• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Secure Linux Systems Require Savvy Users

Patches are available to fix the bash vulnerability known as Shellshock, along with three additional security issues recently found in the bash shell. The patches are available for all major Linux distros as well as for Solaris, with the patches being distributed through the various distros.

DDOS Attack Brings Tux Machines Down

Since sometime last week the popular Linux site Tux Machines has been under an apparent distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. For the last several days, those trying to visit the site have been redirected to Tech Rights, another site operated by Roy Schestowitz, the owner of Tux Machines, to a post dated Saturday by Schestowitz which reads:

Web Software vs. Native Linux Software

In years past, it wasn’t uncommon to rely on a particular operating system because of the software it provided. Mind you, this was before the popularity of web-based applications that can work on any Internet-capable platform. Back then, any task – ranging from word processing down to video editing – had to be done from locally installed software.

Desktop

• Building a Linux lab and its great potential in education

  Learning Linux empowered me to explore and create in a way I never dreamed possible. Open source was initially very challenging as some parts needed configuration that I was unfamiliar with. However, I learned much of what I needed by using search engines and reading forums at Red Hat, Fedora, and other Linux user groups on the internet.

• Spanish anti tax fraud unit renews Linux contract

  Spain’s Tax Administration Agency has renewed its support contract for development and maintenance of its anti fraud information analysis systems. The proprietary database solution runs on Suse Linux server. The massive database system is built and operated using standard free software components.

• What The End-days Of Wintel Looks Like

  Now that OEMs have acknowledged that smaller and cheaper is better (the customer is always right) we should see a lot more GNU/Linux on retail shelves along with all those Android/Linux devices. The market is converging on a system with options not restrictions. Expect to see Android/Linux + GNU/Linux systems being offered in bulk really soon, perhaps by Christmas.

• Data Shows That Chromebook, Mac Sales Are Eating Into Windows’ Share

  There is new data out showing that Chromebooks–portable computers based on Google’s cloud-centric Chrome OS platform–are continuing to eat into Microsoft’s share of the portable computing market. The NPD Group is out with research that shows that during the 10-week period from July 4 to Sept. 1, both Chromebooks and Mac portable computers eroded Microsoft’s share.

Server

• HP Unveils ARM-Based Moonshot Servers

  The new systems ramp up ARM’s competition with Intel and give data centers greater compute choices.

• New computing centers for Afghanistan with UCS

  As to the operating system to use, the team wanted a system, which puts the Afghan staff in a position to perform all the necessary work with as little training as possible and if possible without our support. Over the years, the ZiiK team and its Afghan partners tried out numerous different operating systems, primarily different Linux distributions. The youngest of the computer centers, the IT Center Kandahar (ITCQ), was the first to set up all the servers on the basis of Univention Corporate Server (UCS), which proved to be the best for them in terms of ease of use, flexibility and scope of action due to its App Center, which offers the installation and integration of numerous other proven open source solutions. Until the end of 2015, the other four universities will follow and migrate completely to UCS.

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.17-rc7 – yes, another rc

  So I was really hoping that I could have left rc6 as the last rc and just releasing 3.17 today, but that was not to be. It’s not that anything particularly scary happened, but quite frankly, things just didn’t calm down as I hoped for.

• Linux 3.17-rc7 Released: Linux 3.17 Final Release Pushed Back

  While Linus Torvalds was looking at possibly releasing Linux 3.17 this weekend, there’s been a chance of course with a 3.17-rc7 kernel instead having been released.

• OverlayFS Proposed For The Linux 3.18 Kernel

  After years of development, more than two dozen versions of the file-system, and real-world deployments in some Linux distributions, OverlayFS is trying again to get in the mainline Linux kernel.

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Is Working On A New VA-API State Tracker For Gallium3D

    Years ago there was a VA-API state tracker within Gallium3D for offering drivers support for the Video Acceleration API. That implementation, however, was dropped back in 2012 as it was largely unmaintained and the VDPAU state tracker proved to be more popular. Now, however, it seems AMD is working to introduce a new VA-API implementation for Gallium3D.

  • NVIDIA Suggests Explicit Synchronization For Nouveau

    As another interesting NVIDIA Linux news item before ending out the month are some patches published just before the start of the weekend by NVIDIA. A NVIDIA developer has proposed explicit synchronization support for the Nouveau driver, complete with some “RFC” patches.

  • NVIDIA To Issue An Update On Their Support Of Mir & Wayland

    While there’s no supportive driver out at this time, NVIDIA continues to be working in the direction of supporting non-X11 windowing systems like Mir and Wayland.

  • NVIDIA Is Still Working On The New Linux OpenGL ABI

    It’s been a while since hearing anything new about the proposed overhaul of the Linux OpenGL driver ABI, but it’s continuing to be pursued by NVIDIA.

  • Nouveau Memory Re-Clocking Comes For More NVIDIA GPUs

    Roy Spliet, the student developer behind funded by the X.Org Foundation to work on Nouveau re-clocking, continues making great progress on this critical feature for the open-source NVIDIA graphics driver. With the latest patches, DDR2 / DDR3 / GDDR3 memory re-clocking should be working for a lot more NVIDIA graphics cards.

  • AMD Catalyst 14.9 Officially Released For Linux

    AMD has released the Catalyst 14.9 Linux graphics driver today with some modest changes but it’s not the really big driver update we’re waiting for.

Applications

• ship_game: Keeping with the recent theme

• ncursesoflife: Manipulate the show

• Proprietary

  • Adobe Brings Streaming Photoshop To Chromebooks

    Adobe’s popular Photoshop software landed on Linux sort of today with a streaming version that will be available to Chromebook users running Chrome OS.

  • Linux No Longer Listed as Supported Platform for Adobe Reader

    The Adobe Reader is no longer an item of interest for the Linux users and the company that makes it removed the Linux platform from the list of supported OSes.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • SelekTOR : Apps Based on Java for Quickly Select Tor Exit Nodes by Country

  • How to Install Celtx on Ubuntu

  • How To Create Application Folders in GNOME 3

  • How to Organize Your Linux File System for Clutter-Free Folders

  • Facelift for the apps.fp.o landing page

  • How To Install Kernel 3.13.11.7 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Elementary OS 0.3, Pinguy OS 14.04 And Other Ubuntu 14.04 Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Kernel 3.17 RC7 On On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • 4 steps to use alternatives (multi-version manager)

  • How to set up RAID 10 for high performance and fault tolerant disk I/O on Linux

  • How to configure SNMPv3 on ubuntu 14.04 server

  • Encrypt Your Dog (Mutt and GPG)

  • Setting Up “NTP (Network Time Protocol) Server” in RHEL/CentOS 7

  • How To Change the Resolution of an Ubuntu Hyper-V Virtual Machine

• Games

  • 5 Months After Migrating Servers, Linux Game Publishing Remains Knocked Out

    Five months ago today was when LGP was planning a server migration with minimal downtime, while to this day they’ve yet to return.

  • Neverending Nightmares Released For Linux

    Neverending Nightmares is a black and white psychological horror that looks pretty awesome. There are moments of colour for things like blood, but it’s mostly black and white.

    The game was funded on Kickstarter last year and hit a tidy $100K, so it’s pleasing to see another crowdfunded game have a full release.

  • Tesla Breaks The World! Released For Linux

    Tesla Breaks the World! A platformer that mixes puzzles, adventure and Nikola Tesla into a mixed bag of gameplay.

    The current reviews of the game are mixed, so it’s one of those hit-or-miss platformers that you may or may not want to pickup. The current issues with the game seem to stem from the imprecise controlling of your character which is noted in multiple reviews.

  • Preview: Radeon Gallium3D Performance For CS:GO On Linux

    Following last week’s release of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for Linux I published many AMD/NVIDIA GPU benchmarks of CS:GO. Those initial results were done using the proprietary AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers while starting today will be the open-source graphics driver results for this highly popular Valve game.

  • Intel Haswell HD Graphics With CS:GO On Linux

    Like this morning’s RadeonSI results, the Intel HD Graphics 4600 trial run was done with the current Ubuntu 14.10 development packages — the Linux 3.16 stable kernel and Mesa 10.2.6, although Mesa 10.3 is in the process of landing. As said in the article as well, I will have Mesa 10.3/10.4 results out soon for the open-source Intel/Radeon/Nouveau graphics on Linux, among other Steam on Linux benchmark results.

  • Cosmochoria Released For Linux In Early Access, It’s Fun

    Cosmochoria is a funny little game that puts you in the space-suit of little naked cartoon cosmonaut who jet packs around space.

    The game although it is in early access is very playable right now, and it’s quite fun as well. The Linux version of the game seems to be well done as far as I can see with no immediate problems that I noticed at all, so it’s great to see early access games come out that actually work reasonably well. That’s a refreshing change of pace from other early access releases.

  • GOL Cast: Heavy Bombardment In Cannon Braw

  • GOL World Tour: Linux Gaming From Germany

    This instalment of the GOL World Tour visits Germany, differing from the last two in that it will focus on a country more established in the video game industry and that most people will know quite a bit about anyway. So to make it more interesting and less controversial, the History and Culture section has been replaced with some interesting facts.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • What’s new in porting script “convert-to-new-signal-slot-signal.pl” ?

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME Again, GNOME Again, Jiggety Jig

    GNOME “has truly reached new levels of desperation by tying itself to Systemd in an attempt to seem modern, but they’ve castrated and compromised the user experience,” Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza opined. “The same people that made Linux popular to begin with — systems administrators — are not interested in a candy-coated UI which wastes screen space.”

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Black Lab Linux 6.0 Beta 2 Is a Bizarrely Attractive Xfce Desktop

    Black Lab Linux 6.0 Beta 2, a distribution that is now based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and is using the Xfce desktop environment, has been released for download and testing.

  • Black Lab Linux 6 Beta 2 Released

    Today we are pleased to announce the availability of Black Lab Linux 6 Beta 2. As we march on to the release date of November 1, 2014 we have introduced a few new features for Black Lab Linux 6 Beta 2.

  • Q4OS 0.5.19 released

    We are pleased to announce release of Q4OS 0.5.19 version. An alternative “Kickoff” menu has been significantly improved and more GUI translations has been made. There is new “ipcodecs” installer script for super-easy installation of all kinds of proprietary multimedia codecs that you might need.

• Screenshots

  • Ubuntu 14.10 Beta 2

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • OpenMandriva 2014.1 review

    OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1 is the latest edition of OpenMandriva, a desktop distribution derived from the old Mandriva Linux.

    Though OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1 is a minor update to OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0, which was released back in June (2014), it comes with some significant changes, including, according to the Release Notes, support for booting on computers with UEFI firmware. To quote from the Release Notes: “This is the first release of OpenMandriva Lx that incorporates support for UEFI booting.” Interestingly, the same thing was said of OpenMandriva 2014.0.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Rolls Out New JBoss Developer Subscription, Resources, and Technology

  • Fedora

    • Oracle ships its OpenStack for Linux distro

      Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux, based on the latest Icehouse release of OpenStack, is now available for download.

      Last December, Oracle became a corporate sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation and announced a set of plans to add OpenStack compatibility or integration to a range of its products.

    • Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller talks Shellshock on the Linux Action Show

      Matthew Miller, the Fedora Project Leader recently appeared on episode 332 of the Linux Action Show titled Weaponized Bash to talk about the recent flaw discovered in Bash (aka Shellshock). Matthew also covers how the Fedora Security Team works and how they work together with the Red Hat Security team. Additionally, the interview also covered the future of security, including where containers fit into making a more secure Fedora.

    • Shipping larger application icons in Fedora 22

      In GNOME 3.14 we show any valid application in the software center with an application icon of 32×32 or larger. Currently a 32×32 icon has to be padded with 16 pixels of whitespace on all 4 edges, and also has to be scaled x2 to match other UI elements on HiDPI screens. This looks very fuzzy and out of place and lowers the quality of an otherwise beautiful installing experience.

    • Fedora 21 Alpha [screenshots]

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Mark Shuttleworth on Western media, Iraq, IS and Ukraine

      • What Western media and polititians fail to mention about Iraq and Ukraine

        Be careful of headlines, they appeal to our sense of the obvious and the familiar, they entrench rather than challenge established stereotypes and memes. What one doesn’t read about every day is usually more interesting than what’s in the headlines. And in the current round of global unease, what’s not being said – what we’ve failed to admit about our Western selves and our local allies – is central to the problems at hand.

      • Ubuntu GNOME Devs Encouraged by Ubuntu Team to Add Latest GNOME in Future Versions

        The Ubuntu GNOME makers have been encouraged by an important Ubuntu developer to implement the latest build of the GNOME desktop environment in the future versions of their distro.

      • Ubuntu 14.10 Beta Now Available To Download

        Canonical has this week announced the release of a new version of its Ubuntu operating system with the rollout of the new 14.10 beta version which is now available to download and test out.

      • Ubuntu 14.10 Fans, Prepare for “It’s a Boring Release” Comments

        Canonical made a very good release back in April. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was very well received and it integrated many features. It was very different from Ubuntu 13.10, so it was spared the “boring” rhetoric. On the other hand, Ubuntu 14.10 will not bring any important visible changes to the operating system and it will be very difficult to set it apart from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Devices/Embedded

• Open-spec control oriented SBC builds on RPi COM

  Calao Systems unveiled a Linux-ready, industrial “PinBall” SBC based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, plus special M2M and home-automation models.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google posts Android Auto design guidelines

      Google posted a developer overview for Android Auto, offering guidelines for designing extensions to existing Android apps for customized IVI interactions.

    • Developer offers Jams Music Player app for free, now an open source

      Music player apps for Android are a dime a dozen. There are lot of paid ones too but one app called Jams is about be offered for free. Apparently, it’s developer, Psaravan on Github.com, is now making the app available for free. To formerly paid app on Google Play Store, it is also now an open source because the developer can no longer provide support for the paid users. He doesn’t want the app to just go offline so he’s releasing the app for free and open sourced it.

    • How Apple finally realized it was wrong about big screen phones

      Apple’s introduction of larger screen iPhones came as no surprise to industry observers, despite the fact that the company had loudly proclaimed the importance of one-handed phone use. But what motivated Apple to finally offer larger screen iPhones? Forbes analyzes the numbers that got Apple to change its tune about big screen phones.

