● 07.26.15

● Links 26/7/2015: Purism Librem and Freedom, Akademy Updates

Posted in News Roundup at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• While it’s been several months since the Purism Librem crowd-funding campaing got underway for producing “the first high-end laptop in the world that ships without mystery software in the kernel, operating system, or any software applications,” the Librem 15 still relies upon a proprietary BIOS and there’s still no easy fix.

Kernel Space

• Libreboot, the downstream of Coreboot that strips out all binary blobs / microcode / firmware, has added experimental support for a new ThinkPad laptop.

• The Linux Foundation has announced the availability of a country-specific pricing for its Essentials of System Administration course and Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator exam for people in India. India is the first region in which the Linux Foundation will offer country-specific pricing on select training and certification products. The course plus exam will cost Indian credit/debit card holders 5,000 rupees which is equivalent to $79.

Graphics Stack

• With the Linux 4.2 kernel settling down nicely and AMD developers having already sent in a few round of fixes for their new AMDGPU kernel DRM driver, I’ve started testing out this new kernel driver — plus the new xf86-video-amdgpu DDX and the associated new Mesa/LibDRM code — that is providing the open-source accelerated graphics support for Tonga and all new/future GPUs like Carrizo and Fiji.

Applications

• Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C++ code. As of today, 423 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analyses go faster and further. Note that this is 60 more packages since the last release in May! Also, BioConductor adds another 57 packages, and casual searches on GitHub suggests many more.

• After months of focused work, etcd 2.1 has been released. Since the etcd 2.0 release in January, the team has gathered a ton of valuable feedback from real-world environments. And based on that feedback, this release introduces: authentication/authorization APIs, new metric endpoints, improved transportation stability, increased performance between etcd servers, and enhanced cluster stability.

Instructionals/Technical

• I’ve recently taken a new(ish) look at streaming video for the web, in terms of what’s out there of formats. (When I say streaming, I mean live video; not static files where you can seek etc.) There’s a bewildering array; most people would probably use a ready-made service such as Twitch, Ustream or YouTube, but they do have certain aspects that are less than ideal; for instance, you might need to pay (or have your viewers endure ads), you might be shut down at any time if they don’t like your content (e.g. sending non-gaming content on Twitch, or using copyrighted music on YouTube), or the video quality might be less than ideal.

Games

• Cradle is a brand new adventure game from ‘Flying Cafe for Semianimals ‘ that’s now on Steam, I managed to grab a copy to take a look, and here’s my findings. It’s really nice to see another UNiGiNE powered game.

• Excellent news guys, Aspyr Media have pushed out a hotfix for Knights of the Old Republic II Linux that makes it work with the restored content mod.

• This modification is an essential addon to fix up the game, and now that it’s out I can safely stream some soon.

• Fans of crawling about in the dark rejoice! Rogue’s Tale an interesting looking dungeon crawler now has a Linux version available.

• Volo Airsport is a rather difficult game about gliding through the air, and we have some keys for you lovely Linux gamers.

• I’ve tested it out personally and it’s quite difficult, hilariously difficult. It will take a while to get the hang of it, as the control scheme is pretty unique.

• When I recently complained that Portal 2 was too easy, I have to say, The Talos Principle is challenging. For a solution that, if known, takes only a few seconds, I often have to wring my brain about the logistics for long long time. Here a nice screenshot from one of the easier riddles, but with great effect.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• I did not hope that just handful amount of people would like KDE in comments. Probably there was one or two who pointed the love for Unity.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The KDE community has spent the day in western Spain giving and watching talks showing new developments in the community and where we are likely to be going in the next year.

• The developed prototype was written in C++, using Qt4. The speech recognition system was realized with the open-source speech recognition solution Simon, using a custom, domain-specific speech model that was especially adapted to the pervasive Styrian dialect. Simon was modified to integrate OpenEAR, which was used to evaluate a statement’s “arousal” value, to realize the paralingual weighting discussed above (this modification can be found in Simon’s “emotion” branch).

• Earlier today I gave a talk at Akademy 2015 about WikiFM. Videos of the talk should shortly become available. Based on the feedback that I have received during and after the talk, I have written a short resume of the points which raised more interest. They are aimed at the general KDE developer community, who doesn’t seem completely aware of the project and its scope.

• The yearly KDE conference Akademy is currently being held with lots of interesting talks and workshops. One big thing that was announced yesterday is Plasma Mobile, a free mobile platform.

• Plasma Phone uses Wayland as the windowing system with KWin being the Wayland compositor. This is our first product which uses Wayland by default and also the first product which uses KWin as the Wayland compositor. The phone project pushed the Wayland efforts in Plasma a lot and is the only reason why we are able to make Wayland a technological preview with the upcoming Plasma 5.4 release.

• The latest player to the open source mobile market is here, this time those behind the KDE desktop are pitching in. Their new project is called Plasma Mobile and it is already available for people to test on the Nexus 5. The OS seems to have a few different names at the moment, it is being referred to as Plasma Mobile, Plasma Phone OS and Plasma Phone.

• The KDE Community just announced its ambitious Plasma Mobile platform. To better understand the project I reached out to Sebastian Kügler, one of Plasma’s lead architects and developers, and Chief Operations at Blue Systems. Following is a detailed and exclusive interview about Plasma Mobile.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The Second step has finished June 26. But I prepared several exams in early July and went to Beijing to apply the Visa for GUADEC and had a travel in Beijing. So I was a little busy in the past few days. Now I’d like to spend sometime to write this blog and share something I learned during the second step of my plan.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• On July 24, Russian company ROSA proudly announced the immediate availability of a major release of their ROSA Desktop Fresh GNU/Linux operating system built around a highly customized KDE4 desktop environment.

Red Hat Family

• The sentiment dropped, as 170 investment managers increased or opened new positions, while 201 reduced and sold stakes in Red Hat Inc.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Evernote is one of the most popular note-taking services on the globe. But Evernote client app is still not available for Linux. So are you feeling unfortunate? You don’t need to. We have Everpad! Evernote can be used on Linux with Everpad. You can easily install it and use it on the go on your Ubuntu or other Linux Distributions.

• The Intel Compute Stick is a tiny PC that plugs directly into the HDMI port on your TV or monitor. A model with Windows software launched earlier this year for $150. Now you can buy a model with Ubuntu Linux for $100.

Flavours and Variants

• When I booted into Linux Mint, I immediately saw how mature and smooth the distribution was. It was a breeze to open files, switch between windows and even type, with a GUI which didn’t look like it was designed in the 1990s. The high level of theme customisability and the gorgeous wallpaper selection enthralled me, and impressed me enough to make it the sole operating system on my old laptop.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• When you’re writing code, picking the font you use is more about utility than beauty. Whether you’re an expert coder, or just starting out, this open source font is easy to read and easy to work with.

• The Television Academy, those behind the Emmy award, have announced that they will be giving all voters a Chromecast device instead of distributing DVDs. Chromecast devices will work with a members-only website and streaming app.

