● 01.21.15

● Links 21/1/2015: Andrew Tridgell, Torvalds Being Baited

Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• ArduPilot is the open source software which controls our own Vulture 2 spaceplane on the 3DR Pixhawk autopilot. As Tridge demonstrated, it can now be deployed on a range of hardware which, with the addition of a suitable interface, allows aficionados to create a fully-functioning autopilot.

• Last year, for example, a group of Russians successfully raised funds for the Navio, an autopilot shield for the Raspberry Pi.

• As part of his talk, Tridge connected live to a model aircraft in Canberra, in this case equipped with an embedded Linux box – the BeagleBone Black – coupled to a PixHawk Fire Cape (PXF).

Desktop

• I often ask myself what the current state of video editing is for free and open source software (FOSS). Here are my thoughts.

• I’ve spent many years in the visual effects (VFX) industry from the perspective of being either an artist, compositor, video editor, or systems engineer. (I’ve even got film creds on IMDB!) In the past, I had the pleasure of cutting on, training people on, setting up, and supporting Avid Media Composer, the cream of the crop of professional real-time video editing tools for film and TV alike—at least before things like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere became useful enough to professionals.

• Every few months, new articles roll out proclaiming “this year” to be the year of the Linux Desktop. A wide selection of reasons are cited, explanations given, and various acts of patting we Linux users on the backs takes place.

• I’d be first to admit that it’s worth celebrating each time something is made more secure or easier. But we’re still a long ways off from the average person trying out any Linux distributions on their own.

• In this article, I’ll discuss an untapped resource that can be used to get desktop Linux into the homes of casual users and finally jump start Linux adoption outside schools, governments and geek circles.

• Microsoft is engaged in a silent war and it’s actually losing. They are fighting an enemy that is so insidious and so cunning that it’s actually hurting the company more than anything else. The enemy is called Chromebooks and they are using Linux.

• Windows fans are worried that the desktop PC will follow too closely the design of Windows 10 for phones and tablets, and they are right to do so. This all plays out due to Microsoft’s plans for convergence, but it’s a twisted approach that only makes things more complicated than they should be.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds, the founder and lead developer of the Linux open source operating system, has raised controversy with remarks about diversity and “niceness” among open source programmers.

• The number of companies that base their systems (especially those that don’t actually distribute their kernels outside the company) on the long-term stable releases of Linux caught me by surprise. We dismissed the idea of basing on long-term stable releases in Fedora after giving it a try circa Fedora 14, and it generally being a disaster because the bugs being fixed didn’t match up much to the bugs our users were seeing. We found that we got more bugs we cared about being fixed by sticking to the rolling model that Fedora is known for.

• On the Internet, no one cares if you’re a dog, the saying goes. In open source, no one cares if you’re a jerk.

• That seems to be the lesson emerging from Linux founder Linus Torvalds’ latest run-in with the sensitivity police. In the open source world, code is king (or queen). The people who write it don’t necessarily matter.

• He switched to Mandrake Linux because his Windows machine kept crashing and built his Linux skills by tinkering on his home computer. As he learned more, he took a series of sysadmin jobs that were progressively more advanced. He’s now a Linux Foundation Certified Engineer and is looking for his next career opportunity.

• A question and answer session at Australia’s national Linux conference has led to a bitter Twitter attack on Linux creator Linus Torvalds by Shanley Kane, founder of tech and culture essay publisher Model View Culture.

Graphics Stack

• My personal Nvidia repository has seen quite a few updates on versions, CUDA enablements, legacy drivers and Delta RPMS.

• After a decade of working for Intel, he left the company and started working at HP. According to his LinkedIn profile, he’s now serving as a “distinguished technologist” at HP. Prior to joining Intel in late 2005, he had worked for HP for a couple years as an engineer following his SUSE days. The X.Org BoD page has also been updated to reflect his employment now by HP.

• Outside of his open-source graphics roles as the X.Org Server release manager and X.Org BoD member, he also remains a member of the Debian Technical Committee.

