● 01.23.15

● Links 23/1/2015: Red Hat on IBM Power, Meizu Leaks With Ubuntu

Posted in News Roundup at 7:46 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux has always had passionate advocates and some of them have created images that some might construe as propaganda.

• Have you ever installed a full desktop Linux system on your Chromebook? It isn’t all the hfard, but it is a bit more complex than it should be. New features in the latest version of Chrome OS will make dipping into an alternative operating system easier. For example, you’ll be able to easily boot a full Linux system from a USB drive and use it without any additional hassle!

Server

• The way IBM and the big Linux distros – Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) Red Hat, and SUSE – are tackling the portability problem has to do with the way server platforms treat data stored in memory. Most Linux software is written for the x86 architecture, which uses the “little endian” approach to storing bytes in memory. The alternative is “big endian,” which has traditionally been used by mainframes and IBM’s Power architecture. (Detailed explanation of the difference here)

• Carlos Horowicz: Planisys is a Cloud Services Provider headquartered in Argentina with its hardware and connectivity infrastructure mainly in U.S. data centers.

• Planisys provides businesses with CDN, DNS, and transactional e-mail services focusing on clients with high-traffic requirements like latin american online newspapers.

Kernel Space

• Monday I speculated that Bodhi Linux founder Jeff Hoogland’s change of heart was possibly due to reminiscing with Christine Hall in her interview. Well, today Hall spoke with Hoogland again to find out. In other news, Phil Johnson has 11 technologies that annoy Linus Torvalds and Softpedia.com is reporting on Torvalds’ decision to leave code in the kernel for one lone machine. Jack Wallen said ordinary users are the ideal candidates for Linux and Konrad Zapałowicz is back with three ways beginners can help out with the kernel.

• Linus Torvalds is considered one of the greatest living programmers, and for good reason, having written some of the most widely used software, such as the Linux kernel and the Git revision control system. He’s also known for not being shy about sharing his opinions on things that he doesn’t like through colorful and sometimes NSFW language. Sometimes, he’ll direct his sharp tongue at people who, in his opinion, do substandard work or companies and organizations with which he may have a disagreement or be in competition. Most often, though, the target of Torvalds’ ire is technology that he feels isn’t up to snuff. Use the arrows above to read Torvalds’ thoughts about 11 technologies that have gotten under his skin repeatedly over the years.

• Linus Torvalds is not known to interfere with other projects than the Linux kernel and it must be something really special to get him involved. Well, it looks like the Linux port of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings proved to be interesting enough.

• Bottomley shared that with efitools 1.5.2 it’s tested and works for IA32. He’s been using it with the Quark SoC board via the Galileo Kipps Bay D. He’s been playing with the Intel Quark and will share more in a future blog post.

Graphics Stack

• Maarten Lankhorst of Canonical released the libdrm 2.4.59 library on Wednesday. While most libdrm updates tend not to be too exciting, the v2.4.59 release carries a bit more weight.

• Following yesterday’s NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 launch, here’s an 11-way comparison looking at all of NVIDIA’s Maxwell GPUs as well as many Kepler and Fermi GeForce graphics cards under Linux. Beyond the raw OpenGL performance, the thermal and power efficiency data is also available for the tested range of GeForce 900/700/600/500/400 series graphics cards.

• Keith Packard who this month left Intel’s graphics team to join HP to work on “The Machine” has released a new pre-release version of X.Org Server 1.17.

Benchmarks

• In continuation of this morning’s launch-day article for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960, the graphics card that’s priced at $200 USD and is built on the very power efficient Maxwell architecture, here’s some more Linux benchmark results.

Applications

• There’s a “frame-parallel” branch of libvpx to enable frame parallel decoding. This is designed to speed up the VP9 decoding process for multi-core processors. The work is explained by its developers as, “In frame parallel decode, libvpx decoder decodes several frames on all cpus in parallel fashion. If not being flushed, it will only return frame when all the cpus are busy. If getting flushed, it will return all the frames in the decoder. Compare with current serial decode mode in which libvpx decoder is idle between decode calls, libvpx decoder is busy between decode calls. VP9 frame parallel decode is >30% faster than serial decode with tile parallel threading which will makes devices play 1080P VP9 videos more easily.”

• Docker 1.5rc1 is upon us and should be ready to slide down the slipway in the first week of February.

• Announced in a newsgroup – as is proper – the new version is billed by developer Arnaud Porterie as containing “many major features”.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.7.35 is now available.

• Wine 1.7.35 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development version of Wine for running Windows programs on Linux and other operating systems.

Games

• Shadow Warrior, an FPS build by Flying Wild Hog that is described as a bold re-imagining of the classic 3D Realms’ shooter with the same name that was released back in 1996, might be getting a Linux release.

• Well this was a surprised! Dying Light has hints that it may come to Linux thanks to information from the awesome SteamDB.

• The visuals in the game are just fantastic, and we really don’t have many games in this class on Linux.

