● 01.16.15

● Links 16/1/2015: Chapeau 21, Tails 1.2.3

Posted in News Roundup at 6:18 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Failing to add a check for an empty variable has left some Steam users on Linux running a recursive delete of their entire filesystem with user privileges.

• The Linux landscape is ever changing. Over the last few years, the flagship open source tool has found levels of acceptance thought unreachable for software running on a free platform. That momentum isn’t going to let up. In fact, 2015 promises to be a very bright year in Linux land ─ from enterprise Linux all the way down to the desktop. In fact, the Linux desktop should find 2015 to be a rather exciting time.

• Why? Applications. There are some outstanding projects on the horizon that could easily bring the Linux desktop into a realm of relevancy it has yet to enjoy.

• Let’s take a look at six such projects and see what they have to offer.

• Now that Linux has essentially gained parity with Windows across the enterprise, solution providers have a vested interest in where customers who will make use of the open-source platform in 2015 are headed. In a new survey of 115 customers, Red Hat finds that, in general, optimism concerning IT spending in 2015 is relatively high with investments in mobile computing and big data topping the priority list. Just over half those customers are planning new application deployments on Linux, but perhaps most interesting to the solution providers in the channel is the fact that 26 percent are planning on migrating application workloads from Windows to Linux and another 15 percent are planning to migrate from Unix to Linux. Most of the application workloads also appear headed for private or hybrid clouds rather than public clouds. Also of note to solution providers should be the fact that 33 percent either already have or plan to embrace containers as an alternative form of virtualization in 2015 for reasons, ranging from the ability to deploy applications faster to streamlining testing and development.

• After such a banner year of Linux releases it might seem overly pessimistic to pause and ask this question: is there a future beyond this?

• The answer is, of course, “yes” – or rather it’s yes, but… The qualifying “but” can take many forms, depending on who you talk to and what their stake is in the game.

• Even if you take the most optimistic outlook for the future of the Linux desktop, to what end do all these distros continue turning out all these great releases year after year? Are we waiting for the day when there are no more laptops or desktops left?

Desktop

• Apple has always had attractive and stylish hardware, but now it seems that some users are opting to run Linux instead of OS X on their Macbooks. A redditor asked about this trend and got some very interesting answers.

Server

• My current setup at home involves a HP Microserver. It has four drive bays carrying two SSDs (for home directories) and two Western Digital RE4 2TB drives for bulk data storage (photos, source tarballs and other things that don’t change often). Each pair of drives is mirrored. I chose the RE4 because I use RAID1 and they offer good performance and error recovery control which is useful in any RAID scenario.

• iTWire interviews ESET Malware Researcher Olivier Bilodeau, on his way to be one of the speakers at the 2015 Linux.conf.au conference, presenting on advanced Linux server-side threats.

Kernel Space

• Following his keynote speech at the Linux.conf.au Conference in Auckland, New Zealand, Torvalds opened a Q&A session by fielding a question from Nebula One developer Matthew Garrett that accused Torvalds of having an abrasive tone in the Linux kernel mailing list. “Some people think I’m nice and are shocked when they find out different,” Torvalds said in response (quoted via multiple Twitter accounts of the event). “I’m not a nice person, and I don’t care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel—that’s what’s important to me.”

• On Thursday, Linux legend Linus Torvalds sent a lengthy statement to Ars Technica responding to statements he made in Auckland, New Zealand earlier that day about diversity and “niceness” in the open source sector.

• “What I wanted to say [at the keynote]—and clearly must have done very badly—is that one of the great things about open source is exactly the fact that different people are so different,” Torvalds wrote via e-mail. “I think people sometimes look at it as being just ‘programmers,’ which is not true. It’s about all the people who are more oriented toward commercial things, too. It’s about all those people who are interested in legal issues—and the social ones, too!”

• If there is strength in numbers, there is a whole lot of strength in the open source movement for Internet of Things technology. On January 14, the IoTivity open source project announced a preview release of of its technology that is being developed as a Linux Foundation Collaboration Project.

