● 08.14.15

● Links 14/8/2015: Dell Chromebooks, Chromebooks Outsell Windows laptops

Posted in News Roundup at 2:57 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• In my original piece, I never actually stated that the cloudbook would save the Linux desktop. In fact, I don’t believe the Linux desktop is in need of salvation, because it stands on its own perfectly well. I do believe, however, that Linux needs a cloud-centric option. In a few short years, my guess is that most every platform will be very much in tune with the cloud. Because of this, that desktop cloud stack could be a serious deal maker or breaker for new users.

• Pic Google’s Chromebooks are just over four year old and, while the hardware has done well in education, businesses and normal people haven’t been too keen.

• In response, the ad giant has teamed up with Dell to fix this with a line of Chromebooks for business. Rajen Sheth, director of product management for Android and Chrome for Business and Education, said that with businesses updating from Windows XP, there’s an opportunity for Google to pick up some market share.

Desktop

• For businesses, tablets are on the decline and laptops are rising once again. And Chromebooks aren’t just for consumers looking for cheap laptops.

• Back in March, I was in the market for a new laptop, and like many Linux-educated professionals I felt tempted to purchase one of the lighter Apple laptops on the market back then (including the recently-announced Macbook). To be completely honest, I even ordered one of them, and I was planning on installing Fedora on it (as I have on past Apple laptops).

• The very day my new Apple computer arrived, ASUS tweeted an interesting image. The company claimed it had an ultrabook that was even thinner than the recently announced Macbook. That ultrabook was the ASUS Zenbook UX305.

• He fixed the Strata fast and, as I tested the KDE effects on PCLinuxOS, he was impressed by the beauty of Linux. He also praised the solid construction of the Strata. He said that other clients have cracked the screen of their laptops with less than what I did to mine.

• Choosing the best Linux browser for your needs requires just a bit of homework: Web browsers for the Linux desktop have evolved over the years, just as they have for other popular desktop platforms. With this evolution, both good and bad revelations have been discovered. Revelations from new functionality, to broken extensions, and so forth. In this article, I’ll serve as your guide through these murky waters to help you discover the best in Linux browsers.

Kernel Space

• HMM has gone through many revisions so far and still not accepted (or proposed for that matter) for the mainline Linux kernel. The newest HMM addition is anonymous memory migration support.

• eabhas has recruited embedded design specialists Andrew McCormick and Philip Kirkpatrick to provide on-site team development and public training for individual engineers.

• McCormick has experience of software engineering design, support and integration, gained companies such as Pace, Open TV and Sony Semi-Conductor Europe.

• The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects.

Graphics Stack

• Tomorrow during the Khronos Vulkan BoF at SIGGRAPH, LunarG will be publicly announcing LunarXchange, a support portal for getting started in Vulkan development that was made possible by Valve’s sponsorship of this Linux-focused graphics consulting firm.

• It was just earlier today that OpenGL 4.2 was completed for core Mesa and already there’s patches for tackling another OpenGL 4.3 extension.

• Martin peres at Intel has published five patches that add support for GL 4.3′s ARB_shader_image_size extension. The patches affect core Mesa as well as the code for GLSL and NIR. ARB_shader_image_size with the patches turn on support in the i965 DRI driver while the other Mesa/Gallium3D drivers would still need to finish up their driver hook. The shader image size extension is enabled unconditionally within the Intel driver.

Applications

• Version 2.35 of eBook reader and management software Calibre has been released and is now available for download. It’s not a big update, but it does bring important support for Kobo devices.

• In one of the comments on my last post on Windows 10, a friendly reader from my home country pointed me at QMapShack as a replacement for QuoVadis. I have been using QuoVadis now for many many years, and it contains my mountaineering history all the way back. All the guiding work, all the track. QuoVadis is a great program, able to work with various commercial digital maps as well as GPS receivers. It only has one disadvantage, it doesn’t work on Linux. QMapShack is very similar in the target audience, but very different in usage. The one big difference is of course the set of maps one can use with QMapShack. Fortunately, Garmin Maps are supported, and since all my maps regarding Japan are Garmin maps, I am now in the process to converting to QMapShack at least for my Japan GPS data.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

Games

• The most explosive party game of the year has come to stationary computers! You can play BRAWL on your Windows PC, Mac and Linux right now!

