● 01.15.15

● Links 15/1/2015: KDE Releases, Ubuntu Phone Delays

Posted in News Roundup at 4:53 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The mayor of Munich, the city that replaced Windows with Linux, is told his public attacks on the move to open source are hampering efforts to end the authority’s IT staffing shortage.

Desktop

Server

• In October 2014, Databricks participated in the Sort Benchmark and set a new world record for sorting 100 terabytes (TB) of data, or 1 trillion 100-byte records. The team used Apache Spark on 207 EC2 virtual machines and sorted 100 TB of data in 23 minutes.

• In comparison, the previous world record set by Hadoop MapReduce used 2100 machines in a private data center and took 72 minutes. This entry tied with a UCSD research team building high performance systems and we jointly set a new world record.

Kernel Space

• Storage industry technologies are undergoing a major shift and operating systems must evolve to keep pace with the change. That’s one reason why Micron Technology, a global leader in advanced semiconductor systems including DRAM, NAND and NOR Flash, recently joined the Linux Foundation as a corporate member.

• AtomicRNG is an open-source project started by a Phoronix reader that’s an experimental random number generator that feeds the Linux entropy pool and is based on an Alpha Radiation Visualizer.

• Over the past year or so various people have been automating kernel builds with the aim of both setting the standard that things should build reliably and using the resulting builds for automated testing. This has been having good results, it’s especially nice to compare the results for older stable kernel builds with current ones and notice how much happier everything is.

• While Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center has publicly had Broadwell Linux GPU driver code to post public since the end of 2013 and they’ve already started on Skylake enablement, there’s still yet-to-be-mainlined patches for the Linux kernel to benefit Broadwell graphics performance.

Graphics Stack

• Marcin Juszkiewicz, the ARM developer at Red Hat responsible for a lot of RHEL/Fedora ARM work, has finally managed to get an X11 Server running on real AArch64 hardware.

• NIR aims to be lower-level than GLSL IR but still high enough to be device-independent and support generic optimizations. NIR is flat, type-less, GLSL-like features, native support for SSA, and uses much less memory than GLSL IR.

• Took me some time but finally I managed to workaround all issues and got X11 running on real AArch64 hardware.

Benchmarks

• This week there was a 22-way graphics card test of Metro Redux on Linux using GeForce and Radeon hardware with the latest AMD and NVIDIA proprietary drivers. Today the newest Linux gaming test candidate to look at is the AMD/NVIDIA Linux performance with the latest Unreal Engine 4 demos. In this article is a look at the UE4 Linux performance on AMD and NVIDIA graphics hardware running with Ubuntu.

• For your viewing pleasure today are some benchmarks of PC-BSD 10.1 compared to Ubuntu 14.10 and Fedora 21 when testing with both the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers.

• FreeBSD 10.1 was released back in November along with PC-BSD 10.1 and its new TrueOS. It took a bit of time though to get some benchmarks completed of FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.1 due to running into issues loading the updated OS on a few test systems I frequently use for Linux testing. In particular, disk/SATA issues on multiple systems when booting the PC-BSD 10.1 installer. Fortunately, I came across one of the powerful workhorse systems that played nicely with PC-BSD 10.1

Applications

Proprietary

• A fresh Beta version of the Opera Internet browser has been released by its developers and the Linux users can test it along with everyone else. It brings quite a few minor changes, but there are also two major improvements that really stand out.

Instructionals/Technical

• While movies like to think they’re still common, the concept of a mainframe with dumb terminals is a bit of an obsolete concept now. The proliferation of high-powered machines made it easier to give everyone their own system and that hasn’t really changed.

Games

• However, according to the CEO of Origin PC, the Steam Machine is “pretty much dead” and is just a new term for a living room PC.

• Chivalry: Medieval Warfare is a brutal multiplayer game that pits players against one another, but using medieval weapons and tactics. It’s insanely fun and now Linux users can also play it.

• Gunslugs 2, a new 2D side scrolling arcade shooter that draws its inspiration from games like Contra, has been published on Steam and is also available for Linux users.

• The sequel to the popular run ‘n’ gun platformer is now out, and as a last minute surprise, the developer OrangePixel also made the first game available for Linux today. We have played the follow-up, and it offers the same enjoyable action frenzy as the original, but in a more accessible package.

• Pillars of Eternity will be officially released on the 26th of March this year, and we have it confirmed that they are aiming for a same-day Linux release.