• The Linux Foundation is also the home of the AllSeen Alliance IoT project that is based around Qualcomm’s open-source AllJoyn framework. It is unclear if there is any overlap between IoTivity and AllSeen’s inititiatives. The Linux Foundation did not respond to a request for a comment from Datamation on any potential overlap between the projects. That said, there has always been a lot of choice within the Linux and open source ecosystem and having multiple IoT options isn’t a surprise.

• Systemd is coming to a linux distro near you.

• In fact, if you’re using RHEL 7+, CentOS 7+, Fedora 15+ or Arch, you’re already using systemd. You can always stick to a distribution that stays clear of systemd, but chances are you’ll eventually run into systemd — so we may as well learn to get along with it.

• The latest version of the stable Linux kernel, 3.12.36, has been announced by Jiri Slaby and it has arrived with a fair number of changes and improvements.

Applications

• The official definition of NTP (Network Time Protocol) says that it is a “protocol designed to synchronize the clocks of computers over a network.”

• To participate in that synchronization of clocks, a computer must be running either an NTP daemon (server) or an NTP client. A computer providing NTP services to other computers is an NTP server, while the one syncing to an NTP server is an NTP client.

• Popcorn Time is an app that allows users to stream movies and TV shows directly from torrents, without having to save the files locally. It’s still under development, but it’s quite stable and new features are being added all the time.

• Wouldn’t it be great if there was a cloud based file backup system that put Linux FIRST? One that made it so we didn’t have to use FUSE? One that didn’t put out a Windows client first and the Linux client was an afterthought? One that you could get installed and configured quickly and easily which would allow you to ‘set it and forget it’? Me too!

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The game has some minor tweaks to the structure compared to Injustice, but it’s overwhelmingly similar. Our Shaun Musgrave, a veteran of Injustice, wrote up a guide on how to play the game without spending money and discussing how to do well in the game. Blocking is very important with the combat being based around grappling. Defnitely check that out. If you never played Injustice and prefer wrestlers to superheroes, check this out regardless of the platform, it’s one of the better ways to do not just a mobile-friendly fighting game, but also a fair free-to-play game.

• Nostalgia junkies will be pleased to hear that Super Mario 64 is getting a complete overhaul as fans are rebuilding the game from scratch using the FOSS Blender Game Engine with a Linux release confirmed.

• The remake of the popular classic ‘Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee’ was released for PlayStation 4 last summer, and now the long wait for the Linux version of the game is coming to an end.

• With two weeks left until its January 27th release, Double Fine have announced that Grim Fandango is now available for pre-order via GOG.com. At the same time, a new Grim Fandango Remastered website has gone live, and a third episode of 2 Player Productions’ The Making of Grim Fandango documentary series has been released.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• According to François, “we don’t want to let ourselves be pushed around and make choices that go against our beliefs. This freedom of choice is exactly the advantage that a public institution has over a private school.” All other animation schools in France, fellow members of RECA (the network of French schools of animation), are watching ATI avidly to see how this new methodology works out.

• 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.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• gnome-battery-bench is basically usable as is. The main remaining thing to do with it is to spend some time designing and recording a couple of sequences that better reflect actual usage. The current tests I checked in are basically just placeholders.

• Tarballs are due on 2015-01-19 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.15.4…

• The newest GNOME application is for testing your laptop’s battery power use under various scenarios.

Distributions

New Releases

• SparkyLinux 3.6-dev2 is the second testing release of out spin with LXQt.

• UberStudent is a Linux distribution for everyone, especially higher education and advanced secondary students, people who teach them, and their schools. It is designed for Linux beginners while being equally satisfying to advanced users.

• Black Lab Linux, a distribution based on Kubuntu and that uses one of the latest KDE packages, has been upgraded for version 6.0 and is now available for download. Users might associate the name of Black Lab Linux with a GNOME desktop, but the developer also had a KDE edition of the operating system, which they didn’t bother too much to upgrade. Now they have finally got around to it, and backed by popular demand, and they made quite a few improvements.

