● 07.25.15

● Links 25/7/2015: Plasma Mobile, Linux Mint 17.2 OEM

Posted in News Roundup at 11:08 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I’ve been flirting with Linux on virtual machines for years, dissuaded more than once by the appearance of Ubuntu, I stumbled upon Kali Linux, the deluxe penetration testing and hacking distro compiled by the macho sounding Offensive Security.

Server

• Containers are coming together on Internet time. That’s because, as Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation’s executive director, explained in his OSCon, keynote that “Containers will change the datacenter in the same way that shipping containers changed global trade. They will shift IT from a server view of the world to an application view of the world.”

Kernel Space

• Daniel Vetter of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center has sent in many Intel DRM driver changes to be queued up in DRM-Next for the Linux 4.3 kernel.

• This drm-intel-next load is quite big given that there’s three batches of changes due to Vetter having held off on sending out this pull request for the code to land in DRM-Next.

• Anyone who still thinks that Linux is some sort of second-class citizen when it comes to virtual desktop infrastructure hasn’t been keeping up. New products are allowing IT departments to mix virtualized Linux desktops with those using Windows, without sacrificing any graphics performance.

Graphics Stack

• Earlier this week I finished up a 15-way AMD/NVIDIA graphics card comparison on Linux with the very latest proprietary Linux drivers. That earlier article focused on the OpenGL performance and simply put the Catalyst performance on the tested Radeon hardware was abysmal compared to NVIDIA’s Linux driver performance. However, there is one area where the Catalyst Linux driver really excels at performance and routinely beats out the green competition.

Applications

• As you may know, Dolphin Emulator is an open-source, multi-platform Nintendo GameCube, Wii and Triforce emulator. Like all the emulated software, the games have minor bugs and issues. Being an open-source project, it may be improved by third party developers.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• A developer has posted on the Gauntlet Steam forums about Gauntlet: Slayer Edition, a free upgrade to Gauntlet. In the same post the developer noted that the SteamOS version has now been cancelled due to limited resources.

• They say that taking a vacation is good for your health, so every summer, we take a break from our lists of more serious open source apps and focus on games. This year’s list is longer than ever before with 112 projects. While we’ve removed a few projects that are no longer actively maintained, you’ll find plenty of old favorites on the list, plus a few newcomers that have never been featured before.

• Back in 2011 we were talking about Cradle as the latest Unigine Engine game and it was expected to launch in 2012 with Linux support. Three years later, this game has finally launched on Steam with Linux support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The developers behind the modern and beautiful Enlightenment desktop environment used in countless distributions of GNU/Linux have announced recently the immediate availability of the sixth maintenance release of Enlightenment 0.19.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE is de-camping to the far west of Europe today to A Coruña in Galicia. In this north west corner of the Iberian Peninsula the sun is warm and the air is fresh. KDE contributors of all varieties will be spending a week in talks, discussions, hacking, renewing old friendships and getting to know people new to our KDE Community.

• Plasma Mobile offers a Free (as in freedom and beer), user-friendly, privacy-enabling, customizable platform for mobile devices. Plasma Mobile is Free software, and is now developed via an open process. Plasma Mobile is currently under development with a prototype available providing basic functions to run on a smartphone.

• It was recently brought to our attention that the KDE developers are hard at work these days preparing a new user interface (UI) for mobile devices running on top of the Ubuntu Touch and Kubuntu operating system, as well as on the next-generation Wayland display server.

• There’s a new player in the smartphone operating system space: the folks behind the KDE desktop environment for Linux-based desktop computers have just unveiled Plasma Mobile.

• Today, July 25, KDE, the company behind the modern, mature, and robust desktop environment with the same name, which is used in numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems, had the great pleasure of announcing a new project targeted at mobile device, Plasma Mobile.

• A lengthy write-up of the announcement has been posted to dot.kde.org. That announcement talks of Plasma Mobile’s advantages of freedom, user-friendliness, privacy, and customization and personalization. It also mentions that while native apps will be written using Qt5, it will also support GTK apps, Android apps, Ubuntu apps, and applications from other mobile ecosystems.

• At KDE’s Akademy event today, the KDE camp has just lifted the embargo on Plasma Mobile.

• KDE Plasma Mobile is focusing on a fully-free software stack that’s developed openly for mobile devices such as smartphones.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• On July 24, Igor Gnatenko was more than proud to publish some details about his upcoming news reader app for the highly acclaimed GNOME desktop environment, called GNOME News.

• In the last part, I glued the paper templates for the shield and foot onto the wood. Now comes the part that is hardest for me: excavating the foot pieces in the dark wood so the light-colored ones can fit in them. I’m not a woodcarver, just a lousy joiner, and I have a lot to learn!

Distributions

Ballnux/SUSE

• DeMaio quoted Richard Brown, chairman of the openSUSE board, saying, “The opportunity for topping this SLE core with the things you want in a long-term release really makes this attractive and I see people wanting to get involved with this next chapter of openSUSE. Leap will fill the gap between the longevity of a SLE core and the innovation related to Tumbleweed.”

• OpenSUSE 42.1 Leap is derived from SUSE Linux Enterprise’s source-code and is going to be the openSUSE project’s next non-rolling release and entered development last month. Currently Leap is due for release in November. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, the rolling-release arm of the distribution, will meanwhile keep on rolling.