• Shadowrun: Hong Kong, a new turn-based action game from the famous Harebrained Schemes studio, has been announced for the Linux platform and it’s already making quite an impression on Kickstarter.

• JumpJet Rex, a new 2D platformer developed and published by TreeFortress Games, has been released on Steam and is now available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X platforms.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The developers from the KDE project have made some important changes and you might have noticed that it no longer says KDE Applications and Platform, jus KDE Applications. Also, you might have spotted the fact that KDE SC is also gone. The project has been split into KDE Frameworks, KDE Plasma, and KDE Applications and they are now quasi-independent.

• KDE Frameworks 5.6.0 was released a few days ago and Plasma 5.2 will be out later this month. Meanwhile, the KDE Applications release is coming out in April.

• Plasma, the desktop for the KDE project, has been updated once again and the KDE Community has detailed all the wonderful improvements and numerous fixes that have been implemented.

• On Tuesday KDE has released first beta of the upcoming Plasma 5.2. Plasma 5.2 is adding many new features and improvements and we would welcome testers to help find and fix bugs before the final release.

• Been a while since my last post. Exams came in and threw my momentum off. But now I’m back on track. I’ve been working on porting Baloo to use lucene instead of Xapain using Lucene++. Lucene++ is a C++ port of the java Lucene.

• We are happy to announce the second beta release in 2.9 series of Calligra Suite for you to test. We are focusing on fixing issues including those that you’d report so please continue to work with us. The next beta (3) is expected in February 2015.

• Krita, an application that is used to make digital painting files from scratch, has been updated to version 2.9 Beta 2 and it comes with a large number of improvements and various fixes.

Distributions

• A few days ago, I was cleaning my desk in the lab and happened upon a printout of a fake distro called Chuck Norris Linux — more commonly known as CHUX — which casually mentions that “…if Chuck Norris wrote Linux, you couldn’t boot it, it would boot you.”

• You could only imagine how old that was, it’s a Dell Dimension 3000. It still has the old boob tube type monitor. Quickly I said Yes! It had Windows XP on it. I went out to the local computer store and spent money I didn’t have to obtain all the necessary software to keep my business going.

• Our Ultimate Distro & FOSS Guide 2015 is joined by our introduction to becoming a Linux Foundation Certified Sysadmin

New Releases

• Elive, a Linux distribution based on Debian that uses Enlightenment as the default desktop environment, has been upgraded to version 2.5.2 Beta and is now available for download and testing.

Gentoo Family

• Today’s tiptoe through the newsfeeds found a list of distributions we’ll never see. Elsewhere, Phoronix.com said Fedora leadership is still planning releasing version 22 on time. Bruce Byfield has the advantages and disadvantages of popular Linux desktops and Jon maddog Hall shares his road to Open Source success. Over in Gentooland developer Donnie Berkholz says Gentoo needs focus to stay relevant and Andreas Hüttel has started a new blog series highlighting Gentoo derivatives.

• After nearly 12 years working on Gentoo and hearing blathering about how “Gentoo is about choice” and “Gentoo is a metadistribution,” I’ve come to a conclusion to where we need to go if we want to remain viable as a Linux distribution.

• Gentoo Linux is the foundation for quite some very cool and useful projects. So, I’m starting (hopefully) a series of blog posts here… and the first candidate is a personal favourite of mine, the famous SystemRescueCD.

Red Hat Family

• Goldman Sachs cut shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) from a neutral rating to a sell rating in a research report sent to investors on Wednesday morning, TheFlyOnTheWall.com reports. The firm currently has $70.00 price target on the stock, up from their previous price target of $67.44.

• Analyst concerns about Red Hat’s growth prospects appeared to all but disappear last month after the enterprise software company reported third-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street views.

• Red Hat‘s David Egts says government agencies can use Linux container technology to support virtualization efforts in an effort to efficiency and flexibility of their information technology systems.

• Egts, the chief technologist at Red Hat’s public sector business, wrote in a piece published Tuesday on GCN that Linux containers include applications that agencies can deploy as a single package through isolated host systems.

• RED HAT has announced an update to Satellite 5, promising new features, improvements to security and automation, and a “refreshed” interface.

Fedora

• This morning I wrote about Unless Fedora 22 Is To Be Delayed, GCC 5 Might Not Make It due to needing a mass rebuild of all the Fedora packages and the time involved on the short time-line. The Fedora FESCo committee convened today and their outcome is a bit surprising.

