● 11.28.14

● Links 28/11/2014: Debian Fork, Fedora 21 RC, Git 2.2.0

Posted in News Roundup at 9:56 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• So great: Feminist Hacker Barbie, a viral response to the total sexist disaster that was the Barbie “computer engineer” book. Follow the hashtag.

• Well, the site would be just about perfect if they recommended Debian GNU/Linux but they recommend Ubuntu GNU/Linux. I think a site emphasizing freedom should mention that Debian gives the users more control of everything than Ubuntu. Debian has a few defaults I don’t like but at least I have the option of changing them at installation. Good luck doing that with Ubuntu’s installer. You may get one or two options Debian doesn’t have but you don’t get to choose desktops at all. It’s disUnity or nothing. Ubuntu hides choices from the newbie just like M$. Of course, newbies may not know much about desktop choices but an installer could give some hints.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds announced Linux 3.17, the Shuffling Zombie Juror, saying, “The past week was fairly calm, and so I have no qualms about releasing 3.17 on the normal schedule”. The latest kernel includes a number of nice headline features, such as the new getrandom() system call and sealed files APIs that we covered in previous issues of LU&D. Linux 3.17 also includes support for less highlighted new features, such as new signature checking of kexec()’d kernel images and sparse files on Samba file systems (which is significant for those mounting Windows and Mac shares).

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA has out a wonderful Thanksgiving surprise… New Mesa code for Tegra K1 GPUs and newer!

• The tag in the git repository for Mesa 10.4.0-rc3 is ‘mesa-10.4.0-rc3′.

• There hasn’t been much in the way of exciting Wayland/Weston developments to report on this month, but its development is continuing in its usual manner. Out today is another version of the Weston IVI Shell as it still works to being accepted upstream.

Applications

• Where is M13? is a planetarium application that allows users to view details about distant objects in the sky, covering a very large number of items ranging from stars to other galaxies. There are not many apps that can do this, so most of the shortcomings could be forgotten.

• A multi-platform software with a minimalist aesthetic, Trelby is clean enough to help you focus on the task at hand but still packs a surprising amount of tools and options into its interface, with auto- editing and formatting features alongside a character name database, reports, charts and more.

• I updated the xfdashboard package this morning to version 0.3.4. The big arrival with this update is that there are multiple themes that can be installed.

• Tomahawk is a new type of music player that aims to change the way we think about this kind of applications. It’s not very different from the rest, but some of the features it sports are unique. We’ll take a closer look to see if it’s really all that revolutionary.

Instructionals/Technical

• You can interface a Raspberry Pi with Arduino components – now learn how to program them from the Pi and control robots like the Makeblock

Wine or Emulation

Games

• The Steam for Linux platform hasn’t been called a success just yet, but it just passed the 800 games milestone and there is no sign that it’s slowing down. With a little luck, 2015 will start with 1000 games in the library.

• Thanks to Aspyr Media we now have Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions day 1 on Linux, and the reviews are good.

• Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, a new RPG developed and published by Portalarium on Steam, has also landed on the Linux platform.

• It’s that time of year again to hold onto your wallets before they get sucked into your computers. The Steam sales have arrived.

• You can already find some pretty good deals, so here are my choice picks for you below, you better hurry though as the deals won’t last forever!

• The Linux version of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition is now available DRM free from GOG, so if you missed it on Steam here’s a new chance to get the classic.

• Aspyr Media, a company that has ported a number of titles on the Linux platform for 2K Games, has opened its own store for the open source operating system.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I am happy to announce that Qt 5.4 Release Candidate is now available.

• KWayland was introduced last month with the KDE Plasma 5.1 release but it lacked the server-side code. With the upcoming release of Plasma 5.2, that will change with the server component to KWayland having been merged.

• This is my first SoK and hence I am equally excited and motivated to make a niche for myself with my work. The task allotted to me was to finish test.kubuntu.co.uk . My task was to use a WordPress theme and finish the site but I am not a big fan of WordPress themes. So I decided to make my own theme and thankfully my mentor , Jonathan Riddell was on the same page with me. Thus began the first lap , thinking and coming up with a new design.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• For those doing much development in GTK+, the GtkInspector integrated debugger continues making much progress and will offer a wealth of more development and debug capabilities with GNOME 3.16.