    • Triple-A: Android, Anchoring And Apple

      The iPhone 6 era is just 10 days old, but for Apple it was already underway sometime last year. By April 2013, company executives understood they had a strategic vulnerability. The booming smartphone market had expanded remarkably in 2012, growing from 494 million units the year before to 722 million sold. While 70% of the gains occurred in phones below $300 — a market Apple had no intention of partaking in — the rest came from phones with screens larger than the iPhone’s 4-inch display. Worse still, premium-priced phones with 4-inch screens actually was a shrinking segment, down 22 million. That Apple managed to sell more iPhones was a remarkable achievement but it meant challenges lay ahead.

Bossie Awards 2014: The best open-source desktop and mobile software

InfoWorld Bossies: Calling Out the Best Open Source Projects

InfoWorld is out with its 2014 Bossies awards–one of the most widely followed award roundups for open source projects. It’s always a treat to find out which projects the publication’s editors deem to be on the rise. This time around, there are lots of surprises, including xTuple, CyanogenMod, and Scribus–one of our favorite open source desktop publishers.

Bossie Awards 2014: The best open source desktop and mobile software

Bossies 2014: The Best of Open Source Software Awards

Clearly, open source is changing the way software is procured. In the era of monster contracts and a few monster software vendors, upper IT management called all the shots and passed down applications and tools the rest of the organization had to live with. Open source is helping to crack that monolith, so businesses and individuals can make their own software decisions.

Make no mistake: Although open source incurs less capital expense, it’s not free — nor even necessarily cheap compared to proprietary software. Generally speaking, at scale, open source solutions require a higher level of effort and expertise to implement and maintain. Open source’s rapid pace of innovation often results in more frequent updates, which means a closer eye on dependencies. In addition, professional services and commercial open source contracts result in significant cost.

HHVM – An Open Source PHP Virtual Machine Developed By Facebook

HHVM, stands for HipHop Virtual Machine, is an open source virtual machine developed by Facebook development team. It is designed for executing massive amount of codes written in Hack and PHP languages. HHVM gives superior performance, and improves the efficiency of PHP execution, and increases the productivity for the developers. The developers says that compared with the regular Zend PHP 5.2 engine + APC, HHVM has realized over a 9x increase in web request throughput and over a 5x reduction in memory consumption for Facebook. This is how Facebook handling millions of active users everyday. According to this blog, the wordpress sites running with HHVM delivers better overall performance, approximately 63%, than the websites which are running using traditional LAMP stack (Apache, MySQL, and PHP). Sounds awesome? Indeed!

Latest OpenDaylight Release Helium Out

OpenDaylight is in good position to do for SDN what OpenStack did for cloud. It has increasing support among the biggest vendors in the networking space and an active membership overall with over more than coders and growing. Brocade, Cisco, Red Hat, IBM and Citrix are among the supporters.

OpenDaylight Helium Bootstraps SDN Security

The Linux Foundation’s OpenDaylight Collaboration Project is out today with its’ Helium SDN platform release.

The Helium is the second major release since the OpenDaylight effort got underway in April of 2013. The first major release for OpenDaylight was the Hydrogen release, which debuted in February of this year.

Open, Open, Open: OpenDaylight Helium is Here

OpenDaylight Helium Enhances Open Source SDN, NFV

Open source software-defined networking (SDN) and network-functions virtualization (NFV) are ready for enterprises to start building the networking and cloud computing infrastructure of the future. So says the OpenDaylight Project, which released the second major version of its platform today.

Penn Manor goes ‘all in’ with open source

Open source is playing an ever-expanding role in education at all levels. One school board that’s embraced open source is the Penn Manor School District in Pennsylvania. The District has rolled out the largest open source student laptop program in the state, with 3,500 Linux-powered computers distributed to students.

On the hunt for the right open source project?

I came back from OSCON this year with a new fire to contribute to an open source project. I’ve been involved in open source for years, but lately I’ve been more of an enthusiast-evangelist than a hands-on-contributor to an open source community. So, I started some thinking about what to do next. When I was involved in projects before, it was due to a clear progression from user to forum guru to contributor. It’s a great path to take but what do you do if you just want to jump into something?

Eclipse Foundation Delivers Open IoT Stack for Java

The Eclipse IoT community is helping Java developers to connect and manage devices in an IoT solution by delivering an Open IoT Stack for Java.

Events

• KVM Forum 2014

  The KVM Forums are a great way to learn and talk about the future of KVM virtualization. The KVM Forum has been co-located with the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon events for the past several years, and this year too will be held along with LinuxCon EU in Dusseldorf, Germany.

• Planet Virt

  For a long time various people have been telling me there’s not much information on the low-level / plumbing details of the virt stack on Linux. Especially information related to qemu and its various settings, devices, and so on.

  [...]

  I updated the KVM and QEMU wikis to ensure the Planet gets more visibility, and hope this goes a small way to quell the complaints of not enough available information.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Tor executive director hints at Firefox integration

    Tor, which is capable of of all that and more, crucially blocks websites from learning any identifying information about you and circumvents censorship. It also stymies eavesdroppers from discovering what you’re doing on the Web. For those reasons, it would be a powerful addition to the arsenal of privacy tools Firefox already possesses.

SaaS/Big Data

• Automating the cloud: OpenStack deployment

  One of the crowning achievements of cloud computing is the significant reduction in time required to provision new infrastructure and services. Traditional hardware procurement, installation, configuration and deployment were laborious processes requiring careful planning and often took weeks or months. Efficiencies introduced by modern cloud environments have reduced the time required to complete the same procedure down to hours and minutes. How is this achieved? The key is software automation.

Databases

• New Continuent Tungsten 3.0 combines power of highly available open-source DBMS with real-time analytics

• Oracle MySQL Gets New Features: The Storage Wars Continue

  NoSQL, object storage and Hadoop have ushered in a brave new world of storage technologies and applications for the cloud and Big Data. But Oracle (ORCL) thinks the future remains bright for MySQL databases, too, and has unveiled new technologies to make the traditional storage platform easier to administer and deploy.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle pushes its database platform further into the cloud

  At Oracle OpenWorld 2014, CTO Larry Ellison announced that users will be able use a new cloud database service to send their Oracle Database instances to the cloud with “the push of a button.”

• eG Innovations Delivers End-to-End Performance Management for Oracle Linux and Oracle VM

  eG Innovations, a provider of automated performance monitoring, diagnosis and management solutions and a member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced support for Oracle Linux and Oracle VM in its flagship offering, eG Enterprise. The company will be showcasing its solution at Oracle OpenWorld, September 28 – October 2 in Moscone South Exhibition Hall at the Oracle Linux and Virtualization Showcase, Booth 611.

• Oracle looks to the future — but remains stuck in the past

  You have to hand it to Oracle CEO — sorry, Chairman — Larry Ellison: No one can bash a competitor like he can. Unfortunately, while Ellison may have hit the mark with SAP (“I have no idea what runs on HANA, but it ain’t their cloud. That runs on Oracle”), he failed to address his own company problems: an almost complete lack of interest from developers.

Business

• 12 Open Source CRM Options

  “Why not get the open source software that you plan to use for free, and then use the money that you would otherwise have spent on proprietary license fees to modify the open source software to meet your needs more closely?” he asks. “Why pay for software that is the same for all users when you can pay to have something that is unique?”

BSD

• LibreSSL: More Than 30 Days Later

  Instead, libressl is here because of a tragic comedy of other errors. Let’s start with the obvious. Why were heartbeats, a feature only useful for the DTLS protocol over UDP, built into the TLS protocol that runs over TCP? And why was this entirely useless feature enabled by default? Then there’s some nonsense with the buffer allocator and freelists and exploit mitigation countermeasures, and we keep on digging and we keep on not liking what we’re seeing. Bob’s talk has all the gory details.

  But why fork? Why not start from scratch? Why not start with some other contender? We did look around a bit, but sadly the state of affairs is that the other contenders aren’t so great themselves. Not long before Heartbleed, you may recall Apple dealing with goto fail, aka the worst bug ever, but actually about par for the course.

• LibreSSL Continues Marching Forward On BSD Systems

• FreeNAS 9.2.1.8-RELEASE is now available

  Time for another FreeNAS release! This one fixes a number of issues in 9.2.1.7 as well as addressing the “shellshock” security vulnerability in bash (to which FreeNAS is not generally vulnerable as bash is not the system shell, but it was still worth fixing).

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• guile-ncurses version 1.5 released

  I am pleased to announce a new version of GNU guile-ncurses. guile-ncurses is a library for the creation of text user interfaces in the GNU Guile dialect of the Scheme programming language. It is based on the ncurses project’s curses, panel, form, and menu libraries.

• GnuCash 2.6.4 released

  The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.6.4, the fourth maintenance release in the 2.6-stable series. Please take the tour of all the new features.

• September 2014 GNU Toolchain Update

  This only affect code maintained by GDB project (not binutils or GCC). Also, support for any other target on MIPS (including embedded ones) will be maintained as is.

Licensing

• Retro console Retron 5 accused of stealing open-source emulator code

  Game Politics reports that the company has been accused of stealing code from a number of open-source emulators including the SNES9x (SNES), FCEUMM/FCEUX (NES), VBA NEXT (Game Boy Advance), GenesisPlusGX (Mega Drive and assorted Sega consoles).

Openness/Sharing

• US to craft open source policy by next year

  After delivering his address at the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting last week, President Obama dropped a tidbit of interest for open data advocates: he promised to produce an open source policy by the end of 2015.

• Open Hardware

  • Microduino-Joypad 8-bit Open Source Game Console (video)

    Some of our readers might remember the Microduino Arduino compatible development board that launched last year over on the Kickstarter crowd funding website. This week the same team at Microduino Studio have now unveiled their new Microduino-Joypad in the form of an open source game console.

  • Revel takes iPad POS platform open source

  • Let’s Talk About Open-Source Hardware

    In this and future columns, I will try to record and analyze the current trends with regard to open-source. Despite the fact that we have seen many open-source products in the market, and also that many people have been involved with these products, the picture remains not-so-clear for the majority of people.

Programming

• Clasp: Even Common Lisp Is Coming To LLVM

  The latest open-source project devising an LLVM back-end is a Common Lisp implementation.

Security

• Security advisories for Monday

• Cloudflare just added SSL encryption to two million websites for free

  Last year, the web optimization network CloudFlare promised it would double SSL usage on the web in 2014 — and last night, the company made good on its promise. Overnight, CloudFlare deployed its Universal SSL feature, offering free SSL encryption to any site that opted in. All told, that meant two million new sites with the feature, effectively doubling encryption on the web overnight.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Israel Is Put on Trial for War Crimes

  On September 25, in Brussels, Belgium, the Russell Tribunal gathered to examine allegations of war crimes and genocidal intent by the Israeli military against residents of the Gaza Strip during Operation Protective Edge. I was among those invited to provide testimony before a jury that included Michael Mansfield, John Dugard, Roger Waters, Ken Loach, Vandana Shiva, Richard Falk, Ahdaf Soueif, and Ronnie Kasrils. The following day, I presented testimony in the European Parliament alongside Israeli journalist David Sheen and Mohammed Omer, a journalist from the Gaza Strip. (Two other invitees from the Gaza Strip, Palestinian Committee on Human Rights director Raji Sourani and filmmaker Ashraf Mashharawi, were prevented from leaving the besieged coastal enclave by the Egyptian regime.)

Finance

• Four-Day Workweeks: Change for the Better?

  Changes in the capitalist system’s operating procedures, rules and regulations are always presented as if they were in everyone’s interest, a kind of “everybody wins” social progress. The changes usually turn out to be mostly or entirely in capitalists’ interests since they run their system that way. Are we surprised and shocked?

Privacy

• Tim Berners-Lee calls for internet bill of rights to ensure greater privacy

  The inventor of the world wide web has warned that the freedom of the internet is under threat by governments and corporations interested in controlling the web.

  Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who invented the web 25 years ago, called on Saturday for a bill of rights that would guarantee the independence of the internet and ensure users’ privacy.

Civil Rights

• The (NED Financed) Hong Kong Riots

  Some organized “student groups” in Hong Kong tried to occupy government buildings and blocked some streets. The police did what it does everywhere when such things happen. It used anti-riot squads, pepper spray and tear gas to prevent occupations and to clear the streets.

  The “western” media are making some issue about this as if “western” governments would behave any differently.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Rockchip’s DRM Driver Continues To Progress

    Back in August Rockchip published a DRM driver for their SoCs. While this driver has yet to be mainlined, Rockchip continues revising the open-source driver to address upstream developer feedback.

• Benchmarks

  • Radeon 2D Performance On Fedora 21: EXA vs. GLAMOR

    These quick weekend benchmarks were comparing EXA and GLAMOR on the Radeon HD 6870 graphics card. The Radeon HD 7000 series hardware and newer (with RadeonSI Gallium3D) only supports GLAMOR — 2D over OpenGL — for 2D acceleration. The Radeon HD 6000 series hardware and older meanwhile has the dedicated 2D code-paths to support EXA by default while GLAMOR can be enabled via the xorg.conf if you wish. Fedora 21 has the X.Org Server 1.16 release and with its post-alpha updates was the Linux 3.17 nodebug Rawhide kernel.

  • Preview Numbers For The GeForce GTX 980 On Ubuntu Linux

    For those anxious to see NVIDIA’s newest high-end Maxwell graphics card, the recently launched GeForce GTX 980, on Linux, here’s some preview results.

    My GeForce GTX 980 sample just arrived on Friday so I’ve been busy testing it over the weekend and plan to have the review out in the next few days. So far, the GeForce GTX 980 is running great on Linux.

Applications

• fkmines, minecurses, minefield and pynesweeper: Mine, all mine

• stardork: Has all the right ingredients

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Experimenting with keyboard shortcuts

  • How To Fix The Shellshock Security Vulnerability On Ubuntu, Debian And Fedora Systems

  • How To Install Voice Commands 1.0.2 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivatives

  • How To Install Gaupol (Subtitle Editor) 0.26 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • Using GIT to backup your website files on linux

  • Learn Ubuntu – The Unity Dash

  • Linux: Flexible log rotation

  • How to check if you’re affected by the Shellshock Bash bug for Linux, OS X

• Games

  • The Sunday Gaming Section, Linux Gaming From Around The Web

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Randa

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Top Features of GNOME 3.14

    GNOME 3.14 is out, and all users now want to try it and see what’s new. The developers have provided us with a list of changes and improvements that have been implemented in this latest version.