• While Fedora developers have been trying hard for Fedora 22 to be released on time and be stricter about time-based releases with Fedora releases currently being notorious for delays, there’s already some challenges with the fresh Fedora 22 plans for releasing in mid-May.

• Besides deciding to stick to Fedora 22′s time-based release schedule, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee also approved some new features for Fedora 22.

Debian Family

• Depending on what one is looking for, it should be much easier to find. There’s now a high-level status overview given on the landing page, maintainers can learn how to make their packages reproducible, enthusiasts can more easily find what can help the project, and we have even started writing some history.

Derivatives

• Valve has just released a new update for the stable branch of SteamOS and they’ve updated a ton of important packages, including the proprietary drivers and the Linux kernel.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical published some details about a Git vulnerability that has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

• Last month, Canonical announced snappy Ubuntu Core, the new, transactional version of Ubuntu, designed for public clouds. So far, snappy Ubuntu Core images are available on Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, and Amazon AWS.

• Canonical is hard at work building Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) and they are implementing all sorts of important updates, including for the Linux kernel and other core components.

• I predicted it would fail. Honestly, I didn’t want it to — I was fairly sure the Ubuntu Phone would be just the mobile interface we really needed, but it just seemed Canonical and the Ubuntu Phone were both on a collision course with vaporware-dom. However, like that little train in that adorable children’s story, the Ubuntu Phone seemed to keep moving forward. In a few weeks, thanks to bq, the Ubuntu Phone will finally be given a chance on the marketplace… at least in Europe.

• There isn’t much time left in 2014 so we suppose it comes as no surprise that Canonical, the parent company behind Ubuntu, recently confirmed that the first Ubuntu-powered smartphones have been delayed until “early” next year. The first Ubuntu-powered devices were originally scheduled to launch sometime in 2014.

• “Canonical continues to work closely with its first selected hardware partners, Meizu and bq, to bring Ubuntu phones to market in Europe and China,” Canonical’s vice president of mobile Cristian Parrino recently told PCWorld, without discussing rollouts to other markets such as the United States. The phones are expected to cost somewhere between $200 and $400 when they do launch.

Flavours and Variants

• When it comes to Linux desktops, there are a few routes to go. The most common is to buy a Windows desktop and either replace Microsoft’s operating system or partition the drive with your favorite Linux distro. If you are a bit more technical, you can build your own machine, but this can sometimes be costly (depending on your needs).

• The MintBox Mini is a small form-factor desktop computer that comes with Linux Mint software preloaded. If the computer looks familiar, that’s because it’s a version of CompuLab’s fitlet, a line of small, fanless desktops introduced this week.

• What makes this model a little different is that it’ll have a green case and come preloaded with the popular Linux Mint operating system.

• Linux Mint has announced that a new PC in its ‘MintBox’ line of PCs is coming in the spring: the ‘MintBox Mini’.

Devices/Embedded

• Robinson’s build uses a Raspberry Pi A+, a USB hub, battery, touchscreen, charger, backlit keyboard and a few other random parts. The whole thing is housed inside of two plastic hard drive enclosures that are connected with a piano hinge. You’ll need some extra tools, including a drill, a soldering iron and some wire cutters, but Robinson’s guide is otherwise pretty straightforward.

• CompuLab is the Israeli PC manufacturer of industrial computers, single-board computers, etc. Given the industrial focus of the company, Linux is important to them and generally their hardware plays great with various Linux distributions. Over the years at Phoronix I’ve reviewed their Intense-PC, Utilite, Trim-Slice, and their other interesting petite PCs.

Phones

• Originally I wrote this about Sony (hence the long analysis) and before I posted it, I learned about Blackberry. So we have TWO potential deaths in the Bloodbath now pending. Lets do quick analysis of both. First up

Tizen

• “The Indian market has shown incredible smartphone growth, and we believe migration from feature phones to smartphones will increase,” a Samsung spokesperson said in a statement provided to LinuxInsider by Ashley Wimberley.

• “India’s mobile market is … open to new smartphone platforms that are open source, can provide unique local solutions, and are adaptable across multiple brands,” the spokesperson noted.

• After much expectation and many false starts, Samsung finally launched the Tizen-based “Samsung Z1″ smartphone into India’s vast and rapidly growing market.

• After a string of rumours and amidst much fanfare, Samsung finally launched its first Tizen phone in India dubbed Z1. This time around, it’s the software that’s being talked about instead of the specs or design. And, why not? With Tizen, Samsung is trying to take on its long-time partner Google.