• Dying Light is a new FPS from Techland and it’s all about surviving the night during a zombie apocalypse. This is a studio specialized in this kind of games, and it looks that they might also be interested in the Linux platform.

• The publisher of Hotline Miami, Devolver Digital, has unveiled its new game Ronin, being created in collaboration with Tomasz Wacławek.

• Due out on PC, Mac and Linux later this year, a debut trailer for the turn-based action platformer shows off elements that are clearly inspired by the critically-acclaimed Gunpoint, only with more katanas.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• On Thursday my Broadwell-powered Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop/ultrabook finally arrived for some Linux testing of Intel’s exciting Haswell successor. While many tests are forthcoming of this third-generation X1 Carbon — including Broadwell Windows vs. Linux benchmarks — here’s my initial experiences over the first ~10 minutes with this new hardware.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• An even more impressive review, this time of Plasma 5 on Utopic, is from Ken Vermette.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Matthias Clasen has announced that the GNOME development team has released GNOME 3.15.4, and this is now the latest and most advanced version of the desktop environment.

• GNOME 3.15.4 was released on Thursday night and is the latest pit stop on the road to the very exciting GNOME 3.16.

Distributions

Screenshots

Slackware Family

Red Hat Family

• Two open source titans put their rings together and joined forces to announce that Red Hat Enterprise Linux v7.1 beta is now available on the IBM Power Development platform. Last month Red Hat announced that v7.i beta supported IBM Power Systems based on little endian mode. Today, it is available and ready to use on the platform directly via download as well as at IBM Innovation & Client Centers worldwide.

Fedora

• Many users have already switched to 64-bit a long time ago and they must be wondering why there is still a need for the 32-bit architecture. It creates headaches because many app developers don’t actively support it anymore and it’s becoming too expensive to maintain.

• There’s been many changes and additions for Fedora 22 talked about so far and with this week marking the system wide change proposal deadline we have a last look at some of the new work that’s hoping to be done for the May release of Fedora 22.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Leaks posted this evening on Weibo claim to show some of the features of the upcoming Meizu m1 mini including the choice of Ubuntu OS.

• Weibo posts picked up this evening by Meizu News, hold some interesting surprises for Meizu fans. The images which appear to be from leaked marketing material, list a few of the specifications of the mini Meizu along with price and a choice of operating system.

• In a recent security notice, Canonical has published details about a Samba exploit that has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS operating systems.

• A new rumor regarding the impending launch of a Meizu powered by Ubuntu Touch has started to circulate online and it looks like some new images have been leaked from Weibo, a microblogging platform very popular in China.

• This goes in line with previous news, stating the Meizu m1 mini will be a multi OS device, coming with your choice of Meizu’s Flyme OS, Yun OS, developed by Alibaba, and Ubuntu. The stock Android version was unexpected and it remains to be seen whether it will be another option to purchase, or is a pre-production model for development purposes.

Flavours and Variants

• Lubuntu 15.04 Alpha 2 (Vivid Vervet) is now out and ready for testing. This LXDE-based distro doesn’t have too many changes worth mentioning, with the exception of the base.

• The second Alpha version for the 15.04 branch of Ubuntu GNOME has been released and is now ready for testing. It’s not a major evolution from the previous Alpha, but some of the important packages have been upgraded.

• Kubuntu 15.04 Alpha 2 (Vivid Vervet), a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and the KDE desktop environment, is now available for download and testing. The developers have made quite a few substantial improvements, including to the Plasma desktop.

• The Ubuntu MATE developers have just released the Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Alpha 2 Linux distribution, which is now available for download and testing. It’s the first one in the new development cycle and it comes with quite a few improvements.

• Along with the official Ubuntu flavors, Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Vivid Vervet alpha 2 was released yesterday. Read on to find out what’s new.

Devices/Embedded

• The SAMA5D4 Xplained Ultra (SAMA5D4-XULT) follows the SAMA5D3-based SAMA5D3 Xplained, which was developed by Newark Element 14 and Atmel to support the SAMA5D3 system-on-chip. In this case, the Xplained board amplifies the capabilities of the SAMA5D4 SoC announced by Atmel last October. Newark Element14 is the U.S. distributor of U.K.-based Premier Farnell.

• Sometimes a product comes along, that makes so much sense, that you wonder how no one thought of it before. For example, the Snuggie. I mean come on, a blanket with sleeves? Genius! Let us not forget about the George Foreman Grill; that thing makes some damn tasty turkey burgers.

Phones

Tizen

• As many of you know, I’ve been involved with Tizen for quite some time. I manage Tizen at the Linux Foundation, which means I get a unique perspective on the project. And as anybody who has talked with me about what I do, I am a huge supporter of the Tizen platform and its goals, and am a general optimist (including but not limited to Tizen, of course).