Applications

• Right before the 2014 holidays, and more than 10 years after the first line of NetworkManager was typed, we released version 1.0. A huge milestone on the way to making NetworkManager more cooperative, more flexible, more configurable, and more useful than ever before.

• No need for a introduction to Telegram, right? Telegram is a popular free Instant messenger application that can be used to chat with your friends all over the world. Unlike Whatsapp, Telegram is free forever, no ads, no subscription fees. And, the Telegram client is open source too. Telegram is available for many different platforms, including Linux, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows, and Mac OS X. The messages which are sending using telegram are highly encrypted and self-destructive. It is very secure, and there is no limit on the size of your media and chats.

• Linux programs to make a detailed recording of themselves as they run, claimed Undo Software of Cambridge as it announced a product called Live Recorder.

• “Until now, in order to solve a problem reported on code running in production, developers have needed to gather information relating to the failure to write a test case and, or, reproduce the bug in-house,” said the firm. “Recording enables developers to debug an exact copy of the original program’s execution, allowing them to track down bugs without needing to reproduce them in-house, write test cases, or make visits to customer sites.”

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Verde Station is a strange game. It lets you wander through a space station. You’re all on your own for a full year and just need to keep the station running. You can think of it as a sort of a solitude simulator.

• Age of Wonders III is confirmed to be heading to Linux, and it has seen more activity on the SteamDB, but the developer has noted the Linux build is a “bit too Michael Bay at the moment”. Hah!

• For those that don’t know, Michael Bay is a director who loves his explosions, so it means the Linux version is a bit unstable right now, but it is coming!

• Steam has done a lot for us, and they are always adding useful features people get excited about. Game streaming is huge now, and Steam wants a bit of the pie.

• What better way to keep customers around than to get them to buy and watch games on Steam directly?

• Xonotic is a free and fast-paced first-person shooter for multiple platforms, including Linux, developed by a team of people from all over the globe. The latest version is now 0.8 and it gathers a large number of improvements.

• Cue heavy breathing, Shadow Warrior, the fantastic and brutal looking FPS from Flying Wild Hog and Devolver Digital has some very promising signs it’s going to come to Linux.

• The game has “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam from 5,804 people. With very few bad reviews, and that’s quite amazing.

• 4MDoom 11.0 Beta is a new Linux distribution based on 4MLinux distribution and basically booting directly into a game, without any kind of other desktop or features.

• I know quite a few people who will be waiting on this, and it looks like The Banner Saga is preparing their Linux release now.

• Song of the Myrne: What Lies Beneath is an interesting looking mix of adventure and RPG that has graphics similar to “Realm of the Mad God”.

• It has been out on Linux for over a year now, but has finally made its way onto Steam. Nice to see too, as I had completely forgotten about it, did you?

• As a big Star Wars fan I approve of this. STAR WARS: DARK FORCES is now officially available and supported on Linux and is available from GOG.

• Heroes of Steel is a top-down RPG game developed and published on Steam by a studio called Trese Brothers. The developers have just released a patch that makes the game compatible with Linux platforms.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• One gap that has not been closed yet is support for Wacom tablets. The required libinput changes and Wayland protocol extensions did not quite make it into libinput 0.8 – but much of the work has been done and will hopefully land before long.

Distributions

Reviews

• MakuluLinux 6 Cinnamon, a Linux distribution based on the Debian testing branch, Jessie, that provides stability, speed, and a modern desktop, has been upgraded to version 2.0 and is now ready for download.

New Releases

• Today I’ve released a new version of uid_wrapper (1.1.0) with full threading support. Robin Hack a colleague of mine spent a lot of time improving the code and writing tests for it. It now survives funny things like forking in a thread. We also added two missing functions and fixed several bugs. uid_wrapper is a tool to help you writing tests for your application.

• HandyLinux, a Linux distribution based on Debian and Xfce that comes with a special kind of launcher and desktop interface, has been upgraded to version 1.8.0. The developers have made a large number of improvements and that is quite obvious from the big changelog, although many of them are not very complex.

Arch Family

• Manjaro Linux has received a new update pack and the developers have upgraded many of the core components and applications. This particular update was made available for testing more than a week ago and now it’s ready in its stable form.