• The SmartThings hub was a great home automation hub, and now it is time for the next version, the upgraded model with new new sensors, battery backup, optional cellular, and premium services … oh and it will be running Tizen.

• When Samsung first acquired SmartThings, the company told of its plans to move from an embedded RTOS (real-time operating system) to Linux, which we hoped at the time was Tizen as it kinda made sense at the time. Now a SmartThings rep has told LinuxGizomos that “We will be moving to Tizen over time.”

• Tizen is an important part Samsung’s Internet of things (IoT) strategy as BK Yoon, the company’s CEO, highlighted at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that all Samsung devices will be IoT-ready in five years. We know that many of these devices will be running Tizen and with over 665 million devices last year alone, that will be a lot of Tizen Linux devices.

Android

• In addition to the phablet and headphones announced today, Xiaomi also threw in a little surprise. And by “little” we do mean literally, because this new Mi Box Mini is much smaller than the company’s earlier Android streaming devices; it’s so small that when it’s plugged into the power socket, you’d easily mistake it as a USB phone charger.

• As the map below shows, Android/Linux has overtaken desktop operating systems over much of the world, a huge swath through Asia and most of Africa. Along with skipping lock-in to Wintel, many folks are skipping copper and cable and satellite for WiFi. Further, a huge chunk of the world has Android/Linux in second or third spot. The PC may not be dead yet but it’s certainly changed.

• Every streaming device, from your aging Blu-ray player to your Roku, has limitations. At some point, you’re going to want to stream a service that your device doesn’t support. When that happens, your only big-screen option is to plug a laptop, tablet, or smartphone into your HDTV. That way, you get a real operating system with complete flexibility.

• Google has shed fresh light on Project Ara, its modular Android smartphone initiative, including plans to pilot the project in Puerto Rico through food truck-style stores.

• Project Ara will offer a smartphone endoskeleton; users will be able to add the functionality they want piece by piece, rather than being confined by the hardware configurations determined by operators and providers.

• Google debuted the project’s first functional prototype, known as Spiral 1, in 2013.

• Adobe has put plenty of energy into the mobile side of its Creative Cloud marketplace. However, this concentration has thus far been focused on the iOS side of the equation. That is about to change with the launch of Lightroom Mobile for Android, available free on the Google Play Store.

• Livescribe’s amazing smartpens currently only work with iOS, but the company is hard at work on an Android version of its app. Since Livescribe’s smartpens communicate via Bluetooth Low Energy, the company had to wait for Android to support it first, before making the new app.

• Samsung released the Android 5.0 update in the U.K. on Tuesday, following an international rollout throughout other parts of Europe and Asia. Also called Android L, or Lollipop, Google’s latest version of its operating system includes the “material design” makeover in addition to a number of other changes.

• The popular media player app VLC is coming to Android TV: VLC developers have released a preview version that already looks pretty neat — here’s a first look.

• LG still isn’t talking about the LG G2 Android 5.0 Lollipop update, but they’re making progress and working hard to deliver it to eager customers. And while we haven’t heard anything since last year about the update coming soon, this week more details have surfaced along with a full video showing the LG G2 Android 5.0 update running rather smooth.

• Samsung has been releasing a lot of Tizen-based devices lately including smart TVs, smartwatches and now smartphones. To explain the benefits of Tizen, Samsung has written a new post explaining what the software platform has to offer the world… and it’s something that will no doubt annoy any Android fan who’s ever owned a Samsung device.

• So you won’t need five different home screens anymore

• One of the promises of the HTC Advantage program was Android software updates for up to two years. HTC officials publicly stated it will try to deploy these updates within 90 days of release and HTC is doing everything it can to stick to the plan.

• Yesterday, an engineer at Motorola by the name of Luciaono Carvalho revealed that Android 5.0.2 Lollipop will be coming real soon to all Motorola devices from 2013 and 2014. That means that a Motorola Droid Turbo Android update is also to be expected, although the phone being a Verizon exclusive, it might take longer for the OTA to hit. The Droid Turbo is a highly acclaimed smartphone which boasts with great performance and battery life, and even has an international version called the Moto Maxx.

• The Android 5.0 Lollipop update that HTC One M8 owners have been waiting for is about to arrive – or is arriving now, depending what version of the phone you have.

• For users with the developer or unlocked editions of the HTC flagship, Android Lollipop has already begun rolling out, according to Android Central.

