● 10.31.15

● Links 31/10/2015: Twitch’s Arch Linux Challenge, GNOME 3.19.1

Posted in News Roundup at 8:32 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• You feel safe, wrapped in that comforting blanket of Linux. It soothes you and protects you from the lumbering monsters that hide within your server closet. That innocent penguin has always been there to ward away the evil…it’s glowing red eyes peering through the Windows of a house made of glass. And you stand tall, knowing the open source platform will always have your back. Or, will it?

Desktop

• Psst, want a cheap laptop? Philadelphia’s Nonprofit Technology Resources wants to save a pile of laptops from the scrapyard. So Ed Cummings, the president of the organization, said the organization is having a “Linux Laptop Pizza Party” on Saturday in the City of Brotherly Love, according to Juliana Reyes writing in Technical.ly.

Server

Kernel Space

• With recently having picked up four Western Digital Black HDDs, I decided to run some fresh hard drive benchmarks with the most common Linux file-systems to see how the performance compares atop Ubuntu 15.10.

• While there was still a fair amount of code churn this week, if Linus remains comfortable with the state of the kernel, Linux 4.3 will be released this weekend.

• Alex Deucher sent in another pull request of new AMDGPU/Radeon DRM material for landing in DRM-Next to in turn make it into Linux 4.4.

• Intel has published a new set of patches fpr speeding up AES-CBC encryption for processors having the AVX2 instruction set extension.

Graphics Stack

• Martin Peres at Intel has sent out the latest revised patches for supporting Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 (DRI3) with EGL.

• Alex Goins of NVIDIA posted the patches yesterday evening as version two of PRIME synchronization for the i915 DRM. The patches aren’t big but will hopefully fix tearing for those using PRIME on dual GPU systems.

• Maxime Ripard of Free Electrons published a set of nineteen patches yesterday for adding Allwinner A10 display engine support via a new DRM driver for the Linux kernel.

• The Mesa i965 DRI driver enables ARB_shader_clock support for Intel Ivy Bridge “Gen 7″ graphics and newer. This work will be part of Mesa 11.1.

• Complementing yesterday’s Are The Open-Source Graphics Drivers Good Enough For Steam Linux Gaming? article is a look at the Steam Linux gaming performance for three different Intel Linux systems running Ubuntu 15.10 and firing up the latest Steam client. This is the last of the planned series that began one week ago with the a 22-way comparison of NVIDIA/AMD GPUs on SteamOS.

• Following the 4K AMD/NVIDIA High-End GPU Comparison On SteamOS Linux and 22-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA/AMD Graphics Cards On SteamOS For Steam Linux Gaming articles, a few Phoronix readers were inquiring about the CPU and GPU utilization metrics during testing.

• So I started work on some follow-up tests to look at the CPU/GPU utilization during testing to try to answer that question. The Phoronix Test Suite is able to do so by simply setting MONITOR=cpu.usage,gpu.usage as an environment variable prior to running any benchmarks (or see phoronix-test-suite system-sensors or MONITOR=all for the other system sensors supported through Phodevi – The Phoronix Device Interface).

• As there’s been some discussion lately about the “size” of the different open-source Linux graphics drivers, here are some fresh looks at the rough code size of each of the main DRM/KMS kernel drivers as well as the Mesa/Gallium3D user-space drivers.

• Over the past week on Phoronix have been several featured articles looking at the performance of SteamOS with the proprietary AMD/NVIDIA graphics drivers: 22-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA/AMD Graphics Cards On SteamOS, 4K AMD/NVIDIA High-End GPU Comparison On SteamOS, and Is SteamOS Any Faster Than Ubuntu 15.10 Linux? One of the frequent questions that have come up since then is how the open-source driver performance compares to that of the binary blobs on SteamOS, so here are some of those benchmarks.

Applications

• Furius ISO Mount is an application that allows users to mount a large number of images in their operating systems with minimal effort. It’s designed to be used by beginners and experts alike, although the need for such apps has diminished.

• In Cockpit we run thousands of integration tests per day against pull requests and git master. Each test brings up up Cockpit in a full operating system VM, and hammers on it in some way. Without these tests it’s impossible to validate that Cockpit actually works.

• Thanks to everyone who contributed with bug reports and testing. What isn’t generally visible is that a lot of this happens behind the scenes downstream on distribution bug trackers, IRC, and so forth.

• PyRoom is the kind of application that you don’t ever hear people talking about, but that is completely surprising once you open it. It’s a distraction-free text editor that allows writers to focus on the writing and less on anything else.

• Arun Raghavan from the PulseAudio project has had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of the first point release of the PulseAudio 7 open-source sound server.

• The developers of the open source GStreamer multimedia framework have announced a few hours ago the release and immediate availability for download of the first maintenance version of the GStreamer 1.6 series.

• The developers of the open source, MPlayer-based MPV video player software have announced the release and immediate availability for download of version 0.12.0.

Proprietary

• If you are a systems administrator and you are tasked with ensuring your systems have a backup and replication process, Veeam is likely in your arsenal of tools.

• The Vivaldi developers, through Olafur Arnason and Ruarí Ødegaard, have announced the release of two consecutive Snapshots of the upcoming Vivaldi web browser for all supported operating systems.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• What’s new in this release (see below for details): – Implementation of the TransmitFile function. – More implementation of the Web Services DLL. – Improved video decoding. – Alternative for the deprecated prelink tool. – Major Turkish translation update. – Various bug fixes.

• Alexandre Julliard announced earlier today, October 30, the immediate availability for download and testing of a new development version of the Wine software that lets users run Windows apps and games on any GNU/Linux operating system.

• Wine 1.7.54 was released this morning as the latest bi-weekly Wine development release.

• Wine 1.7.54 offers improved video decoding, an implementation of the TransmitFile function, more of the Web Services DLL has been implemented, and more.

Games

• For Linux gamers, you can now set extra mouse buttons to do things, which is apparently a big thing (I never use mine).

• A new Humble Weekly Bundle has been released, and it’s called Day of the Devs. With one exception, all the games that have been made available also come with Linux support.

• Not the news I expected to hit my inbox this week. Fishing Planet an online fishing game aimed at realism is heading to Linux.

• The game was ported to Linux in time for the Halloween sale on Steam and is a bargain for fans of puzzle platformers.

• Guild Software thought that it will be nice for its Vendetta Online players to receive a new double update of the game, so that they don’t get bored on Halloween night.

• Guild Software thought that it will be nice for its Vendetta Online players to receive a new double update of the game, so that they don’t get bored on Halloween night.

• One of the things I do here is contact developers who promised a Linux version of a game which hasn’t yet surfaced, and the latest user request for me to check was Moebius: Empire Rising. It took a while to get a response on it, but they did kindly reply and allow me to publish their answer.

• On the flip-side, there are companies like Valve (with Steam) and Nvidia (with their Shield line) that are enabling some amazing, but proprietary, games to come to Linux (I still haven’t managed to make myself write it as “GNU/Linux”… I still think that looks goofy as a name). All of which lets me feel a bit better about playing these closed games.

• By buying games written for, and running on, a Free Software platform… I am helping to encourage further development, testing, and usage of that platform. Which is good.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• After introducing the first maintenance version of the soon-to-be-released Cinnamon 2.8 desktop environment, the most anticipated release of Cinnamon, Clement Lefebvre presents the second point release.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Some time ago KDE project bet on the separation of base libs, on somehing called frameworks, that create a set of libraries to be capable to be used for any other software project.

• This month began with a super KDE Sprint for KDevelop and Kate. I’ve mentioned the things I did and learned in my previous blog post.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Hi GNOMErs!

• The development of the next GNOME release, 3.20, has started, and the first development release, 3.19.1, is now available.

