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● 08.25.14

● Links 24/8/2014: GNU/Linux Specialisation and Benchmarks

Posted in News Roundup at 4:13 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ China Developing Its Own OS To Take On Apple, Microsoft, and Google

• If it hasn’t been made clear enough in recent months that China would love nothing more than to cut down on its reliance to American technology companies, its just-announced decision to create its own operating system should remedy that. At first, this OS will target the desktop, but eventually, it’ll make its way to smartphones and other mobile devices.

Desktop

=> ↺ Specialization and the Linux Desktop

• Our benevolent dictator for life recently claimed that he was still aiming at Linux being as prevalent on the desktop as it is in the datacenter or in the cloud. The statement was meant with roaring applause from the crowd, and a few healthy, and a few not so healthy, doses of skepticism from the press. Recently, IT World asked “Does it still make sense for Linus to want the desktop for Linux?”, and Matt Asay from Tech Repubic asked “Can we please stop talking about the Linux desktop?”. Both publishers are critical of the claim that there is still room for Linux on Personal Computers, and point to Android as a Linux success story. What both articles miss though is that the flexibility of Linux, and the permissiveness of it’s open source license may be the thing that saves Linux on the desktop, just not in the way we were expecting.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linus Torvalds is my hero, says 13 year old Zachary DuPont

• Zachary DuPon is a 6th grader who will turn 13 years old soon. He used to be an Arch Linux user and is looking forward to installing Gentoo Linux soon.

• The story of Zach goes like this – his school organized a project where students were asked to write a letter to their heroes, while most kids wrote to celebrities, Zach wrote to the ‘real’ hero of the modern technology world – Linus Torvalds.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Preview Of AMD Radeon R9 290 Hawaii Open-Source Performance

• Coming up next week is a comparison of the Radeon R9 290 graphics card against various other graphics cards on the latest open-source driver. Additionally, there will be a RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. Catalyst driver comparison for the Radeon R9 290 graphics card. Unfortunately there will be no Radeon R9 290X graphics tests for lacking that GPU and having bought the R9 290 myself. For those that are anxious to see how the R9 290 performs on the open-source driver, I uploaded some initial standalone results this weekend for you to facilitate your own comparisons.

=> ↺ Open-Source AMD HSA Should Come To Fruition This Year

• AMD’s open-source OpenCL support has been lagging behind the proprietary drivers, but Bridgman says they’re trying to improve upon that too. In particular, it seems they may try to open-source more of their proprietary OpenCL driver implementation. Bridgman said, “For OpenCL not sure yet — we’re trying to get more people working on it and open up more code from our proprietary implementation, so rate of progress should improve but I don’t know how much yet.”

=> ↺ Preview Of AMD Radeon R9 290 Hawaii Open-Source Performance

• Coming up next week is a comparison of the Radeon R9 290 graphics card against various other graphics cards on the latest open-source driver. Additionally, there will be a RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. Catalyst driver comparison for the Radeon R9 290 graphics card. Unfortunately there will be no Radeon R9 290X graphics tests for lacking that GPU and having bought the R9 290 myself. For those that are anxious to see how the R9 290 performs on the open-source driver, I uploaded some initial standalone results this weekend for you to facilitate your own comparisons.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ Intel Bay Trail Performance With Linux 3.16/3.17 & Mesa 10.3

• The Bay Trail HD Graphics tests for this article came down to:

• • Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS with all available stable release updates.

• • The updated Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS state with then enabling the Oibaf PPA for Mesa 10.3-devel.

• • The Oibaf’ed Ubuntu LTS configuration with then installing the Linux 3.16 stable kernel.

• • The above configuration but then upgrading to the experimental Linux 3.17 kernel in Git form.