• Because it’s 2015 and nobody needs a website any more, Divinity devs Larian boss Swen Vincke today announced via a picture on twitter that the Enhanced Edition of Original Sin will ship with Linux support.

• While all of the initial Steam Machines use Intel CPUs with NVIDIA graphics, a portable Steam Machine gaming device that hopes to ship next year and run SteamOS will be using AMD graphics.

• In a move that I imagine will make a lot of people happy, it seems RollerCoaster Tycoon World will support Linux at launch!

• BOMB: Who let the dogfight? An interesting name, but the game is so bad it makes me want to forget it. Sadly it’s not one of those “so bad it’s good” types, it’s just poor.

• I thought this would end up happening, the developers of Cobalt which is published by Mojang and even shares one of the Minecraft developers has dropped the planned Linux version.

• I’m still hoping they work on the Linux version stability some more, and work on the performance too like they said they would be.

• Creator Sherida Halatoe of one woman developer Tiger & Squid ran a crowdfunding campaign for Beyond Eyes on IndieGoGo a little under two years ago. The campaign was covered in The Funding Crowd #20, and though it made less than half of its modest €10k goal, funds were collected, seeing as it was a flexible funding campaign. We have since become quick to warn about flexible funding campaigns at The Funding Crowd, because even when they fail, backers will still expect to get something in return for their money, and creators will have to stretch already slim budgets beyond the breaking point to be able to deliver.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The first release of KDE PIM based on KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5, which will be part of the KDE Applications 15.08 release, is getting closer and closer. Except for porting the entire suite from Qt 4 to Qt 5 the team also managed to fix many bugs, add a few new features and do some pretty big performance and memory optimizations. And we already have some new improvements and optimizations stacked in the development branch which will be released in December!

• The Kontact groupware client from the KDE community, which also happens to be the premier desktop client for Kolab, is “just” a user interface (though that seriously undersells its capabilities, as it still does a lot in that UI), and it uses a system service to actually manage the groupware data. In fact, that same service is used by applications such as KDE Plasma to access data; this is how calendar events end up being shown in the desktop clock’s calendar for instance. That service (as you might already know) is called Akonadi.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Hello all,

• We would like to inform you about the following: * GNOME 3.17.90 beta tarballs due * API/ABI, UI and Feature Addition Freeze; String Change Announcement Period * New APIs must be fully documented * Writing of release notes begins

Distributions

Screenshots/Screencasts

Gentoo Family

• Good things come to those who wait: The main Gentoo package repository (also known as the Portage tree or by its historic name gentoo-x86) is now based on Git.

Arch Family

• Manjaro is an operating system based on Arch Linux, and it comes in lots of flavors. Two very similar ones have been grouped under the name of Manjaro LX, and a new upgrade has been released for it.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat co-founder Bob Young is taking over the CEO seat of Raleigh-based drone developer PrecisionHawk. Young, a longtime investor in the company, takes over for co-founder and former CEO Chris Dean. Former Raydiance exec William Beyer has been named chief financial officer. Beyer served as CFO of Bitfone Corp when it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard.

• Red Hat is emphasizing application container management, security and provisioning in the latest releases of its Satellite management suite for Red Hat Linux 7.

• Red Hat said Wednesday (Aug. 12) that Satellite 6.1 addresses the gradual shift toward container-based cloud deployments. The latest release therefore allows developers to integrate Satellite management software into a hybrid cloud while leverage better reporting around host systems during the transition, according to Joe Fitzgerald, vice president of Red Hat’s Management Business Unit.

• Red Hat has updated its Satellite systems management product to the 6.1 version, adding Linux containers to the growing list of resources that it tracks and manages.

Fedora

• AS you may know, Fedora 23 Alpha 1 has been recently released using the under-development version of GNOME 3.18 as default. While the Fedora systems are released with delays very often, the first alpha version landed on time.

Debian Family

• I keep being asked about automated bootloader testing and the phrase which crops up is “SD mux” – hardware to multiplex SD card access (typically microSD). Each time, the questioner comes up with a simple solution which can be built over a weekend, so I’ve decided to write out the actual objective, requirements and constraints to hopefully illustrate that this is not a simple problem and the solution needs to be designed to a fully scalable, reliable and maintainable standard.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Developers are working on the next OTA update for Ubuntu Touch and they are preparing to make some big improvements to the operating system, but it looks like the Calendar and the Dekko email client won’t be a part of it.