• Users are complaining after installing an update to take the operating system of the Tegra Note 7, launched by NVIDIA before the Shield gaming tablet, to Android 5.1 Lollipop.

• Popular YouTuber Dave Bennett recently published instructions on how to make Half-Life run on Android Wear. While a smartwatch screen is rather small for such an epic game, the idea of getting Valve’s sacred shooter running on a wearable device just sounds really cool.

• What’s interesting, though, is how similar the platforms are becoming. Android firms are doing a pretty good job of matching Apple’s design smarts, while Apple has clearly noticed how much people like Google Now. The platforms may be bitter rivals, but their battle is driving big improvements in both iPhones and Android devices – and that means everybody’s a winner.

• Not strictly a feature, no, but it’s one of the reasons so many people like Android: unlike certain other platforms, there’s a massive choice of handsets to choose from at all kinds of prices – and even the really cheap ones are really good.

Free Software/Open Source

• Thanks to SourceForge.net, it has been great home for us, but now we have better places to live.

CMS

• I just pushed a new release of PiwigoPress (main page, WordPress plugin dir) to the WordPress servers. This release incorporates some new features, mostly contributed by Anton Lavrov (big thanks!)

BSD

• The latest ARM platform that NetBSD has been ported to is the NVIDIA Jetson TK1.

• This Tegra K1 ARM SoC Cortex-A15 development board is now in a fairly good working state with HDMI audio/video working along with other stability fixes. The NetBSD -current code is working on this board with the customized “JETSONTK1″ kernel.

Leftovers

• A group of parents whose children were killed in the Germanwings plane crash have released a scathing letter to Lufthansa’s chief executive, accusing him of ignoring their needs and feelings and insulting them with his company’s compensation offer.

• Are you a developer who uses Google’s unofficial Autocomplete API? Be warned, you won’t be able to do so anymore after August 10, 2015.

• Google currently supports more than 80 APIs that developers can use to integrate Google services and data into their applications. The company also has unsupported and unpublished APIs which people outside the company have discovered and leveraged. One of those is the Autocomplete API.

Science

• 1980S BEDROOM BRILLIANCE the Commodore Amiga computer has reached the ripe old age of 30 and is still blazing in the hearts and minds of anyone who took keyboard and joystick in hand and shut the door on their parents.

• The search for alien life is moving to the icy moons orbiting Jupiter following the discovery of organic materials hailed as the “building blocks of life”.

• Work is due to start over the coming days on the development of a spacecraft for the European Space Agency (ESA) mission.

• Named Juice (the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer), it is scheduled for launch in 2022 and arrive in the Jovian system around Jupiter eight years later.

• A Dangerous Master, a new book by academic and futurist Wendell Wallach, takes us on a tour of the nefarious possibilities technological innovations can lead to. It’s not a light read if you’re not already familiar with predator drones and hacking the human genome. But it’s a perfect guidebook to the potential threats mankind faces if we continue along our current trajectory of unchecked innovative progress.

Security

• Chrysler is having a bad week. On Tuesday, Wired published a fantastic and gripping report detailing an open vulnerability in Chrysler’s UConnect system, allowing attackers to take control of transmission, brakes, or even steering. There was already a patch available when the article was published, but because cars required physical updates, most cars hadn’t received it. Today, Chrysler upped the ante, asking 1.4 million cars to report to dealerships or install a patch mailed out over USB. It’s the biggest vulnerability we’ve ever seen from a car company, and a firsthand demonstration of how hard it is to patch a problem once it pops up.

• President Obama’s team has spent more than a half trillion dollars on information technology but some departments, notably the IRS, still run on DOS and old Windows, which isn’t serviced anymore, according to House chairman.

• Despite the fact that numerous American officials have blamed China for the massive hack that involved the personal data theft of millions of government employees, the United States has reportedly chosen not to publicly point the finger at Beijing.

• Two breaches at the Office of Personnel Management this year put the data of more than 22 million Americans at risk, raising concern about foreign cyberattacks and lax government security measures.

• Several car infotainment systems are vulnerable to a hack attack that could potentially put lives at risk, a leading security company has said.

• NCC Group said the exploit could be used to seize control of a vehicle’s brakes and other critical systems.

• The Manchester-based company told the BBC it had found a way to carry out the attacks by sending data via digital audio broadcasting (DAB) radio signals.

• Welcome to the age of hackable automobiles, when two security researchers can cause a 1.4 million product recall.

• On Friday, Chrysler announced that it’s issuing a formal recall for 1.4 million vehicles that may be affected by a hackable software vulnerability in Chrysler’s Uconnect dashboard computers. The vulnerability was first demonstrated to WIRED by security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek earlier this month when they wirelessly hacked a Jeep I was driving, taking over dashboard functions, steering, transmission and brakes. The recall doesn’t actually require Chrysler owners to bring their cars, trucks and SUVs to a dealer. Instead, they’ll be sent a USB drive with a software update they can install through the port on their vehicle’s dashboard.

• “When you have access to information about the friends, family members and health issues of someone who works for the U.S. government, you can use that to try to get close to that person and gather intelligence,” she said. “To my mind, the OPM breach is absolutely catastrophic for our national security.”

• As readers of WhoWhatWhy know, our site has been one of the very few continuing to explore the fiery death two years ago of investigative journalist Michael Hastings, whose car left a straight segment of a Los Angeles street at a high speed, jumped the median, hit a tree, and blew up.

• Our original report described anomalies of the crash and surrounding events that suggest cutting-edge foul play—that an external hacker could have taken control of Hastings’s car in order to kill him. If this sounds too futuristic, a series of recent technical revelations has proven that “car hacking” is entirely possible. The latest just appeared this week.

• Lara Abdallat is not your average beauty queen. She was Miss Jordan 2010 and first runner-up to Miss Arab 2011, but she abandoned her career in pageantry to do something slightly more controversial and dangerous.

• Abdallat is currently fighting the Islamic State group and Islamic extremists as a hacktivist with Ghost Security, an international counterterrorism organization tenuously affiliated with Anonymous, perusing the Deep Web and the Darknet for suspicious activity.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The attack on a Navy and Marine Reserve recruitment station in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was an act of war.

• It was not terrorism.

• Was it terrifying? Certainly. War is terrifying. Was it tragic? No doubt. War is tragic. Was it terrorism? No.

• Muhammad Yousef Abdulaziz killed Marines, three of whom had served abroad.

• He did not shoot up a church, school, or movie theater–he attacked a military target. There was premeditation in his action, intent. He attacked a recruitment station, no different in purpose than the recruiters and training camps we regularly destroy in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Although the authorities are still investigating, it is clear his was a political act.

• [...]

• 14 years into the war on terror, the longest war in American history, with close to 7,000 dead U.S. soldiers and–conservatively–over 200,000 dead foreign civilians, it should not take an attack on American soil to jar us into asking these questions.