=> ↺ Radeon Graphics Yield Mixed Results With Linux 3.17 Kernel

• This article serves as a comparison of the stable Linux 3.16 kernel against the latest Linux 3.17 Git kernel when testing a range of graphics cards from the Radeon HD 5770 through the Radeon R9 270X. The system setup was maintained the same through testing and Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS was used as a host but with upgrading to the Mesa 10.3-devel and xf86-video-ati 7.4.99 Git using the Oibaf PPA. With Linux 3.16.0 and Linux 3.17 Git, the following AMD graphics cards were tested on the Intel Core i7 4790K rig:

• • Radeon HD 5770 - Radeon HD 6870 - Radeon HD 6950 - Radeon HD 7850 - Radeon HD 7950 - Radeon R9 270X

=> ↺ Preview: OS X 10.10 Yosemite vs. Ubuntu Linux GPU Performance

• At the request of many Phoronix readers, here’s our first tests of Apple’s OS X 10.10 “Yosemite” operating system as we see how the OpenGL performance compares between it and Ubuntu Linux with an updated kernel and Mesa.

Applications

=> ↺ podbeuter: The hidden podcast tool

=> ↺ grc: More colorizing for terminal output

• I really should have sifted through the titles I had waiting back in June, when I finished the alphabetical sequence, and plucked out all the colorizers. I’m still finding them, months later. Like sand in my shoes after going to the beach.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ jBilling tutorial – an open source billing platform

=> ↺ How To Install Shutter 0.93 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

=> ↺ How To Install Gnoduino 0.5.0 On Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

=> ↺ How To Install Shotwell 0.19.0 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivatives

=> ↺ How To Install WeeChat 1.0 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

=> ↺ How To Install dmMediaConverter 1.0 On Ubuntu 14.04, Debian Jessie, Debian Wheezy And Derivatives

=> ↺ Creating certs and keys for services using FreeIPA (Dogtag)

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ How To Install Wine 1.7.25 On Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

=> ↺ How To Install Wine 1.7.25 On Fedora 20, Fedora 19, CentOS 7, CentOS 6, OpenSUSE 13.1 And OpenSUSE 12.3

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE Releases in the Future

• Long post about releases ahead, brace yourselves!

• Last week we released KDE Applications and KDE Platform 4.14.

• KDE Applications, KDE Platform and KDE Workspaces were sometimes collectively referred as the “KDE Software Compilation” or “KDE SC” in short form, which is arguably a bad name, but it is what it is.

=> ↺ My TODO List for LaKademy 2014

=> ↺ Release of libmygpo-qt 1.0.8 (Qt5 support inside )

• I’m happy to announce the release of a new version of my project libmygpo-qt. It again has been a while, over one year since the last release. And although it took so long, this release doesn’t include many new features, except one: support for building the library with Qt5.

=> ↺ How to contribute to the KDE Frameworks Cookbook

• Im a way, the book will partly provide an alternative way to consume the content provided by KDE TechBase. Because of that, the HTML version of the book will integrate and cross-link with TechBase. The preferences of what kind of documentation should be in the book or on TechBase are not yet written in stone, and will probably develop over time. The beauty of Free Software is that it also does not matter much – the content is there and may be mixed and remixed as needed.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ gnome 3 followup

• A quick followup from my previous post about using gnome shell for a week from a sysadmin view. I got a number of responses on irc and via email. Some of them providing handy hints and solutions or at least work arounds to some of the issues I ran into. I am happy to report that everyone who offered me suggestions/workarounds/tips were very polite and many were in agreement that some of these were issues that should get fixed or implemented.

Distributions

=> ↺ Why I don’t distro-hop: Because work. And pain.

• In any Linux distribution I use, I’d love to have full functionality with the open Radeon graphics driver. I’d also love a packaged Catalyst driver that works with GNOME 3. I can’t get the former with anything just yet, and I can’t get the latter in Fedora due to Wayland code in GNOME 3 that doesn’t yet play with Catalyst. Since I tend to run Xfce instead of GNOME, this isn’t a deal-breaker.

=> ↺ Manjaro 0.8.10 Receives New Update Pack and New Kernels

• Manjaro 0.8.10, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, has received a new update pack that brings some very important updates and changes.