• What do you do if you are trying to establish an ecosystem of apps for your mobile operating system, or are simply trying to bolster the numbers a bit in order to look more attractive to consumers? If you’re Jolla or Blackberry, the answer is adding Android app compatibility. It’s something we are seeing more of as of late when it comes to smaller players in the mobile OS market, and it seems that Samsung is now getting on this train too — well, sort of.

Free Software/Open Source

• Best known for its game development work with the like of BBC (Doctor Who), Ubisoft (Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes) and Mindy Candy (Moshi Monsters Village), Dundee studio Tag Games is now getting into the tools business.

• Maybe you’re looking for new open source tools that your business can use to take it to the next level. Or maybe you’ve made use of countless solutions over the years and feel as though it’s time to give back.

Events

• Join the Regional Technology Partnership at 5:30 pm on January 28 for our event located at the Bonita Springs Chamber of Commerce, 25071 Chamber of Commerce Dr., Bonita Springs. “Mandatory Considerations before using Open Source Code” is sponsored by The McDonough Law Office, P.L., and the featured presenter will be William McDonough. This event is free for RTP Members and $25.00 for future members. Registration, sponsorship opportunities and additional details are available at www.swfrtp.org.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The Mozilla community has just released a new update for the Thunderbird email client and the developers have made a couple of important changes to the application and corrected a few security problems.

• The first Mozilla browser release of 2015 brings Firefox Marketplace and improved performance to desktop users.

• In today’s open source roundup: Firefox 35 is now available. Plus: Linux distros we’ll never see, and Peppermint 5 reviews

SaaS/Big Data

• For the past few years, cloud has been one of the biggest buzzwords among technology enthusiasts. Whether you want data accessibility across devices or need computation power for your business or even develop applications—cloud can help you.

• With growing adoption for cloud computing, almost everyone from individuals to large corporations are leveraging it. For example CERN, the famous European nuclear lab, uses OpenStack to manage their IT infrastructure. Several open source projects related to cloud computing have also come up in last few years, prominent among them are ownCloud, OpenStack etc.

• Featuring full integration of the technology from Google’s acquisition of Stackdriver last year, Google Cloud Monitoring has arrived. It’s a tool that developers can leverage to monitor the performance of application components. If you’re a Google Cloud Platform customer you can try it out for free beginning immediately. Here are more details.

• As the Big Data trend marches forward in enterprises and as Hadoop becomes a true open source star driving the trend, MapR Technologies doesn’t get quite as much attention as some other players. However, the company offers a slew of informative and helpful posts, videos and educational offerings that can help any enterprise get smart about leveraging Big Data tools, including many free, open source applications.

Databases

• MariaDB says its newly-released MaxScale software, which acts as a gateway between databases and apps, will transform life for admins and developers.

• MaxScale, available for MySQL as well as the MariaDB fork, is an open-source proxy that allows databases and apps to be fully decoupled, enabling admin processes to run without affecting apps and for apps to evolve without hampering underlying databases.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• 2015 has started and I realized that in between the New Year and last week’s tragedy, I hadn’t had the time to discuss what’s on the table for the Document Foundation in 2015. This is purely a personal opinion and does not represent any sort of official statement by the Foundation. Let’s try to keep this somewhat synthetic. LibreOffice_external_logo_200px

Education

• This brings up one major point of education: Education is often best when it is proactive, and you receive the education before you need it.

Funding

• Creandum led the round joined by Dawn Capital and current investors Fidelity Growth Partners Europe, Sunstone Capital and Conor Venture Partners.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• It seems like all those arguments (about Twitter, about implementing support for proprietary systems on Free Software, and others) are ultimately about reaching users that would otherwise remain ignorant of the Free Software philosophy. And how can someone have counter-arguments for this? It is impossible to argue that we do not need to take the Free Software message to everybody, because when someone does not use Free Software, she is doing harm to her community (thus, we want more people using Free Software, of course). When the Free Software Foundation makes use of Twitter to bring more people to the movement, and when I see that despite talking to people all around me I can hardly convince them to try GNU/Linux, who am I to criticize the FSF?

• The word, “radical”, has been in the news a lot lately. Often it’s associated with some bad news like problems caused by radical this that or the other.

• we are happy to announce today’s GNUnet developer mumble taking place

Public Services/Government

• Financial pressures have pushed the intelligence community (IC) to relinquish control of some of its data to cloud based services provided by the private sector. And along with trying to tie its 17 agencies together on a single platform, the IC has been forced to adapt to emerging technology trends as well as growing realities.