• GtkInspector officially premiered in GNOME 3.14 while Matthias Clasen of Red Hat and other GNOME developers continue making this interactive debugger even better for the GNOME 3.16 release due out in March.

• GNOME 3.15.2 incorporates GTK+ Inspector improvements, more GTK+ OpenGL support (including GTK+ OpenGL support for the Mir back-end), support for Epiphany to open web page sources in the default text editor, improved thumbnail handling for the GNOME Desktop, updated themes, numerous improvements to GNOME Boxes, various enhancements to GNOME Maps, many bug fixes, and the usual assortment of translation updates.

• The GNOME Shell 3.15.2 release fixes some visual glitching, improves the layout of the extension installation dialog, supports the CSS margin property, and offers other bug fixes and minor enhancements. Most notable to GNOME Shell 3.15.2 though is there’s finally Python 3 support.

Distributions

• Today in Linux news, Swapnil Bhartiya features five distributions you might like. OMG!Ubuntu! found eleven utilities to beef up your Ubuntu experience and Steam now has over 800 Linux games. Larry Cafiero says he’s “a 32-bit guy in a 64-bit world” and Docker users are urged to upgrade due to new found vulnerability.

• Q4OS is a Linux distribution built to offer a similar experience to Windows XP. It’s been around for a long time and now the developers have released yet another update for the operating system.

New Releases

• Clonezilla Live is a Linux distribution based on DRBL, Partclone, and udpcast that lets users perform bare metal backup and recovery with ease. The developers have just upgraded the system and it’s now at version 2.3.1-15.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• It’s been a great run, but all good things must end. Or at least, upgrade to a greater thing.

• Since Mageia 3 was released in May 2013 our packaging and security teams have provided hundreds of updates (actually 1136 source packages in the Core repository, that accounts for almost 9000 binary packages), all of them tested and validated by our QA team.

Red Hat Family

• ClearOS Community 6.6.0 Beta 2 has been released! Along with the usual round of bug fixes and enhancements, the 6.6.0 Beta 2 release introduces WPAD, QoS, YouTube School ID support, and an upgrade to the Intrusion Detection engine. Some of the server-based apps introduced in beta 1 have been added to the ClearOS 7 roadmap. The PHP/MySQL/Web Server stack is more modern in ClearOS 7 and these server-based apps will run better on the new platform.

• I’m running windows 2012 hyper-v on the server, and it’s only since I’ve been running this that I’ve been getting the error. When I was using CentOS/KVM everything was ok. It could just be coincidence but I’m going to try an experiment. I’ve moving back to CentOS/KVM to see if it makes any difference. Perhaps MS is just over working the server and CentOS doesn’t? If it makes no difference that’s fine, it’s just an experiment and seeing as I backup my servers, converting from vhdx to qcow2 isn’t going to be much of a problem.

• Any one else had similar issues? Can it be that MS does cause the system to work harder than CentOS?

• I’ve seen a number of people ask things like: “Foo is in EPEL-6, why isn’t it in EPEL-7?” so I thought I would share a detailed answer:

Fedora

• The votes are in! Two seats were open on the newly formed Fedora Council, and we had five candidates to fill them. The new Fedora Council members are Rex Dieter and Langdon White.

• Matthew Miller sent out the election results quickly after the election ended on 26 November at 00:00 UTC.

• The election was held from 18 November to 26 November, and 192 Fedora contributors voted. (The June 2013 Fedora Board election had 157 voters, and the December 2012 election had 202 voters.)

• Over one week ago, I attended FAD Phnom Penh 2014 in Cambodia. This Fedora Activitiy Day event was for APAC ambassadors to discuss budget planning, event planning, swag production and so on. Below is my full report of the two-day event.

• The Fedora project has announced that Fedora 21 RC is now available for download and testing, for all the new flavors, Workstation, Server, and Cloud.

Debian Family

• Technologic released a fast-booting headless PC/104-expandable SBC, running Debian on a PXA16x SoC, and with a Lattice FPGA and wide temperature operation.

