● 08.02.15

● Links 2/8/2015: KDE Applications 15.08 Beta, Zorin OS 10

Posted in News Roundup at 1:26 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Linux remains the undisputed champion of the server world, which is why it runs most of the internet. We have world class web servers and databases, industrial grade distributions (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or the free CentOS) and the advantage of open source on our side. Linux virtual machines tend to be much cheaper than their Windows counterparts, and are certainly much more efficient thanks to its modular nature.

Server

• Most of our services are in Go, and thanks to the fact that compiled Go binaries are mostly-statically linked by default, it’s possible to create containers with very few files within. It’s surely possible to use these techniques to create tighter containers for other languages that need more runtime support, but for this post I’m only focusing on Go apps.

Kernel Space

• Enabling Multipath TCP on the smartphone is the first step in deploying it. However, this is not sufficient since there are very few servers that support Multipath TCP today. To enable their users to benefit from Multipath TCP for all the applications that they use, KT has opted for a SOCKSv5 proxy. This proxy is running on x86 servers using release 0.89.5 of the open-source Multipath TCP implementation in the Linux kernel. During the presentation, SungHoon Seo mentioned that despite the recent rollout of the service, there were already 5,500 active users on the SOCKS proxy the last time he checked. Thanks to this proxy, the subscribes of the Giga Path service in Korea can benefit from Multipath TCP with all the TCP-based applications that they use.

Applications

• Pixman 0.33.2 RC has many new ARMv6 optimizations, bug fixes for PowerPC 64-bit, and various other fixes and enhancements to the MMX code.

• I have just released version 1.13 of Obnam, my backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details on what it does. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian, and soon in unstable.

• MusicTube is a very interesting music player designed for multiple platforms using YouTube as the music source. It’s not made for locally hosted music, and you can’t add other online sources, but YouTube is a huge resource.

Instructionals/Technical

• I’ve meant to do this for ages, so on my first day of my “staycation”, despite vowing to myself that I wouldn’t look at a computer screen this week (hey, it’s not actually the technical start of my week off is it?), I fiddled this morning with BIND to try and avoid seeing ads on my devices. While AdBlock works great on my browsers, that doesn’t transfer well to mobile devices and apps with built-in advertising, etc.

Games

• Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor was by far one of the best games of 2014. With great combat, abilities, and a really interesting Nemesis system, I was really surprised by what I was expecting to be a pretty generic Batman: Arkham Mordor rip-off.

• Evoland developers Shiro Games recently announced the release date for the anticipated sequel, and though there’s no firm release date for Linux yet, it shouldn’t be far behind the Windows release. If you didn’t catch the great looking trailer when we last wrote about Evoland 2, here it is again for you to enjoy:

• Don’t Be Patchman is releasing very soon on Steam, and it’s going to start by being a Linux-exclusive title. This won’t stay forever though, but the developers are focusing on Linux first.

• Codename CURE is a reasonable well rated first-person shooter on Steam, and it has been updated to include a Linux version.

• The game is free to play, so you lose nothing by trying it. It has quite lot of positive reviews going for it too, if you trust user reviews.

• DiRT Showdown is a good looking racer that is now officially confirmed for Linux, and it is available to pre-order.

• It’s not often I get over excited about a game, and I’m not entirely sure how this flew under my radar, but Shallow Space looks seriously good. You can pre-order now for $15 which will give you access to early builds when they are available. We never recommend pre-ordering, but this looks like it could be a safe bet since it already has Linux builds available.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• After having a lot of fun at Akademy 2015, the annual world summit of KDE, which took place in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain between July 25-31, the KDE developers finally decided to post the announcement for the Beta release of KDE Applications 15.08.

• At this year’s KDE conference Akademy, I was working on a small plasmoid to continuously track the disk quota.

• The disk quota is usually used in enterprise installations where network shares are mounted locally. Typically, sysadmins want to avoid that users copy lots of data into their folders, and therefor set quotas (the quota limit has nothing to do with the physical size of a partition). Typically, once a user gets over the hard limit of the quota, the account is blocked and the user cannot login anymore. This happens from time to time, since the users are not really aware of the current quota limit and the already used disk space.

• KDEPIM 5.0 is the port of kdepim to kf5/qt5.

• I just started the port of rsibreak to KF5.

• Finally thanks to the both Akademy and Akademy-es sponsors. Specially Qindel, that sponsored us for the first time, hope we can continue the relationship in the future.

• A few days ago, fellow Qt/KDE team member Lisandro gave an update on the situation with migration to Plasma 5 in Debian Testing (AKA Stretch). It’s changed again. All of Plasma 5 is now in Testing. The upgrade probably won’t be entirely smooth, which we’ll work on that after the gcc5 transition is done, but it will be much better than the half KDE4 SC half Kf5/Plasma 5 situation we’ve had for the last several days.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• All the *mm projects now require C++11. Current versions of g++ require you to use the –std=c++11 option for this, but the next version will probably use C++11 by default. We might have done this sooner if it had been clearer that g++ (and libstdc++) really really supported C++11 fully.

Distributions

New Releases

• We are excited to finally announce the release of Zorin OS 10 with the availability of the Zorin OS 10 Core and Ultimate editions.

• Zorin OS 10 is our best, most beautiful release yet. We have made major strides with the visual styling in Zorin OS. In addition to the refined & perfected desktop theme and the new default FreeSans desktop font, we have introduced a stunning new icon theme, based on the elementary and elementary-add icon themes. This is its first major overhaul since Zorin OS 2.0.

• On August 1, Artyom Zorin had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the final release of his Zorin OS 10 GNU/Linux operating system, distributed as Core and Ultimate editions, based on Ubuntu 15.04.

Red Hat Family

• Open source users flock to Red Hat for enterprise support, but not all subscribers like the way the company handles IT issues.

• The company recently launched an updated support service. User experience is important to Red Hat Inc., and it dedicated its day-three keynote at the Red Hat Summit last month to its support.