Slackware Family

=> ↺ Salix Fluxbox 14.1 Beta 1 Is Light Distro Based on Slackware

• “It’s time to revive our Fluxbox edition! Here is a first beta that is mostly untested for now, so feel free to try it out and post your findings.The Fluxbox edition is designed to bring a minimalist environment to your desktop. The default desktop layout is comprised only from the Fluxbox panel and the right click menu will bring up the Fluxbox menu, so it should be really light on resources. The file manager that is used is PCManFM.”

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Linux Supplier Red Hat Is Set for Strong Gains

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ The Ubuntu Touch Image #203 Is Quite Fast And Stable

• The developers have started the work for the RTM (release to manufacturing) version of Ubuntu Touch, which will get only bug-fixes.

• Ubuntu Touch is developed on three branches: Utopic, which is the “stable” branch, the development branch utopic-devel and the RTM branch, which, unlike the two others, is not available for public yet.

• So, if you want an Ubuntu Touch version that receives all the new features in time, got for the “stable” branch. And for an Ubuntu Touch with less bugs and crashes, try the Ubuntu RTM.

=> ↺ Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn Now Uses Kernel 3.16.1

• Due to the fact that the Kernel Freeze will arrive in seven weeks, most likely, Ubuntu 14.10 will not ship with the newest version of Kernel 3.16.

=> ↺ Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) Hits Feature Freeze

• Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) is going to pass through several development stages and the Feature Freeze is just one of them. This means that developers can no longer get new features and major changes into the system, unless it’s important enough to get an exemption.

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ Linux Mint 17.1 to Feature a Much Better Update Manager

• Linux Mint developers are working on the first major update for the operating system, 17.1, and one of the big changes will be made to the Update Manager, which will provide much more information for the users.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

=> ↺ Android L update for Google Nexus 4, 5, 7 and 10 to release in late October

• Android L Operating System update for the Nexus 4, 5, 7 and 10 is rumored to arrive in late October.

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Is Open Source Becoming the De Facto Standard in the Data Center?

• Is open source positioned to become the next mode of standardization in the virtualization world?

=> ↺ Islamic State militant group used less restrictive social network

• The Islamic State extremist group began using a social networking website with less restrictions on users after other social media sites, Twitter and YouTube in particular, removed content related to the group.

• The social network called Diaspora lets users control their own personal data rather than storing the information itself, and it allows users to designate their own servers to host their data.

Events

=> ↺ ownCloud to organize Developer Conference in Berlin

• ownCloud is one of the most important free software projects around because we all are moving to the cloud for easy access to our data anywhere, anytime. The ‘so-called’ cloud has it’s own advantages, but it also compromises one’s ownership and control of the data. The moment you put your data on someone else’s cloud you lose the control and ownership over your own data.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Did Brendan Eich Contribute to Firefox’s Decline?

• This may sound like analyzing yesterday’s news, but I think it’s important, and more than that I need to put this here as a resource to point certain people to.

• As we probably all know Brendan Eich [co-]creator of the JavaScript scripting language, co-founder of the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, and ex-chief technical officer of Mozilla Corporation was promoted to chief executive officer (CEO) of Mozilla on March 24, 2014 only to resign on April 3, 2014 due to controversy over his $1,000 donation to the unconstitutional California Proposition 8 in 2008.

Freedom

=> ↺ on the Dark Ages of Free Software: a “Free Service Definition”?

• Free Software community is winning a war that is becoming increasingly pointless: yes, users have 100% Free Software thin client at their fingertips [or are really a few steps from there]. But all their relevant computations happen elsewhere, on remote systems they do not control, in the Cloud.

Misc.

=> ↺ Top 5 articles of the week: Clocker, Docker, and Raspberry Pi

=> ↺ Three Open Source Hardware Projects’ Challenges and Successes

• While open source practices have come to dominate the software industry, they’re still fairly new to hardware. Many open source hardware projects are now seeing some early success but there are still many challenges ahead, as the keynote speakers at LinuxCon and CloudOpen on Friday demonstrated.

