● 11.14.14

● Links 14/11/2014: GNOME 3.14.2, PulseAudio 6.0

Posted in News Roundup at 7:43 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The Linux desktop is one of the most important things about your Linux experience, aiding or supporting your workflow and tasks in many ways. We look at the top ten available for various distros right now to try and help you decide…

Server

• Amazon Web Services on Wednesday rolled out EC2 Container Service, which can manage containers at any scale.

Linux Format

• The time has flown by but it seems I’ve been in the hot FOSS seat for twelve months; more commonly known as one of your Earth years. It’s rare to talk directly about the magazine, but the good news is we’re still here and doing better than ever. We’re continuing to bring onboard new writers to expand our areas of expertise and we’re planning, what we hope you will find, fascinating new features and tutorials for the year ahead.

Kernel Space

• Last month during the Linux Foundation events in Düsseldorf, Germany was also a PulseAudio Mini Summit where the developers behind the once controversial Linux sound system had plotted some of their plans for the future.

• Besides Oracle, Facebook, and SUSE, another major company that’s been investing in the Btrfs next-generation Linux file-system has been Fujitsu. Btrfs already offers some compelling, ZFS-like features not found in other native Linux file-systems while more work is still happening.

• The founders previously worked on the KVM hypervisor project, including as part of Red Hat. “After spending a lot of time at Red Hat and contributing to Linux, we saw what’s going on with the cloud,” said co-founder and CEO Dor Laor. “Usually the deployment is one application per server, and it’s a waste to have a huge general purpose OS running on another OS. OSV is unique because it runs a single application atop a hypervisor and it’s much easier to use. We load the application transparently, and there’s a lot of performance optimization. In terms of internal manageability, we have a kernel runtime and application. That’s it.”

Graphics Stack

• We’re still likely about one year out before seeing any Skylake processors released from Intel, but their open-source Skylake graphics enablement continues to flow.

• A new NVIDIA Beta Linux driver has been released, and this is one of the biggest updates in a long time. It’s considered unstable, but if you’re having problems with the system or you want better performance, then you really need to try this one.

• One of the latest patch-sets proposed in the Wayland world is forming libweston, which would allow more of the Weston reference compositor code to be used by other Wayland compositors.

• Last week we reported on AMD’s plans for a complete user-space open-source HSA stack. Today they have finally delivered!

• The last remaining component,. the HSA run-time library was open-sourced this afternoon on GitHub. This HSA library goes with the AMD GPU LLVM back-end to form a complete user-space open-source driver stack for HSA applications using kernels written using OpenCL C99. This code goes along with AMD’s new “AMDKFD” kernel HSA driver that’s still in the process of being mainlined. The AMDKFD driver could potentially appear in the Linux 3.19 kernel but probably won’t be merged before Linux 3.20 if going through the DRM subsystem pull.

• Marek Olšák this week volleyed a controversial proposal to effectively knock off the EGL state tracker for Gallium3D drivers.

• For conservative users sticking to the Mesa 10.3.x stable series until Mesa 10.4 is christened in December, the 10.3.3 release is out. While there’s many fixes, an overwhelming majority of them are related to Freedreno, the reverse-engineered Qualcomm Adreno graphics driver.

• The R600g Gallium3D driver has new patches available — along with a needed kernel patch — for supporting OpenGL 4.0′s GL_ARB_draw_indirect extension.

Benchmarks

• As we’ve seen a lot of variation in results with different Intel processors when switching between the Intel P-State and CPUFreq scaling drivers and the different governors, here’s some tests when using a 16 thread (eight core + HT) Haswell-EP Xeon processor and testing the different CPU frequency scaling settings in Fedora 21.

• While the Intel X99 series motherboards are popular right now with the Intel Core i7 Haswell Extreme Edition CPUs, some of these motherboards are also compatible with the Haswell-based Xeon processors. The MSI X99S SLI PLUS does officially support a number of the Haswell-EP Xeon processors, including the E5-2687W v3 that’s a ten core processor plus Hyper Threading. In making for some interesting Linux results, MSI kindly sent over the Xeon E5-1680 v3 and E5-2687W v3 to test them with their X99S SLI PLUS motherboard under a variety of conditions with Linux.

• It’s been a while since last having any major news to report on the multi-queue block layer for the Linux kernel, but that blk-mq and more recent scsi-mq work is progressing well.