• Raleigh has seen a 23% increase in IT jobs

• Several research firms have weighed in on RHT. Northland Securities reissued a “buy” rating and set a $92.00 target price (up from $85.00) on shares of Red Hat in a report on Thursday, June 25th. Northland Capital Partners upped their price objective on Red Hat from $85.00 to $92.00 in a report on Thursday, June 25th. Cantor Fitzgerald reiterated a “buy” rating on shares of Red Hat in a research report on Friday, June 26th. Deutsche Bank restated a “hold” rating and set a $75.00 price objective (up from $70.00) on shares of Red Hat in a research report on Thursday, July 2nd. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. reaffirmed an “overweight” rating and issued a $85.00 target price (up previously from $82.00) on shares of Red Hat in a report on Thursday, July 2nd.

Fedora

• So the schedule for Flock is finally fixed and I have to update some things according to my last post. First the practical part of the Wallpaper Hunt is scheduled now for Friday now instead of Satruday. Addionally I will help Máirín Duffy on Saturday morning with the Inkscape and GIMP Bootcamp, guess which part I will do.

• In previous post (How-to set up network audio server based on PulseAudio and auto-discovered via Avahi) I’ve wrote details how I set up network audio-server. Actually I’m using cubietruck there.

• Few days back I wrote about a locally built Fedora 22 image which has systemd-networkd handling the network configuration. You can test that image locally on your system, or on an Openstack Cloud. In case you want to test the same on AWS, we now have two AMI(s) for the same, one in the us-west-1, and the other in ap-southeast-1. Details about the AMI(s) are below:

Debian Family

• Hi all,

• I just looked back on the Halloween Documents, specifically http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/halloween1.html . Here are two quotes I find both interesting and timely:

• * Linux can win as long as services / protocols are commodities.

• * OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.

• So next time one of the new breed calls you a neckbeard for helping build a distro with simple protocols and services, show him http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/halloween1.html . And try not to laugh when the whole thing goes right over his head.

• This month I have been paid to work 15 hours on Debian LTS.

• VLANd is a python program intended to make it easy to manage port-based VLAN setups across multiple switches in a network. It is designed to be vendor-agnostic, with a clean pluggable driver API to allow for a wide range of different switches to be controlled together.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• I want to make something very clear at the start of this review – I have an iPad Mini which I absolutely love. I wasn’t entirely sure about the iPad when it launched but all these years later I thought it would be stupid not to have one in the house. As it turns out, I’ve used it loads and really like it.

• And then Sony sent over my review sample of the Z4 Tablet. To say it has won me over is actually reasonable. I’ve used it a lot now, carried it around with me, replaced my laptop for a short period to see how it stacks up. I have to say, it has done nothing to annoy me, and everything to worm its way into my heart. So what is it that makes the Z4 so good?

• The two big phone announcements of the week featured new Android devices — the OnePlus 2 and the Moto X Style — with specs that compete well with $600-plus premium phones, yet cost between $300 and $400. We also heard that Samsung plans to “adjust” (read: reduce) the price of its $600 – $700 Galaxy S6 phone after weaker than expected sales.

• Android Studio, which has been billed as the official Android IDE, will get improvements in C++ language accommodations, annotations, and memory profiling with the release of the 1.3 version this week.

• Based on JetBrains’ popular IntelliJ Idea Java development environment, Android Studio has been viewed by InfoWorld as a superior alternative to the Eclipse IDE. Version 1.3 is now available in the Android Studio release channel. Key features include full editing and debugging support for C++, a new memory profiler, and improved testing, according to the Android Developers Blog.

• If you’re tired of having to pause games on your Android mobile device just to wipe finger grease off the screen, you are in luck. For $80, the Bluetooth-connected Razer Serval gamepad will ensure that you never touch that screen again (at least until playtime is over). Razer initially announced the Serval back at CES in January but it has finally hits Google Play’s virtual store shelves.

• The next official build of Android M, Preview 3, may see a bit of delay in release, according to the public Android M Developer Preview community on Google+. As stated by a moderator in the community, “We want this to be a near final release to test your apps on, but we need a little more time to get it out to you.” Preview 3 was previously scheduled to be released around late July.

• Bottom line, the Zidoo X1 checks all the boxes when it comes to streaming and playing local media. The X1 is affordable with an MSRP of $59 USD and comes with a one year warranty. Despite its paltry specifications, the X1 was able to handle pretty much all movie files and streaming duties. The only concern would be how well Zidoo would continue to support the device via software updates. While this doesn’t quite beat pricing from the likes of the Chromecast or the MK808B it does provide more features. While this is my first time with an true Android media box, I found that the experience as pretty seamless when it was all set up. While the X1 was able to stand up the challenge of 4K, the real question is: when will see more 4K UHD content that is easily accessible.

• It was odd to hear that Nextbit is working on releasing its first smartphone. The San Francisco startup is known for its cloud-based continuity services for Android – how did they go from making apps to designing smartphones? Regardless of what the answer to that question may be, now we know they are definitely planning this well.

Free Software/Open Source

• IBM’s new developerWorks Open is a cloud-based environment on which developers can access emerging IBM technologies, technical expertise and collaborate with a global network of other developers to try and speed up projects of many diverse types. Developers can not only expect to download the code, but also have access to blogs, videos, tools and techniques to accelerate their efforts.

• [...]

• IBM is no stranger to the open source movement, having been at the forefront of initiatives such as Apache, Linux, Eclipse and most recently Spark, Docker, Cloud Foundry and OpenStack .IBM has thousands of developers working on open source projects.

• Is your data safe on Mega? Not according to Mega’s founder, the headline-grabbing Kim Dotcom. According to Dotcom, speaking in a Q&A session over at Slashdot earlier this week, he’s basically been ousted from ownership of the service he created back in January of 2013. He no longer works for Mega, nor does he even own any shares of Mega.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The new LibreOffice 5.0 version is scheduled for launch this Wednesday, August 5, so we’ll take a closer look at what the new version will bring.

