● 02.06.15

● Links 6/2/2015: CrunchBang Linux Ends, Ubuntu Phone From BQ

Posted in News Roundup at 6:49 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Now what is linux, it is just an Operating System which is used worldwide. Linux for a common man would mean something used in different devices basically for research purposes in NASA, in particle accelerators, also used by Scientists for their studies eg Antartic. Linux is also a vital tool in automobile industry as in car manufacture and also being used by Engineers to build humanoid robots, by security researcher or hackers. Linux is preferred due to its basic properties of being flexible, reliable system and safe. US Navy is now using the Linux Kernel to built their most powerful DDG-1000 Zumawat Class Destroyer.

Desktop

• 2015 has been a great year for GNU/Linux on the desktop in India.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Join Aaron Newcomb and Randal Schwartz this week to speak with Boudewijn Rempt about Krita. Krita is a FREE digital painting and illustration application. Krita offers CMYK support, HDR painting, perspective grids, dockers, filters, painting assistants, and many other features.

Kernel Space

• The fact that 75 % of the fastest HPC systems in the world use Lustre, demonstrates an on-going belief in the future of Lustre and its continued development. Lustre contains a number of components, that together, allow for efficient and fast storage and retrieval of large amounts of data. Lustre is based on Linux and uses kernel-based server modules to obtain the high performance I/O that these users require. In terms of capacity, the theoretical limits on the Lustre file system allows for storage of over 512 Petabytes (PB) in total. That is equivalent to 1,000,000of the 1 TB drives in your latest laptop.

• The OpenDaylight Project, a community-led and industry-supported open source platform to advance Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), today announced the availability of 14 internships — up from seven in 2014 — for people who want to obtain real-world development experience from leading networking technologists while contributing to the industry’s largest SDN and NFV platform.

• Yet another educational opportunity for developers interested in open source software appeared this week with the OpenDaylight’s announcement of an expanded software-defined networking (SDN) summer internship program. It’s not a training program per se, but it’s another way to keep open source expertise coming down the pipeline.

Graphics Stack

• Libinput continues advancing greatly primarily for Wayland and X11 systems as shown by the latest libinput 0.10 release while more surely is on the way.

Applications

• Calibre, an application that can be used as an eBook reader, converter, and editor, among other numerous features, has been updated once more and a few new interesting features have been added.

• Writing can be hard. One of the main obstacles that people encounter when sitting down to write something is all the distractions that a modern desktop throws at you such as cats on the internet, cats on twitter, and cats on reddit. Focuswriter is a neat word processor available in Fedora that provides a user experience to minimize all these cat-related distractions, allowing you to focus on what you need to write.

• Bluefish 2.2.7 is mostly a bug fix release. It fixes rare crashes in the autocompletion, the filebrowser, the htmlbar plugin preferences, in file-load-cancel, and fixes a rare case of broken syntax highlighting after multiple search/replace actions. It furthermore displays better error/warning output when parsing language files. It also finally fixes javascript regex syntax highlighting. The loading of files with corrupt encoding or non-printable characters (such as binary files) has been improved, and project loading over sftp has been improved. Various HTML5 tags have been added, and HTML5 is the default now for php, cfml and other languages that can include html syntax. Saving and loading of UTF-16 encoded files was broken and has been fixed. Various languages have better syntax support, such as javascript, css, html, pascal/deplhi, and html has improved autocompletion. On OSX the charmap plugin is finally included, the keys for tab switching no longer confict with some keyboard layouts, and behavior at shutdown was improved. The upload/download feature has a new option to ignore backup files. The home/end keys now work better on wrapped tekst. And finally the search and replace dialog correctly shows the number of results when searching in files on disk.

• Before I release the final 1.1.0 I wanted to make a release candidate with COPR repos for Fedora 20 and 21. This should be less painful than compiling everything from source so I am hoping to get more feedback and testing that way.

• Plenty of people use encrypted email services to protect their identities and information online. But, that could all be coming to an end soon for many folks because the man behind the most popular free email encryption technology out there is going broke.

• Werner Koch is looking at a big payday after pulling in over $150,000 to fund the continuing development of his crucial open-source GNU Privacy Guard encryption tools.

• GnuPG is a piece of cryptographic software embedded in numerous online solutions in the world, including email clients, and it’s an indispensable part of our online experience. That also means that it’s underfunded and maintained by a single guy who is ready to give up. Fortunately, the online community has responded to his plea and that reaction was amazing.