Ballnux/SUSE

• For the past several years, there have been two semi-official rolling release distributions for openSuSE Linux. The obvious one, the ‘Factory’ distribution, was actually supposed to be where development for the next release was going on, but a lot of people (including me) were willing to use it despite the inherent instability. I learned the hard way, for example, that the Factory Live images were very frequently the first thing that got broken during the development cycle, and the last thing to get fixed before a new release was made. So it was always better (safer) to use the full-blown installer images.

Red Hat Family

• OpenSCAP support has been integrated into Red Hat Satellite and into the Spacewalk open source management platform.

• The enterprise software company said Tuesday that it has developed an on-premise, private cloud infrastructure with advanced IT services that includes its open-source Linux operation system for the space agency’s user communities.

• The European Space Agency has developed a “flexible and reliable” private cloud infrastructure, called ESA Cloud, which offers advanced IT services for its user communities. ESA Cloud, which partially uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is based on VCE systems, on a blade x86 architecture. It is managed entirely by Orange Business Services.

• Red Hat, Inc. RHT, -0.06% the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the European Space Agency (ESA) has developed an on-premise, private cloud infrastructure that offers advanced IT services for the agency’s user communities. The infrastructure partially uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and has proven to be flexible and reliable – critical for ESA’s environment. After seeing exceptional results, ESA has finalized the implementation of a similar infrastructure for another datacenter.

• Red Hat‘s OpenStack focus continues to move the company beyond its popular distribution of the Linux operating system, and investors are starting to notice. The company’s stock was up around 25 percent last year on the heels of several moves expanding its position and its place in the cloud ecosystem.

• Its bigger vision and strategy is the open hybrid cloud. Red Hat provides common management, common storage and middleware that enables building workloads across footprints in heterogeneous environments. It helps an enterprise with its hybrid strategy by helping put the right workloads in the right place. Open source is the way to make everything work together and enable true hybrid cloud.

Fedora

• I am going to make the uncomfortable and ugly proposal to drop 32 bit in Fedora 23 and only look at 64 bit architectures as primary architectures. All 32 bit architectures (arm7hl, i386) would be moved to being secondary architectures that would require their own build teams and ‘koji’ to maintain builds in future releases. At the moment that would make the only 64 bit primary architecture x86_64 with arm64 and ppc64 possible candidates for mainstream support in F24 (if they aren’t ready by Fedora 23).

• To get a context of changes, you will have to visit the current AskFedora instance and observe the changes. Newer slides and the desktop views are on the way. Even though this takes time, its important to have an idea of how you want your interaction with the application to be and FAD gave me a change to do some mockups before we dive into code and CSS.

• So taking into consideration most of the suggestions I had obtained during the recent Design FAD at Red Hat, the initial slides of desktop version are also ready. Maybe these are enough to start off with a basic CSS template which we can build upon iteratively while we work on more mockups for other major pages in parallel. Here is the updated mockup:

• For KDE users on Fedora, the Fedora 22 release is seeking to focus on the still-maturing Plasma 5 shell that’s powered by KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt5.

• An in-progress change proposal for Fedora 22 is to use Plasma 5 (and KF5/Qt5) with the latest KDE components to be fully-packaged in time for F22, an upgrade path be provided from KDE 4, and to retire any KDE 4 packages in Fedora that aren’t compatible with the “KDE 5″ work.

• Today in Linux news Matt Hartley has the key to getting Linux adopted. Christian Schaller discusses some of the coming attractions of Fedora 22 and Phoronix.com is reporting that KDE 5 may also be coming to Fedora 22. Elsewhere, Jamie Watson gives Tumbleweed a roll and Softpedia.com is reporting that Steam is safe for Linux again.

Debian Family

• Soon after publishing the chromium/chrome extension that allows you to edit Debian online, Moez Bouhlel sent a pull request to the extension’s git repository: all the changes needed to make a firefox extension!

• Debian Linux doesn’t usually make many headlines about commercial software products. But the open source operating system is part of the latest anti-spam and anti-virus platform from Proxmox Server Solutions, which was released this week.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical released a “Snappy” version of its lightweight, Ubuntu Core OS for IoT, featuring an app store, hacker-proof updates, and a 128MB RAM footprint.

