● 05.23.15

● Links 23/5/2015: Fedora 22 to May 26th, Netflix in SteamOS

Posted in News Roundup at 4:18 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Research house Gartner estimates that the 2015 calendar year will bring banner sales for the operating system as more schools and home users seek out Chromebooks. Should Chromebook reach the 7.3 million unit mark, the figure would represent a 27 per cent increase over last year.

Kernel Space

• The long awaited Systemd v220 has been released. Systemd v220 has a lot new features, improvements and bug fixes.

Graphics Stack

Applications

• Modern (and some less modern) laptops and tablets have a lot of builtin sensors: accelerometer for screen positioning, ambient light sensors to adjust the screen brightness, compass for navigation, proximity sensors to turn off the screen when next to your ear, etc.

• The GNU inetutils team is proud to present version 1.9.3 of the GNU networking utilities. The GNU Networking Utilities are the common networking utilities, clients and servers of the GNU Operating System.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• A new collection called “Surprise Attack Ultra Mega Pack” has been released on the Humble Bundle website, and it includes 12 Linux games.

• Version 1.1 of the Godot Game Engine has been released. This open-source game engine update brings a new 2D engine and claims to be one of the most advanced 2D engines for cross-platform games.

• CodeWeavers has recently released a new version of their commercial CrossOver software that allows GNU/Linux and Mac OS X users to run Windows applications. It’s a front-end for Wine!

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• RandR 1.5 was firmed up a few days ago for X.Org Server 1.18. The lead features to RandR 1.5 are monitor objects and tile support.

• X.Org developer at Red Hat, David Airlie, has added the RandR 1.5 monitor support to the GTK3 tool-kit’s X11 backend.

Distributions

• The latest edition of Simplicity Linux, version 15.4, recently became available for download. Simplicity Linux delivers just what its name suggests: It is a simpler way to run a fully powered Linux desktop on any computer you touch.

New Releases

• On May 22, Softpedia was informed by the developer of Q4OS, a small distribution of GNU/Linux that uses the old-school KDE3 desktop environment and was designed for low-end computers, that the distro reached version 1.2.2.

• The first release candidate to OpenWRT 15.05, the “Chaos Calmer”, is now available for testing.

Arch Family

• The Arch Linux developers informed users today, May 22, about the immediate availability of a critical update for the kernel packages used in the distribution that promises to patch the well-known EXT4 RAID data corruption issue.

Ballnux/SUSE

• A new set of improvements has landed in openSUSE Tumbleweed, the rolling release branch of the famous openSUSE Linux distribution.

• The advantages of a rolling-release Linux distribution is that developers can add all kinds of cool and new packages without having to resort to major new releases. They do test all these upgrades before releasing them, but they eventually land. The same can be said about the latest updates which cover the Linux kernel and the GNOME stack.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• That’s right — the bits are heading out the door (and onto our mirror network)! Expect the official announcement around 10am US Eastern time Tuesday morning.

• There’s one certainty in life, that is: Fedora will never arrive on time. In a post to the Fedora devel-announce mailing list the results of the ‘Fedora 22 Final Go/No-Go’ meeting were announced, it was a No-Go. Thankfully there was another meeting later today (May 22) to determine whether the release can be signed off and that’s where it was decided to ‘Go’.

• While yesterday there was risk of Fedora 22 being delayed beyond next week, this next Fedora Linux release was cleared today for being released next Tuesday.

• At the Fedora release Go/No-Go meeting last night it was determined that three bugs were serious enough to violate the release readiness criteria. As a result, the Final was blocked and a second Go/No-Go was scheduled for today. The results of that meeting are in! Elsewhere, Jack Germain said, “Simplicity Linux is easy to use and runs fast” and Swapnil Bhartiya shared his secret to converting users to Linux.

• At the Fedora 22 Final Go/No-Go Meeting #2 that just occurred, it was agreed to Go with the Fedora 22 Final by Fedora QA, Release Engineering and Development.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• He has posted the script on GitHub for others to try. It’s in really early stage of development but it’s surprising and at the same time disappointing to see that Valve made no efforts whatsoever to bring steaming services like Netflix to their platform that they plan to dominate the living room.