• According to local and federal officials, Thursday’s bloody assault in Chattanooga, Tenn., was ruthless and deranged. The U.S. attorney says investigators are treating the attacks, committed by a lone gunman at a military recruiting station and a Navy and Marine Corps Reserve centre, as a possible “act of terrorism.” Defence Secretary Ashton Carter calls it a “senseless act of violence.” Navy Secretary Ray Mabus says the attacks were out of bounds: “While we expect our sailors and marines to go into harm’s way, and they do so without hesitation, an attack at home, in our community, is insidious and unfathomable.”

• I’m not a fan of war or of killing of any kind, but the labeling of the deadly attack by Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez on two US military sites in Chattanooga, Tennessee as an act of terror is absurd.

• Lincoln Chafee campaigned for president in New Hampshire last month proudly showcasing his foreign policy credentials based in large part on his opposition to the Iraq war. He also had some things to say about U.S. policy in Yemen.

• The targeting of al-Qaida terrorists with drones has killed militants and civilians in recent years. And many Yemenis have called on the Obama administration to end drone strikes, which Chafee refers to as “extrajudicial killings.”

• “No more drone strikes,” Chafee said in New Hampshire. “One of the reasons I believe we’re in trouble in Yemen is we lost the population on drone strikes issues. That’s what stirred up the population. That’s what is happening in Yemen.”

• “One of the reasons I believe we’re in trouble in Yemen is we lost the population on drone strikes issues. That’s what stirred up the population. That’s what is happening in Yemen.”

• The U.S. is shifting to a more direct role in the near decade-old fight against Al Qaeda-affiliated Shabab militants, launching as many as six drone strikes in southern Somalia over the last week to support African forces battling the group, American officials said.

• Stewart said to Obama: you’ve tried bombing and overthrowing leaders and arming rebels and … what’s that new thing … oh yeah, diplomacy.

• The UK Prime Minister David Cameron has delivered his second speech in as many months on the terrorist threat, proposing a top-down reorganisation of British Islam. His new approach will see ‘moderate’ and ‘reforming’ voices sponsored by the central government.

• This has provoked a mixed response from British Muslims. It is also a remarkably unconservative approach to personal belief, from a supposedly conservative prime minister.

• Cameron’s understanding and presentation of the jihadist threat is that radical Islamist ideology, not Western foreign policy, explains all. In a single sentence, his speech dismissed the latter notion: “9/11 – the biggest loss of life of British citizens in a terrorist attack – happened before the Iraq War”.

• In fact, the speech demonstrated Cameron’s exceptionally poor historical knowledge. Al-Qaeda was attacking Western targets long before September 11, 2001.

• Obama made no mention of the fact that Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen, convicted of no crime, judged in no court, but sentenced to death on the sole authority of the president of the United States. Nor did he refer to the subsequent US government murder of Awlaki’s son, an innocent teenager, in another drone missile strike, or the thousands of other civilian victims of US drone warfare across Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

• It’s erroneous to portray the conflict in Xinjiang as a struggle between Islam and the Chinese government

• At least 3,500 have been killed as a result of the Saudi-led war, launched on March 26 of this year. Some 1,700 of these have been confirmed as civilians, according to the UN, with some 3,800 more civilians confirmed wounded.

• TUNISIA has once again had to deny allegations of agreeing to host a US military base in the country, reviving speculations over the depth of US-Tunisian relations.

• The usual Western strategy for dealing with Islamic terrorists is to kill them. President Obama vows to crush Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The United States helps African nations repel groups like Boko Haram. It uses drones to strike Al Qaeda operatives in any country. “Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms,” Mr. Obama stated in 2009.

• Deaths of civilians and Afghan army personnel in “friendly fire” has become a contentious issue in the country. The toll makes it one of the deadliest such incidents involving coalition and Afghan troops in the 14 years that global forces have fought in Afghanistan.

• Two US helicopters are believed to have carried out the attack against a military checkpoint.

• A statement on behalf of the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan says the U.S. deeply regrets the loss and offers condolences to those affected.

• At least eight Afghan soldiers have been killed in a US air strike on an army checkpoint in Logar province, south of Kabul, Afghan officials say.

• A U.S. airstrike in eastern Afghanistan killed at least seven Afghan soldiers, local officials said, an incident that threatens to strain relations between allies who are battling the Taliban and burgeoning Islamic State insurgencies.

• The airstrike was part of the U.S.-led NATO coalition targeting the anti-Afghan government group the Taliban.

• The trouble is that airstrikes and other quick applications of military force are rarely as cheap as they first appear. They tend to cause unanticipated trouble and begin conflicts without winning them. Escalation to more costly warfare then beckons. Drone strikes may prove to be especially misleading this way. Their benefits come fast and are straightforward. Most strikes bring reports of dead terrorists or insurgents, and their disrupted plans are easily imagined. The costs—especially blowback measured in violent anti-American sentiment and pressure toward escalation — arrive gradually and less discernibly.

• We already have semi-autonomous killing machines in the battlefields but (theoretically) they will do everything except making the final decision to pull the trigger. That final, ultimate decision is supposed to be left up to a human somewhere who can analyze the situation and decide whether or not the drone is targeting a friend or an enemy and then issue the go-/no-go death sentence.

• On Sunday, a Libyan war plane from the forces of the internationally-recognized Tobruk government attack and sank a vessel near the port city of Beghazi according to spokesperson for the air force.

• The hostage crisis in Algeria in 2013 led to the deaths of ten Japanese nationals along with many other individuals from different nations. Sadly, it was abundantly clear from the start that the Libya connection would enter the equation. After all, the terrorist infiltration was extremely close to the border of Libya. Also, since the demise of Gaddafi the region is awash with military arms and countless terrorist groups. Within Libya itself you have various different Islamist terrorist organizations and the same applies to many militias that control parts of this nation. Therefore, in modern day Libya in 2015 you have chaos and a non-functioning state that can’t control the whole of this nation.

• The title comes from the testimony of a 13-year-old Pakistani boy whose grandmother was killed in a drone strike. ‘‘I no longer love blue skies,’’ the boy said, speaking before Congress. ‘‘In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.’’ Houtryve attached a camera to a small drone and traveled around the United States, making aerial photographs of the sorts of events that have been associated with intentional or erroneous drone strikes: funerals, weddings, groups of people at play, in prayer or during exercise. His images show Americans in the course of their daily lives, photographed from a great height, in bright sun that throws their distorted shadows far ahead of them, presenting them as unindividuated, vulnerable and human. Houtryve makes it clear that the people in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia or Afghanistan who are killed by American drones are also just like this. With simple, vivid means, Houtryve brings the war home.

• When a Western soldier suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, there are doctors and organisations who can help them recover from the heartbreaking legacy of war.

• When it is someone from Afghanistan, where bombings regularly wreak devastation and tear families apart, you are unlikely to find any assistance, since there is little understanding of mental illness in the country.

