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● 06.22.14

● Links 22/6/2014: New Linux RC, FreeBSD RC

Posted in News Roundup at 2:19 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ Russia Industry And Trade Ministry To Replace Untrusted Intel And AMD Processors With Their Own ARM Design

• Russia’s Baikal processor will be built around an ARM Cortex A57, which ties into Vladimir Putin’s goal, established in 2010, to move all government computers over to Linux – another move that’s easy to understand given the OS’ open-source and modular nature.

Desktop

=> ↺ Asus C200 Chromebook review: Long battery life, moderate performance

• The Asus C200 Chromebook is a 2.5 pound laptop that offers up to 12 hours of battery life and sells for just $249. It’s not the fastest notebook around, doesn’t have the best screen, and some folks might find Google’s Chrome OS operating system limiting. But there’s a lot to like about this little laptop… especially given the low price.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Yocto part I – baseline boot time

• The Yocto project provides a set of tools to build custom distribution images from scratch. When using Yocto, the image, and all the tooling used to build the image, is built from recipes. These recipes are parsed using the bitbake command. The recipes have dependencies, just as ordinary packages in a classical distro. By pointing to an image recipe, a dependency tree will be constructed and a large number of packages will be downloaded, built and then assembled into a single image.

=> ↺ Linux 3.16-rc2 Kernel Released: Nouveau & SPARC Stand Out

• Linus Torvalds released Linux 3.16-rc2 on Saturday night rather than a conventional Sunday afternoon release due to obligations he has this week, but regardless, there’s still many changes to find with this weekly kernel update.

=> ↺ Linux 3.16-rc2

• It’s a day early, but tomorrow ends up being inconvenient for me due to being on the road most of the day, so here you are. These days most people send me their pull requests and patches during the week, so it’s not like I expect that a Sunday release would have made much of a difference. And it’s also not like I didn’t have enough changes for making a rc2 release.

• Anyway, enough excuses. 3.16-rc2 is out, and contains the usual assortment of fixes all over the map. The most unusual part at this point is how the sparc changes stand out (at almost 40% of the patch by bulk), but they are basically all just sparse warning cleanups.

• Similarly, some Nouveau drm changes standing out size-wise, but again those are largely due to small firmware fixes resulting in big generated changes. The actual real changes are fairly small.

• Ignoring those two unusually large changes (in lines), everything else looks fairly normal. There are driver changes, some tooling updates (particularly perf), and various other arch updates (arm, s390, unicore32, x86..). And just misc random stuff all over the place - rtmutex, btrfs, yadda yadda.

• The shortlog is not tiny, but small enough to include here, so you can see the details there if you care.

• Please do go test it out,

• Linus

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 3.16 RC2 Announced by Linus Torvalds

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ An Open-Source Version Of NVIDIA’s NVPerfKit Continues Coming

=> ↺ Nouveau Will Now Sync Buffer-Swaps To VBlanks By Default

• In trying to reduce tearing and match the behavior of the Intel and Radeon drivers, the Nouveau X.Org driver will now sync buffer-swaps to vblanks by default.

=> ↺ Weston DRM Compositor Support Proposed For NVIDIA’s TK1

• Support for running Wayland’s Weston compositor directly off the DRM kernel driver for the NVIDIA Tegra K1 SoC found within the Jetson TK1 development board has been proposed for mainline Weston.

=> ↺ Nouveau Gains Support For The X PRESENT Extension

=> ↺ Glx-Dock/Cairo-Dock Has Been Ported To Wayland

• One of the first desktop “docks” is now available for Wayland!

• Announced yesterday was that Cairo-Dock has been ported to Wayland. There’s now basic support for using the popular open-source dock on Weston 1.5 with various desklets.

=> ↺ GPU Software Fallbacks: What’s Better?

• When Eric Anholt announced last week he was developing a Broadcom VC4 DRM plus OpenGL driver he said originally he plans to develop the user-space GL driver as a Gallium3D driver but might later turn it into a classic Mesa driver.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ Debian 8.0 Jessie Testing Against Updated Ubuntu Linux

• Our latest Debian GNU/Linux benchmarks following the recent GNU/kFreeBSD vs. GNU/Linux comparison are benchmarks of Debian GNU/Linux in its latest testing form for 8.0 “Jessie” compared to a stock Ubuntu 14.04 LTS plus with an assortment of updates.

=> ↺ Re-Testing NVIDIA’s Threaded OpenGL Optimizations For Linux Gaming

• Back in 2012 with the NVIDIA 310 Linux driver series a threaded OpenGL optimization was added to the proprietary graphics driver. When this driver premiered we tested NVIDIA’s Linux threaded OpenGL optimizations to mixed results. We’re back now re-testing the OpenGL threaded optimizations to see if it makes any more of a difference now with modern Linux games and OpenGL workloads while using the latest 337.25 Linux driver.

=> ↺ Performance benchmarks: KVM vs. Xen

• After having some interesting discussions last week around KVM and Xen performance improvements over the past years, I decided to do a little research on my own. The last complete set of benchmarks I could find were from the Phoronix Haswell tests in 2013. There were some other benchmarks from 2011 but those were hotly debated due to the Xen patches headed into kernel 3.0.

Applications

=> ↺ vtclock: Yes, one more console clock can’t hurt

=> ↺ vux: Playing the odds, against all odds

• I’m counting up the many things vux has working against it, and wondering how I managed to get this screenshot at all.

=> ↺ Bonus: V is for vanquished

=> ↺ vimwiki: The reason, in due season

=> ↺ vlock: The simplest screensaver I know

=> ↺ Vim plugins for developers

• The popular Vim editor provides users with a vast set of features from the get-go, and you can further enhance its capabilities via plugins. If you’re a programmer, check out the following plugins, which can help you do things such as check syntax errors from within the code, browse the source code, and switch to the header file corresponding to the current file.

=> ↺ vit: That full-screen interface I promised

=> ↺ Betty: Turn Generic English Into Linux Terminal Commands

• The Linux terminal can be a complex beast, and it would be handy to have something like Siri to help make things easier. Sure, there’s often no need to go into the terminal for regular users, but there are some advantages to using the terminal over the graphical user interface. You can do a lot of things with the terminal that aren’t as easy to do in graphical user interfaces – besides, there’s just this odd nerdy pleasure in doing as much as possible from a command line interface.

=> ↺ Just play videos with Snappy on Fedora

• Snappy is a minimal application that does one thing — plays videos. Snappy is a super-minimal video player with a neat on-screen display, and that’s about it, here is no other interface in the application. Snappy has no library feature that keeps all your videos, no list of previously played videos, no menus, not even a open video dialog — to play a video, you either tell a video to open in snappy via your file browser or drag and drop a video file to the snappy window. Snappy is also built on the GStreamer framework, so it will support any files that you have GStreamer plugins for.