Openness/Sharing

• While the 3D printer has garnered an enormous amount of attention, performing new and heroic tasks on almost a daily basis, the 3D scanner has not historically received a proportionate amount of time in the spotlight, necessary tool that it often is to achieving the desired result in the maker’s world.

Open Hardware

• How does one crowd-source a dildo? I wondered, until I realized that the makers of The Mod are actually crowdfunding their toy, and open-sourcing the design. And the design is phttp://www.montanalinux.org/firewalld-info.html retty fancy.

• Facebook’s Oculus VR, Samsung Electronics and Sony are pressing ahead into virtual reality, but they’re going to have some company in the form of gaming accessories manufacturer Razer, which is testing a headset that will retail for $200.

Programming

• Michael Henriksen, a member of the SoundCloud security team, has been recently tasked with creating a system that will constantly check the company’s GitHub organizations (i.e. repositories) for unintentionally leaked sensitive information.

• The C Framework For OpenCL has reached version 2.0. CF4OCL allows the rapid development of OpenCL host programs in C/C++ while making it easier to provide OpenCL, simplify the analysis of OpenCL environments, etc.

• After releasing Weblate 2.0 with Bootstrap based UI, there was still lot of things to improve. Weblate 2.1 brought more consistency in using buttons with colors and icons. Weblate 2.2 will bring some improvements in other graphics elements.

Standards/Consortia

• The group on Jan. 14 unveiled the preview release of IoTivity, an open spec designed to make it easier for the growing number of sensors and devices that will make up the Internet of things (IoT) to connect to each other and exchange data. IoTivity is now an open-source project under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.

Leftovers

• I’m a sucker for history videos… and I enjoyed the trip back in time that these were. While I was aware of the feuds that existed in UNIX-land and UNIX-GUI-land back from the early days I didn’t witness it personally… so the first two expose some of that. The third video shows what moving from Windows 95 to Windows 98 was like… including the Linux alternative with an interview with Linus himself. Enjoy!

Science

• A worker ant collects sweet nectar from the trap of an insect-eating Nepenthes pitcher plant. Research from the University of Bristol, UK, has found that, by ‘switching off’ its traps for part of the day, the plant ensures ‘scout’ ants survive and are able to lead large numbers of followers to the trap. When the trap gets wet, it suddenly becomes super-slippery and captures all visitors in one sweep. Credit: Dr. Ulrike Bauer, University of Bristol, UK

Security

• Routers belonging to thousands of homes, universities and businesses could have been used to run LizardStresser DDoS attack service

• Notorious hacking group Lizard Squad has apparently been using unsecured home internet routers to power its LizardStresser service, new research has discovered.

• LizardStresser, which offers paying customers the chance to take down websites using DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, was reportedly run by the group as part of a widespread ‘marketing campaign’ for Lizard Squad.

• KeySweeper a $10 spy tool disguised as Wall Charger which can read data from any wireless Microsoft Keyboard

• The Personal Data Notification & Protection Act is another swing at a long postponed Federal data breach notification law. The Act would clarify and strengthen laws that obligate businesses to notify customers when their personal information has been exposed. Among the changes would be a uniform, federal 30-day notification requirement from the discovery of a breach. The illicit trade of stolen identifies would also be criminalized.

• On January 3rd, the SSL certificate of our website hosting provider, boum.org, expired. This means that if you still are running Tails 1.2.1 or older, you will not get any update notification. Please help spreading the word!

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• I am working very hard on getting Sikunder Burnes into shape for publication. Just ten weeks left to achieve that. Still hacking a lot of draft material out of the text. This passage on the Russian Empire was written before the tragic events in Ukraine.

• USA Today has a feature called “Common Ground,” which is a back-and-forth involving Cal Thomas, “a conservative columnist,” and Bob Beckel, billed as “a liberal Democratic strategist” but more accurately described as a Fox News Democrat with a lucrative sideline as a corporate lobbyist.

• Before Samir Khan was killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in 2011, the FBI had hoped to capture and prosecute the blogger on terrorism charges. But Khan, a US citizen who wrote about violent jihad and was the founding editor of al Qaeda’s glossy English-language magazine Inspire, somehow slipped out of the United States in 2009 and eluded capture.