CMS

• As you may know, Raspberry Pi is an ARM single-board computer having the size of a credit card, created to help the users to understand a computer’s architecture and do basic programming.

Project Releases

• As 3D printing technology inches into the mainstream, users of various devices are requiring easy compatibility between their PCs, laptops, and tablets, and the various desktop 3D printers currently on the market. While we’ve seen Microsoft push forward with initiatives to better integrate 3D printing into their Windows 8 and Windows 10 operating systems, we are still a ways away from the ease in compatibility seen within the 2D printing space, and Apple’s Mac compatibility is still seemingly lagging behind.

Openness/Sharing

• Giving away something that could make you a billion dollars sounds foolish. But Dr. Jay Bradner believes it’s essential to share even the most prized scientific discoveries if we hope to find a cure for cancer.

• The General Services Administration‘s 18F organization has released a new style guide for the documentation of open source projects at government agencies.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• The U.S. has a big healthcare cost problem, as is well known. Mary Meeker, a venture capitalist, has been a leader calling attention to this issue; she famously drew the chart below. I refreshed the data, and it looks the same. The U.S. spends about 50% more per capita on healthcare than other countries with comparable levels of income and development. The main drivers of higher spending are higher prices for medical procedures, hospital days, and drugs; higher utilization of many medical resources; and higher administrative costs (more). Recent U.S. healthcare reform initiatives have begun to push back on some of these factors via value-based provider payments and other mechanisms, but it will be quite a while before we know if this is working.

Security

• The most sensitive work environments, like nuclear power plants, demand the strictest security. Usually this is achieved by air-gapping computers from the Internet and preventing workers from inserting USB sticks into computers. When the work is classified or involves sensitive trade secrets, companies often also institute strict rules against bringing smartphones into the workspace, as these could easily be turned into unwitting listening devices.

• Regular readers will have noticed that I’ve been running a small scale experiment over the last few months, feeding one spammer byproduct back to them via a reasonably accessible web page. The hope was that I would learn a few things about spammer behavior in the process.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Why a tiny South American country can’t escape the ugly legacies of its idiosyncratic past.

• [...]

• This remains very much the case today. Forty-nine years free from British rule, Guyana — an overlooked chapter in the Cold War’s annals of U.S. interventions and the post-colonial dictatorships and racial tensions they fostered — is still haunted by its past. The most recent electoral contest might be seen as many things: a referendum on corruption, a test of coalition politics, or an effort to transcend ethnic voting. But beneath all those skins, it seemed, the unnerving campaign was about the chemical reaction between self and fact, identity and reality. It felt like history was on the ballot, with candidates on both sides putting it to political use or conveniently forgetting inconvenient parts of it.

• With the white settlers no longer in control, and Rhodesia now known as Zimbabwe, the Renamo leaders turned increasingly to South Africa for local support beneath the overall patronage of Washington. The war was pitiless. At least 800,000 Mozambicans died. More than half the victims were children. Out of the population of 16 million, 6 million were displaced. Renamo gangs put to death as many as 100,000 civilians. In one infamous episode, Renamo attacked a hamlet inhabited mostly by women and children, all 425 of whom were slaughtered, their bodies hacked by machetes.

• The Associated Press cited conclusions from the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and others that the situation with the Islamic State is at a stalemate. “We’ve seen no meaningful degradation in their numbers,” an anonymous defense official told AP, adding that after spending billions of dollars and killing more than 10,000 extremist fighters, the group’s likely strength of 20,000 to 30,000 people hasn’t changed since last August when the U.S.-led airstrikes began.

• The Obama administration is joining with Turkey in airstrikes against Islamic State targets in northern Syria – a shift from President Erdogan’s past tolerance and even support for Islamic terrorists inside Syria – but a more complex geopolitical game is afoot, writes ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller.

• Having reached a deal with the Turkish government to set up a buffer zone inside Syria, ostensibly to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), official Washington has begun debating the rules of engagement for US military forces to intervene against the Syrian military.

• Many parties are to blame, but certainly among them are interventionists in the United States and its allies who rationalized supporting the Islamist opposition – and refusing to embrace serious peace negotiations – on the grounds that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a uniquely evil dictator. That image of Assad grew directly out of his regime’s brutal response to civilian protests that began in early 2011, soon after the start of the Arab Spring.

• The neocon-flagship Washington Post fired a propaganda broadside at President Putin for shutting down the Russian activities of the National Endowment for Democracy, but left out key facts like NED’s U.S. government funding, its quasi-CIA role, and its plans for regime change in Moscow, writes Robert Parry.

• US hypocrisy was on full display when it condemned Russia for daring to ban the National Endowment of Democracy (NED), a descendant of the CIA with a history of undermining foreign countries under the guise of promoting democracy, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern told Sputnik.

• Gaddafi overthrew a British installed King, brought Libya from Africa’s poorest nation to be its wealthiest with a UN Quality of Life Index higher than 9 European countries. A million Libyans out of a total population 6, desperately demonstrated for their Green Book Democracy and beloved Gaddafi outside Tripoli as Britain & France bombed. Left Progressives either collaborated with or were silent re lies used to destroy Libya

• The Justice Department has charged Turi with lying on an export-license application, alleging he hid his intent to ship weapons and ammunition to Libya in direct violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 170. The Feb. 26, 2011, resolution imposed an arms embargo on all member states to prevent “the immediate prospect” of a Gadhafi-led attempt “to slaughter rebel forces in Benghazi that would likely result in massive civilian casualties.”

• A group of rebels allegedly trained by the United States to fight the Nusra Front, which is al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, have deserted their headquarters, according to the Associated Press.

• Nusra Front said it attacked the headquarters of the group, known as Division 30, Friday night and abducted some of its members because they were trained by the CIA and vowed in a statement to cut off “the arms” of the American government in Syria. During the fighting, US-led coalition warplanes attacked the Nusra Front fighters, according to activists.