Distributions

• openSUSE 11.4 Is Now Truly, Finally Dead

  The official support for openSUSE 11.4 officially ended back in November 2012, but the openSUSE ecosystem has things that sets it apart. One of those things is called Evergreen support. Basically, after a version of OpenSUSE reaches End of Life, the community can extend the life of the system by integrating patches and fixes long after the developers have finished with it.

• New Releases

  • OpenELEC 4.2.0 Is a Powerful Media Center Linux OS

    The embedded operating system built specifically to run the famous XBMC media player solution, OpenELEC, has been upgraded to version 4.2.0 and the image is now ready for download.

• Screenshots

  • Netrunner 2014.09.1 Rolling

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1 Gets Newer Kernel, New KDE Version, and Better Boot Time

    The OpenMandriva Association association has announced that OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1, the first update for this beautiful KDE-based Linux distribution, has been released and is now available for download.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google’s Schmidt Says Rivalry with Apple Stronger than Ever

      Schmidt was on Bloomberg TV Wednesday to talk about “How Google Works: The Rules for Success in the Internet Century,” a book he co-wrote with Jonathan Rosenberg. When mention was made of how customers are lining up for blocks to get Apple’s new iPhone models, Schmidt pointed out more than once that Samsung’s similar phones were available a year ago.

    • Libdrm 2.4.57 Brings Android Build Support & More

      A notable Mesa DRM library update was released today.

    • Why the new Moto X is a fine contender among titans

      Motorola as a company has gone through what can only be described as a roller coaster ride over the past several years. The company was once highly recognized solely for their popular Droid line (which is so well-remembered that many people synonymize the term “Droid” with “Android”, when they in fact do not mean the same thing), but soon became irrelevant as other manufacturers came along with more powerful products (which also had better availability). When Motorola was purchased by Google in 2011, it felt like forever before the name Motorola resurfaced again. When it finally did, we were greeted with the Moto X.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Happy 4th Birthday, LibreOffice!

  The famous office suite built by the Linux Foundation, LibreOffice, has just turned four years and the developers have been quick to celebrate this momentous occasion.

• LibreOffice Con in Bern, Switzerland

  I was invited to give a talk in Bern, Switzerland, for the LibreOffice Conference. The LibreOffice people are a nice crowd with diverse backgrounds. I talked to design people, coders doing rather low-level GL things, marketing folks, some being new to Free Software, and to some being old farts. It sounds like a lot of people and one is inclined to think of boat loads of people attending the conference when having the community statistics in mind. But it has been a very cosy event, with less than a hundred people. I found that surprising, but not necessarily in a bad way.

BSD

• FreeBSD 10.1-BETA3 Now Available

  The third BETA build of the 10.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.

• FreeBSD 10.1 Beta 3 Released

Project Releases

• libason 0.1

Openness/Sharing

• From a basement in London, Ont.: The open-source communications tech that’s changing ALS patients’ lives

  They could have made millions.

  “Screw it,” says lead engineer Javed Gangjee, in his basement in London Ont., when asked about the commercial potential of his work.

  The engineer, a Western University grad, is part of an organization that’s giving a voice to people who were trapped in their own bodies.

  And it’s open-source. When he’s satisfied with the code, he’ll publish it online so anyone can use it. They just have to help people along the way in return.

• Project Marilyn aims to create an open-source anti-cancer drug

Americans find issues harder to understand, poll says

It’s not just people who have tuned out politics who feel perplexed.

Confused by issues of the day? Join the club

Google HR Boss Says 58% Of Résumés Get Trashed Because Of One Spelling Mistake

Kirin promotes new alcohol by filming rural people with pigeon shaped drones… because they can

Security

• Ex-con Kevin Mitnick now selling zero-day exploits, starting at $100K

  So it probably shouldn’t surprise anybody that Mitnick, who post-prison reinvented himself as a skilled penetration tester, security consultant and social engineer, is now offering to sell zero-day exploits at the eye-popping opening price of $100,000 (£61,283).

  Not a humble price!

  As Wired reports, Mitnick last week unveiled a new branch of his security consultancy business called Mitnick’s Absolute Zero Day Exploit Exchange that will both develop zero-day exploits – i.e., tools that take advantage of as-yet unpatched software bugs – in-house, as well as buy them from developers.

• China, United States Hold Secret Cyber Talks

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• America’s never-ending war

  It is official: US President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama is at war again. After toppling Libyan ruler Muammar el-Qaddafi and bombing targets in Somalia and Yemen, Obama has initiated airstrikes in the Syria-Iraq belt, effectively declaring war on the Islamic State – a decision that will involve infringing on the sovereign, if disintegrating, state of Syria. In his zeal to intervene, Obama is again disregarding US and international law by seeking approval from neither the US Congress nor the United Nations Security Council.

• Lizza says Obama has bombed more nations than Bush

• The absent intellectual war against Islamist cutthroats

  The aerial war waged by the United States and its Western and Arab allies against the cutthroats of the so-called “Islamic State” (formerly known as the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” – ISIS – or the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” – ISIL) is a mere tactic in a war without a strategy.

• The Primaries Project: Will Foreign Policy Finally Become Part of the Debate?

  So far this year foreign policy and defense issues have been pretty absent from the campaign trail. Will this week finally be the week when the 2014 candidates for Congress finally discover foreign policy?

• Obama, power and responsibility

  It is important to question not merely the legal bases of the administration’s claim, but also the wisdom of establishing a national security policy without congressional aid. It is important to note that several national security experts have made arguments that congressional vetting of proposed executive actions improves the quality of the product, legitimizes the policy and lends itself to lesser chance of backlash, either by the public, the federal judiciary or Congress. In short, getting Congress’s approval is often in the best interest of the president.

• Obama and his Nobel “Peace” Prize

  Now it’s a new war or better yet the latest phase of an endless war against whatever new “enemy” is out there to be demonized and contrived as the latest threat to America and Americans.

• Indictments issued in attempted sale of Saddam Hussein’s family guns

  The men, David Phillip Ryan, 50, of Miami, and Carlos Quirola-Ordonez, 57, of New Jersey, are believed by the federal government to have attempted over a four-month period in 2012 to sell a cache of guns smuggled out of Iraq. The firearms, a mixture of exotic shotguns and handguns, was understood to be stolen from the family of Saddam Hussein following the U.S. invasion of Iraq and obtained by Ryan who enlisted Quirola-Ordonez and two others in an attempt to sell the guns for between $250,000 and $350,000. The plan came apart when the buyers turned out to be undercover federal agents working with Homeland Security Investigations and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms.

• UK fighter jets fly into Iraq on combat mission

• RAF planes fly first combat missions over Iraq

  Two Tornado aircraft which left an RAF base in Cyprus to fly the first combat missions over Iraq have returned without carrying out air strikes, the MOD says

• UK MPs vote overwhelmingly for ISIS airstrikes in Iraq

  MPs have voted to back Britain joining US-led airstrikes on Islamic State in Iraq in a vote on Friday. Attacks could begin within days, as ministers admit that UK military intervention could last two or three years.

• New flight plan on drones

  In 2000, the United States had about 50 drones. There are some 7,500 today, armed and unarmed.

• Al-Qaida splinter group claims rocket attack on US embassy in Yemen

• Al Qaeda Group Claims Firing Rocket at U.S. Embassy in Yemen

  An al Qaeda splinter group claimed to have fired a rocket that intended to hit the U.S. Embassy in Yemen on Saturday, wounding several guards in an attempt to retaliate against an air drone strike carried out by the United States in Yemen a day before.

• US drone kills four suspected militants in Wana

  Intelligence officials in Pakistan say a US drone strike has killed four suspected militants in a northwestern tribal region along the Afghan border.

  The two officials and three local Taliban fighters say the strike Sunday killed two Arab militants and two of their local allies in a compound in the town of Wana in South Waziristan.

• An Open Letter to President Obama: Stop Preaching Peace To The World, Even As You Support Terrorists And Wage Illegal Wars

  You Mr. President accused Russia of aggression, arming the rebels in Ukraine, even though Russia has done its utmost to find a political solution and now, there is a ceasefire on the ground. Far more progress towards a political solution has been made in Ukraine, than in any other recent theatre of war.

• Terrorists: UN in line with SA law

  A United Nations Security Council resolution unanimously adopted this week, which aims to curb foreigners joining extremist militants in countries such as Syria and Iraq, is in line with existing South African legislation, according to the Department of International Relations.

• Arms-smuggling Taiwanese duo snared in FBI sting plead guilty

• Top-secret plan to invade Cuba declassified

  The most popular analogy used to describe Fidel Castro’s turning Cuba into communism’s only bastion in the Western Hemisphere in 1959 was “cancer.” And the fear, to carry the analogy further, was that it would metastasize elsewhere in Latin America.

  The CIA, therefore, decided that invasive surgery was needed and launched the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. Lacking air cover, all 1,400 anti-Castro paramilitaries were killed or captured as they waded ashore. That was taken to mean that the Castro regime posed a potential military as well as a political threat to the area. It was decided that the best way to excise the malignancy was to cut it out.

• U.S. Propaganda Enters Into Insane, Irrational Overdrive in Attempt to “Sell” War in Syria

  Thanks to a dizzying barrage of lies, mainstream media fear-mongering and a couple of beheadings, the Obama Administration finally achieved its long sought after war in Syria. The tactic that proved most effective in mobilizing the American public back into a shivering, post-9/11 fetal position, was the same tactic used by elites in the UK to convince Scotland against voting for independence. That tactic, as I detailed in a recent post, is fear.

• What a Mess the United States Has Gotten Into

  Wouldn’t that be a pretty turn of events. Obama started out trying to form a Sunni alliance to take down Shiite Assad and now the NYT suggests that he form a Shiite alliance to take down Sunni ISIS. But then again, the NYT is Obama’s mouthpiece.

• Scott DeSmit: Liars and fools and we buy it all

  ISIS. ISIL. Alibaba. Ebola. Khorasan.

  I checked The Daily News archives for records of such words.

  ISIS? Our first reference to this was in June.

• Going back to Iraq bad idea

  Since 2003 more than 1 million people in Iraq have been killed in the conflict. Do you think that more surgical strikes will change anything, other than to anger the citizens that live there and live under the threat of being accidentally targeted? Is this how we are to win the peace? This will do nothing but send even more “freedom fighters” into the camps of the terrorists.

  It would be prudent to ask where did ISIS get all the weapons and training it currently seems to have and the answer is very alarming. We allowed half a billion dollars of weapons to get into the hands of anti-Gaddafi organizations. Their leadership includes former generals of the Iraq Army that we disbanded.

  Apparently, we arm and train “freedom fighters” when we don’t like the current ruler. Then we have to go fight those same organizations that we built a few years later. We are supplying the resistance forces in Syria and now we want to side with that same government to reduce the capabilities of the rebels?

  Here’s an idea: leave the internal affairs of other countries to the people that live there and lets mind our own business. Let’s get our economy back on track and get our Fourth Amendment robbing government restrained.

• Arming Syrian rebels: Deja vu all over again

  It was only just six weeks ago that the president argued that arming the Syrian rebels was “fantasy.” Now, as he abruptly shifts his strategy – both in bombing Syria and aiding the opposition to President Bashar al Assad — he should first answer three important questions: Who will be on the receiving end of these weapons? And, just who are these “moderate” rebels? And, now that the U.S. is at war with the Islamic State, what is to guarantee the weapons will stay out of their hands?

• CIA-vetted Syrian rebels battling Islamic State say airstrikes haven’t helped

  In the skies over Syria, U.S. and Arab combat aircraft have bombed Islamic State targets 20 times since Tuesday. But on the ground, commanders for rebel groups that are part of a CIA-run program say they’ve pleaded in vain for arms, ammunition and even field rations so they can fight the same extremists.

  Although they are among the few chosen to receive aid under the covert U.S. program, the commanders say the U.S. has done little to help them as they struggle to hold onto their main supply route from Turkey against a determined Islamic State offensive.
  ]

• Selling the Syrian Airstrikes

  The U.S. war establishment is using the ISIS propaganda scare to police the world and continuously subject resistant nations to their global NATO imperial plans through massive aerial bombardment violence that is already murdering people not taking part in hostilities.

  [...]

  The U.S. war criminals dropped as many bombs on Syria in one night on September 23 than the entire span of recent bombings/170 plus death dealing airstrikes on Iraq in the name of waging war against ISIL, which is really a campaign designed to further destroy the Iraqi nation to control its petroleum . In Syria, U.S. NATO imperialists bombed 50 targets in Raqqa, Deir al-Zor and Hasakah provinces and also conducted airstrikes in Alleppo.

• U.S.-led coalition bombs ISIL oil refineries in Syria — Republicans OK war money for Ebola fight

  The United States and a couple of Arab allies yesterday bombed small oil refineries in eastern Syria controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, seeking to deprive the group of one of its top funding sources. The strikes came as President Barack Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly, delivering a 39-minute speech that left no doubt he’s given up his aspiration of bringing an end to U.S. military entanglements in the Middle East — and now views himself, however reluctantly, as a wartime president.

• When the U.S. goes to war, TV networks call on the warheads

  When President Barack Obama decided to drop bombs in Iraq this month, television news turned to a group of familiar faces to decipher the plan for viewers.

• The West’s Syria policy has been shaped by media missionaries

  Eager for scoops, both credulously relayed the stories; and eager to furnish serviceable information, the CIA gave them credence. Together they helped trigger one of the most disastrous interventions in recent history.

Transparency Reporting

• WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning sues U.S. military for gender treatment

• WikiLeaks’ Assange Talks Google, NSA & Granai Airstrike Video At NYC Book Launch

  Assange repeatedly warned of the dangers posed by the mass surveillance of tech giants Google and Facebook, assailing Schmidt and the omnipresent search engine he oversees as worse than the National Security Agency (NSA) in terms of privacy concerns and the sheer, unregulated power it wields via the mass personal data voluntarily handed over by users.