• If you’re curious whether the Linux 3.18 kernel will bring any performance improvements for users of the open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver, here’s some benchmarks compared to Linux 3.17.

• As a follow up to yesterday’s 16-way AMD GPU comparison with the latest open-source Linux graphics drivers, here’s some numbers with the same graphics cards when adding in the Catalyst Linux graphics driver… The numbers may very well surprise you.

• The latest massive set of Linux test data we have to share with Linux gamers and enthusiasts is a look at Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 when using the very newest open-source Radeon graphics driver code. The very latest open-source Radeon driver code tested with these popular Valve Linux games were the Linux 3.18 Git kernel, Mesa 10.4-devel, LLVM 3.6 SVN, and xf86-video-ati 7.5.99. With this bleeding edge code there were sixteen AMD Radeon graphics cards tested from low to high-end and spanning several generations. Beyond looking at the frame-rate results, there’s also power consumption, performance-per-Watt, GPU core temperature, and CPU usage to go along with all of these results.

Applications

Proprietary

• The development version of the Opera Internet browser has been updated yet again and the Linux users have something to look out for, especially if the like the Hangout app from Google.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Though we already knew about War Thunder’s Linux port back in June the release was still quite sudden and unexpected. So, let’s find out if it’s worth our time and how the F2P model works.

• Space Hulk Ascension Edition is a 3D turn-based strategy game for single-player based on the classic board game released in 1989. The game shipped on Steam yesterday, and provides great improvements over the classic version on which it is based.

• Sproggiwood was released for Linux recently, and we decided to give it a go to see how it performs, and to let you know if it’s worth you throwing your money at the screen for.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The metaphor of a floppy for Save is one of the most controversially discussed and challenged icons. There are haters who argue that many younger people never have seen a floppy (except at the Save icons). And there are lovers who favour the clear and unique depiction of the floppy.

• Sean Harmer of KDAB has provided a brief status update concerning the state of Qt3D 2.0 that gives hope that it will be officially released soon. Qt3D 2.0 overhauls the tool-kit’s support for 3D rendering and visualization.

• In Plasma we have our own solution for solving the HighDPI problem, as we were working with new code where we provide the styling, this is all fairly straightforward. However, this doesn’t work for applications which have a lot of existing code we need to bring this feature to.

• The upcoming Qt 5.4 release betters the support for HiDPI monitors — displays like the Retina MacBook Pro and others with high pixel densities — though Qt5 developers need to make some changes to their code to take advantage of these improvements.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Individual modules may get new stable 3.14 releases but our focus is now on the development branches, we released a first snapshot as 3.15.1 two weeks ago and will get another one by the end of the month.

• Fortunately, things went differently. The coverage was amazing. I didn’t expect that our very simple page generated so much traffic. It’s hard to come up with an exact timeline of events as everything happened quickly and, in fairness, a bit chaotically. It may have been OMGUbuntu or Reddit who have reported first on our fundraiser. Other sites, such as Phoronix or Hackernews followed quickly. I was told that the latter was exceptional, because it ranked very high for rather long time.

• GNOME 3.14.2 is the last planned official point release in the GNOME 3.14 series with new developments being focused on the GNOME 3.16 series that will be officially introduced in March.

• It’s not all sweet darkness. GNOME 3 is GTK3-centric, and since Firefox uses GTK2, it’s not dark.

Distributions

• Today in Linux news lifehacker.com posted a comparison of security distributions Tails, Kali, and Qubes. Elsewhere, Government Computer News has some tips for migrating to Open Source. Rob Zwetsloot looks at popular desktops and Michael Larabel reports that Ubuntu is phasing out 32-bit support.

New Releases

• Just like the 2.0 release of this operating system, the base is still Ubuntu 14.04, but the devs have made many improvements. In fact, all Linux Lite versions are only using LTS releases, which means that they show up occasionally. It also means that all releases made for this distro are actually very stable, even if the OS it’s still in the Beta stages.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• Paul Cormier, president of Products and Technologies and an executive vice president at Red Hat, details where the Linux leader is headed with containers.

Debian Family

• The details of this mess are murky, to say the least. On the mailing list, at least one developer apparently involved with the technical committee decision discounted Hess’ interpretation of events, saying that his interpretation didn’t reflect his actual intent. There’s a lot of back-and-forth on the mailing list and in many other venues, and it’s hard to figure out what’s really going on.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Besides figuring out what to do about 32-bit Ubuntu, another session of interest today during the online/virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit was trying to decide what to do about Adobe Flash support on the Ubuntu desktop. There’s three years before Adobe plans to end-of-life their support of Flash on Linux.