• The actors Morgan Freeman, Jack Black and Natasha Lyonne have leant their support to Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran.

• The stars feature in a new video designed to help persuade legislators to get the agreement through Congress when it goes to the vote in September. Alongside them are an eclectic mix of camera-friendly experts including ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame, Queen Noor of Jordan and retired US Ambassador Thomas R Pickering, who urge Americans to support the agreement lest they wind up “super dead”.

• It will be the first joint appearance on a public stage of Obama and Rouhani since the Iran nuclear deal agreed this month in Vienna, and there is great anticipation that the two presidents could meet for the first time. Last year they spoke by phone as Rouhani was leaving town. On this occasion, by the time the presidents mount the famous green marble podium, the US Congress is expected to have voted to reject the Vienna agreement, and Obama could be in the position of counting votes in a scramble to ensure he can sustain a presidential veto of the congressional vote. The domestic politics around an Obama-Rouhani meeting could once more prove awkward.

• Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee said Tuesday he’s seeking the Democratic nomination to keep the question of the Iraq War alive, one which implicitly haunts Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

• Democrats need to point out that the problems with ISIS and other instability in the Middle East started with the Iraq War and should not be afraid to tag Republicans on the issue, Chafee, who was a senator at that time of the vote in 2002, said during a Christian Science Monitor Breakfast in Washington.

• Former CIA covert operations officer Valerie Plame, who has been a vocal supporter of the Iran nuclear deal, sees some hypocrisy in the outcry against the proposition, she told HuffPost Live on Tuesday.

• While President Reagan was revered for his work with the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which was later signed by President George W. Bush, the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran have been much more controversial, Plame pointed out.

• Political scientist Mark Gasiorowski says Iranians of a certain age all knew the CIA had conspired with the Shah 25 years earlier to overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh, an elected and immensely popular prime minister.

• On Thursday evening, Obama spoke by phone with thousands of people affiliated with liberal activist groups Organizing for Action, the Center for American Progress and Credo Action.

• The Bush administration’s narrative, adopted after the invasion of Iraq, described a covert nuclear programme run by Iran for two decades, the main purpose of which was to serve as a cover for a secret nuclear weapons programme. Undersecretary of State John Bolton and Vice-President Dick Cheney, who were managing the policy, cleverly used leaks to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in 2005 to introduce into the domestic political discussion alleged evidence from a collection of documents of then unknown provenance that Iran had a secret nuclear weapons research programme from 2001 to 2003.

• The administration also passed the documents on to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2005, as part of a Bush strategy aimed to take Iran to the United Nations Security Council on the charge of violating its commitments to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Bolton and Cheney were working with Israel to create a justification for regime change in Iran based on the idea that Iran was working on nuclear weapons under the cover of its nuclear programme.

• The entire Bush-Israeli narrative was false, however.

• The U.S. intelligence community first learned that Yemen’s Houthi rebels had launched a Scud missile toward Saudi Arabia on June 30 not from spies on the ground or satellites in the skies, but instead from a more modern form of information gathering: Twitter.

• “The first warning of that event: ‘hashtag scudlaunch,’” Marine Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, the head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), said at a gathering of intelligence contractors just outside Washington on Thursday night. “Someone tweeted that a Scud had been launched, and that’s how we started to search for this activity.”

• Hollywood surprised itself earlier this year by producing an Iraq war movie that was a blockbuster—American Sniper has earned more than half a billion dollars so far, starring Bradley Cooper in the role of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. The film also produced intense cultural criticism about the way it narrowly represented the war, portraying Iraqis as little more than turbaned bullseyes for American valor.

• America’s defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s traumatized the ruling class in the US and its capitalist satellites, including Canada. Many of this class’ most prominent members regrouped to make sure the primary beneficiaries of the permanent war economy would never again face such a setback.

• The CIA was downgraded even as other agencies were created to install and prop up compliant governments within the USA itself and around the world. The plutocrats and their corporate managers thereby expanded and privatized many facets of so-called “national security.”

• Nine U.S. Marines en route to Ukraine for a training exercise were held up in Vienna for questioning last week because their weapons had not been properly declared, an Austrian newspaper reported.

• So you have been entrusted with a very important mission — in this case, trying to convince several countries in the 1950′s to allow take-off and landing of a new, super-secret aircraft, the U2, which would allow the U.S. to conduct surveillance over the USSR at such a high altitude that Soviet MiG-17s would be unable to shoot them down.

• As the Navy investigates reports of seven military and civilian personnel diagnosed with cancer or other illnesses after serving at Guantanamo Bay, one of detention facility’s long-time defense attorneys says there could be almost three times as many claims.

• Last week’s U.S. drone strike in southern Somalia killed al Shabaab leaders Ismail Jabhad and Ismail Dhere. That’s according to both Somali intelligence and Kenyan officials, who offered incomplete and conflicting details on what appeared to be a larger strike against al Shabaab fighters near Bardere, along with a second US drone strike on al Shabaab in northern Kenya.

• The one thing they were sure about – despite the secretive nature of US military operations in Somalia – is that a US drone carried out the strike in Somalia for at least the third time this year, one of dozens of US drone strikes on Somalia conservatively dating back to 2011. As US intervention continues to evolve and expand in the Horn of Africa, many of these missions have been confirmed in recent years by US military and intelligence officials, and by their diplomatic counterparts who are increasingly willing to concede there are American boots on the ground. As a token of the importance the US ascribes to tackling terrorism in Africa, President Obama will visit Kenya and Ethiopia later in July.

• The president’s visit to East Africa has been the occasion for the same kind of hypocritical finger pointing Barack Obama usually reserves for his frequent hectoring of Black America, this time using “gay rights” as the standard, It’s a standard which he would never use to lecture America’s other vassals like the bloodstained beheading backward Saudi regime.

