● 08.31.15

● Links 31/8/2015: Linux 4.2, LXLE 14.04.3

Posted in News Roundup at 2:27 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Based on the operating system when Phoronix readers are viewing the site, 39% are from Linux, 32% from Windows, 16% from Android, 6% from OS X, and 5% from iOS.

Server

• Still up in the air (if you’ll pardon the metaphor) is the matter of whether a preferred public platform for container deployment will emerge, out of the melee that is today’s market. Wednesday, Google took its next step in its bid to produce “the” container ecosystem, lifting the “beta” tag from its Google Container Engine service.

Kernel Space

• The systemd development team, through David Herrmann, had the pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the systemd 225 open-source, next-generation init system for GNU/Linux distributions.

• So judging by how little happened this week, it wouldn’t have been a mistake to release 4.2 last week after all, but hey, there’s certainly a few fixes here, and it’s not like delaying 4.2 for a week should have caused any problems either.

• So here it is, and the merge window for 4.3 is now open. I already have a few pending early pull requests, but as usual I’ll start processing them tomorrow and give the release some time to actually sit.

• The shortlog from rc8 is tiny, and appended. The patch is pretty tiny too.

• Go get it,

• Linus

• Many new drivers required cleaning of their blob-requesting-and-loading machinery. Various others needed deblobbing updates due to blob name changes and false positives.

• Just hours after the release of Linux 4.2 was the update from the Free Software Foundation community for the GNU Linux-Libre 4.2 kernel. This deblobbed version of the Linux kernel has particularly criticized the new AMDGPU DRM driver and the Intel i915 driver this cycle.

• After eight Release Candidate builds, just a few minutes ago, Linus Torvalds had announced the release and immediate availability for download of the final version of Linux kernel 4.2.

• After the release was dragged out by one week, Linus Torvalds just tagged v4.2 in Git while keeping with the “Hurr durr I’ma sheep” codename that he’s been doing for several release cycles now.

• The Linux kernel keyring is effectively a mechanism to allow shoving blobs of data into the kernel and then setting access controls on them.

• In what appears to be a relentless march to absorb more and more of a Linux/UNIX system, systemd, touted as an init system, has now incorporated the su command.

• This command su is used within a shell to obtain root status for performing administrative tasks on a Linux/UNIX system. It is not a full root login.

• Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, has heard a lot of different myths about what containers can’t do and in a session at OpenStack Silicon Valley event on August 26. So he set out to debunk them.

• The Corsair Vengeance K90 is a gaming keyboard featuring Cherry MX Red mechanical key switches and a whole lot of other extra functionality suited for gamers and tailored for MMO and RTS titles. A open-source Linux driver is in the works for properly handling this high-end keyboard.

• Given the recent massive spike in interest in Linux Containers, you could be forgiven for wondering, “Why now?”. It has been argued that the increasingly prevalent cloud computing model more closely resembles hosting providers than traditional enterprise IT, and that containers are a perfect match for this model.

• Containers can be considered the third wave in service provision after physical boxes (the first wave) and virtual machines (the second wave). Instead of working with complete servers (hardware or virtual), you have virtual operating systems, which are far more lightweight. Instead of carrying around complete environments, you just move applications, with their configuration, from one server to another, where it will consume its resources, without any virtual layers. Shipping over projects from development to operations also is simplified—another boon. Of course, you’ll face new and different challenges, as with any technology, but the possible risks and problems don’t seem to be insurmountable, and the final rewards appear to be great.

• In this post, I will shed some light on the GNU/Linux container internals. Basically, what is underlying technology driving that. Here we go, without much ado…

Graphics Stack

• Now that Linux 4.2 is set to be released today, out on the horizon we have to look forward to Linux 4.3 kernel. Set to be merged into Linux 4.3 will be in the initial open-source AMD driver code for supporting the Radeon R9 Fury graphics cards. This open-source Fury support is the focus of our testing today with it being the first time powering up this Fiji GPU outside of Catalyst.

• This week a slew of details concerning AMD’s Radeon R9 Nano have come out with this small form factor graphics card with Fiji GPU expected to begin shipping soon while the official announcement is expected on Thursday.

• This summer for Google Summer of Code, Junwang Zhao ported the virtual KMS drivers (Bochs and Cirrus) over to using the atomic mode-setting interfaces.

• This week I posted some AMD RadeonSI/R600g tests on Mesa 11.0 with DRM-Next along with a Intel Skylake vs. Radeon comparison using this new version of Mesa that will be officially released next month. Of course, following those tests, the requests turned to testing Mesa 11.1-devel rather than the Mesa 11.0 Git code.

• If you haven’t read this morning’s article about Running The AMD Radeon R9 Fury With AMD’s New Open-Source Linux Driver, you should go do so, but the short version is that there’s still much work left before the R9 Fury “Fiji” GPUs will be a worthwhile investment by Linux users.

• Just a few minutes ago, Nvidia published an updated version of the long-lived branch of its proprietary Nvidia graphics driver for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris operating systems, Nvidia 352.41.

• NVIDIA is pitching GRID as a hardware offering tuned to the needs of graphically-demanding desktop virtualisation (VDI) workloads. If that sounds a bit exotic, consider environments like the resources industry, where on-site engineers need CAD and modelling tools, but miners are loathe to deploy desktops in the remote sites where stuff gets dug out of the ground. VDI works a treat in such spots.

• AMD’s open source drivers for its Fury platform have proved rather disappointing.

• According to Phoronix, open-source AMD driver code for supporting the Radeon R9 Fury graphics cards is to be merged into the coming Linux 4.3 kernel.

Benchmarks

• Originally I was also going to feature some OpenMP benchmarks in this compiler comparison since LLVM/Clang 3.7 now has OpenMP 3.1 support, but with these tests and using the latest LLVM OpenMP library, I was still running into some issues even when setting the appropriate compiler flag. I’m still investigating the issue so for now all of the tests in this article are not using OpenMP.

• As a side note, daily LLVM/Clang SVN benchmarks using the daily LLVM APT snapshot repository continue to be done in a fully-automated manner each morning on multiple systems over at LinuxBenchmarking.com.

• Last week from the new Intel Core i5 6600K “Skylake” processor I posted the initial Linux CPU benchmarks as well as results for the new HD Graphics 530 graphics processor with Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver stack. In this article are some complementary data points for this Core i5 Skylake CPU compared to Haswell and Broadwell processors as well as a AMD A10-7870K Godavari APU.

Applications

• Shotcut is a video editor that aims to offer a clear interface and a powerful set of tools. It’s definitely not the application you would expect. It’s far more complex than it lets on at first sight, and it has a steep learning curve.

• Xtreme Download Manager is just that: a download manager that give users much better control over what they are downloading. It also greatly increases the download speed for files, and it comes with lots of features that are not usually available under the same roof.

• It’s difficult for some people to work without some background noise, and this is where ANoise comes into action. It’s a small application that can provide the background noise that’s so needed.

• A new version of RcppGSL just arrived on CRAN. The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL using our Rcpp package.

• Ritesh Raj Sarraf had the pleasure of informing us about the immediate availability of an updated Laptop Mode Tools software, version 1.68, which brings systemd integration, and many other goodies that help prolong your laptop’s battery life.

• Kovid Goyal announced the release of the Calibre 2.36 open-source and cross-platform ebook viewer, converter, and library management software for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

• The Git developers have announced the release of the first maintenance version of the Git 2.5 open-source distributed version control system for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows.

• EasyTAG, the open-source audio tag editor software, reached version 2.4 earlier today, August 29, bringing multiple performance and stability improvements, as well as several updated translations, available right now for download on GNU/Linux and Windows operating systems.

• As you may know, DBeaver is an open source database management tool, with support for the most popular databases, including MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server and SQLite. For more information, see this page.

• Xtreme Download Manager known (also called Xdm or XDMAN), is free and open source download manager based on java and support for major operating system including Linux, Windows and Mac OSX. It can easily integrated with major web browser such as Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, IE etc – So, if you download any file from your web browser, Xdman will automatically launch and download your file.

• It looks like the Kodi developers can’t stop implementing new features and fixing annoying bugs in the best open-source and cross-platform media server software ever created, Kodi (formerly XBMC Media Center).

• Mail-in-a-Box is a free, Open Source, mail server solution developed by Joshua Tauberer. Using Mail-in-a-Box, anyone can easily turn a fresh cloud system into a Mail server in few hours. It can host mail for multiple users and multiple domain names. Mail-in-a-Box is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit and includes automatic DNS configuration, spam filtering, greylisting, backups to Amazon S3, static website hosting, and easy SSL certificate installation.

• As the name suggests, FF Multi Converter is an application that can be used to convert files from one format to another. The interesting thing about it is that it covers a wide array of file types, including video, audio, and documents.

• Last year Intel developers added HEVC decode support to VA-API followed a few months later by HEVC encode support to this Video Acceleration API used by the Intel open-source driver on Linux.

Proprietary

• On August 27, the developers of the Vivaldi project have announced the release and immediate availability for download of a new snapshot for the cross-platform web browser, Vivaldi 1.0.257.3.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

Games

• Valve released a new update for SteamOS Brewmaster branch of the operating system, bringing the version number up to 2.32. It’s an important release since it brings all the latest drivers for AMD and Nvidia.

• DG2: Defense Grid 2 is one of the best tower defense games ever made and it can be purchased right now with a 75% discount that is about to expire in just a few hours.

• Gaming for a long time was the Achilles heel of Linux with at best amateurish home brew games. In the past there have been some good games written natively for Linux but the trouble is that some people have confused the Tux logo with being a good character for a game in the same way that Mario is overused by Nintendo.

• I have always had a fascination with board games, in part because they are a device of social interaction, they challenge the mind and, most importantly, they are great fun to play. In my misspent youth, myself and a group of friends gathered together to escape the horrors of the classroom, and indulge in a little escapism. The time provided an outlet for tension and rivalry. Board games help teach diplomacy, how to make and break alliances, bring families and friends together, and learn valuable lessons.

• After the utter disgrace that MadOut was, I was in the market for something new to play and I already owned BlazeRush from a sale. I mentioned the release of BlazeRush, but never actually got around to trying it—until now.

• With all the big titles coming to Linux, it is easy to miss the smaller ones. You do not always want to invest hours of your life building an empire or engaging in epic quests. Sometimes you just want to blast some alien bugs for a few minutes while your coffee is brewing. The game I am looking into today lets you do exactly that.

• When trying out the game myself on an Ubuntu 15.04 box with the Catalyst 15.7 driver, this game was just the latest showing what bad shape the Catalyst Linux driver is in for OpenGL gaming… Like with the Shadow of Mordor Linux port, even when launching the game from Steam on Linux with the AMD Catalyst driver loaded, there is immediately a warning:

• But even outside of the stresses of developing for operating systems as native to PCs as Linux, the team faced some interesting challenges in bringing their vision for a golden age role-playing game to life.

• Company of Heroes 2, a real time strategy game developed by Relic Entertainment and ported for Linux users by Feral Interactive, has been officially released on Steam for Linux and other stores.

• Developed by Relic Entertainment and previously published by SEGA for PC, Company of Heroes 2 is also available now for Mac and Linux via Steam, with the Mac App Store version to follow shortly afterwards, Feral Interactive announced.