• The GNOME developers are working around the clock to implement the most awesome GNU/Linux technologies in their highly acclaimed open-source desktop environment used in numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems by default.

• Christian Hergert has shared a blog post with some of his plans for what he hopes to accomplish during the GNOME 3.20 cycle with regard to his GNOME Builder integrated development environment.

• GNOME Builder continues to be to GNOME as KDevelop is to KDE. GNOME Builder so far has supported features like extensive inline code completion, quick file access, code assistance, integrated GNOME/GTK document viewing, live markdown previews, and many other features. If you are not familiar with the current state of GNOME Builder, see the GNOME Wiki.

• Javier Jardón announced the release of GNOME 3.19.1 today as the first development release aiming toward GNOME 3.20.

• I’ve been busy working on the plumbing for what will become Builder 3.20. We have a really ambitious cycle ahead of us, so getting these core changes in place as soon as possible will help give us time to stabilize.

Distributions

Reviews

• You can use BackBox as your main Linux distro and do nothing more involved that run its security envelop to harden your immediate computing environment and surf the Web with anonymity.

• You can use BackBox more productively to dig deep into your network to sniff out security risks and lock down your connectivity and data. BackBox’s security tools are professional class.

• Pinguy Builder is a very useful app that can be used by anyone to create an Ubuntu Live CD from scratch or to back up an existing Ubuntu installation. The process should work with all the other Ubuntu-based distributions.

New Releases

• Suman Chakravartula has had the great pleasure of informing Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of the Fedora-based Rockstor 3.8-9 Linux operating system, known as an open-source, powerful and smart NAS (Network-attached storage) solution.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Gentoo Family

• Sabayon 15.11 is a modern and easy to use Linux distribution based on Gentoo, following an extreme, yet reliable, rolling release model.

• This is a monthly release generated, tested and published to mirrors by our build-servers containing the latest and greatest collection of software available in the Entropy repositories. The Change-log files related to this release are available on our mirrors.

• The Sabayon developers are happy to announce the release of their monthly rolling ISO images, dubbed Sabayon 15.11, which include all the updates that have been released during the month of October 2015.

Arch Family

• Twitch playing Pokémon was easy mode. Tomorrow, Twitch viewers will be invited to do something altogether more challenging: install Arch Linux. Using the same Twitch chat-driven concept as the collaborative Pokémon playthrough, anyone will be able to enter commands and control the installation process.

Ballnux/SUSE

• Now that the Release Candidate of the forthcoming openSUSE Leap 42.1 GNU/Linux operating system was made available for download and testing during the last two weeks, the time has come to take a look at Leap’s most prominent features.

Red Hat Family

• I met Alison Chaiken at LinuxCon 2010 in Boston, not long after she joined Nokia as a Meego technical consultant. A few months later, I interviewed her about her role at Nokia and her predictions about where open source technology was headed in 2011. She predicted an increasing role for cameras and microphones in mobile. “Cameras and microphones are used deliberately to take photos and record voice commands, but in the future they will be always on, gathering ambient data about the environment of users on the go,” she said.

• These days Alison works on automotive Linux systems programming at Mentor Graphics’ Embedded Software Division, and she spends a lot of time working with, contributing to, and speaking about systemd. She’ll be leading a training session, systemd, the Next-Generation Linux System Manager, at LISA15 in Washington D.C. on November 9. In this interview, she makes another prediction—that sys admins will enjoy using systemd.

• Multinational software company, Citrix, has partnered with open source company, Red Hat, on new product integrations for building OpenStack Clouds. As part of the collaboration, Citrix unveiled the integration and certification of its application delivery controller, NetScaler, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

• Citrix said, in a statement, that this partnership will enable customers to assemble their Cloud infrastructure using components from Citrix and Red Hat for the first time.

• Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ansible, Inc., a provider of powerful IT automation solutions designed to help enterprises move toward frictionless IT.

• Wall Street brokerages expect that Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) will post $0.31 earnings per share for the current quarter, according to Zacks Investment Research. Nine analysts have provided estimates for Red Hat’s earnings. The highest EPS estimate is $0.32 and the lowest is $0.30. Red Hat posted earnings of $0.30 per share in the same quarter last year, which suggests a positive year-over-year growth rate of 3.3%. The firm is expected to issue its next earnings results on Thursday, December 17th.

• The Ceph Community, an open-source object and file cloud storage stack, has formed an advisory board that will work in governance with the community.

• The Ceph Advisory Board will assist the community in driving open-source software-defined storage technology, and in collaborating with the community’s technical and user committees.

Fedora

• In somewhat of an embarrassing move and indicating that KDBUS likely won’t be proposed for Linux 4.4, this in-kernel IPC mechanism is being temporarily stripped out of Fedora.

• Fedora developers added KDBUS to their Rawhide kernel this summer at the request of the systemd developers involved in KDBUS development. With systemd 221, the upstream developers also encouraged Linux distributions to begin shipping KDBUS even though it wasn’t part of the mainline kernel. This turned out to be a mistake.

• You might have heard of the C.H.I.P., the 9$ computer. After contributing to their Kickstarter, and with no intent on hacking on more kernel code than is absolutely necessary, I requested the “final” devices, when chumps like me can read loads of docs and get accessories for it easily.

• While Fedora 23 failed its Go/No-Go meeting yesterday, at today’s meeting this next installment of Red Hat’s Fedora Linux was cleared to be released next week.

• Fedora 23 RC10 has been promoted to final at today’s meeting, per the notes.

• Fedora 23 will now be officially released next Tuesday, 3 November. Fedora 23 is in exceptional shape and comes with a variety of new features. I personally look forward to upgrading to Fedora 23 on my main production system once switching over to a Skylake ultrabook.

• The Fedora KDE community has been dealt a blow today with one of the co-maintainers of the Fedora KDE packages resigning from those duties along with his roles relating to the Fedora KDE special interest group.

• Kevin Kofler, who has long been involved in KDE packaging for Fedora and advancing KDE on Fedora, he is stepping down from their KDE SIG and from co-maintaining all of the Qt/KDE packages he maintains for the distribution — except for the few packages he is the upstream maintainer of in the KDE world.

• Jan Kurik tonight announced that Fedora 23 is GO for release. An internal RC10 will be created and tested and if no major issues arise, it will be released as Fedora 23 next week. For KDE users it may not be a day for celebration, as Phoronix.com’s Michael Larabel reported today that a co-maintainer for KDE in Fedora said that upcoming version 23 is “easily the worse KDE spin we have ever released.” Yikes.

• Linux Voice magazine periodically releases older issues of their magazine under a CC-BY-SA license so the entire Linux community can read, share and use the articles they publish (they also donate 50% of their profits to the Free Software community).Today, they released Issue 12 of Linux Voice under the CC-BY-SA license, nine months after the release of the magazine back in February.

• Of particular interest to Fedora users is at the end of their Distro Hopper segment, they take a look at our first ever release — Fedora Core 1. While obviously a little dated, with the release of Fedora 23 so close, there is also a review of Fedora 21. The issue also features an interview with systemd developer Lennart Poettering.

• The Red Hat developers have finally greenlit the launch of Fedora 23 and it looks like the new version will finally arrive on November 3, the date that was previously tracked.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical’s Sergio Schvezov announced the release of the fourth maintenance build of the snapcraft utility that can be used by anyone to easily create Snappy packages for the Ubuntu Snappy Core operating system.

• On the last day of October, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily email to inform us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the upcoming OTA-8 software update.

• Canonical’s David Planella sent in his bi-monthly report to inform us all about the last things that happened in the Ubuntu world. The report includes information about the work done by the Ubuntu Community Team during the last two weeks.