• A developer has put together some tools (still under construction) that would allow users to use SteamOS to play Netflix. It’s in its early stages, but the developer has made something that Valve hasn’t even thought about until now.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical has recently announced that Kernel fixes for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 12.04 have been implemented.

• Once released, an Ubuntu system does not get any new features implemented, but kernel updates that include security fixes become available very often.

• Canonical has published details about a FUSE vulnerability in its Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems. This is not a major issue, but that’s not a reason not to upgrade.

• Mark Shuttleworth is reportedly considering a move to make Canonical a public company.

• While the week started out with some of us waxing nostalgic about penguins on racing cars, it seems that the march of progress and onward-and-upward improvement continues, if news from the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is of any indication.

• Because it is a new platform, the main problem is that it does not have a lot of applications yet, despite the fact that it has a big and active community, the community-driven apps are not enough.

Devices/Embedded

• In the future, we may all have our own operating system, as well as 15 minutes of fame. Even now, the lure of owning, or more likely these days, hosting, one’s own OS continues to tempt companies and nations alike. This week we heard some rumbles about new OSes coming from Google, Huawei, and even the government of Russia. Meanwhile, Canonical took another step with Ubuntu Touch by announcing that Meizu has launched the developer version of the Ubuntu MX4 phone in China.

Phones

Android

• We always try to keep up with assorted fan communities to get a sense of how they’re feeling about their favorite products. Reddit’s Android fan community is typically very smart and insightful, which is why we were interested to see what Android M features they’d most like to see Google unveil at its big Google I/O conference next week. Here are the six most popular responses as ranked by upvotes.

• Google has already unwillingly confirmed that it’s going to unveil Android M at its I/O 2015 conference next week, and a few reports now claim to have knowledge of one of the major features that are going to be available to Android M users in the near future.

• Google’s interest in software for low-spec devices might take it through the emerging market and straight to the Internet of Things.

• I didn’t see this coming. Samsung turned up at the Mobile World Congress with a 50% larger stage, 25% cheesier jokes aimed at Apple and a 10% more dramatic mic-drop when it unveiled the S6.

• Every year Google’s I/O Conference is the place where creators and developers unite to discuss some of the biggest ideas that enrich and change the way people interact with their devices.

• Last year, Android Auto was unleashed at Google’s big developer’s conference, but that was just a taste of its dashboard ambitions. At next week’s Google I/O, all signs point to the company giving us a glimpse into a new infotainment system designed from the ground-up to be powered by Android.

• Currently, Google’s in-car play is limited to Android Auto, which does maps, music, texts, calls, and voice searches. But when Google shows off the latest version of its mobile OS – Android “M” – part of that announcement is reportedly a car-specific build designed that could control everything from the stereo to the climate control and more.

• Android 5.1.1 is working its way through Google’s lengthy list of Nexus devices. After coming to Wi-Fi tablets first, this week we saw it start to hit cellular devices like the Nexus 5, N4, and N9 LTE. As you may have noticed, Google’s latest smartphone didn’t make the list. With any luck, the Nexus 6 will get an over-the-air update sometime this weekend.

• Android is getting a TouchID-style system of its own with Android M, according to Buzzfeed’s sources. Apparently it’ll act a lot like the iOS tool too, bypassing passwords for associated apps in favor of reading your fingerprint. Given that I/O is practically right around the corner (next week!) it shouldn’t be long before this all gets confirmed — Google hasn’t responded to our request for comment just yet.

• The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 is considered to be one of the best devices of 2014 and one of the most influential devices this year. TouchWiz and Android 5.0.2 Lollipop on the device work together properly and the S Pen features that Samsung has added to the user interface are highly appreciated by users. Although a pretty large phone, the Galaxy Note 4 keeps its slim body and light-weight construction within users’ preferences. The only thing missing right now is the Galaxy Note 4 Android 5.1 Lollipop update.