Slackware Family

• That updated version 44.0.2403.107 may have to wait, because I will be unable to do a lot of Slackware related stuff until august; real life is catching up with me. If there are real useability issues with 44.0.2403.89, let me know and I will see if I can shift priorities or make the older 43.x packages available again. My initial (not exhaustive) testing showed no weirdness at least.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Speaking of schedules, Fedora 23 development is well underway. Last week, Fedora 23 branched from Rawhide, so that we can focus on stabilization and bugfixes for the planned October release while ongoing work on future features — Fedora 24 and beyond! — can continue in the development branch. The Alpha Freeze (where F23 features and changes are supposed to be substantially complete and testable) is scheduled for a week from today, with the actual Alpha release August 11th — the day before Flock starts. The QA team is already working on early test candidates, and Docs has put out a call for help with release notes.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• On July 23, we reported that the Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) operating system reached end-of-life and that Canonical urges all users that still run the Utopic distribution to upgrade to the current stable release, Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet), as soon as possible.

• On July 24, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report on the work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in the last 24 hours, informing us all that the full-featured Mir 0.14 display server update landed in the devel branch of Ubuntu Touch.

• The boot manager has been updated from something in the past called Upstart, to the more widely supported and loved systemd environment. Upstart still manages user sessions, but the systemd (pronounced System Dee) has been found to be more reliable according to many folks inside and outside of Canonical.

• Over the last few years, Google and Android have increasingly dominated the mobile scene, with Microsoft relegated to bit-player status. Once-massive players like BlackBerry scarcely stir a ripple in the market. Nonetheless, Ubuntu has chosen to stick its neck out and create a mobile operating system based on its own software to hopefully compete against the massive entrenched players. A new review of the Ubuntu Phone OS puts the operating system through its paces — and finds a great deal wanting.

• On July 24, Canonical’s Bill Filler sent in his report on the work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers, as well as to inform us all about the new features and bug fixes that will be implemented in the upcoming OTA-6 update for Ubuntu Touch.

Flavours and Variants

• Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project, has announced on July 23 that the upgrade path from the Linux Mint 17 (Qiana) and Linux Mint 17.1 (Rebecca) distributions to the Linux Mint 17.2 (Rafaela) operating system is now open for all editions.

• We’re now in the RC phase for the Xfce and KDE editions. So far most of the bugs were either minor or cosmetic. The upgrade paths for these two editions were also successfully tested and will be open to 17 and 17.1 users at around the same time as the stable releases, around the end of the month.

• On July 23, Clement Lefebvre, leader of the popular Linux Mint computer operating system, sent in his monthly report on the work done by the Linux Mint developers in the month of July 2015.

• The following OEM installation images are now available:

• Linux Mint 17.2 Cinnamon OEM 64-bit Linux Mint 17.2 MATE OEM 64-bit

• Reminder: OEM images are for computer vendors and manufacturers. They allow Linux Mint to be “pre-installed” on a machine which is then used by another person than the one who performed the installation. After an OEM installation, the computer is set in such a way that the next reboot features a small setup screen where the new user/customer has the ability to choose his/her username, password, keyboard layout and locale.

• We reported the other day that Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project has published news about some of the upcoming work that will be done for the acclaimed GNU/Linux operating system based on Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

• Sundance’s sandwich-style SBC runs Linux on an ARM/FPGA Xilinx Zynq SoC, offers VITA57.1 FMC-LPC I/O, and stacks via a PCIe/104 OneBank expansion bus.

• The MIPS Creator CI20 is a fun little $65 board for those wanting to experiment with alternative architectures on Linux.

• MontaVista Software has launched an Internet of Things version of its commercial MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) development platform. The new Yocto Linux-based MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade eXpress (CGX) distribution will be available in the fourth quarter in a scaled down CGX Foundation optimized for IoT products. Customers can then add profiles including Carrier Grade and Virtualization in modular fashion.

Phones

Tizen

• Smart TVs are becoming the central point of our communications in the modern Smart home. They can entertain and increasingly provide us with important information, and living in the UK it doesn’t get more Important than the weather for me.

Android

• Fallout Shelter, the mobile Fallout game developer Bethesda released in June on iOS devices, is finally coming to Android on August 13.

• Taking a look back at seven days of news across the Android world, this week’s Android Circuit includes Samsung’s surrender to Apple, Samsung’s supporters in the Apple patent case appeal, details on the Moto G leak, updating the S6 Edge software, what we know about the Samsung Galaxy Note 5, the Android 5.1 update for Xperia handsets, who to add MicroSD support to the S6, details on the Pebble Time smartwatch sales, and AP releases a million minutes of archive footage on YouTube.

• A pair of Android tablets are climbing the update mountain to the peak of Android 5.1. They’re the highlight in a slower-than-usual week for Android devices, especially with the first-generation AT&T Moto X pushed back to a holding pattern.

Free Software/Open Source

• For an emerging platform business model, information technology may not top the owner’s agenda. Building a community and setting the ground rules for participation and conflict resolution are often the first priority. IT, however, tends to become a higher priority as a platform scales and matures. That’s been the case for Etsy, which was founded in 2005. Today, Etsy’s technology infrastructure plays a critical role in the current stage of the platform’s evolution.

• [...]

• Etsy is largely built on open source technology, according to Allspaw. At its core, the company’s platform stack includes PHP and MySQL, Hadoop and Scalding, and Solr/Lucerne/ElasticSearch, he explained.

• Besides the open-source Mesa finally hitting OpenGL 4.0+, Vulkan being right on the horizon, there being Skylake just around the corner, AMD R9 Fury Linux benchmarks coming next week, and Intel Skylake being days away, there’s been many other exciting announcements so far this month and milestones for free software.