Devices/Embedded

• Solu Machines recently launched a Kickstarter campaign with the hopes of releasing a completely new class of device. Dubbed the Solu, the company has prototyped a 4.5-inch cloud-powered computer with a peculiar square form factor. Its touchscreen display allows users to navigate the device with their fingers, like they would a smartphone or tablet.

• Solu Machines recently launched a Kickstarter campaign with the hopes of releasing a completely new class of device. Dubbed the Solu, the company has prototyped a 4.5-inch cloud-powered computer with a peculiar square form factor. Its touchscreen display allows users to navigate the device with their fingers, like they would a smartphone or tablet.

• Solu Machines is running a Kickstarter campaign for an unusual type of computer. The Solu is a mini PC that measures about 4.5 inches square and has a touchscreen display, so you can use it sort of like a mobile phone or tablet. But connect it to a monitor and keyboard and the Solu becomes a touchpad that you can use to interact with desktop on a bigger screen.

• VIA’s “EPIA-E900” SBC uses VIA’s own Eden X4 processor, and debuts a reincarnated “Pico-ITXe” form-factor featuring MXM-based PCIe and multi-I/O expansion.

• VIA’s new EPIA-E900 single-board computer introduces a second generation of the Pico-ITXe form-factor that VIA demoed at an Embedded Systems Conference back in October 2008. Although this Pico-ITXe re-spin has the same name, it bears little resemblance to the now-defunct Pico-ITXe v1.0. While the original Pico-ITXe footprint measured 100 x 72mm and included self-stacking SUMIT expansion, today’s Pico-ITXe is 38mm longer and expands with a coplanar MXM slot that carries a collection of I/O interfaces plus PCI Express.

Phones

Tizen

• VLC is a cross platform open source media player that is created by the VideoLAN Project. It supports many different audio and video compression methods and file formats and Is regarded as one of the best and most versatile media players out there.

Android

• Back in March I was given an LG G Watch R, the first Android Wear smartwatch to have a full round display (the Moto 360 was earlier, but has a bit cut off the bottom of the actual display). I’d promised I’d get round to making some comments about it once I’d had it for a while and have failed to do so until now. Note that this is very much comments on the watch from a user point of view; I haven’t got to the point of trying to do any development or other hacking of it.

• That’s where people like GM’s Phil Abram come into play. Abram — who has stints at Sonos and Sony on his résumé — led the company’s adoption of CarPlay and Android Auto, which will eventually reach just about every vehicle GM sells in the US. He’s also coming off a connected car deployment in China after rolling out in Europe and North America, where LTE currently ships on 16 models.

• ChromeOS is a stripped-down Gentoo-derived GNU/Linux operating system built using Chromium OS. At its simplest, it’s a browser as operating system.

• Before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way: there’s no practical application for the apps demonstrated below, at least not in the way they’re being used. You can’t seriously play a game meant for a 20-button controller on a screen smaller than two inches across, even if your fingers are tiny enough to hit the virtual buttons. This is the work of an enthusiast gamer and Android fan. It doesn’t have to make sense.

• Two Android devices, using the very same build of the OS, can be quite different in reality if they’re made by different manufacturers. So much so that it’s not rare for (uninitiated) friends and family members to ask us whether a heavily skinned device is an Android device. It’s kind of weird.

• This week, the Nexus 6P and 5X received a substantial new feature: Factory images. Factory images are a great failsafe to have with a Nexus device, just in case you need to restore it back to its original state if catastrophe strikes.

• This update was one of the few highlights in a rather slow week of updates in Android Land. Of course, if Android really does swallow up Chrome, we can’t wait to add a whole list of Android-powered PCs to this weekly compilation.

• Back at Google I/O in 2014, Google announced Android Auto. Their first step into the car – well other than their self-driving cars. The idea was to provide a seamless experience in terms of infotainment systems in our cars. Because let’s face it, the car makers suck at making infotainment systems. However, Google also wanted that data (reports have stated that Google wants basically an OBD-II dump, while others have stated that it’s just whether the car is in park, what the headlights are doing, etc). After all, Google collects data about everything.

• Root. It’s a word we’re mostly familiar with here. Despite the ever-increasing attempts by Google to make it harder to achieve and use (and most likely this will continue, with the predicted convergence of the heavily locked-down ChromeOS and Android platforms), rooting remains incredibly popular on XDA.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source enterprise use cases appear to be on the rise, at least anecdotally, with an increasing number of CIOs, IT directors and Chief Technology Officers telling CIO UK about investigating and adopting free and open source alternatives to proprietary software as they seek to gain freedom and flexibility, cut costs, increase agility, improve code quality and avoid vendor lock-in.

• UK businesses it seems have also finally conquered their “irrational fears” of open source and security fears are also on the wane, reports have suggested.

• The most recent studies by the non-profit Linux Foundation in its Enterprise End User Trends reports have revealed year on year increases in Linux deployments over the last four years, with the open operating system seeing particular growth as a platform for cloud computing.

• Neo4j graph NoSQL database team launches open source graph query language called openCypher. Neo Technology, the company behind the graph database, announced last week at GraphConnect Conference, the launch of the open source project that will be available to technology providers as a common language for querying graph data.

• The Tor Project has launched the beta version of Tor Messenger, an easy-to-use encrypted message client for those concerned about their privacy and potential surveillance.

• Many organizations use static analysis security testing (SAST) and dynamic analysis security testing (DAST) for monitoring, but while these tools are excellent for finding bugs in code written by internal developers, they are not effective in detecting known open source vulnerabilities in application code. In fact, open source vulnerabilities are far too complex to be found by these automated tools.

Events

• Alan Clark, chairman of the board at the OpenStack Foundation, discusses the progress made at the OpenStack Summit this week.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Earlier this year Samsung’s Julien Isorce posted VA-API support for Nouveau to better video acceleration for this open-source NVIDIA driver. Since then he’s been working on some Gallium3D VA improvements to benefit the use-case of Chromium’s GStreamer back-end.

SaaS/Big Data

• At the OpenStack Summit here, there have been a number of common themes and questions that keep surfacing. Time and again panels are discussing why contributions matter and how Amazon is or isn’t the competition.

• One such panel session was titled “The OpenStack Orchestra: The Next Wave of OpenStack Specialist Startups,” and included executives from Mirantis, Tesora, SwiftStack and PLUMgrid.

• Networking has always been a part of the open source OpenStack cloud platform, but it has never been more popular, or as exciting as it is now. At the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, one of the hottest topics is networking, as organizations of all sizes turn to the cloud for Software Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization capabilities.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 5.1 Alpha has launched, ready for the weekend. Enthusiasts and community members will be able to grab the software and partake in the first Bug Hunting Session from Friday October 30th to Sunday November 1st. The final build of LibreOffice 5.1 is expected to launch in February next year.

BSD

• I’m Henning, not 20 any more, OpenBSD developer since 2002. I architected & wrote large parts of pf, started, architected and wrote large parts of bgpd and ntpd. The imsg & privsep framework I wrote for bgpd is in almost all newer OpenBSD daemons. I also worked a lot in the network stack, including many redesigns. One of the last bigger projects I did was the replacement of the queueing subsystem.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Stepping ahead of the Linux 4.3 release is a Halloween release of GNU Hurd 0.7, GNU Mach 1.6, and GNU MIG 1.6.

• GNU Hurd 0.7 improves the node cache for the EXT2 file-system code (ext2fs), improves the native fakeroot tool, provides a new rpcscan utility, fixes a long-standing synchronization issue with the file-system translators and other components, and the Hurd code has been ported to work with newer GCC versions and libc.

• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) contains provisions penalizing the circumvention of “technological protection measures”. These measures are digital jails denying users access to the software and other digital works they possess, preventing them from examining or changing the software on their devices. While such measures are nominally meant to protect copyrighted works, in reality they function as unacceptable restrictions on computer user freedom. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) opposes such Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) systems. The FSF further opposes the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, and demands that Congress repeal those provisions. Other countries with similar laws should follow suit.

• Every three years, the Library of Congress reviews proposals granting limited exemptions from the DMCA’s broad ban on users controlling the software and data on devices encumbered with DRM. This flawed process is meant to lessen the DMCA’s harm by giving user rights advocates an opportunity to request exemptions allowing circumvention in particular cases. Even when such petitions succeed, the resulting exemptions last only three years, meaning that advocates must repeatedly fight to retain the limited ground they won.

Licensing

• Each approach strikes a different balance between your costs, benefits and PCI risks and workload. The table sums up the highlights, the details of which I’ll explain further.

Openness/Sharing

• Croatia’s e-Građani (eCitizens) project was declared the best European eGovernment services project, in an awards ceremony at the Open Government Partnership Global Summit 2015 in Mexico on Wednesday.

Open Access/Content

• On Thursday, Harvard Law School announced its Free the Law project, teaming up with a company called Ravel to scan all federal court decisions and all state court decisions, and then place them all online for free. This is pretty huge. While some courts now release most decisions as freely available PDFs, many federal courts still have them hidden behind the ridiculous PACER system, and state court decisions are totally hit or miss. And, of course, tons of historical cases are completely buried. While there are some giant companies like Westlaw and LexisNexis that provide lawyers access to decisions, those cost a ton — and the public is left out.

• The Department of Education has launched #GoOpen, a campaign to encourage schools to use open educational resources (OER). To add force to the hashtag, the Department proposed new regulation that any tool developed with its federal grant funds will be required to have an open license, would which allow schools to use and modify those resources for free.

Open Hardware

• A pair of engineers in Singapore, Andrew “Bunny” Huang and Sean Cross, have developed a working laptop which was designed to be completely open sourced, with no proprietary drivers or software of any kind. The Novena laptop is powered by a Cortex A9 and an FPGA and runs Debian, even communications are handled by a software-defined radio board. This is more of a proof of concept than a marketable machine but the links at The Register will take you to the details on how you could build one yourself. Even the bezel is open source and modifiable, it is a laptop with an upgradable screen!

Programming

• PHP 7.0 RC6 was released today for what may be the final release candidate ahead of PHP 7.0.0′s official premiere in two weeks.

• Ceylon, the programming language based on Java and developed at Red Hat, is out with a new version of this programming language that can be lowered down into JavaScript.

• We’re pleased and proud to unleash PyPy 4.0.0, a major update of the PyPy python 2.7.10 compatible interpreter with a Just In Time compiler. We have improved warmup time and memory overhead used for tracing, added vectorization for numpy and general loops where possible on x86 hardware (disabled by default), refactored rough edges in rpython, and increased functionality of numpy.

• PyPy 4.0.0 was released today as a major update for this Python 2.7 interpreter and JIT compiler.

Leftovers

• CAIRO: Egypt confirmed on Saturday that a Russian passenger plan had crashed in central Sinai.

• A statement from the prime minister’s office said Sherif Ismail had formed a cabinet level crisis committee to deal with the crash.

• The plane, travelling from the Egyptian resort Sharm el-Sheikh to the Russian city of St Petersburg, disappeared from radar screens in Cypriot airspace, Russia’s RIA news agency reported, citing a Russian aviation authority source.

• The source said the aircraft was an Airbus A-321 jet, had 224 passengers and crew on board, and was operated by Russian airline Kogalymavia.

• Sunday, October 16 was declared Steve Jobs Day by California’s Governor Brown. I admire Brown for taking a step to recognize Jobs’ extraordinary contributions, but I couldn’t help be struck by Rob Pike’s comments on the death of Dennis Ritchie a few weeks after Steve Jobs.

• I’ve been lamenting the demise of the Unix philosophy: tools should do one thing, and do it well.

• It takes a little longer, but it’s so much nicer if you can read an email thread from top to bottom rather than having to scroll to the bottom, read, scroll backward, read, scroll backward, read, etc. Yes, it’s the easiest way to reply to a message, but it’s an enemy of comprehension for recipients.

Security

• Lauri Love made an appearance on the BBC flagship current affairs programme Newsnight on Friday 23 October, explaining the significance of a widely publicised hack of telecoms provider TalkTalk, which has led to the disclosure of personal information of millions of subscribers.

• Free website hosting service 000webhost has suffered a data breach which has placed the service’s security practices under scrutiny.

• 000webhost is a free web hosting service which supports both PHP and MySQL, catering for millions of users worldwide. On Wednesday, the firm told users in a Facebook message that the company had suffered a databreach on its main server.

• Google has given Symantec an offer it can’t refuse: give a thorough accounting of its ailing certificate authority process or risk having the world’s most popular browser—Chrome—issue scary warnings when end users visit HTTPS-protected websites that use Symantec credentials.

• The ultimatum, made in a blog post published Wednesday afternoon, came five weeks after Symantec fired an undisclosed number of employees caught issuing unauthorized transport layer security certificates. The mis-issued certificates made it possible for the holders to impersonate HTTPS-protected Google webpages.

• Conjecture on cracked primes for the Diffie-Hellman asymmetric algorithm is in recent news, suggesting that several nations have broken primes in common use and can read all traffic…

• While the software was designed to be run on an Intel NUC using Linux (or similar device), it could conceivably be run on other platforms and setups. The code is open, after all, and there for the taking. In any case, here are the specs described by the company:

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Syrian rebels wielding US-made anti-tank missiles have become YouTube war heroes after a surge in successful attacks on forces loyal to dictator Bashar al-Assad.

• Use of the BGM-71 TOW missiles – which cost $50,000 a piece – is up over 850% in October with the American-made weapons responsible for the destruction of scores of Syrian army tanks. Charles Lister, a Syrian expert at the Brookings Institute, said there had been 82 uses of the missiles as of 20 October up from 13 in September.

• It’s been 43 years since the CIA cut off support to the Tibetan guerillas that the agency trained and armed to fight a covert war against China. Yet, a monument to the CIA’s secret war in Tibet is still standing in Pokhara, Nepal.

• The former Hotel Mount Annapurna building sits on a quiet side street off the Pokhara airport. Established in 1972 with CIA funds, the hotel was meant to give former Tibetan resistance fighters based in Nepal’s nearby Mustang region a livelihood and a future as they laid down their arms and transitioned to life as refugees.

• In particular, it is becoming more common for countries to punish people who express sensitive opinions on social media and in other forums. Perhaps the most high-profile example of the past year occurred in March, following the death of Singapore’s first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew. Five days after Lee died, a sixteen-year-old named Amos Yee tweeted mild criticism of the former Prime Minister and linked to an eight-and-a-half-minute YouTube clip in which he condemned Lee as a “horrible person” whose legacy was to make people afraid to criticize him. Yee appears to have had a point, because, days later, the police arrested him, charging him with having violated Singapore’s Harassment Act, which restricts “threatening, abusive, or insulting communication.”

• According to a Brazilian lawmaker, US Central Intelligence Agency is active in several Latin American countries, trying to destabilize the situation there.

• The runaway military surveillance blimp that came loose from an Army base in Maryland on Wednesday dragged its torn tether through power lines in two Pennsylvania counties before crashing into the woods.

• But at least no one died.

• The same can’t be said of a recent accident involving a U.S. military blimp in Kabul that constantly hovers over the Afghan capital. (See The Above, a short documentary from The Intercept’s Field of Vision project, also embedded below.)