• We cause our African allies more problems than we help them solve

• Latin America’s relationship with the U.S. government has been difficult to say the least. The U.S. has been intervening in Latin America since President James Monroe established the Monroe Doctrine, a foreign policy that prevented European powers from colonizing any sovereign nation in “their backyard” (that was America’s job!). The Monroe Doctrine became an instrumental tool for Washington to advance American style Democracy and dominate governments in South and Central America and the Caribbean which brings us to Cuba.

• Cuba was one of the last colonial possessions under Spanish rule just 90 miles south of Florida. As Spain’s Imperial power was in decline, Washington had imperial ambitions to expand its influence on Cuba. Cuba had the potential to produce unlimited profits for U.S. business interests. Even organized crime got into the picture when they became a major player in Cuba since the early 1930’s. The mafia controlled the gaming industry, prostitution and the drug trade in the U.S. mainland also had their sights on Cuba. The mafia managed to expand their operations to Cuba to avoid harassment from the U.S. government. Cuba was to be their base of operations as they were looking to expand into other Caribbean nations. During that time, Cuba was under the leadership of President Fulgencio Batista who had close political ties to Washington and its multinational corporations. Batista was also a good friend to organized crime. Cuba became a cesspool of corruption, illegal drugs and prostitution which became a playground (metaphorically speaking) for the rich and famous while the majority of ordinary Cubans lived in extreme poverty. This is an historical account of Cuba before 1959, a time period that explains why Cuba’s Revolution was a long time in the making.

• Another tactic which provided us great inspiration was the destruction of draft board files to make the induction of soldiers impossible. This was followed by the destruction of corporate records for major war profiteers such as Dow Chemical, producers of napalm, and General Electric, producer of bomb components. Remember, if you can, this was decades before computerization; without those files, meat could not be fed into the maw of the war machine.

• But it is also because we African elites have internalised the ideology of our conquerors that presents us as inferior, inadequate, and incapable of self-government. Bob Marley’s words that we must liberate ourselves from mental slavery are important here.

• U.S. military officials diminish the credibility of any proposed cease-fire when they suggest that the U.S. will, after all, consider maintaining bases and troops in Afghanistan far beyond the supposed 2016 evacuation of U.S. bases. Confidence in a cease-fire is further undermined when parties to negotiations know that the U.S. could assassinate them if they appear on a list of U.S. targets. Consider a recent statement by U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. He was answering a question about whether or not the U.S. would “take out” the purported leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, if the opportunity presented itself. Carter said, “we would certainly take it.” Note, he didn’t say, “if there are no children in the way, we would certainly take it.” Not “if he wasn’t in a dense urban area, we would certainly take it.” Essentially, Ashton Carter assured people that the U.S. will kill civilians if this is a condition of being able to kill leaders of groups the U.S. designates as enemies.

• Is Washington really trying to train a rebel army in Syria? Or are they just marking fighters for death—and worse?

• Several weeks ago, a CounterPunch special report revealed that the US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS)—a $726 million embedded social science program—had quietly expired. As media outlets picked up the story, it became evident that HTS’s demise was a welcome development for many. Tax payers were fed up with what appeared to be a costly boondoggle, anthropologists bitterly opposed the program for its ethical shortcomings, and a small but vocal group of military officers complained about how it drained resources from other priorities.

• The Pentagon did not confirm the death toll, but did confirm the attacks as a “kinetic strike” in the area, targeting “individuals threatening the force.” The US has launched several strikes against ISIS forces in Nangarhar this month.

• Any government serious about preventing global terrorism would abhor Obama’s drone campaign as much as it abhors the recent beach atrocity in Tunisia.

• Among developed nations, the gun problem we face is unique to the United States. Here, politicians are bought and sold to the highest bidder, and people are manipulated by a monolithic corporate media that is bought and sold just the same.

• I say it without equivocation, “Guns kill people.”People use guns to kill people. No one can deny that. I know people kill with other instruments of death. But guns are involved in so many deaths it must be stated. I know that criminals will always have ways to get guns.

• I wish every hand gun, assault rifle, automatic gun, and now sawed off shotguns, not used by law enforcement and military units could be delivered by train and methodically thrown into huge blast furnaces at the steel works in Gary, Indiana, melted and used for productive positive products. I wish for the magical power to extricate all guns from the hands of crooks, thugs, outlaws and melt them. I wish that no guns except those used by military and law enforcement agencies could be produced or imported or sold for the next 150 years. I wish all ammunition for all of those guns could be delivered to military arsenals and disposed of and no ammunition could be produced, imported or sold for the next 150 years. Anyone caught with a gun will be jailed forever. No questions asked. No due process.

• Dawn is just breaking on June 5th at Djibouti’s international airport, but it’s already boiling hot on the tarmac. Mohammed Issa, a rotund and mustachioed border-police officer, gestures to a massive U.S. Air Force transport jet — a gray C-17 Globemaster — sitting a short distance away. “Since the start of the war in Yemen, it’s been crazy here,” he says. “Military flights, humanitarian aid — sometimes there’s no space to park on the tarmac.”

• As the United States provides targeting assistance to the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council in Yemen, it should consider that its allies’ standards for target selection may be less rigorous. However, the United States is still partially responsible for airstrikes enabled with its intelligence. Contrary to the official U.S. position that it remains in a “non-combat advisory and coordinating role to the Saudi-led campaign,” this enabling support makes the United States a combatant in the Yemen air campaign. Even if the United States is not pulling the trigger, the “live intelligence feeds from surveillance flights over Yemen” that “help Saudi Arabia decide what and where to bomb” are indispensable for the launch of airstrikes against Houthi rebels.

• Last week, Retired General Wesley Clark, who was NATO commander during the U.S. bombing of Serbia, proposed that “disloyal Americans” be sent to internment camps for the “duration of the conflict.”

• Discussing the recent military base shootings in Chattanooga, TN, in which five U.S. service members were killed, Clark recalled the internment of American citizens during World War II who were merely suspected of having Nazi sympathies. He said: “Back then we didn’t say ‘that was freedom of speech,’ we put him in a camp.”