• 2014 was a big year, with Tizen wearables and cameras hitting the market, Tizen IVI 3.0 achieving GENIVI 7.0 compliance, and a lot of interesting platform work on Tizen:Common. 2015 has really gotten off to a great start as well, with the announcements at CES that all new Samsung Smart TVs released in 2015 will run Tizen, starting in February.

Android

• Lava has launched the Iris 350 budget smartphone, which is now listed on the company’s site at a price of Rs. 3,499. The official listing of the Lava Iris 350, without revealing an exact release date, notes that the handset will soon be available in stores.

• Android tablets are a dime a dozen these days. Look in any electronics store and you’ll see a sea of virtually indistinguishable slates, few of which manage to stand out.

• Dell’s new Venue 8 7000 tablet is a noteworthy exception. The Venue 8 7000 — sometimes also referred to as the Venue 8 7000 Series or the Venue 8 7840 — is a distinctively stylish tablet with some unusually compelling qualities. Its name may be awkward and forgettable, but the device itself is anything but.

• And with a price of $400 — the same as Google’s flagship Nexus 9 tablet — it’s one of the most interesting Android options available today.

• If you’re in the market for a new cellular plan, you may want to wait for a new player to enter the game: Google. New reports suggest the company is planning on launching a wireless cellular network in an effort to get more people on the Web. It’s a move that could, in turn, force existing providers to offer better plan pricing and better data speeds.

• 2015 is the year the battle for your wrist goes nuclear, as the highly anticipated Apple Watch will finally hit store shelves.

• Last year, Google unveiled its design vision for the future. Called Material Design, it incorporates bold colors, flat elements, and informative animations to create a fresh user interface for the modern age. Material Design made its major debut with the launch of Android 5.0 Lollipop in the fall, and Google has been rapidly updating its own apps and services to take advantage of the new design directives.

• Supporting Android in the enterprise is no longer optional, it is necessary.

• Not a whole lot of LG G3 users can claim to be running Android 5.0 Lollipop or later at the moment even though the rollout technically began last year. Unsurprisingly, the update is taking its sweet time and has so far been mostly limited to South Korean, Europe, and a handfull of other markets. Android 5.0 Lollipop only started rolling out across the majority of Europe last week and now it finally seems ready to grace some other countries as well. The next country in line to receive it will apparently be Australia according to Gizmodo. The article says that official sources from LG Australia have told local LG G3 owners about the good news so this is more than just a rumor.

• The Android 5.0.2 release is crawling along and finally available on our Nexus 7 2013, allowing us to install the latest Nexus Lollipop update and see how it performs on the newest Nexus 7.

• It looks like Google is about to bring its Nexus Player streaming box to some online and brick-and-mortar retailers within the next few days: The Nexus Player as well as the optional Nexus Player gamepad, both of which are being manufactured by Asus, started to appear on Newegg’s website. The online electronics retailer still lists both as unavailable, with a release date of January 25.

• LibreOffice for Android has long been one of the biggest demands in the open source world. The reason is simple, a majority of Android users (myself included) who are concerned about vendor lock-in don’t save their data in Microsoft’s controversial docx, or Apple’s incompatible Pages formats. ISO approved ODF is the only way to go if you don’t want your files to become inaccessible in the future.

• I love Android, but still dabble from time to time with iOS. Doing so usually makes me thankful at how Android works, with its deep Google integration, smart sharing features, and Material Design flourishes in Lollipop.

• Google’s Android OS is now up to version 5.1, dubbed Lollipop. The software broke cover as Android L at Google I/O over the summer of 2014 and we’ve long been anticipating the then-teased Material Design features; an entirely new design language that breathes fresh life into Android. Android Lollipop is now out in the wild on a range of devices, but of course it first arrived on Google’s own batch of Nexus hardware, debuting on the new models – the Nexus 6 smartphone and Nexus 9 tablet.

Free Software/Open Source

• It was a bold prediction in 2009 that Microsoft would take its Windows operating system open source. The advent of Windows 10 says it hasn’t come true — yet.

• I don’t write about Microsoft much here. That’s largely because, as I noted recently, open source has won. Well, it’s won in the field of supercomputers, cloud computing, Web servers, mobile systems, embedded systems and the Internet of Things. Of course, it hasn’t won on the desktop – although there are some interesting indications that even there things may be changing. That means Wednesday’s launch of Windows 10 is still important, since it affects the daily lives of many people – far too many. Here, I want to focus on a few key aspects that emerged.

Events

• With many of the videos from linux.conf.au now available, and a three-day weekend about to hit Australia, there’s no excuse not to watch the best talks from last week.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• WhatsApp has released a web client version of its popular social platform for the desktop, but there are a number of limitations that will prevent plenty of users from getting it through their browser of choice.

Mozilla

• Developers of the Firefox browser want to better protect user privacy by limiting the amount of data contained in Referer headers.

SaaS/Big Data

• Platform9, which many people have taken note of as a virtualization-focused startup, is making news this week after it announced the availability of Platform9 Managed OpenStack, a SaaS solution that leverages an organization’s existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service private cloud. Platform9 claims it can allow organizations to spin up an OpenStack private cloud deployment within minutes.