Leftovers

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

=> ↺ 9-year-old trains to be ‘caliphate’ jihadi

• In Raqqah, heavily-armed jihadists are seen celebrating on US armoured vehicles seized during their advances in Iraq, while sharia police patrol streets and markets with rifles over their shoulders. Patrol chief Abu Obida orders traders to remove a poster showing “infidels,” then blithely tells a man to change the fabric on his wife’s veil.

=> ↺ US weighs direct military action against ISIS in Syria

• The Obama administration is debating a more robust intervention in Syria, including possible American air strikes, in a significant escalation of its weeks-long military assault on the Islamic extremist group that has destabilized neighbouring Iraq and killed an American journalist US, officials said.

=> ↺ The Republican Embrace of ISIL-Type Violence

• Remember when two cops were shot by homegrown white conservative terrorists in Las Vegas and Paul Waldman at the Washington Post, wrote, “It’s long past time for prominent conservatives and Republicans to do some introspection and ask whether they’re contributing to outbreaks of right-wing violence”?

• Remember when Republicans rejected the idea that their rhetoric could incite violence, let alone that it is violent?

• And think again about how Muslims should get a bullet in the head and pro-immigration Republicans should be shot and hanged.

• Remember these instances of violent right-wing rhetoric?

=> ↺ British, American special forces forming hunter killer unit ‘Task Force Black’ to smash Islamic State

• Britain’s elite special forces along with US special forces are forming a unit called Task Force Black to hunt down the killer of James Foley and smash the Islamic State.

• According to the Mirror and as reported by the Sunday People, the undercover unit’s aim will be to “cut the head off the snake” by hitting the command structure of the Islamist terror group responsible for a trail of atrocities across Iraq and Syria.

=> ↺ Op-Ed: Mystery plane bombs Tripoli again for a second night

• Most reports do not mention Haftar’s links to the CIA nor do the most recent reports I have read mention Haftar’s own remarks to the effect that these bombings are a joint effort with the international community.

=> ↺ What’s the truth behind Malaysian Flight 17 downing?: CIA Analysts Won’t Back White House Claims of Russian Culpability

• With the US continuing to push its submissive European “allies” towards an ever more confrontational stance towards Russia over the crisis in Ukraine (a crisis initially provoked by the US itself through CIA and State Department actions that led to the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government), the world appears headed towards a dangerous renewed Cold War between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.

• A central part of that campaign by Washington has been the effort to blame the downing of Malaysian Flight 17, which killed all 298 passengers and crew, on Russia, or failing that, on pro-Russian separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine. This campaign has used innuendo, falsified evidence and, weirdly, spurious and sometimes absurd “evidence” circulating in various social media — all of which which people like Secretary of State John Kerry and president Obama himself have tried to say “prove” that Russia, or at least a Russian-provided high-altitude BUK anti-aircraft missile, was responsible for the downing.

=> ↺ Here’s How The Kremlin’s English-Language Propaganda Organs Are Spinning Russia’s Incursion Into Ukraine

• The current situation in Ukraine is reaching a head as Russian armour and aid trucks are freely flowing over the boarder, an act that Ukraine has called a “direct invasion.”

• For the first time in months of crisis, NATO accused Russia of directly intervening in Ukraine’s restive east, where Kiev has been fighting Russian-supported separatists.

=> ↺ Reports Of ISIS Beheadings Are Horrifyingly Common

• During the first two weeks of August, Islamic State fighters killed 700 members of the al-Sheitaat tribe in Syria’s Deir al-Zor province, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Many of them were beheaded, the organization said. Islamic State militants had been battling the tribe since seizing two oil fields in Syria in July.

=> ↺ Here’s Everything You Need to Know About Hamas

• “Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Sexton explained. “It was founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a cleric and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood himself.”

• Sexton said Yassin founded in Hamas in 1987, during the first intifada.