• He called for the government to identify people most likely to be radicalized so we can “cut this off at the beginning.” That sounds like “pre-crime”!

• Gen. Clark ran for president in 2004 and it’s probably a good thing he didn’t win considering what seems to be his disregard for the Constitution.

• Unfortunately, in the current presidential race, Donald Trump even one-upped Clark, stating recently that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is a traitor and should be treated like one, implying that the government should kill him.

• It is a characteristic of technological development for humans to get machines to do things that they don’t want to, whether it is washing the dishes, mowing the lawn or walking long distances to get somewhere.

• This past week, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and about a thousand other artificial intelligence researchers signed a letter calling for a ban on autonomous weapons.

• The remote-operated drones that we use in modern warfare can already fly virtually undetected and use advanced targeting systems to drop bombs on buildings and people below — but the key phrase is “remote-operated.” A human is usually controlling the weapon from afar.

• An ultra-Orthodox Jew accused of stabbing six people at a Gay Pride march in Jerusalem weeks after his release from jail for a similar attack lashed out in court Friday, Israeli media reported.

• “I do not accept this court’s authority,” said a defiant Yishai Shlissel, representing himself at a hearing.

• Israeli forces have been accused of carrying out war crimes during a day of “carnage” in the Gaza Strip that has been called Black Friday.

• A report by Amnesty International on alleged atrocities in Rafah during last year’s conflict with Hamas claims Israeli forces killed at least 135 Palestinian civilians, including 75 children, following the capture of a soldier.

• See what the team on Discovery Communications’ TV series Mythbusters learned when they tested the safety of drones. The results might make you lose your head.

• My primary criticism of this album is that the storyline is vague. Unlike The Who’s “Tommy,” the listener gets more of an emotional storytelling through sounds and words rather than a literal connect-the-dots progression of clear events.

• The first half of the album is Heavy, with a capital H. Muse returns to their decidedly guitar-centered riff-laden focus of earlier days. While the opening track, “Dead Inside” is augmented by the slightest keyboard accents in the verses and singer Matthew Bellamy’s melodramatic vocals, it surges into the harsh threats of the drill instructor’s intro to the mind-numbing “Psycho.”

• They pointed out that drone strikes result in the killing of innocent people; one research study confirmed that in an effort to kill 41 identified “terrorists,” weaponized drones killed 1,147 unidentified individuals.

• “Drones prevent negotiations. Drones prevent peace,” said Jakob Fehr, chair of the German Mennonite Peace Commission. “You can’t talk to someone who’s shooting at you from an invisible location, nor can peace be obtained at a distance either.”

• The Israeli military had no comment. The bombing reportedly happened in Khader, which is a town in the Syrian border along the countryside of Qunietra in the Syrian Golan Heights. The report says that the auto was hit in the boundary of the Israeli Golan Heights.

• Some months ago, an imagery analyst was sitting in his curtained cubicle at Hurlburt Field airbase in Florida watching footage transmitted from a drone above one of the battlefields in the War on Terror. If he thought the images showed someone doing anything suspicious, or holding a weapon, he had to type it in to a chat channel seen by the pilots controlling the drone’s missiles.

• Once an observation has been fed in to the chat, he later explained, it’s hard to revise it – it influences the whole mindset of the people with their hands on the triggers.

• The overstretched US military has hired hundreds of private sector contractors in the heart of its drone operations to analyse top secret video feeds and help track high value terror targets, an investigation has found.

• Contracts unearthed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveal a secretive industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars, placing a corporate workforce alongside uniformed personnel, analysing battlefield intelligence.

• While it has long been known that US defence firms supply billions of dollars’ worth of equipment for drone operations, the role of the private sector in providing analysts to comb through military surveillance video has remained almost entirely unknown until now.

• Upstate Drone Action activist Ed Kinane claims that private drone operators analyzing intelligence for the US military can lead to more civilian casualties with lesser accountability.

• The overstretched US military has hired hundreds of private-sector contractors to the heart of its drone operations to analyse top-secret video feeds and help track suspected terrorist leaders, an investigation has found.

• Contracts unearthed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveal a secretive industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars, placing a corporate workforce alongside uniformed personnel analysing intelligence from areas of interest.

• Who were the militants who attacked the Dinanagar police station in Gurdaspur district? What were their aims and ideology? How many of their comrades are waiting for another chance to attack? How much help are they getting from the Pakistani authorities, and what other sources of support and finance do they enjoy?

• India needs the answers to such critical questions, but none are available because dead men tell no tales. India has now been at the receiving end of several terrorist attacks from across the border, and almost invariably all attackers perish in gun battles. That leaves us guessing about the attackers, and of ways to check them in future.

• Experts say that the US armed forces are using a growing number of mercenaries or contractors to operate lethal drone attacks as regular troops are increasingly unwilling to do so.

Transparency Reporting

• A number of intelligence businesses despatched categorised emails to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s personal e mail handle, the primary account she used all through her tenure, sources say.

• In accordance with , investigators have found that info got here from the Nationwide Safety Company, the Protection Intelligence Company, the Nation-Geospatial Company, in addition to the Workplace of the Director of Nationwide Intelligence (ODNI) and the CIA.

• The Workplace of the Intelligence Group inspector common has recognized 5 emails containing categorised info when it carried out a random sampling from the emails she launched to the State Division.

• In an era when powerful institutions demonize decent people – and the mainstream media joins in, piling on the abuse – legal proceedings have become another Kafka-esque weapon of coercion. Few cases are more troubling than the persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as John Pilger describes.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• WikiLeaks has unveiled a secret document on US hunters in Zimbabwe allegedly sent from a US official to the CIA, casting light upon the recent killing of Cecil the lion, a popular attraction to Zimbabwean Hwange National Park’s visitors.

• The bad news you probably already know: Cecil the lion, one of Zimbabwe’s best loved wild animals, was slain last week at the hands of unscrupulous safari guides and, it’s claimed, a crossbow-happy dentist from Minnesota.