• On the heels of its introduction as a hot new publlic company a few weeks ago, Hortonworks, which focuses on the open source Big Data platform Hadoop, is expanding its reach. Recently, Hortonworks extended its technology partner program with the addition of three new certifications it offers. Hadoop-related certification is a very hot commodity in the tech job market at the moment.

• Meritalk’s new report, Cloud without Commitment, underwritten by Red Hat and Cisco, examined federal barriers to cloud adoption including migration, data portability, integration and future agility.

• Seventy-five percent of federal IT workers want to move more services to the cloud, but are held back by data control concerns, according to a survey released this week by MeriTalk. According to “Cloud Without the Commitment,” only 53 percent of federal IT workers rate their cloud experience as very successful, the same number as are being held back by fear of long-term contracts.

Healthcare

• Trees are incredibly smart. They run on sunshine, provide shade in summer and ever so kindly drop their leaves to allow the winter sun through. And now a team from the University of Exeter has determined that they are good for our mental health, too. Londoners who had more trees on their street popped fewer antidepressant pills.

BSD

• The PC-BSD crew that base their desktop-focused BSD operating system off of FreeBSD put out their 10.1.1. release candidate this week.

• This quarterly update to PC-BSD (v10.1.1) is set to bring a new system updater that supports automatic background updating, improvements to the boot environments / GRUB support, GPT partition installation improvements, all PC-BSD desktop utillities have been converted to Qt5, OVA files for virtual machines, and various other improvements over the original PC-BSD 10.1 release.

• Besides working toward PC-BSD 10.1.1′s release, the PC-BSD crew have also been working on improving their Lumina Desktop Environment.

• Nearly a year ago I wrote about PC-BSD developing its own desktop environment and months later it was out in alpha form. The new PC-BSD desktop is called Lumina and it’s a homegrown environment catered toward the BSDs. The Lumina desktop is FreeDesktop.org/XDG-complaintand they’re hoping for it to be an alternative to GNOME or KDE.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU RCS (Revision Control System) 5.9.4 is available.

Openness/Sharing

• Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk posted a blog entry on June 12 that was far from typical, but not unexpected for those who know him. He discusses the “wall of patents” his company owns for the manufacturing of electric cars and argues that “these days they serve merely to stifle progress.” The result? Tesla has made all of its patents public, paving the way for an open-source electric car. There’s a similar movement underway in IT: The open-source cloud. What can IT professionals learn from Musk’s recent move?

Open Access/Content

• There was a time not long ago when publishing was difficult and expensive. Thanks to services like Lulu.com and Lulujr.com, that’s changing. Open source and Creative Commons licensing has also opened the door for teachers and students to inexpensively and easily find a new and authentic audience for their work.

Programming

• In work that has serious implications for anyone believing their open source project contributions are anonymous, the researchers find that as many as 95 per cent of contributors to a decent-sized code base can be identified.

Leftovers

• Apple’s journey from ‘it just works’ to ‘it just needs more work’ may undermine the company’s reputation for quality

Health/Nutrition

• Nearly 80% of Americans — 80%! — even wanted doctors and nurses that treated Ebola patients to be locked into quarantines, despite lack of medical evidence.

• Of course, a mass Ebola outbreak in the United States never materialized.

• But a major measles outbreak is already here. And it’s only going to get worse.

Security

• Less than half of firms regularly take basic measures like installing patches and updating software, Cisco research finds

• Cisco has warned that many businesses’ faith in their security tools and policies is misplaced, as just 42 percent of UK firms have highly sophisticated measures in place – less than India, the US and Germany.

• The networking firm’s Annual Security Report found that 75 percent of Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) believe their tools are ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ effective yet less than half take standard steps like patching and updating software to the latest versions, increasing their protection.

• Adobe has rushed out an emergency fix for a flaw that was affecting users of its Flash Player tool on Windows, Mac and Linux systems.

• Adobe said in a notification about the fix that it was aware that the flaw was being abused by criminals to carry out attacks against Flash Player.

• “Adobe is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2015-0310 exists in the wild, which is being used in attacks against older versions of Flash Player,” the firm said.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• SPIEGEL: One of the reasons Snowden didn’t approach the New York Times was that the paper had refused to publish the initial research about the NSA’s bulk collection in 2004. The story was only published almost a year later. Was it a mistake to have held back on that reporting?

• Baquet: I wasn’t even at the New York Times then and I don’t know what the discussions were like. It’s easy to look at it now and say, “how could the New York Times not have published the story,” but I won’t judge them because I wasn’t here, and I don’t know what the discussions were like. Bill Keller, the former editor in chief, has said the story was not as good as the one they published.

• SPIEGEL: There are other cases where the New York Times showed a lot of consideration for the US government. In 2011, for example, you didn’t print a story about drone bases in Saudi Arabia. Can you give us an insight into what your criteria are for not publishing those kinds of stories?