• I am especially excited to have Cossacks 3 on Linux, and this new teaser video is short and sweet, but it’s keeping me excited.

• MadOut certainly looked like it would be pretty promising, but sadly after checking it out I found it to be lacking in everything. I’m really not surprised the reviews on Steam are “Mixed” with nearly as many negative reviews as there are positive reviews.

• Sol is GPL3 licensed and is completely modifiable from the source code level. Additionally, the game has an inbuilt level editor. The newly available Race the Sun crossover attests to what can be done with the game. I gave it a whirl and enjoyed the special levels. One that was over a little quickly.The good news is, however, that it’s fully compatible with the trial version for anyone curious to try it.

• Solar Shifter EX will release for Linux on Steam on the 11th of September, and I must say it looks pretty impressive.

• Big Pharma is a game about creating a factory to build useful drugs, and making money while you do so. I managed to play a build before release, and I found it to be brilliant.

• Exciting news! Road Redemption is a title I’ve really wanted to play since I saw it on Kickstarter, as a spiritual successor to Road Rash which I played when I was younger.

• The new Unreal Tournament has been updated again, and it’s sporting a fresh coat of paint on the main menu, amongst other changes.

• Rocket League is massively popular right now, and we are happy to confirm it’s heading our way! You even get a free copy with Steam Hardware.

• You love your space simulation stuff right? Universe Sandbox 2 has released with full support for Linux, so I decided to check it out.

• Arma 3 is set to see a Linux beta soon, but they will be looking to see how it goes down before they let it graduate anywhere.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• So my GSoC is coming to its end. I have no cool screenshots to upload this time and I have no new great features to talk about, in fact Caludio and I manly focused on bugfixing and testing. We have spent time also discussing about possible changes and improvements to the current OCS protocol.

• So is the client ready do be lunched? In short I would say that no, not yet.. although most of its features are implemented and it is usable, it is still an “under construction” project, we both still have to make some important decisions to make it usable to everyone.

• and refactoring it again, to make sure the codebase remains as clean as possible. The result of that is that an implementation of a simple resource only takes a couple of template instantiations, apart from code that interacts with the datasource (e.g. your IMAP Server) which I obviously can’t do for the resource.

• Language learning is often considered as the task of memorizing new vocabulary and understanding the new grammar rules. Yet for most, the most challenging part is to actually get used to speak the new language. This is a problem that Artikulate approaches with a simple idea: to learn the correct pronunciation of a word or even a longer phrase, the learner listens to a native speaker recording, repeats and recordings it, and finally compares both recordings to improve herself/himself with the next try.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Hi all,

• I’m working on the release notes for 3.18, and I will also be working on release promotion. During GUADEC, the board and Release Team agreed to name September release after the GUADEC host city, and each March release after the GNOME.Asia host city.

• Many of you have asked for help with keyboard shortcuts in Builder. It was always something we wanted to do, but I was humbly waiting for upstream to get that into the toolkit so we would get it for “free”.

Distributions

New Releases

• The Parsix GNU/Linux Project has just announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the third development milestone towards the Parsix GNU/Linux 8.0 (Mumble) operating system.

• Delays, delays. First with SeaMonkey then Lanshop. Still, moving forward with the release of LXLE 14.04.3 OS for both 32 & 64 bit machines. 12.04.5 32 bit has also been updated to reflect the same changes.

• Notable new features in this release includes, ‘Xautolock’ providing a top left hotcorner that invokes the ‘WinPick” script which is an expose like utility and finally ‘OpenSnap’ added true aerosnap with just a simple drag & drop.

• The LXLE team has announced the immediate availability for download of the third maintenance release of their lightweight and open-source LXLE 14.04 Linux kernel-based operating system built around the LXDE desktop environment.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Arch Family

• Manjaro-Fluxbox aims to be light, fast and resource friendly, yet at the same time complete and ready to use for all typical everyday office- and multimedia-needs. The applications are easily accessible from the native right click menu with detachable submenus aswell as from the appealing docklike launcher wbar on the side or by easily configurable keyboard shortcuts. This edition features the beautiful and extraordinarily versatile icon-theme AwOken (coloured, white and dark). Install media are available with both init systems Systemd or OpenRC.

• The Manjaro Linux team, through Bernhard Landauer, has proudly announced the release of an updated version of the Manjaro Linux Fluxbox Edition, namely 0.8.13.1, which features an updated Linux kernel and numerous improvements.

• Edward Snyder, the creator and maintainer of the Debian-based Liquid Lemur Linux distribution, has announced the release and immediate availability for download of the second Alpha build of the upcoming Liquid Lemur Linux 2.0 distro.

Ballnux/SUSE

• The SUSE office in Nuremberg, Germany, had a special presentation given by Dominique Leuenberger, last week about the interconnecting points of the openSUSE project.

• Specifically, Leuenberger covered the integration process of Tumbleweed and Leap and explained the difference between the two.

• “Leap is trying to find the balance between how much SLE (SUSE Linux Enterprise) and how much Tumbleweed,” he said.

Slackware Family

• After slackware-current was treated to a massive update last weekend, it could be expected that some 3rd-party software packages needed to be recompiled – especially due to linkage to gnutls but also icu4c libraries. One by one I am working on the big or complex packages in my own SlackBuild repository, and below you will find the harvest of the week gone by. Note that I am also working on a new KDE Plasma 5 set of packages which is unfortunately quite challenging due to migration of many applications from kdelibs 4 to frameworks 5… lots of compatibility issues to resolve before packages start compiling again. I would have liked to have them ready for release before the end of august but I am afraid that I may not succeed.

Red Hat Family

• Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) appreciated by 2.12% during the past week but lost 6.6% on a 4-week basis. The shares have outperformed the S&P 500 by 1.19% in the past week but underperformed the index by 1.2% in the last 4 weeks.

• September the 1st will be my Day 1 at Red Hat. After being around the GNOME community for 6 years…

Fedora

• If you’re curious what’s on the horizon within the Fedora Linux camp, the videos from this year’s Flock conference are now available online.

• As you may know, Fedora 23 plans to use Wayland as the system’s default display server, despite the fact that it’s under massive development.

• Recently, the Fedora community gathered in Rochester, New York for Flock 2015, our annual conference for contributors. There were dozens of workshops and presentations at Flock, covering subjects like new technology, documentation, and grassroots promotion of Fedora.

• So I’ve been maintaining ownCloud for the last little while. Unfortunately I sat down today to try again and update the package to the latest upstream (8.1.1), and somewhere in the second hour of insanely stupid PHP autoloader code, I just snapped. I can’t take this crap any more.

• Fedora Linux is moving ahead with plans to place emphasis on i686 / 32-bit x86 support, but they stopped short of a proposal to outright eliminate 32-bit Fedora 24 ISOs for all spins.

• Fedora Server already decided they’ll stop spinning i686 images, but for now at least the plan is to still spin i686 images for the other Fedora versions like Fedora Cloud and Fedora Workstation. However, at the end of the day, not many developers there either are concerned about maintaining i686 support.

Debian Family

• This was an event organized due to a coincidental meeting of a few DD’s in the city of Brasilia on May 31st 2015. What a good thing when we can mix vacations, friends and Debian

Derivatives

• Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, version 1.5.1, is out.

• This is an emergency release, triggered by an unscheduled Firefox release meant to fix critical security issues.

• Arne Exton, the creator of numerous GNU/Linux and Android-x86-based distributions, was more than happy to inform us earlier today about the immediate availability for download of a new build for its DebEX KDE edition distro.

• Using GParted live .iso – itself based on Debian Live – allowed me to resize the System partition from 100MiB to 200MiB by moving the Windows partition but Windows became unbootable.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• On the day of August 27, 2015, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report to inform Ubuntu phone users and Ubuntu Touch developers about the next steps that need to be taken in the development of the Ubuntu mobile operating system.

• As you may know, Telegram is already available on Ubuntu Desktop.

• A month from now, Telegram 2.0, based on TelegramQML developed by Aseman will be implemented on Ubuntu Touch. It will be built on Cutegram, which is an open-source telegram client.

• Jon recently published a blog post stating that you’re free to create Ubuntu derivatives as long as you remove trademarks.

• Canonical has just released and announced the first beta of Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf Flavors (Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu MATE, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu and Ubuntu Kylin). All of them now available to download and install for testing.

• Canonical is taking a bold stand and is asking a very direct question: Is the launch of Windows 10 a good enough motive to move to Ubuntu?

Flavours and Variants

• Kubuntu 15.10 Beta 1 (Wily Werewolf), a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and the KDE desktop environment, is now out and ready for testing.

• The Kubuntu developers have been really busy this cycle, and they’ve had their hands full with the new Plasma and KDE Applications release. These two are very important components, and they play a very big part on how the distribution will run and feel.

• As part of the Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) Beta 1 releases for opt-in flavors, the Ubuntu GNOME team had the pleasure of releasing the first development build of the upcoming Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 distributions.

• The Ubuntu MATE 15.10 Beta 1 (Wily Werewolf) has been officially released and users have been invited to download and test the new version of the OS in anticipation of the final version.

• To make a long story short: I’ve been running Linux Mint 17.2 Xfce for about a week now, long enough to take about a dozen screenshots (some of them included here), edit them in GIMP, watch about ten episodes of “Mad Men” on Netflix, and write this review. So far, the system has been responsive and stable, and other than slight changes in a couple of panel applets, I haven’t even noticed that I’ve changed OSes. As I said: business as usual.

• If I were a movie reviewer, I’d give this baby a big ol’ thumbs up.

Devices/Embedded

• Shenzhen Xunlong tipped a $15 “Orange Pi PC” SBC with a 1.6GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC, Pi-compatible expansion, HDMI, 100Mbit Ethernet, quad USB, and more.

• Late last year and early this year, Shenzhen Xunlong Software introduced a family of open-spec, Linux- and Android-ready “Orange Pi” single board computers. The first two, the $49 Orange Pi and $40 Orange Pi Mini, were built with the Allwinner A20 SoC, featuring a dual-core, 1GHz Cortex-A7 CPU and PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPU. They were soon followed by the $59 Orange Pi Plus, based on a new, low cost quad-core, 1.6GHz Cortex-A7 Allwinner H3 SoC, featuring a Mali-400 MP2 GPU.

• Adlink’s latest 15-, 17-, and 19-inch resistive touchscreen panel-PCs for food processing run Linux on a dual-core Atom, and offer IP69K ingress protection.

Phones

Android

• Android becomes a giant brand in communication industry. Android, Inc. was established in Palo Alto, California. There were 4 persons in October 2003 who had the idea to develop this smart phone. Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Chris White, and Nick Sears developed the idea said by Rubin,

• If there has been one thing missing from the Android smartphone market over the past few years, it’s a great device with a physical keyboard. In fact, ever since the T-Mobile G2 (HTC Desire Z) hit the market in 2010, there’s been nothing worth paying attention to. That’s why — to me — the rumored BlackBerry Venice is the most exciting phone of the year so far. At least, the most exciting unreleased phone of the year. As each week goes by, the chances of it becoming a real product get stronger. For the first time, the Android-powered BlackBerry has been shown of in real, leaked hands-on photos.