• [...]

• Whatever poachers’ motivations, they’re threatening to wipe some of the most vulnerable species off the face of the earth. Here are six animals that, like Cecil, poaching might rob us of forever.

• A Shell icebreaking vessel being protested by Greenpeace and other activist groups will not leave a Portland dock Wednesday, according to the Columbia River Bar Pilot dispatch.

Finance

• For some time, the technology startup scene in Russia had suffered due to a lack of angel investors supporting the region, leaving the Russian ecosystem starved for funding. Many explanations have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, such as the lack of internet education amongst the Russian angels or just a strong desire to avoid public attention.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• A well-coordinated campaign appeared to be underway ahead of the July 29 U.N. Security Council vote on whether to form a tribunal to investigate the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17. Its goal seems to be aimed at discrediting the widely accepted version that Russian-separatists were to blame for the crash that killed all 298 people on board using a surface-to-air missile system supplied by Russia.

• Trump, on the other hand, is free to be as much of a maverick as he wants to be. Opinion polls show the tactic seems to be working, at least at this early stage, with American voters. During the press conference called to launch his campaign, he bragged: “I’m using my own money. I’m not using the lobbyists. I’m not using donors. I don’t care. I’m really rich.”

• Tetsuya Abo does not want to leave Moscow because of his convictions. He claims, that in his own country there is no freedom of speech any more, and the American propaganda rules political interests.

Censorship

• UK authorities put pressure on Iran’s Press TV channel for covering events silenced by the Western media, the channel’s director said Tuesday.

• In 2012, the UK communications watchdog Ofcom revoked the channel’s license and forced it off the air. The following year its broadcasting was revoked from several European and US satellites.

Privacy

• President Barack Obama has named Raymond Cook CIO of the Intelligence Community, Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Mr. Cook most recently served concurrently as director of the Office of Space Reconnaissance for the Central Intelligence Agency since 2014, as well as director of Mission Operations for the National Reconnaissance Office, a position he held since 2013.

• The former head of the National Security Agency is among a group of people who have unexpectedly spoken out against inserting government-only electronic backdoors into encrypted devices and services.

• A Hillview man has been arrested after he shot down a drone flying over his property — but he’s not making any apologies for it.

• It happened Sunday night at a home on Earlywood Way, just south of the intersection between Smith Lane and Mud Lane in Bullitt County, according to an arrest report.

• Hillview Police say they were called to the home of 47-year-old William H. Merideth after someone complained about a firearm.

• It’s not monetizing something that happens 1.5 billion times a day

• Facebook is slowly but surely taking over the Internet. In a post after its Q2 earnings call on Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that “1.49 billion people are now part of our community. In 1876, the year the first telephone call was made, around 1.49 billion people were alive.”

• Those 1.49 billion people use Facebook to plan events, talk to each other, share pictures, and keep up with the latest news. But there’s something else we’re using it for that we barely even notice: search. People now make 1.5 billion search queries on Facebook per day, according to opening remarks during Facebook’s earnings call.

Civil Rights

• Pollard was spying on behalf of a US ally and received a life sentence despite pleading guilty and fully cooperating with US investigators. He turned over thousands of classified documents and even allegedly sold documents to Pakistan and apartheid South Africa as well.

• The $40 million cost of producing the Senate torture report was incurred by the CIA, not lawmakers, newly obtained contracting documents reveal, as the agency insisted on outsourcing much of the work to the agency’s long-time contractor.

• Critics of the report, including former and current agency officials and some Republican lawmakers, often complained about the report’s price tag of over $40 million to denounce the Democrats leading the inquiry. Contract documentation obtained by VICE News through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, however, shows that the costs were incurred by the CIA.

• The State Security Agency (SSA) has said its probe into claims that Julius Malema, Thuli Madonsela, Joseph Mathunjwa and Lindiwe Mazibuko were spies is still ongoing four months after it was started.

• The agency began the investigation after an online blog post claimed that the four were working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

• Pro-Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po, citing a report from the official Xinhua News Agency, reported Tuesday that Hong Kong student activist Joshua Wong and his family met former US consul general in Hong Kong Stephen Young during a visit to Macau in 2011.

• The Indonesia debacle wasn’t the first time during the Cold War that American officials had lied about a covert operation against a foreign elected leader, played the subservient “free press” like a Stradivarius and then had the temerity to turn around and talk about the evils of Communist propaganda. It certainly wouldn’t be the last. But it was among the most egregious and unavoidable examples, and also one that suggested that all our sanctimonious homilies about democracy and freedom of expression could not quite conceal a darker reality.

• The National Security Agency (NSA) was only the beginning: Congress—along with the Executive Branch—is so paranoid that we are on the verge of a revolution, that they’re expanding the Surveillance State to watch us even more closely. Watch for the coming Cyber-Security Information Sharing Act (CISA). This Act is going further in watching us than even the NSA ever dreamed.

• If you believe Congress will ever rein in the NSA, think again. The NSA is never going to stop its illegal activities. In fact, what the NSA has done is in its infancy. The new Cyber-Security Information Sharing Act will take the NSA to the next level in watching and listening to us. Too much money and political muscle have been invested in the NSA to create levels of control and ability that monitor each of us 24/7. The NSA has proven itself over and over incompetent where terrorists are involved but very fluent where U.S. citizens are concerned.

• On hold again: The Pentagon’s latest attempt to move forward with a military commission for an Iraqi detainee was abruptly canceled when the judge found that the accused’s defense attorney, Marine Lt. Col. Sean Gleason, was also involved in another war crimes case.

• Officers often lack the training to approach the mentally unstable, experts say

• The investigation, led by David Hoffman of the law firm Sidley Austin, concluded this month with the publication of a 542-page report. Its findings diverge considerably from the APA’s expectations. Far from upholding their Hippocratic oath to “do no harm”, APA psychologists did indeed work with officials from the Defense Department and the CIA to facilitate the torture of detainees. This involved issuing loose ethical guidelines that endorsed existing DoD interrogation policies and permitted psychologists to participate at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere—unlike their colleagues in the field of psychiatry, who refused to back the government’s evolving interrogation tactics. Though the APA’s policies adhered to US law, they violated medical ethics.