• “In 1988, Hamas established a charter, a mission statement,” Sexton continued. “It said that its goal is to raise the flag of Allah over every inch of Palestine. Well, that’s a problem, because when they say Palestine, they mean Israel.”

=> ↺ How Snowden Complicates the Prevention of Future Leaks

• George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and the most prominent members of their teams feel differently, of course, which helps explain why Snowden became a whistleblower in the first place. The national-security state is its own worst enemy, doing more to undermine its own legitimacy than its critics ever could.

=> ↺ The truth about Iraq’s liberation

• US air strikes on Iraq are part of a criminal scheme to safeguard western control of the country’s oil, writes Dahlia Wasfi

=> ↺ US must consider partnering with Assad to defeat IS: former CIA agent

• The Obama administration is still weighing up how to respond to the Islamic State terrorist group after the beheading of American journalist James Foley. Pressure is growing on president Obama to do more than the current strategy of airstrikes on IS targets in Iraq. Chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Martin Dempsey said IS can only be defeated by countering Sunni militancy in Syria. The World Today spoke to former CIA counter-terrorist officer Patrick Skinner.

=> ↺ Why Washington’s War on Terror Failed

• There are extraordinary elements in the present U.S. policy in Iraq and Syria that are attracting surprisingly little attention. In Iraq, the U.S. is carrying out air strikes and sending in advisers and trainers to help beat back the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (better known as ISIS) on the Kurdish capital, Erbil. The U.S. would presumably do the same if ISIS surrounds or attacks Baghdad. But in Syria, Washington’s policy is the exact opposite: there the main opponent of ISIS is the Syrian government and the Syrian Kurds in their northern enclaves. Both are under attack from ISIS, which has taken about a third of the country, including most of its oil and gas production facilities.

=> ↺ ‘Germans fed up with NATO allies & US wars’ – Frmr Defense Secretary

Transparency Reporting

=> ↺ When Google Met WikiLeaks Note

• A pungent account by Assange of the banality of corporate evil, as he terms Google. Assange says the exchange with Eric Schmidt and colleagues may be his best interview — which composes about half the volume.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

=> ↺ FRACK TO FRONT

• Earlier in the summer, SchNEWS broke the story of the infamous Infrastructure Bill. The new law, still winding its way through parliament, will allow for any public land to be ‘transferred’ via a Government body to private developers.The Infrastructure Bill is still very much happening, and it’s got even uglier. We’re talking compulsory fracking uglier.

Finance

=> ↺ In Detroit, Water Crisis Symbolizes Decline, and Hope

• Nearly 19,500 Detroiters have had their water service interrupted since March 1. The Water and Sewerage Department, under pressure to reduce more than $90 million in bad debt, ordered shutoffs for customers who owed at least $150 or had fallen at least two months behind on their bills. The decision to take such drastic measures, done with little warning, ignited a controversy that prompted protests and arrests, more bad publicity for the struggling city, global dismay, and a warning from the United Nations.

=> ↺ How a degree from Duke University dashed my dreams of buying a home

• I didn’t realize just how much of an impact student loan debt would have until I attempted to buy a house

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

=> ↺ BBC’s long struggle to present the facts without fear or favour

• Under such circumstances, it is no wonder that the BBC can appear like a damaged, bullied child, defensive and afraid. The stakes for BBC News are immeasurably high. If we believe in the BBC as a positive and beneficial ideological intervention in our lives, if we believe in it as the greatest, and best loved, signifier of Britain there is, then things have to change – outside the BBC as well as inside it. The bullies need to lay off. The whole culture that surrounds it needs to become less vituperative, more mature.

Censorship

=> ↺ Europe: A Union of Common Censorship

• Freedom is fundamental to prosperity. Those who cherish freedom most are often those who have not always enjoyed it. Thus the souls whose lives were blighted by Communist totalitarianism often rejoice at the simplest pleasures, even 25 years after the evils of the system were unraveled across Europe. Their joy in being able to travel has been hugely enhanced by that core Western value – freedom. Unfortunately, just as the European Union appears to have forgotten how to create prosperity, so, too, it seems to have gone somewhat patchy on the notion of freedom.