Derivatives

• The Debian fork website, put together by the Veteran Unix Admins (VUA) group, has annouced the VUA has decided to fork the popular Debian GNU/Linux distribution. The VUA is critical of Debian’s decision to adopt systemd as the distribution’s default init software and to allow software packaged for Debian to depend directly on systemd. The VUA plans to create a fork of Debian using SysV Init as the default init software and is asking for donations to support the endevor.

• Ha, from ongoing discussions surrounding Systemd/Init in Debian, anybody could have predicted this was going to happen sooner or later.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• In today’s open source roundup: Debian versus Ubuntu. Plus: Five Linux distros for your computer, and which game genres need more games on Linux?

• Whether you’re a relative novice or a seasoned pro, we all want to get the most from our operating system. Ubuntu, like most modern OSes, has more to offer than what is presented at first blush.

• From tweaking and refining the look, behaviour and performance of the Unity desktop to performing system maintenance, there are a huge array of useful utilities and apps that can help tune Ubuntu to meet your needs in no time.

• It has been almost 10 months since we last heard about Canonical and Chinese manufacturer Meizu’s plans for the Ubuntu Mobile, also known as Ubuntu Touch, operating system. The pair have now reaffirmed the partnership, and according to Meizu, the first Ubuntu Mobile phone will finally be released in early 2015. News broke in the local press, and has been confirmed on Meizu’s official Facebook page, in a post saying simply that “a strategic agreement” had be signed on November 25.

• After Chinese smartphone brand Xiaomi, often referred to as the ‘iPhone Killer’ and ‘Apple of China’, managed to outdo big technology names such as Apple and Samsung, another Chinese brand Meizu is now being touted as Xiaomi’s replacement with respect to posing intense competition to well-known technology biggies across the globe.

• imp is a new open source computer that is powered by Ubuntu 14.04 and that wants to fulfil many roles, including that of a media hub, a personal cloud, a wireless streamer, and a simple desktop.

• Canonical and Meizu have signed a partnership for the distribution of Ubuntu-powered phones that should arrive in the first months of 2015. The details are still sketchy, but the information about this collaboration has been confirmed.

• This week I posted some OS X 10.10 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 benchmarks from a Haswell-based Apple MacBook Air. Ubuntu 14.10 out-of-the-box was largely performing better than Apple’s latest OS X Yosemite release while today are some more Ubuntu OpenGL numbers tossed in for the graphics tests when upgrading against Intel’s latest HD Graphics code for Linux.

• The virtual desktops on Ubuntu systems have been working very well in the last few editions, but it looks like there is a problem in Ubuntu 14.10, at least for the system I’m running. The desktop locks up with the workspace switcher activated.

• The Ubuntu Touch operating system has reached a new milestone and Canonical has released a new update for the RTM branch, bringing the entire project a little closer to a shippable version that can run smoothly and without any bugs.

Flavours and Variants

• The Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” MATE distribution has been made available and the ISO images can be downloaded from the officials servers. Just like the Cinnamon flavor, the MATE edition is quite heavy on the new features.

Devices/Embedded

• “Open-source computers” seem to be the latest promoted concept up for funding on popular crowd-funding sites.

• Linux and FOSS have already changed the world, and we’re just at the beginning. This is a great time to learn to be a maker, in contrast to being a mere consumer. Clicking buttons on a smartphone is not being tech-savvy; hacking and building the phone is.

• Some people give Make Magazine the credit for launching the Maker Movement. Whether they launched it or just gave it a name, it is a real phenomenon, a natural evolution of do-it-yourselfers, inventors, and hackers in every generation. Remember Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Hands-On (for Shopsmith projects), photography magazines, woodworking magazines, electronics…remember Heathkit? Remember when Radio Shack was still an electronics store? How about Edmund Scientific? That is still a wonderful playground of anatomical models, microscopes, telescopes, dinosaurs, prisms, lenses, chemistry sets, lasers, geology stuff, and tons more. All of these still exist, and have moved online like everything else. It’s a feast of riches, plus we have all the cool new stuff that Make Magazine covers. This is absolutely the best time to be a curious tech adventurer.