• WikiLeaks Founder Dubs Google The ‘Privatized NSA’

• Wandering Eye: CIA complicity in coke trade, some backstory on prospective councilman Costello’s juice, and Drew Daniel’s anti-listicle listicle

  The story of the CIA’s complicity in the cocaine trade is finally coming to the big screen next month, through the tragic story of Gary Webb, as told in “Kill the Messenger.” Old timers will remember that Webb, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, broke the story in a huge series called “Dark Alliance” in 1996, detailing how CIA contract employees used multi-kilo sales to a notorious LA crack dealer named Rick Ross (from whom that Rick Ross took his name) to finance the agency’s counter insurgency in Nicaragua. As Ryan Devereaux of The Intercept reports, Webb’s worst enemy was not in Langley, but in DC, New York, L.A., and Miami, where mainstream newspapers put squads of reporters on the task of picking his stories apart. The CIA, naturally, observed all this with glee. Webb committed suicide a decade ago, having seen his once promising career reduced to ruins (he was working for a tiny alt-weekly in the end). His work abides though (you can read it all here.) And he was mostly right. (Edward Ericson Jr.)

• Gary Webb: Vindicated

  Sometimes, they kill the messenger, and the message takes flight, only to return later, with its truth self-evident to a new generation. And then, the messenger is resurrected.

• Movie Trailer: Investigative Journalist Gary Webb From “Kill The Messenger” Was Plain Dealer Reporter

  Webb committed suicide after his reports linking the Reagan-era CIA to the cocaine epidemic in the United States was discredited by major outlets in the mainstream media, though Webb was largely accurate. (There’s also a righteous profile of Webb and the whole story in this 1988 Esquire piece.)

• Trailer: Kill the Messenger

  Instead of a superhero or super soldier, Renner is playing real life journalist Gary Webb – a man who uncovered the CIA’s role in cocaine entering the US.

• The lesson Hollywood cannot teach us

  Possibly the most insightful statement ever made by a journalist was from Gary Webb, who killed himself in 2004, years after the CIA and media rivals destroyed his career and credibility.

  I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.

• Managing a Nightmare: How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of Gary Webb

  Eighteen years after it was published, “Dark Alliance,” the San Jose Mercury News’s bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism.

  The 20,000-word series enraged black communities, prompted Congressional hearings, and became one of the first major national security stories in history to blow up online. It also sparked an aggressive backlash from the nation’s most powerful media outlets, which devoted considerable resources to discredit author Gary Webb’s reporting. Their efforts succeeded, costing Webb his career. On December 10, 2004, the journalist was found dead in his apartment, having ended his eight-year downfall with two .38-caliber bullets to the head.

• Revealed: CIA Created ‘Foreign Power’ Chatbot, Interrogated Own Agents

  So how far have we come in the last 30 years? As Pearson points out, the federal government is currently testing bots to interview people for national security purposes. But, there’s still some way to go, since even this year’s “most intelligent” chatbot isn’t as smart as its developers hyped it to be.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• 350.org founder Bill McKibben receives ‘Alternative Nobel’ award

  Renowned US environmentalist Bill McKibben will be one of the recipients of this year’s Right Livelihood Awards, known as the ‘Alternative Nobel’, it has been announced.

Finance

• Five objects that make modern Germany

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Pro-Beijing Media Accuses Hong Kong Student Leader of U.S. Government Ties

  Evidence for Mr. Wong’s close ties to the U.S. that the paper cited included what the report described as frequent meetings with U.S. consulate personnel in Hong Kong and covert donations from Americans to Mr. Wong. As evidence, the paper cited photographs leaked by “netizens.” The story also said Mr. Wong’s family visited Macau in 2011 at the invitation of the American Chamber of Commerce, where they stayed at the “U.S.-owned” Venetian Macao, which is owned by Las Vegas Sands Corp.

Censorship

• SOUL talks banned books, censorship

  A group of about 15 students gathering Wednesday night in Greenlaw Hall to discuss the history of banned books agreed that banning literature keeps people from considering important ideas.

• Free Speech Organizations Report to UN About Censorship In Prisons and Schools

  The report in question cites the Texas Department of Criminal Justice as the main example, where 11,851 titles have been banned from their prisons. “Of the 11,851 total blocked titles, 7,061 were blocked for ‘deviant sexual behaviour’ and 543 for sexually explicit images,” says the report. “Anthologies on Greco-Roman art, the pre-Raphaelites, impressionism, Mexican muralists, pop surrealism, graffiti art, art deco, art nouveau and the National Museum of Women in the Arts are banned for the same reason, as are numerous textbooks on pencil drawing, watercolour, oil painting, photography, graphic design, architecture and anatomy for artists,” the report went on to say. Works from Gustav Flaubert, Langston Hughes, Flannery O’Connor, George Orwell, Ovid, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Shakespeare and Alice Walker were all found on the banned book list. The report also touched on American schools, where people like Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut and Alice Walker are examples of writers banned based on “objections centering around moral and religious reasons.”

• China’s internet censorship machine has become even more advanced to cope with social media

• Exhibit B: Victim Of Mob Censorship Or Vile History Used As Entertainment?

• Exhibit B: Censorship pure and simple

  So let’s be clear. People have every right to object to art they find objectionable but no right whatsoever to have that work censored. Free expression, including work that others may find shocking or offensive, is a right that must be defended vigorously. As an organisation, while we condemn in no uncertain terms all those who advocate censorship, we would – as a free expression organisation – defend their right to express those views. What we do not and will never condone is the use of intimidation, force or violence to stifle the free expression of others.

• Old Story, New Plot: A Look at Censorship

• Book Review: ‘Censors at Work’ by Robert Darnton

  I still think that my argument was right. Pornography, libel, sedition, hate speech and lies are a fair price for freedom of speech. They would be powerless in a justly ordered, well-educated society. If pornography incites your lust, commend the pornographer for success and condemn yourself for succumbing. If you believe the propagandist, he or she has done his job: It is your critical faculties that are at fault. If the advertiser exaggerates, caveat emptor.

• Censorship of books in US prisons and schools ‘widespread’ – report to UN

  Free-speech organisations find US government is ‘failing to protect the rights of its most vulnerable citizens’ as popular books – including Shakespeare – are banned from institutions

• Denver students stage mass walk-out over US history ‘censorship’

  Students at six Denver-area highs schools walked out their classrooms en masse, protesting a plan by the conservative-majority Jefferson County school board to push for curriculum changes to Advanced Placement history courses to promote patriotism and deference to authority. The proposed changes would include the removal of topics that could ‘encourage’ civil disobedience from textbooks and materials.

• Denver-area students accuse school board of censoring U.S. history

  It is the call for a review of the Advanced Placement curriculum for U.S. history classes to ensure that teaching materials present positive aspects of U.S. history and its heritage. According to the wording of the proposal, teaching materials should “promote citizenship, patriotism … (and) respect for authority” and not “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”

  “I understand that they want to take out our very important history of slavery and dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because it portrays the U.S. in a negative light,” said Casey McAndrew, a high school senior.

• Australian Government Scrambles to Authorize Mass Surveillance

  This week, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott used recent terrorist threats as the backdrop of a dire warning to Australians that “for some time to come, the delicate balance between freedom and security may have to shift. There may be more restrictions on some, so that there can be more protection for others.”

• ‘Freedom party’s’ terror laws will have a chilling effect

• New Australian Law Would Permit Unlimited Government Internet Spying, Jail Time For Journalists

  The Australian government is primed to give the nation’s spy agency unfettered access to citizens’ computer networks and potentially put journalists in jail thanks to drafted national security reform laws passed by the country’s Senate Thursday, The Sydney Morning News reported.

  The Australian Senate passed an anti-terrorism bill called the “National Security Legislation Amendment Bill” that would give the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) more power to monitor Web traffic. If finalized, the law permits ASIO agents to search and monitor an unlimited number of computers on a particular network based on a single warrant request. Journalists, bloggers and government whistleblowers could also spend up to 10 years in prison for revealing details of intelligence operations, as part of the law. The bill is set to be voted on and approved by Australian’s House of Representatives next week.

• Free Speech at Risk in Australia, Thanks to Terrible New Counter-Terrorism Bill

  Free speech advocates from across Australia’s political spectrum have raised concerns about new counter-terrorism legislation passed by the Australian senate this week.

• With Its New Security Law, Australia Tries to Out-NSA the NSA

  Australia is in the process of passing new intelligence gatherings laws that, on the face, appear troublingly wide-ranging, even by American privacy standards.

• Reddit Punishes /r/technology for Censoring Keywords, Including “Bitcoin” and “Dogecoin”

  Bitcoin and Dogecoin were among the list of at least 20 words banned by the popular /r/technology subreddit. The scandal shook the Reddit sphere last week. Monday, Reddit punished the censorship by obscuring the community. They officially pulled the subreddit from the list of “default subreddits” awarded to popular sub-communities.

Privacy

• FBI Chief Slams Apple, Google for New Privacy Policies

• FBI and NSA warning against Apple and Google’s default iPhone, Android data encryption

• FBI Director: Very Concerned By New Apple and Google Privacy Features

  Plans by Apple and Google to increase the security on their smart devices have made FBI Director James Comey “very concerned,” he told reporters on Thursday at FBI headquarters in Washington.

• No more Samsung devices for Chinese officials – Banned!

  A few months ago, the Chinese government was said to have prohibited all state officials and agencies from using Apple devices and the now the Chinese government has banned Samsung devices too. However, in Apple products’ issue, China later said that the issue has been greatly exaggerated.

• Door left ajar for civilian intelligence

  Ultimately, a decision on whether to allow Supo to continue in its current capacity or to establish a new security intelligence service will be taken by policy-makers. The issue is expected to be on the agenda in the government negotiations to be held after the upcoming parliamentary elections to ensure that a vision for the organisation of security and intelligence services is inscribed into the next government programme.

• White House wants domestic drone use detailed publicly

  The White House is preparing a directive that would require federal agencies to publicly disclose for the first time where they fly drones in the United States and what they do with the torrents of data collected from aerial surveillance.

• Obama Administration Invents Language to Conceal Reality of War in Iraq & Syria

  One of the bothersome aspects of the war escalation in Iraq and Syria has been the commitment of President Barack Obama’s administration to using language to conceal their war plans.

  The White House has insisted this is not a war. The attacks on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are a part of a “counterterrorism strategy.” The US has not launched a war because it has previously been dropping Hellfire missiles on suspected terrorists in various countries. Those strikes, though they have killed hundreds of civilians and were questionable in their legality and success in bringing about “security,” were part of a “strategy.”

• Artists take aim at hidden world of modern US surveillance

  ‘Covert Operations’ exhibition brings FOIA requests and dogged investigative fieldwork into museum setting

• Every Response I Got When I FOIA’d The Year’s Dumbest App

  When the soul-crushingly simple, single-serving messaging app Yo hit the App Store earlier this year, people couldn’t say enough about the app that said barely anything at all. But given our pseudo-surveillance state and similar apps’ privacy concerns, we wondered — could the government be spying on (or even just talking about) Yo?

• The quiet death of America’s worst spy

  Walker died on August 30.

• Silva Presidential Campaign Looks to Turn NSA Scandal to its Advantage

  “The United States of Barack Obama will have great affinity with Marina Silva’s Brazil,” predicts one of Marina Silva’s campaign coordinators, Mauricio Rands.

  Rands, a former federal deputy for the PT [Labor Party] who changed parties and went to the PSB [Brazilian Socialist Party], is one of Marina’s government plan advisers, along with sociologist Neca Setúbal, a Banco Itaú heiress.

  According to Rands, a focus of her program will be to take a new approach to relations with the United States, which are now being affected by the espionage scandal exposed by former NSA analyst Edward Snowden.

• The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Is Collecting Massive Amounts Of Your Personal Financial Information

  Not a day goes by without news reports on how large corporate entities and the government are collecting ever-increasing amounts of personal information about us. While consumers voluntarily give away personal information to various websites in exchange for their services, more worrisome is the collection of personal information without our knowledge or consent. When our government is doing the collecting, those concerns intensify. We ought to pause and ask what the appropriate place for the government is in this brave new “big data” world.

• Using smart chips Carlyle Group tracked LP movements at annual meeting

  Carlyle Group used ‘smart chips’ implanted in name badges to track limited partners at its annual meeting earlier this month, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

• Don’t let the ISIL threat sink surveillance reform

  When Edward Snowden pulled back the curtain on the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, a war-weary American public finally had its eyes opened to the profound expansions of executive power that occurred after 9/11. But in the week since President Barack Obama announced a new open-ended campaign to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the jihadi group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), one can’t help worrying that the lessons of the past decade will fade from our collective memory.

• MINISTRY REVEALS SECRET SPY PLANS

  Considered a mistake and now shrouded in secrecy, the document detailed a 175,000 euro contract from the interior ministry, responsible for the domestic security services, for the purchase of forensic equipment from a company named as Onerecovery, which are allegedly used for tracing data and smartphone analysis, much in the same way that the American NSA got into hot water for spying on people.

• Snowden Honored with ‘Alternative Nobel’

• NSA whistleblower Snowden honoured with Sweden’s ‘alternative Nobel prize’

  Former US spy agency contractor, Edward Snowden, has been declared one of the winners of a Swedish human rights award-also known as the “alternative Nobel”- for exposing top secret state surveillance programs.

• Snowden wins Sweden’s ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’

• The invention that resulted in the Rights of Privacy and Publicity

  The Right of Privacy has become deeply embedded in our culture and is part of our everyday conversations as a result of NSA’s eavesdropping, drones flying overhead taking pictures, and the data mining of everything we do on the Internet. Let us not forget the surreptitious pens filming us in public, Google glasses capturing our every move, or celebrities claiming violation of their Right of Publicity (an offshoot of the Right of Privacy). Today, the Right of Privacy and Right of Publicity are governed by statutes in most jurisdictions and those that do not have specific statutes use the common law.

• Edward Snowden Receives Swedish Human Rights Award

  Edward Snowden, who remains the most wanted man in the United States and of almost every global hegemon in the world, was honored with an ‘alternative Nobel’. He, together with Alans Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian received the 2014 Right Livelihood Honorary Award. This recognized his contribution of information on surveillance programs made by the American government.

• The cost of resistance

  For an illuminating glimpse of government power in action, it’s hard to beat the fines the US Justice Department threatened to level against Yahoo if it didn’t comply with a secret and sweeping surveillance request in 2008.

• NSA hires ‘risk officer’ for oversight; critics fear ‘talking head with no authority’

  The National Security Agency has hired its first “chief risk officer” in an attempt to quell public fear that it operates outside the rule of law.

• NSA Director Names New Chief Risk Officer

• NSA hires a ‘risk officer’ to oversee intel missions in a bid to appease a wary public

• The NSA is renting its technology to U.S. companies

  The National Security Agency (NSA), which develops surveillance tools that are both dazzling and terrifying, has been making money on the side by licensing its technology to private businesses for more than two decades.