• Canonical isn’t yet prepared to drop 32-bit Ubuntu ISOs outright, but over time — and particularly at or just after Ubuntu 16.04 — they will work to demphasize the existence of the 32-bit releases and work to push more users to 64-bit Ubuntu as a main focus.

• Canonical is very close to finishing the Ubuntu Touch operating system and to making it shippable for phones, but it looks like they have much bigger plans than that. They are going to announce a new development partnership with a major telecommunication company.

• Besides finally moving onto BlueZ 5, developers during the first day of Ubuntu 15.04′s online summit also discussed the improvements still needed to be done for the “File Manager” application used by the Ubuntu Phone/Touch stack and eventually by the desktop Ubuntu under Unity 8.

Devices/Embedded

• The Gizmo Explorer Kit has been available for a while now as an open-source, mini x86 development board to compete with the many ARM development boards available to consumers and developers. The Gizmo 2 has now been announced as the second-generation development board. Like the original Gizmo, the Gizmo 2 is powered by an AMD SoC with Radeon graphics.

• Variscite announced a reduced-sized, Linux friendly COM based on Freescale’s i.MX6, featuring extensive I/O including HDMI, GbE, WiFi, Bluetooth, and more.

Phones

Android

• So far it looks as though the version 5.0 update will be pushed out over the air to Nexus 4, 5 and 7 owners, while firmware downloads are now up on Google.com. However, a change log on the Motorola website indicates the second-generation Moto G handsets will also get the upgrade, and if so then the Moto X should be getting it, too.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source code drives collaborative innovation from a larger pool of developers at a lower cost, which is why federal agencies are adopting the “open source first” model. In fact Sonny Hashmi, CIO of the General Services Administration, recently announced that implementing open source software is among his top priorities this year.

• So what’s the best way to increase your agency’s adoption of open source software and keep it secure?

• Apache Spark, the open source platform for in-memory, cluster-based big data processing, has taken another step toward readiness for prime time with the announcement of a new certification program from Databricks that focuses on Spark systems integrators.

• Making GlobalSight open source in 2009 was a business decision by Welocalize, as it allowed users and clients the most options to support and create solutions that work best for them. As it turned out, clients liked the decision and Welocalize embraced the open source model as a business strategy. The GlobalSight community has been active since then and is a vibrant, active group of users, developers, and translation professionals. Users like GlobalSight because it is a fully featured TMS system, which is core to supporting localization and translation programs in large enterprises.

• Matt Asay has quietly been appointed Adobe’s vice president of mobile for the firm’s digital marketing business, The Reg has learned. He left his post as vice president of community at NoSQL database MongoDB on 31 October.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• A “State of Blink” presentation was shared during the conference and the short story is that this engine, which is used by Google’s Chrome/Chromium among other open-source web projects, is doing great.

Mozilla

• The collaboration will ensure that the Firefox browser will get more privacy features, while the Tor Project will benefit from Mozilla’s developers. The Tor browser is based on Mozilla technology.

• It’s with great pleasure that I can announce that, thanks to Mozilla’s Jan de Mooij, the new ES6 generator functions are twenty-two times faster in Firefox!

SaaS/Big Data

• ownCloud uses its own server-to-server sharing capability to bypass all the Web interfaces that trip up seamless file sharing across silos.

• Anybody who says there’s nothing new under the sun–or clouds–ought to read this story.

• Cloud storage and collaboration service provider ownCloud (yes, with a lower-case “o”) has found a way to sync up files from all over the place–from the cloud, to enterprise silos, to personal connected storage devices, to other disparate places–and make them easily available and sharable using its own cloud (hence, ownCloud) common file access layer.

Databases

• Amazon fired a volley at Oracle and other relational database vendors on Wednesday, with the launch of a new, cloud-hosted database service that it says can deliver better performance than on-premises installations at a fraction of the cost.

• Amazon Web Services senior VP Andy Jassy unveiled the new service, dubbed Amazon Aurora, during the opening keynote of the annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, arguing that traditional database software isn’t serving customers’ needs in a cloud-centric world.