• Werner Koch is a hero, and we owe him so much for selflessly carrying on his work despite that lack of money, because he recognised that it was more important than ever. Fortunately, I am not the only one to think so, and to be ashamed that I/we have allowed this situation to arise. Yesterday, when the article by Julia Angwin appeared on the Pro Publica site, people across the world started donating on a massive scale. As an update by Angwin explains:

Proprietary

• The new Opera 28 Beta has been released and the developers have implemented a number of features from the development version, which includes bookmark syncing and new default themes.

• 2014 showed big growth in the proportion of Linux users downloading CAD Schroer’s free software, and Brazil has joined the top 10

• “We’re working on Linux support—hang tight!” said Google nearly three years ago. And despite that claim and more repeated promises over those many years, Google Drive for Linux still hasn’t been released.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Linux is highly lacking in decent 3D RPG games, and let’s not even get into the near drought of MMORPG games, but Shroud Of The Avatar looks like it could fill the gap eventually. The reason we say eventually, is that the game is in Early Access, and they consider it pre-alpha.

• Astro Emporia is a new turn-based strategy title developed and published on Steam by Squirrelbot Games. A Linux version was made available right from the start by the makers of this rather interesting RTS.

• The company has scheduled a session for March 5 at the Games Developer Conference where it will talk about the new release of the graphics API in a presentation called glNext: The Future of High Performance Graphics.

• I had a chance to speak to the developers of Divinity: Original Sin who confirmed the Linux version is being worked on right now.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• So finally Season of KDE has come to an end but I am sure my relation with KDE especially Kubuntu is far from over. I hope to contribute more in future.

• I usually don’t blog about what I do in my day-time job in my personal blog but since this may affect some of the KDE/Qt developers I will do this time.

• With Plasma 5 our lock screen architecture changed significantly. For example we do no longer support screen saver hacks or widgets on top of the locked screen. Both are very unlikely to make a return in future releases. This means that bug reports against the old infrastructure might no longer apply to our current code base. Two weeks ago I went through all bug reports and feature requests to evaluate whether they still apply to our new infrastructure or should be closed.

• The KDE community has created some of the best of the breed open source software and they continue to win user’s hearts, according to a new LinuxQuestions survey.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• While Unity 8 is written in Qt5, GTK+ is still very important to Ubuntu even with their ongoing transition from running the desktop on an X.Org Server to instead using their own Mir display server technology within the next year on the desktop. Landing today in GTK+ Git ahead of GNOME 3.16 is a number of Mir back-end improvements.

• Do you love Gnome Shell but hate the way it looks? Don’t worry, the Internet is chock full of better-looking themes to choose from. There are so many in fact that we’ve had to filter it down to just eight awesome themes.

Distributions

Reviews

• Fedora 21 Cinnamon is a fedora 21 spin featuring with Cinnamon Desktop environment 2.4.5 as default desktop. it also included with kernel 3.18 and default application such as firefox 35, nemo 2.4, libreoffice 4.3, shotwell 0.2, yum extender as default sotware manager and cinnamon system settings.

New Releases

• 4MLinux Allinone Edition, a Linux operating system built from scratch that wants to provide a complete desktop experience and manage to keep the size to a minimum, has reached version 11.1 Beta.

• Jeff Hoogland announced the release of Bodhi Linux 3.0 RC3, proving he is back. This release brings a new wiki and new blog section to the community as well. In other news Evolve OS is winning Jack Wallen away from Ubuntu and Michael Larabel has a report on GNU Guix, that started as a package manager but is turning into a distribution.

• Bodhi Linux 3.0 ships with just a few applications by default such as Midori 0.5.9 as web browser, nm-applet (connection manager applet) 0.9.8 and of course, a few Enlightenment-specific applications like Enlightenment File Manager, Terminology (terminal emulator) 0.7.0, ePad (text editor) 0.5, ePhoto (picture viewer) 20150116 build, eepDater (update manager) 0.11.

Arch Family

• We’re happy to announce the 0.8.12 release of Manjaro Linux installation media, including images for the Xfce and KDE4 desktop environments, and our minimal ‘Net’ edition.

• Great progress is being made with our new 0.9 series installation media that uses the Calamares installer, along with our new KDE Plasma 5 installation media, but since neither is quite ready yet we’re providing updated 0.8 series installation media that uses our legacy installer, Thus.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Inc, the world’s largest pure-play open-source software company, is ramping up its cloud-based subscription service in Asean to capitalise on the rapid adoption of cloud computing in the region.