• Coder is a fantastic resource for learning programming. It simplifies the process of getting started, requires very inexpensive components, and provides fun and engaging activities. If you are planning on gettting a Raspberry Pi for the holidays, (or already have one), Coder is a great addition to get extra fun and learning from that little board.

Phones

Android

• If you’re willing to throw caution to the wind and void your warranty, you can have Android 5.0 on your Sprint Galaxy S5 right now. An early build of Lollipop for this device has leaked on XDA, and it’s flashable with Odin. Expect bugs, but hey, it’s Lollipop.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Department of Real Estate Management of Mokotów, a district of the city of Warsaw (Poland), is increasingly turning to free and open source software solutions to providing flexible, innovative new ICT services. “Our management values innovations, and so supports the use of open source software,” says Jacek Wolski, the IT department’s team manager, “this encourages the IT department to implement new solutions and tools.”

• When you’re making the case to a data center manager about tech that is worthy of her consideration, make sure these three open source options are on your list.

• Released today was version 14.11 of the Genode OS Framework, an interesting open-source OS research project we’ve been following for a few years now.

Events

• This isn’t a trade-show masquerading as a conference: the CloudStack community says it focuses on making great software and this conference was designed reflect that ethos.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google is moving towards the final steps in eliminating Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) plug-in support from the Chrome/Chromium web browser.

• A new Google Chrome stable version has been released in the 39.x branch and the developers have made a number of changes and improvements, including a new update for the Adobe Flash component.

SaaS/Big Data

• OpenStack is gaining popularity as the cloud platform of choice for IT organizations. This was reflected in a 2013 IDG survey that found as much as 64 percent of IT managers including OpenStack in their technology roadmap. In the current fast-paced IT market, the massive scalability and flexible, modular architecture of OpenStack can help give organizations the agility they need.

• The OpenStack user survey published earlier this month shows the frailties of the project and why customers using it become reliant on vendors. These issues stretch across different aspects of OpenStack, discussed in detail at the Kilo Design Summit at the OpenStack Summit in Paris. Full details of the user pain points can be found here.

• Cisco first got involved with the open-source OpenStack cloud platform in 2011 with the Bexar release and initially was focused mostly on networking. Over the last several years, Cisco’s OpenStack involvement and product portfolio have grown beyond just networking.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Grep 2.21 has been released and represents nearly a half-year worth of improvements to this commonly used GNU utility.

Public Services/Government

• The government of Spain is making available as open source the code for Ciudadania Europea, a web site that pointed citizens to the nearest embassies and consular services in European countries. That service was closed this summer, but the code is now freely available for other similar projects.

Openness/Sharing

• See how these groups are joining forces: Open Food Network, Farm Hack, Open Source Beehives, Open Source Seed Initiative, and Growstuff.

• This data is synthesized into a consolidated, simple risk profile for each country, which includes natural and human hazards, vulnerability and lack of coping capacity. Currently, InfoRM covers 191 countries.

• The United Nations Food and Agriculture Programme (FAO) is teaming up with a coalition of partner agencies to develop a new data crunching tool to help national governments, development and relief organizations in their efforts to prevent and respond to crises such as animal diseases, plant pests and even conflict.

Open Hardware

• One of the more surprising applications has been the natural marriage between the Arduino board and Lego. Once seen only as a child’s building block toy, Lego is finding startling utility as an instant mechanical prototype maker for Arduino ideas.

Programming

• The “llgo” Go front-end to LLVM could soon be accepted as a new sub-project. This Go front-end is written in the Go language itself.

• OpenMP support within LLVM/Clang has been a long time coming but hopefully for the next release — LLVM 3.6 — there could finally be out-of-the-box Clang OpenMP support.

• In the apps economy, Google has two distinct identities: it is the provider of the largest and most used global platform with Android and it is one of the leading app publishers for all platforms.

• Over the past few weeks Google has released multiple security tools and open source efforts to help end-users and organizations defend themselves from modern threats.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Food watchdog warns that Asda has worst rate of contamination but all other supermarket chains failing to meet national targets

Security

• The Docker Linux container format has a major exposure that could allow malicious code to assume unassigned privileges with the host server and order the extraction of files that are not intended to be accessible to the container’s code.