• Canonical is today bringing Snappy Ubuntu Core out of the cloud and into physical devices with the reveal of Snappy Core for smart devices.

• Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, wants to bring its operating system to more connected devices and intelligent objects with the launch of its “snappy” Ubuntu Core for the Internet of Things today. Over the last few months, the company launched “snappy” versions of Core on a number of cloud computing services, but given that the whole idea behind Core is to offer stripped-down versions of Ubuntu that developers can then easily customize based on their needs, the Internet of Things and robotics applications are a logical next area of focus for Canonical.

• Ubuntu could soon been powering all manner of connected devices and autonomous machines with the newly unveiled Snappy Ubuntu Core, which has been designed specifically for the Internet of Things.

• As the latest and lightest version of the Ubuntu operating system, Snappy — as we will affectionately refer to it — is aimed at developers who want to create connected devices or robots using an open, safe system that isn’t overly clunky, and so can be easily customised.

• Ubuntu has released a number of patches for security vulnerabilities in several versions of the OS, including some remote code execution flaws in Thunderbird, which is included with Ubuntu.

• Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS have been updated in order to fix a couple of RPM vulnerabilities that were identified.

Flavours and Variants

• Bodhi is a minimalistic Linux operating system based on Ubuntu and that features low system requirements. The developers have just released a new Reloaded edition for the distro, but they decided to keep the RC tag, at least for now.

• Here’s some news that should make Bodhi Linux users happy. Jeff Hoogland has returned to Bodhi in his former position as project manager/lead developer.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Tizen

• Recent leaks show three new Samsung Tizen devices: a pair of cameras, and a round-faced “Orbis” watch with a digital crown, bezel, and wireless charging.

Android

• Brief news items of note for Lifehacker readers, including: Get 73 per cent off 20×40-inch canvas photo prints from Big W, crashed RC plane captures amazing aquatic life, the worst bugs in Android 5.0 Lollipop (and how to fix them).

• Android 4.3 and earlier suffers from a vulnerability Google doesn’t plan on patching itself. Jack Wallen tells you what you can do to avoid possible exploits on your aging Android device.

• If you’re sceptical about rooting your Android smartphone for several reasons but still wonder what rooting exactly is or should you root your device or why do rooted phones get software updates so quickly and easily or how safe it would be, this article is for you.

• A video by Simrandeep Singh Garcha shows Tizen operating on the Samsung Z1, and demonstrates that Android apps are compatible on Tizen once an extra runtime layer is installed.

• Samsung also unveiled its first range of smart televisions equipped with Tizen at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2015 in Las Vegas, as it seeks to reduce its reliance on Google. Plans for a Tizen TV have been in the works since last year, when the South Korean electronics giant showed off a prototype version at the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco.

• Samsung has also rolled out Tizen-based digital cameras and smartwatches.

• Tizen was born after Intel and the Linux Foundation decided they were going to abandon the MeeGo platform, and is an alternative operating system to Android and Apple’s iOS.

• With Android 5.0 Lollipop Google has slightly improved the lockscreen. There’s now a shortcut to the dialer by swiping left to right, and notifications are more useful and interactive. Shown right on the lockscreen they can be swiped away, slide down to expand, or double tap to instantly unlock right into that app or notification. Everything is simple and smooth, and we still have full-screen album artwork on the lockscreen while playing music.

• QualityTime, a new app for Android devices which launched today, hopes to make you more aware of how much time you spend on your device.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

• Open source storage now has a convention all its own in the form of Vault. Organized by the Linux Foundation, this event will take place for the first time in March with speakers and sessions focused on distributed storage, the Btrfs and Ext4 file systems, memory management and much more. Read on for details.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Canonical published details about a number of Thunderbird vulnerabilities in its Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems, which means that a new version is now available.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Oracle Board of Directors today announced that it has unanimously elected the Honorable Leon Panetta, former U.S. Secretary of Defense and former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to the company’s Board of Directors. The election is effective as of January 19, 2015 and increases the size of the Board to 12 directors.