• Looks like the long-popular, open-source MySQL database, which runs inside so many IT systems now that there isn’t a good way to know exactly how many instances are out there, has a viable new competitor.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Which brings us to a very relevant point. The Gnu/Linux and Free Software Foundation people (we mean the real guys, the ‘amateur’ programmers, artists, writers, engineers — many of whom do not get paid for their ‘real work’ (“I’m a programmer, really. Acting in major motion pictures is just my day job”) — not the ‘Official Value-added Linux Distributors’ who package and dispense the product to supplement their substantial offerings of NSA-quality and price-tag corporate ‘offerings’) are totally responsible for Leaving da Camera On — though we’ll accept the blame; happy to take a bullet for GNU/FSF any time. The crude — but vehemently sincere — multi-media shtick we’ll be offering you — Hey all you people out there on Internet Land! Hi Mom! — would have cost thousands of dollars — per machine — had we been forced to knuckle under to MacWindows shake-down-ware. Which is and would have been impossible — in every sense of the term. And way beyond our humble dissents’ budget. A lot or GNU/Linux ‘day-to-day-routine’ processes are deliberately blocked, as anyone who’s been duped by the iPadphonepoddronelauncher PR hustle and ‘copyright law’ strong-arming via their congressional attorneys has experienced; which is why all of Free Media Offerings (FMCs) within these quercks and decs are ‘conceptually correct,’ the ‘production values’ would have been considered cheap and cheesy by Ed Wood.

Project Releases

• The Git 2.2.0 release candidate 1 is now available as this latest big update to Git stabilizes.

• QEMU 2.2 is near with a plan to release at the beginning of December while QEMU 2.2.0 RC1 was released yesterday.

Public Services/Government

• As a system administrator for the Government of Nepal in Kathmandu, Sandeep Aryal says it will be a formidable challenge to convince his employer to adopt Linux and open source software. But he believes the training he receives through his Linux Foundation scholarship will help him better make his case, he says.

Openness/Sharing

• Our planet is currently inhabited by 7 billion people. And we believe open source holds a key to building better hardware, methods, and systems to help us grow, harvest, and share food with each other. Right where we live, and on a greater scale, with our global neighbors. Out of the sharing economy and the labors of love of open source communities have come innovative ideas that we need today and will need into the future.

Programming

• The latest Linux benchmarks to share of our two new Intel “Haswell-EP” Xeons are some compiler optimization performance tests with the Intel Xeon E5-1680 v3 running with Fedora 21.

• Just in time for posing more competition to LLVM’s compiler infrastructure, the GNU Compiler Collection now has JIT support.

• GCC 5 seems to be getting more exciting by the day! The latest feature being piled onto GCC 5 for release next year is OpenMP 4.0 offloading support to target Intel MIC platforms.

• Facebook today announced the Hack Transpiler as a tool to encourage the growth of their Hack programming language by allowing Hack code-bases to be converted back into legitimate PHP5 for use on platforms where Facebook’s HHVM isn’t available.

• Google’s Go programming language is five years old and now they’ve found it time to abandon Mercurial as their revision control system in favor of Git and moving to GitHub.

Standards/Consortia

• I am sure in open source it is rare to find people who are not aware of Lohit fonts [1] or not used it over the years. It is default fonts for number of Indian language in Most of the open source distribution including Fedora, Debian. It was used in early version of Android for Indian languages. It is used in Wikipedia as a Web fonts. Recently Unicode started using it for building Tamil code charts.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• The insects died en masse just weeks after genetically modified corn was planted in Ontario and beekeepers suspect pesticides are the cause

• Healthcare for millions of Americans is at stake in the latest Affordable Care Act challenge to reach the U.S. Supreme Court — and if the Court sides with the challengers, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and other Koch-funded groups will have laid the groundwork for the healthcare law’s destruction.

Security

• The Coverity Scan service analyzed several hundreds of millions of lines of code from more than 1,500 open source projects – including C/C++ projects such as NetBSD, FreeBSD, LibreOffice and Linux, and Java projects such as Apache Hadoop, HBase and Cassandra.

• If you’re interested in security, you’ve probably already heard of security-focused Linux distros like Tails, Kali, and Qubes. They’re really useful for browsing anonymously, penetration testing, and tightening down your system so it’s secure from would-be hackers. Here are the strengths and weaknesses of all three.