=> ↺ India sacks movie censor chief over bribery charge

• MUMBAI: India has removed the chief executive of its film censorship board after he was arrested on accusations he took a bribe to clear a movie for screening.

=> ↺ Gavin McInnes Makes a Great Argument Against Censorship

• Last week, performance artist, professional agitator, and Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes took to Thought Catalog—a publication known for particularly vapid and terrible millennial musings—to speculate about how “transphobia is perfectly natural.” People were outraged. People demanded the piece be removed. Thought Catalog responded by slapping on a big old trigger warning—if you go to the McInnes article page now, you’ll get a notice that “the article you are trying to read has been reported by the community as hateful or abusive content” before being allowed to proceed—but like hell it was going to take down such spectacular clickbait.

=> ↺ Canada’s despicable climate censorship: Government scientists need permission to tweet basic facts

• New documents reveal the extent of the government’s maddening policy of “suppression through bureaucracy”

=> ↺ Twitter’s busy week: Censorship rules and changing timelines

=> ↺ ‘Recovered Voices’ initiative studies grim history of Nazi censorship

• The Nazis, of course, had their terrible guidelines based on religion, race or modernist “decadence.”

Privacy

=> ↺ Corporate hack attack fears drive flash of cash

• Mr Snowden’s exposé revealed that the NSA had gained access to large internet companies’ servers stored in clouds, and inserted “back doors” into encryption software. In the immediate aftermath there were fears that distrust in US cloud-storage providers could cost such companies dearly, with the highest estimates forecasting a 25 per cent hit to overall IT service provider revenues globally.

=> ↺ White Paper: Identifying back doors, attack points, and surveillance mechanisms in iOS devices

• I received word from the editor-in-chief that the author of an accepted paper has permission to publish it on his website, and so I am now making my research available to anyone who wishes to read it. The following paper, “Identifying back doors, attack points, and surveillance mechanisms in iOS devices” first appeared published in The International Journal of Digital Forensics and Incident Response in March 2014′s publication. The Editor-in-Chief is Eoghan Casey, with the Information Security Institute, John Hopkins University, Maryland. The editorial board consists of researchers from Google, Microsoft, LG, The Mitre Corporation, and a number of universities. This paper was the basis for my talk at the HOPE/X conference in NYC in July 2014. Please enjoy.

=> ↺ THE WEST IS LOSING TURKEY

• The announcements were both as expected and made one smile. Evidently, the main reason is the ambiguity of the policies implemented by the Erdoğan government, which shows an unbounded character according to them. Aside from wiretapping some politicians and bureaucrats of Turkey, the BND also probably used other communication tools such as the Internet. Former BND chief Wieck stated that such authority could only be granted by the German government, while intelligence experts underlined that such an operation could only be conducted by using some intermediaries in Turkey.

=> ↺ Germany spies on Albania to monitor ‘organised crime’: report

• Germany’s secret service has been spying on Albania for years to keep tabs on “organised crime”, Der Spiegel claimed on Saturday, days after it was revealed that Berlin had been eavesdropping on Turkey.

Civil Rights

=> ↺ Ferguson: officer relieved of duty after video of racist remarks surfaces

• A police officer involved in the protests over Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, has been relieved of his duty after video surfaced of him making racist and derogatory remarks.

• Dan Page was recorded in April giving a speech in which he described President Barack Obama as an illegal immigrant, and railed against Muslims and gay people. “I’m into diversity – I kill everybody,” he said.

=> ↺ High school student arrested for writing story about shooting dinosaur

• When a South Carolina student was given an assignment by his teacher to create a Facebook-type status report telling something interesting about himself, he allegedly wrote “I killed my neighbor’s pet dinosaur. I bought the gun to take care of the business.”

=> ↺ John Yoo and The Senate Torture Report

• John Choon Yoo, aka John Yoo, authored the Torture Memos used to justify torture of human beings by the Bush Administration.