• Harnessing the power of apps, devices, and the cloud, IFTTT has just unveiled five open source projects. Now available on GitHub, the projects can be used by anyone to integrate IFTTT automation in their apps and services.

• CNCF’s role is to foster developer and operator collaboration on common technologies for deploying cloud native applications and services, said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation — that is, applications or services that are container-packaged, dynamically scheduled and micro services-oriented. To ease the process, CNCF aims to drive alignment among technologies and platforms.

Events

• The fifth developer weekend was an opportunity for us to gather in a pleasant setting and work together in person. We were graciously hosted, once again, by Codethink in their Manchester offices.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• As of this commit yesterday, by Mike Hommey, Firefox nightly builds are now being built with PLATFORM_DEFAULT_TOOLKIT set to cairo-gtk3! It would appear, according to the commit tag, that mainline Firefox will be built with GTK+3 for Firefox 42. Firefox 42 is expected to be released this November.

SaaS/Big Data

• The OpenStack Foundation’s executive director has defended the community project’s growing corporatisation following criticism from a former colleague and lead pioneer.

• Jonathan Bryce told The Reg big companies are critical to the success of OpenStack as they bring vital resources lacking at startups and among individuals. They also tackle the unsexy work that makes OpenStack acceptable to enterprise customers.

Hadoop Summit

• Enterprise customers could consider open source as the solution to their problems. According to Anand Venugopal, Impetus’ head of real-time stream analytics platform StreamAnalytix, “People have become so friendly to open source, and they have been waiting to be liberated from the hold of proprietary vendors that they are positively biased toward open source-oriented technology.”

• Discussing a recent use-case scenario, Kankariya said, “The guy was looking for his problem to be solved; he doesn’t care if it’s Hadoop or NoSQL or whatever.” This openness has allowed Impetus to become a trusted partner and advisor for customers that want to “cross-learn from across the ecosystem.”

• Cloudera, Inc.’s Todd Laurence, director, global partner sales, and Michael Crutcher, director of product management, joined theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s Media team, at Hadoop Summit 2015 to discuss how Cloudera’s close relationship with EMC is benefiting its Isilon scale-out NAS storage customers and “bringing analytics to data where it lives today in EMC Isilon.”

BSD

• The FreeBSD Project announced a few minutes ago that the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming FreeBSD 10.2 operating system is now available for download and testing through the usual channels.

• This latest development milestone for FreeBSD 10.2 has fixes for ZFS, Xen, SSH, pkg, and many other key components. Besides being offered for i386, amd64, PowerPC, PowerPC64, and SPARC64, there are also ARM spins for popular development boards from the RaspberryPi B to BeagleBone and PandaBoard.

• One week after tagging LLVM 3.7-RC1, Hans Wennborg of Google announced its formal release on Thursday.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• As you may already know, this is the Free Software Foundation’s thirtieth year fighting for computer user freedom. It has been a great year already, with our biggest LibrePlanet conference ever and an article about GNU in the New Yorker. But what’s a birthday without a party?

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• Earlier this month, the Open Data Institute held its Open Data Awards ceremony at Bloomberg’s London office, where ODI founders Sirs Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt presented this year’s winners.

Open Hardware

• What if you could assemble your house like Legos using free modeling software and a 3D printer? That’s the idea behind Eric Schimelpfening‘s WikiHouse – a home designed entirely in SketchUp that can be downloaded by anyone, customized to fit the user’s needs and sent to the 3D printer. The components are then snapped together using less than 100 screws to make rooms that can be rearranged as easily as you would rearrange furniture.

Programming

• Just two weeks after PHP 7 decided to go into beta, the second beta release is now available for testing.

• If you’ve been living under a rock, PHP 7.0 is slated to deliver much greater performance over PHP 5.6 (as much as 2x or more), consistent 64-bit support, various new language features, better handling of fatal errors, and other changes.

Standards/Consortia

• The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has updated the ODF open document format standard for office application. ODF version 1.2 was published on 17 June.

Leftovers

Security

• In 100 milliseconds or less, researchers are now able to determine whether a piece of code is malware or not — and without the need to isolate it in a sandbox for analysis.

• Get your facts straight before reporting, is the main takeaway from Peter Hansteen’s latest piece, The OpenSSH Bug That Wasn’t. OpenSSH servers that are set up to use PAM for authentication and with a very specific (non-default on OpenBSD and most other places) setup are in fact vulnerable, and fixing the configuration is trivial.

• In the weeks since the Hacking Team breach, the spotlight has shone squarely on the small and often shadowy companies that are in the business of buying and selling exploits and vulnerabilities. One such company, Netragard, this week decided to get out of that business after its dealings with Hacking Team were exposed. But now there’s a new entrant in the field, Zerodium, and there are some familiar names behind it.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The National Archives on Friday released more than 350 never-before seen photos of former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, along with top members of the Bush administration, on Sept. 11, 2001, as they reacted to the most deadly attack in terrorism in American history.

• On Tuesday, the Ukrainian government refused to release an international report on the disaster, intensifying widespread concerns that it pointed to Ukrainian rather than Russian or rebel culpability in the crash.

• Saudi-led coalition airstrikes killed more than 120 civilians and wounded more than 150 after shelling a residential area in the Yemeni province of Taiz on Friday evening, security officials, medical officials and witnesses said.

• The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters, said that most of the houses in the area were leveled and a fire broke out in the port city of Mokha. Most of the corpses, including children, women and elderly people, were charred by the flames, they said.

• I’m reviewing some of the videos from the Aspen Security Forum. This one features DOJ Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin and CIA General Counsel Caroline Krass.