=> ↺ Monitoring Software Zabbix 2.2.4 RC4 Now Ready for Testing

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Cockpit Simple Networking Configuration

=> ↺ Fixing broken DNS lookups in spamassassin

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi portable internet radio

=> ↺ Getting Dell’s racadm working in Fedora 20

=> ↺ Create Space Invaders on Raspberry Pi part two

=> ↺ How To Install QupZilla 1.6.6 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pinguy OS, Elementary OS, Debian, Crunchbang And Other Ubuntu And Debian Derivatives

=> ↺ How To Install OpenRA 20140608 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Pinguy OS 14.04 And Other Ubuntu 14.04 Derivatives

=> ↺ How To Install Sigram 0.5.5 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pinguy OS, Elementary OS, LXLE, Debian, Crunchbang And Fedora

=> ↺ How To Install X File Explorer (XFE) On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pinguy OS, Debian, Crunchbang And Other Ubuntu And Debian Derivatives

=> ↺ Fixing broken DNS lookups in spamassassin

=> ↺ View Split functionality in calligra sheets

=> ↺ vim: Don’t start celebrating just yet

=> ↺ How To Install Laptop Mode Tools 1.65 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pinguy OS, Elementary OS And Other Ubuntu Derivatives

=> ↺ How To Install LibreOffice 4.3.0 RC1 On Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Mageia, OpenMandriva And Derivative Systems

=> ↺ How To Install LibreOffice 4.3 RC1 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pinguy OS, Elementary OS, Debian, Crunchbang And Other Ubuntu And Debian Derivative Systems

=> ↺ How to speed up directory navigation in a Linux terminal

=> ↺ How to replace Windows XP with Lubuntu

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi portable internet radio

=> ↺ A Beginner’s Guide to the Linux Command Line

=> ↺ Thunderbird Email Encryption with GnuPG2

=> ↺ Scripting a 4-Color Multiple Grepper

=> ↺ A simple way to install and configure puppet on CentOS 6

=> ↺ Mirror a website using lftp

=> ↺ C++ Gtkmm Tutorial 6

=> ↺ How To Install Calibre 1.41 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Debian And Their Derivative Systems

Games

=> ↺ Team Fortress 2 Update for Linux Fixes Exploit and Adds New Music

=> ↺ Second Day of the Steam Summer Sale 2014 Brings More Linux Games

=> ↺ Linux gaming revolution continues as XCOM: Enemy Unknown hits SteamOS

=> ↺ Steam Summer Sale, open source X-COM for the 21st century, and more

=> ↺ Contagion Source Engine Based Survival FPS Linux Port In Progress

=> ↺ Do We Want Ubisoft To Support Linux?

=> ↺ Here Come The Goats, Goat Simulator Now In Beta For Linux

=> ↺ Goat Simulator Now In Beta On Linux

• The comical Goat Simulator game is finally in beta for Linux and OS X gamers.

=> ↺ Mount & Blade: Warband Confirmed For Linux By A Developer, Beta Soon Too

=> ↺ 9 ASCII Games You’ll Want to Play Again and Again

• Modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) offer exceptional gaming capabilities, and have contributed to the trend of astonishing leaps in graphics fidelity. There is not a year that has gone by without a game being released that makes significant advances in technical graphics wizardry. Computer graphics have been advancing at a staggering pace. At the current rate of progress, in the next 10 years it may not be possible to distinguish computer graphics from reality.

=> ↺ Valve Working Towards A New Steam Runtime SDK With GCC/Clang Changes

• Scott Ludwig of Valve shared some details this weekend about a new release of the Steam Runtime SDK they’re working towards to improve the Linux gaming experience.

=> ↺ 5 games to look out for on the Steam Summer/Winter Sale

• If you love slow-paced but nail-biting turn-based strategy, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a brilliant buy. It brings tactical battles, base management, alien technology research and soldier levelling together in one glorious package that will challenge your brain rather than your reflexes. If you see it on sale, snap it up, you won’t regret it. Also, it’s now available for SteamOS and Linux – which is ace.

=> ↺ GOL Cast: Getting Eaten By Dinosaurs In Beasts Of Prey

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE Network Manager: Results of the Card Sorting

• Unlike a lot of studies before, for the first time, we did not get enough participants. In the mobile broadband study only 22 users participated (Wireless: 113, Wired: 96), while more than 29 answers would have been required for stable results in this study. Furthermore, we do have problems to understand the results and transform them into the desired structure for the UI. But take a look yourself:

=> ↺ The KDE Randa meetings need your help

• The Randa meetings provide an excellent opportunity for KDE developers to come across for a week long hack session to fix bugs in various KDE components while collaborating on new features.

=> ↺ Freshen up your KDE’s Plasma desktop using Evolvere icons

• Icon sets for Linux, especially for the KDE’s Plasma desktop, have usually been scarce, with not so many themes being complete nor good looking. Oxygen icon set looks and feels outdated, and Faenza and Kfaenza mods from different people over the past years gradually morphed into frankenstein projects. There have been attempts at completing icon sets that would give your desktop some crispness and freshness, but many of them, despite being well designed and though out, lack many commonly used app icons, or monochrome tray icons, or, well, take your pick, you probably went through the same experience as I did.

=> ↺ KDE Receives Improved Gmail Integration

=> ↺ Improved Gmail integration in KDE PIM 4.14

• I already teased publicly about the new Gmail resource on Google+ yesterday, now it’s time for some more explanations and…screenshots!

=> ↺ KMyMoney 4.6.6

• It had to happen. It’s been years since I do a release, so I made a rookie mistake. I didn’t properly test the tarball, and it had a build issue.

=> ↺ KDECONNECT-iOS four Plugins done and more coming!

=> ↺ Porting your project to Qt5/KF5

• One of the things I’ve been asked recently quite often is about where’s the information regaring the needed port to KF5. I’ll use this blog post as reference.

=> ↺ Porting Software To Qt5, KDE Frameworks 5

=> ↺ Artikulate port to GStreamer-1.x is ready to merge

• As an pronunciation trainer, Artikulate does not only need sound output, but also sound input. For sound output the (Linux) world is kind of simple and it only costs some lines of code to integrate Phonon or a similar framework into your application. For sound input it is trickier, especially if you do not want to work with a C-style API (when coding a C++/Qt application, C-style API feels very strange). The solution to this problem is QtGStreamer, which provides Qt-style C++ bindings for GStreamer, and hence access to the currently best multimedia framework.

