• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

January 2015 Issue of Linux Journal: Security

The Security issue of Linux Journal always makes me feel a little guilty. It turns out that although I have a fairly wide set of technology skills, I’m not the person you want in charge of securing your network or your systems. By default, Linux is designed with a moderate amount of security in mind. For that, I am incredibly grateful. If you struggle with maintaining security in your environment, this issue hopefully will encourage and educate as opposed to making you feel guilty. My goal this year is to learn and be encouraged by the Security issue, not just feel bad.

January 2015 Video Preview

Guilt by association: Linux Australia members slam others over Williams’ nomination

At least two members of Linux Australia have criticised the attitude of members who have raised questions about an iTWire staff member who attempted to contest the organisation’s elections.

Both Noel Butler and Russell Coker took a diametrically opposite position to that of others following the nomination for treasurer by David M. Williams, a columnist for iTWire in the past and an infrequent contributor for the last two or three years.

A FOSS Wish List for 2015

FOSS’ Shining Moments of 2014

Well we’re into the last few days of 2014 here in the Linux blogosphere, and fortunately the tequila supplies down at the Broken Windows Lounge continue to hold strong.

The weather outside may be frightful, but the refreshments — like the software — remain nothing short of delightful.

It didn’t take long for bloggers to slip into a sentimental mood as they reminisced about the waning year, and a heartening post from Jim Zemlin over at Linux.com only helped things along.

“2014 was a tipping point where companies decided there was too much software to write for any one company to do it by themselves,” Zemlin wrote. “They are shedding commodity software R&D by investing in ‘external R&D’ with open source.

“Average” Users

Users of GNU/Linux don’t even need to read the GPL to be legal and can probably forget about malware and possibly even firewalls in their homes. They can leave that to the router if at all. The average user doesn’t have to install much software at all as most desktop distros include a web browser that people want to use, multimedia software and an office productivity suite like LibreOffice.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Significant Performance Improvements For RadeonSI LLVM With New Patches

    Tom has landed some measurable RadeonSI LLVM performance improvements to his LLVM branch that provided important code generation features for Southern Islands GPUs and newer (Radeon HD 7000 series and newer). The important code generation features now implemented in his branched AMDGPU LLVM back-end are machine scheduling and sub-reg liveness support. With the current machine scheduler, the schedule model is not yet completed and could be improved further, according to Tom, but the results are already positive.

  • AMD Catalyst Linux OpenGL Driver Now Faster Than Catalyst Windows Driver In Some Tests

    Earlier this week I showed benchmarks of AMD’s incredible year for their open-source Linux driver and how the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver moved closer to performance parity with Catalyst. One of the lingering questions though is how does the Catalyst 14.12 Omega Linux driver from December compare to the latest Catalyst Windows driver? Here’s some benchmarks looking at the latest open and closed-source drivers on Linux compared to the latest Catalyst Windows release.

    It’s been a while since last delivering a Windows vs. Linux Catalyst comparison at Phoronix, but found the time to be right for going along with our year-end recaps and performance reviews. Earlier this week I also posted the Intel Windows vs. Linux OpenGL performance comparison. The same Core i7 4790K Haswell system was used with this AMD Linux vs. Windows benchmarking. As shared in that Intel article, Windows 8 was being very unstable on this particular system so for all of the testing I had to revert to running Windows 7 rather than Windows 8.1.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to set up a cross-platform backup server on Linux with BackupPC

  • How To Install Darktable 1.6.1 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install CopyQ 2.4.3 On Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install OwnCloud 7.0.4 On Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Remarkable 0.975 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Debian Jessie, Debian Wheezy And Derivatives

  • Install MODX on a Debian 7 VPS

  • 3 Ways To Create A Lightweight And Persistent Xubuntu Linux USB Drive

  • How To Install Kernel 3.19 RC2 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivatives

• Games

  • Guess The Next Linux Port From Feral Interactive, And Win A Copy

  • Star Traders: 4X Empires & Heroes Of Steel RPG To Gain Linux Versions This Year

    The developer of both ‘Heroes of Steel RPG’ and ‘Star Traders: 4X Empires’ has confirmed Linux ports will happen for both games this year.

  • Braveland Wizard, The Second Braveland Strategy Game Now On Linux, Has Issues

    Braveland Wizard is the sequel to the first Braveland that our Samsai took a look at last year. The first game had a lot of positive reviews, and it seems the second is doing well too.

  • Regeria Hope Is Like Phoenix Wright With Female Leads

    Golden Game Barn has released the first episode of its courtroom drama visual novel Regeria Hope for free on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • digiKam Recipes 4.3.1 Released

    I ring in the new year with a digiKam Recipes update. This version features two new recipes: Remove Keywords from Photos and Add Web Interface to digiKam with digiKamWebUi. In addition to that, the updated and expanded Deal with Bugs in digiKam recipe now explains how to generate backtraces.

  • Retiring Plasma NN 0.9.0.x

  • Krita Receives Artist Choice Award from ImagineFX

    Make sure to check out the January 2015 issue of ImagineFX where Krita receives the Artist Choice award! That’s appreciation with a vengeance! ImagineFX is the #1 resource for concept artists and illustrators in the entertainment industry. It is a great resource if you are looking to level up your art skills.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME Software, GNOME’s App Store, Is Drawing Some Fresh Criticism

    Shouldn’t the GNOME Software “app store” include non-GUI (CLI) packages? That’s one of the questions being asked yet again by users.

    Starting in December and continuing into January are various Fedora development threads of users questioning various GNOME motives with their GNOME Software program. In particular, right now, the GNOME Software application center doesn’t like CLI-only packages for installation but only those with a GUI. Additionally, GNOME Software is limited in showing packages for non-GNOME desktop environments unless certain parameters are set.

  • Introducing GNOME MultiWriter

    I spent last night writing a GNOME application to duplicate a ton of USB devices. I looked at mdcp, Clonezilla and also just writing something loopy in bash, but I need something simple my dad could use for a couple of hours a week without help.