• I’m including it here so you can review Carlin’s complaints in the first part of the video. He explains to Ken Dilanian that ISIL’s recruiting strategy is different from Al Qaeda’s in that they recruit the young and mentally ill. He calls them children, repeatedly, but points to just one that involved a minor. 80% are 40 and under, 40% are 21 and under. In other words, he’s mostly complaining that ISIL is targeting young men who are in their early 20s. He even uses the stereotype of a guy in his parents’ basement, interacting on social media without them knowing.

• Carlin, of course, has just described FBI’s targeting strategy for terrorist stings, where they reach out to young men — many with mental disabilities — over social media, only then to throw an informant or undercover officer at the target, to convince him to press the button that (the target believes) will detonate a bomb — though of course the bomb is an FBI-supplied inert bomb.

Transparency Reporting

• Hong Kong is definitely the Asian hub of the global news industry.

• In an interview, Julian Assange, 44, talks about the comeback of the WikiLeaks whistleblowing platform and his desire to provide assistance to a German parliamentary committee that is investigating mass NSA spying.

• The minute that private email server Hillary Clinton used for work emails as Secretary of State became a controversy, it was clear that evidence would surface showing that classified information passed through that address – despite her repeated denials.

• Of course there was “secret” information in her emails – but not because she had attempted to cover up smoking gun Benghazi emails like conspiracy-addled Republicans hoped. It’s because the US classification system is so insanely bloated and out of control that virtually everything related to foreign policy and national security is, in some way or another, classified.

• And now it’s finally happened: the New York Times reported late Thursday that two internal government watchdogs have recommended that the Justice Department open a criminal investigation into Clinton’s private email account, because the cache of 55,000 emails from her now-deleted server reportedly include “hundreds of potentially classified emails”.

• The nature of secrets is changing. The “half-life of secrets” is declining sharply for many intelligence activities as secrets that in the past may have been kept successfully for 25 years or more, are now exposed well before.

• For evidence, one need look no further than the 2015 breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), of personnel records for 22 million U.S. government employees and family members. OPM is just one instance in a long string of high-profile breaches, where hackers have gained access to personal information, trade secrets, or classified government material. The focus of the discussion needs to be on complementary trends in information technology, including the continuing effects of Moore’s Law, the sociology of the information technology community, and changed sources and methods for signals intelligence, all of which increase the likelihood that government secrets will not remain secret for long.

• An age where secrets become known sooner, means that “the front-page” test will become far more important to decision-makers. Even if a secret operation is initially successful, the expected costs of disclosure become higher as the average time to disclosure decreases.

Finance

• On this week’s podcast, we look back on Elizabeth Warren ripping apart a rip-off artist from Primerica, break down the latest effort to pass a highway funding bill, and explain why a former NSA chief is talking to a bunch of fruit growers.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• US relations with Cuba have had a significant time to relax, and clearly there is a still a long way to go with Iran, which George W. Bush famously included as a member of the “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address (White House Archives, 1/29/02). One might wonder, however, were the US media to grant the same kind of legitimacy to Iranian perspectives as it now does to Cuba’s, whether that latter number might tick up.

• Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly responded to breaking news of a deadly shooting at a Louisiana movie theater by baselessly asking about possible connections to ISIS or radical Islam.

• In his piece “Tennessee Is the Capital of American Jihad,” author and “War on Terror” think-tanker James Kitfield sets out to draw a connection between the the recent Chattanooga shooter Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez and the case of Carlos Bledsoe, who shot up a recruiting station in Arkansas in 2009. The fact that both attacked recruiting stations, both lived in Tennessee and both were Muslim is apparently enough to make Tennessee the “Capital of American Jihad.”

• On Saturday, at the 2015 Family Leadership Summit, an event which showcases Republican candidates, Donald Trump gave a notorious interview in which he discussed John McCain’s military record. Trump said, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” His interviewer cut him off twice and and asked what he thought again. Suddenly, Trump said McCain was a war hero multiple times, creating a debate about whether Trump meant that McCain is a war hero because being captured is heroic or that McCain only got hero status because he was captured, not because he was doing anything special. Amazingly, Trump got a standing ovation — and his interviewer, Frank Luntz, knew exactly what he was doing.

• Luntz is not a journalist. He is not a fellow politician or a Republican Party executive. He is a pollster who specializes in language, and though you might not have heard of him, the Republican candidates certainly have. He knows what words to use to make you like them more.

Censorship

• The Colombo Telegraph, Sri Lanka’s most iconoclastic investigative news website, is gearing up for this year’s second national election. And once again they face the threat of censorship — despite a presidential promise to bring it to an end.

• January’s polls saw the website blocked to domestic voters by order of authoritarian incumbent president Mahinda Rajapaksa. Unseated by shock winner Maithripala Sirisena, one of the victor’s first acts after the vote was to lift the official banning order.

• 127.0.0.1 is the “loopback” address for your Internet stack, the address you tell your computer to visit when you want it to talk to itself.

• Links to 127.0.0.1 just go to your own computer — it’s like asking your computer to knock on its own door. Not understanding this is directly analogous to not being able to find your own ass with both hands.

• Earlier this year, the faculty advisor to Northern Michigan University’s college newspaper was outed for encouraging her students to file public records requests and draw attention to acts of secrecy performed by university administration. Noting that public records requests are legal and even encouraged as per Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act, it is unnerving to know that the accomplishments and reputations of our nation’s finest journalism educators can be undermined in the name of image control. But the Marquette-based college is not alone; the Rochester Talon, the nationally recognized and award-winning student newspaper of Rochester High School in Oakland County, has been subjected to prior review by school administration since January, when–in an attempt to raise awareness about changing smoking trends among students of legal smoking age–it ran a photo (shown below) of a teenager (lawfully, and in an off-campus location) smoking a hookah pen. The school administration’s swift retaliation made certain that no journalist would again dare attempt to inform the school community about an issue of social concern.