• It seems like every other day we hear about another hack, browser exploit, or nasty bit of malware. If you do a lot of your browsing on public Wi-Fi networks, you’re a lot more susceptible to these types of hacks. A security-focused distribution of Linux can help. For most of us, the use cases here are pretty simple.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Ellen Barfield and Marilyn Carlisle talk to the Real News about why they committed civil disobedience opposing drone strikes at the NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland

• On a bright fall day last year off the coast of Southern California, an Air Force B-1 bomber launched an experimental missile that may herald the future of warfare.

• Initially, pilots aboard the plane directed the missile, but halfway to its destination, it severed communication with its operators. Alone, without human oversight, the missile decided which of three ships to attack, dropping to just above the sea surface and striking a 260-foot unmanned freighter.

• For a while it seemed that the drones project had been restrained following a flood of public criticism last year. Reports from United Nations Special Rapporteurs, and mainstream NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International clearly documented violations of International Humanitarian and Human Rights Law by Drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, countries the US is not at war with. US attempts to justify the strikes were clearly inadequate but strikes dwindled so the discussion around Drones lost it’s allure. I warned last fall that this is was just a superficial misdirection while all the corporate and pentagon initiatives remained on track [1][2]. Today the drones are back in force and legality seems a forgotten issue.

• Every time the US goes and pummels another Muslim country — by sending drones to conduct ‘signature strikes’ or using the NSA to eavesdrop — it reinforces the terrorists’ claim that the West has an insatiable desire to dominate the Arab and Islamic world and has no respect for Muslim life

• In the years since Bin Laden declared war on the West, we’ve learned how to kill his followers, but not how to defeat his ideology.

• A Yemeni family was paid $100,000 for the death of relatives in a U.S. drone strike in 2012, according to a remarkable story yesterday from Yahoo News. Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a 56-year-old who works at Yemen’s environmental agency, has been on a mission to find out why his innocent nephew and brother-in-law were killed in a strike that also took out three suspected militants. He made it to Washington D.C. last fall, he told journalist Michael Isikoff, where he met with two White House national security aides. They listened, but said little in response.

• None of them have been identified.

• Three U.S. Navy sailors were assaulted and had bags placed over their heads during a stop in Istanbul, Turkey, according to U.S. military officials.

• The incident, captured on video, happened Wednesday when sailors from the USS Ross were attacked by members of the Turkish Youth Union, according to local Turkish press accounts.

• A statement posted on the Turkish Youth Union website said the bags were placed on the sailors’ heads to protest American “imperialism” in the Middle East and other areas.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Republican congressional leaders on Wednesday wasted no time in criticizing what they called President Barack Obama’s “one-sided” climate deal with China, using the announcement to declare war on the administration’s plan to use executive actions to combat carbon emissions.

Finance

• Electronic payment evangelists say largely cash-free economy has cut costs and reduced crime rate

• A new working paper by London School of Economics professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman sheds some very unflattering light on the American wealth gap, which has reached levels unseen since the Roaring ‘20s. The wealth gap has been overtaking the income gap as a popular cultural topic since Thomas Piketty’s splashy Capital in the 21st Century, and Saez and Zucman’s work fills in some crucial blanks to flesh out Piketty’s contentions. Saez and Zucman conclude that the top .1% of America now controls 22% of the aggregate wealth – an especially troubling figure when examined in the context of America’s stubbornly conservative political landscape.

• So the evidence is Obama making a comment on 60 Minutes and apparently blaming Wall Street for the economic collapse. But while financiers would no doubt rather be referred to as “entrepreneur/philanthropists” than as “fat cat bankers”–a phrase that did not become a regular part of Obama’s vocabulary–there is little doubt that Wall Street does in fact deserve a major share of blame for the financial meltdown. It’s peculiar to classify a commonplace observations about the world as “hot rhetoric.”

• And there’s the fact that Obama made a joke about Goldman Sachs’ profitability–at a dinner where presidents make jokes!–right after the company just paid out a massive settlement for the kind of behavior that helped fuel the economic collapse.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• No, the New York Times isn’t for sale to these guys, but both men long to influence the dialogue over Israel in this country.

• The answer is so simple: Blame the people!

Censorship

• In Britain, if you have extreme views on anything from Western democracy to women’s role in public life, you might soon require a licence from the government before you can speak in public. Seriously.

• Seven years after the Kuwaiti psychologist and entrepreneur first launched his comic book series based on the 99 attributes of Allah, he’s facing a sudden onslaught of death threats, fatwas and lawsuits. His US distributor, meanwhile, continues to sit on a TV deal, in part because of pressure from conservative bloggers who object to any positive description of Islam.