• Google Android is an operating system that was originally designed for smartphones, but these days it also supports tablets, TVs, smartwatches, and more. It’s not really designed to replace a desktop operating system like Windows or Ubuntu, but there have been a number of attempts to modify the open source Android operating system to make it feel more like a desktop OS.

• This year Chinese startup Jide launched Remix OS, which a version of Android with a taskbar, support for multi-window apps, and other desktop-style features.

• The Swift costs £129, and has a quad-core 64-bit ARMv8 Snapdragon 410 system-on-chip running at up to 1.2GHz, 16GB of storage and 2GB RAM, 13Mp camera, a 1280 x 720 5” display, and a 32GB microSD card slot.

• Both devices can do 4G, and have dual SIM slots, and run Cyanogen 12.1 – a customized Android build. Each phone has a 2500mAh battery, which is removable in the Swift and not in the Storm.

• After many delays, all four major mobile Linux alternatives to Android have finally arrived on smartphones. Mozilla’s Firefox OS was first out of the gate two years ago, followed by Jolla’s Sailfish OS, and this year they were joined by the first Ubuntu and Tizen phones. Yet, a fifth open source mobile Linux platform may have already eclipsed them all. The CyanogenMod flavor of Android is rapidly expanding from its role as the most popular alternative mobile phone mod for flashing onto Android phones to being a much sought after pre-installed OS.

• For those not deeply rooted in the mobile phone industry, the notion of bloatware is another way of describing those useless apps that seem impossible to delete and drain the phone’s memory.

• Transforming an Android device into an open source-based camera is actually easier than you might think. And while there are not very many Android open source photography apps out there, all the essential pieces are available on F-Droid and elsewhere.

• BlackBerry CEO John Chen provided plenty of juicy quotes in a recent interview that discussed the company’s hardware business and its future in smartphones, in addition to rumors that BlackBerry is developing a new smartphone powered by Android.

• Google is improving the way its Android operating system (OS) is showing battery stats with the latest Marshmallow preview build.

• As Fall 2015 draws near and Google is getting ready to launch Android 6.0 Marshmallow, there are a number of new features that Google will equip its next-gen version of the Android OS with.

• Back in June at the Google I/O conference, Google shared details on a number of upcoming features, and since then, even more have been discovered in the preview versions of the OS. But as with all new OS versions, only a slim number will turn out to significantly impact the overall experience. In this article, we’ll talk about the 6 best Android 6.0 Marshmallow features to look forward to.

• Your Android phone’s texting app may be quite sleek and fast, but eventually, you may grow tired of same interface and features. Fortunately, we got access to the Google Play Store, where we can find even fancier third-party texting apps.

Free Software/Open Source

• We advocate that software developed with public funds should be released as open-source by default…

• One of fresh additions to Debian family, and thus wider FLOSS family is Elena Grandi. She is from realms of Valhalla and is setting her footprint into the community. A hacker mindset, a Free software lover and a 3D printing maker. Elena has big dedication to make the world free and better place for all. She tries to push limits on personal level with much care and love, and FLOSS community will benefit from her work and way of life in future. So what has the Viking lady to say about FLOSS? Meet Elena “of Valhalla” Grandi.

• The days of coders being shackled to Monaco or Courier New ends now. At SourceFoundry.org this week, programmer Chris Simpkins debuted the 2.0 version of Hack, an open-source typeface designed specifically for use in source code.

• Hack is characterized by a large x-height, wide aperture, and low contrast design in order to be “highly legible” at common coding text sizes. Its “sweet spot runs in the 8px-12px range on modern desktop and laptop monitors,” Simpkins writes on GitHub. “Combine it with an HD monitor and you can comfortably work at 6 or 7px sizes.” As seen in the image above, there’s a heavier semi-bold weight in the regular font, and strategic serifs eliminate large gaps on each side of narrow characters. As Simpkins notes on the SourceFoundry site, this helps to distinguish glyphs like the lowercase l and number 1 at small text sizes.

Events

• Before we get rolling on the last FOSS Force item before the weekend, I’d like to welcome Hunter Banks to the FOSS Force team. Hunter is part of the FOSS-forward Banks family of Los Angeles — dad Phillip is a computer consultant and a long-time Southern California Linux Expo volunteer (along with brother Phillip Jr.), and sister Keila has been in both the FOSS and mainstream media on girls-in-tech issues — and he’s writing a Linux/FOSS gaming column.

• It’s the one show I am most certain to make in a year’s time. The Texas Linux Fest (TLF). The only one I’ve missed was held in San Antonio, and being in the worst part of both chemo and radiation therapy, I wasn’t in the mood to travel across the street that year, not to mention to take a two hour drive each way.

Web Browsers

• Christian Dywan has announced the immediate availability for download of the eleventh maintenance release of the Midori 0.5 open-source web browser used by default in numerous lightweight GNU/Linux distributions, including elementary OS.

Chrome

Mozilla

• Dissatisfaction with Mozilla’s recent announcement to change its extension core code is being expressed across the Internet. Folks aren’t happy. Elsewhere, Chris Hoffman explains why you should switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice and the Canonical IP fight continues. In other news, several container headlines caught my eye recently.

• Also new is a requirement for add-ons to be reviewed and signed by Mozilla before their deployment. Back in April, Mozilla’s security lead Daniel Veditz published The Case for Extension Signing, addressing the volume of feedback their announcement had generated from the developer community. Veditz said the internet browsing experience for tens of thousands of people was being shaped by “third party add-ons in ways they did not choose and that benefit third parties, not the user.”

• A week ago, Mozilla shed some light on its future, laying out a plan on how the browser is going to dramatically change in the upcoming months. While most of us understood “Chrome extensions were coming to Firefox,” it is not as simple as we all thought.

• Once in a while, I must give my sermons, to help you figure out how things work. Why this is not going to be good for us, the users, and why we must duly prepare, in advance. As it happens, Mozilla does not fully understand the market. It truly does not. When you make decisions based on incorrect data, you are bound to make a disastrous choice. Let’s try to amend this, if possible.

SaaS/Big Data

• In October 2012 I announced the first version of the User Data Manifesto during the Latinoware Keynote in Brazil. The idea was to define some basic right that all users should have in the digital age. This was still before the Snowden revelations. But it was already very clear that the privacy and security is at risk by cloud services and SaaS solutions that totally ignore the rights and interests of their users. So the idea was to try to define what this rights should be in the internet age.

• At the OpenStack Silicon Valley event, the head of the OpenStack Foundation announces new nonprofit status and developer initiatives. OpenStack continues to move forward, even as new technologies like containers enter the cloud virtualization landscape. At the OpenStack Silicon Valley event on Aug. 26, OpenStack supporters discussed why the open-source cloud platform is thriving and detailed new efforts to keep momentum moving forward.

• IBM is moving quickly to integrate technology from the recently acquired Blue Box cloud into its Softlayer cloud services. IBM announced the acquisition of Blue Box on June 3.

• Companies are spending billions on tools and engineering to analyse big data, though many are hampered by one little problem: they still don’t know what to do with all the data they collect.

• “This is the dirty little secret about big data: No one actually knows what to do with it,” Jason Waxman, an Intel vice president and general manager of the company’s cloud platforms group, said Thursday in a webcast for investors.

• “They think they know what to do with it, and they know they have to collect it, because you have to have a big data strategy. But deriving the insights from big data is a little harder to do,” he said.

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has advanced the open source Lens project for unified Big Data analytics, providing a single view of multiple tiered data sources.

Databases

• Now that we have CQL for Cassandra and N1QL for Couchbase, it seems the power of SQL is being opened for NoSQL database developers.

• There is, however, a real danger that developers who see these SQL-like languages as an implementation of SQL are in for a world of pain as they try to leverage their SQL skills on a NoSQL database.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• OpenOffice was the first big, mainstream free software competitor to Microsoft Office, and because of that, it still has mainstream name recognition—which is a problem.

• Developers have almost all moved to LibreOffice, the spiritual successor to OpenOffice. But OpenOffice continues to be operated as its own project, seeing little development and only drawing potential LibreOffice users to a defunct piece of software.

Education

• In September 2013, Opensource.com featured a selection of top-shelf software to help students and teachers ease back into the classroom. Like our students, open source learning software has grown up since that time. Let’s take a look at a few affordable and stress-free open source software tools to help students and teachers make learning fun and stress-free… the commercial software bullies will be running off the playground in no time.

• I became more confident when I would explain FOSS philosophy to others. And, my friends began to ask for my assistance moving them to Linux. At school, I formed a FOSS club for our department to help spread FOSS awesomeness to more people. And, at the first club meeting, I gave a presentation on our purpose with confidence and passion! Our club activites include sessions and workshops on various open source projects, ranging from “Firefox add­on development” to “CMS” to “Make your own Linux using SUSE Studio.”

Business

Semi-Open Source

Funding

• Mycroft is an Open Source, Open Hardware, Open APIs product that you talk to and it provides information and services. It is a wonderful example of open innovation at work.

BSD

• François Tigeot has landed his i915 Intel DRM driver update that brings the DragonFlyBSD’s Intel graphics driver up to parity with the Linux 3.17 kernel.

• For a long time, my Beagle Bone Black sat on my desk, gathering dust. Recently I decided I would give it a purpose: as a replacement for the crappy DHCP server and DNS on my home router (it’s a Huawei g655d, and it has poor wireless range, a lousy interface, and wonky internal DNS). I ran an update on the Bone, which promptly downloaded a whole bunch of packages from the angstrom distribution. Over plain unauthenticated http. With, as far as I could see, no further checksumming or anything. Bad doggy.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GDB 7.10 released!

• Version 7.10 of the GNU Debugger (GDB) has been released with various new features and updates to existing functionality.

Licensing

• Open source software diligence requires advanced planning, proper procedures and timely disclosures of information. It often is not a quick or simple process, but the time spent prior to or during diligence is an important step in identifying and remedying open source issues before they become major post-closing problems for both parties.

Openness/Sharing

• The majority of Germans are not aware of the existence of many of the available eGovernment services, according to a report by Initiative D21. This Berlin-based think tank published its sixth ‘eGovernment Monitor’ in July, showing that the use of eGovernment services in Germany lags far behind that in Switzerland, Austria and Sweden.

• Lime Microsystems, a supplier of field programmable RF Transceiver (FPRF) ICs, and ZyXel, a specialist in broadband networking technologies, will collaborate in developing open source implementations for wireless mobile networks. The companies said that the collaboration between them is an important milestone in the adoption of open source ideology by major corporations. They believe that this collaboration will lead to a more diverse, creative and cooperative way of developing technology and that this will result in greater interoperability and scalability in the deployment of wireless mobile networks.

Open Hardware

• It’s a kitten rather than a roar right now, but if the MIAOW project unveiled at last week’s Hot Chips conference can get legs, the next year could see the launch of the world’s first “open GPU”.

• The result of 36 months’ development (so far) by a team of 12 developers, MIAOW – the Many-core Integrated Accelerator of Wisconsin – is based on AMD’s Southern Islands GPU ISA.

• Although the GPGPU is in an early and relatively crude stage, it is another piece of an emerging open-source hardware platform, said Karu Sankaralingam, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sankaralingam led the team that designed the Many-core Integrated Accelerator of Wisconsin (MIAOW).