• On Oct. 11, a British military helicopter was coming in for a landing at NATO headquarters, where the blimp is moored. According to an eyewitness who spoke to the BBC, the helicopter hit the tether, which then wrapped itself around the rotors. The helicopter crashed, killing five people — two U.S. service members, two British service members, and a French contract civilian — and injuring five more.

• WESTERN NATIONS, primarily the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, and Russia, have helped increase corruption among Middle Eastern and North African states by selling them vast quantities of weapons with little oversight, according to a new report by Transparency International. The resultant corruption, the report says, has worsened the region’s many conflicts, weakened military coherency, boosted extremism, and “formed a narrative for violent extremist groups.”

• Donald Trump has claimed many, many times—on TV, at campaign stops and at candidate debates—that he opposed the 2003 US invasion of Iraq in real time. “You know, I was the one, and I said it very strongly, and you know this, and it was reported by everybody, because unfortunately I get a disproportionate amount of publicity,” Trump told CNN‘s Chris Cuomo (10/6/15). At the September debate (9/18/15), he said he could point to “25 different stories” about him being against the war before it started.

• A couple points before dissecting the journalistic efficacy of disseminating these vague, half-assed threats. Firstly, it’s odd that the New York Post is and continues to be the sole source of this bulletin. The FBI typically posts major threats on its website, but this one, according to the FBI press officer FAIR contacted, was “meant for law enforcement and not to be disseminated.”

Transparency Reporting

• President Barack Obama found himself drawn into Hillary Clinton’s email controversy Friday as the White House acknowledged the State Department is withholding a set of messages Obama and Clinton exchanged during her four years as secretary of state.

• As the State Department made public a new batch of more than 7,200 pages of Clinton’s emails, officials stressed that the White House was not asserting executive privilege over the Obama-Clinton exchanges but insisting that they be treated as presidential records, which are normally not available to the public until between five and 12 years after a president leaves office.

Finance

• We all know how hard it is for folks like New York Times columnist David Brooks, living in a remote corner of Washington, to find out about changes in public policy. Therefore it wasn’t surprising to see him praise Marco Rubio, Brooks’ favored candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, for a welfare reform proposal that was put in place almost 20 years ago.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The CIA’s internal watchdog has criticized the spy agency for introducing Hollywood representatives to undercover officers and allegedly being careless in talking to them about agency secrets.

• In a 20-page report prepared in 2012 and stamped “secret,” the spy agency’s Inspector General said that CIA employees who had contact with Hollywood representatives had “not always complied” with agency regulations intended to stop leaks of classified information.

• The report was made public on Wednesday by Judicial Watch, a conservative group which said it obtained the document under the Freedom of Information Act.

• If Europe is serious about regulating the car industry and protecting public health and the climate, it needs to stand up to the car lobby rather than allowing those resisting regulation to write it.

• I am sorry to have to do this, but as a representative of the mainstream media, I hereby declare war on GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz.

• In the media’s defense, Cruz started it. Literally.

• I received a fundraising email from him today that said, “I am declaring war on the liberal media.” Liberal media and mainstream media are synonymous, generally defined by Republicans as “any media outlet that presents facts that prove we’re lying.”

• The Koch-backed measures to eviscerate Wisconsin’s limits on money in elections and neuter the state’s election watchdog hit a stumbling block in the state senate this week, with a handful of Republican senators expressing concern that the measures go too far.

Censorship

• Last week the UK’s Cabinet Office sought silently to remove the reference to “international law” from the Ministerial Code.

• The text had stated that there was an “overarching duty on ministers to comply with the law including international law and treaty obligations and to uphold the administration of justice and to protect the integrity of public life”. The new version states that there is an “overarching duty on ministers to comply with the law and to protect the integrity of public life”.

• In debates about freedom of expression in the UK, a common refrain is ‘well, at least we’re not as bad as Over There’. Whether it’s France banning burqas, Poland prosecuting those who ‘insult Poland’, or half of Europe prosecuting Holocaust denial, we’ve usually been able to point to some more authoritarian, European neighbour to reassurre ourselves that we’re not as bad as all that. Well, it’s time we snapped out of it, and realised we’re no longer in a position to do this. The list of countries that are worse than us on free expression is rapidly diminishing.

• A new chat tool has been launched in an effort to improve the security of online messaging.

• Tor Messenger allows users to chat over the Tor (The Onion Router) network in a way which hides the location of participants.

• China’s leaders have drafted the country’s first film law, which would ease the censorship process and be intended to boost movie production in the world’s second biggest movie market.

• China’s film market is heavy regulated, but, with no clear published guidelines, filmmakers are unsure what can pass censors or not.

• China’s heavy censorship of Hollywood films is not only affecting Chinese moviegoers, but also how American studios produce their films, and Beijing’s Internet censorship was ranked the world’s worst, according to a U.S. watchdog organization.

• A new report co-authored by Bates Dean of Faculty Matthew Auer in this fall’s issue of the journal Index on Censorship pulls back the veil for the first time on the social media censorship surrounding Under the Dome.

• A number of circumvention tools designed to bypass the Firewall have been shut down in the past year, including projects such as Shadowsocks, whose developer was visited by the police. Outside of China, anti-censorship activists and developers have also been hit, with groups such as GreatFire.org suffering major DDoS attacks attributed to the Chinese government. Currently, China is in the process of finalizing a new Internet security law that will bolster Internet censorship and further strengthen information control within the country.

• While the British press were speculating as to the cause of Peng’s powdery complexion, netizens saw their photos vanish from the internet as censors stepped in to maintain the illusion of a gaffe free state visit.

• The photos were taken at a banquet held by the Lord Mayor of London in Xi Jinping’s honor which took place at Guildhall, London on Wednesday. The usually rather stylish Peng was seen with powdery white smears around her forehead, nose and upper lip.

• According to the American Library Association (ALA), there were at least 311 reported challenges in 2014, with many going unreported. Some of the books on the list may serve as a surprise: “And Tango Makes Three” by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, a picture book about a zookeeper’s account of two male penguins caring for a baby penguin; “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky, written from a teenager’s perspective and covering such topics as substance abuse and sex; “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini, which chronicles the friendship of two boys from Afghanistan, yet has violence and offensive language.

• In an authoritarian regime, nothing gets published or broadcast without state approval. I watched the inner workings of direct government control of the press during a visit to Turkmenistan. Every magazine and newspaper was run out of the same office. Many were edited by the same people, all wearing the same lapel pins, an image of the country’s then-dictator, Sapamurat “Turkmenbashi” Niyazov.

• [...]

• If NPR’s “Marketplace” has ever interviewed a communist about why capitalism sucks and should be replaced, I missed it. Biased? You betcha. Always. Inevitably.

• Here in the United States, censorship is usually self-directed. No one from the State Ministry of Propaganda calls The New York Times to tell them what’s fit to print. They make those decisions on their own. But those calls are informed by who those editors are — the elite schools from which they graduated (Columbia Journalism School), their class background (parents rich enough to send them to Columbia J-School), input from their friends and colleagues (other people whose parents are rich enough to send them to Columbia J-School). Who they are determines what makes it into print.

• Some 150 film professionals and institutions from Turkey, including documentary directors, critics and festival organizers, have announced that they will not be attending the Antalya International Film Festival until the festival’s management lifts its censorship of domestically produced documentaries.

• Mobilizing for Digital Freedom has sent an open letter to the Prime Minister’s Office of Turkey to express their concerns about the censorship and restrictions being imposed on Turkish journalists and websites, calling on the Prime Ministry to end this censorship ahead of the Nov. 1 snap election.