• Stephen Harper says Canadians’ metadata not collected

  Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s assertion that Canadian security agencies don’t collect “metadata” has some cybersecurity experts scratching their heads.

  That’s because the Communications Security Establishment of Canada (CSEC) is not only legally mandated to collect metadata — data that details the circumstances around electronic communications — but has repeatedly confirmed that they do.

  “Unfortunately we live in a ‘black hole’ around CSEC’s activities,” Ron Diebert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, said in an email.

• Basu: Edward Snowden: traitor or patriot?

  Knowing all this does not give me confidence in my government, but it does tend to vindicate Snowden’s actions. Maybe he did betray the government’s trust, but the government has been betraying the people’s trust to a far greater degree.

• Public hearing of witnesses in NSA scandal at Berlin inquiry

• Could Snowden come to Berlin?

  German opposition members have appealed to the country’s highest court to allow former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden to testify at a parliamentary inquiry in Berlin.

• German opposition asks top court to order Snowden testimony in Berlin

• German opposition seeks court ruling to force Snowden hearing on NSA in Berlin

• German opposition goes to court on Snowden hearing

  Opposition lawmakers have asked Germany’s highest court to rule on whether former NSA contractor Edward Snowden can come to Berlin to testify about the agency’s activities.

• Canadian spy agency creates global hacking network

  A recent report in the Globe and Mail reveals that Canada’s signals intelligence agency has developed and field-tested software that can secretly hijack a computer and then use it as a springboard to hack into other computers.

• NSA Ordered Facebook Activity of Alabama Students ‘To be Monitored’

  High schools in the district of Huntsville, Alabama, have been monitoring their students’ activities on social media for the past 18 months after receiving a tip from the National Security Agency (NSA) about violent threats being made on Facebook.

• Big Brother is Teaching You: Huntsville students learn about life in the surveillance state: opinion

• Huntsville, Alabama Schools Have Been Secretly Monitoring Students’ Social Media Since Phone Call From NSA

• Alabama schools stalk students on Facebook, supposedly at the NSA’s bidding

• Alabama schools secretly spying on students’ social media after NSA called in a tip

• Superintendent Cites NSA Call as Pretext for Snooping on Student Social Media Activities

• Huntsville City Schools have been monitoring students’ online activity since January

• Huntsville schools: NSA call led to monitoring students online

• Huntsville student explains tweets that led to spying on students

• Alabama School District Claims NSA Told Them to Spy on Students, NSA Denies

• Huntsville Superintendent says NSA call led to student monitoring

• Russian authorities: Google, Facebook and Twitter must register with media watchdog

• Julian Assange: ‘When you post to Facebook, you’re being a rat’

  He said, “Every time you go to a party and take a picture and post that picture to Facebook, you’re being a rat. You’re being a narc.”

• The Kremlin wants more control over Facebook, Google, and Twitter

  The public square that the internet and social media offers Russian activists may soon be compromised. The Moscow Times reported Friday that the Kremlin’s telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, this week notified Google, Facebook, and Twitter that they would need to register as “organizers of information distribution” under the country’s so-called blogger law.

• NSA is Working on an Encryption-Cracking Quantum Computer.

  Surprised? Probably not. According to recent documents from Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency is spending $79.7 million on a research program called “Penetrating Hard Targets”. This project involves building a quantum computer that would be able to break most types of encryption. At the moment, the agency is nowhere near completion of the project, so no need to worry yet. However, the NSA is already pretty good at breaking encryption and bribes companies to promote flawed encryption, so with this much power and money, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched that the NSA will successfully build this computer.

• Journalism in the age of surveillance

  Combine government bad behaviour and an employee with a conscience and you get a whistleblower. Add a journalist into the mix and you have a recipe for government accountability.

  In the technological age, the link between journalist and insider source is very often digital communication. Knowing this, governments all over the world are working hard to track the communications of leakers and the journalists who can make those leaks public.

• American Muslims 13 years after 9/11

  There are reports that American Muslims are sometimes coerced into becoming informants for the security agencies.

• Third group wants in on NSA case

  A third civil liberties organization is asking a federal appeals court for time to defend the only federal court ruling challenging the legality of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of information on U.S. telephone calls.

  The Center for National Security Studies, a D.C.-based group which advocates for individual liberties and government transparency, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Friday to allow the group time to argue that U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon’s ruling that the counterterrorism program appeared to be illegal was correct, albeit on different grounds than Leon identified.

• Burke and Lincoln would have hated the special relationship

  In the last few days three stories have broken that make the “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel appear more insidious and threatening than ever.

• US threat to British online privacy

  Private information stored online by British computer users could be scrutinised by American law enforcement agencies under a wide-ranging new right-to-snoop being pursued by the US government.

  Federal authorities in the US are using the courts to try to force American-owned technology companies to disclose emails and other data held in the “Cloud” – the vast network of servers where data is stored for customers.

  The claim would require companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Google to open up all their electronic records to agencies – such as the CIA, the NSA and the FBI – even if it is stored in Europe rather than on US soil.

Civil Rights

• Author Ronald Kessler offers inside scoop on the Secret Service

• ‘You Are a Bastard and You Know It’ and Other Chilling Quotes From This CIA Interrogation in ’80s New York

• Petition to Obama Administration: End the Harassment and Targeting of Reporters

  Imagine the United States without independent reporters. Where would the news come from? Press releases and corporate statements? Government-run media? And more importantly, what would we have missed over the last century? Watergate, COINTELPRO, the CIA’s manipulation of politics in Vietnam—none of these things would be common knowledge without courageous reporters, who were willing to publish stories on scandals that rocked the entire country.

• Nothing to crow about

  President Obama made some commendable speeches at the United Nations last week, but his self-serving remarks to a panel on open government won’t win any plaudits from supporters of an independent news media. They were an astonishing example of saying one thing while doing just the opposite.

• History Will Not Be Kind To Eric Holder

• ACLU Comment on Attorney General Holder’s Resignation

  However, we’ve had profound disagreements with the Attorney General on national security issues. During his tenure, DOJ approved the drone killing of an American far away from any battlefield, approved the NSA’s mass surveillance programs, failed to prosecute any of the Bush administration torturers, and presided over more leak prosecutions than all previous Justice Departments combined. We acknowledge, nonetheless, that he fought, albeit unsuccessfully, to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in federal criminal courts rather than in flawed military commissions.

• Eric Holder’s dark civil liberties legacy

  Holder’s work on civil liberties has been far less inspiring.

• Holder’s exit doesn’t come soon enough for critics: Editorial cartoon extra

  Thursday President Obama announced Eric Holder will be leaving as Attorney General of the United States as soon as his yet to be named replacement is confirmed.

  Holder is the fist African-American and the 4th-longest serving U.S. Attorney General. He has served in Department of Justice under six Presidents of both parties. But his last five and half years as A.G. were the most eventful, as he confronted issues that were both controversial and historic.

• Bill Maher: Political Correctness Silences Liberals On Radical Islam [Video]

  On Thursday night’s broadcast, however, he suggested that otherwise nonjudgmental liberals, multi-culturalists, and others who express outrage when Jonah Hill, Donald Sterling, Rush Limbaugh, or Mel Gibson say stupid or offensive things, or when a baker refuses to make gay wedding cakes, remain silent “while gross atrocities are ignored across the world.” He also called attention to the fact that a group of Yale students recently tried to prevent Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali from speaking on campus.

• Holder’s Disappointing Tech Legacy

  Large-scale violations of electronic privacy, many of which were exposed by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, also occurred on Holder’s watch. Holder didn’t initiate the bulk collection of phone or e-mail records; nor did he run the N.S.A. But Holder, as the Administration’s top lawyer for half a dozen years, nonetheless bears responsibility for these gross and repeated violations of Constitutional principles. It is ultimately the Justice Department’s duty to stand up for the Constitution when other parts of government want to abandon it, and this Holder failed to do. (During the Bush Administration, Justice Department lawyers, like Jack Goldsmith and then Acting Attorney General James Comey, fought the White House’s excessive surveillance of American citizens at a key moment.) We don’t know what he knew, but Holder’s Justice Department does not seem to have put a real brake on the program.

• How can an Islamophobe train without bias?

  This month, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery hosted a “terror training” for law enforcement led by someone we consider a notorious Islamophobe, John Guandolo. As Muslim leaders of Arizona, we are deeply disappointed that Mr. Montgomery ignored our repeated calls to invite reputable trainers to address this important topic and chose individuals who advocate extreme anti-Muslim views.

• GOLDCAMP: Lincoln, Roosevelt and slavery

  The Nazis and the Japanese resurrected the institution of slavery, and the Nazis even industrialized slavery and genocide in the Holocaust. Allied victory in World War II destroyed slavery based on anti-Semitism. Harry Truman followed up FDR’s work by laying the foundation for confronting the Stalinist brand of slavery, and Ronald Reagan played the major role in bringing down the Soviet Union some 40 years later without a shot being fired.

• Mliswa Exposed for ‘Sleeping and Dining’ with ‘US Spy’, Faces Gamatox

• Jonathan Moyo the real CIA spy, Mliswa

  Mliswa had been challenged over allegations he took US embassy staffer, Eric Little, on a tour of Hurungwe West in June to meet local government officials.

• Passports and foreign affairs

  While Agee was in West Germany, he campaigned traitorously against the CIA. He revealed the identities of several CIA officers, and put their lives in danger. For the domestic purpose of making it difficult for Agee to continue his anti-CIA campaign, the State Department revoked his passport.

• Roger Stone’s Book ‘Nixon’s Secrets’ A Shocking Read

  Roger Stone’s new book Nixon’s Secrets: The Rise, Fall, and Untold Truth About The President, Watergate, and The Pardon is a Washington thriller that hinges on a shocking revelation: that the CIA once planned to assassinate President Richard Nixon.

• JFK theorists gather, press for document release

• 50 years later, doubts still raised on Warren Report

  One panelist, John Newman, who gave a presentation on CIA pseudonyms used by agents connected with the Kennedys, said the Warren Report “was not just wrong. The longer we have to study the case, the wronger its conclusions become.”

• Kill The Messenger: the Gary Webb story has holes but Renner’s performance still sticks – review

• The CIA/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up

  In 1996 — as major U.S. news outlets disparaged the Nicaraguan Contra-cocaine story and destroyed the career of investigative reporter Gary Webb for reviving it — the CIA marveled at the success of its public-relations team guiding the mainstream media’s hostility toward both the story and Webb, according to a newly released internal report.

  Entitled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,” the six-page report describes the CIA’s damage control after Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series was published in the San Jose Mercury-News in August 1996. Webb had resurrected disclosures from the 1980s about the CIA-backed Contras collaborating with cocaine traffickers as the Reagan administration worked to conceal the crimes.

  Although the CIA’s inspector general later corroborated the truth about the Contra-cocaine connection and the Reagan administration’s cover-up, the mainstream media’s counterattack in defense of the CIA in late summer and fall of 1996 proved so effective that the subsequent CIA confession made little dent in the conventional wisdom regarding either the Contra-cocaine scandal or Gary Webb.

• CIA still hiding the worst details of black sites

  The preceding paragraphs will come as no surprise to anyone who has researched or read about the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation program. But if I held a security clearance, I could lose my career or face prosecution for publishing them.

• Senate CIA report release slips again

  The release of a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program appears to have slipped further, judging by filings Thursday afternoon in a pair of related court cases.

• Release of CIA report pushed back again

  The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on “enhanced interrogation” techniques has been delayed again, this time until late October, according to an aide to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

  The Department of Justice was due to release a summary of the report that details the committee’s investigation of a CIA interrogations program under former President George W. Bush in late September. The report was requested via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

  Feinstein intervened, requesting a one-month extension, so that the Intelligence Committee she leads, and the White House, could reduce heavy redactions made to the summary by the CIA, the aide said.

  This is Feinstein’s second request for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to delay the summary’s release under the FOIA request.

• Anatomy of a Non-Denial Denial

  The non-denial denial is an art that takes many forms in official Washington.

  The basic idea is that when you or your organization are accused of doing something that you did in fact do, you respond with what sounds like a denial, but really isn’t.

  You issue a very narrowly-crafted denial involving a lot of hairsplitting, while avoiding the central claim. Or you dismiss the accusation as unworthy of response. Or you deny something else: You raise a straw man accusation and deny that; or – possibly best yet — you take advantage of a poorly worded question.

• The CIA, the President, and the Senate’s Torture Report

• Helen Thomas comes to my rescue

  Gen. Augusto Pinochet and his minions overthrew Allende’s democratic election in 1973 with the full connivance of President Richard Nixon, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

• America’s War With Its Dark Side, Part 4

  Less than two weeks later, Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the two political leaders in San Francisco, where most of the Jonestown victims came from, most likely to undertake an independent investigation of the covert CIA involvement in Jonestown were also murdered.

• Watch Lists and the First and Fourth Amendments

  If you don’t know Ray McGovern yet, you probably should.

  You see, Ray just beat down, in court, Hillary Clinton, the State Department, and a small part of Post-Constitutional America.

• Is it 2014 or 1984?

  Now this CISPA bill, which is yet again pushed by congressional support of the executive, deals with pre-emptively “defending” against cyber terrorism. What this bill actually does is allow, under law, for private corporations and businesses to give detailed information about our lives such as our search, text, email, online store accounts, word and endless other technological privacies, including complete “cloud” access of each U.S. citizen to the federal government.

• Donnelly reflects on Assembly term, critics, future

  On Oct. 2, 2013, Gov. Brown signed the Donnelly-introduced Assembly Bill 351 into law. Coined The California Liberty Preservation Act, the law opposes the indefinite military detention of persons without charge or trial and prohibits state cooperation with federal officials in enacting the provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Agreement.

  The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California lauded the bill as signaling that NDAA was “contrary to the common values of all Americans.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Chinese internet regulator Gao Jianyun sacked for corruption

  A senior Chinese internet regulator has been sacked and expelled him from the ruling Communist Party for accepting huge bribes.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The Power of Linux (Almost) Everywhere

Linux — the free open source operating system for enterprise, small business and home computing use — is not used everywhere yet. However, its user base crosses nearly every industry.