• “The most common treatment is to take your loved one to a religious shrine where they are chained to walls or trees for up to 40 days, fed stale bread, water and ground pepper, and read dubious lines from the Qur’an by individuals with no medical or, for that matter, religious training,” documentary-makers Jamie Doran and Najibullah Quraishi told news.com.au.

• [...]

• “The allied nations that invaded – or liberated, as some still claim – Afghanistan at the beginning of the 21st century have managed to leave an even bigger mess than they inherited.

• “An entire generation brought up in daily fear of death does not augur well for either their future or ours. It may not be entirely fair, but they blame the West and allied nations for the state of their country. Expect some of them, at least, to seek revenge in the years to come.”

• Although it seems like cyber-crime gets all the news headlines these days, national and corporate intelligence agencies around the globe still often use old-fashioned cloak and dagger techniques to get the job done. That said, blackmail has long been one of the most effective ways to turn an intelligence target, and agencies have no compunctions about taking advantage of a target’s predilections for drugs, sex or even gambling to blackmail then into cooperation.

• US intelligence may have used Macau casinos owned by an American tycoon to set a trap for Chinese functionaries who gamble with public money, in order to blackmail and recruit them.

• China feared that casinos in Macau owned by the billionaire gambling magnate and Republican party funder Sheldon Adelson were used by US intelligence agents to entrap and blackmail Chinese officials, according to a “highly confidential” report for the gambling industry.

• A report uncovered Wednesday said the Chinese government believes the U.S. was using Chinese officials’ gambling problems in order to blackmail them.

• Was Bob Smith a super-spy or a super-fantasist? That was the question many in Los Angeles are trying to answer after the puzzling death of man who kept a hoard of more than 1,200 firearms and two tons of ammunition at home.

• The man, who is yet to be formally identified, was found dead in his sports utility vehicle not far from the house in LA’s affluent Pacific Palisades neighbourhood, where his body was believed to have been for two weeks in warm weather before police were alerted.

• During the age of cold war espionage, CIA agents resorted to unusual techniques to outsmart the Russian KGB. One method required the use of life-size rubber sex dolls purchased in a Washington D.C. store.

• Walter McIntosh, who headed the CIA’s disguise unit from 1977 to 1979 told Newsweek magazine that the idea came about when CIA operatives in Moscow needed a trick to get Russian counterspies off their tails so they could safely meet with their secret agents.

• Of all the missions Walter McIntosh undertook in his long CIA career, buying life-size rubber sex dolls in a Washington, D.C., porno shop was maybe the most memorable.

• It was all for a good cause, of course. And deadly serious, not just for McIntosh, who headed the CIA’s disguise unit from 1977 to 1979. The agency’s Moscow operatives were in desperate need of something—anything—to trick Russian counterspies into leaving them alone, if only for a few minutes, so they could meet their secret agents without fear of being arrested. A key operation was in peril.

• “People always think that picture was taken blocks away at the American embassy, but it happened here.”

• Army Secretary John McHugh, who revoked the award, told The Washington Times through a spokesman that Maj. Golsteyn “assassinated an unarmed Afghan.”

• Applying the transmittal letter’s reasoning to the aerial drone strike’s facts, it is unlikely that a US Attorney General would make similar findings with regard to CIA operatives’ participation. The opinion avoids a crucial issue by assuming the operatives carried out this mission from a remote location, presumably where an enemy could not strike, making distinction by insignia unnecessary (why the opinion assumed operatives were distant from the battlefield is unclear, though it certainly made it easier to reach the Prosecutor’s conclusion).

• [...]

• Left to a policy preference, which would be the better choice? Allowing CIA operatives to benefit from combatant immunity while also being considered lawful targets at all times, or maintaining their status as unlawful targets when not directly participating in hostilities who may face criminal liability for hostile actions. Against the lawless foes faced in Afghanistan and Pakistan, perhaps neither presents practical advantage. Nevertheless, the German opinion offers persuasive arguments that might gain support in the international community. Reaffirming US commitment to the principle of distinction might prevent its diminishment on other battlefields.

• From 1945 until their divorce in 1984, she was the wife of William Colby — the spy and later spymaster who, as CIA director from 1973 to 1976, revealed the assassination attempts and other clandestine activities known as the agency’s “family jewels.”

• A decades-old conflict between Turkey and the Kurdish PKK has been reignited.

• Turkey vowed Saturday to continue attacks against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), along with strikes against the Islamic State group.

• “The operations will continue for as long as threats against Turkey continue,” Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said, according to Turkey’s Anadolu Agency.

• We Americans respond with anger when Donald Trump warns us of murderous Mexicans, and we worry that ISIS can hit us at any moment. Yet we continue to pretend we’re safe from our own gun-toting, bomb-making neighbors.

• In all three of the countries where the Obama administration declared US wars “over” in the past few years – Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – the US military is expanding its presence or dropping bombs at an ever-increasing rate. And the government seems to be keeping the American public in the dark on the matter more than ever.

• Pentagon leaders suggested this week that the US military wants to keep remaining 9,800 troops in Afghanistan from withdrawing in 2016, despite the fact that the Obama administration declared combat operations in the country “over” six months ago. The gradual extension of the Afghanistan War hasn’t been a secret to anyone who’s been paying close attention, but sadly it has happened far away from the pomp and circumstance of Obama’s now embarrassingly false State of the Union announcement that the Afghanistan War had ended.

• Despite the disastrous Iraq War, neocons still dominate Official Washington’s inside-outside game…

• Since then, Israeli media have been pressing hard to restore the military option to its accustomed place “on the table.” Flying to Israel Sunday night for a handholding mission with top Israeli officials, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter tried to make his reception in Tel Aviv less frosty, telling accompanying journalists that the nuclear deal with Iran “does nothing to prevent the military option.” The context, however, seemed to be one in which Iran was caught cheating on the nuclear deal.

• That this kind of rhetoric, even when it is not from the president, is still poison to Tehran was clear in the immediate reaction by Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who insisted Monday: “Applying force … is not an option but an unwise and dangerous temptation.” cComments

• Looking for changes in official public statements was my bread and butter during a long tenure as a Kremlinologist. So on Wednesday, as I watched Mr. Obama defend the deal with Iran, I leaned way forward at each juncture — and there were several — where the timeworn warning about all options being “on the table” would have been de rigueur. He avoided saying it.

• The agreement has reduced the chance of a U.S. attack on Iran, which is a great development. But the interventionists will not give up so easily. Already they are organizing media and lobbying efforts to defeat the agreement in Congress. Will they have enough votes to over-ride a presidential veto of their rejection of the deal? It is unlikely, but at this point if the neocons can force the U.S. out of the deal it might not make much difference. Which of our allies, who are now facing the prospect of mutually-beneficial trade with Iran, will be enthusiastic about going back to the days of a trade embargo? Which will support an attack on an Iran that has proven to be an important trading partner and has also proven reasonable in allowing intrusive inspections of its nuclear energy program?