• Details about progress made with Unity 8 have been shared by Canonical, and it looks like some pretty interesting new features will land very soon although it’s not a big update.

• The Ubuntu Touch platform is currently stable and based on Ubuntu 15.04, but there are a few development branches out there. One of those branches is using Ubuntu 15.10 as a base, but it turns out that Canonical has no plans to move to that platform any time soon.

• Details about two Swift that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS have now been published by Canonical in a security notification.

• Canonical Opens Ubuntu One: After dropping its Ubuntu One cloud storage service a year ago, Ars Techinca reports Canonical this week released the system’s file-syncing code under the Affero General Public License Version 3.

Flavours and Variants

• Geary is the default email client default in Elementary OS and it’s also present in a number of other repositories as well. Developers have just made an important upgrade to it that should turn some heads.

Devices/Embedded

• Mycroft is what you would describe as a house computer, a device connected to your house, which acts like a virtual artificial intelligence. In this case, it’s a clever mini PC named Mycroft, which is based on Raspberry Pi 2 and runs Ubuntu Snappy Core.

Phones

• Sometime ago, I managed to upgrade my Firefox OS on the ZTE Open to version 1.2. However, this upgrade broke many things, like the GPS and other features.

Android

• Samsung has unveiled two new Android smartphones with jumbo screens as it seeks to recapture some of the sales lost to Apple after larger iPhones came out last year.

• Samsung said Thursday that the new Galaxy Note 5 and S6 Edge Plus will start shipping Aug. 21 in the U.S. and Canada. Usually, Note phones don’t come out until well after Apple’s new iPhone models in September.

• The new phones will have the MIUI 7 user interface, which is based on Android 5.0 and supports face recognition, but it’s difficult to say how it will fare against Apple and Samsung, Spencer told TechNewsWorld. That’s in part because Xiaomi essentially crowdsources its UI through feedback from its roughly 4 million users, most of whom are in China.

Free Software/Open Source

• The nature of enterprise IT is rapidly evolving and with these changes, open source is becoming a much higher percentage of every IT organization’s environment. As more organizations get aboard the open source train, the necessary skills will become critically important – not only for using open source wisely, but for ensuring your enterprise remains competitive in the Third Platform world.

• RIFT.io — founded last year by veterans of Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), Starent Networks, Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR), 3Com Corp. (Nasdaq: COMS) and more — announced a series A funding round, led by North Bridge Venture Partners with participation from other strategic investors.

• The company plans to release a RIFT.ware, an open source NFV platform, and is working with partners to create an ecosystem of developers for the platform itself and for virtual network functions (VNFs) built on the platform, Tony Schoener, RIFT.io chief strategy officer, told Light Reading.

Events

• The free and open-source software movement has spent decades sharing information and knowledge through various communities, providing outlets for all levels of users to have more control over their own environments, learn from each other, and make things better for the general public. The idea behind being a free and open source enthusiast is sharing knowledge, exchanging ideas and encouraging common growth.

• I am very glad to share with you that registration of the twelfth edition of Software Freedom Day has been opened since early August and you can see from our SFD event map, we already have 62 events from more than 33countries shown in our map. As usual registration happens after you have created your event page on the wiki. We have a detail guide here for newcomers and for the others who need help, the SFD-Discuss mailing would be the best place to get prompt support.

• I am a strong believer that community is the power behind open source code. There are companies who contribute and partake in large contributions to open source software (OSS) projects but the smart ones will always acknowledge the community behind it. I also feel the open source movement is littered with projects that have sprung from corporations rather than individuals, however their power only shines when they enable a community to partake in its roadmap.

SaaS/Big Data

• Docker containers and the OpenStack cloud have had a multi-year history that hasn’t been all that successful — but that’s something that could be changing now with the OpenStack Magnum project.

Business

• In this week’s edition of news for CIOs and IT pros, we bring you stories on open source, and the importance of strategy and leadership in digital transformation.

BSD

Public Services/Government

• India’s open source policy will help the country to “promote a culture of innovation that they need in order to serve their citizens today and in the years to come”, says Mark Bohannon, Vice President, Global Public Policy and Government Affairs at Red Hat, one of the world’s main open source companies. “The use of technology, including open source software, is moving out of the sphere of simply ‘acquiring a product’ to ‘investing in innovation’.”