• Its new cloud service is aimed at competing directly with Microsoft’s cloud platform and provide another alternative for enterprises, said Damien Wong, senior director and general manager of Red Hat Asean.

Fedora

• Corebird 0.9 was released a few months ago, and it is now finally available in the official Fedora repos. Check out my previous post for details on some of the new features in this update.

Debian Family

• Back in December 2014 I won a Creator C120 single board computer from Imagination Technologies, a technology outfit based in Hertfordshire (UK).

• The Creator C120 is a development board for Linux and Android.

• It’s powered by a dual-core MIPS32 CPU (1.2 GHz) and a PowerVR SGX540 GPU. Add to that 1 GB of RAM, 8 GB NAND Flash, two USB ports, an HDMI port up to 2k resolution, a full size SD card slot, 10/100 Mbps Ethernet and WiFi connectivity (with Bluetooth 4) and what you’ve got is a very powerful single-board computer.

Derivatives

• Philip Newborough, the lead developer behind the CrunchBang Linux distribution, has tossed in the towel.

• The lead developer of CrunchBang Linux has decided to halt development of this Linux distribution that’s based on Debian but known for its choice of using the Openbox window manager.

• The Linux world is in mourning following the stunning announcement of the death of CrunchBang Linux. The developer of CrunchBang has decided that it’s time to move on.

• I have decided to stop developing CrunchBang. This has not been an easy decision to make and I’ve been putting it off for months. It’s hard to let go of something you love.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical has published details about a Django regression in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems, which has been identified and fixed.

• The mobile market is saturated. Any new entrants are doomed from the start. And if you need proof, just look at Windows Phone or BlackBerry. The problem is that you need an app ecosystem to gain market share, but you need market share in order to entice developers to your platform.

• Ubuntu Touch already has a large number of native apps and more are added every day. The platform needs as many applications as possible and now it’s Telegram’s turn to land in the Ubuntu Store.

• It’s been a long time coming, but finally Canonical is ready to release its first Ubuntu phone. After teaming up with Meizu and BQ almost a year ago, we’re getting a (sort of) new handset from the latter; it’s actually a repurposed version of its Aquaris E4.5, a mid-range smartphone that normally ships with Android. The new “Ubuntu Edition” keeps all of the same hardware, which is nothing to write home about. It has a 4.5-inch, 540×960 resolution display, a 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek Cortex A7 processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. For shutterbugs, there’s also a 8-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 5-megapixel snapper on the front. At €169.90 ($195), the specs are pretty unremarkable.

• Canonical is launching the first Ubuntu smartphone after a year of promises, though it’s unclear why anybody but hardcore Ubuntu aficionados would want one.

• The Ubuntu launch date are usually set in stone, but from time to time we might see some of them delayed. The same happened with the Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS release which is delayed for a couple of weeks.

• A promotional video for the first Ubuntu phone, BQ’s Aquaris E4.5, is now live and it shows just what are some of the capabilities and features of the operating system.

Devices/Embedded

• A “Deep-SCINI” submersible with Linux-based Elphel cameras discovered surprisingly diverse life under the Antarctic ice shelf — and rapidly melting ice.

• TechNexion and Freescale launched an IoT Gateway that runs Linux on a dual-core, Cortex-A7 QorIQ SoC, offers six GbE ports, and expands via Arduino Shields.

• The $429 LS1021A-IoT Gateway Reference Design, which is built by TechNexion and co-branded with Freescale, is the first product we’ve seen to run the first ARM-based versions of Freescale’s previously PowerPC-only QorIQ processor line. QorIQ has always been focused on networking, and that’s no different with the low-power QorIQ LS1 system-on-chip announced in Oct. 2013.

Phones

Tizen

• Samsung unveiled their Tizen based TVs at CES 2015, and today they have gone on-sale in South Korea. This initial batch comes in four sizes — 55, 65, 78 and 88 inches. The 55-inch version is priced at 5.49 million won (US$5,038), with SUHD TV’s having the capability of display over 1 billion colors, 64 times more than the existing models.

• This is the Samsung Z1—the world’s first Tizen phone. After one of the bumpiest pre-launch situations in recent memory, Samsung’s home-grown OS has finally hit smartphones.

Android

• We rightly laud Apple for its ability to get us to pay a premium, but the world owes more to Google for making mobile computing a commodity.

• My feeling is that we ought to be grateful that people have a choice. I can’t imagine anything worse than one platform dominating any particular market completely. We saw what that looked like on the desktop when Microsoft ruled the roost with Windows back in the 90s, and it wasn’t pretty.