• Baquet: It was my decision not to publish the drone research — and it was a mistake. The circumstance was that the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki had been killed by a drone strike. We were writing a story on deadline. A high-ranking CIA official called me up and made the case to leave out where the drone base was. It was Saudi Arabia. I accepted it. And I was wrong. I made a decision on deadline that I regretted almost the next day. We then published the information later. It taught me a lesson. But there are instances where I think you do have to hold things back, and I can think of some instances where I don’t regret it.

• SPIEGEL: For example?

• Baquet: During WikiLeaks, there was one specific instance in which there was a really remarkable cable. Moammar Gadhafi was still in power and it was a greatly detailed cable, which clearly came from somebody with firsthand knowledge of Gadhafi’s activities. It felt like a great thing to publish, but the government made the case that if we published it, it would be very clear to Gadhafi where it came from, and that the source would be killed. Once I reread that cable in light of that, I think it was pretty clear that the government was making a compelling case not to publish it. As I recall, everybody involved agreed not to use that particular cable.

• The moral depravity into which the US is sinking is shown by the movie American Sniper glorifying the exploits of a racist killer receiving six Oscar nominations, whereas ‘Selma’ depicting Martin Luther King’s struggle against racism has received none.

• American Sniper is directed by Clint Eastwood, and tells the story of Chris Kyle, a US Navy Seal who served four tours of duty in Iraq as a sniper credited with 160 confirmed “kills”, and earning him the dubious honor of being lauded the most lethal sniper in US military history.

• [...]

• Anything resembling balance and perspective is sacrificed in American Sniper to the more pressing needs of US propaganda, which holds that the guys who served in Iraq were the very best of America, men who went through hell in order to protect the freedoms and way of life of their fellow countrymen at home. It is the cult of the soldier writ large, men who in the words of Kyle (Bradley Cooper) in the movie “just want to get the bad guys.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• On January 21, 98 U.S. senators voted to affirm that “climate change is real and not a hoax.” But the media should not misconstrue that vote as evidence that the Republican-led Senate is now seeing eye-to-eye with scientists on the issue. Moments later, 49 senators voted to deny that “human activity significantly contributes to climate change” – the position held by the vast majority of climate scientists.

• The town, with a population in the low hundreds, was forecast to swelter through a whopping 49 degrees Celsius (120.2 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). By 1:30 p.m., Marble Bar had reached a high of 48.4 degrees Celsius. At 2:30 p.m. local time, the mercury dropped a measly point to 48.3 degrees Celsius, while by 4 p.m. it had only slid to 48.2 degrees Celsius.

• A cancer-causing component of oil has been detected in the drinking water supply of an eastern Montana city downstream from a crude oil spill

• Oil spill into Yellowstone River renews concerns about pipeline safety.

• Instead of protecting it, the Queensland and Australian federal government have traded the crown jewel of the Seven Wonders of the World for exporting more heat-trapping gas and coal and more poisonous mercury vapor.

Finance

• In a world plagued by economic depression, certain states are beginning to take measures against the financial oligarchy.

• So in Obama’s proposal, offered more as a what-if dream than as a concrete agenda he expects to see enacted by Congress, the wealthiest 1 percent would give up a little more than 1 percent of their income–after seeing their share of income more than double since 1980. All in all, it’s a shift of 0.2 percent of US personal income.

• You call that stealing from the rich to give to the poor? I call it Sheriff of Nottingham Lite.

• After six years of recession – during which three centre right coalitions failed to raise the country from its knees – young, unemployed, frustrated Greeks are looking for a new way out.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• But Iftikhar was merely suggesting that there is prejudice based on skin color in our political culture–hardly a far-fetched claim–and that non-white politicians like Jindal may tend to bash other minorities (in this case, Muslims) in order to avoid the consequences of this prejudice. (Iftikhar’s use of the skin-scrubbing metaphor indicates that he finds this a futile endeavor.)

• On the other hand, it’s equally hard to argue that Obama has done much to slow the boom down. The administration has resisted pressure from environmental groups to regulate hydraulic fracturing, and Obama’s current energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, has been a fairly outspoken defender of the technique. If anything is holding back drilling, it’s falling prices, not administration policies.

Censorship

• Iranian authorities have shut down a newspaper and suspended its licence after it published a front page depicting George Clooney at the Golden Globes alongside the headline “I am Charlie, too”.

• China is blocking VPN services that let users skirt online censorship of popular websites such as Google and Facebook amid a wider crackdown on online information, tech companies and specialists said Friday.

Privacy

• That is the terrifying dystopian world portrayed by a group of Harvard professors at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, where the assembled elite heard that the notion of individual privacy is effectively dead.

• “Welcome to today. We’re already in that world,” said Margo Seltzer, a professor in computer science at Harvard University.

• “Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible… How we conventionally think of privacy is dead,” she added.