  • GNOME MultiWriter: Easy Duplication Of Many USB Devices

    Richard Hughes’ latest announcement isn’t of another open-source hardware project but rather a new GNOME software application.

Distributions

• Happy New Year & Browser and OS stats for 2014

  LQ ISO recently surpassed 55,000,000 Linux downloads

• New Releases

  • 4MRescueKit

    4MRescueKit provides its users with software for antivirus protection, data backup, disk partitioning, and data recovery. It is distributed in the form of a multiboot CD, which includes four (extremely small) operating systems. Each of the systems tries to follow the UNIX philosophy (Small is beautiful. Make each program do one thing well).

• Ballnux/SUSE

  • The Perfect Desktop – OpenSUSE 13.2 (GNOME)

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Work On Improving Glibc Math Performance

    Siddhesh pushed into glibc-2.18 upstream performance improvements of about eight times for the slowest path of the pow function inside glibc. Other functions received significant performance improvements too thanks to improving the multi-precision code-path.

  • Improving math performance in glibc

    Mathematical function implementations usually have to trade off between speed of computation and the accuracy of the result. This is especially true for transcendentals (i.e. the exponential and trigonometric functions), where results often have to be computed to a fairly large precision to get last bit accuracy in a result that is to be stored in an IEEE-754 double variable.

  • Fedora

    • Resolving my slow booting in Fedora 21

    • Let’s Plan Events in EMEA!

      At EMEA FAD in Leverkusen, we started planning events and activities in EMEA for the fiscal year 2016 (starts on March 1, 2015). Right after that, I asked others, who couldn’t attend the FAD, to provide their input. Today, I put it all together on a new wiki page that should help us organize events where we want to promote Fedora in the next year.

• Debian Family

  • My Debian Activities in December 2014

  • UEFI Debian installer work for Jessie, part 3

    If you have appropriate (U)EFI hardware, please try this image and let me know how you get on, via the debian-cd and debian-boot mailing lists.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu-Powered Meizu Smartphone Might Launch This Month

        Much like Xiaomi, Meizu has had a great 2014. The company has launched several great devices which are very affordable at the same time, which let this China-based smartphone manufacturer to sell tons of units. The company has launched not one, but two flagship handsets this year, the Meizu MX4 (September) and MX4 Pro (November). The latest handset this company has launched is the M1 Note handset, or the Blue Note, as it’s called in China. This device was launched quite recently actually and surprised many people by what it has to offer. This is a rather powerful mid-high end handset which costs only 1,999 Yuan (16GB version) in China, which is about $322.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • All Of Samsung’s 2015 Smart TVs To Be Powered By Tizen

      Samsung Electronics announced today, one week prior to the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, that all of their Smart TVs this year will be powered by the Linux-based Tizen operating system.

  • Android

    • Amazon now has 33 paid Android apps available for free

      If the 40 free applications that Amazon gave away last week wasn’t enough to satiate your hunger for new apps, the company is back today with even more goodies for your Android device.

      Amazon is now offering 33 paid Android apps for free as part of its latest Free App of the Day Bundle. There are games and utilities packed inside of the bundle, including big names like Monopoly, République, Thomas Was Alone, Lyne, and Angry Birds Star Wars.

    • OnePlus One gets official Android 5.0 Lollipop alpha ROM

      OnePlus has been quietly developing its own Android 5.0 Lollipop based ROM for the OnePlus One. Following the controversy with Cyanogen licensing in India, the company had announced that it will be providing an early build to customers, which will replace the Cyanogen OS on their devices.

    • 16 Essential Apps For Your New Android And iPhone 6

      So you’ve unwrapped, unboxed and cuddled your new smartphone to death. Candy Crush? Check. Instagram? Check. Staring at the screen wide-eyed and full of excitement but have no idea what to do next? Check.

    • How To Migrate From iPhone iOS to Android Without Losing Your Files

    • Verizon Announces Android 4.4.4 KitKat Update is Now Available for Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 10.1

      Android 4.4.4 KitKat update is now available for Verizon’s Samsung Galaxy Tab 4.10.1.

      Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 10.1 owners can now enjoy the perks that comes with the new update. Verizon shared the improvements that come along with the firmware.

      The tablet has now a self activation support and ICC ID information added to Settings. The bugs such as VPN and Chrome cast connectivity issues are fixed. There are also pre loaded applications and services such as Find My Mobile, Kids Mode Widget, Email Widget and My Verizon (10.0.710).

    • One important area where top Android phones crush the iPhone 6

      The iPhone 6 is a spectacular smartphone. I reviewed the iPhone 6 earlier this year and while there are a few things that could certainly be improved, I said that the phone was clearly one of the best smartphones in the world. And it still is. From handset design and build quality to performance and the supporting third-party app ecosystem, the iPhone 6 is a class leader in almost every key area.

Broadwell Support Marching Along For Coreboot

For months now there’s been Coreboot developers working on Intel Broadwell support (primarily from Google and focused on future Chromebook support). With the start of the new year and hopefully seeing more Broadwell hardware on the market soon, that support is coming along in Coreboot.

Events

• Typoday 2014 At Pune

  This blog was pending on me from long time. I got a chance to attend typoday.in 2014 conference At Symbiosis International University, Viman Nagar, Pune in February. This was the my second conference specifically on typography domain after National workshop on calligraphy and typography in 2007.

SaaS/Big Data

• A year in the life of OpenStack

  What a year for OpenStack! With two shiny new releases, two excellent summits on opposite sides of the Atlantic, countless new features, and an ever-growing community of users and developers, it truly has been a year of progress for OpenStack.

• Big Data Becomes a Market Force, Ushering in Change

  As reported here earlier, a new KPGM study on cloud computing trends at enterprises shows that executives are very focused on extracting business metrics from their cloud computing and data analytics platforms. That suggests that we’re going to continue to see the cloud and the Big Data trend evolve together this year.

