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● 07.18.15

● Links 18/7/2015: Android PC, Chromixium 1.5

Posted in News Roundup at 7:16 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ Not Just For Desktops: 10 Devices You Can Install Linux On

• Linux is perhaps the most versatile OS available. Capable of being installed on a variety of devices, the open source operating system is used in a variety of uses, from running self-driving cars and web servers to desktop computing and gaming.

Desktop

=> ↺ Keeping skills fresh in tech pays off

• Over the years, I’ve improved my skills with the help of mentors and colleagues, by learning on and off the clock, at conferences and events, and with a mix of formal and self-paced training. My first Linux installs were on old laptops on weekends, and the first websites I built were for friends or barter. (I traded one basic business site in exchange for personal training at a gym.) Being comfortable using a variety of Linux and open source tools, and knowing my way around Drupal, WordPress, ezPublish, Joomla, and other content management systems didn’t move me into another field or allow me to add web developer job titles to my resume, but they did help my resume stand out among ones with fewer technical skills, and they allowed me to land dozens of freelance articles that otherwise would have been passed on to writers with more experience or larger networks.

=> ↺ How to squeeze more battery life from your Linux laptop

• Reduce your laptop’s screen brightness to get longer battery life. If your laptop has built-in brightness-reducing hotkeys, they should work on Linux. Otherwise, your desktop’s settings window should have a brightness option.

Server

=> ↺ ClusterHQ: The Importance of Container Plugins for Extending Docker’s Functionality

• A container isn’t a computer. It can be something as simple as a process — coupled with only the resource code and local operating system services needed to make that process operational — supported by an underlying OS. But there’s something else that people still have a difficult time envisioning: Because containers can be networked, so can processes. For the first time, functions can have their own IP addresses.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ FLOSS Weekly 345: digiKam

• This week Dmitri Popov about digiKam. digiKam is an open-source, cross-platform (Win/Linux/OS X) photo management application.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Here is the video of Linus Torvalds riding a fighter jet

=> ↺ Linus Torvalds rides fighter jets to ‘relax’ between kernel releases

• Linus Torvalds’ kernel is ‘running’ the modern world, literally. Everything from the tiny router to space shuttles to stock exchanges are powered by the Linux Kernel.

• How do you relax when you are heading a project as huge as the kernel? Looks like nothing is ordinary about him and he is not contained with the ‘ground level’.

=> ↺ Linus Torvalds Takes Fighter Jet Flights to Relax in Between Linux Kernel Pulls

• You probably won’t believe this, but Linus Torvalds, the father of the Linux kernel, has just posted three astonishing photos bragging about doing fighter jet flights to relax in between Linux kernel pulls.

=> ↺ Linus Torvalds seems shocked he didn’t puke during a zero gravity plane ride

=> ↺ Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Goes Zero G in Fighter Jet

=> ↺ Linus Torvalds goes airborne at Oregon International Air Show

• Linux creator Linus Torvalds, who lives in Dunthorpe, was among those going aloft this at the annual Oregon International Air Show.

=> ↺ Gmail Spam Filter Gets Trigger Happy On Linus Torvalds Email

=> ↺ GOOGLE GMAIL ATE MY LINUX: Gobbled email enrages Torvalds

• Linux kernel supremo Linus Torvalds has published a scathing open letter to Google’s Gmail team after discovering that the service had incorrectly marked hundreds of his incoming email threads as spam – including ones containing kernel patches.

=> ↺ Google Overfills Linux Chief’s Spam Folder

• “I don’t know how to even describe the level of brokenness in those kinds of spam numbers,” Mr. Torvalds wrote in his post. “Quite frankly, that sucks. It’s not acceptable. Whatever you started doing a few days ago is completely and utterly broken.”

=> ↺ Linus, LibreOffice, and Linux

• Today in Linux news, Linus Torvalds posted pictures of him actually flying in real world fighter jets and expressed frustration at new Gmail spam filtering. Caolán McNamara posted a screenshot of LibreOffice running on Wayland and The Document Foundation announced the publication of ODF 1.2 as ISO 26300. Attila Orosz reviewed Antergos and Dedoimedo put SteamOS 2.0 Beta through some tests.

=> ↺ EXT3 File-System Driver To Be Removed From The Linux Kernel

• With the EXT4 file-system having been stable for years as an evolutionary upgrade to EXT3, the EXT4 module supporting mounting EXT3 file-systems, and most (all?) Linux distributions having switched to EXT4 by default, there’s now patches for removing the EXT3 file-system driver from the Linux kernel.

=> ↺ AllSeen Alliance Expands Membership for IoT Efforts

=> ↺ The AllSeen Alliance Expands its Internet of Things Roster

• As the Internet of Things (IoT) gains momentum, there is a need for collaboration, open and interoperable tools, and governance. The AllSeen Alliance’s overarching goal is to build out an open source software framework, AllJoyn, to seamlessly connect a huge range of objects and devices in homes, cars and businesses. That calls for enormous collaboration among its members, and this week, the Alliance has announced a slew of new members. Specifically, the Alliance is welcoming 13 new participants.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Intel Iris Pro 6200 Graphics Are A Dream Come True For Open-Source Linux Fans

• The Intel Iris Pro Graphics 6200 (GT3e) as the fastest Broadwell GPU boasting an eDRAM cache and 48 execution units is a dream for open-source fans. Backed by a fully open-source Linux graphics driver, the Iris Pro Graphics 6200 found on the socketed Core i7 5775C is a dream come true that can compete with mid-range Radeon graphics cards on their open-source driver.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ Intel Celeron N3050 Braswell Linux Performance

• This week has been fun testing out the Braswell-powered NUC5CPYH. This NUC features the Celeron N3050 SoC and in this article are some of the first benchmarks of this new Intel design when testing under Linux.

=> ↺ Open-Source Linux Graphics: A10-7870K Godavari vs. i7-4790K Haswell vs. i7-5775C Broadwell

• Earlier this week I posted some interesting Linux graphics benchmarks comparing the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers for the Iris Pro 6200 Graphics on the Intel Core i7-5775C “Broadwell” CPU compared to several discrete graphics cards. Those results were quite interesting with this new socketed Intel CPU able to blow discrete mid-range AMD Radeon graphics cards out of the water on the open-source Linux drivers. Here’s the next part of the testing in showing how the Iris Pro 6200 graphics compare to Haswell HD Graphics 4600 and the current top-end APU, the AMD A10-7870K Godavari.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Install Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware on an Ubuntu 14.04 VPS

=> ↺ How to install PHP 7 (PHP-FPM & FastCGI) for ISPConfig 3 on Debian 8 (Jessie)

=> ↺ How to install closed drivers, media codecs, and other forbidden stuff on Linux PCs

=> ↺ Performance tuning of lintian

• For quite a while, Lintian has been able to create performance logs (–perf-debug –perf-output perf.log) that help diagnose where lintian spends most of its runtime. I decided to make lintian output these logs on lintian.debian.org to help us spot performance issues, though I have not been very good at analysing them regularly.

=> ↺ D-bus Tutorial for Python

=> ↺ Aruba access points, EAP, and wpa_supplicant 2.4 bugs

=> ↺ Using git-notes for marking test suite successes

=> ↺ Installing NVM And Node.js To Your Home Directory

=> ↺ libinput and handling resolution-less touchpads

=> ↺ Documents idea: rename documents right from the title bar

=> ↺ debmake and debamke-doc and debian-handbook

=> ↺ How to check for python GObject Introspection modules in Autotools

=> ↺ How to monitor CentOS and Ubuntu servers with Pandora FMS

=> ↺ ssOSX Bundling Soprano and other joys

=> ↺ Install Calibre 2.32.0 (Open-Source E-book Management Software) on Linux

Games

=> ↺ Monstrum, A Procedural Survival Horror Now On Linux, Some Thoughts

• Monstrum is a game I had honestly not heard of until the developers sent in a key, since the game has been ported to Linux I decided to give it a go.

• I’m pretty crap at horror games, as the wuss in me comes out big time. I did give it an honest chance, and hopefully you get an idea of what it’s like.

=> ↺ Feral Interactive Are Teasing Yet Another New Port

• Feral Interactive look like they will soon be kings of the Linux porting business, as they are teasing yet another new port on their radar.

=> ↺ First-Person Exploration Puzzler ‘The Magic Circle’ Released For Linux, Has Demo

• The Magic Circle is a free-form puzzle game that pokes fun at the game industry, and was released for Linux earlier this week. The game left Early Access last week after two months of patching and polishing, but because of an issue with gamepads on Linux, the Linux build was held back. Thanks to GOL editor Cheeseness, the developer quickly got in contact with a Unity developer, and was able to identify and resolve the issue.

=> ↺ Linux games market, Nixie Pixel on Tacoma, and more open gaming news

=> ↺ End Of An Era, LinuxGames Website Looks To Be Shutting Down

• A sad day in Linux gaming history could soon be upon us, as the owner of LinuxGames.com currently plans to shut it down. Although one of their contributors wants to continue it, and Icculus has offered to buy the domain.

=> ↺ The Flock Will Only Be Playable For A Limited Time, Releasing For Linux This Year

• The Flock is one of the most interesting games I’ve ever heard of, and that’s not just because it looks good, but you only get to play for a limited time.

=> ↺ Team Fortress 2 Update Arrives on Steam for Linux

• Team Fortress 2, the online multiplayer game developed by Valve with Linux support and that’s constantly in the top ten titles played everyday on Steam, has been updated once more.

=> ↺ Caves Of Qud Science Fantasy Roguelike Now In Early Access For Linux, Some Thoughts

• Caves of Qud from the developer of Sproggiwood has just released into Steam’s Early Access, and I decided to give it a spin. I’m not a massive traditional roguelike fan, so has it convinced me?