• Taking a look back at seven days of news across the Android world, this week’s Android Circuit highlights a number of stories including the low sales of the Samsung Galaxy S6 family, the early arrival of the Galaxy Note 5, early reviews of the Sony Xperia Z4 tablet, Microsoft Office preview for Android, the new OnePlus 2 handset is benchmarked, Android Wear updates, MixRadio arrives on the platform, and the release of AdBlock’s Android browser.

• If you were itching to build an open source browser for Android, you can now do it using a practically all the code from Chrome for Android.

• As Venture Beat spotted, Google has uploaded the bulk of the remaining code into the open source Chromium repository.

• The open-source browser shares a lot of the same code as Google Chrome and often serves as the proving ground for new and experimental services.

• Mitsubishi’s “FlexConnect.IVI” automotive system runs Android on a TI Jacinto 6 SoC, and drives IVI, HUD, and cluster displays simultaneously.

• The trouble with most in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems is that they’re mounted in the center of the dashboard, and therefore not ideally located for the driver. Yet the display also needs to be accessible from the front seat passenger. Mitsubishi Electric’s FlexConnect.IVI system follows the trend of integrating IVI screens with a separate GUI instrument cluster, and also adds a third GUI heads-up display (HUD) display projected against the windshield for greater driver safety.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source development is the future of software. It’s great for users like you and me because open source software is usually free (not always) and often safer to use because malicious code is less likely to be implemented.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google developers have released a new development version of the Google Chrome browser, and the latest version is now at 44.0.2403.9. It’s not a big update, but it does bring some interesting changes.

• Launched in September 2008, Google’s Chrome browser is now dominant in its share of the desktop web browser market, with approximately 1 in 4 Internet users interfacing with the web using the browser. What many Chrome users probably don’t know, however, is that it’s actually based off the open source Chromium browser, also developed by Google. Up until today Chrome for Android differed from its desktop counterpart in that it’s codebase wasn’t open source – meaning, the code for the app wasn’t publicly available for other developers to view, modify, and build upon. That changed today.

SaaS/Big Data

• As the OpenStack cloud computing scene evolves, an ecosystem of tools is growing along with it. Tesora, the leading contributor to the OpenStack Trove open source project, cam out a few months ago with what it billed as the first enterprise-ready, commercial implementation of OpenStack Trove database as a service (DBaaS). The company also announced that it had open sourced its Tesora Database Virtualization Engine.

• Concentrating on the hybrid clioud during a time when it is seriously reshaping its whole business around cloud computing, IBM has announced that it will make OpenStack the central platform for its portfolio of cloud services. Dubbed IBM Cloud OpenStack Services, the new program will deliver a collection of OpenStack-based services for hybrid cloud customers.

Business

Semi-Open Source

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• In 1983, when I started the free software movement, malware was so rare that each case was shocking and scandalous. Now it’s normal.

• To be sure, I am not talking about viruses. Malware is the name for a program designed to mistreat its users. Viruses typically are malicious, but software products and software preinstalled in products can also be malicious – and often are, when not free/libre.

• In 1983, the software field had become dominated by proprietary (ie nonfree) programs, and users were forbidden to change or redistribute them. I developed the GNU operating system, which is often called Linux, to escape and end that injustice. But proprietary developers in the 1980s still had some ethical standards: they sincerely tried to make programs serve their users, even while denying users control over how they would be served.

• This week the FSF added our signature to a coalition letter addressed to Barack Obama, calling on him to reject any proposal to systematically undermine the encryption used to secure digital devices and software made in the US.

Openness/Sharing

• Software developers—and even consumers—are familiar with the open-source movement. Open-source projects, like the popular Firefox web browser, are generally developed in a public, cooperative effort. The copyright holder “opens” the consumer’s right to modify the “source” product and distribute it to others as long as the result is also “open” for others to do the same.

• We hear enough about how so many third world diseases are preventable, but people just lack the resources; preventable diseases can too easily become severely crippling, or even deadly, due to the condition of poverty. We also hear enough good stories about people who are using their medical and technical knowledge to change this fact.