• How Open Source Can Fix 2015′s Data Entropy

  This will not be a good year for those that believe in human progress. At least, not if enterprise software is any indication.

Databases

• MemSQL adds open-source connector to external data sources

  MemSQL Inc. has returned to the limelight four months after its landmark funding round with the release of an open-source connector for its namesake database that simplifies the process of importing data from external sources. The launch is the latest milestone in the startup’s efforts to remove the barriers that keep information siloed in the enterprise.

  The ability to act on real-time events without any logistical delays is useful in applications ranging from ad optimization to signal intelligence processing. The real-time analytics capability is one of the reasons MemSQL received a capital infusion from the Central Intelligence Agency’s investment arm as part of its September round.

• MongoDB Set to Gain Additional Momentum in 2015

  With more than 10,000 downloads of MongoDB now occurring daily, many organizations are using MongoDB to consolidate a raft of proprietary document repositories using an inexpensive open source platform that scales significantly higher than its counterparts.

BSD

• FreeBSD Ports 2015Q1 To Bring Many Changes

  The Ports package management system in FreeBSD has seen 6024 commits from 160 individuals in the past quarter. Among the updates for users to find with the FreeBSD Ports 2015Q1 state compared to the last quarterly snapshot is pkg 1.4.3, new keywords and USES, a dependency on LLVM Clang 3.4, Firefox 34, Chrome 39, Python 2.7.9, Ruby 2.0.0.598, GCC 4.8.3, GNOME 3.14, Cinnamon 2.4.5, and X.Org 1.14.

• Deciso Launches OPNsense, a New Open Source Firewall Initiative

  OPNsense combines the best of open source and closed source firewalls. It brings the rich feature set of commercial offerings with the benefits of open and verifiable sources combined with a simple BSD license. This makes OPNsense the platform of choice for users, developers and commercial partners.

  Companies that want to use OPNsense to create a branded version, extend its features, or even create a fork and build upon the same codebase are allowed to do so under the 2-clause BSD license.

Project Releases

• man-pages-3.76 is released

  I’ve released man-pages-3.76. We’ve just passed 12k commits in the project, and this release, my 158th, marks the completion of my tenth year as maintainer of the man-pages project.

Openness/Sharing

• Banana Pi, Spiderman arm, and World of USO

• Open Hardware

  • InMoov is an open source 3D printable robot you can build for only US $1,500

    InMoov is the world’s first life-size, open source robot, and currently also the cheapest ever built. It’s software back end is all open source and the parts are constructed from 3D printed plastic

Sarah Palin posted a photo of her son stepping on their dog for New Year’s

Palin’s son, Trig, was just trying to help wash the dishes. The dog was lying in front of the sink, so he did what a lot of other kids would probably do. Palin saw a sort of “overcoming all obstacles” message in this and decided to share.

Tram delays Manchester’s New Year fireworks

Tram delays New Year’s Eve fireworks spectacular

New Year fireworks in Manchester were delayed by an excruciating four minutes after a tram got in the way of the display.

Videos show an excited crowd counting down to midnight only for the sky above Picadilly to remain dark.

“Five, four, three, two one: Let’s have the fireworks!” announces the show’s host – but none follow.

New Year’s Eve London fireworks: BBC loses 1.4m viewers in 12 months

New year fireworks add sparkle to 12 million viewers’ nights

More than 12 million viewers watched Big Ben ring in the new year amid a spectacular fireworks display on BBC1 – but it failed to hit the highs of last year’s celebrations.

The 15-minute New Year’s Eve Fireworks programme had an average of 12.3 million viewers (63%) from 11.55pm, down from 13.7 million viewers (67.5%) for the same broadcast in 2013.

Science

• 7 things Back to the Future predicted for 2015

  In the cult film Back to the Future 2, Doc Brown and Marty McFly land in 2015, a futuristic land of flying cars and hovercrafts. As the New Year dawns, which of their predictions were hits – and misses?

Security

• North Korea/Sony Story Shows How Eagerly U.S. Media Still Regurgitate Government Claims

  The identity of the Sony hackers is still unknown. President Obama, in a December 19 press conference, announced: “We can confirm that North Korea engaged in this attack.” He then vowed: “We will respond. . . . We cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the United States.”

  The U.S. Government’s campaign to blame North Korea actually began two days earlier, when The New York Times – as usual – corruptly granted anonymity to “senior administration officials” to disseminate their inflammatory claims with no accountability. These hidden “American officials” used the Paper of Record to announce that they “have concluded that North Korea was ‘centrally involved’ in the hacking of Sony Pictures computers.” With virtually no skepticism about the official accusation, reporters David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth deemed the incident a “cyberterrorism attack” and devoted the bulk of the article to examining the retaliatory actions the government could take against the North Koreans.

• Doxing as an Attack

  Doxing is not new; the term dates back to 2001 and the hacker group Anonymous. But it can be incredibly offensive. In 2013, several women were doxed by male gamers trying to intimidate them into keeping silent about sexism in computer games.

  Companies can be doxed, too. In 2011, Anonymous doxed the technology firm HBGary Federal. In the past few weeks we’ve witnessed the ongoing doxing of Sony.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• JFK and the Cuban Embargo

  Already, we’re hearing that President Obama is a traitor, that he is surrendering America to Fidel Castro and the communists, and betraying the Cuban people and the cause of freedom and democracy for wanting to lift the 54-year-old Cold War-era U.S. embargo against Cuba.

  That is precisely the way that the national-security establishment felt about Kennedy and actually much worse.
  Already, we’re hearing that President Obama is a traitor, that he is surrendering America to Fidel Castro and the communists, and betraying the Cuban people and the cause of freedom and democracy for wanting to lift the 54-year-old Cold War-era U.S. embargo against Cuba.

  That is precisely the way that the national-security establishment felt about Kennedy and actually much worse.

  It began with the CIA’s plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, an invasion that would be carried out by Cuban exiles but secretly funded and directed by the CIA in order to provide U.S. officials with “plausible deniability” with respect to their role in the operation.