=> ↺ SteamOS 2.0 Beta review – Commencing countdown

• Overall, SteamOS 2.0 Beta is not a revolutionary release, and that’s a good thing. Stability and predictability are highly critical to product success. Especially when you have a really decent baseline. In this case, almost to the point of being boring, SteamOS delivers a rather painless experience, with polish and gloss across the board.

• Performance improvement, even inside a virtual machine, and Big Picture tweaks are the most notable fixes. On the other hand, using this distribution on a virtualized platform introduces its share or issues, including a somewhat tricky UEFI setup, Guest Addition hacks, and OpenGL incompatibility. Luckily, all of these can be sorted out, giving you an opportunity to test SteamOS, and get your first impression. Remember, don’t do this on your live systems. But test, you shall. Anyhow, SteamOS 2.0 Beta brings the Linux gaming reality that much closer. If you consider yourself a techie, then you will want to be part of this journey, so some downloads and testing are definitely in order. Try it for yourself, see what gives. I like it. End of discussion, and this review, too.

=> ↺ The Magic Circle Puzzle FPS Gets Linux Support on Steam

• The Magic Circle, an FPS puzzle game developed and published on Steam by the Question studio, has been released on the Linux platform as well.

=> ↺ Unreal Engine 4.8.2 Contains over 30 Important Fixes for Windows, OS X, and Linux

• Stephen Ellis, a renowned Unreal Engine developer at Epic Games, has had the great pleasure of informing us about the immediate availability for download of the second hotfix release for the stable Unreal Engine 4.8 game engine for Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux operating systems.

Desktop Environments/WMs

=> ↺ GNOME vs KDE: Usability vs. Options

• After a week of using GNOME, Eric Griffith concluded that GNOME was more usable than KDE, arranging features more intelligently and conveniently. Even a quick glance shows that he is right. In fact, considering the number of years that GNOME has focused on usability, the only surprising outcome would be if he were wrong.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ How to make your Qt application icon appear on Wayland task managers

=> ↺ QtAccountsService 0.6.0

• QtAccountsService is a Qt-style API for the AccountsService D-Bus service available for both C++ and QML.

=> ↺ LaKademy 2015 – my own Cantor sprint and other tasks

• My main work at LaKademy 2015 was to finish the port of Cantor to Qt5/KF5. I started this work in previous LaKademy, and now it was the time to end it. During the event I was engaged to drop KDELibs4Support from that software. I opened 5 review requests during the sprint, one for each library dropped. Now I am just finishing the plugin loading mechanism and the work will be completed.

=> ↺ “… if nothing changes”

• I try to keep memory of how various aspects of development were for me in past years. I do this by keeping specific projects I’ve been involved with fresh in my memory, revisiting them every so often and reflecting on how my methods and experiences have changed in the time since. This allows me to wander backwards 5, 10, 15, 20 years in the past and reflect.

• Today I was presenting the “final” code-level design for a project I’ve been tasked with: an IMAP payload filter for use with Kolab. The best way I can think to describe it is as a protocol-level firewall (of sorts) for IMAP. The first concrete use case we have for it is to allow non-Kolab-aware clients (e.g. Thunderbird) to connect to a Kolab server and see only the mail folders, implying that the groupware folders are filtered out of the IMAP session. There are a large number of other use case ideas floating about, however, and we wanted to make sure that we could accommodate those in future by extending the codebase. While drawing out on the whiteboard how I planned for this to come together, along with a break-out of the work into two-week sprints, I commented in passing that it was actually a nicely simple program.

=> ↺ 3 weeks till Plasma 5.4 Freeze

• If you have any new modules that need merging, new features, text changes or new artwork we need everything merged before the 6th of August.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ We all need parents. GTG needs them, too!

• Here I am again with and update on how Getting Things GNOME! is moving forward.

Distributions

=> ↺ PackageKit 1.0.7 Is a Major Release with Portage, Entropy, and Yum Improvements

• PackageKit, the open-source system that provides a universal solution for installing and updating software on GNU/Linux operating systems, has recently been updated to version 1.0.7.

Reviews

=> ↺ Antergos – A Beginner-Friendly Arch-Based Distro

• Antergos is an Arch Linux-based distribution featuring a live environment and a user-friendly graphical installer. It aims to provide a pre-configured Arch environment “for everyone” with sane defaults which is easy to install and use, yet retains the flexibility and features of Arch Linux. According to Wikipedia, “The Galician word Antergos (meaning: ancestors) was chosen ‘to link the past with the present.’ ”

New Releases

=> ↺ Solus OS Gets a Refreshed Filysystem and Is Moving Closer to a Stable Release

• The Solus operating system has just received another boost of improvements and developers have pushed another stable version out the door. The new daily build should be very interesting, especially with the new system layout.

=> ↺ Clonezilla Live OS Is Now Using Linux Kernel 4.0.8

• Clonezilla Live, a Linux distribution based on DRBL, Partclone, and udpcast that provides users with the tools to maintain and recover operating systems, has been updated to version 2.4.2-21 and is now ready for download and testing.

=> ↺ Voyager X8 – One of the Best Linux Distros You’ve Never Heard Of

• Although it might seem hard to believe for the beginner Linux user, there is is life beyond Ubuntu. One of the most notable systems the average user often overlooks is Debian itself, the origin of all Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distros.

• Debian offers unparalleled stability in comparison to most other Linux distributions, which is achieved by slower release cycles and deep and thorough testing of the system and all included packages as well.

=> ↺ IPFire 2.17 Core Update 92 Patches OpenSSL and Squid Security Vulnerabilities

• Michael Tremer from the IPFire project has announced the immediate availability for download of IPFire 2.17 Core Update 92, an important release that brings updated components and patches critical security vulnerabilities.

Ballnux/SUSE

=> ↺ SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 4 Adds Support for IBM POWER8

=> ↺ Suse expands partner support to boost development of 64-bit ARM-based servers

=> ↺ SUSE Linux Enterprise is coming to 64-bit ARM Processors

=> ↺ SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 4 Now Available

=> ↺ Suse Linux Enterprise 12 Says Hello to ARM

• Suse’s partnership with ARM reflects the company’s “we adapt, you succeed” philosophy, said Suse senior technology strategist David Byte. Supporting ARM architecture is about going where the business is. “From a competitive perspective, partners who engage with these technologies early will be able to take advantage of any number of innovations that are happening at the silicon level.”

=> ↺ Suse promotes ARM servers with Suse Linux Enterprise 12 for data centre workloads

=> ↺ SUSE launches partner program to bring SUSE Linux Enterprise to 64-bit ARM

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Kesha Shah Wins Red Hat ‘Women in Open Source’ Award

• Kesha Shah, a student at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, was one of two women awarded the inaugural Women in Open Source award by Red Hat Inc.

• The award was announced at the Red Hat Summit June 23.

• Shah, along with fellow award winner Sarah Sharp, was part of a 10-finalist group, five in the academic and five in the community categories. The winners of each group were chosen by a nine-judge panel who are members of the open source community.

=> ↺ Oracle, Red Hat jump on the mobile bandwagon with MBaaS

• Oracle and Red Hat have both introduced mobile backend services to gain new customers for their other cloud services.

=> ↺ Red Hat argues enterprises are being “deliberate” in IoT implementations

• Open source technology provider Red Hat argues enterprises are being “deliberate” when it comes to implementing Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.

• The view comes on the back of a recent survey, conducted by TechValidate, which showed only 12% of respondents are currently in the process of rolling out an IoT solution. Yet Red Hat argues this is the natural path for enterprises, generally watchful and glacial over new technology trends.

=> ↺ Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) a Top Growth Pick

=> ↺ Active Stocks News Buzz: Covanta Holding Corp (NYSE:CVA), Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT)

=> ↺ Analyst Price Target Update on Red Hat, Inc.

=> ↺ Red Hat Makes Progress On Firefox Native For Wayland

• Besides LibreOffice running natively on Wayland, progress has been made this week on running Mozilla’s Firefox web-browser natively on Wayland.

• Red Hat developers have been working on getting Firefox native to Wayland with their ambitions to switch Firefox Workstation over to Wayland by default rather than an X.Org Server. This Firefox Wayland work is in-step with the GTK3 version of Firefox.

• This is good news for Fedora users running the latest Wayland stack. Details on Firefox native for Wayland can be found via this Google+ post by Red Hat’s Jiří Eischmann.

=> ↺ Notable Session Mover: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

=> ↺ Enterprises Taking a Calculated Approach to the Internet of Things: Red Hat

• Enterprises are subscribing to a slow-and-steady strategy when it comes to incorporating Internet of Things IoT technologies into their environments, finds a new study from open-source software maker Red Hat.

=> ↺ Pre-Market News Analysis on: Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), FirstEnergy (NYSE:FE), Golar LNG (NASDAQ:GLNG), Microchip Technology (NASDAQ:MCHP)

Fedora

=> ↺ Translation mailing list activity

• Noticed that the messages from Fedora translation mailing list is much less than before after the L10n platform had moved from Transifex to Zanata. So I decided to use simple R commands to see the monthly activity of the mailing list in 12 years since it’s started.

=> ↺ Video: Super Privileged Containers

• For anyone who hasn’t seen this yet who is interested in containers, this is a must see. Watch Red Hat’s SELinux guru Dan Walsh explain and demo Super Privileged Containers from the Red Hat Summit 2015. Enjoy!

=> ↺ Fedora Infrastructure over to Ipsilon

• Well, the switch has happened this morning (2015-07-15): Fedora Infrastructure upgraded the authentication infrastructure, which is the web application that does the authentication of users for our web applications, from FedOAuth to Ipsilon!