• Laying eighteen pages of clauses before the Lords to insert the Snoopers’ Charter into an already complicated bill is an abuse of procedure. The Lords cannot have time to properly consider the bill, and would deny the Commons the opportunity to consider the clauses as well.

• Four members of the House of Lords have attempted to bring back from the dead the Communications Data Bill – otherwise known as the Snoopers’ Charter. The entirety of the bill that had previously been rejected (or at least put on hold) by Parliament – some 18 pages in all – was added as a late ‘amendment’ to the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill currently passing through the Lords. This is utterly cynical at best, and a total abuse of parliamentary procedure at worst.

• The Technological boom has touched nearly every industry; it may now be taking over the farming industry. Monsanto and John Deere, two big Agribusiness giants, have started services that allow them to collect minute by minute data from farms as crops are being planted and harvested. Currently available to Midwestern farmers, both companies pledge that the data will benefit the farmers by increasing profits.

• In order to create clear rules about when law enforcement agencies can access and track Americans’ electronic location data Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, reintroduced the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act (GPS Act) today.

• The bipartisan, bicameral bill is co-sponsored by Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., and in the House by Reps. Peter Welch, D-VT and Jon Conyers Jr., D-MI.

Civil Rights

• They are best known for hacking government and corporate websites, but in the wake of the Westminster child abuse scandal and allegations of establishment cover-ups, the Anonymous internet collective has a new target: exposing international paedophile networks.

• A journalist with connections to the hacking collective Anonymous has been sentenced to five years in jail after posting online links to stolen data.

• Barrett Brown originally faced charges punishable by more than 100 years in prison, but the sentence was reduced after he pleaded guilty last year.

• He said he broke the law to reveal details of illegal government activity.

• The case drew criticism from advocates of free speech and media rights organisations.

• Terrorists, hackers, and journalists. According to a recent Guardian article covering new Snowden documents, British spy agency GCHQ considers all of these individuals threats—various levels of threats, but threats nonetheless. One intelligence report goes so far as to say, “Of specific concern are ‘investigative journalists’ who specialise in defence-related exposés either for profit or what they deem to be of the public interest.”

• [...]

• It shouldn’t need to be said, but journalists’ communications need to be safe from government hands. And yet, we see example after example of the British government going after this important check to power. (The US has done its fair share of targeting journalists as well.) The Guardian, for example, was forced by GCHQ to destroy their hard drives containing Snowden documents. That was soon after David Miranda, partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained and interrogated at Heathrow for nine hours. England has notoriously abused its surveillance laws to spy on journalists, prompting over 100 editors to sign a letter to the British prime minister calling for a stop to the spying and passage of a strong freedom of expression law.

• THE US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE (DoJ) will pay $134,000 to a woman who was the victim of a spoof Facebook page that featured her in varying states of dress.

• The fine relates to a case from 2010 when a waitress called Sondra Arquiett was arrested as part of a drugs bust.

• The BBC reports that Arquiett complained after she realised that images, including some with her in short shorts, had been posted online by a third party.

• She sued the government for its actions and the DoJ set about considering it. The DoJ has admitted what it did, but has not accepted that it acted improperly.

• The Supreme Court heard oral argument yesterday in the Fourth Amendment case Rodriguez v. United States. At issue is whether an officer “unnecessarily prolonged” an otherwise legal traffic stop when he called for backup in order to safely walk a drug-sniffing dog around the stopped vehicle. According to a previous Supreme Court ruling, the use of drug dogs during routine traffic stops poses no constitutional problems so long as the traffic stop is not “prolonged beyond the time reasonably required to complete that mission.”

• It didn’t take long for North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr to stir up his Democratic colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee he now chairs. He has sent the White House a letter, The New York Times reports, demanding that copies of an internal CIA report on torture be “returned immediately.”

• Burr and some other Republicans didn’t like the report released under the previous Intelligence Committee chair, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat. In it, the CIA’s use of torture was detailed and documented, and it embarrassed the agency and, for that matter, the country.

• Shortly after he became chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in January, Senator Richard Burr told reporters in his home state that he had no intention of trying to rewrite the committee’s 6700-page, $40 million torture report. Burr said that despite his disagreements with the report, he wanted to “look forward and do oversight in real time.”

• It turns out that Burr’s statement was half true: he doesn’t want to rewrite the torture report. But he does want to help the CIA slip it into a memory hole—along with the Panetta Review, an internal CIA study that confirms the Senate report’s conclusions.

• King Abdullah’s reign brought about marginal advances for women but failed to secure the fundamental rights of Saudi citizens to free expression, association, and assembly.

• Greece’s anti-bailout Syriza party has widened its lead over the ruling conservatives to 6.7 percentage points from six points previously, a survey showed on Friday, two days before a national election.

• The British, forever bragging about how attuned to irony they are, are responsible for some of the most hilariously ironic free speech and privacy violations in the world. There was the man charged with a “Racially Aggravated Crime” because he made a statement criticizing Islam—which turned out to be a direct quote from Winston Churchill. There’s the flat in London surrounded by 32 CCTV cameras—it once belonged to George Orwell.