• The letter includes the signatures of various human rights, media, and political organizations in Turkey and around the world. In the letter, Access states that they sent the letter to “request the cessation of online censorship of independent news organizations and journalists. We demand authorities refrain from imposing limitations on access to the Internet or specific online services and remind the government of its duty to protect the rights of people in Turkey to freely seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

• We are writing to you before the November 1, 2015 general elections, to request the cessation of online censorship of independent news organizations and citizen journalists. We demand authorities refrain from imposing limitations on access to the Internet or specific online services and remind the government of its duty to protect the right of people in Turkey to freely seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

• The UK Prime Minister has doubled down on his Great Firewall of Cameron, which is an arrangement whereby the UK ISPs “voluntarily” agreed to block websites that had been secretly ruled to be pornographic, unless customers specifically asked them not tp.

• The Ubud Writers and Readers Festival has cancelled events discussing the 1965 Indonesian massacres, after police threatened to revoke the festival permit.

• Over 300 radio and TV stations in Ecuador could disappear overnight, according to a warning issued by Ecuadorian NGO Fundamedios on Wednesday, October 21.

• The Agency for Regulation and Control of Telecommunications (Arcotel) is currently reviewing hundreds of network licenses, and claims that the government agency that originally issued them was “not authorized” to do so.

• Arcotel’s list includes media outlets whose licenses were automatically renewed by the Telecommunications Superintendency, formerly known as Supertel, between 1995 and 1997.

• Internet censorship will inevitably impact Malaysia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and discourage businesses from operating here, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) said today.

• HRW Asia Director Brad Adams added that research from China, known for its multiple bans on many popular websites like Facebook and Twitter, has shown that the move to stifle Internet freedom has affected the country’s monetary gains.

• A top scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) filed a whistleblower complaint Wednesday that accuses the agency of harassment and retaliation for his work showing harmful effects on monarch butterflies from a class of widely used insecticides know as neonicotinoids, or neonics.

• [...]

• Since late March, I have been subjected to a sudden but escalating pattern of impediments and disruption of my scientific work, restraints on my ability to communicate with scientific colleagues, as well as the media and a growing professional toll that is making further scientific work in ARS untenable. This abrupt onset of actions undoubtedly appears to have been prompted by the scientific activities that are supposed to be specifically safeguarded and encouraged under the USDA Scientific Integrity Policy.

• This follows the European Parliament vote on net-neutrality regulations, which will ban the current voluntary agreement that the Government pressured Internet Service Providers into accepting, where they provide filters for the Internet and encourage customers to use them. Some of these filters are now switched on by default.

• We’ve said it before, and we will keep saying it: filters are flawed. They block lots of “good” websites and let through many “bad” ones (and anyway, who gets to decide the difference?) They apply equally to your seven-year old and your 17 year-old despite their different needs. They affect many more people than just children, and most housholds switch them off, as they just get in the way.

Privacy

• Edward Snowden’s efforts to inform the American public just how far the NSA tick is dug in to the American information streams revealed that while the United States, with that pesky 1st Amendment, does not yet have something like China’s “Great Firewall” actively blocking access and dissemination of information that the government doesn’t like, what the US government does have is a pervasive, never-sleeping information Panopticon where everything every American (and as much of the entire world as they can reach) does online, or with their cell phone, is saved, supposedly “just in case”, and saved forever, while also being sifted for “key words” or phrases, you know, “just in case”.

• The future just got a bit brighter for Edward Snowden.

• The European Union called on its member states to protect the former NSA contractor, recommending in a close vote Thursday that states drop charges against the fugitive whistleblower and reject U.S. extradition requests.

• The 285-281 vote in the European Parliament suggested that states “drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as whistleblower and international human rights defender.”

• Police are to be given the power to view everyone’s entire internet history in a new surveillance bill to be published next week, according to reports.

• The proposed legislation will make it a legal requirement for telecoms and internet service providers to retain all of the web browsing history for all customers for a period of 12 months, according to the Daily Telegraph.

• Authorities such as the police, intelligence services and the National Crime Agency would be able to access specific web addresses people had visited, but would need approval from a judge to view the content of websites, emails and social media messages.

• Theresa May will next week refuse to allow judges to sign off spying warrants after the government’s top lawyer warned they could paralyse the intelligence agencies.

• The major reform has been called for by civil liberty campaigners and backed by a top QC’s independent report.

• But The Sun can reveal that the Home Secretary has been told by the Attorney General that all judges’ spying decisions could be judicially reviewed under controversial human rights laws.

• The director of the FBI confirmed to Congress last week that the agency flew surveillance aircraft over Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore during the protests following the police killings of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. Today the ACLU is releasing FBI and FAA documents with new details about the Baltimore surveillance flights.

• The new internal documents, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, reveal that the government was doing more than just monitoring the situation with regular cameras. The FBI was using advanced technology like infrared and night-vision cameras, and it is holding on to surveillance video it recorded from the sky.

• Today, the 100,000th person signed our petition calling on President Obama to reject compelled backdoors in our communications.

• The campaign, hosted at SaveCrypto.org, uses the White House’s We the People API to feed signatures into a petition hosted on Obama’s preferred petition platform. The campaign was the work of over 40 nonprofits and tech companies, including Access Now, Fight for the Future, OpenMedia, Mozilla, Sum of Us, Twitter, Google, and DropBox. President Obama has promised to respond to any petition that gets 100,000 signatures within 30 days.

• Peers are preparing for a fresh showdown with the Government over plans to allow police to examine people’s online browsing histories. They are also concerned that the Government has rejected calls for judges, rather than ministers, to issue eavesdropping warrants.

• The moves, which come days after the House of Lords torpedoed George Osborne’s tax credit plans, reflect growing anxiety over the impact of a wide-ranging surveillance Bill to be published next week.

• Is there a tear in the spy fiction continuum? On Monday, the new James Bond movie Spectre premiered to the sort of five-star reviews normally reserved for subtitled documentaries about extraordinary rendition. On Wednesday the Times was given unprecedented access to GCHQ, which it ran, tie-in style, beneath the splash headline “For your eyes only”. And in a further coup for state-of-the-art news planning technology, next week sees the publication of the draft investigatory powers bill, with senior police officers demanding the right to view the web-browsing history of every internet user in the country.

• I don’t know who’s running this mutually masturbatorial PR campaign – my guess is a slightly disappointing nuclear publicist in the mould of Jonathan Pryce’s media baron in Tomorrow Never Dies. But I will of course withdraw that remark if they can produce a fourth nipple or a properly shaggable concubine with a sledgehammer single entendre name. Something like Snowden Asfaka.

• SNOOPERS’ CHARTER VERSION 2.0, otherwise known as the Investigatory Powers Bill, could allow police to view the web browsing history of everyone in Britain.

• A report at The Times (paywalled) said that senior police officials have lobbied the government to force telecoms companies to retain data for 12 months that would reveal specific web addresses visited by customers.

• This could mean that, under the Investigatory Powers Bill that is expected to be introduced by home secretary Theresa May next week, ISPs will be required to retain customers’ web browsing histories for a year.

• Access to this data would then be granted to police, the National Crime Agency, intelligence agencies and HM Revenue and Customs, according to the report. However, approval from a judge would be required to view the content of websites, emails and social media messages.

• Want to travel from anywhere to anywhere in the United States without being hassled by law enforcement officers? Good luck with that, citizen.

• USA Today’s Brad Heath pointed out an interesting footnote in an asset forfeiture filing that made the assertion that traveling from Chicago to Los Angeles is inherently suspicious. (One presumes the opposite is also true.)