=> ↺ Eclipse problems on Fedora 22

• Since upgrade to Fedora 22, I had several problems with Eclipse. The most annoying one, in my pretty old laptop, was nearly locking up the system after using it for awhile as reported here. I found that my 4GB RAM is almost full and kswapd is taking almost 100% CPU.

=> ↺ Fedora BTRFS+Snapper PART 1: System Preparation

• For some time now I have wanted a linux desktop setup where I could run updates automatically and not worry about losing productivity if my system gets hosed from the update. My desired setup to achieve this has been a combination of snapper and BTRFS, but unfortunately the support on Fedora for full rollback isn’t quite there.

=> ↺ CloudRouter 2.0 Hits Beta with OpenDaylight Lithium and Fedora 22

• Jay Turner, CloudRouter Project Lead and Senior Director of DevOps at IIX, told Enterprise Networking Planet that CloudRouter 2 is based on the Fedora 22 Linux distribution. Fedora is a community distribution of Linux that is backed by Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat. Fedora 22 was first released in May of this year.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Debian Project Lead: Snappy and Mir Bad Ideas

• Neil McGovern, Debian Project Leader, opened himself up to questions a few days ago on reddit and questions he got. McGovern answered queries on his relationship with Valve, his opinion on Ubuntu, and his desktop of choice among many others. He also spoke a bit on the Chromium spyware mistake, the current state of Debian GNU/Hurd, and lots more.

• One of the first questions wondered if McGovern was jealous of anything from any other distro. To that he answered Arch’s wiki calling it “an absolutely amazing resource” that he himself uses. He then said Debian’s graphical installer needs a bit of an update, but the curses installer is there to stay. He desktop of choice is GNOME and is currently using version 3.14 (and vim is his favorite editor). Later he added that GNOME will remain the default desktop in Debian.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Ubuntu Software License Updated to Comply with GNU GPL

• The company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system, Canonical, has changed the licensing terms of Ubuntu to comply with the GNU General Public License and other free software licences.

• This week, Canonical added a “trump clause” that says that when Canonical’s license contradicts the widely accepted “copyleft” license GPL, GPL shall prevail.

• Activist groups, including the Free Software Foundation and the Software Freedom Conservancy have been in discussion with Canonical for nearly two years, trying to get Canonical’s policy to unequivocally comply with the generally accepted GNU GPL software license.

=> ↺ Thoughts on Canonical, Ltd.’s Updated Ubuntu IP Policy

• Most of you by now have probably seen Conservancy’s and FSF’s statements regarding the today’s update to Canonical, Ltd.’s Ubuntu IP Policy. I have a few personal comments, speaking only for myself, that I want to add that don’t appear in the FSF’s nor Conservancy’s analysis. (I wrote nearly all of Conservancy’s analysis and did some editing on FSF’s analysis, but the statements here I add are my personal opinions and don’t necessarily reflect the views of the FSF nor Conservancy, notwithstanding that I have affiliations with both orgs.)

=> ↺ The Controversy Behind Canonical’s Intellectual Property Policy

• In the world of FOSS, a small change to a license can be a big deal. For users of proprietary software, changes in the EULA are hardly even registered. Those users click “Ok” and forget about it in the blink of an eye. They have accepted that they are severely limited as far as their rights to alter or redistribute the software is concerned.

• But for users of free software, such as Linux or any of the hundreds of packages that make up a modern operating system, a license change has the potential to change their rights dramatically. So, these events are usually the cause of controversy.

=> ↺ Kubuntu’s Jonathan Riddell Says Ubuntu Policy Is Still Lacking

• Kubuntu’s Jonathan Riddell talked about the recent changes to the licensing procedures on the Ubuntu project, and he said that there are still some important problems that have been left unresolved.

=> ↺ Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition Review

• Finally, after months of waiting, the second Ubuntu Phone is upon us. The original – the BQ Aquaris 4.5 – was a serviceable phone but the poor specs and extremely early version of Ubuntu that accompanied it made it seem a lot more like an early development phone than something you’d use on a day-to-day basis. The low specs and shaky interface made it undesirable enough that our review for it was somewhat less than positive. Put simply, the hardware needed to be better, and the operating system itself needed much more love from the community and social media companies.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Touch OTA-5 Update Detailed

• Now that the latest update for Ubuntu Touch has a firm launch date, the developers have also released a complete changelog for the upcoming release.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Touch Major Update Confirmed for July 20

• Ubuntu developers are preparing to launch a new major update for the phone version of the OS, and they are now pretty certain that the patch will arrive on Monday.

=> ↺ Daily Builds for Ubuntu 15.10 Return After One Month of Absence

• Some users from the Ubuntu community have noticed that Canonical stopped releasing daily builds for Ubuntu 15.10 over a month ago. Now, the developers have resumed the process, and things are back on track.

=> ↺ Ubuntu’s Unity 8 Gets Shell Rotation Fixes, Vulkan API Is Being Evaluated for Mir

• Canonical’s Kevin Gunn sent in his weekly report on the work done by the Ubuntu developers on the Unity 8, Mir, and LXC for Xapps technologies for the Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu Desktop Next operating systems.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Touch OTA-5 to Land on BQ Aquaris Devices First, Meizu MX4 Users Must Wait

• With only a couple of days before the official launch of the OTA-5 software update for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report informing users about some interesting aspects of the Monday launch.

=> ↺ The Linux 4.2 Mainline Kernel From Ubuntu Is Finally Working Again

• After the Linux Git kernel built by the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA failed to work for the past two weeks, the kernel should now be bootable again.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Touch OTA-6 to Bring Telegram App Improvements, New Thumbnailer

• Canonical’s Alejandro J. Cura sent in his report on the work done by the Ubuntu Touch team in the first two weeks of the month of July 2015, informing us all about the new features implemented in the forthcoming OTA-5 update.

=> ↺ Ubuntu PC Maker No Longer Bundling Flash With OS

• Ubuntu device maker System76 recently said in a blog that it will no longer pre-install Adobe Flash on all laptops and desktops. Why? Because the company deems the software a security risk. System76 is even urging its customers to get rid of Flash altogether.

=> ↺ FSF, Canonical Breakthrough; OSCON & More…

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ Gorgeous Ubuntu-Based Chromixium 1.5 Distro Released with Many New Features

• Rich Jack, the developer of the Chrome OS lookalike Chromixium Linux operating system, had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of Chromixium 1.5.

=> ↺ Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” Xfce RC released!

• Linux Mint 17.2 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

=> ↺ Linux Mint 17.2 ‘Rafaela’ KDE and Xfce release candidates are here

• Whether you are a beginner or expert, Linux Mint is a great distribution. Not only is it very easy to use, but beautiful too. It is quite apparent that the developers care for the operating system.

=> ↺ Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” KDE Edition Release Candidate Is Now Available for Download

• Clement Lefebvre and the hard-working developers behind the popular Linux Mint project had the great pleasure of announcing a few minutes ago that the RC (Release Candidate) version of the forthcoming Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” KDE Edition operating system is available for download and testing.

=> ↺ No personal information exchanged with DuckDuckGo

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ 7-inch industrial touchscreen modules run Linux on i.MX6

• Reach Technology announced a 7-inch, 800 x 480 pixel Linux touchscreen module for HMI apps, that’s offered in both capacitive and resistive touch models.

=> ↺ Welcome to the Internet of…Cars?

=> ↺ First steps with smartcards under Linux and Android — hard, but it works

• Well this has been an interesting project.

• It all started with a need to get better password storage at work. We wound up looking heavily at a GPG-based solution. This prompted the question: how can we make it even more secure?

Phones

=> ↺ Jolla Introduces New Reference Designs And Software To Fight Android

• Finnish smartphone designer Jolla continued to grow its influence this week as it announced Indian-based Intex Technologies as its first licensing partner. While Jolla’s innovative OS has shipped in its own hardware since late 2013, and has been picked up by a number of telecoms partners, this is the first partnership that will see the OS licensed for use.

=> ↺ Jolla Finds A Device Partner In India

Tizen

=> ↺ Samsung Z3 is the developer giveaway at the Tizen Developer Summit 2015

• Samsung Electronics are spotted to have imported 1,200 Samsung Z3 (SM-Z300H) devices, dated on the 15th July, destined for a Partnering Event. This correlates to be the right amount as a giveaway to developers at the upcoming Tizen Developer Summit 2015, being held in Bengaluru, India. Previously Samsung have imported 1,400 Z3 empty boxes also for a Partnering event.

=> ↺ Tizen Dev Tools Version 15.01 Released

• The Dev tools team are pleased to announce the release of version 15.01 of the Tizen development tools. The updates to the tools include the following:

• GBS 0.23.2 MIC 0.24.4 REPA 0.3 BMAP-TOOLS 3.3

=> ↺ Samsung gearing up to launch a Tizen Smartphone in Europe?

• Samsung was originally supposed to launch the Samsung Z in Russia last year, followed by a European roll-out, but that launch got delayed. Fast forward to today and the latest rumour is that Tizen Mobile is still being tested across some of the large European countries. According to Information from Sammobile, the device might be the Samsung Z or the soon to be released Samsung Z3.

Android

=> ↺ Android 5.1.1 Lollipop Update For Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 (SM-T330NU): How To Install It Manually

=> ↺ Google updates Play Books for Android with UI tweaks and improved recommendations

=> ↺ Android 5.1.1 update for Xperia Z2 and Z3 series coming this month

=> ↺ Moto G 2014 Getting Android 5.1 Update In China

• Through a post on his Google Plus account, Motorola’s David Schuster has announced that the company is starting to roll out the Android 5.1 Lollipop update to the Motorola Moto G 2014 (2nd Generation) model in China. In his post, Mr. Schuster says, “Good news, we have started to fully deploy Android Lollipop 5.1 to Moto G (2nd Gen) in China today”. The 2014 iteration of Moto G was launched last year by the company with Android 4.4.4 KitKat on board, but the device had already been updated to Android 5.0 Lollipop earlier this year. This update will now install the latest publicly-released Android version on Motorola’s mid-range offering in China. The device meanwhile, is slated to be replaced fairly soon, with the heavily-rumored next generation Moto G being readied for launch by the Lenovo-owned company.