• There is no direct evidence that an ex-CIA officer leaked details of a classified mission to a journalist, but phone and email records show the two were in frequent contact, an FBI agent testified Wednesday.

• Prosecutors wrapped up their case with a web of circumstantial evidence based on the phone and email contacts.

• Former CIA man Jeffrey Sterling, 47, of O’Fallon, Missouri, is charged with leaking information about a purportedly botched operation to thwart Iran’s nuclear program to New York Times reporter James Risen, who wrote about the mission in the 2006 book “State of War.” Risen has refused to disclose his sources.

• Hugo Chávez was elected President of Venezuela four times from 1998 through 2012 and was admired and supported by a large majority of that country’s citizens, largely due to his policies that helped the poor. King Abdullah was the dictator and tyrant who ran one of the most repressive regimes on the planet.

• The effusive praise being heaped on the brutal Saudi despot by western media and political figures has been nothing short of nauseating; the UK Government, which arouses itself on a daily basis by issuing self-consciously eloquent lectures to the world about democracy, actually ordered flags flown all day at half-mast to honor this repulsive monarch.

• It’s not often that the unelected leader of a country which publicly flogs dissidents and beheads people for sorcery wins such glowing praise from American officials. Even more perplexing, perhaps, have been the fawning obituaries in the mainstream press which have faithfully echoed this characterization of Abdullah as a benign and well-intentioned man of peace.

• Tiptoeing around his brutal dictatorship, The Washington Post characterized Abdullah as a “wily king” while The New York Times inexplicably referred to him as “a force of moderation”, while also suggesting that evidence of his moderation included having had: “hundreds of militants arrested and some beheaded”. (emphasis added)

• While granting that Abdullah might be considered a relative moderate within the brazenly anachronistic House of Saud, the fact remains that he presided for two decades over a regime which engaged in wanton human rights abuses, instrumentalized religious chauvinism, and played a hugely counterrevolutionary role in regional politics.

• Above all, he was not a leader who shied away from both calling for and engineering more conflict in the Middle East.

• King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died yesterday aged 90, and there has been some controversy over the tributes paid by world leaders to the ruler of a repressive regime that carries out public beheadings and bans women from driving.

• [...]

• You are not supposed to repeat what the Queen says in private conversation. But the story she told me on that occasion was one that I was also to hear later from its subject – Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia – and it is too funny not to repeat. Five years earlier, in September 1998, Abdullah had been invited up to Balmoral, for lunch with the Queen. Following his brother King Fahd’s stroke in 1995, Abdullah was already the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. After lunch, the Queen had asked her royal guest whether he would like a tour of the estate. Prompted by his Foreign Minister, the urbane Prince Saud, an initially hesitant Abdullah agreed. The royal Land Rovers were drawn up in front of the castle. As instructed, the Crown Prince climbed into the front seat of the front Land Rover, with his interpreter in the seat behind. To his surprise, the Queen climbed into the driving seat, turned the ignition and drove off. Women are not – yet – allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, and Abdullah was not used to being driven by a woman, let alone a queen. His nervousness only increased as the Queen, an Army driver in wartime, accelerated the Land Rover along the narrow Scottish estate roads, talking all the time. Through his interpreter, the Crown Prince implored the Queen to slow down and concentrate on the road ahead.

• Documents published online for the first time Thursday indicate that the FBI opened an inquiry into New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez on August 1, 2012, focusing on repeated trips he took to the Dominican Republic with longtime campaign contributor and Miami eye doctor Salomon Melgen. TheDC reported in November that Menendez purchased the service of prostitutes in that Caribbean nation at a series of alcohol-fueled sex parties.

• Saudi Arabian activist blogger Raif Badawi, sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for advocating free speech, may not have to serve the full decade in prison.

• Badawi family’s spokesperson, Dr Elham Manea, who is also an associate professor specialising in the Middle East at University of Zurich, said on Facebook that the news was delivered by a Saudi ambassador in Germany.

• She wrote: “Saudi ambassador in Germany informed NDR-TV that flogging will not continue and ‪#‎RaifBadawi‬ maybe not have to serve the whole time in prison.”

• A journalist and activist accused of working with Anonymous has been given a five-year prison term and ordered to pay nearly $900,000 in restitution and fines. Barrett Brown was sentenced on Thursday after pleading guilty last year to charges of transmitting threats, accessory to a cyber-attack, and obstruction of justice. Supporters say Brown has been unfairly targeted for investigating the highly secretive world of private intelligence and military contractors. After his sentencing on Thursday, Brown released a satirical statement that read in part: “Good news! — The U.S. government decided today that because I did such a good job investigating the cyber-industrial complex, they’re now going to send me to investigate the prison-industrial complex.” We discuss Brown’s case with Kevin Gallagher, a writer, activist and systems administrator who heads the Free Barrett Brown support network. He says that the public should not believe what the government says about Brown.