=> ↺ Qt Wayland Now Supports Minimizing Windows With XDG-Shell Support

• Current versions of Qt5 with Wayland support don’t support minimizing/hiding windows. However, patches have now been merged into Qt Wayland for addressing this shortcoming.

=> ↺ Phonon 4.7.2, Phonon VLC 0.7.2 and Phonon GStreamer 4.7.2

• Fresh out of the oven comes a batch of maintenance updates for the Phonon 4.7 series.

=> ↺ Metalinks, an excellent fast way to download KDE files

• First, torrents aren’t available, since 1. that requires dedicated tracker software, which isn’t needed since 2. KDE doesn’t distribute many large files.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

=> ↺ Mageia 4.1 Released, LXLE 14.04 Review, and LibreOffice 4.2.5

=> ↺ Pulling Mageia 4.1 out of the hat

• While most of the world is turned towards Brazil to enjoy the World Cup, Mageia has been preparing its own major worldwide event: Mageia 4.1 has been released!

=> ↺ Mageia 4.1 Comes Out As A Surprise Release

• Mageia 4.1 is out today as an unscheduled maintenance release to the Mandriva-forked Linux distribution.

=> ↺ Mageia 4.1 Officially Released with New Linux Kernel

• Mageia 4.1, a GNU/Linux-based free operating system that started its life as a fork of Mandriva Linux and that is supported by a nonprofit organization of elected contributors, has been release and is now available for download.

=> ↺ Mageia 4.1 GNOME

Red Hat Family

Fedora

=> ↺ Call to nodejs fedora packager

=> ↺ Status of Fedora 21 Supplemental Wallpaper

• The submission phase for the supplemental wallpaper for Fedora 21 is now half over. Some already asked me for the status and most wanted also to see what is submitted. But we decided not to show them until after the voting, to avoid that people vote only for people they know instead of the quality of the submission.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Thunderbird 24.6.0 Officially Lands in All Supported Ubuntu OSes

=> ↺ Thunderbird 24.6.0 Has Been Added To The Default Repositories Of Ubuntu And Derivatives. Install It on Your System

=> ↺ First impressions: Canonical Orange Box and Juju (Gallery)

• Inside the Orange Box, you’ll find ten Intel micro-servers. Each is powered by Ivy Bridge i5-3427U CPUs. Every one of these mini-servers has four cores, Intel HD Graphics 4000, 16GBs of DDR3 RAM, a 128GB SSD root disk, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. The first micro-server also includes a Centrino Advanced-N 6235 Wi-Fi Adapter, and 2TB Western Digital hard drive. These are all connected in a cluster with a D-Link Gigabit switch.

=> ↺ Canonical’s cloud-in-a-box: Under the hood

=> ↺ Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander Is Reaching The End Of Life

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ 8 hours on a train with Lubuntu and Abiword

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi DRM+Gallium3D Driver Makes Great Progress In One Week

• Last week Eric Anholt left Intel’s Linux graphics driver team to go work for Broadcom developing a VC4 DRM/KMS and Gallium3D driver for the GPU that supports the Raspberry Pi.

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Will Carriers Step Up to Open Challenge?

• Telecom service providers are being asked in multiple ways to put their money where their mouths are when it comes to supporting open source software and technology in the move to virtualization.

• The most obvious move those willing to embrace openness will make is joining the new open source project — called Open Platform for NFV, or OPN — that a number of telecom operators associated with the ETSI Network Functions Virtualization Industry Specification Group are setting up with the Linux Foundation , already home to OpenDaylight . (See Is Open Source the New De Facto Standard?)

=> ↺ Google Chrome PDF Engine is now Open Source

=> ↺ Google open sources PDF rendering

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Mozilla is Working on a Firefox OS-powered Streaming Stick à la Chromecast

• Mozilla took the world by surprised when it announced that it was developing a Firefox operating system that would be used for mobile phones, especially in developing markets. Now, there are already a few devices out there, but it seems that this isn’t the last step for the company whose name is still associated with the famous web browsers.

SaaS/Big Data

=> ↺ ForgeRock Raises $30M for Open-Source Identity-Relationship Tech

• ForgeRock’s $30 million capital injection will help the company drive adoption of identity-relationship management technology.

=> ↺ OpenStack by the numbers

• Haven given that warning, I still think there’s good value in project statistics. They say something about trajectory, and when used in conjunction with solid knowledge of why the numbers are what they are, they can tell a good bit about comparative success. And they can be inspiring. “Look what we’ve done” you can say to your community, as you provide them with the raw data about what they’ve created. They can also say something about the relative participation in a project, as with Chuck Dubuque’s look at how to gauge the contributions of the various corporate contributors to OpenStack.

=> ↺ OpenStack: What It Is, What It Does

• OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage and networking resources throughout a data center, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface. In general, it is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) operating system for building and managing cloud computing platforms for public, private and hybrid clouds.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

=> ↺ LibreOffice 4.2.5 Emerges

CMS

=> ↺ WP Engine Launches New Open Source Project Effort

Education

=> ↺ Are there too many computers in the classroom?

• I could not disagree more with Dvorak. One of the things I always hated when I was in school was having to sit in a classroom and listen to a teacher drone on endlessly about a subject. It felt like it was taking forever for them to get to the point and present the information. Really, I remember doodling on my notebook while the teacher went on and on in what seemed like an endless monologue about whatever.

• Maybe that was just my perception at the time (I graduated high school back in 1987), but I would much rather have had faster access to all of the course information rather than waiting for the teacher to regurgitate it verbally to me. Oral communication in person is such a slow and ponderous way to transfer information compared to what you can do with today’s computers and tablets.

Healthcare

=> ↺ Some patients are eager to share their personal data

• While many researchers encounter no privacy-based barriers to releasing data, those working with human participants, such as doctors, psychologists, and geneticists, have a difficult problem to surmount. How do they reconcile their desire to share data, allowing their analyses and conclusions to be verified, with the need to protect participant privacy? It’s a dilemma we’ve talked about before on the blog (see: Open Data and IRBs, Privacy and Open Data). A new project, Open Humans, seeks to resolve the issue by finding patients who are willing—even eager—to share their personal data.

BSD

=> ↺ LLVM 3.4.2 Brings Bug-Fixes

=> ↺ FreeBSD 9.3 RC1 Released

=> ↺ FreeBSD 9.3-RC1 Now Available

• The first RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.

=> ↺ FreeBSD 9.3 RC1 Is Out, Final Version Is Around the Corner

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

=> ↺ GCC Allowed To Add Offloading Library To Code-Base

• The GCC steering committee has ruled on allowing a foreign library for compute offloading into the GNU Compiler Collection.