Public Services/Government

• A public competition has been launched to boost the development of Oskari – a collection of map tools made available as open source by National Land Survey of Finland. Interested software developers have until the end of this month to submit proposals for applications using Oskari or for improvements to the existing tools. National Land Survey of Finland will award EUR 3,000 to the best application and EUR 1,000 for the best concept. Two more prices, EUR 1,000 each, will go to the next best projects.

• Peterborough City Council is looking to drop Microsoft and its “expensive” user agreements in favour of other, more open source applications and collaborative tools. That’s what Richard Godfrey, ICT, strategy, infrastructure and programme manager for Peterborough Council, revealed to Computing in a recent interview.

Licensing

Openness/Sharing

• NON-WRESTLING ORGANISATION the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF) has published its latest Open Data Barometer and awarded the UK government the ‘most open’ crown.

• However, Tim Berners-Lee, head of the WWWF, said that it is a shallow win, and does not mean that the UK government is really open, just more open than others.

• Openness, in these instances, relates to the way in which governments make official data available and usable.

Leftovers

• Page Three has split opinion in recent years. A ‘No more Page Three’ campaign, started in 2012 by Lucy-Ann Holmes and featuring the tagline “boobs aren’t news,” has attracted more than 200,000 signatures. It’s also been backed by MPs and anti-sexism charities.

• Here are 14 nightmare clients you may very well encounter on your quest for success as an independent software developer. May you have strength in recognizing, avoiding, and neutralizing them, when possible. Please feel free to add your own in the comments below.

• Jean-Louis Gassée writes in Monday Note that the painful gestation of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) with its damaged iWork apps, the chaotic iOS 8 launch, iCloud glitches, and the trouble with Continuity, have raised concerns about the quality of Apple software. “It Just Works”, the company’s pleasant-sounding motto, has became an easy target, giving rise to jibes of “it just needs more work”.

• For the past six months or so, I’ve become increasingly concerned about the quality of Apple software. From the painful gestation of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) with its damaged iWork apps, to the chaotic iOS 8 launch, iCloud glitches, and the trouble with Continuity, I’ve gotten a bad feeling about Apple’s software quality management. “It Just Works”, the company’s pleasant-sounding motto, became an easy target, giving rise to jibes of “it just needs more work”.

• The rise of iPad apps such as Microsoft Office would make the transition easier than you might expect, but it’s still no slam-dunk

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• In a recent video from Saudi Arabia, three uniformed security officers and a professional swordsman in a white gown struggled to placate a woman cloaked in black and sitting in the street.

• Surprisingly, there have been a number of mainstream celebrities to actually speak up about the blatant propaganda film and its celebration of death.

• Actor Seth Rogen was even bold enough to compare the movie to a Nazi propaganda film.

• On Tuesday, Shiite insurgents overran Yemen’s presidential palace, posing a coup-style threat to current President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Should Hadi be pushed out, it’ll likely have broad consequences: Hadi had proven himself a loyal ally in the fight against al-Qaeda’s much-feared branch in Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

• The U.S. government should immediately close and evacuate the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a, Yemen, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

• To Khalek, any movie that lionizes Kyle represents “dangerous propaganda that sanitizes a mass killer and rewrites the Iraq War.” She said Kyle was consumed by “unrepentant bloodlust” fueled by “hatred, bigotry and enthusiasm for killing Iraqi ‘savages.’” Khalek got death threats almost immediately for her comments.

• In the wake of this month’s terrorist attacks in Paris, European leaders are calling for significant changes to what has long been a paradox of their borderless continent: Their citizens can move freely, but information about them does not.

• China dismissed accusations it stole F-35 stealth fighter plans as groundless on Monday, after documents leaked by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden on a cyber attack were published by a German magazine.

Transparency Reporting

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (2012) predicted this banality of evil in the digital age, alerting us to how the internet has been transformed into a “threat to human civilization” (p. 1). In his recent book When Google Met WikiLeaks (2014), Assange exposed Google’s part in the hijacking of large swaths of the Internet for surveillance in collusion with the U.S. government. He pointed out how by getting close to Washington halls of power, this Silicon Valley tech giant lost the “language to see, much less to express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing” (p. 60).