• Campaigners blast policy as ‘discrimination’ but attraction cites ‘child protection’ rules after turning away adults and their carers

• A major U.S. Supreme Court decision has upheld the right of federal employees to become whistleblowers. The case centers on former Transportation Security Administration Federal Air Marshal Robert MacLean. In July 2003, MacLean revealed to an MSNBC reporter that the Department of Homeland Security had decided to stop assigning air marshals to certain long-distance flights in order to save money, despite warnings of a potential plot to hijack U.S. airplanes. MSNBC’s report on the story sparked outcry, and the policy was quickly reversed. MacLean was fired three years later after admitting to being the story’s source. He filed a lawsuit over his dismissal, sparking a multi-year legal battle that ended earlier this week when the Supreme Court ruled on his behalf in a 7-to-2 decision. At issue was whether MacLean’s actions could be protected by the U.S. Whistleblower Protection Act, a law that protects employees if a disclosure exposes unlawful conduct, gross mismanagement or threats to public safety. We speak to Robert MacLean and attorney Neal Katyal, who argued MacLean’s case before the Supreme Court. Katyal is the former acting solicitor general of the United States.

• Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, has praised King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia as a “strong advocate of women”, but human rights campaigners said his reign only brought marginal advances for women, while failing to secure fundamental rights of free expression, association, and assembly.

• In paying tribute to the king who died on Thursday aged 90, Lagarde – who has expressed her concerns over gender inequality – described the monarch as a great leader who implemented many reforms.

• “In a very discreet way, he was a strong advocate of women. It was very gradual, appropriately so probably for the country. I discussed that issue with him several times and he was a strong believer,” said Lagarde, who is attending the Davos economic forum in Switzerland.

• Former Conservative MP Louise Mensch has unleashed an extraordinary tirade on Twitter, instructing both David Cameron and the Queen to “fuck off”.

• Mensch became enraged after the British Government declared all UK flags be flown at half mast to mourn the death of King Abdullah on Thursday.

• She began by criticising US President Barack Obama for paying tribute to the late royal, whom Mensch said “whipped women for driving & is currently starving his daughters.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The chief executive of BlackBerry has claimed that Apple should be forced to make apps for BlackBerry users under net neutrality laws currently being debated in the US.

• Two weeks before the crash, Anatol Shmelev, the curator of the Russia and Eurasia collection at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford, had submitted to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library in California, a list of Ukrainian and Russian Web sites and blogs that ought to be recorded as part of the archive’s Ukraine Conflict collection. Shmelev is one of about a thousand librarians and archivists around the world who identify possible acquisitions for the Internet Archive’s subject collections, which are stored in its Wayback Machine, in San Francisco. Strelkov’s VKontakte page was on Shmelev’s list. “Strelkov is the field commander in Slaviansk and one of the most important figures in the conflict,” Shmelev had written in an e-mail to the Internet Archive on July 1st, and his page “deserves to be recorded twice a day.”

• Earlier this month, Lamar White, Jr. woke up to discover his Internet connection wasn’t working. He had just gotten a new cable box installed at his Dallas, Texas, home and figured his lines should still be in ship shape because it hadn’t been long since they were last checked.

• Rather than just assume he had crappy Internet service, like you or I might, he thought his home computer system was on the receiving end of a denial of service attack. White, you see, is something of a major figure in the political media. And there are a good many people who may want revenge for the things he’s dug up.

• What The Media Should Know About The GOP Bill That Is Net Neutrality In Name Only

• On January 20th, La Quadrature du Net along with other European organisations co-signed an open letter [pdf] calling once more the EU’s Member States to adopt clear and strict rules to protect Net Neutrality. However, a negociation document shows that at the same moment, Member States were one towards the end of a free Internet. It is time for the European Parliament to get back to work on this issue and defend a real protection of Net Neutrality, against oligopolistic strategies of the large Internet actors backed by governments.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• A Greek anti-piracy group has lost its bid to have various torrent sites blocked by local Internet providers. The Athens Court ruled that barring access to torrent sites such as KickassTorrents and The Pirate Bay is disproportionate and unconstitutional, while hindering the ISPs’ entrepreneurial freedoms.

• A man jailed for 50 years in the United States for multiple bombings, drug smuggling and felony perjury, is attempting to leverage copyright troll cases to his advantage. Brett Kimberlin says that since a court has already revealed the identities of BitTorrent users, it should also unmask his critics.

• Policy makers intending to promote creativity have always overemphasized the importance of “copyright protection” without addressing the wide range of other concerns that are necessary to consider when making comprehensive innovation policy. In an era where everyone, with the use of their computer or mobile device, can easily be a consumer, creator, and a critic of art, we can not afford to ignore this digital ecosystem of artistry and innovation. Yet copyright remains completely out of touch with the reality of most creators today, while the rules that do pass seem to stray even further from addressing their needs.

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