• The first general-purpose graphics processor (GPGPU) now available as open-source RTL was unveiled at the Hot Chips event here. In a separate talk, another academic described an integrated open source processor with a core that’s more power efficient than a similar block from ARM.

Programming

Leftovers

• ComRes has released a new poll which outlines Labour’s present plight (as with all post-election opinion polls, treat these numbers with some caution). Just 20 per cent of the public say they would be inspired by any four the leadership candidates to vote Labour. Jeremy Corbyn and Andy Burnham coming joint top on 22 per cent, Yvette Cooper on 21 per cent and Liz Kendall last on 18 per cent. And for those who think candidate would persuade them not to vote Labour, Kendall and Corbyn are joint top on 58 per cent — not surprising given they have the most strident views.

• Looking at his list of new appointments, it’s hard to imagine another sector where you could be rewarded for such failure… except for banking of course

Science

• This photo just won’t go away. The 1948 picture above doesn’t show Albert Einstein with his therapist. The guy Einstein’s meeting with is Cord Meyer, Jr, president of the United World Federalists. Meyer, a CIA operative, was merely discussing world politics with the famed scientist.

• Somewhere, during the early days of networked communication, somebody likely complained about a lengthy term and decided to do something about it. At that point, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary are guessing, “electronic mail” became e-mail, and a cornucopia of e-prefixed words followed.

• But that’s all just conjecture. For years, the dictionary’s editors have been asking the public to help them find documentation of the first time “e-mail” was used — and they still haven’t had any luck.

• The appeal has been online for three years — and the word has been an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary since 1989 — but the OED still doesn’t have a verifiable instance of the first time someone used it.

• 3D printing of electronics, robots, and even bridges with materials such as metal and plastic, is already a reality. But now engineers at MIT have shown we can now print with glass using their brand new G3DP (Glass 3D Printing) platform.

• Employing a process that combines ancient techniques with modern technology, the Mediated Matter Group created a two-tiered “printer” capable of producing intricate designs that would’ve been tough, if not impossible, to replicate using conventional glass-blowing methods. The upper chamber stores the molten glass at 1,900°F which then then funnels it down through a heat resistant funnel to a lower compartment that allows the glass to cool but not break.

• Along the sloping walls of the Black Dragon Canyon in Utah, there’s a curious rock painting that looks remarkably like a flying dinosaur. Creationists say it’s proof that humans and pterodactyls once coexisted. But now, in a paper published in the journal Antiquity, archaeologists have revealed that the “dinosaur” is actually a time-worn depiction of humans, a snake and some sheep.

Health/Nutrition

• On August 22, during a rally supporting the Confederate battle flag, counter-demonstrators partially blocked views of the memorial with balloons and a sign that read, “Heritage of Hate: Coca-Cola Supports Racism” for a few hours before cops took the banner down. Activists have also started a petition calling upon Coca-Cola to end its sponsorship of the theme park. At last count, it had gotten 4,701 signatures, 299 short of the activists’ goal. It’s not the first time this year that the park has drawn unwanted attention. Last month, a few weeks after nine people were killed in a shooting at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, allegedly motivated by racism, the Atlanta branch of the NAACP called for the carving to be removed entirely. Local lawmakers have since followed suit.

• “Hold on to something,” Jim Tennant warned as he fired up his tractor. We lurched down a rutted dirt road past the old clapboard farmhouse where he grew up. Jim still calls it “the home place,” although its windows are now boarded up and the outhouse is crumbling into the field.

• Recently, the White House launched a new “heroin response strategy” to fight America’s devastating heroin epidemic by providing treatment and not arresting persons addicted to heroin. The money allotted was $2.5 million out of a total “war on drugs budget” of $25 billion (0.01 percent), earmarked to be shared by 15 states in the Northeast, where it was felt the epidemic was at its worst.

• Months ago, Kentucky launched a statewide effort to rid the state of the scourge of heroin which includes providing treatment to addicts, and Ohio has plans to do the same. Piecemeal efforts by individual cities and entire states are good but not enough. There must be interstate cooperation and meaningful assistance from the federal level. Perhaps the White House initiative is a small step in the right direction. More is needed.

• China has formally detained a dozen people over explosions in the city of Tianjin this month that killed at least 145 people, and has accused 11 officials and port executives of dereliction of duty or abuse of power.

• Anger over safety standards is growing in China, after three decades of swift economic growth marred by incidents from mining disasters to factory fires, and President Xi Jinping has vowed that authorities will learn the lessons paid for with blood.

Security

• The government of Luxembourg aims to make an inventory of policies on IT security and data protection in the EU Member States. The study is one of the priorities of Luxembourg’s presidency of the EUPAN network, an informal network of European public administration representatives.

• Starting with Windows Vista, a new AutoUpdate mechanism was added, allowing these trusted root certificates to be seamlessly downloaded on first use.

• Why does this matter? Because the incomplete information shown by Windows leads many people (including some security professionals) to believe that Windows trusts only a dozen or two root certificates out of the box, rather than hundreds.

• If you’re a Linux user, especially a systems administrator, the Linux Foundation has some security tips to share with you, and they’re quite good.

• Konstantin Ryabitsev, the Foundation’s director of collaborative IT services, published the security checklist that the organization uses to harden the laptops of its remote sysadmins against attacks.

• The recommendations aim to balance security decisions with usability and are accompanied by explanations of why they were considered. They also have different severity levels: critical, moderate, low and paranoid.

• Linux Foundation project director Konstantin Ryabitsev has publicly-released the penguinistas’ internal hardening requirements to help sysadmins and other paranoid tech bods and system administrators secure their workstations.

• The baseline hardening recommendations are designed that balance security and convenience for its many remote admins, rather than a full-blown security document.

• This is a set of recommendations used by the Linux Foundation for their systems administrators. All of LF employees are remote workers and we use this set of guidelines to ensure that a sysadmin’s system passes core security requirements in order to reduce the risk of it becoming an attack vector against the rest of our infrastructure.

• On April 15, 2015, officials of the Office of Personnel Management realized they had been hacked and the records of 4.2 million of current and former employees had been stolen. Later investigations by OPM determined in early June that the number affected is 21.5 million, for whom sensitive information, including Social Security Numbers (SSNs), was stolen from the background investigation databases.

• This was the biggest breach of United States government data in history. Reports point to China as the source of the breach, but the Administration has not formally accused China.

• You might think the effort to fortify cars’ cybersecurity could possibly make strange bedfellows out of automakers and safety advocates, what with all the recent reports basically amounting to the conclusion that a whole car can be hacked. But you’d be wrong.

• Oracle’s chief security officer, Mary Ann Davidson, recently ticked off almost everyone in the security business. She proclaimed that you had to do security “expertise in-house because security is a core element of software development and you cannot outsource it.” She continued, “Whom do you think is more trustworthy? Who has a greater incentive to do the job right — someone who builds something, or someone who builds FUD around what others build?”

• Grsecurity is a well-known set of patches for the Linux kernel, which greatly enhance the ability of the system to withstand various security threats. As you can imagine, there are many companies that want to use Grsecurity, and they need to follow the accompanying GPL license. They are not doing that, and now Grsecurity needs to take some drastic action.

• GitHub is under a distributed-denial-of-service attack being perpetrated by unknown actors.

• The service’s status page reported “a brief capacity overload” early on Tuesday. The site’s assessment of the incident was later upgraded to a a DDOS and at the time of writing the site is at code yellow.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• A comprehensive new book about U.S. special operations reveals that the mission to get top terrorist Osama bin Laden was “a kill mission, not a capture mission,” and that SEAL Team 6 members handpicked for the assault were ordered by President Obama to fight it out, not surrender, if caught.

• “Bin Laden was the first time [were were told], ‘This is a kill mission, not a capture mission, unless he was naked with his hands up,’” a Team 6 source is quoted in Relentless Strike, due out September 1.

• Jeremy Corbyn has come under fire for saying it was a “tragedy” that Osama bin Laden was killed by the US rather than being put on trial.

• The Labour leadership frontrunner made the remarks shortly after the special forces raid in 2011 on the al-Qaida chief’s Pakistan compound in which he and four others were shot dead.

• In an interview for Iranian television, he suggested the assassination of the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks would result in deeper unrest.

• In tracing these patterns, you can go back in time to such misguided fiascos as the CIA’s huge covert operation in Afghanistan in the 1980s (which gave rise to the Taliban and Al Qaeda). However, for argument’s sake, let’s start with the neocon success in promoting President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Not only did that war divert more than $1 trillion in U.S. taxpayers’ money from productive uses into destructive ones, but it began a massive spread of chaos across the Middle East.

• The Pentagon’s inspector general is investigating allegations that military officials have skewed intelligence assessments about the United States-led campaign in Iraq against the Islamic State to provide a more optimistic account of progress, according to several officials familiar with the inquiry.

• The investigation began after at least one civilian Defense Intelligence Agency analyst told the authorities that he had evidence that officials at United States Central Command — the military headquarters overseeing the American bombing campaign and other efforts against the Islamic State — were improperly reworking the conclusions of intelligence assessments prepared for policy makers, including President Obama, the government officials said.

• It is hard to say what is going to happen, but there is reason for concern and our domestic media is not addressing this increasingly deteriorating situation.

• A US military source has revealed in private conversation that the US-led Coalition formed to target the Islamic State (IS) and other terrorist groups is currently training 82 new recruits for its Syria operations. These include 12 new fighters in Jordan and 70 in Turkey.

• A spokeswoman for the US military’s Central Command (CENTCOM), Major Genieve David, would not confirm these numbers. “We are not giving out numbers due to operational security concerns,” she said via phone.

• But Turkey’s Foreign Minister Minister Mevlut Çavuşoğlu’s comment a few days ago that “in the second group we have around 100 (fighters)” suggests that the source’s numbers are likely to be accurate.

• Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, has disclosed that it suffered heavy casualties when the U.S. launched drone attacks last month to defend a moderate opposition group called “Division 30.”

• Turkish intelligence orchestrated last month’s capture of a group of Syrian moderate rebels trained by the United States to fight the Islamic State, according to rebel sources who spoke with McClatchy.

• Police say one car was shot at, and several other cars possibly hit by a sniper lurking along I-94 between I-69 and Battle Creek.

• Other possible hits happened on I-69 south to the Indiana border.

• Calhoun County Sheriff Matthew Saxton tells RTV6′s Detroit sister station 7 Action News, people in Metro Drive who have driven through that area from the end of July through last week may have also been hit and did not know it.

• Tony Blair has made a final plea to Labour party members to reject the “Alice in Wonderland” politics of Jeremy Corbyn.

• The former prime minister says Corbyn’s supporters are operating in a “parallel reality” which rejects evidence and reason, and says their left-wing choice for leader will be an electoral disaster.

• With just 11 days to go before the ballot of more than 550,000 party members and affiliates closes, Mr Blair admits he does not understand the appeal of “Corbynmania”.

• …hoping to find the common ground that makes having weapons of mass destruction unnecessary.

• Iran’s Intelligence Minister accused the CIA, Mossad, MI6 and others of trying to undermine Tehran’s security, Israel’s Maariv reported on Tuesday.

• Iran’s foreign minister said on Sunday it was too early to talk of reopening the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, as Britain restored its diplomatic mission four years after protesters ransacked the British ambassador’s residence.