• The first library in question is the poorly named “liboffload”, which handles offloading work to Intel’s high-end Xeon Phi compute cards. Permission was needed from the GCC steering committee for introducing a foreign library plus that there’s some GPLv2.1 header files and new sources.

=> ↺ Democracy and Software Freedom

• It is striking that, despite talking a lot about freedom, and often being interested in the question of who controls power, these five criteria might as well be (Athenian) Greek to most free software communities and participants- the question of liberty begins and ends with source code, and has nothing to say about organizational structure and decision-making – critical questions serious philosophers always address.

• Our licensing, of course, means that in theory points #4 and #5 are satisfied, but saying “you can submit a patch” is, for most people, roughly as satisfying as saying “you could buy a TV ad” to an American voter concerned about the impact of wealth on our elections. Yes, we all have the theoretical option to buy a TV ad/edit our code, but for most voters/users of software that option will always remain theoretical. We’re probably even further from satisfying #1, #2, and #3 in most projects, though one could see the Ada Initiative and GNOME OPW as attempts to deal with some aspects of #1, #3, and #4

=> ↺ Staying free – should GCC allow non-free plug ins?

• To this extent, the argument between LLVM and GCC is a retread of the historic differences between GNU/Linux and the BSDs, between ‘open source’ and free software. Open source developers allow the code to be reused in any context, free or proprietary. Free software is restrictive in that it insists that the code, and any modifications to the code, must remain free in perpetuity. Advocates of free software would argue that the integrity of copyleft licensing has been instrumental in the spread of GCC, and has taken Linux and free software into places it would not otherwise have reached, and that free software cannot be bought or corrupted by commercial or corporate interests. Open source advocates argue that open source is more free because the user has no restrictions and can do what he or she likes, including developing closed source versions of the code.

Public Services/Government

=> ↺ India’s Crusher For Wintel Grinds Inexorably Onward

• They just get on with it. Wintel just isn’t necessary. A few items seem necessary only because of lock-in.

Openness/Sharing

=> ↺ Indians to get 50 essential medicines for free!

• If the Narendra Modi government has its way, India is all set to see a perceptible change in primary health facilities across the country. According to Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare Dr Harsh Vardhan, the health ministry aims to provide 50 essential generic medicines from “birth to death” to all Indian citizens.

=> ↺ New Relic’s Centurion Docker deployment tool, DIY brain scanners, and more

=> ↺ New open-source router firmware opens your Wi-Fi network to strangers

• EFF says open Wi-Fi tool promotes efficiency, neighborliness, and privacy.

=> ↺ This Tool Boosts Your Privacy by Opening Your Wi-Fi to Strangers

• In an age of surveillance anxiety, the notion of leaving your Wi-Fi network open and unprotected seems dangerously naive. But one group of activists says it can help you open up your wireless internet and not only maintain your privacy, but actually increase it in the process.

Open Hardware

=> ↺ Use of open-source hardware is growing

• The impact open source hardware has had in the past year has been momentous. Educators, students and hobbyists have all traditionally been big proponents of open-source hardware, but in the last 12 months we finally saw large companies and professional engineers begin to openly embrace the open source movement as well.

Programming

=> ↺ PHP 5.6 Is Nearly Ready For Release, RC1 Is Out

• PHP 5.6 is on track for its official release this summer as a major update to PHP5 while those looking to do some pre-production testing, RC1 is now available.

=> ↺ Replacing freecode: a proposal

• Web frameworks have gotten much more powerful since the original Freshmeat was built 17 years ago; today, I think building a replacement wouldn’t be a huge project. It is not, however, something I am willing to try to do alone. Whether or not this goes forward will depend on how many people are willing to step up and join me. I figure we need a team of about three core co-developers, at least one of whom needs to have some prior expertise at whatever framework we end up using.

=> ↺ ESR Mulls Replacing freecode

• The concept is interesting. Distros do a lot of similar things as does Sourceforge, GitHub and Distrowatch. A site specializing in distributing release-announcements could have a niche. On the one hand, with the millions of projects that might use the service, the site might be too busy to be useful. On the other hand, a good search engine might make the site scale well. Perhaps Google could provide the searching function.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Intel Starts Landing Another OpenGL 4.3 Extension

• Finally receiving some mainline treatment within Mesa this Sunday is the start of Chris Forbes’ long work-in-progress patches concerning ARB_fragment_layer_viewport.

Leftovers

=> ↺ After 47 years in print, Computerworld finally goes digital-only

=> ↺ Happy Midsummer Solstice! with A Kopimist Gospel

• Today is the Midsummer Solstice, which has been celebrated as a holy day by most religions throughout human history. and is also recognized by science as one of the four special days in the solar year.

• Kopimism is one of Sweden’s newest religions. On or about the winter solstice of 2011, the Swedish authority Kammarkollegiet — blessed be its name! — officially recognized by Kopimism as a religion, just like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and others.

Science

=> ↺ UK bans teaching of creationism in any school that receives public funding

• On Thursday, the United Kingdom expanded its ban on the teaching of creationism from all state schools, to all state schools as well as semi-private Free Schools and Academies.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ American ‘Healthcare’ Exceptionalism: Highest Costs, Worst Care

=> ↺ The measles crisis

• Suspicion increased when Dr Shakeel Afridi was revealed to have been running a fake hepatitis vaccination programme for the CIA to help in its search for Osama bin Laden. Now with deaths that can be linked to a vaccine, and that too a vaccine purchased from India, our public health goals will be that much harder to achieve. Those responsible for the deaths should of course be held responsible but it will now become very difficult to contain the damage they have caused.

Security

=> ↺ Friday’s security updates

=> ↺ Google unveils independent “fork” of OpenSSL called “BoringSSL”

• Stripped down package means there will be three independent versions of OpenSSL.

=> ↺ Google Is Maintaining A “BoringSSL” Fork Of OpenSSL

=> ↺ Bored yet? Now there’s ANOTHER OpenSSL fork – it’s from Google

=> ↺ boringssl and such

• suspect everyone working on LibReSSL is happy to hear the news about BoringSSL. Choice is good!!

=> ↺ Following TrueCrypt’s bombshell advisory, developer says fork is “impossible”

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

=> ↺ The New Ground-Based Defense Missiles Cost $40 Billion We Could Use For A Lot of Other Things. Oh, and They Don’t Work.

• A decade after it was declared operational for bogus political reasons – “you just needed to build them” – the $40 billion Ground-based Midcourse Defense System, or GMD, “cannot be relied on,” says a blistering report from the L.A. Times. It has an “abysmal” record: It has failed more tests than it has passed, has “performed less well than people had hoped,” has been hyped by U.S. officials who claimed it was more reliable than it was, has failed tests far less stringent than real-life scenarios would be, and over time has continued to perform worse, not better, despite years of tinkering, failing five of its last eight tests. It was also designed for a threat that likely doesn’t exist, or in the immortal words of Charles Pierce, “not to defend ourselves against missiles but, rather, as a platform for international dick-waving.” Oh yes, and members of Congress – the guys who battled over how much to cut food stamps – want a bunch more.