• Want a new and improved hypervisor for your cloud or data-center? Then consider the latest edition of Xen, Xen 4.5, from the Linux Foundation’s Xen Project Collaborative Project.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• I am delighted to announce the release of Chapeau 21 “Obree”.

• Like most Linux distros, Fedora is a massive, sprawling project. Frankly, it’s sprawl-y to the point that it has felt unfocused and a bit lost at times. Just what is Fedora? The distro has served as a kind of showcase for GNOME 3 ever since GNOME 3 hit the beta stage. So Fedora in theory is meant to target everyday users, but at the same time the project pours tremendous energy into building developer tools like DevAssistant. Does that make Fedora a developer distro? A newbie-friendly GNOME showcase? A server distro? An obscure robotics distro?

Debian Family

Derivatives

• 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.

• Tails, a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and that helps you use the Internet anonymously, is now at version 1.2.3 and is available for download and testing.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Caffeine is a tool used to temporarily prevent the activation of the screensaver / lock screen / sleep mode when using full-screen windows. The application is useful when using video players that don’t do this automatically, when listening to music while not using the computer, etc.

• It’s easy to think that Ubuntu developers are usually working only on the next version of the operating systems, but they also put a lot of effort into the distros they already released. For example, an important Unity update has been unveiled now for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

• Canonical has updated the Firefox packages for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems. If you have this application already installed, you only need to update your system

• Juju first debuted in Ubuntu 11.10, the “Oneiric Ocelot,” back in October of 2011. The word “juju” is a word meaning magic in the African language from which the name Ubuntu itself was derived. Ubuntu Linux Server The promise of Juju is easier application and service deployment, which is enabled by way of a number of Juju components.

• While it already has many applications specially developed for it, Canonical’s Will Cooke has managed to make LibreOffice’s Writer tool (developed for X.org) run on Ubuntu Touch.

• For now, Ubuntu’s convergence concept has been previously demoed by Jono Bacon, Ubuntu’s former Community Manager, via the Weather App and the Karma Machine.

• A single GParted vulnerability has been found and corrected in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin). The developers have issued a patch and the GParted app has been updated.

• One of the problems on Ubuntu platforms is that the Software Update tool doesn’t remove the old kernels after an upgrade, but the Ubuntu devs are now talking whether their tool should be used to perform this kind of cleaning.

Flavours and Variants

• Recently, the Xfce edition of Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” was released. It and the MATE edition are notable in featuring…Compiz! This really caught my eye, so I wanted to review it. There are several other changes too, so I figured that it would be worthwhile to review the Xfce edition rather than the MATE edition, given that I already tried the MATE edition of Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” not too long ago. Note that Ubuntu-based Linux Mint is sticking only to LTS releases, so a major release will roughly coincide (lagging by a month or so) with the Ubuntu LTS release, and then decimal point releases will be put out every 6 months or so and be given a new code name while still sticking with the last LTS release as its base. As far as this review goes, I tried this as usual as a live USB system made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what it’s like.

• We’re starting 2015 with exciting news. Linux Mint and CompuLab will be announcing a brand new unit called “MintBox Mini” in Q2 2015.

• The Linux Mint project has announced the MintBox Mini, which is a mini PC that is basically small enough to almost fit into a pocket.

• CompuLab’s MintBox computers have always had a relatively small form factor, and have gotten very positive reviews from customers on Amazon. But now they are getting even smaller with the upcoming release of the MintBox Mini. The MintBox Mini is expected to debut sometime in the second quarter of 2015 and will sell for $295.

• [...]

• Tails is a Linux distribution geared toward helping you protect your privacy and anonymity while you use the Internet. The latest release is version 1.2.3 and you can download it now.

Devices/Embedded

• The OIC’s “IoTivity” project released a v0.9.0 preview of its open source IoT framework software, with ready-to-test builds for Arduino, Tizen, and Yocto.

