply the highest possible standards to avoid civilian casualties, the administration has, so far, continued its secretive practices.

• Former CIA analyst and activist Ray McGovern was arrested as he attempted to attend an event in New York City featuring former CIA director and retired military general, David Petraeus. He was charged with resisting arrest, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct.

• Ray McGovern, a retired CIA agent turned peace activist, was arrested by the New York Police Department before McGovern could attend a speech by David Petraeus. Witnesses say McGovern was “yelling in pain” as he was being detained.

• Former CIA director David Petraeus, retired U.S. Army Lt. Colonel John Nagl, and author Max Boot were slated to give a speech on American Foreign Policy at the 92nd Street Y on the Upper East Side in New York. The anti-war group “The World Can’t Wait” said McGovern was arrested “at protest of speech.”

• A former CIA analyst turned anti-war activist was arrested right after attempting to crash a discussion about foreign policy with retired Army Gen. and former CIA Director David Petraeus — even although he claims he purchased the $45 ticket. Ray McGovern,…

• Investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau’s new book unveils the secret history of how the United States became a safe haven for thousands of Nazi war criminals. Many of them were brought here after World War II by the CIA and got support from then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Lichtblau first broke the story in 2010, based on newly declassified documents. Now, after interviews with dozens of agents for the first time, he has published his new book, “The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men.”

• Amazon’s $600 million contract with the CIA related to cloud computing services has caused alarm throughout the civil liberties community. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed raising concern that the CIA could be using its access to Amazon’s massive data to conduct intelligence work rather than simply storing data. In light of the ongoing domestic spying scandal regarding the NSA, fewer and fewer people are willing to take government assurances on protecting the public’s privacy.

• Thus began the Iran-Contra scandal. The Contras were an irregular military formation put together by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1981 to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The war they provoked caused tens of thousands of deaths and devastating damage to Nicaragua’s economy.

• Federal prosecutors obtained 100 blank subpoenas last week for use in the upcoming trial of a CIA officer accused of leaking top-secret information to New York Times reporter James Risen.

• The move clears the way for the Justice Department to proceed with a new review of whether Risen should be subpoenaed to testify at the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, the CIA employee accused of disclosing details of a CIA effort to set back Iran’s nuclear program.

• Former CIA operative Bob Baer’s newest book on assassinations hasn’t even been released yet, and he told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” federal officials have already told him there’s a threat on his life.

• Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.Newsmax.com/Newsfront/CIA-Book-Bob-Baer-FBI/2014/10/27/id/603354/#ixzz3HvRbCqLm Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed? Vote Here Now!

• Be it war, counterterrorism, securing Africa’s natural resources or fighting ebola, this former US Navy SEAL, now a billionaire, is the ultimate Mr Fix-It when it comes to the world of what used to be known as mercenarism.

• Today, that word, “mercenarism”, with its dogs-of-war and soldiers-of-fortune connotations, is frowned upon by the likes of men like Prince, who much prefer the less lurid acronym of PMSCs – private military and security companies – to describe their line of business.

• While Attorney General Eric Holder is calling for the Senate and the Obama Administration to lay bare the alleged abuse of detainees in Central Intelligence Agency custody, his Justice Department is going to unusual lengths to impose a complete black-out on details about the investigations he supervised into those same incidents.

• For politicians, “Transparency and accountability!” is one of those uncommonly generous and dark-horse-sympathetic political slogans: the kind that parties of any ideology can plagiarize but that underdogs can most easily claim as their own (at least while they remain underdogs).

Finance

• Over 50,000 low-income homes in Detroit have had their water services terminated since 2013. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes dismissed a lawsuit that argued that terminating water services is denying individuals the right to life. Rhodes ruled that free or affordable water is not a “fundamental right.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The chatter around Kill the Messenger, the film based on the life of investigative reporter Gary Webb, has mostly faded. But this week USA Today ran a column that mangled the basic facts of Webb’s reporting.

• Yet the process by which Facebook has developed this tool—what the firm calls the “voter megaphone”—has not been very transparent, raising questions about its use and Facebook’s ability to influence elections. Moreover, while Facebook has been developing and promoting this tool, it has also been quietly conducting experiments on how the company’s actions can affect the voting behavior of its users.

• In particular, Facebook has studied how changes in the news feed seen by its users—the constant drip-drip-drip of information shared by friends that is heart of their Facebook experience—can affect their level of interest in politics and their likelihood of voting. For one such experiment, conducted in the three months prior to Election Day in 2012, Facebook increased the amount of hard news stories at the top of the feeds of 1.9 million users. According to one Facebook data scientist, that change—which users were not alerted to—measurably increased civic engagement and voter turnout.