  What did that mean? It meant that the CIA would lie to the American people and the world about the U.S, government’s role in the operation. And it would also mean that under the CIA’s plan, the newly elected president would immediately become the nation’s liar-in-chief, a secret that the CIA would obviously have over his head for the rest of his time in office.

  Keep in mind that the CIA plan was concocted before Kennedy got into office. Once Kennedy was sworn in, the CIA presented him with the plan. Kennedy was dumb to go along with it, a point that he later acknowledged. But the fact is that he fell hook, line, and sinker for the CIA’s assurances to him that the invasion would be a smashing success, that the Cuban people would rally against Castro, and that no air U.S. support would be needed.
  It began with the CIA’s plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, an invasion that would be carried out by Cuban exiles but secretly funded and directed by the CIA in order to provide U.S. officials with “plausible deniability” with respect to their role in the operation.

  What did that mean? It meant that the CIA would lie to the American people and the world about the U.S, government’s role in the operation. And it would also mean that under the CIA’s plan, the newly elected president would immediately become the nation’s liar-in-chief, a secret that the CIA would obviously have over his head for the rest of his time in office.

  Keep in mind that the CIA plan was concocted before Kennedy got into office. Once Kennedy was sworn in, the CIA presented him with the plan. Kennedy was dumb to go along with it, a point that he later acknowledged. But the fact is that he fell hook, line, and sinker for the CIA’s assurances to him that the invasion would be a smashing success, that the Cuban people would rally against Castro, and that no air U.S. support would be needed.

• Austrian filmmaker uncovers apparent secret Nazi nuclear complex

  Documentary filmmaker discoveres 1944 CIA report that revealed the existence of underground atomic weapon program in the area of St. Georgen an der Gusen, according to local media.

• Secret Nazi nuclear bunker discovered in Austria by filmmaker

• Nazi nuclear bunker discovered in Austria

  A network of underground tunnels and bunkers used by the Nazis to develop an atomic bomb has been discovered in Austria by a filmmaker.

• Secret Nazi nuclear weapons testing bunker unearthed in Austria

  An underground weapons bunker built by Nazis to test nuclear and chemical weapons has been unearthed in Austria.

• Nazis’ vast, secret WMD facility uncovered in Austria

  A huge, secret, underground Nazi weapons factory, believed to have been built for the development and planned manufacture of nuclear weapons and other WMDs, has been uncovered in Austria.

• Vast secret Nazi ‘terror weapons’ site uncovered in Austria

  A SECRET underground complex built by the Nazis towards the end of World War II that may have been used for the development of weapons of mass destruction, including a nuclear bomb, has been uncovered in Austria.

• Secret WWII WMD factory found — Was Hitler testing nuclear bomb?

  St. Georgen an der Gusen is a small market town in Upper Austria. Quiet and picturesque, it’s hard to imagine that during WWII, it was selected to be the business center for the SS in exploiting slave labor. Now another secret have been unearthed.

• Secret Nazi Nuclear Complex Used to Try to Build Atomic Bomb Discovered in Austria

  A Nazi nuclear bunker was discovered in Austria under a large weapons factory.

  The complex, which features a network of tunnels and bunkers used by the Nazis to try to to build an atomic bomb, was discovered in Austria by filmmaker Andreas Sulzer.

• Filmmaker Finds Nazi Atomic Bomb Research Bunker

  A filmmaker has found a secret network of underground bunkers used by the Nazis to develop an atomic bomb.

  Located in the hills surrounding the Austrian town of St. Georgen an der Gusen, the vast site covers an area of up to 75 acres. It is believed that it could be connected to the nearby Bergkristall factory, an underground facility where Nazi scientists and engineers developed the Messerschmitt ME 262, the world’s first jet powered fighter plane.

• Secret Underground Nazi WMD Factory Found: Report

  Suspiciously high radiation levels around the Austrian town of St. Georgen an der Gusen had long fueled theories that there was a buried bunker nearby where Nazis had tested nuclear weapons during WWII. Those suspicions came one step closer to being confirmed last week after the opening of a 75-acre underground complex was dug out from below the earth and granite used to seal off the entrance, the Times of Israel reports. The excavation team was led by Austrian filmmaker Andreas Sulzer, who says the site was “likely the biggest secret weapons production facility of the Third Reich”—a facility that probably relied on forced labor from the nearby Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp and may have even been the testing location for a nuclear bomb, the Daily Mirror reports.

• Filmmaker says he uncovered Nazis’ ‘biggest secret weapons facility’ underground near concentration camp

  An Austrian filmmaker believes he has discovered a huge Nazi “secret weapons facility” in an underground complex near the remains of the Mathausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria, where thousands of Jews were killed.

• Secret Nazi Nuclear Plant Discovered in Austria

  Austrian documentary filmmaker Andreas Sulzer found the 75-acre complex just outside the small town of St. Georgen an der Gusen, near Linz. This site is not far from the Bergkristall factory, where the Messerschmitt Me 262 — the first operational jet-powered fighter — was invented.

  Sulzer noticed that an Austrian physicist who was recruited by the Nazis had mentioned about the subterranean site in his diary.

  It was built by slave labourers who lived in the nearby Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.

  The exact location of this Nazi factory was determined with the help of intelligence reports and radiation tests that revealed that the radioactivity levels at the site were higher than normal.

• ‘Biggest secret Nazi weapons factory of the Third Reich’ discovered underground near sleepy Austrian town

  The 75-acre facility, located near the town of St Georgen an der Gusen, is believed to have been used to create and test weapons of mass destruction and was deemed so important to the Nazis that the head of the SS and Hitler’s right hand man Heinrich Himmler, even oversaw its development.

• Underground lab where Nazis worked on secret nuclear bomb is uncovered

  An underground Nazi labyrinth where slaves laboured on high-tech weapons including a secret nuclear missile programme has been uncovered in Austria.

  The 75-acre facility near the town of St Georgen an der Gusen is described as the ‘biggest secret weapons facility of the Third Reich,’ after it was unearthed by documentary maker Andreas Sulzer.