• IoTivity is a project sponsored by the Open Internet Consortium (OIC), an industry association formed last July in order to develop open source standards and software for providing “interoperability and services” to potentially billions of Internet-of-Things devices.

Phones

Android

• Android: A while back, Adobe released a Lightroom companion app for iOS phones and tablets. Now, Android is catching up with a version of the app for phones. And it starts with a 30-day free trial.

• It’s no secret that Adobe hasn’t exactly done a stellar job at keeping parity between its collection of apps for iOS and Android. iOS users, for instance, enjoy Adobe Illustrator Line and Draw, Color CC, Premiere Clip, Brush CC, and many more that have yet to see the light of day on the Play Store.

• Originally discovered by Notebook Italia, both tablets are powered by an Intel quad-core Bay Trail Atom Z3735F processor. Accompanying the processor package is 2GB of RAM, as well as 32GB of internal storage. Both the Pro Slate and Pro Tablet come with 10.1-inch displays, as well as 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC.

• In terms of specs, the tablet description isn’t far off. The consumer model is powered by a Snapdragon 805 system-on-a-chip, which frequently appears in flagship phones and tablets from Android OEMs. The current demo unit is running Android Kit Kat, though the final release will sport Lollipop.

• If you’re still waiting for your OnePlus One to make the official jump to Android 5.0 Lollipop we have some good news. The Cyanogen-powered phone is getting its own specialized version of Google’s latest mobile OS in February, according to Cyanogen founder Steve Kondik.

• Last week on our Android customization series, we went a little crazy with device security, rigging things up using Tasker to take a photo of anyone accessing your device. We were sure to save the device’s current GPS coordinates as a part of the file name of the photo, making it as likely as possible you can recover a lost device.

• Back in December, the Nexus 7 (2012) received a new factory image with the build number LRX22G, containing an update to Android 5.0.2. Now the Nexus 7 (2013) Wi-Fi and Nexus 10 are following suite, as factory images have just landed for both of these tablets.

Free Software/Open Source

• The plain English takeaway is that faster training of neural networks will now be widely available via open source project Torch.

Events

• Next week will be the first Berlin ownCloud meetup of 2015.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• L10n teams are incredibly diverse in nature, and Mozilla is no exception. At the meetup, I had a chance to meet people of many different cultures and languages who are all working to enable their Mozilla products. Michael Bauer, for example, works on Scottish Gaelic, a language spoken by less than 100,000 people. Michael’s efforts helped Scottish Gaelic be present on several applications.

SaaS/Big Data

• As predicted, 2015 is turning out to be the year when many IT departments are moving from evaluation stage to deployment stage for OpenStack cloud instances.

BSD

• As countless user surveys have shown, Linux is a predominant platform for many cloud deployments, with Ubuntu reigning king. In fact, many surveys show that more than half of OpenStack deployments are built on Ubuntu.

Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

Science

• For the past 10 years, I’ve had a front row seat to the transition of they way young adults approach IT work. As a professor teaching software architecture at the National Technology University, I’ve witnessed a lot of changes in students today.

• First, I need to point out that my class is an elective for students in the final year of their degree. They typically enroll in my “IT Project Architecture” class because they want to learn and they want to get a job after they graduate, which tends to eliminate any slackers from my class.

Security

• Most Americans still don’t worry about malware on their mobile devices. But the halcyon days of Android innocence are fast coming to a close, according to a new report by San Francisco-based mobile-security-software developer Lookout, Inc.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• In a follow-up to coverage on Democracy Now! over the past few days, the news network CNN has been given some direct, on-air criticism of its use of so-called terrorism “experts” for discussion of violent attacks like the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Speaking to CNN, The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill was asked about his comments during a Democracy Now! interview on Monday in which he criticized corporate media coverage of the attack’s aftermath. Scahill called out CNN and other networks for using pundits he said have no right to call themselves “terrorism experts.”