• I wouldn’t want Android or iOS to completely dominate the mobile phone market. In fact, I’d much rather there were a strong third or fourth choice available as well. It’s never a good idea for one or two companies or platforms to have too much power or control over consumers.

• Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi launched its 2014 flagship, the Mi 4, in India last week, and the device is set to on sale on Tuesday in the country for about $325.

• While the phone isn’t exactly new, it does come with the latest version of MIUI, the company’s own flavor of Android. The Mi 4 is Xiaomi’s first device to get the update in English.

• Today, 6 February, is the third birthday of the Lumicall app for secure SIP on Android.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source scares people. And tossing them into the deep end usually doesn’t help dampen that fear. Instead, we need to help ease people into using open source. Scott Nesbitt, technology coach and writer, shares some advice to help you do that.

• First, curb the urge to get on open source soapbox. Instead, go for the heart of it—show them how they can do their work with it.

• Open source is not only for the techie. So, explain to people they don’t have to be a coder. They can learn to code, but it’s not required.

• The Coreboot project has now ported over the XGI Z9s frame-buffer support from the Linux kernel.

• FOSDEM doesn’t get the ra-ra headlines or (thankfully) the “booth babes” but the conference does get networking and top technologists (and Belgian beer). I saw a couple of my tech heroes and big cheeses here a few minutes apart just before writing this, for example, and got some top advice for a specific tech issue a breath later.

• I also saw photos of RMS (Richard Stallman) at large a few paces away, though I didn’t get to meet him in person and buy one of his badges, alas…

• Man-flu and technicolour yawning on the second day didn’t stop me having riotous fun with geekery, champers and IP lawyers this year!

• If you use Linux, most likely Apache is your web server of choice. Apache is a great choice. It’s incredibly powerful, very reliable, and secure. There may, however, be certain deployments that either do not need all of the features found in Apache, do not have the resources to support Apache (such as in the case of an embedded system), or need something easier to manage. If that’s the case, fear not ─ there are plenty of light weight, open source, web servers out there ready to meet and exceed your needs.

• Salesforce’s new Lightning platform aims to make it easier for ordinary folks to build apps, and leverages open source tech to do so.

• A year ago, Pivotal announced its intent to set up a foundation for the open source Cloud Foundry project, but issues lurk in the bylaws and ownership of the name

Events

• DevConf.cz, in the beautiful city of Brno, Czech Republic is one of the most popular free software conferences in the region. It brings together hundreds of developers, enthusiasts, and engineers to discuss and collaborate on new technology.

SaaS/Big Data

• Trying to learn more about what OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project, might have to offer? Need some help figuring something out, or inspiration for a new approach to try? We’re here to help. We have gathered some of the best how-tos, guides, tutorials, and tips published over the past month into this handy collection.

• Lately we’ve been covering tools that orbit Hadoop in the Big Data ecosystem, ranging from Elastic Search to Qubole, which offers analytics on Hadoop data as a service (HaaS), to the Apache Spark project. In this arena, Kafka and YARN are much talked about. YARN is a sub-project of Hadoop at the Apache Software Foundation that takes Hadoop beyond batch to enable broader data-processing. Kafka allows a single cluster to serve as the central data backbone for a large organization. With it, data streams are partitioned and spread over a cluster of machines to allow data streams larger than the capability of any single machine.

Databases

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle sometimes seems to be a bit miffed by enthusiasm for Linux container darling Docker because its own Solaris “Zones” have done containers for ages.

• Big Red also knows in its heart of hearts that Solaris isn’t for everyone, but reckons its own Linux is for anyone who fancies robust, well-supported Torvalds-spawn. And given that Docker needs an OS in which to run containers, Oracle has therefore decided to make Oracle Linux available in the Docker repository. The company will also package an Oracle-maintained version of MySQL and pop it in the same place.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Version 2.21 of the GNU C Library is now available. Glibc 2.21 fixes a lot of issues while also adding some new functionality.

• Glibc 2.21 has many bug fixes, several security fixes, a port to the Altera Nios II platform, a new sempahore algorithm, support for TSX lock elision on PowerPC, optimized string functions for AArch64, support for new MIPS ABI extensions, and many other changes.

• More details on glibc 2.21 can be found via the mailing list release announcement. Other GNU C Library 2.21 details can be found via the Sourceware.org Wiki.