• Secret Nazi ‘weapons of mass destruction factory’ discovered underground in Austria

• Hitler’s secret ‘nuke plant’

  A labyrinth of secret underground tunnels believed to have been used by the Nazis to develop a nuclear bomb has been uncovered.

  [...]

  Excavations began on the site after researchers detected heightened levels of radiation in the area – supporting claims that the Nazis were developing nuclear weapons.

• Vast, secret Nazi nuclear testing facility unearthed in Austria

  Huge web of tunnels covering area of 75 acres reinforces claims Nazis were working on developing WMDs

• Researchers Discover Suspected Secret Nazi Nuclear Development Site

  The facility, which spans an area up to 75 acres, is thought to be an extension of the underground Bergkristall factory, where the world’s first operational jet fighter was produced. According to the Sunday Times, the Nazis took pains to hide the research facility, even as Bergkristall was inspected after the war.

• Mission Ends in Afghanistan, but Sacrifices Are Not Over for U.S. Soldiers

  On Wednesday, as 2014 came to a close, the United States and allied forces formally turned over combat operations in Afghanistan to Afghans, officially ending the longest war in America’s history, and starting a new struggle for recognition among many military families who say they already feel forgotten.

• New U.S. Stealth Jet Can’t Fire Its Gun Until 2019

  America’s $400 billion Joint Strike Fighter, or F-35, is slated to join fighter squadrons next year—but missing software will render its 25mm cannon useless.

• The Tragedy of the American Military

  The American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win.

• Did You Know We Won the Afghan War This Weekend?

  Now, there is no journalism without fact-checking, so let’s dig in on the president’s statement. Afghanistan no longer is under threat from the Taliban, and all terrorism has been taken care of. Instead of an economy based on corruption, smuggling and opium production, Afghanistan is a thriving consumer society. Women walk the streets in mini-skirts, and elections happen without incident. An American can stroll among Kabul’s cafes and quaint bazaars with his head held high and his safety guaranteed by grateful Afghans. America and its allies’ investment of over 3,400 lives and four trillion dollars has paid off. Also, all the dead Afghans, whatever.

  Oh, wait, none of that is true.

Transparency Reporting

• Supreme Court, in Big Leap, Plans to Put Filings Online

  The Supreme Court will soon join other federal courts in making briefs and other filings available electronically, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. announced Wednesday.

  The changes will come “as soon as 2016,” the chief justice wrote in his annual year-end report on the state of the federal judiciary.

• Exclusive: Julian Assange on “When Google Met WikiLeaks” While He was Under House Arrest

  In a holiday special, we feature an exclusive Democracy Now! interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In July, Amy Goodman spoke to Assange after he had just entered his third year inside Ecuador’s embassy in London, where he has political asylum. He faces investigations in both Sweden and the United States. In the United States, a secret grand jury is investigating WikiLeaks for its role in publishing a trove of leaked documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as State Department cables. In Sweden, he is wanted for questioning on allegations of sexual misconduct, though no charges have been filed. During his interview, Assange talked about his new book, which at that time had not yet been released, titled, “When Google Met Wikileaks.” The book was later published in September.

Finance

• Police suspect fraud took most of Mt. Gox’s missing bitcoins

  Nearly all of the roughly US$370 million in bitcoin that disappeared in the February 2014 collapse of Mt. Gox probably vanished due to fraudulent transactions, with only 1 percent taken by hackers, according to a report in Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, citing sources close to a Tokyo police probe.

• Finns Party, SDP say poor can’t take more austerity

  Finnish politicians reacted to President Sauli Niinistö’s appeal for leadership on structural reforms with their own suggestions of what might be cut from the government’s budget. The SDP and the Finns Party say there is no room to cut spending that goes to support low-income Finns.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• NBC’s Chuck Todd explains why journalists so rarely ‘bark’ at politicians

  An open secret in Washington, D.C., journalism was unexpectedly shared with frustrated voters across the country on Sunday’s edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

  Anyone who’s ever watched an elected official from either major political party be interviewed by a serious journalist has probably angrily asked aloud, “Why don’t they ask him about XYZ?!” Or, “Why did they let him get away with that answer?!”

  One of the most obvious and serious reasons is time constraint. Reporters, whether on TV or print, are almost always only allowed a small window of time to ask elected officials a set of questions.

  But one of the other lesser known reasons is access. Competition in political journalism is fierce and having access to big names in D.C. is everything. If a congressman thinks he’s treated unfairly or too aggressively by a reporter, he may simply choose to give his time to someone he thinks is more fair (i.e., more “friendly”).

• The Shadow Lawmakers

  While the public believes the people they elect to Congress create legislation and policies, their role is increasingly theatrical.

Censorship

• Three Al Jazeera Journalists Remain in Jail After Egyptian Court Orders a Retrial

  Egypt’s highest appeals court on Thursday ordered a retrial for three imprisoned journalists from Al Jazeera’s English-language service, implicitly acknowledging critical procedural flaws in a case that rights advocates have described, from the men’s arrests to their convictions, as a sham.

  But the decision offered no guarantees that the journalists, who have been imprisoned for more than a year and now face a potentially lengthy second trial, would be freed anytime soon.

• India bans Open Source Sites

  The Indian government has blocked a clutch of Open Saucy websites including Github because they were carrying “anti-India” content from the head-lopping terror group ISIS.

• India Illustrates The Risks Of Censorship Laws

  Next time you see your government proposing internet censorship laws of any kind, remember this incident where the Indian government crippled their own software industry so they could be seen to be doing something about terrorism. Their department of telecommunications has blocked 32 web sites — including archive.org and Github — as if to illustrate why it’s bad to allow anyone the power to block web sites arbitrarily (ETI claims it’s 60+). They’ve blocked entire slices of multi-purpose web infrastructure because one of their functionaries found something about ISIS somewhere on it, according to TechCrunch.