• Turkey’s Press Council has said censorship is still in place in Turkey, adding the country ranked 149th among 199 countries in press freedom reports, with 21 journalists in jail and a large number of ongoing cases filed against journalists, in a written statement issued to mark the 107th anniversary of Journalists Day.

• According to local filmmakers, the recent suppression of documentary Beyond The Fear is just one episode in a quickening erosion of artistic freedom in Israel.

• As Nanni Moretti’s Mia Madre began to roll on the opening night of the Jerusalem Film Festival in the picturesque Sultan’s Pool amphitheatre in early July, another screening was kicking off just metres above the spectators’ heads.

• Putrajaya’s three-month ban on two local publications reveals a growing clampdown on press freedom in Malaysia and a bid to encourage self-censorship, human rights groups said today.

• “If the Film and Publication Board’s new internet regulations are implemented, they’d have the right to review and classify almost every blog, video, and personal website – even Avaaz campaigns like this one. Think apartheid-era censorship, reloaded and super-charged for an all-out assault on our digital freedoms.”

• WeChat is China’s hottest social media app. But like internet services in China, discussion on WeChat isn’t entirely free – it is censored by Tencent in accordance with Chinese law. Just how censored is WeChat, and what exactly is being hidden from view? Those questions are the subject of an exhaustive new report from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab on WeChat censorship.

• The Citizen Lab report, published on Monday July 20, conducted an analysis over several thousand posts that were posted publically on the social messaging app WeChat’s public blog. WeChat is owned by Tencent.

• Legislation that is being promoted as a way to update the country’s anti-discrimination rules has sparked controversy in the Lower House and society at large amid concerns that it could lead to censorship, particularly in online forums.

Privacy

• Pakistan has been striving to set up a refined National Security Agency-style public watching system capable of tapping the phone calls and emails of hundreds of millions of people globally.

• In 2013, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence commissioned a major surveillance system that taps into three international under-sea cables affecting communications of its citizens and also the neighbouring countries whose communications pass through its borders, according to the findings of a report published by the British NGO, Privacy International.

• A report published by London-based advocacy group Privacy International claims that the practical surveillance capacity of the Pakistani government and Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) has exceeded local and international regulation laws for surveillance.

• Pakistan’s intelligence agency has been trying to build a sophisticated spying network that would rival the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in its scope, recording the phone calls and Internet data of hundreds of millions of people worldwide, according to a new report.

• Top officials of US and Pakistan have stressed on achieving peace and stability in South-Asia and its economic development through enhanced cooperation.

• You have to ask yourself: have trojan viruses and worms already been planted in peacetime, so that if we ever get into a serious confrontation with a potentially hostile state, then we will suddenly discover disruption?

• Top-secret intercepts prove that economic spying by the U.S. is pervasive and wielded to benefit powerful corporate interests.

• For years public figures have condemned cyber espionage committed against the United States by intruders launching their attacks out of China. These same officials then turn around and justify the United States’ far-reaching surveillance apparatus in terms of preventing terrorist attacks. Yet classified documents published by WikiLeaks reveal just how empty these talking points are. Specifically, top-secret intercepts prove that economic spying by the United States is pervasive, that not even allies are safe and that it’s wielded to benefit powerful corporate interests.

• An Obama campaign bundler and prominent Washington, D.C., attorney has been tapped as the new general counsel for the National Security Agency, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

• Glenn Gerstell has decades of experience helping to run a major law firm, and he has served on public boards and a presidential commission. But while he is well known in Washington legal circles, he’s a relative outsider among national security lawyers and experts who have recently composed the recruiting pool for the top legal position at the nation’s largest intelligence agency.

• The German domestic security service has urged the Federal Public Prosecutor to consider charges of treason as a result of two articles posted earlier this year by Netzpolitik.org, one of Germany’s most influential digital rights blogs. The articles reported on leaked documents regarding the German government’s mass surveillance plans. The German criminal code considers the leaking of state secrets to a foreign power, or to anyone else with the intention of damaging the Republic to be treason: the crime can be punished with up to five year’s imprisonment.

• A leaked NSA intercept shows that German FM Steinmeier was relieved to have “not received any definitive response” from the US on its rendition program at the time of the scandal, which exempted him from the need to act on the matter, WikiLeaks claims.

• Secret-spilling organization WikiLeaks has published new evidence of what the group says shows the extent of the National Security Agency’s longstanding surveillance of top German officials.

• The latest release from the anti-secrecy group, published Monday on its website, includes a list of 20 targets, all pertaining to German politicians, who had been supposedly singled out by the NSA for the purpose of gathering intelligence on behalf of the U.S. government.

• Following a meeting in the U.S. with then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier allegedly, “seemed relieved that he had not received any definitive response from the U.S. secretary of state regarding press reports of CIA flights through Germany to secret prisons in Eastern Europe allegedly used for interrogating terrorism suspects.”

• Steinmeier, per the reports, didn’t appear too interested in investigating CIA torture flights going through German airports, and the NSA reported he seemed “thrilled” that his tactic of avoiding asking direct questions had succeeded, and relieved that Condi Rice had given him nothing he “had to” look too far into.