• Operation Ajax (1953) was a covert operation executed by the CIA to oust the democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadeq. While the reasons for this now declassified covert operation exceed the scope of this letter, it is important to note that once Mossadeq was overthrown by forces funded and manipulated by the U.S., he was replaced with the tyrannical Shah of Iran (which the 1979 revolution forced from power).

• Iran has many more reasons to be suspicious of us than we of them. Our government had supported a puppet regime in their country which held them back for decades and was installed by our CIA. We have intervened in Afghanistan and Iraq, literally surrounding them.

• A top Central Intelligence Agency official said Friday that the recently brokered nuclear agreement between leading nations and Iran will make it difficult for the Middle Eastern country to dupe nuclear inspectors.

• CIA deputy director David Cohen, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, said intelligence officers were “reasonably” confident that the terms of the nuclear deal would prevent Iran from cheating in a way that avoided international detection.

• The accord struck in Vienna to rein in Iran’s nuclear activities has warmongers fulminating. Citizens worldwide should support U.S. President Barack Obama’s brave effort to outmaneuver them, taking heart from the fact that the signatories include not just the United States, but all five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany.

• Many of the warmongers are to be found in Obama’s own government agencies. Most Americans struggle to recognize or understand their country’s permanent security state, in which elected politicians seem to run the show, but the CIA and the Pentagon often take the lead — a state that inherently gravitates toward military, rather than diplomatic, solutions to foreign-policy challenges.

• The late Chalmers Johnson (once a CIA consultant, a former “spear-carrier,” he said) called the agency the president’s “praetorian guard,” a private army producing phony intelligence to justify extrajudicial actions.

• They include toppling democratically elected governments, assassinating foreign heads of state and other key officials, propping up friendly dictators, and abducting targeted individuals for extraordinary rendition to agency controlled black sites – torture prisons to extract forced confessions from innocent victims under extreme duress, at times bringing them close to death and back.

• Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Paul Pillar said that Iran’s regional policies depend on various political interests and equities and not on how much money it has in its bank account.

• The relationship between video games and violence is healthier than we like to think

• [...]

• He started up the desktop computer he had built himself, and opened up the first-person shooter game Counter-Strike. The military-style video game had been updated many times since its initial release in 1999, but this was the same version that had infested my middle school computer lab back then—or some pirated incarnation. Halil connected to a server by manually entering a memorized IP address.

• [...]

• “No no no,” and he smiled, “that wouldn’t be a ‘The Great Secret.’” The team of “counterterrorists” threw a couple grenades and started firing, peering around corners and strafing.

• “Then who is playing as Israel and Lebanon?”

• “IDF,” Halil pitched his screen to the rushing counterterrorist team, “and Hezbollah,” he tilted in the direction of the virtual AK fire. “This is my ‘Middle East Peace Plan.’” He said the phrase derisively, putting on his best American accent.

• I didn’t believe him, at first. The teams in the game were made up of the same avatars that always populated it. But Halil then showed me a series of taunting pictures the two teams had posted online. Among the match reports and running commentaries, the Israelis in uniform threw up imitations of American gang signs learned from rap videos, while young men of Hezbollah held real life rifles next to computer monitors, all with their faces blurred or blacked out in Photoshop. My favorite was a succession of shots of real guns, superimposed on computer monitors displaying virtual ones.

• An ex-senator, a former CIA officer, and an Iraqi mogul lobby Congress for a private army, led by Saddam’s officers, to take on the terrorists that have trampled America’s proxies.

• A US military drone flying a combat mission has crashed in Iraq after losing communication, the US Defense Department has confirmed.

• A slew of news reports have highlighted the crisis of drone pilot burnout in the United States military. Indeed, pilot shortages have prompted the US Air Force to cut the number of drone flights to fewer than 60 per day. That’s an important problem, but buried in these stories is another one. The Air Force has announced that, in response to the shortage, it will increase its use of contractors for these flights. Given the service’s manpower shortages, this statement is not surprising. Yet the growing numbers of contractors in drone operations, while little discussed, raise significant concerns about oversight and accountability at a time when drone use is set to accelerate. We simply don’t know enough about how contractors will be used in the increasingly automated version of war that appears to be our future. And that means we need to ask hard questions now about how this system should operate rather than simply letting it evolve without oversight.

• George Clooney is being paid by the world’s top two war profiteers, Lockheed-Martin and Boeing, to oppose war profiteering by Africans disloyal to the U.S. government’s agenda.

• Human rights activists in the country told me earlier this month that he should raise these issues sensitively, and not pretend that the U.S. record on policing and fighting terrorism has been flawless. The scandal of CIA torture and the prison at Guantanamo Bay are widely known throughout Kenya. They said President Obama should be sure to make reference to the United States’ own mistakes when he talks to his Kenyan counterparts, and fully acknowledge how much the United States still has to improve.

• Kenya inherited the massive investment in the militarization of the Horn of Africa from the era of anti-communism and this militaristic link to the West was deepened during the so called War on Terror. This Global War on Terror has now backfired against the peoples and the insecurity generated within Kenya and East Africa reinforce the influence of the US military when Barack Obama and his Administration want to focus on “Doing Business with Africa.” In 2014, the Obama Administration with much fanfare had called the first major US Africa summit but the present Washington sequestered bureaucracy has not worked to turn the page with the new engagement with African peoples. There have been no resources from Congress to support the much touted Power Africa.

• Chadian dictator Hissene Habre goes on trial in Senegal, a quarter of a century after his blood-soaked reign came to an end, in trial seen as test case for African justice

• When Chad’s former president Hissène Habré strode into a Senegalese court yesterday accused of 40,000 murders, war crimes and torture, he may have been wondering what became of his old superpower friends.

• In breaking news from Senegal, the trial of Chadian former dictator Hissène Habré has been postponed until September 7 after Habré’s lawyers did not show up to court for the second day of trial. Habré has been charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture related to his eight-year reign in Chad during the 1980s. We’ll have more on this story later in the show.

• Gunners from the Royal Air Force (RAF) Regiment and Scotland Yard police are training foreign governments in how to prevent aviation being shot down by missiles looted from Libyan armories after the 2011 war.

• As many as 10,000 handheld surface-to-air missiles are feared to have been taken from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s armories as the regime collapsed, leading to fears they could be used by militants to bring down civilian airliners.

• Now members of the RAF Regiment – British soldiers who specialize in defending airfields – have been deployed to Middle Eastern and North African countries to advise on missile defense.

• Following calls for government to come clean over role in US air force unit, MoD says such UK personnel are ‘effectively operating as foreign troops’

• The Kurdish Peshmerga have repeatedly been praised by U.S. congressmen from both sides of the aisle, the Department of Defense, and numerous pundits, as the most effectual allies in the fight against ISIS and a group in need of American arms. But remember that October 2014 CIA study demonstrating that nearly all attempts to arm rebels have backfired or failed? It turns out that the Kurds aren’t our perfect match. They will be no exception to the trend, with their massive human rights violations, political conflict with Syrians and Iraqis, and destabilizing role in the Middle East.