• [...]

• The SSCI Torture report has been approved for public release. However, the SSCI and the CIA are fighting over the CIA’s substantial redactions to the torture report summary. The torture report is 6,000 pages, adopted by the SSCI in December 2012; it is the most comprehensive report on the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a euphemism for torture.

=> ↺ This guy accepted a ‘water-boarding challenge’

• Some sheep have been bold enough to show their bravery by accepting the Ice Bucket Challenge. Others demand a greater feat, such as proving one’s capability to read on a fifth-grade level. But some motherfuckers? Some motherfuckers just don’t know when to quit. Some motherfuckers decidedly accepted a means of CIA-endorsed torture–not so much for the ALS children–but, like Bill Burr has already professed, for their own two and a half seconds of fame.

=> ↺ Journalist James Risen: will he be jailed for not revealing source?

• While President Obama and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder have asked this week for law enforcement in Ferguson, Mo., to not jail reporters for doing their jobs, press advocates are asking the administration and the Justice Department to stop prosecuting a New York Times national security correspondent for doing his. As Ashley Westerman reports from Washington, DC, the years-­long case of James Risen has had a chilling effect on journalists and whistleblowers.

=> ↺ The administration should not press reporter James Risen to reveal a source

• LAST WEEK President Obama offered some lofty words about journalism and democracy. Commenting on the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., he declared, “Here, in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground.”

=> ↺ Obama Admits ‘We Tortured Some Folks,’ But Is the Bush Era Over?

• As Taguba noted in his piece for the Times, he knows “from experience that oversight will help the C.I.A. — as it helped the United States military.” He wrote: “Ten years ago, I was directed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior officer in Iraq, to investigate allegations of detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. My report’s findings, which prompted a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, documented a systemic problem: military personnel had perpetrated ‘numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses.’” He believes that the reason American’s support for terrorism has increased in recent years only because there has been no honest accounting. He cited a 2012 YouGov poll and research conducted by Amy Zegart of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Although several years old, that survey showed that 41 percent of Americans supported torturing prisoners, a 14-percentage point increase from 2007. “It turns out that Americans don’t just like the general idea of torture more now,” Zegart wrote for Foreign Policy in September 2012. “They like specific torture techniques more too.”

=> ↺ Saudi Arabia executes 19 in one half of August in ‘disturbing surge of beheadings’

• Saudi Arabia has beheaded at least 19 people since the beginning of August in a surge of executions, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said.

=> ↺ ‘Comprehensive’ CIA Torture Report Won’t Even Name Well-Known Architects of Torture Program

• Some familiar names will be missing from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s long-awaited report on the CIA’s torture program, VICE News has learned.

• Notably, two retired Air Force psychologists, Dr. Bruce Jessen and Dr. James Mitchell, who have been credited with being the architects of the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” have their names redacted in the 480-page executive summary of the report, according to current and former US officials knowledgeable about the contents of the document.

=> ↺ The killer on the (Saudi) king’s highway

• The House of Saud, directly and indirectly, and the proverbial wealthy Gulf Cooperation Council donors are the Mom and Dad of ISIS. All duly vetted/approved by the industrial-military-Orwellian-Panopticon complex.

=> ↺ Leaks, Whistleblowers, and the Media’s Right to Report

• Their stories are not new. What Spione brought to the screen was the humanity of the whistleblowers and the patriotic idealism that compelled them to work in government agencies like the NSA and the CIA and then to speak out against the excesses they saw there. If anything, Silenced dramatizes how the landscape of government secrecy has changed dramatically since 9/11 and the war on terror. It makes the argument that whistleblowers play an essential role: Leaks are a necessary prophylactic, especially when they reveal the abuse of public authority and the harm done to the rights of citizens.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ Police: Finding Pirate Bay Documents is Too Expensive

• City of London Police have denied a Freedom of Information request for access to correspondence relating to The Pirate Bay. According to the police it would take more than 18 hours to locate the requested information and would therefore cost too much money.

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