Finance

• The Bank of Canada surprised markets today by cutting its key overnight lending rate by a quarter of a percentage point, citing the economic threat posed by plunging oil prices.

• Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz will hold a news conference at 11:15 a.m. ET Wednesday from Ottawa to comment on the bank’s rate cut as well as the lowered growth outlook. CBC is livestreaming his remarks.

• The British Bankers Association (BBA), which represents organisations including Barclays, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland, has written to the Chancellor warning that his push to make Britain a haven for virtual currencies could be putting the country at risk.

• By 2016 the richest 1% of people in the world will own over 50% of its wealth, according to a study by Oxfam.

• The latest calculation shows an increase on the 48% of wealth owned by the wealthiest 1% in 2014.

• Billionaires, world leaders and pop stars are clogging up the skies with their private jets as they descend on the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to liaise over issues such as terrorism, the central banks and growing economic inequality.

• Over the course of this week, approximately 1,700 private jets are expected to fly into the region, resulting airport traffic increasing by 10% which means that landing spots are in short supply.

• In Switzerland, a whistleblower has been found guilty of violating bank secrecy laws by giving information on offshore accounts to WikiLeaks. Rudolf Elmer headed the Cayman Islands office of the bank Julius Baer until his firing in 2002. In 2011, he publicly handed compact discs containing information on offshore account holders to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a bid to reveal what he called the “damaging” impact of hiding money offshore. Elmer’s attorney has vowed to appeal the guilty verdict, which comes with a suspended fine, but no prison time.

• A former private banker found has been found guilty in Switzerland of breaking the country’s strict secrecy laws by passing confidential client data to WikiLeaks in 2007.

• Rudolf Elmer claims he was trying to expose rich tax evaders banking with his former employer, Julius Baer, which fired him in 2002.

• Elmer’s lawyer, Ganden Tethong, says Zurich’s district court also found her client guilty of forging a document purporting to be a letter from the bank to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The mayor of Paris plans to sue Fox News for its reporting on the city in the wake of the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

• “When we’re insulted, and when we’ve had an image, then I think we’ll have to sue, I think we’ll have to go to court, in order to have these words removed,” Mayor Anne Hidalgo told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday. “The image of Paris has been prejudiced, and the honor of Paris has been prejudiced.”

Censorship

• Sky Broadband have announced they will force web-filters on all customers, starting this week, unless the account-holder opts out.

• [...]

• All ISPs promised David Cameron they would make all customers choose whether to use filters or not. Sky is not offering a choice however – they are imposing filtering unless customers opt out – an approach that the government rejected after running their own consultation. In addition, most households do not contain children so, Sky’s default-on approach seems over-reaching.

• Could Sky Broadband be seeking to increase adoption of web filters through “nudge” tactics in order to avoid Government criticism for a lack of uptake? Public interest in activating filters has been low since the Government started pressuring ISPs to introduce them in summer 2013. Ofcom said in July 2014 that just 8% of Sky Broadband subscribers had switched them on. The same report showed a 34% adoption-rate for competitor TalkTalk, who promote filters aggressively, and have made them the default option for new subscribers for a long time. Nudge tactics rely on the principle that most people don’t bother changing defaults.

• As part of David Cameron’s plan to protect young internet users, broadband providers have been forced to offer an “unavoidable choice.” This impels new subscribers to decide whether they want to enable or disable blocks on adult content. However, UK consumers have already highlighted their dislike for such filters, with only one in every seven customers letting the big four UK ISPs guard them from porn and the darker parts of the internet. One of those major providers, Sky, saw just eight percent of customers enable the option before July 2013, but that statistic could change drastically as part of new measures announced today.

Privacy

• “cryptography is bypassed, not penetrated”

• Microsoft’s Outlook email service was subject to a cyberattack over the weekend, just weeks after Google’s Gmail service was blocked in China.

• On Monday, online censorship watchdog Greatfire.org said the organization received reports that Outlook was subject to a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack in China. A MITM attack intrudes on online connections in order to monitor and control a channel, and may also be used to push connections into other areas — for example, turning a user towards a malicious rather than legitimate website.