• Over the last few months, Webmail provider Posteo has been working with the FSF to license and tag all JavaScript on their Web site and Webmail system so that it is immediately identifiable as free software. They have also done everything possible to ensure that it is 100% compatible with the GNU LibreJS browser extension, which automatically blocks any potentially nonfree JavaScript, making it easy to browse the Web in freedom. This is an outstanding effort in defense of the freedom of Posteo’s users, and the company deserves recognition for it. We hope others will follow their lead.

Public Services/Government

• This year half of all the software applications at the Diputación Foral de Bizkaia (the provincial council of Bizkaia, Spain) will be open source, up from 25 percent in November 2014. The goal was announced on 12 November at the start of the LibreCon software conference. “Open-source technology offers competitiveness and savings, boosts the economy, promotes knowledge and makes us more transparent”, a press statement quotes Counsellor of the Presidency, Unai Rementeria, as saying.

Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

Science

• Innovation makes things cheaper, which frees up cash for consumers to buy other things. That drives the virtuous cycle of economic growth. We dug into the inflation data, more formally known as the personal consumption expenditures price index, to highlight some of the items that have seen the biggest discounts.

Health/Nutrition

• The imperative to improve mental health in the UK is primarily a moral one. That said, even a hard-nosed economist, insensible to the suffering of individuals, should appreciate the benefits that better mental healthcare can bring. Unsurprisingly given its prevalence, mental illness has a huge economic impact: a 2010 report by the Centre for Mental Health estimated the aggregate costs in 2009-10 as £105.2 billion – rather more than the total NHS budget for the same year, £95.8 billion. As for the benefits of treatment, a report just released by the same Centre finds that, for every £1 invested in group cognitive-behavioural therapy for adolescents suffering from anxiety, £31 is saved in wider costs.

Security

• Sharyl Attkisson’s lawyer told the Daily Beast that an investigation that found no evidence her personal computer was hacked is “irrelevant” because it reviewed the wrong computer, despite her own repeated claims that the desktop in question had been compromised. He also falsely claimed her lawsuit against the federal government for alleged hacking was focused solely on a separate work computer.

• A malware program designed for Linux systems, including embedded devices with ARM architecture, uses a sophisticated kernel rootkit that’s custom built for each infection.

• A malware program designed for Linux systems, including embedded devices with ARM architecture, uses a sophisticated kernel rootkit that’s custom built for each infection.

• We know that the NSA likes taking unsolicited action inside the computers of others. We know the FBI is also very much into hacking.

• Now, the UK government is telling the world that its spies and cops are hackers too — and has asked the public what they think about it

• In a new unprecedented document released on Friday, the UK government released the guidelines and rules that all British spy and law enforcement agencies have to follow in their “equipment interference” activities.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• When Kenneth Jarecke photographed an Iraqi man burned alive, he thought it would change the way Americans saw the Gulf War. But the media wouldn’t run the picture.

• A federal judge is demanding that the government explain, photo-by-photo, why it can’t release hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of pictures showing detainee abuse by U.S. forces at military prison sites in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• In a courtroom in the Southern District of New York yesterday, Judge Alvin Hellerstein appeared skeptical of the government’s argument, which asserted that the threat of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda exploiting the images for propaganda should override the public’s right to see any of the photos.

• Thirteen years ago they were just a few men, disaffected students and farmers, shouting outside a rural mosque in the north Yemeni highlands. Today, they are in charge. They’re known popularly as the Huthis; the U.S. believes they are an Iranian proxy and Saudi Arabia has already fought one war with them.

• The privatization of America’s wars swells the ranks of armies for hire across the globe.

• The Middle East today is the last place anyone in mainstream western thought would think to look for progressive political thought, and even less to see those thoughts translated into action. Our image of the region is one of dictatorships, military juntas and theocracies built on the ruins of the former Ottoman Empire, or hollow states like Afghanistan, and increasingly Pakistan, where anything outside the capitol is like Mad Max. The idea of part of the region being not just free, but well on its way to utopian, isn’t one that you’re going to find on mainstream media.

Transparency Reporting

• Prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia began investigating WikiLeaks in 2010 after the site posted some of the quarter-million State Department cables leaked by Chelsea Manning.

• Last month, an official from the Department of Justice publicly confirmed the investigation is still ongoing. It was the first time anyone, including WikiLeaks’ own defense team, has gotten such confirmation since April 2014.

• Whistleblower laws exist because government officials do not always act in the nation’s best interests.

• The Obama administration, in its war on whistleblowers, just lost a major battle. Major in its venue — the Supreme Court — and major in its implications for future whistleblower cases.