Open Data

• Politiken, the third-largest daily newspaper in Denmark, has put online a data visualisation application which presents the budgets of 98 Danish municipalities, using Open Data.

Open Hardware

• We’ve seen the first version of the Tessel a few years ago, and it’s still an interesting board: an ARM Cortex-M3 running at 180MHz, WiFi, 32 Megs of both Flash and RAM, and something that can be programmed entirely in JavaScript or Node.js. Since then, the company behind Tessel, Technical Machines, has started work on the Tessel 2, a board that’s continuing in the long tradition of taking chips from WiFi routers and making a dev board out of them. The Tessel 2 features a MediaTek MT7620 running Linux built on OpenWRT, Ethernet, 802.11bgn WiFi, an Atmel SAMD21 serving as a real-time I/O coprocessor, two USB ports, and everything can still be controlled through JavaScript, Node, with support for Rust and other languages in the works.

Programming

• Zapcc is the latest compiler I heard about this morning… Zapcc is based on LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compiler but claims to be much faster than it.

• As of this month, the mainline code for LLVM and Clang finally have complete OpenMP support (currently against the OMP 3.1 specification).

Leftovers

Security

• Using secret questions to give people access to their passwords is a terrible idea, according to a new paper from Google.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• It started in April with a rash of deals between Argentina and Russia during President Cristina Kirchner’s visit to Moscow.

• And it continues with a $53 billion investment bang as Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visits Brazil during the first stop of yet another South American commercial offensive – complete with a sweet metaphor: Li riding on a made in China subway train that will ply a new metro line in Rio de Janeiro ahead of the 2016 Olympics.

Transparency Reporting

• Today it was reported that McNeilly turned himself in to the police at Edinburgh airport and is currently in military custody.

• With the Obama administration having prosecuted more national security leakers than any other, anonymous sources are the only way Americans can find out how their government is waging its secret war on terror. That’s why journalist Seymour Hersh deserves congratulations rather than condemnation for his story on the killing of al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden.

• There’s been criticism of Hersh, much of it centering on his use of anonymous sources. But if you read Hersh’s story closely and check what others have written, you’ll see that his account holds up. The report was published in the May 21 edition of the London Review of Books.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

Censorship

• If Theresa May has a reputation as a safe pair of hands, one has to wonder what she would have to do to lose it. The home secretary invented a human right to a pet cat in a conference speech, and allowed “go home” immigration vans to be wheeled out in diverse communities, before conceding that the vans themselves had to go home to the garage. Now we learn, courtesy of a leaked letter from her cabinet colleague Sajid Javid, about a wild scheme to censor broadcasters.

• UK Home Secretary Theresa May has been accused of trying to introduce state censorship of TV broadcasters by a senior Conservative minister in a leaked letter.

• In a letter to David Cameron written before the general election, then Culture Secretary Sajid Javid attacked Ms May’s plan to use regulator Ofcom to vet programmes before they were broadcast in the strongest terms, saying it posed a threat to freedom of speech.

• Mr Javid, now Business Secretary, also said Ofcom would be turned from a regulator into a state “censor” by the proposal and lead to comparisons with “regimes” with dubious human rights records, according to the letter which was leaked to The Guardian newspaper.

• Home Secretary Theresa May has been accused of attempting to introduce government censorship of British television programming by one of her Cabinet colleagues, a leaked letter has shown.

• The phenomenon of the Streisand Effect, where high-profile attempts to censor or prevent people from seeing something result in massively increased attention for the something, is a brilliant example of psychological reactance, the tendency of people to strongly object when a freedom is being taken from them [even though they weren’t using it] and do whatever they can to restore it [which will get them arrested if they’re not careful].

• Wikipedia is yet again being censored by China’s Great Firewall.

• Español On Thursday, May 21, the Cuban Patriotic Union (UNPACU) — an illegal opposition party created in 2011 — uploaded a YouTube video of activists in the southern city of Palma Soriano sharing DVDs filled with news and other hard-to-access information with the public.