=> ↺ Why Bush and Blair Should Be Prosecuted for War Crimes

• Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently stated that air strikes and drones should be used once again on Iraq to stem recent gains by extremists in that country. Mr. Blair is oblivious of the responsibility he shares with former U.S. president George W. Bush on account of one of the most serious breaches of international law in recent times. The prosecution of Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush, along the lines of similar trials conducted in Argentina, Chile and Peru, is the only fitting response to such careless remarks.

=> ↺ S.Korean Soldier Said to Kill 5 Comrades at Border

• All able-bodied South Korean men must serve about two years in the military under a conscription system aimed at countering aggression from North Korea.

=> ↺ Washington Digest: House declines to put its foot down on Iraq

• “We must not let history repeat itself,” Lee said. “Calls to be dragged back into a war in Iraq must be rejected.”

=> ↺ Rolling Back the Clock? –Progressive Style?

• In 1981, my first professor in political science, the late Dr. Charles Benjamin, explained that roll-back-the-clock was the plan of the new Ronald Reagan administration in terms of American foreign policy. We had just come out of the Carter era–the only time that USA presidential leadership had sincerely tried to put the CIA and NSA leadership in their societal places (subservient to the executive branch and constitution) and had unveiled a practicing Human-Rights policy that would support popular people’s rebellions against dictators around the globe. During the Carter term, from Central America to the Middle East, the USA foreign policy had allowed people’s movements to have their day in the sun.

=> ↺ What Megyn Kelly Should Have Asked Dick Cheney

• The former vice president got his comeuppance on Fox News last Wednesday, producing a minor news story.

• Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz had published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advocating renewed U.S. military involvement in Ira to prevent a seizure of power by the al-Qaeda spin-off ISIS (or ISIL) and opining, “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”

• Citing this comment, Fox anchor Megyn Kelly unexpectedly snapped, “But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well sir.” She referred specifically the false accusation about weapons of mass destruction used to sell the Iraq War. A flustered Cheney fumbled his interrogator’s name (“Reagan, um, Megyn”) before declaring, “You’ve got to go back and look at the track record.” (As though Megyn were doing something other than precisely that.) “We inherited a situation where there was no doubt in anybody’s mind about the extent of Saddam’s involvement in weapons of mass destruction. … Saddam Hussein had a track record that nearly everybody agreed to.”

• In other words, the unfortunately mistaken but universal belief in Saddam’s WMD preceded the Bush-Cheney administration, was part of its heritage but in no way its invention. Everybody was honestly mistaken. Thus he utterly rejects personal responsibility for crediting, promoting it, and using it to justify a war he badly wanted.

=> ↺ Rand Paul Defends Obama Against Dick Cheney

• “Do you think Dick Cheney is a credible critic of this president?” host David Gregory asked Paul, quoting from Cheney’s op-ed in which Cheney wrote, “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”

=> ↺ Utah is where Army learns to fly drones better

• Two types of drones — the MQ-1C Gray Eagle and the RQ-7 Shadow — began flying in tandem with the Apaches. The drones’ cameras and sensors transmit the intelligence to the Apache crew — showing it what lies over the hill so the Apaches don’t have to expose themselves to find a target to attack or don’t fly into an ambush.

=> ↺ Drone strikes more right than wrong, Key says

• New Zealand has no issue with US drones striking terrorists in Iraq, PM John Key told TV1′s Q+A this morning.

• “They sometimes go wrong and that’s a great tragedy.

• “On balance of benefit, are they more often right than they’re wrong? I think the answer is ‘yes’,” he said following a meeting with US President Barack Obama.

=> ↺ No consensus on ‘targeted’ military action in Iraq

• President Barack Obama announced on Thursday that the United States is “prepared to take targeted and precise military action” in Iraq if the situation on the ground requires it. The president added that if he decides to take military action in Iraq, he would consult with Congress and world leaders.

=> ↺ Iraq veterans now wonder if all their sacrifices were for naught

• Mike Dizmang thinks about the Iraqi children who shook his hand and smiled when he told them that all would be OK in the end.

=> ↺ The Drone Memo Cometh

• In response to consolidated lawsuits filed by the ACLU and The New York Times, the Second Circuit recently ordered the Obama administration to disclose (with redactions) one of the legal memos authorizing the government’s premeditated killing of Anwar al-Aulaqi, an American citizen. The government has challenged certain aspects of the court’s decision, apparently with some degree of success (more on that below), and it has managed to defer the release of the memo by two months. To its credit, though, the court appears unwilling to allow the government to delay the release of the memo indefinitely. If the court holds to a plan it set forth ten days ago, it will publish the memo itself this coming week.

=> ↺ US aid of f $96 million approved for Pakistan

=> ↺ The crisis of ISIS in Iraq: was America the midwife?

• Communities Digital News published a report outlining strong circumstantial evidence that arms transferred from the Special Mission Compound in Benghazi before the attack on September 11, 2012, ended up in Syria and are now being used against the Iraq government. Media reports and Pentagon / State Department statements have confirmed that U.S. weapons are being deployed by ISIS in Iraq.

• More disturbing information is emerging to bookend these revelations. The United States probably trained elements of the ISIS militia, which has accounted for the deaths of hundreds of civilians in Syria and now in Iraq.

=> ↺ Why The MSM Is Such A Farce

• hen again one only has to remember the MSM basically cheering on the the preemptive illegal invasion and all the breathless bullshit emanating from “embedded” journalists to see how effing useless they are.

=> ↺ Isis threat justifies greater surveillance powers in UK, says Liam Fox

=> ↺ John Prescott: I’m proud to have served with you Tony but we DID cause Iraq mess

• The Sunday Mirror columnist and former Deputy Prime Minister says it’s time to learn from the past and leave Iraq and its neighbours to sort out this mess

=> ↺ The Iraq Surge ‘Worked’ All Over Again

• Treating “the US troop surge worked” argument as a fact, as Engel is doing, is very dangerous–since it logically suggests that it is only the presence of US troops that can keep Iraq safe. That is a recipe for a never-ending war.

=> ↺ Iraq blowback: Isis rise manufactured by insatiable oil addiction

=> ↺ Iraq and Your Gas Tank

• When it comes to US foreign policy and warmaking in the Middle East, you’re not supposed to talk about oil. To suggest it plays a serious role in US decision-making is to invite taunting about conspiracy theories.