• The Center for Media and Democracy has asked Wisconsin’s U.S. Attorneys to investigate Wisconsin Club for Growth for allegedly making false statements on tax filings and conspiring to defraud the United States, federal crimes arising from WiCFG claiming to spend $0 in political activity in 2011 and 2012 while spending almost $20 million influencing elections.

Censorship

• Hungary’s leader suspended a controversial plan to tax Internet traffic in the face of mass protests and corporate opposition.

• It’s hard being Verizon sometimes. The poor little wireless carrier and Internet service provider often gets a bum rap in the tech press for its controversial actions on net neutrality and on enabling the American government’s surveillance programs. To combat these nattering negative ninnies in the media, Verizon has decided to take action and bankroll its own news site where none of those nasty sorts of stories will ever pop up.

Privacy

• Tenet had a request from former President George H.W. Bush, who served as CIA director from 1976 to 1977. Olson says Bush was always a “strong advocate” of intelligence, and wanted it to be taught at A&M’s new school of government and public service that bore his name. Olson’s move to Marquette was two weeks away, but the idea of “helping build a program of intelligence and national security” was too appealing, he said.

• A UK court has upheld the Government’s right to ban commercial marketing of a money-saving telephone service on security grounds because it could provide anonymity for callers. The service uses “GSM gateways” that can reduce call charges by rerouting calls through mobile phone SIM cards – but it also allows users to make anonymous calls, potentially avoiding government surveillance.

• The Court of Appeal refused to award companies damages for a government licensing system that in effect bans the GSM gateway services they offered and largely halted their business.

• Earlier this month we wrote about potential malicious behavior in Adobe’s e-reader software, “Digital Editions.” There were several independent reports claiming that Adobe’s software was sending back to Adobe–in the clear–a list of books read in the software. There were also independent reports that the program was sending back lists of books on an attached e-reader, even if those books had never been opened in ADE itself – in other words, collecting information not just about the book you are reading now, but your electronic library.

• In terms of both design and security, hidden services still need some love. We have plans for improved designs (see Tor proposal 224) but we don’t have enough funding and developers to make it happen. We’ve been talking to some Facebook engineers this week about hidden service reliability and scalability, and we’re excited that Facebook is thinking of putting development effort into helping improve hidden services.

• Two high school students in Taunton have been suspended after they posted a photo of themselves holding Airsoft rifles. Thousands of people have leapt to their defense online, but their school isn’t backing down.

• The Airsoft rifles look dangerous, but they shoot plastic pellets. Tito Velez, 15, often competes with a team as a hobby.

• The National Security Agency’s collection of Americans’ phone records will face a fresh test this coming week when a Washington, D.C., appeals-court panel hears arguments over the surveillance program.

• Brazil is building a cable across the Atlantic to escape the reach of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The move is one of many ways the Brazilian government is breaking ties with American technology companies — but it won’t come cheap.

• While Congress mulls how to curtail the NSA’s collection of Americans’ telephone records, impatient civil liberties groups are looking to legal challenges already underway in the courts to limit government surveillance powers.

• With little more than two months before he closes the book on a 16-year Congressional career, U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (D-12th Dist.) discussed the challenges in store when it comes to preserving civil liberties in the 21st century.

• This is a longstanding issue that’s been brought up by lots of people lots of times. It’s not some minor subtlety. If the government decides to look for “all calls from the 213 area code,” that’s not necessarily bulk collection even though it would amass millions of records. It would be up to a judge to decide.

• [...]

• If and when we get close to Congress actually considering bills to rein in the NSA—about which I’m only modestly optimistic in the first place—this is going to be a key thing to keep an eye on. As the ACLU and the EFF and others keep reminding us, reining in the NSA isn’t a simple matter of “ending” their bulk collection program. The devil is truly in the details, and tiny changes in wording can literally mean the difference between something that works and something that’s useless. Or maybe even worse than useless. As Pohlman points out, if you choose the right words, the NSA could end up having a freer hand than they do today. This is something to pay close attention to.

• That man, Leslie James Pickering, is a bookstore owner in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, however, Pickering was formerly a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, an environmental group deemed “eco-terrorists” by the FBI—and the presumed cause of his surveillance.

• On November 4, 1952 the NSA was created by a Presidential Executive Order signed by then president Harry Truman. Earlier that year, in January 1952, Truman’s state of the union address focused on the Korean War, the global Soviet-Communist threat, the “Iran oil situation”, and the need to increase the production of US military equipment for use by American forces, and for transfer to Western European Allies. Truman called on Americans to seek guidance in the God of Peace even as a brutal shadow war was being waged by the United States to eliminate popularly elected “leftist” governments.

• The Pentagon has scaled back its plan to assemble an overseas spy service that could have rivaled the CIA in size, backing away from a project that faced opposition from lawmakers who questioned its purpose and cost, current and former U.S. officials said.