• In the past, the Syrian Electronic Army has claimed responsibility for hacking into Twitter accounts and posting pro-Assad messages, has redirected popular websites to their own pages, and defaced some sites with their own text and images.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Syrian rebels backed by the United States are making their biggest gains yet south of the capital Damascus, capturing a string of towns from government forces and aiming to carve out a swath of territory leading to the doorstep of President Bashar al-Assad’s seat of power

• A September 30, 2014 report by YahooNews! highlighted how recent US air strikes on ISIS militant targets in Iraq and Syria reflect the US’s relaxation of its standards for killing civilians by ignoring a 2013 policy meant to reduce civilian deaths.

• Finally, on 15 October 2010, Hellfire missiles fired from a Predator or Reaper drone killed Hussain, the Pakistani Taliban later confirmed. For the death of a man whom practically no American can name, the US killed 128 people, 13 of them children, none of whom it meant to harm.

• A new analysis of the data available to the public about drone strikes, conducted by the human-rights group Reprieve, indicates that even when operators target specific individuals – the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls “targeted killing” – they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November.

• Today, when U.S. intelligence agencies believe they know the location of a terrorist in Pakistan and a few other countries, they are largely free to deploy a weapon that’s become the symbol of war on terror: an aerial drone.

• News reports recently suggested that the US drone program came very close to achieving one of Zarb-e-Azb’s main benchmarks – elimination of Mullah Fazlullah – when a strike last week took out four or five key TTP commanders a few days ago. Yet more serious research, appearing in the British media on the same day, suggested that during the long hunt for 24 people on President Obama’s ‘kill list’, drone attacks have claimed close to 900 innocent Pakistani lives; a good number of them women and children. The analysis, prepared by UK based group Reprieve, collected facts from reported instances, of course, which means the real number must be higher.

• The Obama administration has made the drone program the centerpiece of its counterterrorism strategy, but a new report reminds us that it often stretches the limits of human rights behind its breaking point.

• The crisis over 43 massacred students shows how dysfunctional and corrupt Peña Nieto’s government is. And yet Obama keeps patting him on the back.

• President Obama has secretly extended the U.S. role in Afghanistan despite earlier promises to wind down America’s longest war. According to the New York Times, Obama has signed a classified order that ensures U.S. troops will have a direct role in fighting. In addition, the order reportedly enables American jets, bombers and drones to bolster Afghan troops on combat missions. And, under certain circumstances, it would apparently authorize U.S. air-strikes to support Afghan military operations throughout the country. The decision contradicts Obama’s earlier announcement that the U.S. military would have no combat role in Afghanistan next year. Afghanistan’s new president Ashraf Ghani has also backed an expanded U.S. military role. Ghani, who took office in September, has also reportedly lifted limits on U.S. airstrikes and joint raids that his predecessor Hamid Karzai had put in place. We go to Kabul to speak with Dr. Hakim, a peace activist and physician who has provided humanitarian relief in Afghanistan for the last decade. We are also joined by Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, who has just returned from Afghanistan.

• None of the killers obviously enjoy killing and they all believe what they do serves some greater purpose.

• Let’s play a game, the kind that makes no sense on this single-superpower planet of ours. For a moment, do your best to suspend disbelief and imagine that there’s another superpower, great power or even regional power somewhere that, between 2001 and 2003, launched two major wars in the Greater Middle East. We’re talking about full-scale invasions, long-term occupations and nation-building programs, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq.

• The dilemma is that Washington does not want the Pentagon to directly invade Syria itself. It wants to pull the strings while another force does the work on the ground. Candidates for an outsourced invasion of Syria include the Turkish military or other US regional allies. There, however is also an impasse here as Washington’s allies are also afraid of the consequences of an invasion of Syria.

• In a recently released report by Amnesty, the oil-rich UAE has been slammed over arbitrary detentions, cancelling citizenships and labeling dissidents Islamists

• Of the $557 billion that Washington spent in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2011, only 5.4 percent went to development or governance. The rest was mostly military expenditure, a significant chunk of which ended up in the coffers of regional strongmen like Jan Muhammad (JMK).

• Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was supposed to steer the Pentagon away from a decade of war, including bringing US troops home from Afghanistan and paving the way for a reduction in the Pentagon budget. Instead, the Obama administration has opted for remaining in Afghanistan, continuing the disastrous drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen, and dragging our nation into another round of military involvement in Iraq, as well as Syria. The ISIL crises has also been used as a justification for not cutting the Pentagon budget, as required by sequestration.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The significance of the Newsweek article is therefore threefold: firstly Shell appears to have misled the court in the Hague which from a reputational perspective is extremely damaging (hence the headline of the article), secondly the case will now return to court for a retrial, and thirdly the lawyers and witnesses in the original case may be subject to legal action by the Dutch authorities.

• The oil company Shell lied to a Dutch court about steps taken to minimize the risk of oil spills during a court case brought against the multinational oil and gas company by four Nigerian farmers and Friends of the Earth, lawyers acting for the claimants alleged today.

Finance

• The erosion of Black Friday started several years ago, when major retailers started opening their doors to shoppers on Thanksgiving Day. That meant the big sales started early, giving less importance to Friday. This year, many stores, including Toys R Us, Best Buy and JCPenney, will open for business at 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving.

• No, this was the very worst kind of deal-making by callous political operatives, where party interests came first, second and last. I do not give a fig for the result. Income tax devolution is of minimal use if other major taxes are set from London and most income still comes from a Westminster “grant”. Revenue from oil and whisky will still be treated in government accounts as “UK” rather than arising in Scotland. It is far short of the quasi Federal powers which No voters were promised and the Lib Dems pretend to believe in.

• Stockholm taxis have a reputation for being among the most expensive in the world, but new regulations designed to make costs more transparent have been agreed on by Stockholm’s Traffic Committee.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• This is what you call “working the refs”: The Times had gotten so much criticism that “they show the suffering of Palestinians only” that it was afraid to accurately report that Palestinians were, in fact, enduring far more suffering. So they added the false “symmetry” of a rocket count–false not only because Israeli weapons were far more lethal, but also because when Israel “struck” a “target” in Gaza, it often did so with far more than a single weapon. One could have as accurately conveyed the “symmetry” of a massacre of a Native American tribe by comparing the number of arrows fired with number of US Army cannon.

• Advertising Standards Authority rules that video paid for by Oreos brand that featured YouTube stars broke advertising code

• In March 2014, Rep. Illeana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) introduced the Truth in Advertising Act of 2014, which calls on the Federal Trade Commission to regulate and reduce altered images of bodies in advertising. As Elizabeth Zwerling reports for Women’s E-News, the bill (HR 4341) has the potential to positively impact the self-perceptions of women and men everywhere. “We need to give young people the tools they need to distinguish fact from fiction,” said U.S. Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) who is cosponsoring the bill with Rep. Ros-Lehtinen and Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL). “This bill is a first step.”

Censorship

• The UK website blocking bonanza continues with the High Court adding 32 “pirate” sites to the country’s unofficial ban list. The new order requires six major ISPs to block access to public and private torrent sites, warez sites and streaming portals.

• In politics, as with Internet memes, ideas don’t spread because they are good—they spread because they are good at spreading. One of the most virulent ideas in Internet regulation in recent years has been the idea that if a social problem manifests on the Web, the best thing that you can do to address that problem is to censor the Web.

• It’s an attractive idea because if you don’t think too hard, it appears to be a political no-brainer. It allows governments to avoid addressing the underlying social problem—a long and costly process—and instead simply pass the buck to Internet providers, who can quickly make whatever content has raised rankles “go away.” Problem solved! Except, of course, that it isn’t.

Privacy

• There’s a good chance the software that runs your cloud, stores your data and serves your websites is open source. Soon, the SSL/TSL certificate that encrypts it can be, too — or something close to it, at least, if Let’s Encrypt, an initiative back by Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai and others to build an open certificate authority, succeeds.

• Emma Carr, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “The Home Secretary’s speech today highlights that the “snoopers charter” is anything but dead and buried.

• The Government has announced that it will bring forward proposals to enable IP address matching. The measures would require internet firms to keep records of customer information, to enable law enforcement bodies to decipher who was using a device, such as a smart phone or computer, at a given time.