• The new revelations about the government’s investigation into Khan were detailed in heavily redacted FBI files obtained by VICE News under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Previous documents revealed that the FBI launched an investigation of Khan in 2006 after the bureau discovered his incendiary blog, Inshallahshaheed, an Arabic phrase that means “Martyr, God willing.” Less than a year later, according to the set of records, the FBI’s “primary goal” was to determine if Khan “Is influencing/did influence anyone to commit an act of terror.”

• A brutal attack on a Nigerian town by the militant group Boko Haram that killed as many as 2,000 people has been given relatively little attention by the U.S. media.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• As climate-change activists pressure public institutions to dump their fossil-fuel investments, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do

Censorship

• Francis spoke about the Paris terror attacks while en route to the Philippines, defending free speech as not only a fundamental human right but a duty to speak one’s mind for the sake of the common good.

• Within an hour of the massacre at the headquarters of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper, thousands of Parisians spontaneously gathered at the Place de la Republique. Rallying beneath the monumental statues representing Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, they chanted “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”) and “Charlie! Liberty!” It was a rare moment of French unity that was touching and genuine.

• Forty-eight hours after hosting a massive march under the banner of free expression, France opened a criminal investigation of a controversial French comedian for a Facebook post he wrote about the Charlie Hebdo attack, and then this morning, arrested him for that post on charges of “defending terrorism.” The comedian, Dieudonné (above), previously sought elective office in France on what he called an “anti-Zionist” platform, has had his show banned by numerous government officials in cities throughout France, and has been criminally prosecuted several times before for expressing ideas banned in that country.

Privacy

• The White House has announced a new proposal to fix cybersecurity. Unfortunately, the positive effects will be minor at best; the real issue is not addressed. This is a serious missed opportunity by the Obama adminstration; it will expend a lot of political capital, to no real effect. (There may also be privacy issues; while those are very important, I won’t discuss them in this post.) The proposals focus on two things: improvements to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and provisions intended to encourage information sharing. At most, these will help at the margins; they’ll do little to fix the underlying problems.

• This is similar to FBI director James Comey’s remarks from last year. And it’s equally stupid.

• Activists from the Pirate Party’s youth wing have wiretapped high-level political surveillance hawks at Sweden’s top security conference. They set up an open wi-fi access point at the conference and labeled it “Open Guest”, and then just logged the traffic of about a hundred high-ranking surveillance hawks who argue for more wiretapping, and who connected through the activists’ unencrypted access point. They presented their findings in an op-ed in Swedish this Tuesday.

• An online ad company called Turn is using tracking cookies that come back to life after Verizon users have deleted them. Turn’s services are used by everyone from Google to Facebook.

• David Cameron is to urge Barack Obama to pressure internet firms such as Twitter and Facebook to do more to cooperate with Britain’s intelligence agencies as they seek to track the online activities of Islamist extremists.

• Later this month, the Washington DC Public Library will teach residents how to use the internet anonymization tool Tor as part of a 10 day series designed to shed light on government surveillance, transparency, and personal privacy.

• A series called “Orwellian America,” held by a publicly funded entity mere minutes from a Congress and administration that ​allowed the NSA’s surveillance programs to spin wildly out of control certainly seems subversive. But the library says it wasn’t really intended that way.

• Facebook today debuted Facebook at Work, a new pilot program the company is testing to try its hand at social networking in the business world. The product is only available to select partners on the web, as well as Android and iOS apps available on Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

• Danish authorities look set to bring back mandatory internet session logging despite an EU ruling last year that blanket data retention is illegal.

• Last May the European Court of Justice (ECJ) concluded that the EU Data Retention Directive was “a particularly serious interference with fundamental rights”, meaning countries across the EU were forced to re-evaluate their national laws on data retention.

• “There is something about the internet that isn’t working anymore,” is the line that opens filmmaker Jonathan Minard’s short documentary on Deep Lab—a group of women hackers, artists, and theorists who gathered at Carnegie Mellon University in December to answer the question of what, exactly, that disquieting “something” is. The film premieres on Motherboard today.

• I’ve been working on some other blog posts, including a conclusion of (or at least an installment in) this exciting series on zero knowledge proofs. That’s coming soon, but first I wanted to take a minute to, well, rant.

• The subject of my rant is this fascinating letter authored by NSA cryptologist Michael Wertheimer in February’s Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Dr. Wertheimer is currently the Director of Research at NSA, and formerly held the position of Assistant Deputy Director and CTO of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for Analysis

Civil Rights

• Raif Badawi, the Saudi liberal convicted of publishing a blog, has been told he will again be flogged 50 times on Friday – the second part of his 1,000-lash sentence which also includes a 10-year jail term.