Privacy

• Standard & Poor’s issues BB- score, saying social network is growing strongly but spending heavily at the same time

• A university student was furious when she found her Facebook profile pictures had been stolen and used to advertise a ‘no-strings attached’ casual sex website.

• Three pictures of Grace Marr, an English language student at Aston University, Birmingham, were used alongside a promotion offering ‘hot horny singles in your local area’.

• Embarrassingly, she only found out they were being used when she was contacted by a friend of her mother, who told her he had seen the advert while surfing the Internet last month.

• Entrepreneurs are often time and money poor, yet engage in a daily habit that diminishes both: Facebook.

• With over 750 million active accounts, an astounding one in nine people in the world log on to Facebook, arguably the most addictive social media site. Studies reveal that Facebook makes us spend more, work less and generally, discourages us. In this, has Facebook become a liability for budding entrepreneurs?

• The major post-Edward Snowden legislation meant to constrain the National Security Agency received a new lease on life Wednesday when the Senate majority leader paved the way for the USA Freedom Act to receive a vote before the congressional session expires.

• Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who will cease being majority leader when his party returns to the minority in January, filed a procedural motion that will permit the bill to receive a hearing on the Senate floor, perhaps as early as next week. Its supporters have feared that Senate inaction would quietly kill the only post-9/11 attempt at curtailing mass surveillance.

• Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Wednesday moved to advance a bill that would usher in sweeping reforms to the government’s most controversial domestic-spying program, more than a year after Edward Snowden’s leaks exposed it publicly.

• “The legal reforms in the USA Freedom Act send a clear signal to U.S. citizens and Internet users around the world that Congress is serious about reforming government surveillance practices, and providing the judiciary and the public with tools that allow better oversight over remaining narrowed programs,” CCIA President and CEO Ed Black said by email. “The USA Freedom Act closes key loopholes on bulk call data collection and offers greater transparency, which is essential for citizens in a free democracy.”

• Former NSA technical director Brian Snow discusses the ethical issues around the use of mass surveillance and tells Sophie Curtis why citizens should be careful what they wish for

• The complexity of the National Security Agency’s spying programs has made some of its ex-technical experts the most dangerous critics since they are among the few who understand the potential totalitarian risks involved, as ex-NSA analyst William Binney showed in an interview with journalist Lars Schall.

• The U.S. government should give European citizens whose personal data is sent to U.S. authorities the same privacy protections that American citizens already enjoy in the EU, Google’s top lawyer has said ahead of trans-Atlantic talks.

• Republicans are set to take over the Senate next year, but the chamber is gearing up to make the lame duck session eventful: lawmakers will vote on the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline bill next week, as well as another to curb domestic surveillance.

• Margo Schlanger has written a great article forthcoming in the Harvard National Security Journal about intelligence legalism, an ethical framework she sees underlying NSA surveillance. Margo makes the case that NSA and the executive branch haven’t been asking what the right surveillance practices should be, but rather what surveillance practices are allowed to be. She takes the concept of legalism from political theorist Judith Shklar: “the ethical attitude that holds moral conduct to be a matter of rule following, and moral relationships to consist of duties and rights determined by rules.” In the model of legalism that Margo sees the NSA following, any spying that is not legally prohibited is also right and good because ethics is synonymous with following the rules. Her critique of “intelligence legalism” is that the rules are the bare minimum, and merely following the rules doesn’t take civil liberties concerns seriously enough.

• Ex-NSA hackers and their corporate clients are stretching legal boundaries and shaping the future of cyberwar.

• Dangerous cybersecurity legislation would allow Google and Facebook to hand over even more of your information to the NSA and FBI

• A bill that would set the stage for turning off the water at the NSA datacenter facility in Bluffdale, Utah will get a public hearing this month, and your action can help move the legislation forward.

• Rep. Marc Roberts introduced the Utah Fourth Amendment Protection Act (HB0161) during the 2014 legislative session. The bill would ban the state and its political subdivisions from providing material support or resources to federal agencies engaged in mass warrantless surveillance programs. This would include the up to 1.7 million gallons of water per day being supplied to the datacenter by the city of Bluffdale.

• Before May, Congress has no alternative but to endorse or end NSA spying on the phone calls of virtually every American. What does the new party in charge want?