• The N.S.A. claims it needs access to all our phone records. But is that the best way to catch a terrorist?

• The FBI wants to search through your electronic life. You may think it’s a given that the government is in the business of collecting everyone’s personal data — Big Brother run amok in defiance of the Constitution. But under the limits of the Fourth Amendment, nothing it finds can be used to prosecute its targets. Now the FBI is taking steps to carry out broad searches and data collection under the color of authority, making all of us more vulnerable to “fishing expeditions.”

• Inbox has the right idea, in that the protocol and API set it has devised are open source (GNU Affero GPL licensed), and the project is designed to appeal most directly to developers of email applications building on mobile platforms. A similar project both in its approach and its design is JMAP, a protocol proposed by FastMail. JMAP uses JSON to encompass and package all the possible requests and responses used for email: sending and receiving, calendaring, contacts, and so on.

• At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance.

• In the past, Alexander Karp, the CEO of data analytics firm Palantir, has called wealth “culturally corrosive.” A former money manager for high-net-worth individuals, the cofounder of the CIA-backed data analytics firm has maintained that personal riches were of little importance to him, despite associating with some of the world’s wealthiest to raise funds for his company.

Civil Rights

• On January 22, jailed American journalist Barrett Brown will finally learn his sentence. This had been expected to happen last month, on December 16, but the government unleashed a torrent of exhibits, supposedly to demonstrate “relevant conduct”, and wasted the day with testimony from an FBI agent, eventually leading the judge, Sam A. Lindsay, to decide that he needed more time to make his decision.

• Judge Lindsay should sentence Mr. Brown to time served. The man has been in jail for 28 months now, and I’ve been advocating for him at each step of the way. By now, many people have heard his name, and much has been written about him. The popular perception of Mr. Brown is based on his work with Anonymous and his crowd-sourced research outfit Project PM. He’s noted as an activist who made an impact to exact greater transparency: helping to overthrow Middle Eastern dictatorships, and investigating private intelligence firms.

• Not a spokesperson for the group, but one who thoroughly understood its potential for collaboration and effecting change, Brown holds some Anonymous operations closest to his heart: OpTunisia, OpBahrain, the hack of HBGary’s Aaron Barr and the investigation that followed, which was termed OpMetalGear. He focused on the secret surveillance regime at a time when it was regarded as a paranoid conspiracy, as in before Snowden. Because of his activist brand of journalism, people messed with him – starting with security contractors and confidential informants, and rising to the FBI. This is all true and known information.

• GCHQ’s bulk surveillance of electronic communications has scooped up emails to and from journalists working for some of the US and UK’s largest media organisations, analysis of documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

• Emails from the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post were saved by GCHQ and shared on the agency’s intranet as part of a test exercise by the signals intelligence agency.

• A Hockessin man arrested about 30 minutes after multiple gunshots were fired near Vice President Joe Biden’s Greenville home says he was “accosted” during an altercation with New Castle County Police.

• Rock Peters, 57, was not charged in connection with the shooting incident, The News Journal has learned. But he faces reckless endangering and resisting arrest charges after fleeing from an officer near the Biden estate and scuffling with two others just before 9 p.m., according to a police affidavit.

• “They’re lying through their teeth,” Peters said Monday night during an interview at his Hockessin home, saying the officers were the aggressors.

• Midway through the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, one comment stands out. “A criminal case,” defense attorney Edward MacMahon told the jury at the outset, “is not a place where the CIA goes to get its reputation back.” But that’s where the CIA went with this trial in its first week — sending to the witness stand a procession of officials who attested to the agency’s virtues and fervently decried anyone who might provide a journalist with classified information.

• In another tweet, the activist explained that he has to pay 200 BHD (£350) bail if he wants to stay out of prison until the appeal.

• Rajab, who is president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) was freed in May 2014 after serving two years in prison for his role in the pro-democracy uprising. He was arrested again last October and charged with publicly “insulting a public institution” on the microblogging site.