=> ↺ Android TV, like Google TV, still too ahead of its time

• Name five devices that run on Google’s Android TV operating system. If you managed to do that without hurriedly running to a Google search, you are a rare breed. Ask the average user, even someone who is a longtime Android user, and you will probably get a blank stare.

=> ↺ New Google APIs: Point your phone at a telly like a streaming hose of vid

• Google has mashed the Processing graphics language into its Cast software, letting visual artists and others with a bent for graphics point their creations at the nearest big-screen TV.

• The project even seems to hint at a possible games angle: an Android device like a mobile phone can be used as a controller of the displayed video.

=> ↺ How smartphone companies are screwing with your Android phone

• Phone makers like Samsung, HTC, and LG technically make Android phones, but what you see on their screens barely resembles the “clean” version of Android that Google develops.

=> ↺ The Turing Phone is the craziest Android device you’ll see this year

• “We’re walking into the cipher phone age.” That’s the way Turing Robotics Industries CEO SYL Chao introduces the Turing Phone, an Android smartphone that aims to put security, durability, and fashion above all else. In a myriad of ways, the Turing is anything but your typical phone. There’s no headphone jack, and the thing doesn’t even have a USB connector. Instead, you charge it with a plug that looks like a clone of Apple’s MagSafe.

=> ↺ This mini Android PC is yours for just $30 on Kickstarter [VIDEO]

• If, for whatever reason, your current PC isn’t cutting it for you or you want to get someone an inexpensive computer as a gift, there’s a great option on the way. Jide Tech has introduced the Remix Mini through Kickstarter, a miniature Android computer that’ll put inexpensive computing power in a small form factor for those with thin budgets.

=> ↺ HBO Now drops Apple exclusivity and is Android ready

=> ↺ HBO NOW comes to Android and Amazon Fire devices

=> ↺ HBO Now comes to Android devices

=> ↺ Following a period of exclusivity, HBO Now is finally coming to Android and Amazon devices

=> ↺ Samsung Galaxy Android 5.1.1 Release Breakdown

=> ↺ HTC One M9 Android 5.1 Lollipop Updates Detailed

=> ↺ HTC One M9 and Galaxy Note Edge get Android updates this week

=> ↺ Android Auto vs Apple CarPlay

=> ↺ Report: Android Crushing App-Download Contest, iOS Drives More Revenue

=> ↺ VLC For Android Beta 1.5 Gets Fewer Permissions, More Material, Video Playlists, And Some Other Features

=> ↺ Fallout Shelter for Android release date rumours: Bethesda marketing executive confirms Android port is “coming along nice”

=> ↺ Budget MVNO Ting Officially Recommends The Nexus 6, Complete With Android Police Watermark

=> ↺ 2014 Moto G starts receiving Android 5.1 in China

=> ↺ Hacking Team’s evil Android app had code to bypass Google Play screening

• Security researchers at Trend Micro’s Trend Labs have uncovered a trick in a sample of a fake news application for Android created by the network exploitation tool provider Hacking Team that may have allowed the company’s customers to sneak spyware through the Google Play store’s code review. While the application in question may have only been downloaded fewer than 50 times from Google Play, the technique may have been used in other Android apps developed for Hacking Team customers—and may now be copied by others trying to get malware onto Android devices.

=> ↺ Next-gen Android M might finally come with built-in visual voicemail

• Android M, Google’s newly announced but not yet publicly released mobile operating system, will reportedly carry visual voicemail in its built-in dialer app, according to an Android issue tracker thread for developers first spotted by tech website Android Police. Like on an iPhone, this would allow users to navigate a list of missed and saved voicemails, so it would be much easier to see who has recently been in touch.

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ 7 big reasons to contribute to Opensource.com

• Opensource.com runs like other open source projects. The content collected and shared with you on this site is the result of the time, energy, and contributions from people all over the world. The writers you see published here, the community you see engaged with us on social media, and our readers keep Opensource.com going.

=> ↺ Visualizing flux: Time travel, torque, and temporal maps

• Open source is so important to our mission to make maps more accessible, and it’s been essential for our stack development as we progressively learn from community requests and contributions. Our software is engineered for ease-of-use, and our GUI Editor interface is an effort to make mapping projects more accessible to non-GIS experts. Everyone should be able to map found, open, and personal data, easily. At the same time, we have almost all of the functionality accessibility in our editor, available via our open source libraries and APIs. We have Carto.js for making maps, Torque.js for time-series data mapping, Odyssey.js for building chapterized narratives on maps, Vecnik.js for vector rendering, as well as our Import, Map, and SQL APIs to facilitate easy and open map-building in code.

=> ↺ What’s next for open source question answering technologies

• Grant Ingersoll is CTO at Lucidworks, provider of Fusion, but his claim to the open source community are his contributions to Apache Lucene, Solr, and Mahout. (He co-founded Apache Mahout in 2008 with the goal to build an environment for quickly creating scalable machine learning applications.) This year, Grant will be speaking at OSCON 2015 about building a next generation QA system with open source tools and about how to use Apache Solr for data science.

=> ↺ Bright Future & Strong Growth for Open Source Web Development According to Opace

• “Open source software is the way forward and has been since day one for us here at Opace” says David Bryan, Managing Director at Birmingham-based digital agency, Opace. The company, which specialises in web design and eCommerce development, proudly bases their entire business model and delivery around open source, believing it offers the best opportunities for both innovation and ground breaking developments. With 78% of companies now running some kind of open source software (according to the 2015 Future of Open Source survey), it’s looking like they could be onto something great.

=> ↺ Follow the Open Source Road

• This spring, I attended my first OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. As usual, there was a room reserved for media and analysts to hold meetings, but this one had only a curtain to separate two seating areas. I thought that it was strange, since it offered no privacy, and indeed, one company I met with was quite unhappy about it.

• A few weeks later, I recounted this story to my colleague, Caroline Chappell, who thought the setup was, in fact, perfectly appropriate for an open source conference. We talked about how a “curtain test” could be used to gauge a company’s true seriousness about openness — the theory being that there should be no secrets when it comes to open source, so who cares if there’s only a curtain for separation?

Google

=> ↺ Linux on supercomputers, Google’s Eddystone, and more news

=> ↺ Google takes on iBeacon with open-source Eddystone

=> ↺ Google Proposes Open Source Beacons

• Google introduced an open specification for Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons on Tuesday in the hope that it can encourage developers, marketers, and hardware makers to adopt its technology alongside, or in lieu of, the iBeacon system offered by Apple.

=> ↺ Google Backs Open Source System In Cloud Battle with Amazon

• Google has become the biggest name yet to back the open source cloud system OpenStack. Specifically, Google will help integrate its own open source container management software Kubernetes.

• This may seem like in-the-enterprise-weeds news, but it represents another significant step as Google tries to make up ground against Amazon’s wildly popular AWS suite of cloud products.

=> ↺ Google joins the OpenStack Foundation to promote open source technologies

• GOOGLE HAS JOINED the OpenStack Foundation, becoming a corporate sponsor in a bid to promote open source and open cloud technologies.

=> ↺ Google Embraces Rival OpenStack Cloud Technology

• Google officially is joining the open-source OpenStack Foundation today as a corporate sponsor. Google’s sponsorship isn’t about advocating for a rival cloud technology, but rather about helping boost interoperability across clouds, using container technology.

• Google, of course, has its own cloud technology that is not open-source. In that light, Google’s Cloud can and should be seen as a rival to OpenStack, which powers both private and public clouds around the globe. However, Google is not undermining its own cloud by becoming a sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation; rather, it is deftly taking the initiative to improve support for its own cloud technologies.

=> ↺ Google Sponsors The OpenStack Foundation

Web Browsers

=> ↺ The New Metasploit Browser Autopwn: Strikes Faster and Smarter – Part 1

• Today, I’d like to debut a completely rewritten new cool toy for Metasploit: Browser Autopwn 2. Browser Autopwn is the easiest and quickest way to explicitly test browser vulnerabilities without having the user to painfully learn everything there is about each exploit and the remote target before deployment. In this blog post, I will provide an introduction on the tool. And then in my next one, I will explain how you can take advantage of it to maximize your vuln validation or penetration testing results.

Mozilla

=> ↺ Time for a brutal TELLY-OFF: Android TV versus Firefox OS

• Breaking Fad The battle for Smart TV dominance continues to ratchet up, with Google and Firefox now both wading into the same connected space. The former has reignited its living room ambitions via Android TV, while open source rival Firefox has partnered with Panasonic.

=> ↺ Firefox OS fork “H5OS” gets a $100 million boost

• Acadine, founded by former Mozilla execs, has received a $100 million investment from China’s Tsinghua Unigroup, to launch a Firefox OS fork called “H5OS.”

• In March, former Mozilla president Li Gong left to form a startup code-named Gone Fishing, with a mission to build a web-oriented mobile OS partially based on Firefox OS. The company is now called Acadine Technologies, and the OS is dubbed H5OS, according to a report from CNET. Acadine has received $100 million in funding from a Hong Kong-based Chinese state-controlled company called Tsinghua Unigroup International, says the story.

SaaS/Big Data

=> ↺ OpenStack Mitaka will Rise in the Land of the Rising Sun after Liberty

• Ok, so the OpenStack Foundation stumbled a little with its first attempt at an ‘M’ name for the first OpenStack release of 2016. Originally chosen to be ‘Meiji’ that name turned out to be a political hot potato and so the Foundation went back to the polls and chose – Mitaka.