• British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond attended a ceremony at the opulent 19th century building in the Iranian capital where attackers in 2011 burned Britain’s national flag, slashed portraits of British monarchs and stole goods.

• A conditional, shelf AUMF for Iran, tacked on now to make the JCPOA more palatable to skeptical hawks—what could possibly go wrong?

• Reading the above passage, which could have just as easily been derived from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” I was immediately reminded of current U.S. Congressional Republican efforts to undermine, for purely political reasons, the Obama administration’s agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program negotiated between six world powers (United States, Russia, China, United Kingdom, France and Germany) and Iran, a great first step towards promoting peace with Iran, following a long mutual mistrust between our two countries, which began with a CIA orchestrated overthrow of Iran’s last democratically elected leader about 62 years ago.

• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is correct in his criticism of the nuclear deal signed recently between world powers and Iran. Indeed, it is not a good deal. But it is Netanyahu who substantially brought this about.

• This conclusion is based on talks with Israeli and US officials who were ‒ and still are ‒ privy to the inner workings of the Israeli government, its defense, nuclear and intelligence agencies, and their dealings with US counterparts.

• Dennis Ross, a former Middle East envoy, and David Petraeus, who directed the CIA after commanding US. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote that the bunker-busters would be an effective “firewall” against Iranian nuclear development, especially in 15 years, when the agreement between Tehran and Western powers expires.

• Iran is marking the August 19 anniversary of the 1953 coup against the then-democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. The coup anniversary also marks America’s first Middle East intervention.

• US secretary of state John Kerry has joined the family of US marine veteran Amir Hekmati in calling on Iran to release him on the four-year anniversary of his detention by the Islamic Republic.

• There are dozens of Iranians in the U.S. imprisoned on sanction-related charges, Iran foreign ministry spokeswoman said.

• “Some of Iranians released from imprisonment have been under supervision for long time and Iran wants to have consular access to both imprisoned and released Iranians in the U.S.,” the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham said during a press conference on August 26, Trend’s correspondent reported.

• She said, “we call the U.S. government and judiciary system to put end on imprisonment and keeping Iranians under control.”

• Additional to the 19 Iranians jailed on sanction-related charges, Iran says another 60 Iranians are held for ordinary crimes in the U.S.

• In Tehran, the abandoned US embassy has been turned into a museum that is rarely open to the public.

• The anger that has run like a dark thread through Britain’s relationship with Iran has left its enduring mark on the wall of the UK’s embassy in Tehran. Four years after a radical mob stormed the compound, and even after several million pounds worth of refurbishment, the words ‘Death to England’ are still visible, scrawled in red felt-pen on the doors and walls.

• [...]

• The hardline newspaper Kayhan greeted Hammond’s arrival by publishing a litany of Britain’s “crimes” against Iran. One of them was Britain’s long suspected role in a US-led coup in 1953 against a democratically elected nationalist leader, Mohammad Mossadeq. Hammond made it clear that Britain had currently no intention of following the CIA’s example and providing a full account of any such British transgressions.

• The tables have turned. When you play with fire you will eventually get burned. The CIA does not represent us nor do they act on our behalf. If we have benefited from their work in any way it is merely incidental. But the trade off is inequitable. In fact, the worse case scenario of such an arrangement has been realized.

• The Inter-Parliamentary Union expressed regret Friday that the speaker of Russia’s upper house of Parliament will not be attending a world congress at the United Nations next week, apparently because of issues with her visa to the United States.

• “I made ‘Tibet: The Truth’ because I have been annoyed by the constant negative reporting about Tibet in the Western media,” Chris D. Nebe, director of the documentary, told Xinhua.

• “The Western media is biased and does not tell the truth about the historic past or present of Tibet,” he said.

• The 60-minute documentary debuted in the U.S. in 2013 and showed the audience a true Tibet in the past and present by using sufficient and convincible history materials.

• “It took me about a year to create the film. It has been based on me actually filming in Tibet, as well as extensive research”, Nebe said, “I was also able to locate in Washington D.C. archives authentic footage filmed by the CIA that showed that the U.S. trained Tibetans in a camp in Colorado as terrorist, which were then in 1958/1959 infiltrated into Tibet and instigated the 1959 revolt.”

• Nebe told Xinhua, “I also found material filmed by the CIA, which shows that the Dalai Lama was let go by the Central Government and did not have to escape from Tibet.”

• It is expected for any leading nation that prides itself in its military prowess, technological advancement and cultural dominance to showcase its perceived superiority through different mediums. Wartime propaganda in particular is of utmost importance, as it reinforces political ideology and rationalises questionable foreign policy. This is evident for anyone who’s watched, read or studied Israeli, Chinese, British, Russian, Indian, Pakistani, Nazi German, Turkish and North Korean wartime propaganda.

• However, the United States has arguably surpassed every modern nation in investing billions of dollars in the film and media industry to justify its wars and to dehumanise the hundreds of thousands of people killed in those conflicts. In terms of Hollywood blockbusters and TV series, Homeland, 24, Three Kings, Jarhead, Green Zone and American Sniper come to mind. Whilst these films and series addressed direct US involvement in foreign wars and its subsequent domestic terrorism threat, I naively expected something different from the latest drama series Tyrant – a fictional account of a Middle Eastern dictatorship based on the Arab Spring.

• The United States named a senior envoy Friday to work for the safe return of hostages after criticism of its response to the kidnap and murder of Americans held in Syria.

• A WikiLeaks leak of a CIA memorandum, however, proves that not even the White House is convinced by the rhetoric that it appears to be selling, and that staff fear that their actions will make them be perceived as exporters of terrorism by America’s allies. They admit explicitly that the official narrative is inaccurate: “contrary to common belief, the American export of terrorism or terrorists is not a recent phenomenon.”

• The 38th Parallel dividing North and South Korea is less tense thanks to a sensible new agreement. Pyongyang has expressed regret over land mines injuring South Korean soldiers. The South will curtail loudspeaker broadcasts. The confrontation led to artillery fire.

• According to the top-secret 1954 document, the US had arrived at a conclusion that it is only India and Pakistan, which can resolve the dispute over Kashmir through peace and dialogue.

• My first lesson in how intelligence can be rigged started with a newspaper photograph, 45 years ago. I was sitting in a sidewalk cafe in Da Nang, South Vietnam, which was still a charming former French colonial port city despite the war raging 10 miles away. A rookie spy handler in military intelligence, I would go downtown most mornings, gather up the local newspapers and look for useful bits of information over cups of strong chicory coffee. And so it was one day that I spotted a very familiar face in a photo of anti-government demonstrations in the city. After much squinting, I was sure it was my principal agent, the top guy in the spy ring I was running against communist forces.

• It didn’t take much investigating to conclude that my agent had divided loyalties. A few weeks later, I made a strong case to Saigon headquarters that the guy was untrustworthy and suggesting we get rid of him. The response: Nothing’s wrong, keep up the good work. The message from higher-ups was as blunt as a rock slide: We had to keep showing, against all evidence to the contrary, that things were going swimmingly in our intel ops. Not only that, they told me they were upping the reliability rating of my very questionable agent.

• Years later, I learned that a new boss had seen my reports and canned my spy. But I was long gone by then, and I had learned a lot more about how intelligence officials spun–and continue to spin–intelligence to back up wishful thinking about how well a war is going. And that’s not counting fabricated reports to get us into a war to start with, from Spain in 1898 (“Remember the Maine”) to Vietnam (the 1964 Tonkin Gulf non-incident) to the multiple deceptions on Iraq in 2003.

• David Headley was probably one of the most important links in the 26/11 attack. An agent of the CIA turned rogue, he was the one who landed in Mumbai and carried out the reconnaissance of the targets which were attacked on that fateful night of 26/11.

• David Headley in a confession to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) speaks extensively about the attacks, his visit to Pakistan, the meeting with the Lashkar-e-Tayiba top brass.

• The Peruvian National Congress approved the Airspace Surveillance and Control Law on August 20, authorising the country’s air force to shoot down aircraft suspected of transporting drugs, weapons, or explosives.

• A drone capable of locating and hacking into wireless networks is now available for as little as $2,500 (£1,600). Drones with high quality video cameras retail for $1,000 (£640) upwards and one US enthusiast successfully fitted a handgun into an inexpensive store-bought drone.

• [...]

• There are also fears that some drones could be used as assassins after a man in Connecticut posted a video of a customised drone armed with a handgun. The video shows the drone firing shots by remote control.

• Even with the resumption of diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana, the U.S. and Cuba have unfinished business to take care of.

• There is the issue of terrorism — the terrorism that U.S.-based exile extremist outfits perpetrated against Cuba.

• [...]

• The vilest of all acts that these U.S.-based extremists committed was the 1976 bombing of a Cuban passenger airliner in Barbados, in which all 73 occupants were killed. Exile militant Luis Posada Carriles has been directly linked to this crime in declassified CIA and FBI documents. He is currently free and living in Miami, and the Cuban government is requesting his extradition.

• South Sudan’s president signed a peace deal on Wednesday to end a 20-month conflict with rebels…

• An 85-year-old international agreement aimed at ending American and world wars – while unsuccessful – is still worth attention, Albuquerque City Councilors declared this month, naming Aug. 27 as Rededication to the Kellogg-Briand Treaty Day.

• Also in honor of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed in 1928, internationally known CIA agent turned peace activist Ray McGovern visited Albuquerque as part of his work fighting against “out-of-control military spending” and U.S. military policies that he said are undermining American security by causing the deaths of innocent people and fueling terrorism.

• Voices for Creative Nonviolence engaged with a number of Wisconsin peace groups to organize an 8-day 90-mile walk across southwest Wisconsin from August 18-25. The purpose of the walk was to call attention and make connections between the militarized police violence at home and the military using violence abroad through drone warfare and by other means. In both cases the victims are people of color, which forces us to reflect on the systemic racism of our society.

• And serious security concerns, as we all know, are far worse than war, and spending $1 trillion a year on war is a small price to pay to handle those concerns. Eighty-seven years ago this would have seemed insanity. Luckily we have ways of bringing back the thinking of years gone by, because typically someone suffering from insanity doesn’t have a way to enter into the mind of someone else who’s viewing his insanity from the outside. We have that. We can go back to an era that imagined the ending of war and then carry that work forward with the goal of completing it.

• Henry Kissinger has not held high government office since 1977, almost 40 years ago. True, he accomplished a great deal during his eight years as national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations — for better (opening China, arms control with the Soviet Union, peace in the Middle East) or for worse (secret bombings and cold-blooded diplomacy that, some scholars argue, contributed to genocidal outcomes in Bangladesh and Cambodia). Nonetheless, it is remarkable how visible, even at age 92, Kissinger remains.

• Good economic times also helped keep Menzies in power. Under Menzies, Australia seemed safe, secure and prosperous. But, as Prime Minister, Menzies did two terrible things. First, without serious thought for the consequences, he allowed the British to test nuclear weapons on Australian soil and second, he committed Australian combat troops to fight in Vietnam when he did not have to.

• It is a matter of perspective of whether you see John McCain, the former Navy pilot and present Senator from the safety of the U.S. today or from the ground up in Vietnam when his payload of napalm bombs were reigning down on downtown Hanoi residents in 1967.