• The Bahraini ministry of interior said they summoned Rajab “to interview him regarding tweets posted on his Twitter account that denigrated government institutions”.

• “There is no hairdresser privilege,” the judge presiding over the case, Leonie Brinkema, ruled.

• While the jury will likely neither note nor learn of them, there were details from last week’s testimony in the Jeffrey Sterling trial that resonated with two other notable cases involving the CIA: the New York Police Department’s spying on Muslims and the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity.

• The 466-page handwritten manuscript was written in his single cell at Camp Echo in 2005. The Guardian and Canongate Books worked together to publish a declassified version. It still was censored by the United States government, and 2,500 black bars appear throughout the text accentuating the criminality described vividly by Slahi.

• Memoir serialised by Guardian tells how Mohamedou Ould Slahi endured savage beatings, death threats and sexual humiliation

• A Dutch court on Tuesday blocked the extradition of a man accused of having fought against U.S. troops in Afghanistan, saying it could not be ruled out that the CIA had been involved in his torture after his arrest in Pakistan.

• Dutch court documents showed the suspect, a Dutch-Pakistani dual citizen named Sabir Khan, was tortured after his arrest by Pakistan’s ISI security service.

• He faces charges in New York of conspiracy to commit murder and of supporting al-Qaida.

• The court said the Netherlands could not transfer him because Dutch and international law prohibits the extradition of torture victims to countries that played a role in abuse.

• John Kiriakou is the only CIA employee to go to prison in connection with the agency’s torture program. Not because he tortured anyone, but because he revealed information on torture to a reporter.

• Kiriakou is the Central Intelligence Agency officer who told ABC News in 2007 that the CIA waterboarded suspected al-Qaeda prisoners after the September 11 attacks, namely Abu Zubaydah, thought to be a key al Qaeda official. Although he felt at the time that waterboarding probably saved lives, Kiriakou nevertheless came to view the practice as torture and later claimed he unwittingly understated how many times Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding.

• Four days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a junior member of Congress introduced a bill to establish a federal holiday to honor the slain civil rights leader.

• Five decades later, the holiday is on the calendar, and that lawmaker, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), is now the longest-serving member of Congress.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Virgin Media, Vodafone and EE have promised to be more upfront with their subscribers about traffic management policies two and half years after rival, big name UK ISPs signed up to the voluntary “Open Internet Code”.

• The telcos have also vowed not to choke the services of competitors, such as over-the-top players – Microsoft’s Skype for example, and the BBC’s iPlayer.

• However, the code has long made it clear that it is perfectly acceptable for ISPs to throttle traffic to “manage” congestion or block sites and services based on a court order to, for example, cut off access to pirated material or to prevent illegal child abuse images from being served up on broadband networks.

• BT, Sky, EE, KCOM, giffgaff, O2, Plusnet, TalkTalk, Tesco Mobile, Three, Virgin Media and Vodafone are signatories of the code, trade body the Broadband Stakeholders Group said.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• After signing an anti-piracy deal with Xunlei last year the MPAA is already suing the Chinese file-sharing giant. What went wrong is unclear but documents obtained by TorrentFreak reveal the toughest and most shocking set of anti-piracy demands to be found anywhere on the planet.

• Julia Reda, a politician for the German Pirate Party and member of the European Parliament, has this morning released her draft report for the overhaul of EU copyright. In her role as rapporteur, Reda says that EU copyright rules are “maladapted” to the increase of cross-border cultural exchange facilitated by the Internet.

• It would be something of an understatement to say that European copyright is a mess, with different rules applying in each of the 28 Member States, making cross-border cultural exchange and business hard to the point of impossibility. But worse than that inconsistency is the fact that European copyright is simply not fit for the digital age. There is now a huge gulf between what copyright allows, and what the public would like to do – and, in many cases, is already doing online, irrespective of the law. That was revealed in the results of the European Commission’s consultation on copyright last year – shown most dramatically in this interesting visual representation of the widely-differing views on various aspects.

• [...]

• As that small sample makes clear, this is pretty heady stuff. The copyright industries will doubtless fight very hard against practically everything here, as is their wont when any change to copyright in favour of the public is proposed.

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