• Uh oh… We’re not sure Taylor Swift said “eff you” on stage at the Billboard Music Awards, a Fox News anchor definitely didn’t talk about the prospect of free “cock” across the nation and we’re pretty sure a little boy didn’t beg his mother to get nasty with a homeless man.

• A New York benefit show for the National Coalition Against Censorship cancelled last week over allegedly offensive material will go on at a new venue — though without the Mohammed-themed play that first started the controversy.

• An anti-censorship benefit event at New York City’s Sheen Center was canceled recently over concerns about some of the scheduled speeches and Neil LaBute‘s play Muhammad Gets a Boner.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has proclaimed the Film and Publication Board’s (FPB) Draft Online Regulation Policy “Africa’s worst new Internet censorship law”.

• As a woman who writes articles about video games, I hear the word “censorship” a lot these days. To hear certain corners of the internet tell it, “censorship” supposedly means having discussions on the images we see in media, asking people to think about the language they use and the effect it achieves, doing any kind of media criticism, or moderating comments so that nobody can shit them up with frantic sealioning about how other people are being too sensitive to criticism.

• “Kanye West was grossly over-censored at the Billboard Music Awards,” the statement reads. “Non-profane lyrics such as ‘with my leather black jeans on’ were muted for over 30-second intervals. As a result, his voice and performance were seriously misrepresented.

• Kanye West was all ready and amped to close out the 2015 Billboard Music Awards with “All Day” and “Black Skinhead.” But home viewers weren’t able to fully enjoy Yeezy’s performance, as the broadcast heavily muted parts of the show, including words that don’t even anger the FCC or violate its regulations.

• Authorities in Iran are prosecuting another writer on national security charges for signing statements and writing posts that criticized state censorship on the Facebook page of the Iranian Writers’ Association.

• An administrative court in Egypt ordered the prime minster to take the necessary and immediate action to censor pornographic websites on Wednesday. While the court specifically calls for immediate action, the order can still be appealed at the Supreme Administrative Court.

• An Egyptian court has ordered Egypt’s Prime Minister take immediate action to ban pornography websites in Egypt, reported state media Al-Ahram.

• The decision by Egypt’s Administrative Court on Wednesday contradicts the same court’s decision two years ago in which it decided not to ban pornography websites, stated Ahram Online.

• Country’s new gender equality minister among those blurred from photograph on grounds that pictures of women offend conservative religious mores

• When it was announced that Miri Regev was to be the culture and sports minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fourth government, some people made jibes about her suitability for the position, based on her reputation as a loud and inflammatory politician who sees the world in clear terms of good and pure (us) and evil and impure (the entire world, including groups in Israel that don’t think “as we do.”)

• Only once in a while does an Internet censorship law or regulation come along that is so audacious in its scope, so misguided in its premises, and so poorly thought out in its execution, that you have to check your calendar to make sure April 1 hasn’t come around again. The Draft Online Regulation Policy recently issued by the Film and Publication Board (FPB) of South Africa is such a regulation. It’s as if the fabled prude Mrs. Grundy had been brought forward from the 18th century, stumbled across hustler.com on her first excursion online, and promptly cobbled together a law to shut the Internet down. Yes, it’s that bad.

• Today, in an important First Amendment decision, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked an attempt by the NAACP to use trademark as a tool to censor unwanted online criticism—a result we had urged in an amicus brief filed with the court back in October. The Fourth Circuit overruled a federal district court in Virginia, which had previously ruled that the Radiance Foundation’s use of the moniker “NAACP” infringed on the organization’s trademark.

• Rockstar Games and parent company Take-Two Interactive have filed a lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) over the latter’s in-production TV drama film Game Changer (working title).

• The BBC revealed the project last month, confirming earlier reports. The film traces the conflict between Rockstar Games lawyer Jack Thompson over Rockstar’s controversial Grand Theft Auto series, with Bill Paxton playing Thompson and Daniel Radcliffe starring as Rockstar Games co-founder Same Houser.