Linux is in many places today. It’s in consumer products like TVs and computer networking gear. Linux drives services that users do not even know run Linux. Think in terms of servers, Big Data farms and cloud storage facilities. The analytics and Big Data marketplaces host and run platforms and applications on top of Linux in data centers and in the cloud.

The Linux OS certainly is evolving in the connected car space, for example. Linux also is embedded in many appliances. It often controls the sensors in industrial machines, navigational gear and medical instruments.

Kernel Space

• The Top Features Of The Linux 3.17 Kernel

  If all goes well, the Linux 3.17 kernel might be released this weekend. For those not closely following the kernel’s development over the past two months, here’s a recap of some of the most interesting changes found in this new version of the Linux kernel.

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA Alerts Nouveau: They’re Starting To Sign/Validate GPU Firmware Images

    To the dismay of open-source fans, NVIDIA is tightening the belt so to speak around their GPU hardware: with Maxwell and future hardware, certain aspects of the NVIDIA graphics processor chip will only be available to the “Falcon” (a.k.a. “FUC”) firmware images that have been signed by NVIDIA. While this will throw a wrench at Nouveau’s open-source effort, NVIDIA at least informed Nouveau and are jointly working towards an adequate solution.

  • AMD Is Still Moving Towards A Unified Open-Source Driver

    Earlier this year I delivered the exclusive news how AMD was looking at a new Linux driver strategy for Catalyst that involved leveraging the open-source Radeon DRM kernel driver. The strategy at the time effectively meant just making Catalyst a user-space blob and riding off the open-source Radeon kernel driver to share more common code and hopefully lead to a better experience. It looks like this driver strategy is moving forward.

  • AMD Wants To Know What’s Wrong With Catalyst

    AMD is soliciting feedback on the Catalyst driver.

Applications

• yaourt: In the interest of parity

• binary-clock: Welcome to the geek club

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Install Calibre 2.4.0 On The Most Popular Linux Systems

  • How To Install Node.JS 0.10.32 On Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Node.js 0.10.32 On The Latest Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS And OpenSUSE Systems

  • How To Install LibreOffice 4.3.2 On Ubuntu, Debian And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install LibreOffice 4.3.2 On Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Mageia, OpenMandriva And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install (And Test) GNOME 3.14 On Arch Linux

  • Apache’s mod_proxy, mod_ssl, and BitTorrent Sync

  • How To Properly Remove LXDE And Install XFCE On Raspbian (Debian For Raspberry Pi)

• Games

  • Tropico 5 On PS4 Will Run At 1080p, Developer Aiming For Locked 30fps

  • Interstellar Marines FPS Releases A Huge Update, Now Includes Co-op Play

    The Interstellar Marines developers have been very busy and this new update is bloody huge. It includes the first co-op level and it’s quite big.

    It adds “The NeuroGen Incident” which is the first ever co-op experience for the game, but it’s not limited to that. It also includes their first pass at a revival system for downed marines as well like many other co-op games have.

  • Ibb & Obb Coming To Linux Soon, Developer Looking For Testers

  • Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition Now In Beta For Linux, Finally

    It took longer than we ever hoped, but Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition is finally in opt-in beta for Linux. It may have taken over a year and a half, but they really are about to deliver on their promise. Better late than never right?

  • Hearthlands City Builder Has A Massive Update

  • A Future Catalyst Update Will Improve CS:GO’s Linux Performance

    AMD is expected to release an updated Catalyst Linux driver in due time that will improve the frame rates for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Another kickstarter feature done: cage transform

    Yesterday, Dmitry finished another part of his work on the transform tool. He added cage tranform and improved the anti-aliasing. Only liquify is still on the transform tool todo list!

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 3 and HIG Love

    I have spent the last few months of spare time working on the user interface. The purpose is to adapt the UI and use the great GTK+3 features when adequate. There is still much left to do, but here are before and after screenshots.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • OpenELEC 4.2.0 released

    The OpenELEC team is proud to announce OpenELEC 4.2.0.

    OpenELEC-4.2 is the next stable release, which is a feature release and the successor of OpenELEC-4.0.

    Since OpenELEC 4.0 we have reworked many parts of the underlying OS. This release is the result of 6 months of development and testing and will be the basis for the upcoming OpenELEC-5.0 release series which is planned to release with Kodi-14 later this year.

  • OpenELEC 4.2 Works To Improve The Linux HTPC/Multimedia Experience

    A new release of OpenELEC is out for the Linux distribution designed around XBMC (now known as Kodi) for carrying out multimedia tasks with an easy-to-setup operating system.

  • RELEASE: Netrunner Rolling 2014.09.1

    We are releasing this maintenance shortly after our initial 2014.09 release to fix problems with the nvidia driver, and include a first fix for the bash shell vulnerability.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • If you thought it couldn’t get better, here is OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1

    OpenMandriva is proud to announce the release of OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1, that aims fixing lots of bugs and improving the overall performance of the distro.

  • OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1 Released

    The OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1 release features the Linux 3.15.10 kernel, KDE 4.13.3 desktop, Firefox 32, Mesa 10.2.6, X.Org Server 1.15.2, and other updated but not too bleeding-edge packages.

• Red Hat Family

  • Scientific Linux 7.0 RC1 Has Finally Arrived

    The first release candidate to the RHEL7-based Scientific Linux 7.0 is finally available.

    While the Scientific 7 Alpha came not too long after the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 release, today we’re finally seeing the release candidate — long after CentOS 7.0 was released as the other popular community-based RHEL alternative.

  • What does SELinux do to contain the the bash exploit?

    Do you have SELinux enabled on your Web Server?

    Lots of people are asking me about SELinux and the Bash Exploit.

  • Fedora

    • Updated Bash packages now available via Fedora updates

    • Packages for Builder — a GNOME IDE — now available for Fedora 21

      Builder is an in-development IDE that we reported on a few months ago as part of our GUADEC coverage. Builder aims to be an IDE that will focus purely on GNOME applications, with a goal of making it “Dead Simple”. The lead Builder developer Christian Hergert recently reported on his blog that there are now Fedora 21 COPR builds of the Builder master available for use and testing.

    • F21 Alpha, Shellshock, Schedule Docs Update, Flock 2015 Locations, and a Fedora User Committee idea

      Of course, this week’s big news is the release of Fedora 21 Alpha — the first formal test release on the way to an early-December final release. This will be our first release with distinct Cloud, Server, and Workstation products — a first phase of Fedora.next. Read the F21 Alpha release announcement, and download the flavor you’re interested in (or launch the cloud image in EC2).

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 14.10 beta released

        The next version of Ubuntu Linux is set to launch October 23rd. But you can take the first (and last) beta of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn for a spin today.

      • Ubuntu 14.10 final beta released

        The Ubuntu developers have announced the release of the final beta of Ubuntu 14.10 (also known as Utopic Unicorn). This final beta also includes each of the usual Ubuntu spins. So you can check out Lubuntu, Xubuntu and Ubuntu GNOME as well as the main version of Ubuntu. Download links to each version are included below.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Valve Super Sale, Office Reunification, and elementary Reviews

          In today’s newsfeeds the elementary OS beta is getting good reviews. The Register says don’t be disappointed that Ubuntu 14.10 is bring precious few new goodies. Both Bash bugs are now patched. Charles-H. Schulz blogs about reuniting LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice and Valve is giving Linux users 75% off all games.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung Android KitKat 4.4.4.: Sprint Galaxy S5 Update is Leaked; and Android KitKat 4.4.2 Roll Outs for Galaxy S4 and the Note 3

      On the Android 4.4.4 KitKat front, a Sprint Galaxy S5 file has emerged.

  • Android

    • Chrome APK Packager now in Google Play Store

    • Icarus Excel Features 9.7 inch Screen and Android 4.0

      Netherlands based e-reader company Icarus has just revamped their wildly successful 9.7 inch Excel e-reader with Android 4.0. This will allow users to not only have a very large screen display to take notes but also install their own e-reading apps.

    • Report: Google Requires More Google From Manufacturers, Because Android has Evolved and Google Apps are Still King

    • Google tightens its grip on Android manufacturers

      Google products and services have always been one of the most useful things about Android. But until now the company has not had particularly stringent requirements for how they are included in Android devices. Droid Life reports that that is about to change with a new contract Google has provided to Android manufacturers.

    • China’s Xiaomi joins the smartphone health market

    • Hands-on review: Probox2 EX Android 4.4 TV box

      This hands-on review examines the Probox2 EX media streaming box, featuring Android 4.4, a quad-core Cortex-A9 SoC, 4k video, Miracast, and an air-mouse.

      W2Comp began shipping the Android 4.4-based Probox2 EX media streaming mini-PC last month. Compared to the company’s earlier media streaming products, the $150 Probox2 EX uses a faster Amlogic quad-core processor and runs Android 4.4 (“KitKat”). On the wireless side it advances from Bluetooth 2.0 to 4.0, and features dual-band 802.11 b/g/n support that uses 5.8GHz instead of 5GHz as its upper band, resulting in reduced interference, according to W2Comp. (More hardware details appear farther below.)

Giving Away Software to Make It More Valuable

SaaS/Big Data

• OpenStack day two operations tools

  This is the third part in a series of three articles surveying automation projects within OpenStack, explaining what they do, how they do it, and where they stand in development readiness and field usage. Previously, in part one, I covered cloud deployment tools that enable you to install/update OpenStack cloud on bare metal. In part two, I covered workload deployment tools. Today, we’ll look at tools for day two operations.

CMS

• Bitnami: Making it easy and efficient to test server apps on your desktop and in the cloud

  It’s Friday morning and marketing tells you they need a WordPress blog up and running by Monday and they want a theme like this and features like that and, and, and … you’ve not got much time if you plan to have a weekend off so the last thing you’re going to want to do is work with a remote server. If you did you’d be loading themes one after another, testing them with various plugins, and generally beating the application into submission while dealing with the delays inherent in using a machine that’s somewhere out on the Internet. That would mean you’d be waiting just that little bit longer (or quite possibly, a lot longer) to do everything than you’d prefer.

Project Releases

• xfce4-power-manager updated to 1.4.1

  Xfce4-power-manager has now been updated to the latest version on my xfce411 COPR repo.One nice thing about this update for me is that it seems to fix the lid closing actions!

• PSPP 0.8.4 has been released.

  I’m very pleased to announce the release of a new version of GNU PSPP. PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS.

Openness/Sharing

• Valve’s Steam Discovery Update, game development for kids, and more

Churchgoers decrease in Germany due to ‘church tax’

The Catholic Church in Germany has even forbidden those who do not pay their church taxes from receiving communion.

Tory minister Brooks Newmark quits over sex scandal

The married dad-of-five exchanged X-rated pictures with an undercover reporter posing as a young female activist

Mark Reckless is second Tory MP to defect to Ukip in a month

“Today I am leaving the Conservative party and joining Ukip,” Tory MP Mark Reckless announced today in a second shock defection to the Eurosceptic party in recent weeks.

Mr Reckless, the MP for Rochester and Strood, made the announcement that he is quitting the party this afternoon at the Ukip party conference in Doncaster.

Security

• A boatload of weekend security updates

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The cost of action in Iraq

  When parliament voted to invade Iraq in 2003, it was based on what we later found out to be disinformation and deceit. We were misled. The countless thousands who opposed the war were vocal in their opposition – but they were not listened to, they were ignored. And the UK went to war.

• Iraq – Repeating Past Mistakes

  Before we move forward against ISIL in Iraq, we have to learn from our past mistakes, or we will be doomed to repeat them.

• Should the UK fight ISIL in Iraq

• Bombing Islamic State is fueling the violence

  So yes, we need to do something. But that “something” is not more violence and war. Answering violence and war, with more violence and war, is always part of the problem, not part of the solution.

• A Wartime President

  All pretense ended Monday night, when President Barack Obama became Commander-in-Chief at a time of war. He has never been reluctant to kill terrorists with unmanned drones, but now the United States military is bombing ISIS targets inside Syria. The president has authorized strikes by fighter planes, bombers, and Tomahawk missiles, the same weapons brandished by President Bush a decade ago.

• The Aborted Origins Of The First Hunt For Osama Bin Laden

  The author of a new book on the U.S. drone program reveals an early attempt to pilot drones out of Germany, without the German government’s knowledge.

• Drone warfare in Good Kill … and a roundtable interview with writer-director Andrew Niccol and actor Ethan Hawke

• ‘Norway can stop drone war’: UN advisor

  Professor Christof Heyns asked Norway on Thursday to challenge its allies on the US’s use of armed drones which Heyns states violates international law and will, in the long run, make the world become a more dangerous place, reported NTB.
  Heyns, who normally investigates and reports to the UN on extra-judicial and illegal executions, said: “The world listens to the voice of Norway for it is often the voice of reason.”

  The professor thinks Norway should bring the case to a human rights council of the UN and the general assembly.

  The issue of the US’s drone attacks was the subject of a seminar in the Norwegian parliament on Thursday. The debate was raised by spokesperson for foreign affairs, Bård Vegar Solhjell.

• Killing people rarely kills their ideas

  Every vote I cast in Parliament weighs heavily on my mind, especially as, unlike most other MPs, I have no whip telling me what to do – I consider the evidence, reflect on the principles I was elected to stand up for, listen to my constituents in Brighton Pavilion.

• How the Pentagon Exploits ISIS to Kill Surveillance Reform and Re-Occupy Iraq

  As the US, Britain and France are maneuvering to escalate military action in Iraq and Syria against the ‘Islamic State’ in an operation slated to last “years,” authorities are simultaneously calling for new measures to tighten security at home to fend off the danger of jihadists targeting western homelands. Intervention abroad, policymakers are arguing, must be tied to increased domestic surveillance and vigilance. But US and British military experts warn that officials have overlooked the extent to which western policies in the region have not just stoked the rise of IS, but will continue to inflame the current crisis. The consequences could be dire – while governments exploit the turmoil in the Middle East to justify an effective re-invasion of Iraq along with intensified powers of surveillance and control – the end result could well be accelerated regional violence and increasing criminalization of Muslims and activists.

• US’ Anti-ISIS Campaign: Emulating the ‘Success’ in Somalia and Yemen?

  US President Barack Obama pointed to “successful” campaigns in Yemen and Somalia as models for his strategy to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). But in both countries, US military action has only worked to embolden extremist groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al-Shabaab.

• US government tweets and deletes photos of dead jihadists

  A US government Twitter account tasked with countering jihadist propaganda triumphantly posted pictures of dead Islamic State fighters only to delete them a short while later.