• The latest secret document revelations from WikiLeaks regarding US National Security Agency (NSA) espionage on Europeans, shows German government as a “complete vassal” of the United States, a member of the German Bundestag with the Die Linke party told Sputnik Tuesday.

• New WikiLeaks revelations about US National Security Agency (NSA) spying on the German Foreign Ministry reveal hypocrisy by the United States toward its allies, co-director of privacy activist group Code Red Simon Davies told Sputnik on Tuesday.

• Germany’s domestic intelligence chief said Tuesday that the revelations by Edward Snowden have had at least one positive effect, by raising awareness about the importance of counter-espionage.

• Hans-Georg Maassen told a gathering of business leaders in the southwestern city of Stuttgart that after the Cold War ended, the issue of counter-espionage was seen as unimportant, German news agency dpa reported.

• “So maybe one can be grateful to Snowden that he has put a spotlight on the issue of counter-espionage in Germany,” dpa quoted Maassen as saying.

• Somewhere in the thousands of towering apartment blocks that ring the Russian capital, whistleblower Edward Snowden remains in hiding two years after outraging US intelligence agencies with revelations of their snooping into the private communications of millions of ordinary citizens.

• Mr Snowden’s release of classified files he took from his National Security Agency contractor’s job blew the lid off programs long said to be aimed at catching terrorists and keeping Americans safe. The leaks triggered a global debate on government trampling of personal liberties and led to last month’s congressional action to end the mass collection of telephone records, the first major restrictions on spy agency powers in decades.

• On July 1, The Intercept published an exposé on and NSA program it called, “The NSA’s Google for the World’s Private Communications.” It turns out advertisers and the data they rely on are facilitating the government’s bulk surveillance.

• Saxby Chambliss, a former Republican senator from Georgia, has called for National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden to be publicly hanged.

• Gov. Chris Christie on Wednesday sharpened his verbal attacks on Edward Snowden for his disclosure of classified domestic surveillance programs, blasting the former NSA contractor as a “piece of garbage.”

• The internet is not for businesses, governments, or spies. It’s for users—and it’s up to the independent web engineers to keep it safe for them.

• Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee and NSA contractor who in 2013 blew the whistle on several government-run surveillance programs, envisions an Internet that largely focuses on privacy. He urges leading group of engineers to weave an interweb that prioritises on people’s privacy over anything else.

• In a very powerful exclusive interview, I recently had the privilege of speaking to an American hero, William Binney, NSA whistleblower.

• We discussed how NSA mass data collection makes us LESS safe; how the intentions behind it are not misguided but positively nefarious; how the lies that have been told about it are snowballing, and how Rand Paul may uniquely represent an opportunity for change.

• We discussed how NSA mass data collection makes us LESS safe; how the intentions behind it are not misguided but positively nefarious; how the lies that have been told about it are snowballing, and how Rand Paul‘s presidential candidacy may uniquely represent an opportunity for change.

• Years after Edwards Snowden exposed the scale of NSA and GCHQ mass surveillance in a series of high profile leaks, UK police are still investigating the journalists involved in the expose to decide whether to prosecute.

• After refusing to confirm or deny whether the two-year investigation was still underway, the Metropolitan Police have revealed they are still examining the journalists who published the leaks by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

• The disclosure was reported by the Intercept, who had been engaged in a Freedom of Information battle which has lasted seven months.

• In 2013 Cressida Dick, a high-ranking UK police officer, told a parliamentary inquiry the force was investigating whether the journalists should be charged for their reportage.

• A controversial data localization law in Russia that would require businesses to perform data storage and processing with servers located on Russian soil is set to go into effect on September 1, 2015, after an amendment passed late last year accelerated the law’s start date. Recently, the Association of European Businesses (“AEB”), an industry lobby group, raised concerns to the Russian government about industry’s ability to comply with the accelerated date. There is some indication that Russia may be considering giving businesses more time to comply.

• The chilling effect of broad surveillance programs limits the exercise of the constitutional rights to freedom of speech, assembly, and religion, as well as equal protection under the law. It also causes professional harms—lawyers and journalists cannot do their jobs as well, and customers may avoid search engines and email servers run by U.S.-based companies.

• In an interview with HuffPost Live on Tuesday, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales discussed changing American attitudes toward hacking and mass surveillance and expressed optimism about the lawsuit he helped bring against the government.

• Earlier this year, the Wikimedia Foundation, which Wales chairs, and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the National Security Agency. The suit, Wales explained, objects to the spy agency’s use of “upstream surveillance” methods, which Wales described as “collecting data on almost everybody’s Internet usage in a really wholesale manner.”

• Joseph P. Nacchio, the former chairman/CEO of Qwest Communications International and of two national commissions on security and infrastructure, will speak at a National Press Club Newsmaker news conference on Wednesday, July 29 – to explain why he believes the USA Freedom Act signed into law last month provides inadequate protection against National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk data collection of the public’s electronic communications.

• On March 20, 2000, as part of a trip to South Asia, U.S. President Bill Clinton was scheduled to land his helicopter in the desperately poor village of Joypura, Bangladesh, and speak to locals under a 150-year-old banyan tree. At the last minute, though, the visit was canceled; U.S. intelligence agencies had discovered an assassination plot. In a lengthy email, London-based members of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, a terrorist group established by Osama bin Laden, urged al Qaeda supporters to “Send Clinton Back in a Coffin” by firing a shoulder-launched missile at the president’s chopper.

• The parallel between Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and CCTV may be clear, but what happens when you step into the world of data capture?