• The heavily-redacted order does contain some good news, however. The presiding judge ordered the Dept. of Defense and the CIA to turn over FOIAed documents to the ACLU that contain “previously acknowledged facts,” thus preventing the Dept. of Justice from turning real life into a bizarre fantasy world where previously disclosed information can be treated as though it was still locked up in the agency’s “TOP SECRET” digital filing cabinet.

• But the obvious downside is this: because the government has been given permission to avoid confirming or denying the existence of the documents the ACLU is seeking, the search for more information on accidental deaths and collateral damage will still consist of issuing speculative FOIA requests, which will then result in more lengthy, expensive litigation.

• I’m pretty sure the involved agencies believe they can outlast FOIA requesters, especially if they continue to receive mostly-favorable decisions from judges who place more faith in the government and its assertions about national security than in those who view government secrecy with considerably more skepticism. The problem is that the government has the resources to fight long legal battles. Most FOIA requesters do not.

• But Rubio cannot accept that Cubans’ nearly unanimous rejection of his right-wing politics might mean he is badly mistaken in his Manichean view of the Cuban socioeconomic system. Rubio wears Cubans’ disapproval of him as a badge of honor. For Rubio, Cubans are incapable of independent judgement. If the Cuban people are against him, it means they must be brainwashed by the evil Castro regime.

• The United States and Cuba have re-established embassies in each other’s capitals, formally restoring diplomatic ties severed more than five decades ago.

• As the Cuban flag was raised over Washington, D.C., on Monday, some 20 anti-Castro demonstrators gathered outside Versailles Restaurant in Little Havana to protest warming relations between the U.S. and Cuba. In Washington, a man rushed the embassy gate with red paint splattered across his shirt, yelling “This is Cuban blood.” But for the most part, protests in both cities were small and low-key.

• On July 20, history was made in Washington, D.C., and in Havana, Cuba. As the Cuban national anthem was played, the island nation’s flag was raised over its embassy in Washington. The embassy, as well as the U.S. Embassy in Havana, was open for business, for the first time in 54 years. The Washington ceremony was attended by more than 500 people. Earlier in the day, the U.S. State Department elevated the Cuban flag to a place of honor, joining 150 other national flags on display in the main lobby. While diplomatic relations have been restored, the crushing U.S. economic embargo against Cuba is still in place, and the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay remains open. More than 100 prisoners are still languishing there, many of them cleared for release for over a decade.

• On Tuesday, July 21, a judge in Santiago, Chile ordered the arrest of seven army officers for their participation in the burning alive of photographer Rodrigo Rojas Denegri, and student Carmen Gloria Quintana on July 2, 1986. The case is known in Chile as Caso Quemados (Case of the burned).

• The army had detained both during the repression of an anti-government demonstration. They were severely beaten, before being soaked in gasoline and set afire. The young people, still alive, were dumped in a remote area and left to die, but were found by construction workers. Quintana survived, but Rojas died from his injuries, four days later.

• The horrible crime took place during the military-fascist dictatorship of General Pinochet (1973-1989) and was part of the reign of terror against workers and youth that took place with the assistance of the US Central Intelligence Agency.

• It’s probably a good thing that United States Army General John F. Kelly’s May op-ed in the Miami Herald went largely unperceived, but recent developments have rendered the cynicism that informed it too blaring to ignore.

• Ostensibly, General Kelly’s editorial seeks to extrapolate salient lessons from the Colombian government’s military campaign against the country’s leftist guerrilla insurgency. Specifically, Kelly contends that Plan Colombia, the $9 billion U.S. military aid package passed in 2000, has “shown us the way” to defeat ISIS, which he claims poses a similarly “daunting challenge for the United States and its allies.”

• On first read, the article is a relatively straightforward parade of banality and adulation, remarkable only because the individual leading it is the commander of U.S. Southern Command (Southcom). Sure, the content consists almost entirely of lies, half-truths, and meaningless platitudes, but nothing that ventures too far from the official Washington line.

Transparency Reporting

• But, of course, that was just one batch of the emails. A few weeks ago, reports started leaking from inside the State Department that, in fact, there was classified information on that server, and late last night the other shoe dropped, with a report in the NY Times that two separate Inspectors General have requested the Justice Department open a criminal investigation into Clinton’s mishandling of sensitive information — in particular the inclusion of “hundreds” of potentially classified emails on her private server.

• A government watchdog has ordered the CIA and the Pentagon to re-investigate retaliation allegations brought by two intelligence employees who accused their agencies of major institutional failings.

• The action by the intelligence community inspector general is the first public indication that a new intelligence appeals system is underway. The panel was set up by President Barack Obama as an independent forum that can evaluate whether whistleblowers were improperly fired or otherwise punished for disclosures after their agencies rejected their claims.

• The cases, nonetheless, demonstrate that the whistleblower system continues to be beset with problems and bureaucratic delays despite being overhauled by Congress and the Obama administration.

• Sterling has long maintained that the CIA retaliated against him for questioning racial bias at the agency, where, as he put it in a letter to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, he was deemed “too big and too black” to move up the ranks. The CIA does not release data on its racial demographics, but a recent internal report on diversity affirms some of Sterling’s allegations of bias. Minorities accounted for less than 24.8 percent of its workforce and only 10.8 percent of its top leadership, according to the report. The CIA’s lack of diversity underscores the racial underpinnings of the global “war on terrorism,” in which white CIA officers torture nonwhite others in secret prisons and incinerate them with drone missiles.

• When reporter Jason Leopold gets ready to take on the U.S. government, he psychs himself up by listening to the heavy metal bands Slayer and Pantera.

• He describes himself as “a pretty rageful guy.” Mr. Leopold (45), who works for Vice News, reserves most of his aggression for dealing with the government. He has revealed about 20,000 pages of government documents, many of them the basis for explosive news stories.

• At least 309 police officers and police community support officers (PSCOs) in the UK have been convicted of criminal offences in the last three years, according to figures released after a Freedom of Information request.

Finance

• A year ago he slept in his own apartment, but today Charles Jackson sleeps under a bridge bordering Silver Lake, one of the more fashionable neighborhoods in Los Angeles. A few dozen strangers share the encampment; some become neighbors, while others come and go. Jackson wants to get off the streets, but as many of those who live on the margins have found, it is easier to lose a home than find another.

• “People say, ‘This is going to be temporary, you know, until I get out from under this rock,’” he told me. A kind-looking brown-eyed man in his mid-50s, Jackson stands in front of the tent he lives in, looking away as we talk, his voice barely louder than a whisper. Beside us, Jackson’s white-and-tan terrier, Ozzie — well-groomed and clearly beloved — pokes his nose out from the front of the tent, panting in the midday sun. “Two years pass by, four, five years pass by; before you know it, you’re ten years homeless in the streets because out here, time is nothing. You get to not know what day it is, what month it is.”