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• The Greek government wants the country’s public administrations to transition to free and open source software, open standards and open data. The Ministry of Economy, Infrastructure, Marine and Tourism has asked the Greek free and open source software society (Gfoss) to help organise workshops and conferences, train public administrations and propose research and development projects.

Open Hardware

• Alicia Gibb has a passion for hardware hacking—she founded and is currently running the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA). Also a member of the ADA Initiative Board, Defensive Patent License Board, and the Open Source Ecology Board, she got her start as a technologist from a combination of backgrounds: informatics and library science.

• Alicia formerly worked as a researcher and prototyper at Bug Labs where she ran the academic research program and the R&D lab. Her work is fascinating and she graciously agreed to this interview.

Leftovers

• Jim Bakker, the smarmy, sex-scandal embroiled, 1980s TV evangelist fraudster and ex-con who fleeced his followers for decades with his then-wife Tammy Faye Bakker, has a new gig: selling “creamy potato soup bulk buckets” to end-times preppers for $160. He’s even got a big-haired. Tammy-Faye lookalike helping him pitch these buckets, too!

• A huge hole has appeared in one of Manchester city centre’s busiest roads after heavy rainfall.

• It is believed a large water pipe beneath the Mancunian Way eroded, causing the road surface to cave in.

• A giant 40ft deep hole has opened up on the Mancunian Way – with fears the road could be shut for weeks.

• Traffic was halted in both directions on Friday morning after the crater – measuring at least 15 feet – appeared at the Ancoats end of the busy commuter route.

• Stop the shutterbugs. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton and Prince William, spoke out against unauthorized photos of their son, Prince George, in a letter released to Us Weekly on Friday, Aug. 14, after a photographer was found in the “boot of a vehicle” trying to take pics of the 2-year-old royal.

Science

• For most of recent history, babies have had a pretty good run, PR-wise. Not only have they been successfully branded as “bundles of joy,” they’ve also been widely recognized as the reason, collectively at least, that we’re here (what with reproduction being so crucial to existence).

• But in recent decades, scientific studies of parental happiness — or the lack thereof — tell a very different story. And one recent survey goes even further, finding that the “drop in life satisfaction during the year following the first birth [of a child] is even larger than that caused by unemployment, divorce or the death of a partner.”

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The National Rifle Association’s online magazine attacked an analysis of federal data that found that more than 200 hate crimes were committed with firearms between 2011 and 2013, writing that the number is not “enough to merit mention.” The gun group also falsely claimed that the data in question “shows firearms are not being used in hate crimes.” The NRA’s stunning statements come less than two months after a white man shot to death nine African-American parishioners at a historically black church in South Carolina, in what authorities have classified as a racially-motivated attack.

Transparency Reporting

• Swedish prosecutors have dropped their investigation into allegations of sexual assault against Julian Assange after the deadline for bringing charges expired, but said they would continue to pursue an interview with the WikiLeaks founder over an outstanding rape allegation.

• Two women made allegations against Assange five years ago in Stockholm, but no charges have been brought because the prosecutor has been unable to interrogate him after he challenged an extradition order and claimed political asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy in June 2012.

• The head of the Swedish delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Kerstin Lundgren said that people should have an opportunity to seek asylum applying to embassies instead of being forced to risk their lives undertaking dangerous trips overseas.

• After months of denials and delaying actions, Hillary Clinton has decided to turn over her private email server to the Department of Justice. As this controversy has grown since the spring, Clinton and her campaign operatives have repeatedly denied that she had placed classified information in her personal email while serving as secretary of state during President Obama’s first term. (“I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received,” she said last month.) Her team also denied that she would ever hand over her server to investigators. Now both those assertions have been overturned.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Battling a record dry spell that has left reservoirs badly drained, the Las Virgenes County water district on the outskirts of Los Angeles has decided to fill its reservoir with hundreds of black plastic balls. The balls sit on top of the water and block the sunlight from hitting it, helping to reduce water evaporation as well as natural contamination and certain chemical reactions that could cause algae blooms in the reservoirs.

Finance

• Despite an increase in its first-quarter revenue, Chinese computing giant Lenovo has seen a significant drop in its profit, and in response will be restructuring its business.

• For the quarter, revenue improved by 3 percent, to come in at $10.7 billion, but pre-tax income fell 80 percent year on year to be reported at $52 million, with operating profit taking a 67 percent year-on-year cut to $96 million.

• Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index is the average of two components: how Americans rate the current economy and whether they feel the economy is “getting better” or “getting worse.” The index’s theoretical maximum is +100, if all Americans rated the economy as positive and improving, while the theoretical minimum is -100, if all Americans rated the economy as negative and getting worse.

• The giant Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal could be signed within days…

• Australia and 11 other Asia-Pacific countries have for more than five years been negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an agreement that would encompass 40 per cent of global trade.

• The negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free-trade agreement (FTA) have gone into a pause. Only two weeks back, there was feverish activity, at the meeting in Hawaii—it seemed that the ministers of the treaty nations had the end-game before them. But the talks broke down, and no new date for further negotiations has been announced. Going by media reports, differences had been narrowed down substantially and only small steps had to be taken to seal the deal. The suspense on the continuation of talks in future has, therefore, caused some surprise.

• Japanese Minister of State for Economic and Fiscal Policy Akira Amari, in a blogpost circulated yesterday, also questioned why the US appeared to have lacked its usual “stubborn persistence” at those talks, despite a willingness by some countries to stay to try to reach an agreement.

• The Minister spoke at length about trade agreements, but was short with details about the biggest trade agreement you’ve never heard of: the uber secretive Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).

• If the past is considered as a guide to the future, trade agreements must be watched closely. Considering the scope of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it should be watched even more closely.

• The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a contentious free trade agreement currently being negotiated by a number of multinational corporations and government officials from the Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam. Categorized as potentially the largest trade agreement in world history, the TPP involves more than 40 percent of the international GDP. The partnership is an essential component of President Obama’s economic agenda and could revolutionize international economic relations in the future.

• Intellectual property (IP) issues are generally among the most controversial in any trade agreement, and this one is no exception. The United States, home to much of the world’s drug industry, is pushing for longer pharmaceutical patents than many other countries are willing to stomach. And the US is arguing for longer copyright restrictions – as well as stronger punishment for IP violators – than most of its negotiating partners would prefer.

• Another controversial issue has been the inclusion of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms in the agreement. These mechanisms would allow private corporations to demand compensation from states, through quasi-judicial international panels, for violations of TPP that directly harm their interests.

• In response, Dairy Farmers of Canada has been waging an expensive lobby and advertising campaign in defense of the system.

• Yet the federal Conservative cabinet minister who would have to sell any TPP deal to dairy, poultry and egg producers seems anything but worried at the prospect.

• About 300 people descended on Parliament this afternoon to protest against New Zealand joining the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

• 100,000 people have signed a petition urging the government to ditch the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, with another 300 joining a protest to deliver it to Parliament.

• In her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton has lately promoted herself as a populist defender of the middle class. To that end, she attempted to distance herself last week from a controversial 12-nation trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would set the rules of commerce for roughly 40 percent of the world’s economy.

• As with similar business-backed trade pacts, the labor unions, environmental groups and public health organizations are warning that the deal could result in job losses, reduced environmental standards, higher prices for medicine and more power for corporations looking to overturn public interest laws. And so, in her quest for Democratic primary votes, she is suddenly trying to cast herself as a critic of the initiative.

• Most Vietnamese companies have not heard of or have little understanding about TPP. According to Viet National Textile & Garment Corp, very few of the country’s 2,000 textile companies have been preparing for TPP. — Photo cafef.vn

• The debate over proposed changes to copyright laws taking place in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations is being closely watched by anime and manga fans who create “doujinshi” independently published comics and magazines.

• Beijing has been negotiating a separate agreement with numerous same nations that’s called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

• Critics say the proposals indicate a deal moving more toward protection than free trade…

• For Washington, this bloc is geo-strategically important because it will further increase U.S. influence in the Asia Pacific at a time of tensions with Beijing. Moreover, President Barack Obama has around a year and a half left in office, and his objective is to cement his legacy regarding foreign policy issues, in the vein of recent successes like historical agreements with Cuba and Iran. Hence, a successful TPP agreement would be the proverbial cherry on the cake for the Obama presidency’s foreign policy.

• Big Tobacco is pushing back against a strict anti-smoking provision in the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and has enlisted the support of the most powerful Republican in the Senate to help quash it.

Censorship

• Reddit has been banned and then unbanned in Russia, following the 4chan-lite site’s decision to block domestic access in the country to a single page on growing mushrooms.