• As Attorney General Eric Holder is about to leave office, Senator Ron Wyden has sent him a letter more or less asking if he was planning to actually respond to the various requests that Wyden had sent to Holder in the past, which Holder has conveniently ignored. Wyden notes, accurately, that the government’s continued secrecy on a variety of issues “has led to an erosion of public confidence that has made it more difficult for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to do their jobs.”

• WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange is considering suing UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg for defamation over comments made regarding Assange’s legal situation.

• Speaking on LBC radio on Thursday (5 February), Clegg said that Assange should go to Sweden to “face very serious allegations and charges of potential rape.”

• Assange has been accused of sexually assaulting two women in Stockholm in 2010, however no formal charges have been made and Assange denies the allegations.

• Scotland Yard have spent more than £10 million on policing the Ecuadorian Embassy where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been avoiding extradition.

• Mr Assange was granted asylum by the government of Ecuador and has been holed up in the building in Knightsbridge since 2012.

• The Metropolitan Police have posted round-the-clock police officers outside the building ever since, costing an estimated £10,500 a day.

Finance

• For his 50th birthday, Jim Tananbaum, chief executive officer of Foresite Capital, threw himself an extravagant party at Burning Man, the annual sybaritic arts festival and all-hours rave that attracts 60,000-plus to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada over the week before Labor Day. Tananbaum’s bash went so well, he decided to host an even more elaborate one the following year. In 2014 he’d invite up to 120 people to join him at a camp that would make the Burning Man experience feel something like staying at a pop-up W Hotel. To fund his grand venture, he’d charge $16,500 per head.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• NBC Nightly News anchor Brian William has apologized for falsely claiming (NBC, 1/30/15) that “during the invasion of Iraq…the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG.”

• After a January 30, 2015 ruling from Milwaukee-based federal Judge Charles Clevert, some declared that the “John Doe” probe into alleged campaign finance violations by Governor Scott Walker’s campaign was dead.

• The Franklin Center’s Wisconsin Reporter website claimed that Judge Clevert’s decision “effectively pulled the life support plug” on the investigation. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s right-wing columnist Christian Schneider repeated his erroneous “zombie law” claim, declaring that the ruling “almost certainly means the end of the most recent John Doe investigation.”

Censorship

• Google’s lawsuit against Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood is a crucial case for the future of SOPA-like Internet filters in the U.S. This week Digital Citizens Alliance, Stop Child Predators and others voiced their support for the Attorney General, suggesting that Google Chrome should be censored as well.

• After review by the French Cabinet last Wednesday, the implementation decree for the administrative blocking of pedopornographic and terrorist websites was published today.

Privacy

• A security problem in WhatsApp means that anyone can see users’ profile photos, even if they have been set to be viewable to friends only, according to security researchers.

• US intelligence community issues limited list of tweaks to data collection and surveillance at end of year-long effort to respond to Snowden revelations

• Director of National Intelligence James Clapper this morning released a report detailing new rules aimed at reforming the way signals intelligence is collected and stored by certain members of the United States Intelligence Community (IC). The long-awaited changes follow up on an order announced by President Obama one year ago that laid out the White House’s principles governing the collection of signals intelligence. That order, commonly known as PPD-28, purports to place limits on the use of data collected in bulk and to increase privacy protections related to the data collected, regardless of nationality.

• Three Democratic lawmakers on the influential Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation are calling on federal regulators to investigate Verizon for its practice of using unique customer codes to track the online activities of its wireless subscribers.

• So for the past three months I’ve been using Tor Browser to surf the Web, not as a primary browser, but as a secondary browser. Firefox is my primary browser.

• Together with using StartPage as my search engine, I feel much better about my privacy while surfing the Internet. Using Tor Browser leads to a tad slower browsing experience, but I knew that going in, so no complaints there.

• The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is using license-plate reader technology to photograph motorists and passengers in the US as part of an official exercise to build a database on people’s lives.

• According to DEA documents published on Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the agency is capturing images of occupants in the front and rear seats of vehicles in a programme that monitors Americans’ travel patterns on a wider scale than previously thought.

• About two-thirds of investigative journalists surveyed (64%) believe that the U.S. government has probably collected data about their phone calls, emails or online communications, and eight-in-ten believe that being a journalist increases the likelihood that their data will be collected. Those who report on national security, foreign affairs or the federal government are particularly likely to believe the government has already collected data about their electronic communications (71% say this is the case), according to a new survey of members of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) – a nonprofit member organization for journalists – by the Pew Research Center in association with Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism

• Leonid Levin, the head of the Duma’s committee on public communications policy, wants to grant police the extrajudicial power to block access to Internet anonymizers and “the means of accessing anonymous networks, such as Tor.”