• People underestimate what cyberwarfare can do, but as the infrastructure of all our countries is run over the internet now, an attack on them could make society collapse within days, says Annie Machon, former MI5 agent.

• Germany passed legislation which requires over 2,000 essential service providers to implement new minimum information security standards. If they fail to do so within two years they are going to face fines of up to €100,000.

• A bill prohibiting law enforcement from obtaining location data from electronic devices without a warrant in most cases became law in New Hampshire this week. The new law not only protects privacy in New Hampshire, but also takes an important first step in addressing the growing federal surveillance state.

• Rep. Neal Kurk introduced House Bill 468 (HB468) back in January. The legislation prohibits any government agency from obtaining “location information from an electronic device without a warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause and on a case-by-case basis” with only a few exceptions. The law also prohibits law enforcement from placing tracking devices on any person, or their property, without a warrant.

• A new anonymous web browser capable of delivering encrypted data across the dark web at high speeds has been developed by security researchers.

• HORNET (High-speed Onion Routing at the Network Layer), created by researchers from Zurich and London, is capable of processing anonymous traffic at speeds of more than 93 Gb/s, paving the way for what academics refer to as “internet-scale anonymity”.

• The research paper detailing the anonymity network reveals that it was created in response to revelations concerning widespread government surveillance that came to light through the US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden.

• On February 6 next year, legal provisions that allow police and the secret services to conduct surveillance will disappear. All of it! This will be the result of a judgment by the Constitutional Court a year ago – and the government has yet to prepare regulations to replace them. It was put on its work schedule in March, but at this point there isn’t even an outline of how to approach the project.

• A few weeks ago, the Sejm Speaker and a group of senators from the Civic Platform (PO) presented a plan to the lower chamber on how to implement Court decision as sparingly as possible. For example, the Court held that it’s necessary to establish the maximum time that surveillance of an individual is permitted. The senators propose that police should be limited to a year and a half. Other services, however, [like the intelligence agencies], have no such limitations; although the Court didn’t exempt them from its decision.

• Palantir, the makers of a data analytics platform used by government agencies, law enforcement, as well as financial, insurance, retail and healthcare industries, has confirmed by way of an SEC filing that it has raised an additional $450 million in a new round of funding. The filing indicates the company had offered $500 million in stock, which means $50 million more could still be in the works. According to a report by the WSJ, the funding was raised at a valuation of $20 billion, up from its late 2014 valuation of $15 billion.

• Palantir is a big-data company that can sift through vast amounts of data to find patterns, answer questions, and solve problems. It serves various government agencies including the military, law enforcement and spy agencies like the CIA and NSA. It also counts Wall Street financial firms, pharmaceutical firms and other big companies as clients.

• Leaked e-mails from the Italy-based computer and network surveillance company Hacking Team show that the company developed a piece of rugged hardware intended to attack computers and mobile devices via Wi-Fi. The capability, marketed as part of the company’s Remote Control System Galileo, was shown off to defense companies at the International Defense Exposition and Conference (IDEX) in Abu Dhabi in February, and it drew attention from a major defense contractor. But like all such collaborations, it may have gotten caught up in the companies’ legal departments.

• Former White House Chief Privacy Officer Peter Swire told Sputnik that the likelihood of secrets coming to light limits the degree of control a government can exert over its people.

• The hack of the Office of Personnel Management databases is reverberating on Capitol Hill. The first phase of the response was a series of withering hearings that put (now former) OPM Director Katherine Archuleta in the spotlight, along with agency CIO Donna Seymour.

• “If we are going to continue to preserve our right to free speech in the electronic age, then we need to use tools like encryption,” says Ladar Levison, founder of the Lavabit, the encyrpted email service used by Edward Snowden prior to the NSA leaks.

• Levison shut down Lavabit after the FBI asked for access to all of his users data during what many suspect was a hunt for Snowden. He talked about that decision in an interview with Reason TV last year.

• Reason TV’s Zach Weissmueller sat down with Levison at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas this July to discuss the latest developments in the Dark Mail Alliance, a collaborative efforts by some of the world’s top cryptographers to create a user-friendly email service that encrypts data on the user devices themselves, rather than over a server.

• Cloud security and privacy has become critical in the wake of the Prism scandal, said Cronje.

• Three British politicians, including a current MP, are taking the UK government to the country’s top secret security court over claims intelligence agencies are unlawfully intercepting the communications of MPs.

• Not only has the NSA been collecting our personal information, but now it has finally leaked that the Obama administration has been undertaking a massive program to mine and collect personal data on your health, credit cards, jobs and movements.

• Public keys, trusted hardware, block chains — developers should use these tech tools to help secure the Internet for all

• Days ago South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) announced that it too had purchased hacking tools from cyber security pariahs, the Italian Hacking Team. Now the organization reveals one of its agents has been found dead in his car. The spy’s body was discovered beside a supposed suicide note that comments on the recent NIS revelation.

• The NIS was originally established as the Korean Central Intelligence Agency in 1961. In 1999 the organization changed its moniker to reflect its present mission which reflects something of a mix between Foreign Intelligence and NSA-level Domestic Spying – despite what its officials claim.

• In a recent post, Google said the newly proposed export controls for vulnerability research from the U.S. Commercial Department would make finding bugs and reporting them much more difficult. Instead of the new rules protecting Internet users, they might even have the opposite effect and make the Web less secure overall.

• The period for comments on proposed amendments to the Wassenaar Arrangement – which governs the export of guns, lasers and proper weaponry, and computer hardware and software – ends today. So far, the tweaks concerning IT security products have received an overwhelming thumbs-down from the technology community.