• After following through with its threat to censor the site over pages advising on “the cultivation of narcotic plants” [sic], Russian telecommunications regulator Roskomnadzor has managed to get Reddit to acquiesce to the nation’s censorship demands.

• Country’s internet regulator demands internet providers block post on website, making all of Reddit unavailable to many Russians

• Reddit will censor posts and communities in certain countries in response to takedown requests from authorities, the company confirmed on Thursday night.

• For the first six months of 2015, Turkey led the way. As this chart compiled by Statista shows, more than 70% of government takedown requests came from Turkish authorities — the company received 408 court orders and another 310 requests from government authorities to remove content “based on violations of personal rights and other local laws.” That’s more than ten times as many as second place, Russia, which issued zero court orders and 68 official requests.

• George Bernard Shaw once said that “censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions”.

• In an effort to promote tolerance and equality in Argentina, online censorship could become a reality. Argentina’s House of Representatives is currently debating a series of reforms to the National Anti-discrimination Act, a bill that was enacted in 1988. The current proposal would require online platforms that allow user comments to monitor and remove any content considered “discriminatory” according to the vague and ambiguous provisions outlined in the proposed reforms. The amendments would also make it a criminal offense to publish discriminatory or insulting comments on Internet sites, punishable by fine or even prison time.

• Both the writer and director of the production have explicitly stated that they believe the show was cancelled due to external pressure from the police, while some of the young actors in the company have also complained of censorship.

• What started as censoring porn and gambling sites soon spread to banning social media sites, including the likes of video-sharing site Vimeo and Reddit (yet, according to one online commenter, illegal file sharing sites are still ten-a-penny and go unblocked). Understandably, the Indonesian public is not amused by Ipo-chan’s existence.

• The character was originally thought up by Indonesian artist Rouzille Erzabalna after Indonesia’s Minster of Communication and Information – the head of Internet censorship – stepped down last year. In the months leading up to her big debut on Spring Roll in July, Erzabalna has developed Ipo-chan into a full-blown character, complete with a detailed profile.

• The recent jailing of teenager Amos Yee for insulting Christianity in a video tirade against Lee, as well as a defamation suit against an activist who accused the current prime minister of misusing state pension funds, have been held up as examples of the government’s intolerance for dissent.

• SOME politically active Singaporeans might want to comment more freely about their leaders and the values they proclaim must be upheld. Yet many others want to keep the status quo, for Singapore to stay “superb” and “undisturbed by racial disunity”. Not a ripple of dissent will you hear from them.

• Joining the walkabout on Monday at Ang Mo Kio was also M. Ravi, human rights lawyer as well as Amos Yee, who was arrested and charged in March for remarks he made in a video on YouTube of the late Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew.

• And the government’s strict controls over speech have also come under fire recently. Free speech advocates point to the case of Amos Yee, a video blogger who served jail time for posting a vulgar video criticizing Lee, as evidence the country’s speech laws don’t work in the age of social media.

• Amos Yee, the blogger recently released from jail for defaming Christians and the late prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, has taken a pot shot at a number of brands that associated themselves with Singapore’s SG50 National Day celebrations, including Singtel and language centre My English School.

Privacy

• To my friends in the news business: Yes, I block your advertising, or at least some of it. Yes, I block your videos, or at least some of them. Yes, I block you and your business “partners” from tracking my every online move.

• And yes, I recognize that this may cause you some financial difficulties. But you’ve given me little choice. Blame yourselves, not your audience. Advertisement

• I’m among the growing legions of people who are fed up with what you and the advertising business have done to my online experience. To sum up, you’ve damn near ruined it.

• Skilled engineers charged with tracking weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, US government-backed cyber attackers and even the general who led the National Security Agency have all left the organisation to launch their own cyber security start-ups.

• The National Security Agency has used its bulk domestic phone records program to search for operatives from the government of Iran and “associated terrorist organizations” — not just Al Qaeda and its allies — according to a document obtained by The New York Times.

• The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today rejected the government’s latest attempt to delay consideration of whether the NSA’s tapping into the Internet backbone is legal in Jewel v. NSA, clearing the path for the first appellate court decision on whether this formerly secret mass surveillance program violates the Fourth Amendment.

• Officials had in recent months used the lack of American permission as an excuse not to release the list of targets passed by the NSA to the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency.

• But Die Zeit reported on Wednesday that while the White House had concerns about releasing the list to parliamentarians, US President Barack Obama’s administration told the Germans that it was up to them to make the final decision.