• Sir William Hunter was a senior British civil servant and in 1871 published a book which warned of “fanatic swarms” of Sunni Muslims who had “murdered our subjects”, financed by “men of ample fortune”, while a majority of Muslims were being forced to decide “once and for all, whether [they] should play the part of a devoted follower of Islam” or a “peaceable subject”.

• More people were using the mail to get high, and Jared Der-Yeghiayan knew it.

• “We hadn’t seen ecstasy being seized in letter-class like that in a long time,” said the Homeland Security special agent. “Since I’d been at O’Hare.”

• Der-Yeghiayan was speaking on Wednesday from the stand in a Manhattan federal courtroom, where 30-year-old Ross Ulbricht stands accused of being the mastermind in the most successful drug-dealing website of all time, the Silk Road.

• We’ve written before about faulty legal activities based on nothing stronger than an IP address. An IP address is not a person, but many entities have decided it’s “close enough.” Fortunately, the judicial system has (occasionally) stepped in to correct this assumption, usually in the context of copyright infringement lawsuits.

• There are those in the law enforcement arena that know an IP address can’t be used as an identifier. Careless statements get made about the “danger” of open WiFi connections, or it’s suggested that accessing open networks should be illegal. This doesn’t have much to do with keeping citizens safe, but it does have everything to do with easing law enforcement’s investigative workload.

• The Los Angeles Police Department isn’t laughing about a videotaped prank involving a “coke” sale that they say misused police resources, was misleading and potentially dangerous.

• The video, titled “Coke Prank on Cops,” was posted to YouTube on Monday with the caption, “officer we have some coke in our trunk.” By 3 a.m. ET Thursday the video had been watched more than 440,000 times.

• On Friday, shortly after the gunmen were killed by French forces in a raid on a printing plant outside of Paris, a source from within al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) provided The Intercept with a series of messages and statements taking responsibility for the attacks, asserting that AQAP’s leadership “directed” the raid on the magazine to avenge the honor of the Prophet Mohammed.

• According to public records, at least 58 U.S. politicians have accepted campaign contributions from David Duke supporters. This includes candidates for federal office, current and former Members of Congress, and one former president. Oh, and one Democrat. This information is all accessible in public records and we’ve presented it here at the bottom of this article.

• The United States has a prison crisis of epic proportions. With just five percent of the world population, but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, the United States has, far and away, the highest incarceration rate, the largest number of prisoners, and the largest percentage of citizens with a criminal record of any country in the world.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Most eyes have been on the US arrangements, due to be announced at the end of February, but quite a storm has emerged on the Indian sub-continent almost overnight, forcing one of the world’s fastest growing economies to face up to decisions on the future of the internet on its own soil, reports Techdirt.

• We recently reported on extraordinarily wide-ranging censorship imposed on Internet users in India. That’s rather obscured another story that’s been playing out there: an attempt to undermine net neutrality in the country.

• [...]

• That’s a clear attack on the principle that all IP packets should be treated equally, and prompted the creation of the site Net Neutrality India to raise awareness of what’s at stake, as well as vague promises from the Indian government to “look into it.”

• We’ve been saying for months that while the FCC may have a role to play in promoting and protecting an open Internet, Internet users shouldn’t rely entirely on the FCC. That’s because, at root, the “neutrality” problem is a competition problem. Internet access providers, especially certain very large ones, have done a pretty good job of divvying up the nation to leave most Americans with only one or two choices for decent high-speed Internet access. If there’s no competition, customers can’t vote with their wallets when ISPs behave badly. Oligopolies also have little incentive to invest, not only in decent customer service, but also in building out world-class Internet infrastructure so that U.S. innovators can continue to compete internationally. Even in cities like San Francisco and New York, we pay more for slower connections than people in many Asian and European cities.

• The U.S. broadband market has failed. It’s time for the people to step in.

• Hotel group Marriott International has announced it will stop blocking guests from using personal wi-fi kits.

• The firm was fined $600,000 (£395,000) last year by a US watchdog after a complaint that it had jammed mobile hotspots at a hotel in Nashville.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Hoping to deter and stop the ongoing threat of ‘cyber’ attacks President Obama unveiled new cybersecurity plans yesterday. While the plans don’t reference copyright infringement, the MPAA notes that Congress should keep online piracy in mind as it drafts its new cybersecurity bill.

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