Databases

=> ↺ MariaDB Summer 2015 adds Docker and Chef Recipes with MaxScale special sauce

• MARIADB CORPORATION has been giving details of the latest release of the MariaDB database, with a heavy emphasis on fixing DevOps.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

=> ↺ LibreOffice GTK3 On Wayland Starts To Work

• The recent efforts of the LibreOffice GTK3 port is starting to pay off with this open-source office suite beginning to run on Wayland.

• Caolán McNamara who has been hacking on the GTK3 VCL plug for LibreOffice shared todayt that it can now launch on Wayland, displays the interface, and the interaction is mostly all functionality. However, there isn’t yet window resizing support and there are some other issues to still work through.

=> ↺ LibreOffice on wayland

• Hacked LibreOffice a bit more today towards wayland support via the gtk3 vclplug. Good news is that it launches, displays and you can interact with it mostly as expected.

BSD

=> ↺ FreeBSD Developers Arguing Over Their New Code of Conduct

• The latest drama in the FreeBSD world are over differing views with the project’s new code of conduct.

• Like most open-source projects these days, the FreeBSD core developers decided to come up with a code of conduct in an effort to prevent discrimination, etc. The FreeBSD Code of Conduct was made public this week on this FreeBSD.org web page.

=> ↺ FreeBSD 10.2 beta 2

• The second BETA build for the FreeBSD 10.2 release cycle is now available.

=> ↺ The Second Beta Build of FreeBSD 10.2 Is Now Available for Download and Testing

• The FreeBSD Project, through Glen Barber, announced recently that the second Beta build of the forthcoming and highly anticipated FreeBSD 10.2 operating system is now available for download and testing.

=> ↺ GhostBSD 10.1 Beta 2 Reintroduces Support for the Xfce Desktop Environment

• While not a Linux kernel-based operating system, GhostBSD is an important and acclaimed player in the open-source ecosystem, and it has recently published details about the second Beta build of its next major version, GhostBSD 10.1 (codename Eve).

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

=> ↺ Fall internships with the Free Software Foundation: Apply by July 31st

=> ↺ GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 5.2.0 Officially Released for Linux, Mac OS X, and UNIX

• On July 16, GCC (GNU Compiler Collection), the open-source and cross-platform software that includes frontends for C, C++, Fortran, Objective-C, Java, Ada, Go, and numerous other popular programming languages, has reached version 5.2.0.

Project Releases

=> ↺ Audacity 2.1.1 Open-Source Audio Editor Adds Scrubbing and Seeking Support

• The first point release of the Audacity 2.1 software, an open-source audio editor for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, has recently been released and introduces new and anticipated features.

=> ↺ Git 2.4.6 Open-Source Distributed Version Control System Fixes Five Issues

=> ↺ QEMU 2.4-rc1 Brings More Fixes

=> ↺ Calibre 2.32 Arrives with New Features and Lots of Fixes

• Calibre, an application that can be used to view, convert, and edit eBooks, has been upgraded to version 2.32 and is now ready for download. The developer has added a few new features and a number of small fixes.

=> ↺ NetworkManager 1.0.4 Released!

• Just a quick note that we’ve released the latest stable NetworkManager, version 1.0.4. This is mainly a bugfix release, though it does have a couple new features and larger changes. Some of those are:

=> ↺ Vivaldi Internet Browser Technical Preview 4 Officially Released

• The Vivaldi Internet browser has been updated to Technical Preview 4, which is now available for download and testing. Despite the boring version number, it’s quite a big leap and lots of new features have landed.

=> ↺ MyPaint 1.1.0 released

=> ↺ Making things more super with supernova 2.0

=> ↺ Wammu 0.39

=> ↺ ibus-fbterm

• Recently I updated ibus-fbterm to work with ibus 1.5.

=> ↺ RcppRedis 0.1.5

=> ↺ RcppTOML 0.0.4

Public Services/Government

=> ↺ The strategy for migration of public administration software applications to open standards in the Canary Islands

• Through his presentation, Mr. Roberto Moreno-Díaz jr will explain how, in 2011, the government of the Canary Islands implemented an aggressive plan for open source migration.

Openness/Sharing

=> ↺ Not Impossible Labs Creates Open-Source Technology for Transformational Good

=> ↺ Linux on supercomputers, Google’s Eddystone, and more news

Open Data

=> ↺ Opendata.ch : Switzerland on the road to Open Government Data

• “If Switzerland is not yet a model regarding the opening of public data, it is a student who learns quickly.” This is how Opendata.ch presented the fifth edition of the opendata.ch/2015 Conference which took place in Bern on July 1st.

Open Hardware

=> ↺ New generation of robotics are industry-agnostic, open-source

• In 1961, a robotic arm nicknamed Unimate joined the General Motors assembly line to perform basic welding tasks that were unpleasant and particularly dangerous for humans. The 4000-pound, six-axis robot ran off of magnetic tape.

• [...]

• Fetch Robotics, founded in 2014, represents a generation of companies developing adaptable platforms that are designed for use beyond the specific industries for which they were initially conceived. Not surprisingly, the company’s approach has largely been informed by the impressive open-source robotics pedigree of Wise, who got her start at Willow Garage, developer of the now-ubiquitous open-source Robotic Operating System (ROS).

• The Fetch system comprises a self-guiding robotic picker that can navigate a warehouse floor, identify products, and pick them off a shelf. Used in conjunction with Fetch’s autonomous cart, nicknamed “Freight,” the system can automate pick and place processes in fulfillment warehouses without requiring costly reconfiguration or setup.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 published as International Standard 26300:2015 by ISO/IEC

• The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) Version 1.2, the native file format of LibreOffice and many other applications, has been published as International Standard 26300:2015 by ISO/IEC. ODF defines a technical schema for office documents including text documents, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents like drawings or presentations.

Leftovers

Security

=> ↺ Security updates for Thursday

=> ↺ Friday’s security updates

=> ↺ Feds search for ways to impede ‘cyber bazaar’

• Experts call it the “cyber arms bazaar” — an Eastern European underground market in hacking tools, viruses and other forms of infiltration and cyber sabotage that has been developing with little Western attention for around 15 years.

=> ↺ Feds take down elite hacking forum

• The Justice Department said Wednesday it had taken down a hacking forum known as Darkode.

• The government has filed criminal charges against 12 people allegedly affiliated with the forum, a dark Web repository for hacking tools of all kinds.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

=> ↺ NSA document: Israeli special forces assassinated top Syrian military official

• Evidence has emerged from leaked US signals intelligence intercepts that Israeli special forces were responsible for assassinating a senior Syrian military official who was a close adviser to President Bashar al-Assad.

=> ↺ NSA leak: Israeli commandos killed Syrian general attending dinner party

• According to a National Security Agency (NSA) document leaked by American whistleblower Edward Snowden, Israeli naval commandos killed a top Syrian General during a dinner party at his beach house in 2008.

• According to the document, an Israeli special forces unit known as Shayetet 13 landed near the northern Syrian port of Tartus, located General Muhammad Suleiman and shot him in the head and neck.

=> ↺ Israeli commandos ‘assassinated Syrian general in 2008’ – NSA leaks

• Israel’s naval commando unit shot and killed Muhammad Suleiman, a top military advisor to the Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2008, according to a leaked National Security Agency file, published by The Intercept.

=> ↺ Greece Deal, James Bamford on NSA, Honduras Coup 6 Years Later — 07/14/15

• Plus, 6 years after the US-backed coup in Honduras, we’ll examine how democracy has been subverted and the ways in which people are fighting back.

=> ↺ Retired General: Drones Create More Terrorists Than They Kill, Iraq War Helped Create ISIS

• Retired Army Gen. Mike Flynn, a top intelligence official in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, says in a forthcoming interview on Al Jazeera English that the drone war is creating more terrorists than it is killing. He also asserts that the U.S. invasion of Iraq helped create the Islamic State and that U.S. soldiers involved in torturing detainees need to be held legally accountable for their actions.

• Flynn, who in 2014 was forced out as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has in recent months become an outspoken critic of the Obama administration’s Middle East strategy, calling for a more hawkish approach to the Islamic State and Iran.

=> ↺ Another “Terror” Arrest; Another Mentally Ill Man, Armed by the FBI

• U.S. law enforcement officials announced another terror arrest on Monday, after arming a mentally ill man and then charging him with having guns.

• ABC News quoted a “senior federal official briefed on the arrest” as saying: “This is a very bad person arrested before he could do very bad things.”

• But in a sting reminiscent of so many others conducted by the FBI since 9/11, Alexander Ciccolo, 23, “aka Ali Al Amriki,” was apparently a mentally ill man who was doing nothing more than ranting about violent jihad and talking (admittedly in frightening ways) about launching attacks—until he met an FBI informant. At that point, he started making shopping lists for weapons.

• The big twist in this story: Local media in Massachusetts are saying Ciccolo was turned in by his father, a Boston Police captain. The FBI affidavit says the investigation was launched after a “close acquaintance … stated that Ciccolo had a long history of mental illness and in the last 18 months had become obsessed with Islam.”

=> ↺ Misunderstood word may have led to catastrophic outcome

• In August 1945 the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan’s Hiroshima followed by another on Nagasaki, resulting in the death of more than 135,000 people.

=> ↺ German Missile Hack

Transparency Reporting

=> ↺ Australian police, spy agencies flocked to Italian hacking company

• Among the revelations contained in more than a million emails from the Italian surveillance malware vendor Hacking Team released by WikiLeaks last week, is that a host of Australian police, intelligence and government agencies actively sought out the dubious company, with some apparently purchasing its hacking programs.