Privacy

• UK wants hot tech grads to do spy work before building startups

  The British government is considering a program that would see the most promising tech graduates spend some time working for the GCHQ signals intelligence agency, the U.K.’s equivalent to the NSA, before they move into the private sector.

  As per a Thursday article in The Independent, confirmed to me by the Cabinet Office on Friday, the scheme would give the U.K. a rough equivalent to the system in Israel, where many tech entrepreneurs have come out of Unit 8200 of the Israel Defence Force. Unit 8200 is also a signals intelligence operation, and the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks is a notable spinout.

• What We Learned About NSA Spying in 2014—And What We’re Fighting to Expose in 2015: 2014 in Review

  In fact, some of the most significant information about the NSA’s surveillance programs still remain secret. Despite one of the most significant leaks in American history and despite a promise to declassify as much information as possible about the programs, nearly two years later the government still refuses to provide the public with the information it needs. For example, government officials still have not answered a simple, yet vitally important, question: what type of information does the NSA collect about millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans (or the citizens of any other country, for that matter)? And the government still refuses to release some of the most significant decisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—the secret court tasked with monitoring the government’s surveillance programs.

• The IOB Reports on the Internet Dragnet Violations: “Nothing to Report”

  I’ve been working through the NSA’s reports to the Intelligence Oversight Board. Given that we know so much about the phone and Internet dragnets, I have been particularly interested in how they got reported to the IOB.

  By and large, though, they didn’t. Even though we know there were significant earlier violations (some of the phone dragnet violations appear in this timeline; there was an Internet violation under the first order and at least one more of unknown date), I believe neither gets any mention until the Q1 2009 report. These are on the government’s fiscal year calendar, which goes from October to September, so this report covers the last quarter of 2008. The Q1 2009 reports explains a few (though not the most serious) 2008-related phone dragnet problems and then reveals the discovery of the alert list, which technically happened in Q2 2009.

• NSA Obfuscated to Congress about Back Door Searches in 2009

  The NSA got a lot of criticism for releasing its IOB reports on December 23, just as everyone was preparing for vacation. But there were three reports that — at least when I accessed the interface — weren’t originally posted: Q3 and Q4 2009 and Q3 2010 — all conveniently important dates for the Internet dragnet (I’ll have more on what they didn’t disclose soon).

• Leahy & Grassley Press Administration on Use of Cell Phone Tracking Program Print Share

  Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) pressed top Obama administration officials on the use of cell-site simulators, which can unknowingly sweep up the cell phone signals of innocent Americans.

• How ABC Investigative Reports Turn into NSA Briefings to the SSCI

  First, this is ABC News, one of the outlets notorious for laundering intelligence claims; indeed, it is possible this is a limited hangout, an attempt to preempt one of the most alarming revelations in Bamford’s book. While the report doesn’t say it explicitly, it implies the claims of whistleblowers Kinne and Faulk prove Hayden to have lied in his CIA Director confirmation hearing, in response to the softball thrown by Hatch. In any case, the briefing about this disclosure appears to have gone exclusively to SSCI (with follow-up briefings to both intelligence oversight committees afterwards), the committee that got the apparently false testimony (and not for the last time, from Michael Hayden!). But by briefing the Committee, it also gave Jello Jay an opportunity — and probably, explicit permission — to sound all stern about a practice the Committee likely knew about.

• Email Encryption Grew Tremendously, but Still Needs Work: 2014 in Review

  What if there were one thing we could do today to make it harder for the NSA and other intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on millions of people’s email communications, without users having to change their habits at all?

  There is. It’s called STARTTLS for email, a standard for encrypting email communications. 2014 saw more and more email providers implementing it.

• Stingrays Go Mainstream: 2014 in Review

  We’ve long worried about the government’s use of IMSI catchers or cell site simulators. Commonly known as a “Stingray” after a specific device manufactured by the Harris Corporation, IMSI catchers masquerade as a legitimate cell phone tower, tricking phones nearby to connect to the device in order to track a phone’s location in real time. We’re not just worried about how invasive these devices can be but also that the government has been less than forthright with judges about how and when they use IMSI catchers.

  This year the public learned just how desperately law enforcement wanted to keep details about Stingrays secret thanks to a flurry of public records act requests by news organizations across the country. The results are shocking.

• FISA “Physical Searches” of Raw Traffic Feeds, Hiding in Plain Sight?

  I’m still trudging through NSA’s reports to the Intelligence Oversight Board, which were document dumped just before Christmas. In this post, I want to examine why NSA is redacting one FISA authority, starting with this section of the Q1 2011 report.

• French Government Quietly Enacts Controversial Surveillance Law On Christmas Eve

  Techdirt has noted that the NSA chose to release embarrassing details of its illegal surveillance of Americans on Christmas Eve. By an interesting coincidence, the French government picked the same date to enact a hugely controversial new surveillance law, which had been passed back in 2013, and will now enter into operation almost immediately, at the start of 2015. One of its most troubling aspects is the vagueness of its terms. As reported by Le Point, here’s what can be collected (original in French)…

Civil Rights

• United States of Emergency

• Prince Andrew named in lawsuit over underage sex allegations

• Prince Andrew denies allegations in underage sex lawsuit filed in U.S.

• Prince Andrew sex case claim: Duke of York is named in underage ‘sex slave’ lawsuit over claims of forced sexual relations

• Palace denies Prince Andrew ‘underage sex’ claim

• Police Chief Accuses Secret Service Of Misconduct

  Nashville’s police chief is raising stunning new allegations regarding the U.S. Secret Service, saying local agents once asked his officers to fake a warrant.

  Even more disturbing, Chief Steve Anderson said he complained to top Secret Service officials in Washington, and they did not seem to care.

• And the Winner of the ‘War On Terror’ Financed Dream Home 2014 Giveaway Is…

  Oceanfront views, 24-hour doorman, heated pool, and perhaps best of all, a “private tunnel to the beach.” This $3 million Palm Beach, Florida penthouse could be yours, but unfortunately it isn’t because this prize has already been claimed by a former high-level U.S. official who helped pave the way for the over decade-long “war on terror,” which has been a near complete catastrophe.