Privacy

• In October 2014, the IPT hearings produced another unexpected admission from the UK government. As Privacy International reported: “Details of previously unknown internal policies, which GCHQ was forced to reveal during legal proceedings challenging their surveillance practices in the wake of the Snowden revelations, reveal that intelligence agencies can gain access to bulk data collected from US cables or through US corporate partnerships without having to obtain a warrant from the Secretary of State.” The safeguards on how this material can be used are minimal: “On the face of the descriptions provided to the claimants, the British intelligence agencies can trawl through foreign intelligence material without meaningful restrictions and can keep such material, which includes both communications content and metadata, for up to two years.”

• In December 2014, the IPT ruled against the Privacy International group of human rights organisations, and “accepted the security services’ position that they may in principle carry out mass surveillance of all fibre optic cables entering or leaving the UK and that vast intelligence sharing with the NSA does not contravene the right to privacy because of the existence of secret policies.”

• In 2011 and 2012, the NSA and the communications intelligence agencies of its “Five Eyes” allies developed and tested a set of add-ons to their shared Internet surveillance capability that could identify and target communications between mobile devices and popular mobile app stores—including those of Google and Samsung. According to an NSA document published by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the targeting capability could have been used to launch “man-in-the-middle” attacks on mobile app downloads, allowing the NSA and other agencies to install code on targeted devices and gather intelligence on their users.

• Edward Snowden has hailed landmark shifts in Congress and the US courts on NSA surveillance but cautioned that much more needs to be done to restore the balance in favour of privacy.

• The conversations are, mainly, pretty mundane: one man at East Village restaurant Cafe Orlin, talks about publishing photographs. A woman at Crunch is talking to her personal trainer about how much she enjoys watching House of Cards. A guy in a cafe is telling a story about getting evicted from an apartment with “a bathtub the size of a racquetball court”.

• Over the past year, they’ve hidden dozens of mini tape recorders under tables and benches around New York City, secretly taping people’s conversations. This week, they launched a website where they’ve posted some of their recordings. They range from the mundane, like a woman at a gym talking about her plans for the evening, to the intimate, like a man at a restaurant talking about his lover’s fetishes.

• The head of the German Intelligence Agency (BND) told a special parliamentary committee on Thursday that his agency is ‘dependent on’ the American National Security Agency (NSA).

• More than 400,000 new keywords have been found in German spy agency BND’s computers, a German media report says. The findings would further undermine the organization, accused of helping the NSA with surveillance.

• The scheme is laid out in a top-secret NSA presentation dated June 2010 and titled “Medical Pattern of Life: Targeting High Value Individual #1,” which was among the files provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

• [...]

• Once the compound was located, the U.S. government also wanted DNA evidence that bin Laden was inside. Not long after the raid, it was reported that the CIA had set up a hepatitis vaccine drive in Abbottabad as a front to obtain DNA samples. The doctor working for the CIA, Shakil Afridi, was arrested by Pakistani intelligence and eventually sentenced to decades in prison — not for allegedly working for the CIA, but on charges of aiding a militant group.

• Chinese kit-maker Huawei isn’t apportioning swelling sales outside the Middle Kingdom to NSA snooping fears, more that double digit growth in Europe is related to brand recognition a decade after it up shop there.

• The NSA and its surveillance state supporters in the Senate are making a last ditch effort to prevent Congress from taking away any of the spy agency’s authority to snoop on innocent Americans, despite the fact that there is now broad support for NSA reform in Congress.

• Two U.S. Senate Republicans predicted Friday that their chamber will have enough votes to pass a short extension of three U.S. spy programs until Congress and the White House can come up with a final plan.

• “You can’t enjoy your civil liberties if you’re in a coffin,” Christie — a likely presidential candidate — said earlier this week.

• As Congress ponders the fate of the PATRIOT Act — and the counterterrorism surveillance programs it authorizes — two potential Republican presidential candidates stuck up for those programs Friday at a conference of Republican activists.

• Kirk Wiebe says the Senate is not challenging the authority that allows bulk collection of phone records

• Russian companies are taking no drastic steps to replace US-made equipment.

• The creator of a searchable database of 27,000 National Security Agency (NSA) contractors says his team has received a death threat as well as legal threats.