=> ↺ Chelsea Manning Defense Fund Flooded With Donations

• A legal defense fund for Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence worker sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking secret documents to WikiLeaks, has been flooded with donations, exceeding its goal with more than $125,000 in 48 hours.

=> ↺ Martin Rowson on the Freedom of Information Act review – cartoon

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

=> ↺ Reef oil spill: Oil spill off Great Barrier Reef

Finance

=> ↺ Elizabeth Warren Pushes To Slow Revolving Door Between Business and Government

• A new bill that would ban private-sector bonuses to executives entering public service got a rousing endorsement on Friday from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, as she delivered a much-anticipated keynote address to the annual Netroots Nation convention.

• Warren not only praised the bill – “No more paying people off to remember their Wall Street friends while they run our government,” she said – she also issued what was widely seen as a challenge to Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton.

• “It’s a bill any presidential candidate should be able to cheer for,” Warren told the gathering of progressives in Phoenix.

=> ↺ Prof. Wolff discusses Greece and European Union on CPR

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

=> ↺ Five Things to Know About the Scott Walker John Doe Ruling

• The Wisconsin Supreme Court has single-handedly rewritten the state’s limits on money in politics, rendering the state’s disclosure laws and contribution limits meaningless, and opening the door to unlimited funds directly from corporations and foreign firms.

• In a 4-2 decision that broke along ideological lines, the Court’s conservative majority ended the John Doe probe into whether Governor Scott Walker illegally coordinated with supposedly “independent” dark money groups during the recall elections. The Court declared that any coordination that did occur didn’t violate the law, since it only involved so-called “issue ads” that stopped short of expressly saying “vote for” or “vote against” a candidate.

=> ↺ Hannity Apologizes For Wrongly Attributing Chattanooga Shooting To ISIS Tweet

Censorship

=> ↺ Press Explains First Amendment To Florida Judge, Who Rescinds Questionable Photography Ban

• About a week ago, we wrote about Judge Mark Mahon in Florida who originally issued an order barring people from protesting outside of the courthouse if they were “questioning the integrity of the court.” After it started making national news, Judge Mahon rescinded part of the order, but kept part that banned photography around the courthouse — which was interesting given that the issue in particular had to do with a reporter for PINAC: Photography Is Not A Crime (who is now suing).

=> ↺ Cameron opens new front in war on porn

=> ↺ Vodafone outlines government efforts to censor telecoms networks

• Governments regularly block content, engage in censorship on telecoms networks and restrict freedom of expression, according to a report by Vodafone that details the number of lawful interception and communications demands the company received in 28 countries.

• The telecoms group said that governments used a number of justifications to block internet services, including national security or emergencies. In such situations, some forms of internet content infringed on a country’s laws or a government wanted to restrict access to information that they considered harmful to social order.

=> ↺ SA bookstore raided for selling novel

• CENSORSHIP has proved to be alive and well after an Adelaide bookstore was raided by police for selling unwrapped copies of the cult novel American Psycho.

=> ↺ Censorship in Adelaide

• The more things change, the more they stay the same in all their decaying tedium. And so, the censors in Australia have been busying themselves through the not so intelligent arm of the law by insisting that copies of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, the Wall Street, psycho dramatic examination of 1980s “Gecko” culture that can only be damned for its disservices to art rather than censorship, be placed under plastic wraps.

=> ↺ Former Reddit CEO explains “what the racist-sexist neckbeards don’t understand”

• Reddit’s users thought they’d won victory for their values of free speech absolutism and resistance against the political correctness culture of oppression.

=> ↺ Former Reddit chief accuses founders of pressuring Ellen Pao into censorship

• The former chief executive of Reddit has accused the online community’s co-founders of pressuring recently-departed chief Ellen Pao into censoring the website.

• Yishan Wong, who left Reddit last year and was replaced by Pao before her departure last week, said that his successor had defended the site’s free speech credentials against the company’s board.

=> ↺ What is Voat, the anti-censorship alternative to Reddit that trolls have flocked to?

• Thousands of Reddit users are now migrating to Voat, a Swiss-hosted clone with a layout that is almost identical to Reddit, which is slowly rising in popularity.

=> ↺ Conflict erupts in Green Party after censorship of Sanders supporters

=> ↺ Uber censorship on Chinese social media a system ‘blip’

• A technical ‘malfunction’ has caused a block on Uber-related searches and posts on Chinese mobile messaging platform WeChat, according to a spokesperson [Chinese] for the Tencent-owned company on Thursday.

=> ↺ WeChat blocks the word “Uber”, claims it’s a technical glitch

• On Thursday afternoon, Chinese WeChat users discovered something weird: searches for the word “Uber” on WeChat wouldn’t turn up any posts related to or mentioning the company in their circles. Searches for any other term seemed to work fine. Moreover, anyone who shared an Uber-related post could still see the article in their own feed – meaning they were unaware of the censorship – but if anyone else looked, the Uber articles wouldn’t be there.

=> ↺ Abbott’s desire to impose guidelines on Q&A is censorship, says Labor MP

• Joel Fitzgibbon describes prime minister’s letter to the ABC chairman as the ‘greatest attack on the independence of the public broadcaster in its history’

=> ↺ “Whose side are you on?” Public broadcasters and counter-terrorism

• On June 22, Zaky Mallah appeared on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC’s) program “Q&A” – a show following the same (often wooden and tired) format as the BBC’s “Question Time.” Sitting among the audience, Mallah posed a question to Steven Ciobo, MP, of the ruling conservative Coalition:

=> ↺ Internet censorship reaching dangerous levels in Turkey

• internet censorship is reaching dangerous levels in limiting freedom of expression, especially concerning critical matters in Turkey, information technology legal expert and lawyer Burçak Ünsal states in his article published in the European Magazine Media Association’s (EMMA) 2014-2015 issue.

=> ↺ Censorship doesn’t keep Vietnam’s rappers from speaking their piece

• Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party continues to suppress sensitive information and tightly control freedom of assembly. It also cracks down on Internet users who disagree with the government or peddle sexually explicit or violent content.

=> ↺ EU “Police” Will Censor Internet to Fight “Extremism”

• Under the guise of battling the Islamic State (ISIS) and jihadists on the Internet, the European Union’s self-styled “police” force, dubbed “Europol,” is launching a new bureaucracy to supposedly combat “online propaganda” and “extremism” with censorship. The so-called EU “Internet Referral Unit” (IRU) will be charged with monitoring the World Wide Web, taking down and flagging “extremist” material, providing information and analysis to EU member governments, and looking forward to the future. While details of the unit remain hazy, critics are expressing concerns — both about the EU usurpation of the awesome power to unilaterally censor the Internet, and with the constantly changing definition of “extremism” to cover increasingly broad swaths of the population.

=> ↺ UK freezes bank account of Russian news agency, gives no reason

=> ↺ Russia Considers Rossiya Segodnya Bank Accounts Closure in UK ‘Censorship’

=> ↺ Russian news agency furious as Barclays closes its account

=> ↺ Barclays Bank Freezes Russian News Agency Rossiya Segodnya’s Account

=> ↺ Russian Social Networks Start Courting Russian Users Sick of Censorship on Facebook

• In the latest episode of Facebook’s drama with users in Russia and Ukraine, the network suspended accounts and deleted several posts belonging to a handful of prominent pro-Kremlin bloggers, as well as a high-ranking Russian state official. After a wave of complaints from Russian liberal oppositionists and Ukrainian users (including an appeal from Ukrainian Petro Poroshenko himself), it’s now the other side’s turn to protest Facebook’s apparent political bias.

=> ↺ Bahraini king pardons rights campaigner Nabeel Rajab

• Index welcomes King Hamad’s pardoning of human rights defender Nabeel Rajab, but calls for the release of all political prisoners in Bahrain

=> ↺ Action against MRT bully? What about man who threatened Amos Yee?

• On Tuesday, Law Minister K Shanmugam posted on his Facebook page about the incident involving a Caucasian on the MRT train who was verbally abusing a younger man for wearing a t-shirt the former somehow disagreed with.

• The bully had also made threats against the youth, threatening to “throw you off” the train when it pulled into Ang Mo Kio station.

• Later, a Malay man, now known as Elfy, stepped forth to defend the youth from the abuse.

• The police were called in and both men (the Caucasian and Elfy) got off the train.

=> ↺ The shame of how Singapore treated Amos Yee

• The clip making its rounds online is heart-breaking. Sixteen-year-old Amos Yee is exiting court, clutching a plastic bag, his mother by his elbow, his father clearing the way cluttered by pushy cameramen and this boy — he is shaking.

• He is free — the judge having sentenced him to four weeks in jail for “obscenity” and “wounding religious feelings” ordered him released on account of his already having spent over a month in prison — but he looks trapped.

• I’ve since read sensational summaries of his 55 days in remand which allege he was shackled to his bed and denied access to a toilet.

• For 23 hours a day, he was kept in a cell with closed-circuit security cameras and with the lights always on. He usually spent the one hour each day he was allowed to leave his cell undergoing psychiatric assessment, reports Amnesty International.

Privacy

=> ↺ MPs win legal challenge as rushed UK surveillance powers ruled as “unlawful”

=> ↺ High Court rules that DRIPA is unlawful

• Open Rights Group welcomes today’s High Court Judgment that the key parts of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (DRIPA) are inconsistent with European Union law.

=> ↺ Snooping Law Found Illegal

• DRIPA was in response to the Court of Justice of the EU ruling that the directive on data retention interfered with an individual’s right to privacy. The then coalition government rushed through DRIPA claiming an “emergency”. DRIPA allows the Home Secretary to order communications data be stored by a company for up to a year.