=> ↺ Russia Reignites The Proxy War: Putin Offers “Complete Support” To Iraq Prime Minister Scorned By Obama

• It was the bolded text that was of biggest interest because as we noted the next day, when discussing the next steps for ISIS, we said that “One wonders how long until the mercenary force finds its latest major backer, because for all the western, US-led intervention, both Russia and China are oddly missing from the scene. We expect that to change soon.”

=> ↺ Where Is the Accountability on Iraq?

• Can someone explain to me why the media still solicit advice about the crisis in Iraq from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)? Or Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)? How many times does the Beltway hawk caucus get to be wrong before we recognize that maybe, just maybe, its members don’t know what they’re talking about?

=> ↺ Capitalism’s Bullets in Latin America: Invisible Empires, State Power and 21st Century Colonialism

• “Soccer, metaphor for war, at times turns into real war,” wrote Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano. For many people in Brazil, a war has indeed broken out surrounding the current World Cup. Poor communities have been displaced by stadiums and related infrastructure for the event, the high level of security has increased police violence, and the enormous economic costs of the World Cup are seen by many as a blow against the rights of the country’s most impoverished people. As a result of these controversies, the international sports event has been met with wide-spread protests.

=> ↺ Assange Urges Ecuador to Counteract Massive U.S. Spying

• The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, felt that despite being a small nation, Ecuador can pursue the cessation of US mass espionage against its citizens, according to an interview published here today. The Australian publisher and journalist considered that Ecuador can pass laws to mandate that companies providing services within the country use audited industrial standard encryption by default.

• In an interview with the El Telegrafo, Assange said the best model for small nations like Ecuador is the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, which aimed to make Iceland into a competitive jurisdiction among the market of jurisdictions for companies wishing to provide internet services.

Transparency Reporting

=> ↺ Details Leak On How Secret Global Treaty Will Force Countries To Further Deregulate Financial Sector

• WikiLeaks has been rather quiet recently — probably something to do with Julian Assange being stuck in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for the last two years. But today, we saw a flash of the old, dangerous WikiLeaks, with its publication of a major leak concerning the Trade In Services Agreement (TISA). Although Techdirt wrote about this in April, for many this is the first time they have heard about this secretive deal, which has probably come as something of a shock given the global scale of its ambitions and its likely impact.

=> ↺ Another Secret Pro-Corporate Trade Negotiation Is Leaked

=> ↺ Leaked docs reveal financial deregulation

• Prime minister Tony Abbott is holding secret trade negotiations to fundamentally deregulate Australia’s banking and finance sector, according to WikiLeaks documents.

=> ↺ TISA trade talks will lock NZ into finance rules behind GFC

=> ↺ China jails transparency activists

• Liu Ping, Wei Zhongping and Li Sihua are part of New Citizens group campaigning for government officials to disclose assets

=> ↺ Nearly Two Years Caged in Embassy, Groups Demand Justice for Julian Assange

=> ↺ I am Julian Assange, publisher of Wikileaks. Ask me anything.

=> ↺ Juilian Assange Answers All in Reddit AmA

=> ↺ WikiLeaks Founder Urged Google To Embrace Bitcoin

• The Australian publisher and journalist, best known as the editor-in-chief of the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, recently revealed in a reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA), that he has long supported bitcoin.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

=> ↺ Thousands of fracking wells in Pennsylvania ‘may be leaking methane’

• Study finds abandoned wells could be bigger climate change contributor than thought, reports Climate Central

=> ↺ Glastonbury festival drops plastic water bottles and opts for steel

=> ↺ Russia in secret plot against fracking, Nato chief says

• Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Russia was mounting a sophisticated “disinformation campaign” aimed at undermining attempts to exploit alternative energy sources such as shale gas

=> ↺ Russia ‘secretly working with environmentalists to oppose fracking’

Finance

=> ↺ The Teaching Class

• Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone paying tuition should care.

=> ↺ Spain’s new king sworn in amid anti-monarchy rally (PHOTOS, VIDEOS)

• ​Several people have been detained at an anti-monarchy protest near Madrid’s heavily guarded central square following the coronation of Felipe VI as Spain’s new king.

=> ↺ BBC and press ignore massive demonstration against austerity in London

• It seems the BBC are capable of tracking down a single Scot in Brazil who cheered a goal against England but fail to notice 50,000 demonstrating on their doorstep.

=> ↺ Miami Sues Banking Giant Over Predatory Mortgages

• The city of Miami on Friday filed a lawsuit in a federal court against JPMorgan Chase & Co., accusing the banking giant of a pattern of discriminatory loan practices “since at least 2004″ which sparked foreclosures and violated the U.S. Fair Housing Act.

• “JPMorgan has engaged in a continuous pattern and practice of mortgage discrimination in Miami since at least 2004 by imposing different terms or conditions on a discriminatory and legally prohibited basis,” Bloomberg reports lawyers for Miami as saying in the complaint.

=> ↺ Tens of thousands march in London against coalition’s austerity measures

• Tens of thousands of people marched through central London on Saturday afternoon in protest at austerity measures introduced by the coalition government. The demonstrators gathered before the Houses of Parliament, where they were addressed by speakers, including comedians Russell Brand and Mark Steel.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

=> ↺ The Koching of America — and of PBS

• A few months back the filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin got some bad news. The PBS funding that they had counted on to complete their documentary on campaign financing was being withdrawn. This setback came not long after PBS took the unusual step of warning David Koch (of right-wing billionaire donors “the Koch Brothers” fame) that he had been negatively portrayed in another of the networks documentaries, and giving them a chance to respond.

=> ↺ Fox Covers Up a Benghazi Story

• So why no mention of the suspect’s stated motive now? Fox News has aired more than 2,000 segments on the Benghazi attacks. Like other right-wing media with the Benghazi bug, Fox News claims that the White House deceived the public by not immediately branding the incident an Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist attack, but instead claimed that it was a spontaneous reaction to the notorious internet video. The motive for the deception, goes the theory, was the White House’s desire not to remind voters that Al-Qaeda was still active two months before a US presidential elections (e.g., Special Report, 5/14/13.)

• Indeed, the conspiracy-mongering got so out of control at one point that the Republicans, with Fox News at their backs, attempted to turn a State Department email mentioning that the anti-Muslim Internet video had caused incidents at a number of US embassies into a smoking gun–evidence, they said, that State Department was trying to repeat inaccurate talking points to be used on Sunday morning chat shows (e.g., Kelly File, 5/1/14). They were ultimately unsuccessful, as more level-headed media corrected the record (e.g., Slate, 4/30/14).