• Regulations governing access to intercepted information obtained by NSA breached human rights laws, according to Investigatory Powers Tribunal

• Spy agency could now be forced to reveal whether it spied on civil rights groups after watchdog human rights ruling

• A British tribunal ruled on Friday that some aspects of intelligence-sharing between security agencies in Britain and the United States were unlawful until December 2014, in a ground-breaking case brought by civil liberties groups.

• The Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that Britain’s GCHQ had acted unlawfully in accessing data on millions of people in Britain that had been collected by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), because the arrangements were secret.

• Campaign groups Liberty, Privacy International, Amnesty International and others brought the case following revelations about mass surveillance made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

• The court that oversees intelligence agencies in Britain ruled on Friday that the electronic mass surveillance of cellphone and other online communications data had been conducted unlawfully.

• The legal decision, the first time the court has ruled against the British intelligence services since the tribunal was created in 2000, relates to information that was shared between British security agencies and the National Security Agency of the United States before December 2014.

• Although privacy campaigners claimed the decision as a victory, many experts said the British and American intelligence agencies would continue to share information obtained with electronic surveillance, even if they had to slightly alter their techniques to comply with human rights law.

• The United Kingdom’s top surveillance agency has acted unlawfully by keeping details about the scope of its Internet spying operations secret, a British court ruled in an unprecedented judgment issued on Friday.

• Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, was found to have breached human rights laws by concealing information about how it accesses surveillance data collected by its American counterpart, the National Security Agency.

Civil Rights

• Once the items were deemed harmless, Vanderklok says, he told Kieser that if someone had only told him what “organic matter” meant, he could have saved everyone a lot of trouble. Kieser then became confrontational. Vanderklok says he calmly asked to file a complaint. He then waited while someone was supposedly retrieving the proper form.

• Instead, Kieser summoned the Philadelphia Police. Vanderklok was taken to an airport holding cell, and his personal belongings – including his phone – were confiscated while police “investigated” him.

• Vanderklok was detained for three hours in the holding cell, missing his plane. Then he was handcuffed, taken to the 18th District at 55th and Pine and placed in another cell.

• He says that no one – neither the police officers at the airport nor the detectives at the 18th – told him why he was there. He didn’t find out until he was arraigned at 2 a.m. that he was being charged with “threatening the placement of a bomb” and making “terroristic threats.”

• Vanderklok’s Kafkaesque odyssey finally ended at 4 a.m., when his wife paid 10 percent of his $40,000 bail.

• When I heard this story, my first thought was that Vanderklok had to have said or done something outrageous for others to respond with such alarm. In fact, Kieser said as much at Vanderklok’s trial on April 8, 2013.

• [...]

• But here’s the thing: Airport surveillance videos show nothing of the sort.

• On a quiet weeknight among the stately manors of Great Falls, ten men sat around a table in the basement of a private home last November playing high stakes poker. Suddenly, masked and heavily armed SWAT team officers from the Fairfax County Police Department burst through the door, pointed their assault rifles at the players and ordered them to put their hands on the table. The players complied. Their cash was seized, including a reported $150,000 from the game’s host, and eight of the ten players were charged with the Class 3 misdemeanor of illegal gambling, punishable by a maximum fine of $500. The minimum buy-in for the game was $20,000, with re-buys allowed if you lost your first twenty grand.

• [...]

• “It’s crazy,” said the regular, looking back on the night of the raid. “They had this ‘shock and awe’ with all of these guys, with their rifles up and wearing ski masks.” He noted that the Justice Department recently revamped its guidelines for civil forfeiture cases, following reports by The Post about abuses of the seizure process by police around the country, including Fairfax. But in Virginia, the seizure law remains the same, and agencies may keep what they seize, after going through a court process.

• Looking west from the scrub and boulders of the Sandia Mountains, the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, sprawls across the valley of the Rio Grande, surrounded by the vast openness of the high desert. On the city’s eastern edge, the winding roads and cul-de-sacs of tony subdivisions in the Northeast Heights abruptly give way to the foothills of the mountains, whose sharp red peaks tower over the city.

• Coca-Cola has been forced to withdraw a Twitter advertising campaign after a counter-campaign by Gawker tricked it into tweeting large chunks of the introduction to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

• For the campaign, which was called “Make it Happy” and introduced in an ad spot during the Super Bowl, Coke invited people to reply to negative tweets with the hashtag “#MakeItHappy”.