  The US State Department runs a number of social media accounts to push back against Isil and al-Qaeda and convince young Muslims not to enslist with the jihadists.

  The “Think Again Turn Away” Twitter account posted pictures of the corpses of four jihadist fighters reportedly killed in US air strikes in an apparent warning to those thinking of taking up arms.

• Why Are We Sending Soldiers Trained for War to Respond to the Ebola Crisis?

  The use of the US military in this operation should raise red flags for the American public as well. After all, if the military truly is the governmental institution best equipped to handle this outbreak, it speaks worlds about the neglect of civilian programs at home as well as abroad.

• US says airstrikes targeted ISIL-run oil refineries

• Australia, the United States, the Islamic State and oil

  The current commentary about Australia’s latest Middle East military adventure ignores the obvious, says Dr Geoff Davies — oil and its impact on U.S. foreign policy.

• FP’s Situation Report: Islamic State oil installations are targeted; France weighs joining the fight in Syria; Ebola takes center stage at U.N.; and a bit more.

• U.S.-Led Strikes Target ISIS Oil Operations in Syria

  U.S.-led warplanes are bombarding oil-producing facilities in eastern Syria for a second day in a row in a bid to cut off key revenue from Islamic State militants. According to U.S. Central Command, the refineries net about $2 million per day. On Thursday, the Pentagon rejected accounts that up to 24 civilians have been killed by U.S.-led strikes in Syria, saying there are no “credible” reports of civilian deaths. U.S. planes are also continuing to bomb Iraq with at least 11 airstrikes on Thursday. Pentagon spokesperson Rear Admiral John Kirby acknowledged the Islamic State remains strong.

• Lord Alton on Government call for military action against ISIS

  It is hard to imagine that a campaign of aerial bombardment in Syria will make that dire situation any better.

• Drone crashes in Shabwa

  A drone crashed into a mountain in Shabwa governorate, southeast of Sana’a, on Tuesday morning, eyewitnesses told the Yemen Times.

• US pulls some embassy staffers from Yemen

• US orders some of its diplomats out of Yemen

• US gives ‘strong support’ to Yemen government despite Shia rebel uprising

  Administration officials say there has been has no dropoff in backing for Hadi, days after Shia minorities, who have endured a brutal crackdown, took hold of government and military installations in the capital of Sana’a. Barack Obama’s counter-terrorism chief, a critical manager of the relationship with Yemen, passed along the US president’s “strong support” for Hadi in a phone call to him earlier this week.

• How TV dupes our public

  IF today, with remote in hand, you randomly flip through channels on your TV, or browse through nearly two dozen online newspapers, you will see video clips or photos of Pakistan Air Force jets pounding targets in North Waziristan, artillery firing into the mountains, or, perhaps, some other celebration of Operation Zarb-i-Azb. But hang on! You rub your eyes. Our jets bombing Islamic fighters within the territory of this Islamic republic?

• Q&A with journalist John Pilger: ‘What the US did to Cambodia was an epic crime’

  Since his early days as a correspondent covering the wars in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, documentary filmmaker and journalist John Pilger has been an ardent critic of Western foreign policy. Following in the footsteps of Martha Gellhorn, Pilger set out to cover the Vietnam War from the perspective of those most affected by it – the Vietnamese people and US draftees. In 1979, he filmed Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, which depicted the humanitarian catastrophe following the ousting of the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh. He would go on to make three more films about Cambodia and become an outspoken critic of the United States’ intervention in the country and the West’s support of Pol Pot.

• ISIS: Their barbarism… and ours

  The incessant drumbeat of war, accompanied by the harsh propaganda of “barbarism” and “brutality” directed at individuals in Syria and Iraq, is as wearily familiar as that used to demonize the German “Hun” a century ago and dozens of other “enemies” in the interim. The PR industry, which is the landing pad for many politicos from the Conservatives to the NDP, is having a field day, from allegations that “Islamic militants” are murdering seniors in hospital rooms (perhaps an update of the Hill & Knowlton-created falsehood that Iraqis ripped babies from incubators after the 1991 invasion of Kuwait) to claims that a group with no air force, weapons of mass destruction, overseas military bases, aircraft carriers, and hundreds of billions in other war infrastructure presents the greatest threat known to our generation.

• US drone strikes like death sentences, worse than ISA, says Dr M

• ISA not nearly as bad as killing people with drones, says Dr M

  Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad today shrugged off criticism over his use of the now-defunct Internal Security Act (ISA), saying it does not compare to the atrocities committed by the United States in the use of unmanned drones to kill suspected terrorists.

• Don’t Reinvent the Wheel in Syria and Iraq

  Hersh further explains the clandestine unit masqueraded as “a civilian aerial photography operation.” He is referring, of course, to the units that ultimately found Pablo Escobar, in an age predating drones. Manhunting is a core competency of the United States, and the last thirteen years have seen no shortage of attempts to not only reinvent the wheel but form an octagon for no logical reason.

• Officials: US drone kills 10 in northwest Pakistan

  A suspected U.S. drone fired four missiles at a vehicle carrying Uzbek and local militants in the country’s northwestern tribal region near the Afghan border on Wednesday, killing 10 of them, two Pakistani intelligence officials said.

• Echoes of Bush in Obama’s U.N. speech

  President Barack Obama’s blunt words on Islamic terrorism marked a striking shift for his annual address to United Nations, as he moved away from the language of accommodation to rhetoric reminiscent of predecessor President George W. Bush.

• US drones kill eight militants in N. Waziristan

  US drones on Wednesday fired missiles at a compound and vehicle and killed at least eight militants in a restive tribal area bordering Afghanistan, officials said.

• ‘Brainwashed’ British fighter reportedly killed by US drone strike in Syria

  A British teenager fighting with Islamist militia Al-Nusra Front in Syria has reportedly been killed in US airstrikes, with his mother finding only finding out via social media.

• 9 Arrested in Overnight U.K. Terror Raids As Strikes Against ISIS Continue

• British Police Arrest 9 in Antiterror Sweep

  A day after Prime Minister David Cameron pledged British support for the American-led air campaign in Iraq, the counterterrorism police in Britain rounded up nine men suspected of having links to a banned Islamist group and searched 18 buildings across the capital and in the English Midlands.

• As U.S. Bombs Fall, Islamic State’s British Hostage Warns of Another Vietnam

  In the propaganda video, Cantlie is again seated at a table wearing an orange jumpsuit, in a reference to the outfits worn by Muslim prisoners at U.S. detention centers at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He reads from a prepared script, explaining how the United States’ involvement in the Syrian conflict will mirror its misadventures in Vietnam.

• Islamic State posts video showing British hostage John Cantlie

  Man identified as British journalist criticises Obama preparations for US-led attacks on militant group in five-minute clip

• Blasts From The Past

  So, the other day, he hipped me to some recently declassified CIA material, specifically National Intelligence Estimates dated April 17, 1963 and titled “Prospects In South Vietnam.” These concerned, among other things, the CIA’s assessment of the relative strength of the Viet Cong in our adopted Indochinese client state.

• Letter: Signs of imminent war in Ukraine

  Our CIA and German BND triggered a coup in Kiev because independent Ukraine elected Victor Yanukovich president of Ukraine. He is the legal Ukrainian president. When the BND took over the government in Kiev, NATO and the European Union offered membership to Ukraine and Russia, detached Crimea and annexed it into Russian rule for its strategic importance, as well as its economic importance.

• FBI report: Mass shootings increasing fast

  The number of shootings in which a gunman wounds or kills multiple people has increased dramatically in recent years, with the majority of attacks in the past decade occurring at a business or a school, according to an FBI report released Wednesday.

• The Secret Service’s Open-Door Policy

  In the first case, federal prosecutors said Omar Gonzalez, 42, jumped the White House fence and raced into the front door before he was apprehended. He was carrying a small pocket knife and, apparently a message for the president about global warming. Later, authorities said they found two hatchets, a machete and 800 rounds of ammunition in his car.

• French, U.S. planes strike ISIL; Britain to join coalition

  The strikes killed 14 fighters and at least five civilians, said Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the Syrian conflict.

• America’s wartime president

  Quick: Which U.S. president has authorized wars of various kinds in seven Muslim countries?

  If you guessed Barack Hussein Obama, you are correct.

• Syria Strike Protesters Arrested at White House

  About two dozen anti-war activists rallied near the White House Tuesday against U.S. airstrikes in Syria, which began Monday.

  Five of the mostly gray-haired protesters were arrested for blocking a White House gate after insisting they meet with President Barack Obama or a senior official to discuss their concerns.

• As US Bombs ISIS in Syria, Even Some Pro-War Pundits Express Skepticism

  Here we go again, I thought. This is how modern America goes to war. When superpower Goliath is challenged by sudden savagery, it has no choice but to respond with brute force. Or so we are told. Otherwise, America would no longer be a convincing Goliath. When war bells clang, politicians of every stripe find it very difficult to resist, lest they look weak or unpatriotic. And the American people, as usual, rally around the flag, as they always do when the country seems threatened. Citizens and members of the uniformed military are tired of war, but both in a sense are prisoners of the media-hyped hysteria that is the usual political reflex. Shoot first, ask questions later.

• In Post-Qaddafi Libya, It’s Stay Silent or Die

  On Sept. 19, Benghazi witnessed a string of assassinations that seemed to be coordinated. The assassins targeted military and security personnel as well as civilians. Among those killed were two teenage civil society activists, Sami al-Kawafi and Tawfik Bensaud. They were 17 and 18 years old respectively. Their murders have capped off more than two years of extremist attacks on peace activists and journalists, killings that are endangering any remaining freedoms Libyans still have.

• Islamic fighters advance in Syria despite US strikes

  US and coalition planes pounded Islamic State positions in Syria again on Wednesday, but the strikes did not halt the fighters’ advance in a Kurdish area where fleeing refugees told of villages burnt and captives beheaded.

• Syrians say 8 to 24 civilians killed in US airstrikes

  Hours after the last airstrike, fighters with the group gathered on Tuesday in public areas of the city where the corpses of those executed by Islamic State are put on display. They told residents that Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which took part in the airstrikes, were attacking them, resident Abu Muhammad said. The militants threatened the Arab countries with car bombings in retaliation for cooperating with the West, he said.

• Ron Paul: Congress Votes For More War In The Middle East

• The big question on ISIS: Does Obama really know what he’s getting into?

  Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., also warns about jumping head-first into funding Syria’s rebels.

• War On Terror II: Upping The Ante

  With congressional authorization in his back pocket, U.S. president Barack Obama stepped up American military aggression against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) this week.

• US drone strike kills as many as 10 in Pakistan

  While AP’s source claimed ten were killed in the strike, Reuters cited “intelligence officials” who said five to eight militants perished in the blast.According to AFP, eight suspected fighters died.

• Foreign Ministry slams US drone strike on militants

• Dawn reveals scope of bombardments

  Many government supporters were worried about where events might lead because some of the countries in the coalition, like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have called for Assad to step down or actively supported his enemies with money and arms.

• The Islamic State and Obama’s Diabolical “Hidden Agenda”: Iraq, Syria and “Superpower Prerogatives”

  Obama’s intention to bring his air war against IS to Syria may result in a serious violation of international law. The Damascus government has said it will allow the U.S. to act but Washington must first ask permission to bomb its territory. The White House indicated it has no desire to ask for authorization. In addition, the Russian government, which supports and supplies arms to both Iran and Syria, pointed out that any such strike against Syria would need backing from the UN Security Council. Otherwise, it “would constitute an act of aggression.”

• The audacity of air strikes and secret deals: just making Isis grow stronger?

  The insurgency in Iraq, Syria and beyond is a fight for natural resources as much as political control. Why are we so busy giving leverage to terrorists?

• ‘Private sector’ mobilization to fight IS launched in NY

  CEP lists among its goals the compilation of the world’s most exhaustive database on extremist groups and their networks, and places unmasking the funding sources for IS high on its list of immediate priorities.

• Help Us Crowd-Fund SecureDrop For These Four Independent Media Organizations

  We are excited to announce the first four recipients of our next crowd-funding campaign, all of whom may now start receiving donations intended to cover the costs of installing SecureDrop, our open-source whistleblower submission system. The first round includes BalkanLeaks, the Government Accountability Project, Cryptome and Firedoglake.

• UK warned to increase transparency of armed UAV operations

  Failure of the British government to inform Parliament of its intention to redeploy armed unmanned air vehicles outside recognised warzones may result in legal action, a charity and law firm have warned.

  Following a notification by the UK’s minister of state for the armed forces, Mark Francois, in July that claimed it was not necessary for Parliament to approve UAV strikes, charity Reprieve and law firm Deighton Pierce Glynn notified the government that action will be taken if it is not clear on where armed UAVs are being used.

• War on Terror: What’s Old Is New Again [pro-war ravings]

• Germany Decides Not To Arm Syrian Rebels

  As we just heard, so far there is no coalition behind U.S. airstrikes against ISIS in Syria. There is more support, however, for operations in northern Iraq, where France and Germany are actively involved. Peter Wittig is German Ambassador to the U.S. I spoke with him earlier this week and asked him to describe Germany’s current strategy against ISIS.

• Arming ‘Moderate’ Syrian Rebels Is Questionable

  Heeding the call to do something about ISIL, Congress passed and Barack Obama signed a measure approving weapons and training for “moderate” Syrian rebels. These moderates are ostensibly fighting against the new Islamic upstarts but are also sworn to overthrow Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. Obama has repeatedly assured Americans that no boots would be on the ground in Syria (or Iraq, for that matter), sending out National Security Advisor Susan Rice to state, “This program will be hosted outside of Syria in partnership with neighboring countries.” Rice added the process would take “many months,” which the administration hopes will be enough time to sort out all of the various regional players.

• ANSWER statement against the U.S. bombing of Syria

  We in the ANSWER Coalition oppose this war and are calling for demonstrations to oppose the bombing of Syria and Iraq from September 23 through September 28. This war, like the earlier ones, is being sold on the basis of misinformation and fear. The United States is a major part of the problem and cannot be the solution to the current crisis in Syria and Iraq.

• US military has large force arrayed across Mideast

  Having expanded its air war against Islamic State jihadists into Syria, the US military can draw on a vast arsenal of aircraft, troops and hardware across the Middle East.