• The Counter Terrorism and Security Bill is due to be published today, making it the seventh major counter terrorism law introduced in Britain since 9/11. The Bill can be accessed here.

• Renate Samson, Chief Executive of Big Brother Watch, said: “The conclusion that a failing of an unnamed technology company should determine future legislation, whilst the catalogue of errors by the intelligence agencies is all but excused, is of grave concern.

• In a new court filing, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has jumped into the criminal case of a man who federal prosecutors allege orchestrated a murder-for-hire earlier this year in Baltimore, Maryland.

• Specifically, in its 29-page amicus (friend of the court) brief filed on Tuesday, the ACLU supports the defendant’s earlier motion that the government be required to disclose information about how it used a stingray, or cell-site simulator, without a warrant, and therefore the court should suppress evidence gathered as a result of its use.

• In a post on its help centre web page, Twitter said it would target people who use its app on all mobile devices that run Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems.

• “To help build a more personal Twitter experience for you, we are collecting and occasionally updating the list of apps installed on your mobile device so we can deliver tailored content that you might be interested in,” the company said.

• The MPs on the Science and Technology select committee called for the Government to draw up new guidelines for websites and apps explaining clearly how they use personal data, warning that laws will be needed if companies fail to comply.

• Last week I talked about how people are thinking too small when they think about the Internet of Things (See Part 1). When we truly consider the ramifications of connecting a vast array of data-gathering sensors, devices, and machines together, what’s important to realize is that information will be translated into action at a rate that we have never seen before. We are closing in on a world with infinitesimal reaction times, immediate responses to changing conditions, and unparalleled control in managing assets and resources.

• Some will have assumed this week’s headlines blaming Facebook for Lee Rigby’s murder were just the usual spin, diverting the attention from the agencies’ own incompetence. Yet it is part of a growing pattern.

• We have reviewed the whole report by the Intelligence Security Committee on the killing of Fusilier Rigby, and found the conclusion that only Facebook is to blame very difficult to justify.

• In the absence of real reform, people and institutions at home and abroad are taking matters into their own hands. In America, the NSA’s overreach is changing the way we communicate with and relate to each other. In order to evade government surveillance, more and more Americans are employing encryption technology.

• With the lame-duck Congress failing to advance bipartisan surveillance-reform legislation, President Obama faces an uphill climb next year with his plans to end the National Security Agency’s mass collection of phone records.

• Privacy advocates, facing an uphill battle in a Republican-controlled Congress next year, will have to make a difficult choice.

• The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence service, spied on some citizens living abroad, a former lawyer for the spies told MPs on Thursday.

• ASIO has for long had a negative reputation among Australians old enough to remember the Cold War, to have seen their file, and to know if they lost a job, a promotion, or a government grant because of its contents, accurate or not. Younger Australians, however, may approach Moorhouse with reasonable, contemporary questions: if I have nothing to hide, why should I fear ASIO surveillance? If others plan acts of violence, shouldn’t ASIO intercept them by whatever means? If national security is endangered, isn’t it appropriate to reverse the onus of proof onto the suspect? Doesn’t ASIO need to operate in secrecy?

• The legislation is being rushed through on a fast-track timetable, as the government similarly rushed through the DRIPA legislation on an emergency timetable. The subject matter of this legislation deserves comprehensive parliamentary scrutiny.

• THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT has voted in favour of breaking Google into separate companies to put an end to the online firm’s dominance.

• In a vote on Thursday, 384 members of the European Parliament voted in favour of taking drastic measures to stop Google’s dominance in online search results and enforcing a split between its search business and other services. Around half that number, 174, voted against the measures.

• Professor Gerald Horne and civil rights organizer Kevin Alexander Gray say the Ferguson grand jury decision is in line with U.S. history, and discuss whether a Department of Justice investigation would yield different results

• The West is trying to split the BRICS while also trying to weaken individual members.

• “I don’t know what happens to my personal data when I use it on a smartphone,” Sir John was reported by the BBC as telling MPs. “If you go to an ATM and put in your credit or debit card, that system is supervised by the bank in some way,” he said in evidence to the Commons Science and Technology Committee, which is examining the use of biometric technology.