• Right now, there is a viable, bipartisan bill called the USA Freedom Act that would limit government spying on Americans and has received support from members of both parties, the tech industry, and the Obama Administration. Yet, there are few remaining legislative days left to allow a vote on the bill so that it can become law. Failure to move the bill in the lame duck session will leave some tough questions for the new Senate to deal with in 2015.

• Glenn Greenwald, a journalist famous for breaking the story of Edward Snowden’s leak of confidential information from the National Security Agency’s surveillance of American citizens, will be speaking at the U about topics concerning security and privacy.

• Matthew Potolsky, an English professor at the U, is teaching a course on secrecy Spring Semester, and Greenwald was selected to coincide with the class. Potolsky said he was also intrigued at the thought of Greenwald coming to Utah because of the NSA’s new data facility in Bluffdale.

• Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the outgoing chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has announced details of his plan to become a talk-radio host.

• Rogers, who didn’t run for re-election, will launch a thrice-daily radio segment on Cumulus media’s national radio network.

• A new report has been released that requests for information on Facebook from federal spy agencies is up by 24 percent.

• The uncensored contents of a letter sent from the FBI to Martin Luther King in which he is called an “evil, abnormal beast” and apparently encouraged to kill himself have been made public for the first time.

• In what appears to be a heavy-handed attempt to unsettle the civil rights leader, the anonymous letter was written by a deputy of the bureau’s director J Edgar Hoover, posing as a disappointed activist, and sent to King in the weeks before he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

• Isis, Ebola and NSA reform all make the list – but most important will be nominees the White House wants approved before Republicans take the Senate

• Germany and Brazil have made alterations to a United Nations draft resolution on the issue of state surveillance, with the two countries calling for protection against government spying on communications and personal data.

• Germany and Brazil are pushing the United Nations to be tougher on spying by beefing up an earlier UN resolution raising concerns that mass surveillance, interception of digital communications and personal data collection could harm human rights.

• Quantum computing has many benefits, but it could also undermine the cryptographic algorithms that underpin the World Wide Web, according to a former NSA technical director

• The report shows that between 2011 to 2014, there have been at least 7,255 breaches. This is the equivalent to 6 breaches every day. Examples of the data breaches include:

• Non-profit IT consortium OASIS is developing a server-based biometric authentication standard. Industry professionals, government officials, and academics have been invited to help develop the standard as part of the Identity-Based Attestation and Open Exchange Protocol Specification – or IBOPS – Technical Committee.

• In the nearly 18 months since the first Snowden revelations, policymakers around the world have spent countless hours discussing the proper scope and reach of surveillance authorities. The United States has been at the center of these discussions, and for good cause. Many of the revelations have focused on U.S. activities and the U.S. maintains the largest budget for surveillance in the world many times over. However, frighteningly little has been said in these discussions about surveillance of people outside of America.

• The European Court of Justice (ECJ) could be tempted to invalidate “Safe Harbour” agreements on data retention between the United States and the European Union because of the PRISM spying scandal, writes Yann Padova.

• The United States should recognize the right to privacy of other countries and stop its practice of spying on the communications of friendly nations, Human Rights Watch’s general counsel Dinah Pokempner said Thursday.

• If we film everyone, all the time, that’s not merely a threat to trust in our society – it’s the end of it

• Within hours of Robert Hannigan becoming the new director of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) spy centre last week, he demanded it be allotted even more draconian powers.

• Over the last year the extent of NSA and GCHQ monitoring of communications has come under increasing scrutiny and informed privacy policy in Europe.

• A new survey saying an overwhelming majority of U.S. adults believe they have lost control over how private companies collect their personal information may be an opportunity in disguise for Web-based companies, some privacy experts said.

• You can’t throw a rock these days without hitting a surveillance art project, and the remarkable thing is that so much of it is so good. Some of the Snowden era’s sharpest interrogations of collect-it-all tracking by corporations and the government are to be found in galleries and other art spaces. They are the opposite of the acronym-laden news stories we read: NSA, FISA, PGP, PRISM, ACLU, EFF, SIGINT, GCHQ, TOR, FOIA, HTTPS, are you still awake? They are playful, invasive and eerie, and best of all they are graphically visual. With a transgressive edge that journalism struggles to match, they creatively challenge what it means to be human in a time of data.

• If we didn’t have all these expensive high-tech capabilities, we might spend a lot more time thinking about how to discredit and delegitimize the terrorists’ message

• [...]