  Here are the basic facts on the American military presence in the region and the strikes carried out so far, according to the Pentagon and defense analysts:

• American Amnesia: Why the GOP Leads on National Security

  If the latest polls are accurate, most voters believe that Republican politicians deserve greater trust on matters of national security. At a moment when Americans feel threatened by rising terrorist movements and authoritarian regimes, that finding is politically salient—and proves that amnesia is the most durable affliction of our democracy.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Murray CEO predicts doom for coal, says own company will survive

  Robert Murray, CEO of Ohio-based Murray Energy, kicked off a gathering of coal interests Monday presenting a gloomy picture of an industry in irreversible decline, a political administration out to get him, and a patient on an operating table waiting for electricity that’s bound to be cut off due to impending coal plant retirements.

• Environmentalism Is Dead

  How America abandoned its role as leader of the fight to save the planet — and killed a movement.

• Nightingales v 5,000 new homes: the battle over the woods of Lodge Hill

  The controversial plans have been billed as a battle between a small brown bird and homes for 11,000 local people but environmental groups say what is really at stake is the robustness of the entire conservation regime: this is the biggest attempt to build on an SSSI in England since the wildlife protection legislation of 1981.

• ‘Carbon Pricing’ Emerges As UN Climate Summit Darling

  The market-based mechanism received the endorsement of the U.N. Secretary-General and World Bank president at Tuesday’s gathering in New York.

• Ban hails ‘bold’ announcements on tackling climate change as historic UN summit closes

• Climate Summit: ‘All hands on deck’ declares Ban, calling for leadership, concrete action

  23 September 2014 – We are not here to talk, we are here to make history, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today told world leaders at an “unprecedented and important gathering” that aims to raise ambition, mobilize resources, and generate action towards a universal climate deal.

Finance

• Inside the New York Fed: Secret Recordings and a Culture Clash

  Barely a year removed from the devastation of the 2008 financial crisis, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York faced a crossroads. Congress had set its sights on reform. The biggest banks in the nation had shown that their failure could threaten the entire financial system. Lawmakers wanted new safeguards.

• Housing, Fair Wages, Water, Food, Schools — Ya’ Gotta Bomb them First!

  Don’t forget that much of this murder hardware is designed and conjured up by the best and brightest at our Western colleges. Lawyers abound in this industry. Unions love good Boeing missile making jobs. This is the legacy of killing, empire, a black president who isn’t and is, fabricated by the same shit schools and teachers who also advance murder, economic hits or direct hits with drones and napalm or guided bunker busters.

• Tax fraud’s such a drone on economy

  The Buenos Aires province’s tax agency says it has used drones to identify around 200 mansions and 100 swimming pools that have not been declared by their owners.

• Should The Cuban Trade Embargo Be Scrapped?

  It seems like ages ago that Americans spent 13 days wondering if we were on the brink of nuclear war as the Soviet Union and Cuban government engaged the Kennedy Administration in the tumultuous Cuban Missile Crisis. Or even longer ago when American CIA agents stormed the shores of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in a failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government. Cuba’s allegiance to the Soviets and their admiration for communism encouraged the US to go on the defense and place a trade embargo and severed diplomatic relations with our neighbors 90 miles to the south.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Why Jeff Bezos Bought the Washington Pos

  And now Mr. Amazon owns a newspaper that helps shape the debate on virtually every topic of public importance—including those that affect his grand ambitions. Bezos didn’t buy a newspaper. He bought power.

• Conflict Of Interest: George Will Again Uses His Column To Prop Up A Koch-Backed Candidate

  Weeks after appearing at a VIP dinner for the Koch brothers-backed political group Americans for Prosperity (AFP), George Will devoted his Washington Post column to promoting one of the Kochs’ favored political candidates without disclosing the conflict of interest.

Censorship

• MEAA says national security law an outrageous attack on press freedom in Australia

  The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA), the union and industry advocate for Australia’s journalists, has described the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill No 1 which been passed by the parliament an outrageous attack on press freedom in Australia.

• Watchdog: Kremlin Internet Plans Could Endanger Free Speech

  Russian proposals on protecting Internet users against threats from the West could be a Kremlin ploy to crack down on critical voices inside Russia, a representative of Europe’s main rights and democracy watchdog said.

Privacy

• German tourist banned from Yellowstone Park after crashing drone into lake

• German man banned from Yellowstone in drone crash

  A German citizen who crashed a drone into a lake in Yellowstone National Park this summer has been banned from the park for a year and was ordered to pay $1,600 in fines and restitution.

• The FAA’s slow move to regulate domestic drones

• If you’re on a phone in DC, someone could be listening

  A Nevada-based security technology company says it has discovered proof of as many as 15 cellphone interception devices secretly operating in the nation’s capital, capable of illicitly identifying the movements of prominent people, recording audio from mobile phones, listening to calls and reading email.

• FAA expected to approve drones for moviemaking

• Drone Exemptions for Hollywood Pave the Way for Widespread Use

• FAA gives drone exemption to Hollywood production firms

• FAA Approves Drone Use For Hollywood Productions, Sets Guidelines – Update

• Hollywood opens doors for legal drone use

  The commercial use of drones in American skies took a leap forward on Thursday with the help of Hollywood. The US Federal Aviation Administration, responding to applications from seven filmmaking companies and pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America, said six of those companies could use camera-equipped drones on certain movie and television sets. Until now, the FAA had not permitted commercial drone use except for extremely limited circumstances in wilderness areas of Alaska.

• FBI Director Comey Gives Apple and Google a Tongue-Lashing

  FBI Director James Comey on Thursday strongly criticized Apple and Google for hardening information stored in smartphones by encrypting data, making it inaccessible to law enforcement even with a court order.

Civil Rights

• ‘Maybe we missed something’: Warren Commission insider publicly concedes that JFK assassination was likely a conspiracy

  Describing someone as a “conspiracy theorist” is usually meant as an insult, suggesting tin-foil hats and babbling rants on late-night radio talk shows. But when it comes to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, the list of important, seemingly credible public figures who count themselves as conspiracy theorists is long and impressive.

  Fifty years ago this coming week, the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the panel led by Chief Justice Earl Warren and better known as the Warren Commission, published an 888-page final report that identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole gunman in Dealey Plaza and said there was no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic.

• Walmart grand jury continues its work 3rd day

  Demonstrations continued in Greene County Tuesday as a grand jury spent a second day deciding whether Officer Sean Williams and Sgt. David Darkow will face charges for shooting and killing John Crawford III when they said he would not drop a BB gun at a Beavercreek Walmart.

• Australia: Questions over police killing of young Muslim “terrorist”

  The establishment media has seized on the killing to whip up an atmosphere of suspicion and fear over further “lone wolf” terrorist attacks, as well as outright anti-Muslim xenophobia, based on gross distortion, unsubstantiated speculation and outright fabrication. The lack of any regard for elementary journalistic standards was highlighted by the publication in the Fairfax press yesterday of a photo, allegedly of a well-dressed version of Haider, alongside an image from Haider’s Facebook page, showing him in military camouflage, wearing a balaclava and holding an Islamist flag. In fact, the well-dressed young man was not Haider, but another 18-year-old who told the media last night that he now fears going out in public.

• Own Your Own Devices You Will, Under Rep. Farenthold’s YODA Bill

  A bill introduced Sept. 18 would make clear that consumers actually owned the electronic devices, and any accompanying software on that device, that they purchased, according to sponsor Rep. Blake Farenthold’s (R-Texas).

  The You Own Devices Act (H.R. 5586) would amend the Copyright Act “to provide that the first sale doctrine applies to any computer program that enables a machine or other product to operate.”

• Eric Holder Legacy: From Fast And Furious To Ferguson, A Look Back At The US Attorney General’s Tenure

• Eric Holder was the worst Attorney General for the press in a generation. We deserve better.

  Attorney General Eric Holder announced he would resign yesterday, after serving as the nation’s top law enforcement official since President Obama came into office in 2009. Holder will leave behind a complex and hotly debated legacy at the Justice Department on many issues, but one thing is clear: he was the worst Attorney General on press freedom issues in a generation, possibly since Richard Nixon’s John Mitchell pioneered the subpoenaing of reporters and attempted to censor the Pentagon Papers.

• AP Slams Obama on Press Freedom

• Eric Holder’s Legacy: Bold on Equality, Less So on Civil Liberties

  From gay rights to voter-ID laws, this attorney general became the man to fight the way the president couldn’t. Yet his liberal voice was too often silenced on War on Terror issues.

• Obama Administration Learns: If You Redefine Every Word In The Dictionary, You Can Get Away With Just About Anything

  But, it goes beyond that. As Trevor Timm highlights over at The Guardian, pretty much the entire drone bombing (drones, by the way, are also apparently “authorized” by the AUMF) of Syria involves the administration conveniently redefining basic English to suit its purposes.

• Egypt court delays Mubarak murder retrial verdict

  Egyptian security forces stepped up security on Saturday ahead of the verdict in the murder trial of former president Hosni Mubarak and top security officials.

• The Next Attorney General Should Enforce the Rule of Law, Protect Constitutional Rights and Investigate Abuse of Power

  Eric Holder’s tenure as attorney general will be remembered for the failure to prosecute any leading bankers who were responsible for the collapse of the economy. While the SEC negotiated large fines, the DOJ prosecuted none of those who were guilty of crimes that robbed the wealth of tens of millions of Americans. The failure to prosecute bankers was one example of many where corporate power dominated the DOJ on finance, environmental, labor and other issues. This should have been an era of aggressive enforcement of corporate crime, instead corporate criminals were rarely investigated.

• A departing Obama friend leaves mixed legal legacy

  It wasn’t difficult for Barack Obama and Eric Holder to be in the same orbit. Both were sons of immigrants, Columbia Ivy Leaguers, basketball fans and prominent African-American political figures.

• Eric Holder’s Complex Legacy: Voting Rights Advocate, Enemy of Press Freedom, Friend of Wall Street

  …failed to prosecute any Bush administration officials for torture…

• CIA Boss Lies About His Earlier Lie, Proved Wrong By Earlier CIA Statements

  Senator Ron Wyden points our attention to a declaration from Neal Higgins, director of the CIA’s “Office of Congressional Affairs” in a FOIA lawsuit brought by the ACLU demanding the CIA release the Senate Intelligence Committee’s terror report. In that declaration, Higgins insists that the works on those computers are not the CIA’s and the CIA cannot access them, contradicting the new story from Brennan’s latest spin attempt. In fact, Higgins confirms Feinstein’s claim that there was a clear agreement between the Senate and the CIA concerning these computers.

• Pakistani citizen challenges UK’s ‘act of state’ stance in Iraq torture case

  MoD and Foreign Office claim UK-US relations would be harmed if high court allows Yunus Rahmatullah’s case to go ahead

• Scottish pro-Palestine protesters occupy arms factory

  In a press release, the Glasgow Palestine Action Network (GPAN) said it decided to take action in protest against “the UK economy’s ever growing military industrial cooperation with governments that flout international law.”

• One whistleblower gets $30m in the bank, but others count the personal cost

  The SEC this week promised an overseas whistleblower $30m – but others who have uncovered wrongdoing haven’t been so lucky

• Pablo Neruda: A Poet Possibly Poisoned By A CIA Agent Working For Pinochet

  Investigative reporter and author Francisco Marín has written extensively about the case, with his research being published in a 2012 book titled “El Doble Asesinato de Neruda” (“The Double Murder of Neruda”). Based on extensive testimony offered by Araya, forensic evidence, and the circumstances surrounding the upholding of the official version despite the dissonance, Marín has managed to present a compelling case that the poet had indeed been murdered by the dictatorship.

• What drives Latino children to El Norte?

  Did the public remember nothing about the civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua? Of the dictatorships the U.S. backed? The Honduran coup blessed by Saint Obama? The U.S. invasion of Panama? Didn’t they have a clue where their 60 cents-a-pound bananas came from and at what cost? Apparently not.

• Rudy Giuliani to defend Activision in Manuel Noriega lawsuit

• Call of Duty maker Activision moves to dismiss former dictator Manuel Noriega’s “absurd lawsuit”

• Giuliani Slams Noriega’s ‘Absurd’ Lawsuit

• Activision: Noriega’s ‘Call Of Duty’ Lawsuit ‘Absurd,’ Giuliani Named Co-Counsel

• Ex-dictator Manuel Noriega says video game made him look like bad guy

  Activision said its portrayal of Noriega, in which the former drug peddler and CIA operative aids the game’s main villain during the Cold War, is protected under free speech laws. “Call of Duty” games have also portrayed historical characters such as President John F. Kennedy and Fidel Castro, as well as semi-historical characters such as Nazi zombies.

• Madonsela reveals ‘intelligence report’ on her activities

  PUBLIC Protector Thuli Madonsela on Monday fielded hostile questions from members of public accounts committees in the provinces and municipalities, prompting her to reveal for the first time that attacks on her office had assumed a “bizarre” level, including the emergence of a controversial intelligence report claiming to provide evidence that she was a spy for the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

  [...]

  Deputy Defence Minister Kebby Maphatsoe recently accused Ms Madonsela of being a CIA spy after she wrote a letter to President Jacob Zuma warning that Mr Zuma had not sufficiently responded to her findings in a report on Nkandla. Mr Maphatsoe later withdrew the allegations.

• Yes, I’ve voted, in my own time and place

  Mind you, their sacrifices had been made to preserve a political system free from the nonsense which is the recent exercise in democracy. They might have given an indulgent chuckle when told there was a party advocating liberalisation of marijuana use, but what would they have made of this Dotcom stuff?

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Health Experts Issue Call To Prevent ICANN’s Commercialization Of New .health Domain Leading To Exclusive Control Of Online Health Information

  Last month, we wrote about a troubling decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to give control over the new .pharmacy domain to big pharma — thus allowing it to lock out sites around the world that threaten its generous profit margins.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Awful Spanish Copyright Law May Be Stalled Waiting For EU Court Ruling On Plans To Change Spain’s Copyright Levy System

    Techdirt has written about Spain’s new copyright law a couple of times. There, we concentrated on the “Google tax” that threatens the digital commons and open access in that country. But alongside this extremely foolish idea, there was another good one: getting rid of the anachronistic levy on recording devices that was supposed to “compensate” for private copying (as if any such compensation were needed), and paying collecting societies directly out of Spain’s state budget. Needless to say, it is such a good idea that the collecting societies hate it, and have appealed against the new system.