• Sir John Chilcot is facing legal action from bereaved families after again defying calls to set a timetable for publication of the Iraq Inquiry report.

• The Chilcot inquiry members in the UK have no interest in exposing facts about the war in Iraq back in 2003 and the US in turn is doing everything to discourage them, author and activist David Swanson told RT.

• A Saudi army general has been killed in cross-border fire from Yemen, the armed forces announced Sunday, making him the highest-ranking officer to be killed in border attacks since March.

• Major General Abdulrahman bin Saad al-Shahrani, commander of the 18th Brigade, was inspecting troops deployed “on the front lines along the southern region when the post came under random enemy fire,” said the military said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency.

• Anti-war protesters rally outside parliament to oppose new laws that could see Japanese troops engaged in combat overseas for the first time since WWII. In one of the largest postwar demonstrations in Japan, protesters swarmed in front of the Diet (parliament) building in Tokyo to oppose the current administration’s contentious security legislation.

• Drones are instruments of state terror. Washington’s official narrative is pure rubbish – claiming terrorists alone are targeted, civilians aren’t killed, and drone warfare makes America safer.

• Fact: Attacks are indiscriminate extrajudicial executions – in flagrant violation of core international law.

• Fact: Few so-called “high value” targets are eliminated.

• Fact: Large numbers of civilian men, women and children are murdered in cold blood. International law protecting them in combat theaters is ignored. Fact: Bodies of innocent victims are blasted into unrecognizable pieces or burned beyond recognition. Fact: Family members, bystanders and rescuers are killed or maimed by what’s called “double tapping” – striking the targeted area two or more times.

• South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa was on a secret mission to Colombo last weekend. Mr. Tony Blair, who was the British Prime Minister during the genocidal onslaught of Eezham Tamils was in the island on a two weeks tour since 11 August. US Assistant Secretary of State Nisha Biswal and another US official are in Colombo. The section of Sinhala Buddhist elements in the mission or payroll of protecting Rajapaksa, who openly took a China line earlier this year, connected the dots to depict IC conspiracy, by linking Ramaphosa to the ICG and to a CIA mission. In response, the South African Government on Tuesday announced that Mr Ramaphosa was no longer connected to the ICG. The hectic visits and the recent Indian media scurry in claiming hold on affairs as well as ‘guidance’ for domestic investigation, signal only mounting competition in stabilizing the genocidal State with new local partners.

• The vintage Hawker Hunter fighter jet that crashed on to a busy roadway during an air show in Shoreham, Sussex, England, last weekend had also performed at recent air shows in Ireland — at Shannon, Bray and Foynes — which were attended by up to 150,000 people. It might just as easily have crashed at one of these shows causing many deaths, including that of children.

• If the U.S. government comes after its own people, what’s your plan to defeat missiles, grenades, aircraft bombers and drones with your guns?

• United States President Barack Obama is the most admired foreign leader in Africa because he has ancestral roots in our continent.

• This is partly the reason his ill-informed and stereotypical admonitions of our leaders attracted cheers from a large section of our elite class. 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. In his speech to the African Union in Addis Ababa, Obama acted like a colonial headman lecturing the natives on how to behave as good subjects. Yet behind Obama’s seeming concern for our good lies the social contempt he holds us in.

• In closing, Bradford cites Churchill, Reagan, and the medieval Song of Roland.

• Type ‘‘Anwar al-Awlaki’’ into YouTube’s search bar, and you get 40,000 hits. Most of them bring up the earnest, smiling face and placid voice of the first American citizen to be hunted and killed without trial by his own government since the Civil War. Here is Awlaki on what makes a good marriage; on the nature of paradise; on Jesus Christ, considered a prophet by Muslims; on tolerance; on the holy month of Ramadan; and, more quirkily, on ‘‘obesity and overeating in Islam.’’ Here is Awlaki, or Sheikh Anwar, as his many admirers still call him, easily mixing Quranic Arabic with American English in chapters from his 53-CD series on the life of the Prophet Muhammad, once a best seller among English-speaking Muslims.

• France’s defense ministry says a French soldier deployed in Mali has died after being accidentally shot by a fellow soldier at a military camp.

• Also unlike the superheroes of yesteryear, these “friendly” imperial superfascists did not shy away from incurring extensive “collateral damage,” if that’s what it took to terminate the superhuman dictators, terrorists, and other “bastards” plaguing the planet.

• William “Bill” Livsey, 84, of Fayetteville, Georgia is a retired four-star U.S. Army general and Silver Star recipient for heroism.

• On August 15, Livsey ordered Chinese food delivery to his home and got into a dispute with the driver over the $80.60 order when the general’s debit card was declined. The restaurant refused to take a personal check. And here is where the details become hazy.

• Delivery driver Ryan Irvin claims the 84-year-old Livsey put his left hand on the driver’s neck and pushed him against the refrigerator. The police were called, and neighbors then witnessed a brutal arrest.

• When the police arrived, officers claimed Livsey refused to willingly sit in the back of a police car and had to be forced in by three officers, and also claim Livsey “constrict his muscles and refuse to put his hands behind his back while being placed under arrest for robbery.”

• Appearing on Newsmax TV’s “Steve Malzberg Show,” Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson had some tough words for the media, specifically CNN.

• Sunday, on CNN’s “State of The Union,” host Jim Acosta asked Carson a series of nearly identical questions regarding something Carson said previously about drones on the border.

• The good news is that the North Dakota legislature passed a bill this week requiring police to get a search warrant before they use a drone; The bad news is that drones could shoot rubber bullets, pepper spray, or even tear gas.

• I was surprised Wednesday morning to see Google news alerts showing up in my inbox saying that North Dakota is the first state in the nation to legalize armed drones for law enforcement.

• North Dakota’s police agencies can fly drones armed with Tasers, tear gas, bean-bag cannons, and other “less-lethal” weapons, thanks to fierce lobbying from the law enforcement industry on a bill that was initially meant to restrict police use of the flying robots rather than outfit them with weapons. While other local police departments have flirted with weaponizing their drones, North Dakota is the first state to explicitly allow the armaments.

• The Chinese military’s flagship drone Rainbow 5 made its debut on state television on Sunday, showing off new weapons and the latest technology to “change the game in airstrikes”.

• Hang on to your drone. Boeing’s developed a laser cannon specifically designed to turn unmanned aircraft into flaming wreckage.

• The aerospace company’s new weapon system, which it publicly tested this week in a New Mexico industrial park, isn’t quite as cool as what you see in Star Wars—there’s no flying beams of light, no “pew! pew!” sound effects. But it is nonetheless a working laser cannon, and it will take your drone down.

• People keep flying their drones where they shouldn’t. In airport flight paths. Above wildfires. Onto the White House lawn. Luckily, there haven’t been any really bad incidents—that is, no one has been killed by a civilian quadcopter or plane, yet.

• At this point it’s clear: the world is going the way of the drone, and as much as people might kick and scream, there is nothing that’s going to stop it from happening. So, that leaves us to the next issue at hand. We need to come together and not only create laws specific to flying drones, but we also need to learn some basic drone etiquette. You know, things such as not flying your drone in flight paths, above wildfires, or on the lawn of the White House.

Transparency Reporting/Wikileaks

• Ask any journalist and they’ll tell you the Freedom of Information Act process is broken. Denials are at record highs, navigating the bureaucracy can be a nightmare, and the federal agencies recently killed a modest reform bill. But a series of FOIA lawsuits also have just shown how the 50-year-old transparency law can still be indispensable. And absent any change in the law, the best way for news organizations to make sure it stays relevant is to use it innovatively and aggressively.

• The controversial Wikileaks founder is so fearful that someone will try to take his life that he no longer uses the property’s balcony, despite having had no fresh air or sunlight for THREE YEARS.

• The Australian faces extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges – which he denies – and has been living at the central London diplomatic residence since 2012, at a cost of £12million to UK taxpayers.

• The reclusive figure fears he will ultimately be sent to the US where he could face the death penalty.

• In an interview with The Times magazine, Mr Assange claimed it had become too dangerous to even poke his head out the embassy’s balcony doors.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has spoken of his fear he may be assassinated if he steps outside the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge.

• In an interview with The Times Magazine, the controversial hacker said there were “security issues” with the balcony and suggested one risk if he left the building was being “droned” by the CIA.

• In an interview with The Times Magazine, Mr Assange said he has not had any fresh air or sunlight for three years because it is too dangerous to leave the building.

• Australian WikiLeaks founder and hacker, Julian Assange, has expressed fears of being kidnapped or “droned” by the CIA if he were to step out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

• “There are security issues with being on the balcony. There have been bomb threats and assassination threats from various people,” he said in an interview with The Times.

• WikiLeaks founder says he told the NSA whistleblower he could be kidnapped or killed, and that he was better off sheltering in Russia despite ‘negative PR’

• The Central Intelligence Agency is set to release 2,500 previously top-secret briefings it gave to presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s, a private pro-CIA group announced on Wednesday.

• “The vast majority of the documents have never been previously released,” an informed official says, although a number of CIA presidential briefings have surfaced in heavily redacted form over the years. Intelligence officials from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations have also discussed their private conversations with the presidents in memoirs and other books.

• For the second time in three years, a federal judge in Washington has ordered the CIA to release information about its involvement in the death of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.

• On Monday, U.S. Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the agency to prepare a “Vaughn index,” a document that agencies submit in Freedom of Information Act litigation to justify each piece of information withheld from disclosure. The index is due by Sept. 10.

• The case concerns a Freedom of Information request submitted June 1, 2004, to the CIA by the Institute for Policy Studies, based in Washington, DC. When the CIA did not respond after nearly two years, the institute filed suit on May 23, 2006, in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

• The Justice Department’s corruption probe of U.S. Senator Robert Menendez began with “serious and specific allegations into child prostitution” that turned out to be unproven, prosecutors said in a court filing.

• Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, wasn’t charged on the basis of unfounded claims that he and a campaign donor had sex with underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic. Rather, the investigation uncovered corruption involving the New Jersey Democrat and the donor, a Florida eye doctor who sought his help in disputes with the government, prosecutors said.

• Lawyers for U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez have subpoenaed the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Departments of State, Commerce and Homeland Security to prove that actions taken on behalf a friend were motivated by legitimate concerns and not a quid pro quo in exchange for trips and campaign donations.

• The subpoenas addressed to CIA Director John Brennan, Secretary of State John Kerry, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson seek documents to prove that the government was aware of problems with port security in the Dominican Republic.

• The Justice Department also filed a 65-page response to deny claims by the men, detailed in 15 motions filed July 20, that prosecutors and FBI agents lied and abused their power in obtaining the indictment in federal court in Newark, New Jersey.

• Same as it ever was. Once again, according to pundits on the influential Washington, D.C. cocktail-party circuit, Hillary Clinton is in deep trouble. The National Bitch Hunt is definitely on.

• Surely you didn’t think we could have a woman presidential candidate without one?

• Former CIA director John Deutch was also found to have stored classified documents — including top-secret intelligence — on computers in his homes in Bethesda and Belmont, Mass., leading to an investigation by the CIA inspector general and a criminal investigation by the Justice Department. Deutch was stripped of his security clearance and ended up reaching a plea agreement admitting to his crimes — but was saved by a last-minute pardon from none other than . . . President Bill Clinton.