• To be clear: I’m not suggesting we dismantle the NSA, fire all our cryptographers, and revert to Cordell Hull’s quaint belief that “gentlemen [or ladies] do not read each other’s mail.” But until we see more convincing evidence that the surveillance of the sort Hannigan was defending has really and truly kept a significant number of people safer from foreign dangers, I’m going to wonder if we aren’t overemphasizing these activities because they are relatively easy for us, and because they have a powerful but hard-to-monitor constituency in Washington and London. In short, we’re just doing what comes naturally, instead of doing what might be more effective.

• The Pew Internet Project has updated its must-read 2013 work on privacy perception in the post-Snowden era with a survey of American attitudes to privacy and surveillance that shows that the number of Americans who worry about privacy is steeply rising.

• A year and a half after Snowden’s initial NSA revelations, internet privacy has become one of the most widely discussed topics in media and technology. But there is little evidence that snooping habits have diminished. Even apps that emerged to ensure consumer anonymity, such as Snapchat and Whisper, have been under investigation for breeching their own privacy specs. But how much has changed in the mindset of consumers, and are we genuinely concerned about privacy?

• Nine in 10 Americans believe they have no control over their personal information, how it is collected and how it is used by companies, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

• A Pew Research study examined how Americans view the privacy of their personal information in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about online government snooping.

• The Senate is poised to vote as early as next week on the USA Freedom Act, legislation that would end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of records about Americans’ phone calls.

• The influx of immigrants to the UK, with different languages and their own communities, are an obstacle for British police combating terrorism, the country’s most senior police chief said.

• Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said officers working in local communities aiming to combat radicalization often found it “more difficult to integrate with new populations.”

• This especially applies to multicultural London, where a disproportionately high number of migrants from overseas arrive each year.

• A few months after President Obama took office in 2009, he announced that securing the nation’s critical infrastructure — its power generators, its dams, its airports, and its trading floors — was a top priority for his administration. Intruders had already probed the electrical grid, and Obama made it clear the status quo around unsecured systems was unacceptable. A year later, however, a sophisticated digital weapon was discovered on computers in Iran that was designed to attack a uranium enrichment plant near the town of Natanz. The virus, dubbed Stuxnet, would eventually be identified by journalists and security experts as a U.S.-engineered attack.

• Germany is to develop a new cyber security “early-warning” system to detect impending foreign-based internet attacks before they are launched.

• The move reflects growing concern about possible cyber attacks being launched on German targets from a range of potential sources, including Islamist extremists, crime gangs, and state-backed hackers in Russia and China.

• Germany’s spooks have come under fire for reportedly seeking funds to find bugs – not to fix them, but to hoard them.

• According to The Süddeutsche Zeitung, the country’s BND – its federal intelligence service – wants €300 million in funding for what it calls the Strategic Technical Initiative. The Local says €4.5 million of that will be spent seeking bugs in SSL and HTTPS.

Civil Rights

• U.S. Sen. Mark Udall has seven weeks left in office, but the Colorado Democrat isn’t prepared to go quietly — especially when it comes to the twin issues of CIA torture and government snooping.

• In his first interview since Election Day, Udall told The Denver Post that he would “keep all options on the table,” including a rarely-used right given to federal lawmakers, to publicize a secret report about the harsh interrogation techniques used by CIA agents in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

• He also vowed to make one final push to curb the National Security Agency and its power to gather information on ordinary Americans.

• The U.S. made its most formal admission of torture yet to a United Nations panel in Geneva, telling the international community that “we crossed the line.”

• The Obama administration has prevailed in the first court challenge to its controversial force-feedings of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, even as the judge ruling in the government’s favor criticized its lack of “common sense and compassion”.

• Gladys Kessler, a federal judge in Washington DC, denied Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s request to significantly change the manner in which the US military transfers, restrains and forcibly feeds detainees on hunger strike to protest their confinement. Kessler’s ruling, siding with the government in nearly every particular, is the denouement of a courtroom drama that in May saw a civilian judge ordering the military to briefly halt Dhiab’s forced feeding.

• In a shocking, enraging report released Wednesday by the New Orleans Office of Inspector General, the city’s special victims unit appears to have failed to investigate 1,111 sexual abuse reports over a three-year period – including those involving young children.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Columbia Pictures has asked a Florida federal court to keep its anti-piracy policies secret forever. The records in question are part of the now closed case between Hotfile and the MPAA. Previously, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams ruled that the information should be unsealed in the public’s interest.

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