• American government sources also told Die Zeit that claims from German intelligence circles that the US would limit future intelligence co-operation with Germany if too much were revealed about the two agencies’ relationship were “a fairy tale”.

• They’re making a big public appearance: Next week, Chancellor Merkel and half of her cabinet are visiting Brazil for their first-ever government consultations. Brazil is now the third most powerful emerging nation.

• Former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson is planning to notify several federal agencies he will sue them if they don’t settle claims of violation of privacy for an alleged dragnet surveillance program around the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah that purportedly captured all texts, emails and data about phone calls.

• And he’s looking for other Utahns who want to join the case.

• Anderson, a longtime critic of the federal government’s domestic spying, says he will notify the Department of Justice, the National Security Agency and the FBI by Aug. 20 that he intends to sue if they don’t settle all claims filed. Claimants, under federal law, could be awarded a minimum of $10,000 each if the agencies acknowledge the claimants’ rights were violated or a court later rules in their favor.

• Former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson is asking for the public’s help in filing claims against the National Security Agency for what he called the “illegal” and “criminal” gathering of information during the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.

• In an interview with KSL NewsRadio, Anderson said he first became aware of the alleged surveillance when he read an article detailing the NSA’s activity in the Wall Street Journal in 2013. The publication disclosed that every phone call and text message in Salt Lake City was subject to surveillance by the NSA and FBI before and during the 2002 Olympic Games held in Utah.

• NBC News obtained a classified document from an internal National Security Agency presentation given last year that suggests China has sought the private correspondence of top Obama administration figures since at least 2010, with varying degrees of success.

• But as Maass writes, Socrates’s writings provide a rare glimpse into the surveillance rationalizations deployed by workaday spies, as opposed to the bland rubbish spouted by the upper cadres.

• The plaintiffs alleged that the NSA intercepts, copies and searches thru Web visitors the use of key phrases referred to as selectors which are related to its goals.

• Human Rights Watch Battling Illegal Surveillance of Americans’ International Phone Calls

• [...]

• Earlier this year, the organization learned from government statements and news reports that the DEA had collected records of HRW’s international calls for over two decades, along with those of millions of other Americans. The DEA’s bulk collection of call records reached into the billions, covering calls to over a hundred countries—occurring without judicial oversight or approval or the public’s knowledge. News reports suggested the DEA’s bulk collection program even served as the model on which the NSA’s call records program was based.

• As late as Thursday night, establishment Republican leaders are still eager to defend government surveillance of U.S. citizens even two years after Edward Snowden exposed illegal, domestic snooping of U.S. citizens. This establishment is using typical Washington double-talk, false choices and games to try to bamboozle Americans into accepting abuses and domestic spying by the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Civil Rights

• Congress is starving federal white-collar law enforcement — a subtle and lucrative favor to the crooks and connivers among the political donor class. The move is costing honest people everywhere, damaging economic growth and perverting government.

• This year the number of federal white-collar crime prosecutions will be about 37 percent below 20 years ago, when Bill Clinton was in the White House.

• The rapidly deteriorating health of a Palestinian political prisoner on hunger strike has pit Israeli legislators, who recently enacted a law mandating that he be force-fed, against physicians, who refuse to comply on grounds that doing so would be unethical and tantamount to “torture.”

• Mohammed Allaan, 30, a West Bank lawyer accused of working with the armed group Islamic Jihad, has refused food, vitamins, supplements and even medical treatment for almost 60 days in protest of his detainment.

• Allaan was arrested in November 2014 and has since been held in administrative detention — a controversial form of imprisonment that allows Israeli authorities to detain an individual indefinitely without charge, trial or access to counsel if he/she is deemed a “security threat.

• The latest brief filed by Mohamud’s lawyers describes his actions that night:

• “He pushed the buttons of a cellphone, twice, believing they would cause the explosion of a massive, nail-filled bomb capable of eliminating at least two city blocks. … The bomb was a fake, created by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as the culmination of a sting operation they had started over a year earlier.

• “The defense at trial was entrapment: that the government had induced this teenager to attempt a crime he was not predisposed to commit.”

• Germany’s chief federal prosecutor has dropped an investigation into two journalists at the Netzpolitik website suspected of revealing state secrets.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• One of the core, almost totemic, policies of the Pirate Party is on copyright.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.