• The Secret Service is forcing out four of its most senior officials while two others are retiring…

• Years after the U.S. military tried to create a new army in Iraq — at a cost of over $25 billion — American trainers have returned to help rebuild the country’s fighting force.

• Emily Miller, the chief investigative reporter for Washington, D.C.’s Fox affiliate WTTG, is scheduled to speak at a rally organized by Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), a far-right pro-gun group. VCDL has previously published racially charged content in its newsletter and suggested violent action against the government may be an “option” for gun advocates.

• “Congress needs to show patience,” Mr. Obama said during a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain. “There is no good argument for us to try to undercut, undermine the negotiations until they have played themselves out.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Last year broke another global heat record, becoming the hottest since 1880. But did it feel that way to you? Probably not, since it was Canada’s coolest in 18 years.

• NASA and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced today that last year broke the global temperature record for the third time in a decade.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Fox News pundit Steve Emerson drew international ridicule for claiming Birmingham, England, was a “no-go zone” for non-Muslims (FAIR Blog, 1/12/15). But he was far from alone on Fox in advancing this xenophobic fantasy of urban areas lost to Western civilization.

• Audrey Cooper does not believe it should have taken a century and a half for the San Francisco Chronicle to name its first female editor-in-chief.

• And she should know. She’s that editor.

• Cooper, who was named to the top post at the Chronicle on Wednesday, said a glass ceiling still exists at news organizations and she’s personally had experiences where she felt she wasn’t treated equally because of her gender.

• “Obviously there is (a glass ceiling),” Cooper said. “I think all of the coverage of [New York Times editor Jill Abramson's 2014] departure laid bare a lot of things that other female editors felt but hadn’t really articulated. They’re much more subtle than people might think. Sexism in general is a lot more subtle than it used to be 20 years ago. Yes, I’ve had the experiences that I think that I was not treated the same as men based on my gender.”

Censorship

• Weighing in on last week’s terror in France and the debate over freedom of expression it stirred, Pope Francis said en route to the Philippines that killing “in the name of God” is wrong, but it is also wrong to “provoke” people by belittling their religion.

• Immediately upon unveiling its new cover — a depiction of Muhammad — the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Tuesday reignited the debate pitting free speech against religious sensitivities that has embroiled Europe since 12 people were killed during an attack on its Paris offices by Muslim extremists a week ago.

• The cover shows the bearded prophet shedding a tear and holding up a sign saying, “I am Charlie,” the rallying cry that has become synonymous with support of the newspaper and free expression. Above the cartoon on a green background is the headline “All is forgiven.”

Privacy

• In response to the terrorist attacks in Paris, the UK government is redoubling its efforts to engage in mass surveillance.

• Prime minister David Cameron wants to reintroduce the so-called snoopers’ charter – properly, the Communications Data Bill – which would compel telecoms companies to keep records of all internet, email and cellphone activity. He also wants to ban encrypted communications services.

• Cameron seems to believe terrorist attacks can be prevented if only mass surveillance, by the UK’s intelligence-gathering centre GCHQ and the US National Security Agency, reaches the degree of perfection portrayed in his favourite TV dramas, where computers magically pinpoint the bad guys. Computers don’t work this way in real life and neither does mass surveillance.

• Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered 17 people, were known to the French security services and considered a serious threat. France has blanket electronic surveillance. It didn’t avert what happened.

• The FBI had, and most likely still has, a much closer involvement with the NSA’s mass surveillance programs than previously thought – with access to raw foreign intelligence and data on Americans gleaned from the PRISM program.

• The 231-page report, from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, was obtained – albeit in a heavily redacted form – after a Freedom of Information request by The New York Times, a request made possible using key details leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

• The report finds that in 2008 – almost since the inception of the PRISM program, which allows the NSA access to citizens’ information stored by Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yahoo! among others – the FBI had access to slurped private data.

• It has invoked the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to catch viewers evading the £145 charge.