• NSA reform died in the U.S. Senate two weeks after the 2014 midterm election. The lame duck Democratic majority and Libertarian minded Republicans produced 58 of the 60 votes needed, agonizingly close to collaring an agency that has clearly run amuck. This seeming ideological dividing line is a bit puzzling, given the broader effects Snowden‘s revelations have had on the U.S. defense industry.

• A good deal of folk aware of NSA leaker Edward Snowden have improved the security of their online activity after learning of his exploits, a large survey has found.

• Researchers from think tank The Centre for International Governance Innovation collected responses from 23,376 users between October and November and found 60 percent had heard of Snowden.

Civil Rights

• Michael Ratner and Paul Jay discuss Obama administration’s policy towards Ferguson, Guantanamo, the NSA and torture

• Asset forfeiture may be the greatest scam perpetuated on the American people by their government — and it’s all legal. For the most part, assets seized translate directly to monetary or physical gains for the agencies doing the seizing, an act often wholly separated from any American ideals of due process.

• A man is facing a felony charge of menacing for allegedly pointing a banana at two sheriff’s deputies in western Colorado.

• “Gillespie likes to point out that unlike the words ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican,’ ‘libertarian’ should be seen as a modifier rather than a noun-an attitude, not a fixed object. A cynic might assert that this is exactly the kind of semantic cop-out that relegates Gillespie’s too-cool-for-school sect to the margins. Not surprisingly, he begged to differ. ‘It’s wedded to an epistemological humility,’ he told me, ‘that proceeds from the assumption that we don’t know as much as we think we do, and so you have to be really cautious about policies that seek to completely reshape the world. It’s better to run trials and experiments, as John Stuart Mill talked about. The whole point of America-and this is an admixture of Saul Bellow and Heidegger and Jim Morrison lyrics-is that it’s in a constant state of becoming, constantly changing and mongrelizing. We’re doing exactly what free minds and free markets allow you to do. Part of why I’m a libertarian is that if you restrict people less, interesting stuff happens.’”

• On CNN Wednesday, leftist Professor Cornel West, given the chance to bloviate about the non-indictment of Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown, decided to impart his perspective with a vengeance, even targeting President Barack Obama and blurting that the Ferguson affair signaled the “end of the age of Obama.”

• Security experts believe the Internet of Things will be used to kill someone

• CIA director John Brennan is promoting a reorganization scheme at the Central Intelligence Agency that will make it more likely that intelligence analysis will be politicized to support the interests of the White House and senior policymakers. The organizational change that he favors would abolish the directorates of intelligence and operations, which were designed to maintain a bureaucratic wall between intelligence analysis and clandestine actions, in order to create regional and functional “centers” that would place analysts and operatives side-by-side. There is no doubt that such centers would do great harm to the production of strategic intelligence and would increase the likelihood of politicizing all intelligence production.

• The mission was later revealed to be the staged break-in of the office of Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was a former Pentagon official who had angered the Nixon administration by leaking the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history of the Vietnam War, to the media.

• The United States must rise to meet the high human rights standards it has set for itself and others around the world, a group of United Nations human rights experts urged on Wednesday, as they called on President Obama to support “the fullest possible release” of a report detailing Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) interrogation practices.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• I actually get the cached, MITM-ed, portal version.

• So what can we do to fight off this well-financed attack on Net neutrality? EDRi.org has dusted off its Save the Internet site that was used to fight for Net neutrality last time.

• The breadth and diversity of this coalition underlines how net neutrality has truly become a global issue. While Internet users in the United States are speaking up in favor of the reclassification of broadband as a telecommunications service, across the Atlantic activists are also fighting to preserve Europe’s open Internet, which has been placed in jeopardy again this week. (Europeans can take action here.)

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The MPAA’s search engine for movies and TV-shows “WhereToWatch” can now be upgraded with torrents, thanks to PopcornCab. The deviant torrent site, run by former U.S. Pirate Party leader Travis McCrea, decided to add torrent support so it can reach a wider audience.

• Following an all day hearing in the Auckland District Court, Kim Dotcom left the building a free man today. Officially broke and unable to comment on his case due to a news blackout, the Megaupload founder will have to wait until tomorrow to discover if he’ll be put back behind bars.

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