=> ↺ New German law to protect critical infrastructure, but has privacy caveats

• Certain sectors will have additional tasks, with telecommunications providers required to warn customers when their connection has been abused. More controversially, they will also be required to store traffic data for up to six months for investigatory purposes. This is only slightly shortened on the expectations of the proposed Draft Data Communications Bill in the UK – or ‘Snooper’s Charter’ as named by privacy advocates.

=> ↺ ‘Encryption fears’ over UK security

• Britain’s security services are “increasingly concerned” that they could be locked out from the communications of potentially dangerous suspects because of sophisticated encryption techniques, a major report has disclosed.

=> ↺ Another Reason Adopting ‘Collect It All’ Was A Bad Idea: China May Now Be Applying It To US Citizens’ Personal Data

• At the start of the year, we wrote about an important point made by Bruce Schneier and Edward Snowden concerning information asymmetry in the world of spying — the fact that the US and the West in general have far more to lose by undermining security in an attempt to gain as much information as possible about other countries, than they have to gain. A fascinating analysis from Bloomberg indicates that this also applies to the “collect it all” mentality. The article raises the troubling possibility that both the huge OPM data breaches were not only the work of Chinese state actors, but part of a much larger plan:

=> ↺ How IT can spy on your smartphone

• I recently applauded MobileIron for providing a tool in its mobile device management (MDM) client app that lets users see what IT is monitoring on their iOS and Android devices. User privacy is as important as corporate security, and the spy culture epitomized by the NSA, GCHQ, China, Google, Facebook, and so on has gotten way out of hand.

=> ↺ Senator uses clever response to bash the NSA using emojis

• On Friday, the National Security Agency posted a tweet highlighting its role surveilling the internet for signs of foreign threats.

=> ↺ A font that automatically censors NSA “spook” words as they are written

=> ↺ New Font Automatically Censors ‘Spook Words’ Monitored by the NSA

=> ↺ This spooky typeface automatically redacts NSA trigger words

=> ↺ A man created a font that tells you if the NSA might think you’re a terrorist

=> ↺ NSA sponsors cybersecurity camp at SCSU

=> ↺ N.S.A. Summer Camp: More Hacking Than Hiking

• The dozen or so teenagers staring at computers in a Marymount University classroom here on a recent day were learning — thanks to a new National Security Agency cybersecurity program that reaches down into the ranks of American high school and middle school students — the entry-level art of cracking encrypted passwords.

=> ↺ Students study online hacking defenses

=> ↺ NSA funds FSU STARTALK initiative

• The National Security Agency (NSA) has provided FSU’s Dr. Wenxia Wang, assistant professor of Foreign and Second Language Education, with just under 90,000 dollars to initiate a STARTALK program here at FSU. The STARTALK initiative seeks to expand and improve the teaching and learning of strategically important world languages that are not widely taught in the US.

=> ↺ NSA holding cybersecurity seminars for area teachers

=> ↺ Artists Blow the Whistle on Their NSA Whistleblower Project

• On Friday artists Jeff Greenspan and Andrew Tider walked away from We Are Always Listening (WAAL), a National Security Agency (NSA) subcontractor, DIY surveillance program, satirical prank, or new media art project, depending on your interpretation. The artists, who anonymously scored a viral hit earlier this year when they clandestinely installed their sculpture bust of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in a Brooklyn park, secretly taped the conversations of strangers in New York and Berlin and posted the audio files online.

=> ↺ Latest Snowden Leak Devastating To Defenders Of NSA

• The agency collected and stored intimate chats, photos, and emails belonging to innocent Americans—and secured them so poorly that reporters can now browse them at will.

=> ↺ Court asked to kill off NSA’s ‘zombie dragnet’ of Americans’ bulk phone data

• The leading civil liberties group in the United States has requested a federal court to stop the National Security Agency from collecting Americans’ phone data in bulk through the end of the year.

• While the surveillance dragnet was phased out by Congress and Barack Obama last month, an American Civil Liberties Union suit seeks to end a twilight, zombie period of the same US phone records collection, slated under the new law to last six months.

=> ↺ ACLU asks 2nd Circuit appeals court to stop NSA collection of Americans’ phone records

=> ↺ ACLU challenges NSA phone surveillance program

• The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) [official website] on Tuesday brought a lawsuit [press release] asking a federal appeals court to review a National Security Agency (NSA) [official website] phone data surveillance program. The motion filed by the ACLU state stated that “today the government is continuing – after a brief suspension – to collect Americans’ call records in bulk on the purported authority of precisely the same statutory language this court has already concluded does not permit it.” The ACLU’s major argument in support of the requested injunction is that although the Freedom Act [backgrounder] is in the middle of a transition period, the underlying law allowing for bulk surveillance includes the same Patriot Act [text, PDF] provisions that the second circuit held do not warrant the NSA’s phone-records collection activities. The same activities that Edward Snowden [BBC profile] had exposed. The ACLU goes on to say that “there is no sound reason to accord this language a different meaning now than the court accorded it in May. [The Patriot Act] did not authorize bulk collection in May, and it does not authorize it now.”

=> ↺ ACLU asks court to shut down NSA surveillance ‘for good’

=> ↺ ACLU sues to block extension of NSA dragnet program

=> ↺ ACLU wants to end NSA mass spying forever – good luck with that

=> ↺ ACLU asks court to immediately kill NSA phone snooping

=> ↺ ACLU asks appeals court to bar NSA bulk collection of data

=> ↺ ACLU to appellate court: Please halt NSA’s resumed bulk data collection

=> ↺ A.C.L.U. Asks Court to Stop Part of N.S.A.’s Bulk Phone Data Collection

=> ↺ ACLU Asks Appeals Court to Halt NSA Phone Record Collection

=> ↺ NSA Data Collection ‘Grace Period’ Violates Constitution – ACLU Attorney

=> ↺ ACLU Moves to Shut Down NSA’s Ongoing Bulk Phone Data Collection

=> ↺ ACLU Demands End to NSA Mass Surveillance

=> ↺ Civil liberties groups push to end NSA bulk collection of phone records

=> ↺ Civil Liberties Groups Call On Court To Stop NSA Phone Record Collection

=> ↺ ACLU Sues National Security Agency to End Bulk Phone Spying

=> ↺ NSA Dragnet Fight Will Return to Second Circuit

=> ↺ ACLU Sues to Stop Bulk Phone-Data Collection, Even if it’s Only Temporary

=> ↺ NYCLU Asks Court To Halt NSA Call Record Collection

=> ↺ Activists ask US court to stop phone record collections by government – report

=> ↺ The world’s first hack: the telegraph and the invention of privacy

• John Tawell had money worries. The £1 weekly child allowance he had to give his mistress Sarah Hart was the last straw, and on New Year’s Day 1845 he travelled to her house in Slough, poisoning her beer with a potion for varicose veins that contained prussic acid.

• After the murder, Tawell made his escape on a train headed to London’s Paddington station. He wasn’t known in Slough and expected to slip through the hands of the law. But he was travelling along one of the only stretches of railway in the world to have telegraph wires running beside the railway lines.

• Tawell was a Quaker and had been dressed in a distinctive dark coat. A witness, Reverend ET Champnes, had seen Tawell leaving the crime scene and followed him to Slough station, but not in time to stop the train. Champnes found the stationmaster and together they sent a message to the police in Paddington. Pre-dating morse code, only 20 letters could be covered by the early telegraph system, and Q wasn’t one of them.

=> ↺ CIA documents raise questions about spy agency’s domestic data collection

• …CIA is hoovering up mass amounts of data on Americans as it conducts foreign surveillance operations.

=> ↺ Assange Offers to Release Unredacted List of German NSA Spy Targets

• WikiLeaks posted a trove of redacted NSA spying lists; Assange claims he has full copies of these lists and would share them with German lawmakers.

=> ↺ Wikileaks Revelations Expose US NSA Tentacles Reaching into Allied Governments Around the World

• CCR’s Michael Ratner breaks down how documents expose United States economic and political spying as CCR calls on UN to protect publishers as well as whistleblowers

=> ↺ NSA Surveillance of Schroeder Confirms Spying Assets Used for Business

• Experts claim that NSA surveillance of former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder after he left office confirms electronic intelligence assets are being used to gain economic advantage.

=> ↺ Schroeder, Gazprom Case Reveals Business Motives Behind US Spying

• US experts claim that NSA continued to spy on former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder because it was interested in tracking the business deals of the Russian energy giant Gazprom for economic gain.

=> ↺ NSA spied on former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder: Media

• The US National Security Agency spied on former German Chancellor and Kremlin-ally Gerhard Schröder, after he left his post in 2005. That’s according to reports published on Sunday by German newspaper Bild am Sonntag.

=> ↺ Kremlin Aware of NSA Spying on Gerhard Schroeder Over Friendship With Putin

• Russian leadership knew that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had spied on Germany’s former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder because of his friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday.

=> ↺ Report: Evidence of 2011 US cyberattack on defense giant EADS in Germany

• According to German newspaper “Bild am Sonntag,” evidence linking an attack on European defense group EADS from American soil has surfaced. The news outlet claims it is the first of its kind.

=> ↺ Germany’s YouTube star LeFloid takes on Merkel

• From here LeFloid had very few hits against the Chancellor – getting the usual appeasing lines regarding the NSA scandal and a categorical “no” to the legislation of cannabis. Publicist and viewer Gunnar surmised the general public sentiment by expressing frustration at the unusual lack of aggressiveness from LeFloid.

=> ↺ WikiLeaks says NSA spied on French business

• According to the WikiLeaks report, “NSA has been tasked with obtaining intelligence on all aspects of the French economy, from government policy, diplomacy, banking and participation in worldwide bodies to infrastructural development, business practices and trade activities”.