=> ↺ How Fox News Has A Conversation About Islam

=> ↺ Steve Wozniak wants you to support Mayday.US and get money out of politics

• Apple co-founder, nerd legend, and all-round Good Guy Steve Wozniak has recorded an excellent video explaining why he’s supporting Larry Lessig’s Mayday.US super PAC, which is raising $5M to elect lawmakers who’ll promise to vote to abolish super PACs and effect major campaign finance reform.

Censorship

=> ↺ The Metropolitan Opera’s Censorship of “The Death of Klinghoffer”: Artwork About Oppression of Palestinians Considered Anti-Jewish

=> ↺ Ask the BBC why it didn’t cover the anti-austerity demo – here’s what you can expect!

• This is what happened when a friend of Vox Political, going by the monicker Sick Britain, contacted the BBC to ask why there has been no coverage of today’s (June 21) anti-austerity demonstration in London, which was attended by more than 50,000 people.

Privacy

=> ↺ CISPA returns as CISA — and it’s just as terrible for privacy

• Defeated twice before, a rebranded Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act is just as vague, broad, and detrimental as the original bill

=> ↺ Germany’s Deep Cooperation with the NSA

=> ↺ NSA ‘third party’ partners tap the Internet backbone in global surveillance program

=> ↺ Coming soon: Email Self-Defense in Spanish, German, Portuguese, and more

• We’re excited to announce that volunteers are currently working on translations of the guide and infographic into ten languages. Wow!

=> ↺ Modern databases erode our Bill of Rights

• The Bill of Rights and other provisions of our Constitution have been gone anyway, what with presidents starting wars all over the world without even a nod to Congress and the National Security Administration recording everything from whom we call to who calls us to our facial images. The spooks can find us whenever they want.

=> ↺ Kim Komando: How to outsmart the NSA smartphone spies

=> ↺ Most Canadians Oppose Tories’ Cyberbullying Bill, Poll Suggests

• A new poll suggests Canadians are giving a thumbs down to the Conservative government’s cyberbullying legislation, at least when asked about elements of Bill C-13 that have nothing to do with cyberbullying.

• The poll by Forum Research, conducted June 13-14 and surveying 1,433 Canadians via interactive voice response, showed more than two-thirds of Canadians disapproved of a stipulation in the controversial bill that would allow authorities to access personal data without a warrant.

=> ↺ Fundraiser to support ‘NSA-proof’ email gets off to a roaring start

• Since then, the company says it has signed up 200,000 users – and it just launched a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo because, co-founder Andy Yen says, “that is the best way to get financing and also keep ProtonMail independent.”

=> ↺ Ex-NSA chief charges banks $1 million a month for advice

• That’s the monthly fee that former National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander charges banks for advice. The four-star general, who once oversaw U.S. digital defenses, has joined a growing field of cyberconsultants, and the audience is receptive. Under pressure from regulators, lawmakers and their customers, financial services firms are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into protecting themselves from digital assaults.

=> ↺ Snowden gets German Fritz Bauer award for exposing US intelligence

• ​Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden has been awarded the Fritz Bauer Prize of the German Humanist Union, a prominent civil rights organization, for exposing the controversial surveillance practices of the NSA and its accomplices.

=> ↺ Snowden receives German award for civic courage

=> ↺ Key urged to come clean over surveillance

• As John Key flies home from a successful trip to Washington, the Government is being told to open up about spying by the United States.

• A Stuff Ipsos poll shows 71.6 per cent of New Zealanders believe American espionage networks are gathering data on us.

=> ↺ Glenn Greenwald to Paul Rieckhoff: ‘Total bull’

• Things got heated Friday on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” after Glenn Greenwald called Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America founder Paul Rieckhoff’s questioning of Edward Snowden’s asylum in Russia “total bulls—-.”

=> ↺ NSA Playset: Hackers invited to become digital James Bonds

• After last year Germany’s Der Spiegel published a 48-page catalog of gadgets used by the NSA back in 2008, a group of hackers led by security researcher Dean Pierce decided to make an attempt to reconstruct these NSA spying gadgets using open-source hardware.

=> ↺ Stung: Government Disappears Stingray Spying Records

• We’ve heard variations on the phrase “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” from the government for quite some time. It appears this may be true, at least if you are the government.

• In the case of Stingray, a cell phone spying device used against Americans, the government does have something to hide and they fear the release of more information. Meanwhile, the Fourth Amendment weeps quietly in the corner.

=> ↺ Emails Show Feds Asking Florida Cops to Deceive Judges

• Police in Florida have, at the request of the U.S. Marshals Service, been deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of a controversial surveillance tool to track suspects, according to newly obtained emails.

=> ↺ Skybox: Google Maps goes real-time – but would you want a spy in the sky staring into your letter box?

• When planning a road trip or buying a new house, it has become routine to scope out the area on Google Maps.

=> ↺ GM Wants You to Creepily Text Drivers by Scanning Their Plates

• General Motors wants to make it easier for Chinese customers to curse out the moron who cut them off or get the digits of the attractive driver one car over at the stop light. So it’s developed an app called DiDi Plate that lets Android users text the owner of a car by simply scanning its license plate.

Civil Rights

=> ↺ No answer yet on how many elected politicians have been monitored by police’s domestic extremism unit

• Two Green Party politicians have criticised police chiefs who recorded their political activities on a secret database that tracks ‘domestic extremists’

=> ↺ US demotes Thailand and Qatar for abysmal human trafficking records

=> ↺ Sign the petition to provide reparations to the Chicago Police torture survivors

=> ↺ Guildford Four’s Gerry Conlon dies of cancer in Belfast, aged 60

• Belfast man who was wrongly jailed for 15 years devoted his life after release to campaigning for justice

=> ↺ How the CIA Stole ‘Dr. Zhivago’

• As The Zhivago Affair reveals, Feltrinelli was not the novel’s only publisher: The CIA played a central role in promoting and disseminating Pasternak’s novel. “The CIA, as it happened, loved literature,” Finn and Couvee write, and the agency was involved in the shipment of some one million books behind the Iron Curtain, including Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Nabokov’s Pnin. It became an urgent American agenda to place Doctor Zhivago in the hands of Russian readers. At a 1958 exposition in Brussels, attended by many Soviet visitors, the Vatican pavilion gave out free copies of Zhivago. In the words of a CIA memo, “this book has great propaganda value.”

=> ↺ Benghazi suspect faces US criminal court

=> ↺ Daphne Eviatar: Sending Benghazi suspect to Gitmo would be obstruction of justice

=> ↺ Kangaroo courts and guns on the table: The week in quotes

• Activist Margaretta D’Arcy made a strong presentation to an Oireachtas committee on the use of Irish airspace and Shannon Airport by, in particular, the US Military and CIA.