• Will we ever see the Senate’s 6,000 page report on CIA torture without someone leaking it? A leak always been the most likely resolution for the transparency-seeking public, but, in this case, it’s increasingly looking like the only one.

• The document is known as the “Panetta Review,” and senators contend it backs up damning conclusions in their still-classified report on the CIA’s post-9/11 enhanced interrogation program. Senate investigators uncovered the internal CIA document in their years-long probe, and the agency was so concerned that it alleged the investigators had broken the law in obtaining the review. CIA agents, in turn, searched Senate computers.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a new brief in response to a government opposition against a summary judgment motion.

• Not satisfied with a Bay Area judge’s ruling that allowed the government to withhold a series of documents about its telephone surveillance program, the Obama administration filed an appeal Monday over the one document that the judge ordered disclosed.

• Not only did this explanation finally clarify what had previously been to me a very confusing idea, it also confirmed what I had already come to suspect: namely, that high-ranking officials from the NSA possess a paternalistic and condescending attitude toward the American people. The fundamental premise of Hayden’s argument is that the American people are like children, who must not only be protected from external threats, but also from themselves.

• Private companies should not use the law of talion, taking revenge over the entities, which are suspected to be hacking them, warned Joel Brenner, a former senior counsel at the NSA and and head of US counterintelligence under the Director of National Intelligence.

• National Journal raises an interesting question about the presumed candidacy of Hillary Clinton: Where does she fall on NSA spying and the mass surveillance state?

• On 6 June 2013 the Guardian and Washington Post published the first in the latest round of revelations about the NSA’s surveillance programs. Amidst the outpouring of brave rhetoric about the need to change, I predicted that nothing would happen. Rather, our passivity would encourage the leaders of the national security state (aka the Deep State). After 17 months it’s clear I was right

Civil Rights

• …U.S. economic and military policies have made huge impacts in Central America.

• Boynton Beach police arrested their own Stephen Maiorino Thursday for allegedly raping a woman earlier this month. Police said he held a gun while he assaulted the 20-year-old victim and threated to kill her family if she told anyone. He will be fired, the department said.

• Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst-turned-antiwar activist, shared details with RT on Friday about an incident the night before in New York City during which he was arrested for trying to enter a public event.

• McGovern, 75, says he had ticket to see former CIA director David Petraeus speak Thursday night at the 92nd Street Y, a “world-class cultural and community center,” according to its website, but was arrested before he could get inside.

• A dozen of Nobel Peace Prize laureates have urged US President Barack Obama to declassify information on tortures applied by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in interrogations of suspected terrorists.

• The torture techniques were devised by the CIA in collaboration with intelligence officers from the Egyptian and Saudi regimes, according to the report.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• As we’ve pointed out in the past, the wireless providers, led by lobbying group CTIA, are desperate not to have the FCC include wireless broadband in whatever new net neutrality/open internet rules it releases. However, Tom Wheeler has been hinting that he’s had enough of wireless providers screwing over the American public. The head of CTIA, Meredith Attwell Baker (famous for jumping from an FCC commissioner job to head Comcast lobbyist just months after she approved Comcast’s merger with NBC Universal), has written an absolutely hilarious opinion piece at Wireless Week insisting that everyone loves their wireless providers, so there’s no need whatsoever to apply any net neutrality rules.

• [I am posting below a short essay by my friend and colleague Brett Frischmann of Cardozo Law School concerning the “net neutrality” rules now being considered by the FCC. I’ve stayed largely away from the whole net neutrality debate over the years — too much inside [FCC] baseball for my taste — but Brett’s been in the middle of it for some time, and I think he draws attention below to a simple, but very profound, problem at the heart of the approach the agency is taking: the distinction it is drawing between “edge providers” (suppliers of content) and “end users” (recipients of content). One can hardly imagine a more inappropriate distinction one could draw on the Internet that we now have, so much of whose power has come from its “end-to-end” design: all senders are recipients, all recipients are senders, and all IP addresses are equal. But I’ll let Brett fill in more of the details./DGP]

• THE NET NEUTRALITY DEBATE looks set to be settled soon with a neither-fish-nor-flesh solution designed to appease everyone and please no one.

• According to sources close to Tim Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and chief architect of the deal that no one wants except the cable industry, the Shill in Chief is expected to announce that the FCC will take on greater responsibility for broadband management.

• Public advocacy groups said they are making progress in talks with U.S. regulators to apply utility-style rules to ensure broadband providers treat Web traffic fairly.

• “The baseline of what we can expect has gone up,” Chris Riley, senior policy engineer with browser maker Mozilla, said in a blog post yesterday. Likely outcomes are that the Federal Communications Commission will use powers crafted last century for telephone companies to devise net neutrality rules, he said.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Activist and writer Peter Kofod argues that the trial of Swedish Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg represented a total failure on the part of the Danish police and legal system.

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