• The idea was that an automatic algorithm would then convert the tweets, using an encoding system called ASCII, into pictures of happy things – such as an adorable mouse, a palm tree wearing sunglasses or a chicken drumstick wearing a cowboy hat.

• In a press release, Coca-Cola said its aim was to “tackle the pervasive negativity polluting social media feeds and comment threads across the internet”.

• A top U.S. defense official said it was “no coincidence” that recent Islamic State videos of the savage executions of Jordanian and Japanese hostages showed the victims wearing orange jumpsuits, “believed by many to be the symbol of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.”

• Fox News Radio host Tom Sullivan is backtracking and brazenly lying about his controversial remarks calling bipolar disorder “made up” and “the latest fad.” While Sullivan now claims his remarks were taken “out of context,” this defense is preposterous. He repeatedly dismissed the validity of bipolar disorder and the clip used by Media Matters was the same one posted by his employer with the headline “(AUDIO) Bipolar Woman Says She DESERVES Disability Benefits. Tom Tells Her She’s WRONG!”

• Few in public life are as contemptuous of privacy as Stewart Baker, an attorney whose career has included stints at the NSA and Department of Homeland Security. He is a staunch defender of most every U.S. government surveillance effort. As Americans expressed alarm at the scope of spying revealed by Edward Snowden, he delivered a speech asserting that they were engaged in an irrational moral panic.

• But even this man, who believes that bulk, warrantless surveillance is fine under the Fourth Amendment, acknowledges that the Drug Enforcement Administration deserves censure for secretly operating surveillance programs. In fact, he believes that the DEA’s behavior was egregious enough that the public’s failure to respond more forcefully calls the value of transparency itself into question.

• Yet he isn’t personally condemning the DEA.

• Witness after witness in the Jeffrey Sterling trial made claims about how closely held the program was. “More closely held than any other program,” Walter C, a physicist who worked on the program described. “More closely held,” David Shedd, currently head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and head of Counterproliferation Operations until just after the Merlin op.

• Of course, Bob S’ admission that — when FBI showed him a list, in 2003, of 90 people cleared into the program, he said it was incomplete — suggests all those claims are overstated.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Michael Powell tried to do for broadband Internet what his father did for Iraq.

• One of the first things George W. Bush did after he was installed in the Oval Office was to put the younger Powell, who was fond of saying things like “the oppressor here is regulation” (Washington Post, 1/23/01), in charge of the agency that regulates media. His blithe attitude toward the consequences of his beloved market was perhaps best expressed by his dismissal of concerns over the digital divide (Chicago Tribune, 2/7/01): “You know, I think there’s a Mercedes divide. I’d like to have one; I can’t afford one.”

• MSNBC’s Harold Ford, Jr. used air time to push net neutrality myths without disclosing his relationship to the telecom industry, which has contributed millions of dollars to lobbying against net neutrality regulations.

• Now that FCC boss Tom Wheeler has made it official that he’s going to present rules to reclassify broadband under Title II for the purpose of implementing stronger net neutrality rules (details still to come…), the opponents to this effort have come out of the woodwork to insist, over and over again, that reclassifying is “treating the internet as a utility.” The cable industry’s main lobbyists, NCTA, decried “Wheeler’s proposal to impose the heavy burden of Title II public utility regulation….” and AT&T screamed about how “these regulations that we’re talking about are public-utility-style regulations…” Former Congressman Rick Boucher, who is now lobbying for AT&T whined that “subjecting broadband to public utility regulation under Title II is unnecessary.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• It appears that, even though I am past 50, my opportunities to become a spy have not expired. This is because, as an MEP, I have now been granted privileged access to the European parliament restricted reading room to explore documents relating to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal. But before I had the right to see such “top secret” documents, which are restricted from the gaze of most EU citizens, I was required to sign a document of some 14 pages, reminding me that “EU institutions are a valuable target” and of the dangers of espionage. Crucially, I had to agree not to share any of the contents with those I represent.

Copyrights

• Australia’s current Prime Minister Tony Abbott has asked the Opposition to back data retention laws by mid-March, playing the security card to try and pressure Labor leader Bill Shorten.

• But, as I’ve pointed out on more than one occasion, this rush to retain data of internet users is for other reasons. One, to satisfy big American media companies who want to use retained data to threated those whom they deem to be copyright violators.

• Australian ISPs have been given until April by the government to agree on a scheme for preventing what the big film and music companies call copyright theft. The mid-March deadline for passing data retention laws fits into that scheme neatly.

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