• The news that the NSA is preparing to begin winding down their bulk surveillance program against Americans would be welcome to the general public, but it’s probably not true, and the claim is certainly not directed at us.

• After Congress passed the PATRIOT Act in the panic following the 9/11 and anthrax attacks, officials described it as a way of breaking down a wall that had kept the CIA and FBI from sharing information. They argued that international terrorism investigators needed the same powerful tools that a grand jury gives law enforcement agents to conduct broad criminal inquiries.

• Section 215 was already law, but it was expanded by the PATRIOT Act to allow federal agents to obtain not only “business records,” but also “any tangible things.”

• Librarians were among the first to sound the alarm, and they were ridiculed for it. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft accused them of spreading “hysteria” that FBI agents were tracking what people were reading and “how far you have gotten on the latest Tom Clancy novel.”

• Internet anonymity has become difficult to procure as the NSA is doing everything in its power to keep tabs on Internet activity. One way that people have been protecting their anonymity is by using the anonymizing network, Tor. It was popularly used to access dark web sites like Silk Road, but it can also be used for good. For example, people in certain countries without free speech protections could be jailed or worse for disparaging online claims against the government; Tor provides a way to prevent those users’ web activity from being tracked. As it turns out, Tor isn’t as safe from the prying eyes of big government surveillance as we once thought.

• It has become very hard to keep internet anonymous, as the NSA is doing everything in its ability to keep a check on internet activity. The hackers which have the full force and backing of Beijing, London, and Washington, D.C. are anonymity’s toughest opponents. People have been using the anonymizing network, Tor to protect their anonymity. Tor was generally used to enter dark web sites like Silk Road, but it can also be used for good.

• This week, Paul tried to recapture that spirit, inveighing for 10.5 hours against the National Security Agency’s data collection program — an effort that also attempted to boost his presidential campaign.

• One in three Germans have said their trust in the government is shaken. Regardless of the media outrage over the allegations that German intelligence helped the NSA, Angela Merkel wasn’t rushing to offer an explanation.

• The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, is coming under increasing pressure to divulge a list of targets, including the IP addresses of individual computers, that German intelligence tracked on behalf of the US National Security Agency (NSA).

• Among the many arguments presented in opposition to allowing the federal government collecting mass amounts of data from people who aren’t even suspected of terrorism (besides the Fourth Amendment violations) is that: one, it hasn’t actually helped stop any terrorist plots; and two, we can’t trust a massive federal bureaucracy to subsequently dispose of information it gathers unrelated to any cases its working on.

• “The court” in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial is a shadowy tribunal that tries (and executes) Josef K., the story’s protagonist, without informing him of the crime he’s charged with, the witnesses against him, or how he can defend himself. (Worth noting: The FISA court doesn’t “try” anyone. Also, it doesn’t kill people.)

• There’s a reason why gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins. According to whistleblower former NSA official William Binney, the NSA has too much data to sift through, that it hampers the agency’s effectiveness in detecting threats before they happen with potentially deadly results. Basically, the NSA is no longer as effective in preventing any attacks. What it’s good for now is forensic investigation to trace the perpetrators of any terrorist attack—after it happens. The Boston Marathon gets bombed, the government finds the Tsarnaevs quickly enough, (through a lot of security videos and much later their transmissions) but the agency still failed to prevent the bombing from happening. So all the data the NSA has collected is actually slowing the agency down. Imagine a cop so pumped up with donuts he can’t catch up to a purse snatcher on foot.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Such a plan would affect over 500 million citizens’ ability to use the Internet. Imagine using Twitter and not being able to link to a news article without paying a fee. It would shut down the spread of news. This is just one way copyright is being twisted to censor the Web – but it’s far from the only way. That’s why we are part of a huge network of individuals and organizations committed to stopping these censorship plans, wherever they emerge.

• It’s taken more than two years for Swedish authorities to seize two key Pirate Bay domains but over in the United States the process is dramatically quicker. A TV company has just achieved similar aims against 11 ‘pirate’ streaming domains after being granted a comprehensive ex parte restraining order by a Florida court.

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