  Iraq is aflame, the Islamic State is on the rampage, the situation in Afghanistan worsens by the day, and thousands of Americans—and many more Iraqis and Afghans—have died during the post-9/11 conflicts. Meanwhile, the combined cost of the “war on terror” comes to an estimated $1.6 trillion.

  But if the American people got screwed on the deal, a lot of former senior government officials who played important roles in this debacle have done quite well for themselves. It’s New Year’s Eve and I need to write a final sendoff to 2014, so I thought I’d take a look at the fortunes (literally) of some of these figures: Former CIA director George Tenet and former FBI director Louis Freeh (I’ll cover former Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge in a New Year’s post).

  Consider Tenet. As head of the CIA, he missed multiple signs of a major Al Qadea attack directed against the United States, called the case against Saddam building Weapons of Mass Destruction a “slam dunk,” and approved the Bush administration’s torturing of terror suspects.

  In any fair world Tenet would be tried for criminal incompetence. Instead, he got the Presidential Medal of Freedom and after resigning in 2004 (at which point his agency salary was south of $200,000), he received a $4 million advance to write a memoir. In it, he confessed to “a black, black time” a few months after 9/11 when he was sitting at home in his favorite Adirondack chair thinking about the tragedy that killed 3,000 Americans on his watch and asked, “Why me?”

• Disclose the full torture report, Senator Udall

  Colorado’s U.S. Sen. Mark Udall can perform yeoman’s service in upholding the rule of law and government accountability before his term concludes on Saturday.

  Protected by the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, the senator can publicly disclose the already redacted 6,700-page “Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program.”

• These Charts Show How Ronald Reagan Actually Expanded the Federal Government

  One of the many, many problems Jeb Bush faces in his quest for the Oval Office is his break from Republican orthodoxy on president Ronald Reagan’s legacy. In 2012, Bush told a group of reporters that, in today’s GOP, Reagan “would be criticized for doing the things that he did”— namely, working with Democrats to pass legislation. He added that Reagan would struggle to secure the GOP nomination today.

• Web Freedom Is Seen as a Growing Global Issue

  Government censorship of the Internet is a cat-and-mouse game. And despite more aggressive tactics in recent months, the cats have been largely frustrated while the mice wriggle away.

  But this year, the challenges for Silicon Valley will mount, with Russia and Turkey in particular trying to tighten controls on foreign-based Internet companies. Major American companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google are increasingly being put in the tricky position of figuring out which laws and orders to comply with around the world — and which to ignore or contest.

• Demonstrators March Against Police Brutality In Oakland and San Francisco On New Year’s Eve

  A number of downtown Oakland transit lines were detoured due to a protest against police brutality that took place in the area on Wednesday evening.

  Protesters met at Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland around 9 p.m. for the New Year’s Eve march.

  Reports on Twitter suggested somewhere around 100 to 200 people were marching, accompanied by a large police presence.

• Letter: Grand jury results damage justice

  The grand jury decisions not to indict police officers Darren Wilson and Daniel Panteleo in the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner can be seen as another example of the racist and criminal history of United States justice.

• Anti-brutality activists aim to ‘evict’ St. Louis police from headquarters

  Scores of protesters at the helm of the ongoing nationwide movement against police violence stormed the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department Wednesday, aiming to “evict” officers they accused of “perpetrating police brutality on our citizenry.”

  Five of the roughly 25 demonstrators who linked arms in the lobby of the police department were arrested in the headquarters, the St. Louis Police Department told Al Jazeera. Police pepper-sprayed and forced other protesters off the premises.

• Fox affiliate fires reporter and cameraman who deceptively edited video of police brutality protesters

  Fox 45 fired the reporter and cameraman involved with a story that claimed protesters against police brutality were shouting “to kill a cop,” the Baltimore City Paper reports.

• Congressmen admit to not reading NDAA before voting for it: ‘I trust the leadership’

  US House members admitted they had not read the entire $585 billion, 1,648-page National Defense Authorization Act, which predominantly specifies budgeting for the Defense Department, before it was voted on Thursday in Congress.

• Mike Lee Thwarted In Bid To Strip Government’s Ability To Detain Americans Indefinitely

  Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) mounted a largely symbolic bid Friday to end the White House’s authority to indefinitely detain Americans without trial.

  The conservative Republican senator offered an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that was immediately blocked.

  “The bottom line is that there is simply not enough time left before we adjourn to debate even a single amendment, and surely not a single amendment of this complexity,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who objected to Lee’s request to debate his amendment. Levin added that he had previously supported a similar measure.

• Levin Is Leaving Congress Disappointed the NDAA Doesn’t Do More

• US Congress Gives Native American Lands to Mining Company

  The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) sanctioned giving federal lands belonging to indigenous Americans to Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of the British Australian multinational, Rio Tinto.

• The International Criminal Court on shaky ground

  A DOZEN years after its creation, the International Criminal Court is foundering. So far it has brought just 21 cases in eight countries, all of them in Africa. Only two have resulted in convictions — of relatively obscure Congolese rebel leaders. Though 139 countries signed the founding treaty, the United States, Russia, China, India, Israel and every Arab nation but Jordan have declined to join. The most horrific crimes against humanity perpetrated in the world in the past decade — in North Korea, Syria and Sri Lanka, among other places — remain outside the ICC’s reach.

  [...]

  Pending such opportunities, the court may be tempted to pursue more quixotic initiatives. This month chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda reported that she was “assessing available information” on “enhanced interrogation techniques” by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, which is an ICC member. This month’s Senate Intelligence Committee report on cases of torture may increase the impetus behind that probe. But the alleged crimes committed by U.S. personnel, though shocking, are not grave enough to meet the ICC’s high bar for prosecution — and it would be politically foolish for the court to pursue U.S. targets.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Marriott plans to block personal wifi hotspots

  The hotel chain and some others have a petition before the FCC to amend or clarify the rules that cover interference for unlicensed spectrum bands. They hope to gain the right to use network-management tools to quash Wi-Fi networks on their premises that they don’t approve of. In its view, this is necessary to ensure customer security and to protect children.