• The American Psychological Association, or APA, under fire for its role in supporting the use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques by US national security agencies, vows it will address the numerous ethical breaches detailed in the findings of an independent investigation leaked this month to The New York Times.

• But whether the association, the largest professional organisation for psychologists in the United States and arguably the most influential organisation for psychologists in the world, can salvage its reputation – or repair collateral damage – remains an open question.

• Some of its harshest critics predict mass resignations from the association. But APA’s reach extends far beyond its membership, which includes more than 122,500 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. It’s the publisher of major textbooks and journals. It’s also the accrediting body for university psychology programmes. And the episode has already been used as a case study in ethics courses.

• It was recently revealed that key leadership in the American Psychological Association knowingly misled its membership of 125,000 psychologists as well as the American public in regard to their collusion with the Department of Defense and the CIA. This collusion appears to have been aimed at preserving unethical detention and interrogation practices that involved psychologists in human torture and abuse. These findings came to light on July 10 with the release of a report (www.APA.org/independent-review). Attorney David Hoffman had been commissioned by the APA board of directors to investigate allegations of APA collusion with the Bush administration to facilitate enhanced interrogation techniques. Such practices are abhorrent and violate the long-held principles and values of psychologists across the state and the nation to protect and preserve the mental and physical health and safety of our fellow human beings.

• Rejecting this program is not only the right thing to do — it’s the smart thing to do. Past reports showed that the CIA kidnapped and tortured individuals in secret prisons, built in foreign countries paid for with bribes given to foreign officials. Government agencies ought to uphold our most cherished values, not dishonor them. By voting against torture, the Senate has clearly rejected the CIA’s past torture program.

• Before the American Psychological Association (APA) meets in Toronto next Thursday for what all expect will be a fraught convention that reckons with an independent review that last month found the APA complicit in torture, former military voices within the profession are urging the organization not to participate in what they describe as a witch hunt.

• Reformers consider the pushback to represent entrenched opposition to cleaving the APA from a decade’s worth of professional cooperation with controversial detentions and interrogations. The APA listserv has become a key debating forum, with tempers rising on both sides.

• A recent letter from the president of the APA’s military-focused wing warns that proposed ethics changes, likely to be discussed in Toronto, represent pandering to a “politically motivated, anti-government and anti-military stance”. A retired army colonel called David Hoffman, a former federal prosecutor whose scathing inquiry described APA “collusion” with US torture, an “executioner”.

• At 11am on July 2, my friend and colleague, Steven Reisner, and I met with the board of the American Psychological Association (APA). The board had just received a devastating report on an investigation of the APA’s years-long collusion with the CIA and US defense department in support of psychologist involvement in the George W. Bush-era torture program.

• The board of the American Psychological Association plans to recommend a tough ethics policy that would prohibit psychologists from involvement in all national security interrogations, potentially creating a new obstacle to the Obama administration’s efforts to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects outside of the traditional criminal justice system.

• Last December, a Senate Intelligence Committee report laid bare the extensive involvement of individual psychologists in the CIA’s black-site torture program. Then, in early July, a devastating independent report by a former federal prosecutor determined that more than a decade ago APA leaders — including the director of ethics — began working secretly with military representatives. Together they crafted deceptively permissive ethics policies for psychologists that effectively enabled abusive interrogation of war-on-terror prisoners to continue.

• These recent actions by the APA are appropriate first steps to address the egregious ethical lapses that occurred during the creation and implementation of the 2005 ethics guidelines. Despite these actions, the APA’s collusion with the DOD in issuing so-called ethics guidelines that allowed psychologists to participate in the torture of detainees held in DOD and CIA facilities has left an indelible stain on the organization’s reputation. The actions by the APA provided an aura of legitimacy to activities that are now widely recognized as having constituted torture. Such shameful conduct must never be repeated by the APA or any other professional organization representing health care providers.

• FBI whistle blower Coleen Rowley and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern to speak at organized events in nine Iowa cities beginning Sept. 24

• Some time in the future we will know if terrorism was dealt a deathly blow by Yakub’s execution, whether death penalty is a violation of human rights, whether Yakub was promised immunity and was eventually cheated out of it, whether he deserved the death warrant, whether the issue of the warrant while passing the test of the law, as the Supreme Court noted, also passed the test of justice.

• Did Yakub Memon come back to India because of a deal struck with the Indian authorities? Was he promised some sort of immunity? The honest answer has to be that we don’t know. Some of those involved in his arrest and prosecution say that India reneged on an agreement made with Yakub. Others say that there was never any deal.

DRM

• Critics of Apple’s surcharge for in-app purchases, as well as rules meant to keep that money flowing, have a powerful new friend in Washington. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) on Wednesday sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Federal Trade Commission chairwoman Edith Ramirez, asking them to review Apple’s policies for possible anti-competitive behavior.

• Apple Music is shaping up to be Apple’s worst received product launch since Apple Maps in 2012.

• Apple Music, released in June, was supposed to be Apple’s big splash into the world of subscription on-demand music and online radio. But it seems to have a lot of bugs.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The long-running copyright dispute between Oracle and Google over the latter’s use of the Java language APIs in its Android operating system will likely drag on for another year or more, based on the latest developments in the case in a US federal court.

• Reuters reports that US District Judge William Alsup, who has been presiding over the suit since it was filed in 2010, said in proceedings on Thursday that the case would likely not return to court for its next round until spring of 2016 at the earliest.

• A decade-and-a-half of disruptive technology has certainly played its part, but without that turmoil the music industry might still be playing catch up today. At any rate, the rise of online piracy arguably provided a much needed wake-up call and prompted the rise of dozens of legitimate music services.

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