• The Act, which regulates the powers of public bodies to carry out surveillance and investigation, was introduced in 2000 to safeguard national security.

• But a series of extensions mean it can now be applied to investigate minor offences, including not paying the licence fee.

• The chairman of the youth wing of the Swedish Pirate Party successfully fooled attendees at a major Swedish security and defense conference into connecting to an open Wi-Fi network that he controlled—as a way to protest mass digital surveillance.

• Double agent working for US, identified only as Markus R, may have sold top-secret details of 3,500 German intelligence officers posted abroad, according to Bild newspaper

• [...]

• An employee of the BND, Germany’s equivalent of MI6, Markus R worked in the registry section of its overseas operations department, where he had access to top secret documents including the identities of operatives posted abroad.

• That the CIA did block him and Doug Miller, a fellow FBI agent assigned to the “Alec Station,” the cover name for CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, from notifying bureau headquarters about the terrorists has been told before, most notably in a 2009 Nova documentary on PBS, “The Spy Factory.” Rossini and Miller related how they learned earlier from the CIA that one of the terrorists (and future hijacker), Khalid al-Mihdhar, had multi-entry visas on a Saudi passport to enter the United States. When Miller drafted a report for FBI headquarters, a CIA manager in the top-secret unit told him to hold off. Incredulous, Miller and Rossini had to back down. The station’s rules prohibited them from talking to anyone outside their top-secret group.

• As we try to process our rage and grief after attacks like the one on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, Chris Hayes examines how we are susceptible to mistakes that can have devastating consequences.

• It’s academic, Google Glass is reported to now be on the way out. I remember in May 2014 I voiced my concerns about the product, the dislike of its camera pointing at you and also mentioned the fan boys/girls who defended the device with cries of “Glass Hater”. Seems I was right, because the views I aired appear to have been echoed by potential consumers (or the lack thereof).

• Laura Poitras’s “Citizenfour,” about Edward J. Snowden’s leak of National Security Agency documents, has long been seen as the front-runner for the best documentary Oscar. It plays out like a thriller while touching on one of the rawest nerves of our time – government surveillance of private citizens.

• Of course getting the actual nomination is another thing altogether. What had been seen as “Citizenfour’s” biggest challenger, the Roger Ebert film “Life Itself,” failed to get a nod.

• In the wake of recent terror attacks in Europe, British Prime Minister David Cameron has called for an end to secure communications technology.

• In other words, he wants to ensure that you will never again be able to use encryption technology to maintain privacy.

• A secret US cybersecurity report warned that government and private computers were being left vulnerable to online attacks from Russia, China and criminal gangs because encryption technologies were not being implemented fast enough.

Civil Rights

• The Obama administration has used the Espionage Act to wage an unprecedented war on national security whistle-blowers.

• “Both the CIA Inspector General and the review board appointed by Director Brennan have now concluded that the CIA’s unauthorized search of Senate files was improper. It is incredible that no one at the CIA has been held accountable for this very clear violation of Constitutional principles. Director Brennan either needs to reprimand the individuals involved or take responsibility himself. So far he has done neither.

• The Central Intelligence Agency will not discipline any of the five agency employees who accessed Senate Intelligence Committee computer systems last year during the Senate investigation of abusive interrogation tactics by the CIA.

• While the CIA’s decision was in line with a review that the agency commissioned, it contradicts the agency’s own internal watchdog, the CIA Office of the Inspector General, which had concluded that the employees accessed Senate computers “improperly” and didn’t respond with candor when questioned.

• No Central Intelligence Agency personnel will be disciplined for intruding into computers being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee as part of a highly-sensitive investigation into the agency’s use of harsh interrogation techniques against terror suspects, the agency said Wednesday.

• Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan’s decision last year to quietly flag White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough to a developing showdown with the Senate drew repeated warnings at the time from a CIA lawyer who said such contact was unwise because it might undermine a criminal investigation or appear to do so, a report released Wednesday revealed.v

• Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan consulted the White House before directing agency personnel to sift through a walled-off computer drive being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to construct its investigation of the agency’s torture program, according to a recently released report by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General.