• In May the US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) suggested altering the Wassenaar Arrangement to include controls on the selling of state-sponsored or commercial surveillance software among the 41 countries that abide by the agreement.

• But the amendments were so loosely written that they would also ban the trade in vulnerability exploits, including possibly making bug bounty programs illegal, and criminalizing many of the tools used by legitimate security researchers to test software for flaws.

• Ever since the internet emerged into public view in the 1980s, a key question has been whether digital technology would pose an existential challenge to corporate and governmental power. In this context, I am what you might call a recovering utopian – “utopian” in that I once did believe that the technology would put it beyond the reach of state and corporate agencies; and “recovering” in the sense that my confidence in that early assessment has taken a hammering over the years. In that period, technology has sometimes trumped politics and/or commercial power, but at other times it’s been the other way round.

• In the digital world we live in– from the videos shared on social networks to location-aware apps on mobile phones to log-in information for connecting to our email to our search history — our data is no longer private, though we have every right to it

Civil Rights

• In the US, race has always mattered. Whiteness in particular has mattered most, standing as the seal of civilisation and the gateway towards citizenship.

• Since 1944, Arabs have been deemed white by law. Many Arabs still embrace and defend that status today.

• “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity”. Anyone who heard that in childhood as a wise saying, not to be questioned, was being told their elders believed the Nazis were not all bad.

• While research hitherto has focused on the support German aristocrats secretly provided Hitler within Germany, Urbach’s book discusses an additional, international dimension to this secret diplomatic back channel, most notably from members of the British royal family.

• Writing in the Telegraph, Conservative London mayor Boris Johnson thundered that it “makes my blood boil to think that anyone should use this image in any way to impugn the extraordinary record of service of Her Majesty to this country.”

• She was “a tiny child, and she is making that parodic salute long before her family could possibly have grasped what Hitler and Hitlerism was really all about.”

• In the Guardian, columnist Michael White wrote that the “Queen’s Nazi salute [was] a sign of ignorance shared by many in scary times.” The royal family’s “wobbly views” were, he claimed, shared by the “great British public.”

• Elsewhere, military historian James Holland opined, “I don’t think there was a child in Britain in the 1930s or 40s who has not performed a mock Nazi salute as a bit of a lark. It just shows the Royal Family are as human as the next man.”

• In the past decade, advances in neuroscience have given new insights into old problems, ranging from drug addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder to adolescent shenanigans.

• For example, if the new neuroscience shows that a drug addict’s brain is physically dissimilar to a non-addict’s brain in ways that make the former more prone to addiction, then we must ask if his infractions of the law ought to be treated less punitively.

• 16-year-old traumatized, Amos Yee is open for cash donation, who had already served four weeks in jail.

• Mr Lee was asked about the cases of Amos Yee and Roy Ngerng – the former found guilty of insulting a religion, the latter of defaming the Prime Minister – in an interview with Time.

• AWARE has grave concerns about the negative implications of the recent prosecution of Amos Yee. This statement focuses on harassment and hate speech as these areas are closest to our work, although we also share concerns that others have raised about the importance of upholding freedom of expression, children’s rights, and the integrity of people with autism and mental health issues.

• Teenage blogger Amos Yee, who received a four-week jail sentence for posting an obscene image online and posting content intended to hurt the religious feelings of Christians, is appealing against both his conviction and the sentence.

• The lawyers for teenage blogger Amos Yee want his appeal to be heard by a non-Christian judge when it goes before the High Court.

• The 16-year-old will be appealing against both his conviction and sentence. His lawyer Alfred Dodwell filed the notice of appeal on July 9, three days after Yee was released from remand.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Washington lobbying by companies and groups involved in global trade boomed in the past nine months, records show, as Congress debated a landmark trade pact proposed by President Barack Obama, the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

• Lobbying expenditures by members of a pro-TPP coalition increased to $135 million in the second quarter of 2015, up from $126 million in the first quarter and $118 million in the fourth quarter of 2014, according to Senate Office of Public Records reports reviewed by Reuters.

Trademarks

• Today, Forbes unearthed a lawsuit from late last year that Jewish dating site JDate’s parent company filed against an app called JSwipe (also aimed at Jewish folk). It’s over the use of the letter J. The case is set to pick up again next month.

• Jdate, the popular dating service responsible for more Jewish hookups than a bottle of Manischewitz, is playing hardball in the dog-eat-dog world of nice Jewish match-making.

• Jdate’s parent company, Spark Networks, discreetly filed a lawsuit late last year against Jswipe, the ‘Tinder for Jews’ dating app, claiming intellectual property over the letter “J” within the Jewish dating scene (the company refers to the branding as the “J-family”).

• Over the sounds of the packed crowd at the lower level of Noho hotspot “Acme,” on Tuesday evening, one phrase could consistently be heard: “I work in real estate.”

• Additionally, Jdate claims it owns the patent on software that “confidentially determines matches and notifies users of mutual matches in feelings and interests.” Jswipe, like Tinder, notifies users when their romantic interest ‘swipes right’ on their picture, violating Jdate’s patent.

Copyrights

• “Using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), our team has now successfully removed all posts related to this incident as well as all Personally Identifiable Information (PII) about our users published online,” said Ashley Madison parent company Avid Life Media in a statement. “We have always had the confidentiality of our customers’ information foremost in our minds and are pleased that the provisions included in the DMCA have been effective in addressing this matter.”

• The Intellectual Property Office is consulting on proposals to increase prison penalties for criminal online copyright infringement to 10 years to bring them to the same levels as those for similar physical copyright infringement.

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