• Could Mrs. Clinton have said all this, clearly and simply, six months ago? Probably not. Because we have so hogtied our politicians with expectations of obfuscation that the old admonition of Adlai Stevenson, “Tell the truth to the American people”, has become a forgotten relic of the political past.

• During the 2012 attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, State Department officials in Washington were emailing one another with updates in real time. Embedded in those messages were nuggets of classified information, including an apparent reference to a CIA facility that was a closely guarded secret.

• Hillary Clinton dismisses criticism of her using a private email server while secretary of state as “politics” and “partisan games,” pledging she “won’t get down in the mud” with her critics and—in a particularly nice touch—“won’t play politics with national security.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• President accused of undermining own agenda with decision to allow hunt for oil in Arctic, as he prepares for three-day tour to showcase effects of climate change

• A CUMBRIAN council forced to deny it had plans to terminate seagulls by using drones has issued a plea to the public about feeding the birds.

• Northumbria police have launched an investigation after a photo was posted on Facebook of a man apparently strangling a seagull. Councillors in seaside towns are considering using drones to kill seagull chicks in their nests. Although the numbers of most gull species in the UK are in decline, they have an ‘increasing presence in urban areas’. The RSPCA is looking into reports that people in Cornwall are attacking gulls with fishing line. Meanwhile the birds have been accused of attacking people and killing pets, and in Namibia they’ve been spotted pecking out the eyes of baby seals, as if they weren’t already hated enough.

• A TOUR guide has been mauled to death by a lion during a walking safari in the Zimbabwean national park where Cecil the lion lived before he was shot, police said.

Finance

• With this country’s massive needs in housing and renewable energy, it is typical that the only public spending announcement the Tories wish to make is on more potential for death and destruction at Faslane. The politics of the ludicrous claims on employment creation are risibly transparent. Don’t vote SNP! Don’t Vote Corbyn! This is not an industrial or a services economy, its the WMD economy.

• In June, Italy’s central eInvoicing system handled over 10 million invoices, 5 % more than in May, reports the Agency for the Digitalization of the Public Sector (Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale, AGID). “The number of invoices received is rising, and the amount of rejects is decreasing”, AGID writes.

• But the concerns have been overdone. For a start, the Chinese equity market is still 40 per cent higher than a year ago despite the 40 per cent fall since June; and barely 10 per cent of Chinese ­actually own shares anyway.

• Yesterday, Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) CEO Tim Cook emailed CNBC “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer with a rare mid-quarter stock update on the company’s performance.

• Hugo Landecker is on a mission to end homelessness in San Rafael, by trying to force the closure of the homeless program that serves 3,700 Marin County families, the Ritter Center.

• It is a different matter for our “systems.” Politics is a cesspool of corruption. Our economic system is full of hardworking workers and greed-driven, self-centered leaders like the Koch brothers. Our religious system appears to have developed the ability to segregate out of its collective mind war, the poor, suppressed black- and brown- skinned peoples. Our social systems accept that it is impolite to talk about war, politics, economics and the “u” word — unions. The phrase “sold a batch of bad goods” is pertinent here if you just exchange “goods” for “ideas.”

• For those of us trying to fight back on issue after issue, we find it is like weeding a 100-acre garden: Each day we get up there are more weeds to pull.

• George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their boys popped us into a grand “war on terror” that has nearly broken our soldiers and brought death, starvation, wounds, sickness, homelessness and broken economies/social systems to nations like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria across the world. The more we fight, the more we lose.

• One is in the mirror. Americans have grown addicted to buying stuff online — of course, the cheaper the better. They seem to want to avoid face-to-face interactions in stores — and community engagement in general — and Amazon’s power ensures that they’ll get low prices, at least for now (see below), even as their local stores close because of such online competition.

• The preference for communicating via screens rather than person-to-person is especially common among the young, who grew up in the Internet Age. Human-resource managers have told me that young job applicants often don’t look them in the eye because in-person encounters make them anxious.

• The disappearance of many well-paying jobs, and static (or worse) compensation except for top executives and investors, have encouraged consumers to seek out cheaper stuff than a few decades ago. But – irony of ironies! – Amazon and other high-tech automators have helped destroy good U.S. jobs in their “data-driven’’ mania to take full advantage of the international low-wage, cheap-goods machine.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Fox News tried to blame First Lady Michelle Obama’s healthy school lunch program for reports of financial woes and layoffs at school districts, but it failed to disclose that the study it cited comes from a group supported in part by food industry companies that sell their product to schools, including PepsiCo, General Mills, and Domino’s.

• CounterSpin interviews with Rosa Brooks, Colette Pichon Battle, A.C. Thompson and Jordan Flaherty on Katrina’s 10 years of media neglect

• When seriously practiced, the journalistic profession involves gathering information concerning individuals, locales, events, and issues. In theory such information informs people about their world, thereby strengthening “democracy.” This is exactly the reason why news organizations and individual journalists are tapped as assets by intelligence agencies and, as the experiences of German journalist Udo Ulfkotte (entry 47 below) suggest, this practice is at least as widespread today as it was at the height of the Cold War.

• Fox News host and resident media critic Howard Kurtz questioned Jorge Ramos’ journalistic integrity in the wake of the Univision anchor’s contentious press conference questioning of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, concluding that Ramos was little more than “a heckler.”

• So perhaps Wikipediology may not be much different from counting peach pits in privies after all. Either way, there seems to be a lot of manure to sort through before you can start guessing at the truth.

• Yes, that’s the US Central Intelligence Agency—one of the most powerful government organizations in the world—sending a tweet, with no other context, in Russian. The tweet was made just days after the US CENTCOM Twitter account was hacked by alleged ISIL sympathizers. Naturally, a lot of people thought the CIA had just been hacked by the Russians.

• In May of 1967, a former CIA officer named Tom Braden published a confession in the Saturday Evening Post under the headline, “I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral.’” Braden confirmed what journalists had begun to uncover over the previous year or so: The CIA had been responsible for secretly financing a large number of “civil society” groups, such as the National Student Association and many socialist European unions, in order to counter the efforts of parallel pro-Soviet organizations. “[I]n much of Europe in the 1950’s,” wrote Braden, “socialists, people who called themselves ‘left’—the very people whom many Americans thought no better than Communists—were about the only people who gave a damn about fighting Communism.”

• But this is not really a biography of either parent. Nor does it concentrate on Stephen’s poetry, although the question about whether Encounter, the literary magazine he edited for several decades, was funded with CIA money is discussed in exhaustive detail. This book is more a portrait of a marriage and of the childhood that emerged as a result.

• RFE was created by the U.S. government to help win the Cold War by countering Soviet propaganda. That it would pass off accounts from members of a paramilitary organization, the Basij, controlled by the mullahs and used to suppress regime critics is disturbing. That it fails to challenge a work of hagiography originally presented as fact by an Iranian state-run outlet, Fars News, about Soleimani, a U.S.-listed terrorist and murderer of U.S. service personnel and non-combatants defies description.

• Will Greece set the new standard of fearlessness for the rest of Europe to follow? – Will Greece dare to go the only practical way – exit the unviable euro – go back to her drachma and revamp their economy with public banking for the benefit of the Greek people? – I trust Greece will dare take back her sovereignty, breaking the all-permeating Fear Factor and become a flagship of courage for Europe and for the world.

Censorship

• Influential conservative Iowa radio host Steve Deace likened ESPN to Nazis after the sports network suspended former Major League Baseball pitcher Curt Schilling as a commentator for posting an Islamaphobic meme to his Facebook page.

• The objective that the Commission is pursuing in conducting this exercise is twofold: first, to gather input in order to assess whether current rules are (still) fit for purpose; secondly, to determine whether the provisions in this Directive should be extended to transmissions of TV and radio programmes by means other than satellite and retransmission by means other than cable. In other words: whether the Directive rules should be also made applicable to online providers of TV and radio programmes.

• ARTICLE 19 calls on the Malaysian government to retract threats to block websites which promote or report on the upcoming “Bersih 4″ protests. Furthermore, we call for a public commitment to abide by international obligations to respect the right to protest. The Malaysian government should guarantee the free flow of information around the “Bersih 4″ protests, and refrain from treating them as illegal.

Privacy

• As an Eisenhower Fellow, Dr. David A. Bray recently participated in a five-week professional program that took him out of his normal day-to-day role as CIO for the Federal Communications Commission. While on the Fellowship abroad, Bray met with industry CEOs as well as the Ministries of Communication, Justice, and Defense in both Taiwan and Australia to discuss the “Internet of Everything” and how established industry, startups, public service, non-profits, and university leaders are anticipating and planning for a future in which everything is connected by the Internet.

• The FBI demanded that Scandinavian countries arrest and extradite Edward Snowden if he flew to any of those countries and claimed asylum, newly released official documents reveal.

• Norway’s NRK broadcaster has obtained a copy of the formal requests US authorities sent to Scandinavian agencies asking them to assist them in their efforts to track down NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden should he enter Norwegian territory.

• IBM is warning corporates to start blocking TOR services from their networks, citing rising use of the encrypted network to deliver payloads like ransomware.

• Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan denied that the development of the National Cyber Agency would involve foreign countries including the United States.

• Speculation was rife that the development of the cyber agency would involve the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which has the ability to tap into any conversation through social media networks such as WhatsApp, Blackberry Messenger and other applications, and then store these conversations on a system called Big Data.

• Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!’ warns Nietzsche. ‘Out of their countenances peer the hangman and the sleuth-hound.’

• The Ashley Madison hack provides an excellent illustration.

• There are, by some accounts, 37 million names listed in the leaked database. Even excluding bots and duplicates and horny teenagers, that’s a remarkable figure, a quantity suggestive of an immense pool of unhappiness, especially when you factor in the partners and children of the straying spouses.

• One response to the hack, then, might begin with an inquiry into those miserable relationships. Why are so many ordinary people seemingly so discontented with their marriages? What might be done to alleviate the wretchedness both of those who cheat and those who don’t? What does the evident attraction of a site like Ashley Madison (which seems to have been run as a fairly overt scam) tell us about society, about intimacy and sexuality more generally?

• “Hmmm,” my wife wrote back. “Maybe I should check whether you’re in the database.” Not long afterward, I came across a story about the blackmail emails that some Ashley Madison members were getting—“sextortion” is the clever neologism. Buried deep in the article, a cyber-security expert said members could also expect to be bombarded with email solicitations for sexual services.

• It seemed an unlikely coincidence to be getting these missives, just after the Ashley Madison data were leaked. And yet I was emphatically not an Ashley Madison member and couldn’t be on the cheat sheet. Or could I? I dismissed the thought, but it recurred. I soon found myself at one of the newly arisen websites that let people check whether an email address is in the Madisonian data dump. I typed in my address but hesitated before clicking Enter. It felt in some way dirtying, like going to a pawn shop in a bad part of town to retrieve a stolen watch. Even worse was the result: my email was there.

• With malware joining missiles among the threats to America’s security, leading technology innovators such as Apple and Google are being recruited to join traditional defense contractors on the front lines.

• Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is visiting Silicon Valley Friday as part of a continuing effort to bridge the divide between the Pentagon and a tech community wary of excessive surveillance and privacy violations.