=> ↺ 20-plus security vendors that NSA targeted

=> ↺ It’s Still 2+2=4 for NSA and ISIS

• L. Gordon Crovitz is puzzled that Silicon Valley can’t stop terrorists from using strong encryption (“Why Terrorists Love Silicon Valley,” Information Age, July 6). The reason is simple. Encryption methods are nothing more than mathematics. Silicon Valley companies cannot make mathematics work differently for terrorists.

=> ↺ Publicly Shaming the US’s Top Surveillance Officials with Street Art

• Ever since Edward Snowden leaked top-secret National Security Agency (NSA) documents that revealed the extent of the US government’s surveillance program, the response from the art world has been vast and varied. In the past year alone a large statue of the whistleblower was erected in Manhattan and a controversial bust of Snowden — crafted by the same artists who recently revealed themselves as the masterminds behind We Are Always Listening — was featured in a surveillance-themed art fair. In another recent and ongoing project, New York-based artist Paolo Cirio is chastening key NSA, CIA, and FBI officials involved in the agencies’ surveillance programs by finding and disseminating across the world snapshots of them in informal or intimate contexts.

=> ↺ Former girlfriend of undercover spy sues corporate security firm

• An environmental campaigner who had an intimate relationship with an undercover spy is suing a corporate security firm in what is believed to be the first legal action of its kind.

• The woman is taking legal action against Global Open, a commercial firm hired by companies to monitor protesters. She alleges in the high court case that Mark Kennedy pursued her to start the relationship, while, she says, he worked undercover for Global Open.

• Kennedy had previously worked for the police as an undercover officer and used a false identity to infiltrate environmental groups for seven years. He maintained his fake persona after he left the police.

=> ↺ Glenn Greenwald’s Latest Has Us Wondering Who Watches the Watchers?

• Of course, Snowden’s story is far from over. However, as Greenwald details in his latest work, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, this story isn’t meant to be about the leaker, it’s about the leak itself. Snowden is emphatic that the focus remain on the information he revealed to Greenwald and other journalists. And this has been somewhat successful, given the whistleblower’s evasion of interview or comment.

=> ↺ Privacy advocate Caspar Bowden dies after cancer battle

• Caspar Bowden, the privacy advocate who was warning about the activities of the NSA before Edward Snowden, has died. The co-founder of the Foundation for Information Policy Research lost his battle with cancer, and tributes have been paid by the world of technology.

=> ↺ Trust in UK politics at all time low as half of citizens believe they’re spied on

• Trust in politics is at an “all time low” with 56% of UK citizens believing that their government is spying on them.

• That’s according to new research from secure server provider Artmotion, which questioned more than 2200 people on their levels of trust in politics following the recent NSA and GCHQ privacy scandals.

• According to the findings of this research, concerns over government snooping are highest amongst young voters, with 62% of 18-24 year olds believing that the UK government is spying on their activities.

• Interestingly, despite the furore around the NSA’s involvement in mass surveillance, trust in politicians is even lower in the UK than it is in the US. According to additional research from Artmotion, 52% of US citizens believe that their government is spying on them – 4% less than within the UK.

=> ↺ Richard Nixon’s Blueprint for the 21st Century US

• Still, think about the illegal break-in (or black-bag job) at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist committed by a group of Nixon White House operatives dubbed “the Plumbers”; the breaking into and bugging of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate office complex; the bugging, using warrantless wiretaps, of the phones of administration aides and prominent media figures distrusted by the president and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger; the slush funds Nixon and his cronies created for his reelection campaign; the favors, including ambassadorships, they sold for “donations” to secure a second term in office; the privatized crew of contractors they hired to do their dirty work; the endemic lying, deceit, and ever more elaborate cover-ups of illegalities at home and of extra-constitutional acts in other countries, including secret bombing campaigns, as well as an attempt to use the CIA to quash an FBI investigation of White House activities on “national security grounds.” Put it all together and you have something like a White House-centered, first-draft version of the way the national security state works quite “legally” in the twenty-first century.

=> ↺ US spy agency targeted top Brazilian officials

• The list of those selected for intensive interception includes not only President Dilma Rousseff but also her assistant, her secretary, her chief of staff, her Palace office and even the phone in her presidential jet.

=> ↺ Snowden is a Russian, or Chinese spy?

• Such a paranoia generated by the US fevered imagination suggests that there may be a secret ‘driving force’, as a common employee could hardly get access to such a quantity of secret documents.

=> ↺ US Might Let Snowden Come Home, If He Pleads Guilty To A Felony & Serves Time

• Recent interviews with Eric Holder, the former U.S. attorney general, have spurred rumors that the U.S. government might offer Edward Snowden, the exiled NSA whistleblower, a plea bargain. Yet there’s little evidence such a deal actually exists and even less indication that Snowden would be interested if it did.

=> ↺ Senate, Once Again, Looks To Bring Back CISA: Surveillance Expansion Bill Pretending It’s A Cybersecurity Bill

• We’ve discussed the “cybersecurity” bill, CISA, that’s been making its way through Congress a few times, noting that it is nothing more than a surveillance expansion bill hidden in “cybersecurity” clothing. As recent revelations concerning NSA’s surveillance authorities have made quite clear, CISA would really serve to massively expand the ability of the NSA (and other intelligence agencies) to do “backdoor searches” on its “upstream” collection. In short, rather than protecting any sort of security threat, this bill would actually serve to give the NSA more details on the kind of “cyber signatures” it wants to sniff through pretty much all internet traffic (that it taps into at the backbone) to collect anything it deems suspicious. It then keeps the results of this, considering it “incidental” collections of information.

• In an incredibly cynical move, supporters of the surveillance state have seen OPM hacks as a ridiculous excuse to push to pass this bill. Senator Mitch McConnell tried to include it in the defense appropriations bill by pointing to the OPM hack. That gambit, thankfully, failed.

=> ↺ ‘Not only can the state intercept your communication, it does’

• In June 2013, the biggest act of mass surveillance in the Internet age was exposed by Edward Snowden, a security analyst; Glenn Greenwald, a legal blogger; and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker. They collaborated to release the National Security Agency (NSA) files in The Guardian. The revelations raised a huge public debate, both about the ethics of the surveillance as well as the ethics of publishing the story. Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, spoke to Hari Narayan about one of the most important journalistic projects undertaken by the publication. Excerpts:

• It’s been a little more than two years since the Snowden revelations. Has there been enough debate since then? The USA Freedom Act has done away with some provisions of the Patriot Act. But have the laws gone far enough?

• Well, I think the penny has dropped that this is a very complex thing; that this is not just about decisions made by security chiefs without anybody else having a say. Has there been enough debate? No, not enough, but at least there has been some debate. We’ve moved from a world in which the security services didn’t want any of this discussed to one in which they say, ‘We feel we can discuss it’.

• Is the Freedom Act enough? Well, I think it is up to each country to decide what its rules are. America has moved from a position of ‘The state will collect all this information’ to ‘It is not alright for the state to hold all the information. The telecom companies can hold it. We can establish a procedure by which we can ask for information’. That, to me, is an improvement. Whether that answers all the questions that Edward Snowden has raised… I doubt it. And technology is moving so fast that it is quite hard for the laws to keep up.

=> ↺ Why government-mandated encryption backdoors are bad for US businesses

• Cybersecurity experts once again issue a stern warning about repercussions of adding US government-accessible backdoors.

Civil Rights

=> ↺ Torture, Impunity and the American Psychological Association

• It has been almost a year since President Barack Obama admitted, “in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we did some things that were wrong. … we tortured some folks.” The administration of Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, carefully crafted a legal rationale enabling what it called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which is no more than a euphemism for torture. From the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay to the dungeons of Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram air base in Afghanistan, countless hundreds, if not thousands, of people were subjected to torture, all in the name of the “Global War on Terror.” With the exception of a few low-level soldiers at Abu Ghraib, not one person has been held accountable. The only high-level person sent to prison over torture was John Kiriakou—not for conducting torture, but for exposing it, as a whistleblower.

=> ↺ How the CIA Really Won Hearts and Minds

• One night, shortly after she moved there, Paget met two men who informed her they were working for the CIA. And, it turned out, so too was her husband, because the agency entirely funded the NSA’s international program.

• This meant the CIA was paying for the apartment where Paget was living. And the money coming into her joint bank account? Well, that was secretly deposited by the organization, too. So, technically, Paget was on the CIA’s payroll.

• Then a naïve 20-year-old, she was promptly told to sign a document swearing complete secrecy about the information to which she had just been exposed. She willingly put pen to paper. But before the ink was even dry, Paget realized she was part of a security oath that was covered under the Espionage Act. This meant she could face up to 20 years in prison if she spoke out.

=> ↺ Royals told: open archives on family ties to Nazi regime

• Buckingham Palace has been urged to disclose documents that would finally reveal the truth about the relationship between the royal family and the Nazi regime of the 1930s.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ Public Revolts Against Plan to Kill Domain Name Privacy

• A new ICANN proposal currently under review suggests various changes to how WHOIS protection services should operate.

• The changes are welcomed by copyright holders, as they will make it easier to identify the operators of pirate sites, who can then be held responsible.

=> ↺ Reddit’s Unenforceable “No Copyrighted Material” Rule

• Following an extended period of controversy, Reddit has just rolled out a list of rules for the site. One of those rules bans the posting of illegal content such as copyrighted material. While the posting of such content has never been explicitly permitted, it’s going to prove impossible to stop moving forward.

=> ↺ Ripping CDs and movies for personal use is once again illegal in UK

• Making copies of copyrighted music and videos for personal use is again illegal in the UK because of a ruling by the High Court issued today.

• Today’s ruling quashes the 2014 regulation that made it legal to make personal copies of performances for private use as long as the person doing so has lawfully acquired the content and doesn’t distribute it to anyone else. That regulation allowed people to make backups or play songs or movies in different formats but didn’t allow selling copies or sharing them with family and friends.

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