=> ↺ Revealed: Police investigate evidence that six CIA torture flights landed in Scotland

• POLICE are investigating evidence that a CIA jet landed in Glasgow after carrying 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to a secret torture prison in Poland.

• And the Sunday Mail can reveal that elite detectives are also probing five other stopovers in Scotland, which researchers suspect were part of CIA “rendition circuits” to move terror suspects between secret jails and torture sites.

=> ↺ Risen’s Petition Denied

• According to sources however, Eric Holder has declared, “As long as I’m attorney general, no reporter will go to jail for doing his job.”

=> ↺ UK government urged to prevent US use of Diego Garcia for renditions

• Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee has called on the UK Government to restrict the use by the US of Diego Garcia, a British overseas territory, for renditions.

=> ↺ Miracles, secrecy and Obama

• To make matters worse, agencies can’t deal with the explosion in electronic information. The CIA is believed to generate 1 petabyte of classified records every 18 months, or the equivalent of 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets of documents.

=> ↺ Canadian woman who stopped car on highway to save ducklings found guilty of causing two deaths

• 25-year-old Emma Czornobaj stopped her car on the left lane of a highway near Montreal in 2010 after spotting a group of stray ducklings on the road. A motorcyclist and his daughter were killed after slamming into her car.

=> ↺ ‘Cash cow’ spy cars to be banned

• The “overzealous” use of spy cars by councils to issue parking fines will be reined in as the government seeks a better deal for the High Street.

=> ↺ Telling Folk Heroes From Monsters

• Even if hackers like Mr. Swartz are still a problem for us to reconcile in real life, maybe it is in the movies, with their capacity to empathize with the outré, their ability to present difficult, morally prismatic antiheroes, that we can properly come to terms with them. Especially now, in a world so vividly shaped by complex agents of change like Mr. Assange and Edward J. Snowden, we may need movies to help us comprehend our shades of gray.

=> ↺ Immigration And Mindless Partisanship – OpEd

• Many news articles have reported record deportations under Obama, while his anti-immigration critics have argued that a sensitivity to novelties in classification expose a president lax on border enforcement. Adjusting for all this, it appears that the truth is somewhere in the middle: Overall, the Obama administration has conducted deportation policies qualitatively similar to the last administration’s. Whether one concludes a slight decline or increase, the more important fact is that there has been no radical shift since he took office, and certainly not one toward liberalization. Obama’s proposal for reform last year was in fact quite reminiscent of Bush’s plan. Although conservatives tended to find Bush too liberal on immigration, a June 2007 poll showed that 45 percent of Republicans favored their president on these policies, down from 61 percent just a few months before.

=> ↺ Brazilian police criticised over raid on protest camp

• Several people were injured by rubber bullets and teargas canisters in Tuesday’s dawn attack by police on a tent community occupying a historic wharf known as Cais José Estelita.

=> ↺ Police say they have not counted how many politicians they have been monitoring

• It seems as though we may never know how many elected politicians have been monitored by the police’s ‘domestic extremism’ unit.

• And the reason? Police say that they have not counted how many there are.

• In response to a freedom of information request from the Guardian, Scotland Yard said that the national ‘domestic extremism’ unit “has not conducted any research to count how many elected politicians are currently recorded in any way in its files.”

=> ↺ Iran’s morality police: patrolling the streets by stealth

• President Rouhani vowed to rein them in, but they are still in force quietly keeping check on Tehran’s dress code

=> ↺ Groups Appeal to UN for ‘Humanity’ as Detroit Shuts Off Water to Thousands

• ‘By denying water service to thousands, Detroit is violating the human right to water.’

=> ↺ Brutal Repression Of Anti-FIFA & World Cup Protests in Brazil: at least 109 Arrested, countless Wounded

• Clashes in São Paulo ongoing, activists erected barricades and police have begun trying to disperse them with gas bombs. Protestors trashed a high-class car dealership and a bank on their way to the barricades, the cops could not keep up.

=> ↺ Spain: Piss Off The New King, Get Arrested For Displaying Anti-Monarchy Flags

• At least 5 people were arrested by the Spanish police for displaying flags for the Republic during the crowning ceremony of an imposed king aimed to reboot the fading support for the monarchy.

• Since 2008, it is legal to carry flags in support of the republic in Spain, but police arrested old people, young people, parents in front of their kids, intimidated and abused dozens for speaking against the king on the streets, or for wearing anti-monarchy signs. The ones who shouted ”¡Viva la República!” (Long live the Republic), during the ceremony, were arrested on the spot, officials said that it was for the crime of “opposing resistance to the authorities“.

=> ↺ Report: California Illegally Sterilized Dozens of Female Inmates

• Last year, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) accused California of sterilizing over 140 female inmates between 2006 and 2010 without required state approvals.

• One doctor, James Heinrich, was responsible for the two-thirds of the tubal ligation referrals during that period from the biggest offender, Valley State prison.

• Asked by CIR about his startling record, Heinrich justified the money spent sterilizing inmates by claiming it was minimal “compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children—as they procreated more.” He has since been barred from future prison work.

Internet/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ The EFF wants to improve your privacy by making your Wi-Fi public

• Conventional wisdom dictates that to maintain your security and privacy, you should encrypt your Wi-Fi network. But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues that partially opening up your home Wi-Fi network could actually enhance your privacy, and is working on a tool to make it easier to do so.

Intellectual Monopolies

=> ↺ TTIP Update XXIX

• Since the text itself is pretty dry, WikiLeaks has asked one of the world’s top experts on these trade agreements, Professor Jane Kelsey of the Faculty of Law, University of Auckland, New Zealand, to provide a commentary. I strongly recommend reading her analysis, since it explains what all those innocuous-sounding phrases really mean. Here is her summary of what the new leak tells us…

Copyrights

=> ↺ Dotcom’s Disruptive Music Service First to Support FLAC Streaming

• After several years of development, Kim Dotcom’s much-anticipated music streaming platform Baboom is gearing up for its public release. Baboom aims to disrupt the music industry by closing the bridge between artists and fans. This includes a higher revenue share for artists and free music streaming in a lossless format for fans.

=> ↺ EU Commission Set to Unveil New Anti-Piracy Action Plans

• The EU Commission will next week announce new strategies for dealing with online piracy and counterfeiting. These non-legislative measures will include an EU action plan aimed at fighting IP infringement, plus a strategy to protect and enforce IP rights in third countries. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the aim is to “follow the money”.

=> ↺ Digital Content Online Should Be Free, Children Say

• A new survey of young children and adults has found consensus on what should be charged for content online. In both groups, 49% said that people should be able to download content they want for free, with a quarter of 16-24 year olds stating that file-sharing was the only way they could afford to obtain it.

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