• People have wondered if China let Snowden leave although his passport was invalidated by the US. Actually, there was no sneakiness by China. Snowden still had a valid passport when he left China. What happened was that the US State Department canceled his passport while he was in the air. He had been planning to transit via Moscow to Ecuador, but his passport was invalid by that point. That’s how he got stuck in Moscow: the Russian authorities couldn’t let him leave without a valid passport (and visa, if required) for where he was going.

• The second part, “‘Big data,’ algorithms, and computational counterinsurgency,” published this month, analyzes the rise of “predictive policing” and its Pentagon connections, reviews some relevant programs and examines these in light of scientists’ concerns over the development of artificial intelligence and long-term human survival.

• Your personal data is the currency of the modern Internet. Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn — to name but three — all primarily profit from collecting your personal data. At the same time, data breach after breach, such as Office of Personnel Management, Ashley Madison, and Anthem, have revealed the secrets of tens of-millions of people. What can you do about it?

• For nearly two decades, the Colombian government has been expanding its capacity to spy on the private communications of its citizens. Privacy International’s investigation reveals the state of Colombia’s overlapping, unchecked systems of surveillance, including mass surveillance, that are vulnerable to abuse.

• Deb Nicholson gave a fascinating talk about privacy and surveillance at this year’s Texas Linux Fest. I have to admit that I was so into her stories that I found myself forgetting to write down what she was saying!

• But no, that’s ridiculous. Your identity is not your personality or in your genes. It’s a paper trail starting with a print of your foot and stored with the names others (usually parents) gave you to get government-issued numbers to receive mail and pay taxes.

• That’s what you are. Artificial. You are a string of numbers assigned to height, weight, eye color, hair color, and the flaws in the ridges of our skin. That is your legal identity.

• Then again, your physical characteristics change. And the government changes people’s identities all the time for various reasons. You can even get a new life history with your new identity. So when can I be certain that you is still you?

• California lawmakers on Monday approved two bills intended to regulate drones. The Assembly voted 43-11 in favor of a bill [SB 142] that would make it a crime to fly a drone over private property without permission. The Senate voted 40-0 to approve a bill [AB 856] targeted a paparazzi that would make it a crime to use a drone to take pictures or video on private property. Both bills return to the other chamber for a final vote.

Civil Rights

• Human rights and free speech advocates expressed outrage Saturday at the news that three Al-Jazeera English journalists were sentenced to three years in Egyptian prison.

• The reporters — Canadian national Mohammed Fahmy, Australian journalist Peter Greste and Egyptian producer Baher Mohammed — were found guilty of broadcasting “false news” as well as an array of transgressions ranging from not registering with the country’s journalist syndicate to bringing in broadcast equipment with approval.

• A TSA screener is accused of sexually assaulting a woman at LaGuardia Airport in New York City after telling her she needed to be searched in the bathroom.

• The suspect did not post $3,000 bail and was moved to jail late Friday night.

• Greek-American former CIA analyst and case officer John Kiriakou will be honored with a 2015 PEN First Amendment Award during a ceremony in Beverly Hills, CA on November 16.

• PEN Center USA stated that they “are admirers of Kiriakou’s bravery in the face of unspeakable adversity.” They also state that the “Board and staff of PEN Center USA have followed your story with equal parts interest and shock. The stress of what you bore witness to during your time in the CIA, and the losses you’ve suffered as a result of your disclosures, is unfathomable. You join a group of patriotic whistleblowers who have our deepest respect ad admiration.”

• Former CIA officer John Kiriakou will receive one of the 2015 PEN First Amendment Awards, one of the most important literary awards in America. The ceremony will be held on November 16 in a ceremony in Beverly Hills.

• Kiriakou resigned from the CIA in 2004 and came to public attention three years later in 2007 when he gave an interview to ABC News in which he acknowledged the CIA’s use of waterboarding as a method of torture. For several years leading up to Kiriakou’s big reveal, the CIA had managed to keep secret the scope of its abusive interrogations of Al Qaeda-affiliated prisoners, which had the formal approval of President George W. Bush.

• Singapore-Washington ties shaken after revelation of bribe by CIA to hush up arrest of its intelligence officer

• [...]

• Singapore-United States ties were roiled in September 1965 after it was revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had offered the Singapore Government US$10 million to hush up the arrest of an American intelligence officer.

• Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew revealed details of the 1960-1961 episode in an interview with foreign correspondents that was televised on Aug 30.

• There are three main organs. The least-mentioned is the biggest: Government Communications Headquarters, based in a vast doughnut-shaped complex outside Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Its task is mainly signals intelligence.

• Alongside GCHQ is the Security Service or MI5. Its task is in-country security against foreign espionage, foreign and domestic terrorism and home-grown treachery.

• Only three of the 116 men still detained at Guantánamo Bay were apprehended by US forces, a Guardian review of military documents has uncovered.

• The foundations of the guilt of the remaining 113, whom US politicians often refer to as the “worst of the worst” terrorists, involves a degree of faith in the Pakistani and Afghan spies, warlords and security services who initially captured 98 of the remaining Guantánamo population.

• Last week, news broke that the Pentagon is considering several military and federal prisons to house some of the remaining 116 men held at Guantánamo Bay. The effort inaugurates a last-ditch bid to close the infamous facility, opened in 2002 at the inception of President George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror.” The sites being toured by top military brass include a Navy brig in South Carolina and an Army Disciplinary Barracks in Kansas.

• The image of torture in US popular culture is an intimate one: a government agent and a suspect in a dark cell, usually alone. But the reality of our state-sanctioned torture program is that it took a village, working in broad daylight, to pull it off.

• This summer, all eyes are on the American Psychological Association, as they should be. An independent investigation commissioned by the APA found that the organization had, as David Luban describes here, engaged “in a decade of duplicity to permit its members to participate in abusive interrogations while seeming to forbid it.” The report, lead-authored by former prosecutor David Hoffman, tells a tale of wholesale corruption and cooptation. Among its explosive findings is that APA officials refused to act on ethics complaints against military and CIA psychologists so as to shield them from sanction.

• But the APA was not the only institution asked to investigate these matters. State licensing boards in Ohio, New York, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama also received credible, well-documented complaints against implicated psychologists, including many of the same subjects of the improperly dismissed APA complaints. As lawyer and advisor for Dr. Trudy Bond and other courageous complainants in many of these cases, I witnessed how the licensing boards, like the APA, stonewalled and refused to bring formal charges, offering opaque, implausible, or seemingly pretextual justifications for their decisions.

• Unprecedented numbers have visited the largest exhibition ever held on the Magna Carta, presented at the British Library in London, 800 years after the “Great Charter” was sealed at Runnymede Meadows near Windsor, England.

• The Magna Carta is recognised by millions as a powerful symbol of civil liberties. It was sealed by King John in June 1215 and was “a major historical event in the social and political development of England and in the emergence of the rule of law against arbitrary power,” as the World Socialist Web Site noted on that date this year.

• This year is the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, one of the most awesome documents ever created. This magnificent document was signed way back in 1215 AD.

• I purposely do not use the word “awesome” lightly. The younger generation seems to love it and has taken it from senior citizens like me. When I was young I would simply utter “Wow, that’s cool Daddy-O.”

• In direct contravention of these legally binding resolutions, Canadian troops were on the ground in the North African country. On September 13, three weeks after Tripoli fell to the anti-Gaddafi National Transition Council, Canada’s state broadcaster reported: “CBC News has learned there are members of the Canadian Forces on the ground in Libya.”[i] A number of other media outlets reported that highly secretive Canadian special forces were fighting in Libya. On February 28, CTV.ca reported “that Canadian special forces are also on the ground in Libya” while Esprit du Corp editor Scott Taylor noted Canadian Special Operations Regiment’s flag colours in the Conservatives’ post-war celebration. But, any Canadian ‘boots on the ground’ in Libya violated UNSCR 1973, which explicitly excluded “a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.”

• Many of the famed Arab roles haven’t even been played by Arabs.

• “You’re not a robot,” she replies. And she’s right – he’s actually a sleeper agent for the CIA who’s just been “activated,” only to find out that the rest of the CIA, helmed by higher-up Yates (Topher Grace, ironically of the marijuana-centric “That ’70s Show”), is out to get him. In the subsequent goose chase around the town of Liman, W.Va., Mike reveals himself to be something else, too: a hero.

• About 132 kindergartners and pre-K students were already inside the building Monday when nearly 30 demonstrators waving American flags, and signs denouncing the Arabic Immersion Magnet School arrived, the Houston Chronicle reported.

• It’s very possible that mainstream media proprietors, executives and some of their journalists will read Fowler’s book and then scoff. Some will throw it away after three or four pages. In others it could easily provoke anger and indignation. Still others may well dispute at least some of the facts and/or the book’s interpretation of them. But Fowler won’t care. His book is for non-media people. He wrote it for media outsiders. He has tried to let “civilians” know why and how some events were ­reported the way they were. He’ll be absolutely confident of not ­getting accused of peddling pro-journalism propaganda. It’s a good and interesting book. Equally, it’s the type of book that’s best done from retirement.

• Seated in full body armor, with an ACE 21 assault rifle resting on her lap, Agent “China” speaks rather calmly about enlisting to patrol one of the scariest police beats in the world.

• In Guatemala, a judge has ordered that former Vice President Roxana Baldetti must remain in prison while her corruption trial takes place. The ruling comes on the heels of the Guatemalan Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday to lift the immunity from prosecution for President Otto Pérez Molina, clearing the way for his impeachment.

• One of the Army commanders who carried the mass murders out under Rios Montt was Otto Perez Molina, who was literally on the CIA payroll while the Army slaughtered indigenous people, unionists, college students, and anyone they declared a Communist-leaning “guerrilla sympathizer.”

• Days after Louisiana’s Governor Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency and the National Hurricane Center warned the White House that Hurricane Katrina could top the New Orleans levee system, the only FEMA official actually in the city itself — Marty J. Bahamonde — was not even supposed to be there. He had been sent in advance of the storm and was ordered to leave as it bore down, but could not because of the clogged roads.

• Michael Brown, the head of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), was known to have made it as far as Baton Rouge but seemed out of reach.

• On Wednesday, August 31, with tens of thousands trapped in the Superdome and looting out of control in the parts of the city still above water, Bahamonde e-mailed Brown directly: ”I know you know, the situation is past critical … Hotels are kicking people out, thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water”’

• A Washington State woman was pulled over and given a ticket after she admitted to breastfeeding while driving, a precarious practice for which she’d been busted before.

• This weekend tens of thousands protestors gathered in Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere calling for political reform in Malaysia. They were joined twice by 90-year-old Mahathir Mohamad, who ran the nation for more than two decades and has—like many of the protestors—called for the removal of embattled prime minister Najib Razak, whom he helped put in power.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The intellectual property interests are at it again, trying to leverage their rights to take away yours. No one knows this better than 44-year-old Eric Smith of Charleston, West Virginia. Smith has devoted his life to the office supply company founded by his father—a company that’s now under legal attack by printing behemoth Lexmark International, Inc.

Copyrights

• The metaphors we use determine how we see the world. When we’re calling all stories, songs, news, gossip, and bedtime stories the bland “content”, we reinforce that they’re contained by something.

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