• French socialists have, once again, betrayed liberties to strenghen surveillance! Claude Moraes’ report has been adopted today by the European Parliament. This report was condemning mass surveillance and calling for an investigation of French surveillance laws. But thanks to the pressure exerted by French Socialist MEPs on their party, any mention of investigation into French laws has been erased.

• Federal prosecutors have said that they are moving forward in their attempt to compel Apple to unlock a seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7, even after the defendant in a felony drug case has now pleaded guilty.

• The judge in the case, United States Magistrate Judge James Orenstein, said in a Friday court filing that he is confused.

• The defendant, Jun Feng, whose trial was scheduled for next month, was originally charged with three counts of possessing and distributing methamphetamine.

• On Thursday, Feng pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine.

• Edward Snowden said the United States spies on ally South Korea as part of its massive surveillance network called “Five Eyes.”

• Speaking from Moscow via video, Snowden made the remarks after a screening of the 2014 documentary Citizen Four, which is to be released in Korea on Nov. 19. Snowden said South Korea is one of 38 countries under National Security Agency surveillance, a list that includes close U.S. partners France and Germany, South Korean newspaper Kyunghyang Sinmun reported.

• The former NSA contractor told reporters that Seoul and Washington already share a significant amount of classified military information to track North Korea movements, but added that he didn’t see anything wrong with the sharing of information.

• The public defender representing 41-year-old Martin told the judge he has no criminal record, he works for the National Security Agency as a mathematician and he is pursuing his Ph.D. at Cornell University in math, according to the statement. The attorney also said Martin taught math at James Madison University.

• Adam Fuchs and his small team labored for years inside the National Security Agency on a system that would enable analysts to access vast troves of intelligence data and spot hidden patterns.

• “We very much had a startup feel,” Fuchs said of the team’s office at Fort Meade with whiteboards and old furniture.

• Experts in the cybersecurity space have called into question how effective CISA will actually be in the ongoing blitz of cyberattacks.

• “In theory it is a great idea, but when we take the legislation from theory into practice it breaks into two areas. Information sharing is positive with synergistic benefits to the companies under attack. However, forcing engagement rules will slow the process down,” Shlomo Touboul, CEO of cybersecurity company Illusive Networks, said. “Cyber attackers are organized like malicious, agile start-ups that don’t require consensus for success, while government legislation and consortiums don’t move at the same speed as a cyberattackers.”

• Symantec CEO Michael Brown voiced concerns about the act and says that — in its current form — it does not go far enough to protect privacy.

• The largest tech companies in the world, from Google and Apple, to Reddit and Twitter, issued statements condemning the cyber-security bill called CISA, but to no avail. CISA (Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015) easily passed through the U.S. Senate’s vote on Tuesday, creating a new avenue for consumer data sharing that benefits anti-privacy entities like the NSA, reports The Guardian.

• A US appeals court on Thursday refused to immediately halt the government’s bulk collection of millions of Americans’ phone records during a “transition” period to a new federal scheme that bans the controversial anti-terrorism surveillance.

• A lawyer who won a federal judge’s determination that the National Security Agency’s spy-on-Americans program is “Orwellian” and likely unconstitutional is encouraging the judge to maintain his stance after a federal appeals court ruled the collection of phone metadata can continue.

• Germany’s hard line on the transfer of its citizens’ personal data to the U.S. has come in for criticism from an influential European association of global digital businesses, which argues that severely limiting such transfers would cause market volatility.

• Germany’s federal and regional data-protection authorities this week said they wouldn’t approve any new transfers of data to the U.S. — even for transfers based on arrangements different from the trans-Atlantic data-transfer pact knocked down by the European Union’s highest court.

• The European Court of Justice this month invalidated a 15-year old agreement, known as Safe Harbor, which allowed businesses to move Europeans’ data, such as employee information, to servers in the U.S. The court ruled that Europeans’ data was insufficiently protected when transferred to the U.S., where it could be accessed by national intelligence services.

• U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker on Thursday pressed European Union officials to put in place a new “safe harbor” data transfer agreement to replace one struck down earlier this month by the European Court of Justice.

• As a leader in the VPN industry, Khan warns there are mixed opinions on the subject of protection and privacy, “There are those who believe every internet user should have the right to privacy irrespective of the circumstances. On the other hand, many believe that privacy is a right but should not infer complete anonymity.”

• CISA significantly weakens the Freedom of Information Act and puts decision-making power on FOIA requests into the hands of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the same body where current CISA legislation originated.

• Under the guise of “cybersecurity,” the Senate on Tuesday passed a spying bill that “carves a giant hole in all our privacy laws and allows tech and telecom companies to hand over all sorts of private information to intelligence agencies without any court process whatsoever,” writes Trevor Timm at The Guardian.

• In the UK, David Cameron’s administration has all but declared war on encryption. In the US, 63 percent of Americans approve of backdoors for the government to monitor encrypted business communications in response to a national security threat, according to a recent Vormetric survey.

• But in Germany, the government openly advocates that all citizens use encryption and has even pushed forward a De-Mail service to help make that a reality.

• In the country’s Digital Agenda, the German government made it clear that it aspired to be “one of the most secure digital locations” on the planet: “We support the use of more and better encryption and aim to be the world’s leading country in this area. To achieve this goal, the encryption of private communication must be adopted as standard across the board.”

• It’s no secret that Germans value privacy, and Rik Turner, a British senior analyst with the IT and telecoms consulting firm Ovum, argued that the country’s embrace of encryption has geopolitical roots extending back to World War II.

• Senators Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy are investigating why the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is using a cellphone tracking system in its investigations. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has already admitted they are using this technology but did not say in what capacity. The technology, known as cell-site simulators, send out a signal similar to a cell tower which could fool your cellphone into connecting to it. The technology does not monitor phone conversations but it does gather information (including text messages) about the device and can track the devices location as it moves.

• Germany on Friday announced new measures to curb the activities of its foreign intelligence agency after a damning official report revealed improper collusion with the US National Security Agency.

• Berlin will in future implement stricter guidelines governing cooperation between the BND foreign intelligence service and the NSA, deputy government spokeswoman Christiane Wirtz said in a statement.

• An NSA catchword surveillance list contains numerous European and German targets, according to a German news magazine. According to its report, a German federal investigator has concluded that US spying was widespread.

• A special investigation into the extent of mass surveillance carried out by the US National Security Agency (NSA) within Germany has unveiled a huge list of targets wanted by the US agency, including many European governments and companies.

• The US National Security Agency (NSA) overstepped an intelligence-sharing agreement with Germany by requesting German technicians to snoop on allied governments‘ emails, a top-level inquiry has concluded.

• Media obtained Friday the 300-page report by Kurt Graulich, a judge appointed to investigate how the BND, or Bundesnachrichtendienst, intercepted data streams from satellite links, fishing out messages by spotting email addresses, telephone numbers and words of interest.

• Graulich is the only non-intelligence official to have been shown 40,000 of these so-called selectors which the BND challenged.

• A German government-sanctioned special investigation has exposed a “clear breach” of intelligence-sharing agreements—including illegal surveillance of European authorities—between the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and its German counterpart, known as the BND.

• When it was revealed in 2013 that the NSA and its UK equivalent, GCHQ, routinely spied on the German government, artists Mathias Jud and Christoph Wachter came up with a plan.

• In the face of Obama administration opposition, AT&T customers asked the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday to rule that a government mass surveillance program is unconstitutional.

• Five people sued the National Security Agency seven years ago in Federal Court seeking a court order to dismantle a “digital dragnet” that allows the agency to tap into the fiber optic cables of U.S. telecommunications companies to intercept emails, text messages, phone records and other communications.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been busy lately, especially with all of the revelations coming from Edward Snowden. The organization has been busy taking on the NSA, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have time for other causes.