• …Japanese officials have systematically exaggerated the Japanese economy’s various weaknesses, real and imagined.

• But he chose to “follow the rules” by accepting the EU plan. Greece is getting its financial bailout, Greeks are tightening their belts, and the Eurozone will survive more-or-less intact. Tsipras learned what happens when you challenge the rules of an elite club. Once in a while, the club changes the rules. Most of the time, the club issues an ultimatum: suck it up or move on.

• July 18th 2015 was the first day of this year’s summer camp for the world’s business and political aristocracy and their invited guests. 2,000 to 3,000 men, mostly from the wealthiest global one percent, gather at Bohemian Grove, 70 miles north of San Francisco in California’s Sonoma County—to sit around the campfire and chew the fat—off-the-record—with ex-presidents, corporate leaders and global financiers.

• [...]

• On the surface, the Bohemian Grove is a private place where global and regional elites meet for fun and enjoyment. Behind the scene, however, the Bohemian Grove is an American version of building insider ties, consensual understandings, and lasting connections in the service of class solidarity. Ties reinforced at the Grove manifest themselves in global trade meetings, party politics, campaign financing, and top-down corporatism.

• Washington never granted islanders control of their lives, welfare and destiny. They have no say over foreign relations, commerce and trade, their air space, land and offshore waters, immigration and emigration, nationality and citizenship, currency, maritime laws, military service, US bases on its territory, constitutionality of its laws, jurisdictions and legal procedures, treaties, radio and television, communications, agriculture, its natural resources and more.

• Independence supporters aren’t tolerated – men like Oscar Lopez Rivera, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, wrongfully imprisoned for wanting Puerto Ricans to live free, behind bars for over three decades.

• Washington wants to continue exploiting its Caribbean colony for profit – raping and pillaging it at the public’s expense, much like what’s happening to Greece.

• For the many people who have engaged in the struggle for Puerto Rico’s independence, July 25 has a special significance. On that date in 1898, U.S. troops invaded Puerto Rico, beginning a period of U.S. colonial domination on the island that continues to this day.

• The United States invaded Puerto Rico, along with the Philippines, Guam and Cuba, in the setting of the Spanish-American War. That war was the opening of what would be the menacing role and predatory nature of the U.S. capitalist class in the Caribbean, Latin America and the entire world. The seizure of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam and the Philippines by the United States signaled the quest of the U.S. capitalist class to become a world power. European powers had pursued a policy of colonial acquisitions since the end of the 15th century.

• But only in the late 19th century had the mature and developed capitalist powers virtually colonized the entire planet. The projection of U.S. power outside of the North American mainland signified a rush not to be left behind in this global division of markets.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Mr. Gates, you swing a lot of weight in political circles. If you told policymakers that the current thrust of reform was blocking alternative ways of improving learner performance, and educators should have enough autonomy to explore those alternatives, those of us who have been working on them for decades might have a chance to show what’s possible.

• If you talk to the reporters who work for various big media companies, they insist that they have true editorial independence from the business side of their companies. They insist that the news coverage isn’t designed to reflect the business interests of their owners. Of course, most people have always suspected this was bullshit — and you could see evidence of this in things like the fact that the big TV networks refused to cover the SOPA protests. But — until now — there’s never necessarily been a smoking gun with evidence of how such business interests influences the editorial side.

Censorship

• Everyone’s fired off a hasty email that they desperately wish they could take back. A new Gmail tool will let you do that whenever you please.

• Dmail is a new browser extension for Google Chrome that gives people more control of how long others can view their Gmail messages. When sending an email through Gmail, users can set a specific time when the message will self-destruct, ranging anywhere from an hour to a week. And even emails without a specific self-destruct timer can still be recalled by the sender at an time, making them unviewable to the recipient.

Privacy

• There’s a reason “librarians everywhere” were singled out for an EFF Pioneer award in 2000. Time and again, in fights against censorship and intrusive surveillance laws, librarians have been allies of the public, serving as the institutional representation of the ideals of intellectual freedom, unfettered speech, and reader privacy.

• The United Nations Human Rights Committee has criticised the UK’s spying framework, saying that it “allows for mass interception of communications,” and “lacks sufficient safeguards against arbitrary interference with the right to privacy.”

• Separately, but perhaps even more importantly, the UK government has stated that the Wilson doctrine—a 50-year-old political convention which historically prevented politicians from being spied on—has no legal standing, and will not prevent the UK’s intelligence agencies from surveilling MPs and members of the House of Lords.

• A secretive British police investigation focusing on journalists working with Edward Snowden’s leaked documents remains ongoing two years after it was quietly launched, The Intercept can reveal.

• London’s Metropolitan Police Service has admitted it is still carrying out the probe, which is being led by its counterterrorism department, after previously refusing to confirm or deny its existence on the grounds that doing so could be “detrimental to national security.”

• Hitherto-secret MI5, MI6 and GCHQ documents revealed in court that the agencies amended internal policies on surveillance of parliamentarians eight times in the past 12 months. The updated internal rules fail to comply with a 50-year-old political convention, known as the Wilson doctrine, which states that no parliamentarian’s telephone can be tapped unless there is a major national emergency and that changes to the policy will be reported to Parliament by the Prime Minister.

• The 50-year-old political convention that the UK’s intelligence agencies will not intercept the communications of MPs and members of the Lords cannot survive in an age of bulk interception, government lawyers have conceded.

• Nicola Sturgeon demands assurances that MSPs are not being spied on, amid reports GCHQ has decided monitoring rules do not apply to devolved governments

• Tribunal hears claims that GCHQ is unlawfully intercepting MPs’ and peers’ communications

• Palantir Technologies is quickly rising up the ranks after disclosing that it raised $450-million in its latest fundraising round, which – according to the Wall Street Journal – gives the 11-year-old Palo Alto firm a private market valuation of $20-billion, putting it an elite club of so-called unicorns, including Uber, Snapchat, AirBnB and Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi.

• The amount of cyber attacks has grown in the last three years exponentially, helped on by the growth in government attacks. The fact we hear about a GCHQ cyber attack on allied corporations in Belgium and The Netherlands, alongside human rights organisations, sure does give the impression hacking isn’t taken seriously.

• In the past, it was agencies like the CIA, FBI and foreign intelligence services that had access to high tech electronic tracking devices.

• Now, police agencies in San Diego County own or can borrow sophisticated surveillance tools like that too. The use has evolved over the years, to where now, it’s commonplace for both law enforcement and the private sector.

• Hear ‘Edward Snowden and the Ethics of Whistleblowing’ this Sunday afternoon at 5, on the KSUT Sunday Special.

• The Obama administration is preparing to release Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Navy intelligence officer convicted of spying for Israel, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing U.S. officials.

• An American convicted of selling classified information to Israel may be released from federal prison within months, according to his lawyer and the US Justice Department.