• The Inspector General’s report, which was completed in July but only released by the agency on Wednesday, reveals that Brennan spoke with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough before CIA employees were ordered to “use whatever means necessary” to determine how certain sensitive internal documents had wound up in Senate investigators’ hands. The conversation with McDonough came after Brennan first issued the directive, but before he reiterated it to a CIA attorney leading the probe.

• Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a highly unusual public appearance Thursday — taking the witness stand for the prosecution in a criminal case against a former CIA officer on trial for leaking details of a top-secret spy program.

• Rice, who once traveled the globe as America’s top diplomat, found herself describing another type of diplomacy to a federal court jury: the Bush administration’s effort in 2003 to kill a New York Times story that threatened to reveal a CIA effort to undermine Iran’s nuclear program by secretly providing Tehran with flawed plans for an atomic weapon.

• The outrageous whitewash issued yesterday by the CIA panel John Brennan hand-picked to lead the investigation into his agency’s spying on Senate staffers is being taken seriously by the elite Washington media, which is solemnly reporting that officials have been “cleared” of any “wrongdoing“.

• This week, in a federal courtroom, I’ve heard a series of government witnesses testify behind a screen while expounding on a central precept of the national security state: The CIA can do no wrong.

• The United States transferred five more detainees — all of them Yemenis — from the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Wednesday, the Defense Department announced. Their release intensified the dispute between the Obama administration and several Republican senators over President Obama’s recent flurry of transfers as he seeks to empty the American-run prison.

• In the aftermath of a series of brutal terrorist attacks that claimed the lives of 17, including eight journalists at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, police officers and hostages at a kosher food market, more than three million people marched in Paris in solidarity with the victims and in support of freedom of the press. Forty heads of state also joined the march, but as many critics pointed out, some of the nations they represented, such as Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Russia and Israel, have poor records when it comes to press freedom at home. The U.S., criticized by some for not sending a high-level representative to participate in the Paris march, also has a flawed record on freedom of the press.

• The FBI and federal prosecutors have recommended felony charges against former CIA director David Petraeus for allegedly providing classified information to a woman with whom he had an extramarital affair. Petraeus resigned in 2012 after admitting to cheating on his wife with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. The recommendation of charges stems from a probe into whether Petraeus gave Broadwell access to his CIA email account and other sensitive material. Attorney General Eric Holder was supposed to have decided by the end of last year on whether to indict. According to The New York Times, the delay has frustrated some federal officials “who have questioned whether Petraeus has received special treatment at a time Holder has led a crackdown” on government whistleblowers. On Sunday, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California urged the Department of Justice not to bring criminal charges against Petraeus, saying “the four-star general of our generation” and “very brilliant man” has “suffered enough.” We are joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who calls Feinstein’s comments “one of the most disgusting you will ever hear. What she’s actually saying is that because David Petraeus is a really important person, that he should be immunized from consequences for his lawbreaking … Dianne Feinstein has called for the prosecution of all sorts of leakers, and yet she exempts David Petraeus.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Even as China cuts access to some foreign online services, it is laying more fiber optic cables to improve its connection to global Internet networks.

• China recently added seven new access points to the world’s Internet backbone, adding to the three points that connect through Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced on Monday.

• Frustrated over the number of Internet providers that are available to you? If so, you’re like many who are limited to just a handful of broadband companies. But now President Obama wants to change that, arguing that choice and competition are lacking in the U.S. broadband market. On Wednesday, Obama will unveil a series of measures aimed at making high-speed Web connections cheaper and more widely available to millions of Americans. The announcement will focus chiefly on efforts by cities to build their own alternatives to major Internet providers such as Comcast, Verizon or AT&T — a public option for Internet access, you could say.

• Expansion in DNS means you may struggle to handle email from Chinese or Arabic domains

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