• Now the EFF is taking on the California Supreme Court, urging an end to the gathering of personal prescription information by law enforcement and done without a warrant.

• Prescriptions in question cover things such as pain, anxiety, attention disorder, insomnia and the like. Up until now, this was a treasure trove of information being gathered, though reasons for that netting of data are unclear.

• Once you get in your car, get ready to be tracked, no matter how well your face is disguised. Law enforcement agencies all over the country use ALPRs (automated license plate readers) to track drivers’ locations and activities. ALPRs are cameras—mounted on police cars or placed in stationary locations like light poles—that detect when a car passes, capture a picture of that car, and record its license plate number. Accumulated location data creates a history of drivers’ movements that can provide private and intimate details on people’s lives, like where they work, where they live, where they worship, where they go throughout their day, and who they associate with. Law enforcement agencies like the NYPD have used ALPRs in exactly this way, trying to map out the entire Arab and Muslim community of New York and Newark. The Los Angeles Police Department and the LA County Sheriff’s Department scan three million plates every week.

• John Miller reckons he can get into pretty much any safe. A court order to the owner is one option, another is a team he has with blow torches.

• The reason John Miller has such a team is because he is Deputy Commissioner of the New York Police Department (NYPD) for intelligence and counter-terrorism.

• Getting into safety deposit boxes and bank vaults has not been a challenge. But he says NYPD is now faced with a new problem.

• The Pentagon’s principal spy agency is appointing a British Air Force officer as its first deputy director in charge of improving “integration” between U.S. intelligence units and spy agencies of other English-speaking countries.

• U.S. intelligence agencies have long had close relationships with their British counterparts, but former and current U.S. intelligence officials said this is the first time they knew of a U.S. spy agency naming a foreigner to a top executive position.

• The UK government wants backdoor access to communications for “everything people actually use”, Edward Snowden has claimed.

• The former NSA contractor took to Twitter to criticise comments from Baroness Shields, the UK minister for internet safety and security, over her position on encrypted data.

• Shields said the government didn’t want to introduce backdoors that allow security services to access encrypted information, but Snowden argued proposed warrants for access to data were in effect a backdoor.

• The UK surveillance agency GCHQ had only a small public relations team up until June 2013. As the most secretive of the intelligence agencies, it did not really need anything more. The duties were not arduous, with inquiries from the national media invariably met with a blunt refusal to comment.

• That attitude has not survived the shock of former CIA and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who leaked tens of thousands of documents exposing GCHQ’s innermost secrets. Today, GCHQ’s new and expanding PR team is increasingly sophisticated, open to engagement with journalists in ways that were inconceivable before Snowden.

• It seems that many organisations are now wanting to shift their data out of the UK and the US, thanks to concerns about surveillance and privacy.

• This news comes courtesy of Artmotion (a data hosting provider), which questioned 1000 IT decision-makers in this country and the States, subsequently producing a report entitled Defending Data Privacy.

• The headline figure is that 76 per cent of respondents said they would move their company’s data to another country, away from the UK or US, due to privacy concerns.

• Over the last year, law enforcement officials around the world have been pressing hard on the notion that without a magical “backdoor” to access the content of any and all encrypted communications by ordinary people, they’ll be totally incapable of fulfilling their duties to investigate crime and protect the public. EFF and many others have pushed back—including launching a petition with our friends to SaveCrypto, which this week reached 100,000 signatures, forcing a response from President Obama.

• This is in addition to multiple findings that the government’s “going dark” concern has proven completely unfounded in the past, along with former national security officers disavowing the concern all together. And given law enforcement’s continuing attacks on the public’s use of encryption, we think it’s time for a quick look at the long tradition of encryption use by some ordinary, and some not so ordinary, Americans.

• In a return to what is being called ‘Cold War level’ tension, the New York Times reported on Sunday that Russia could be developing plans to sever key global internet communications – undersea data cables – “that carry almost all global internet communications” during possible “future wars”.

• The Times report claims that there is “aggressive” movement near vital undersea cables, raising concern among several US military and intelligence officers.

• Millennials are rather careless when it comes to using technology and sharing information online. We don’t think twice about entering personal information into an online form or telling the world where we are at any given moment and who we are with. So when we are told that the government is collecting this data, a common reaction is—Why should I care? I have nothing to hide. But how many of us understand the implications of having so much personal information up for grabs?

• Hillary Clinton is wrong about Edward Snowden. Again.

• The presidential candidate and former secretary of state insisted during the recent Democratic debate that Snowden should have remained in the United States to voice his concerns about government spying on U.S. citizens. Instead, she claimed, he “endangered U.S. secrets by fleeing to Russia.”

• After accusing Snowden of stealing “very important information that has fallen into the wrong hands,” she added: “He should not be brought home without facing the music.”

• Clinton should stop rooting for Snowden’s incarceration and get her facts straight.

• New York Times reporter Eric Licthblau is returning to cover the Justice Department, a beat he left in 2009 amid threat of subpoena over a Pulitzer Prize-winning story on the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program.

• Lichtblau, who was most recently covering 2016 campaign finance issues, drew the ire of the Bush administration early on for his reporting, leading to his Justice Department press credentials being temporarily revoked in 2003. Tensions only increased after The Times published Lichtblau and James Risen’s 2005 report on NSA surveillance, a story the paper initially held for 13 months under pressure from the White House.

• Lichtblau told The Huffington Post that the Bush administration aggressively investigated the NSA leak and there were vague threats of subpoena in 2006 and 2007. But it wasn’t until Dec. 16, 2008 — after President Barack Obama won the presidential election but before the Bush administration left off — that Lichtblau received a letter threatening a subpoena if he didn’t provide the source information by Inauguration Day a month later. He did not comply. Still, the threat didn’t go away when Obama took office, and in early 2009, Lichtblau and Times editors decided it was best he leave the beat.

• The tech sector is an ever-growing force in politics. No longer just a bunch of scrappy startups struggling for their place at the bargaining table, Silicon Valley’s top companies—Google, Facebook, Apple, and others—now spend millions of dollars a year lobbying for their industry’s interests.

• Politicians like tech companies, not only because they paint a rosy picture of the future, but because they’re among the top job creators in the country. Plus, their idealistic, largely white-collar workforce tends to have deep pockets, turning the tech sector into a bigger source of campaign funding than other politically powerful and entrenched industries like defense and big pharma in recent years. Candidates are all too aware of this shift, so they make frequent stops at tech startups and carve out time on the campaign trail for fundraising trips to Silicon Valley.

Civil Rights

• The propensity of the Saudis to use barbaric physical punishments is blithely passed off as a local tradition and custom, as if tying someone to a pole and flogging them nearly to death is somehow comparable to having a pole on a village green for dancing around on May mornings.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• We’ve discussed many times now how zero rating, or the carrier act of letting some apps or services bypass a user’s broadband usage cap, sets a horrible, dangerous precedent. By its very nature, letting one company or service bypass usage caps immediately puts non-whitelisted services, small businesses or non profits at a disadvantage, tilting the entire playing field and distorting the entire democratic nature of the Internet. For some reason, this is a very difficult concept for some consumers to understand, so lathered up they are by the initial lure of getting something for “free.”

• Of course you’re not getting something for free. Usage caps are entirely arbitrary, untethered from financial or network performance necessity. They’re an artificial construct, and allowing some services to bypass them (for a fee or otherwise) puts the ISP in the powerful position of picking winners and losers, instead of just doing its job (the delivery of bits). When it comes to net neutrality, the battlefield is no longer focused on ham-fisted throttling or blocking of services, it has shifted to more nuanced and clever abuses of gatekeeper power including interconnection, usage caps, and zero rating.

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