Civil Rights

• Hundreds of Westernised young men who grew up in Britain after fleeing war-torn Afghanistan as children have been forcibly returned to their home country due to what experts believe is an inhumane shortcoming in the UK asylum system.

• President Obama’s recent statements about mass incarceration, together with his decision to commute the sentences of 46 people serving lengthy and life sentences in federal prison on drug charges, treat “nonviolent drug offenders” as the symbolic figureheads of America’s prison problem. This framing seems to imply that everyone else actually deserves to be in prison.

• It’s becoming increasingly clear that the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, isn’t going to be closed during President Barack Obama’s administration — or beyond, despite the administration’s efforts. That raises a deep question about foreign policy and the rule of law: What if Guantanamo never closes, and some of its detainees remain there for the rest of their lives?

• The sad truth is that the continued operation of the prison is unlikely to do any more long-term damage to the U.S. reputation abroad — because the world has already come to the conclusion that the U.S. is no better than anyone else when it comes to dealing with terrorists.

• It sounds like an old vinyl record stuck in its groove, another regular reminder of what has long since been a national disgrace. After six years of trying in vain to close the infamous prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, the White House, it is said, is close to finalising another plan to do just that. To which one is tempted to reply: “Dream on”.

• Congress is faced with the opportunity to forbid the CIA from engaging in torture forever, thanks to a bill sponsored by Sens. John McCain and Dianne Feinstein. The legislation passed the Senate in a recent impressively bipartisan 78-21 vote, and now heads to the House of Representatives.

• When we talk about torture, too often we use distant, medical language to grapple with the most vile things that can be done to a human being. Very few of us can imagine this horrific treatment, and even fewer of us want to think about it.

• But our government has too often sanctioned torture. It is critical that we understand it so that we can stop it.

• Through Survivors of Torture, International, an organization that advocates for an end to torture everywhere and treats torture survivors, I have heard stories from survivors that have never been more relevant. I shall try to share my sense of what torture is and why Congress must pass the McCain-Feinstein legislation that would prohibit it.

• The government would prefer you never knew about any of that. When Montgomery was being sued by a former employer, then–Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte quashed any public court discussion of Montgomery’s bizarre relationship with U.S. intelligence. He insisted that public revelations about how easily the country’s protectors can be conned would constitute “serious, and in some cases exceptionally grave, damage to the national security of the United States.”

• Democracy is supposed to transmit the people’s will to our governors, but it’s hard to argue that’s the case when said governors can keep us ignorant about what they’re doing and what it costs. However, the U.S. government has become increasingly adept at waving the flags of democracy and national security simultaneously.

• The chief reason why the USA is no longer a democracy (if it ever was) is that its mega-criminals have impunity, just like kings and other dictators in countries that make little pretense to being a ‘democracy.’

• Outspoken political activist and avant garde hip-hop artist Sole, together with DJ Pain 1, gives Sputnik readers a first look at his visually stunning new video that tells the story of a CIA black site as seen through the eyes of a detainee.

• Hacktivist group launches action against RCMP in B.C. following fatal shooting in Dawson Creek

• I am concerned that yet again Cameron is conflating the issue of extremism and terrorism with those of cohesion and integration.

• He says that Muslims are not doing enough to integrate and that risks fostering extremism – but just what is enough and how do you measure it?

• Jailed journalist and activist Barrett Brown has received 30 more days of solitary confinement in the prison, where he is serving a five-year and three-month sentence issued against him in January.

• Brown, who had been put in “the hole” at the Fort Worth Correctional Institution previously, was put in solitary confinement in late June after staff “singled” him out “for a search” of his locker and “found a cup of homemade alcohol.”

• The case against Khan, an imam at a Miami mosque before his 2011 arrest, was built on hundreds of FBI recordings of both telephone calls and Khan’s face-to-face conversations with an undercover informant. In the calls, Khan discussed details of numerous wire transfers to Pakistan over a three-year period that totaled about $50,000.

• Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old white man who stands accused of murdering nine black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, last month, was indicted Wednesday on federal hate crime charges, some of which carry the possibility of the death penalty.

• Louisiana police on Friday identified John Russell Houser (59) of Alabama as the suspected lone gunman who opened fire in a crowded movie theater, killing two and wounding others before turning the gun on himself.

DRM

• Here’s some remarkable news: a judge in a New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Appeals Court has ruled that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s ban on breaking DRM only applies if you break DRM in order to violate copyright law. This is a complete reversal of earlier rulings across the country (and completely opposite to the approach that the US Trade Representative has demanded from America’s trading partners). In the traditional view, DRM is absolutely protected, so that no one is allowed to break it except the DRM maker. In other words, a film-maker isn’t allowed to take the BluRay DRM off her own movie, a video game programmer can’t take the iPad DRM off her own game, and an audiobook author can’t take the DRM off his own Audible book.

• In 1985, Japanese giant Namco got out its wallet, and bought control of Atari Games – the coin-op arcade games maker that was doing rather well compared to its ailing home console cousin, Atari Corp.

• The deal was the first step toward a massive legal battle that changed the way console manufacturers produced, licensed, and distributed their games. And this is how it happened:

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• A restaurateur has been threatened with a £1,000 fine or court action if any customer watches TV on their mobile phone in her premises in a ‘bullying’ letter from the BBC TV Licensing body.

• Neleen Strauss, the owner of the High Timber restaurant in central London, was sent the ‘intimidating and aggressive’ letter this week.

• This week several Hollywood studios and pay TV giant Sky found themselves on the wrong end of an EU antitrust investigation for blocking cross-border access to TV shows and movies. Yet twenty years ago Sky was doing the same thing, a stubbornness that sparked a huge wave of piracy right across Europe.

• During his stay in prison, Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij was deprived of the Internet and forced to view broadcast TV. A grueling experience, but not as bad as it used to be, something the Pirate Bay can take credit for in part. Still, Fredrik believes that there’s plenty of room for improvement.

• Prenda Law is gone, and today it’s a legit porno company, Malibu Media, that files more copyright lawsuits than anyone else. Malibu sues thousands of people for downloading the company’s content via BitTorrent, then asks for settlements reportedly in the several-thousand-dollar range.

• A bill extending the term of copyright by an additional 45 years—almost doubling it, in the case of corporate and government works—sailed through the Jamaican Senate on June 26, after having passed the House of Representatives on June 9. The copyright term in Jamaica is now 95 years from the death of the author, or 95 years from publication for government and corporate works. This makes it the third-longest copyright term in the world, after Mexico and Côte d’Ivoire respectively with 100 and 99 years from the death of the author.

• The State is particularly upset that Malamud ran some crowdfunding and donation campaigns seeking to raise money to keep his operations running, saying that he raised this money “to assist the Defendant in infringing the State of Georgia’s copyrights.” The State also complains that he uploaded the code to the Internet Archive under a CC 0 public domain dedication, saying (incorrectly) that this implies that he claimed that he was the owner of the annotations. That’s not true at all. He’s claiming that everyone owns them, because they’re the law.

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