• Google Fiber, Net Neutrality & More…

  Reclassifying ISPs as common carriers is seen by many as the easiest way to bring back Net Neutrality.

DRM

• Watch Netflix video in your chromium browser – this time for real

  Apparently, having a functional Widevine CDM support will allow you to watch Youtube Movies as well, but since I already pay for Netflix I did not want to test these Youtube rentals. Another test which failed was my attempt to watch television on horizon.tv, the content streaming network of my provider (UPC/Liberty Global). Even with a UserAgent spoofer and all browser cookies removed, that site still detected that I was visiting using a Chrome/Chromium browser and kept presenting an annoying popup to force me to switch to a different browser because Chrome does not support Silverlight anymore (on Mac OSX and Windows 64-bit at least, remember their NPAPI depreciation). No way around that, even though I was fairly sure that Horizon TV also used Widevine for Digital Rights Management (DRM) in the past. Guess I still have to use Firefox with Pipelight for that, then.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Rental Car Stereos Infringe Copyright, Music Rights Group Says

    STIM disagrees. The collection society says that previous cases involving hoteliers have ended with licenses being obtained which enable hotel guests to listen to music while on the premises. Furthermore, other car rental companies in Sweden have already agreed to pay a per-stereo levy so Fleetmanager should also pay, STIM argues.

    This is not the first music-related copyright case to hit the car sector this year. In July, the Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies launched a class action lawsuit against Ford and General Motors over the CD-ripping capability of their cars. In November the group followed up with fresh legal action against Chrysler and technology partner Mitsubishi.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Indiegogo Campaign for Beautiful Linux-Powered Librem 15 Laptop Is Going Well

  Librem 15 is a new Linux-powered laptop in the making, and the crowdfunding campaign that’s taking place on Indiegogo has just passed the halfway mark.

• New tool lets Chromebooks run Linux in a desktop window

• Run Linux in a window on your Chromebook

• Chrome OS Users Can Now Run Linux In A Window Using The Crouton Chrome Extension

Applications

• Comix Review – An Old and Still Powerful Comic Book Viewer

  Comix is an application that lets users read comic books that can even be archived. It’s been around for many years and it’s one of the best so far, despite its age and simplistic approach.
  The American culture always held comic books in high regard and this trend is now spreading across the world. It’s true that not everyone is really a fan of this kind of storytelling and that there is still a long way to go until more people from other continents appreciate them. In any case, if you want to read comic books on a Linux platform, it’s rather easy to do so, especially since there are quite a few options out there.

• uGet Review – Probably the Best Download Manager on Linux

  Download managers are not something new for Linux users, but it’s true that apps with nice GUIs and lots of options are. uGet is definitely one of the most interesting download managers for the Linux platform and we’ll now take a closer look at it.

• Non-Liner Video Editor LiVES Gets Better openGL Playback with Latest Update

  LiVES is a simple-to-use video editor and VJ tool that allows users to combine real time and rendered effects, streams, and multiple video/audio files. The developers have released a new version of it with some minor changes and improvements.

• Drag and Drop Works Again in phpMyAdmin

  PhpMyAdmin is a tool built in PHP that handles the administration of MySQL databases. The developers have released a new version and is now available for download.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Monit – monitor your processes and services simply

  • How To Install LAMP Server (Apache, MariaDB And PHP) On Fedora 21/20/19

  • Installing Debian in UEFI mode with some stunts

  • How to Install the Most Advanced Cinnamon 2.4.5 in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

  • How to Create a cPanel Account in WHM

  • Docker in 5 minutes

• Games

  • Seven Out of Ten Most Played Games on Steam Have Linux Support

    Steam for Linux has been available for a couple of years already and it seems like it’s definitely making an impact, if we look closely at the most played games on the digital distribution platform.

  • Blitzkrieg 3 RTS Is Getting a Linux Release

    Blitzkrieg 3, a new strategy game developed by Nival Interactive, will be getting a Linux release, at least this are the latest reports from the German media.

  • The Most Popular Linux Gaming Articles For 2014

    Here is a look back at the most popular articles on GamingOnLinux for 2014, it was a seriously crazy year for us here, and for everyone in Linux gaming, so let’s see what happened! We had a few downers, but most of it was great stuff that I am proud to be a part of.

  • LISA, A Quirky Side-scrolling RPG, In Beta For Linux

    Lisa is a quirky side-scrolling RPG set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It has a nice style to it, and very positive reviews on Steam.

  • GOL Cast: Bringing Humanity To New Worlds In Civilization: Beyond Earth

    After a bit of a wait it’s finally possible for you to bring your penguins to space and colonize new worlds in the name of Torvalds. But how does Civilization: Beyond Earth fare, what are its strengths and weaknesses? Let’s find out.

    Civilization: Beyond Earth is the newest installation in the long standind series of Civilization games and, as you all are probably aware, instead of allowing you to become the most powerful nation on Earth it brings you onto an unexplored planet far away as humanity’s last resort to save itself from an overpopulated home.

  • GOG’s Installer Encryption Proving To Be Difficult For Linux Users

  • Control a Spinning Car in Roundabout on Steam for Linux

    Roundabout, a weird arcade driving game developed and published on Steam by No Goblin, has also reached the Linux platform and is now available with 34% discount.

  • The Way of Life Is a New Adventure Game Made in Just 24 Hours

    The Way of Life, an adventure game developed in just 24 hours, has made its way on Steam for Linux. It’s not ready yet and is still under development, but the first three levels have been provided for free.

  • Transport Tycoon’s OpenTTD Remake Ends 2014 with a Great Release

    OpenTTD is an open source simulation game based on the popular Microprose title Transport Tycoon written by Chris Sawyer. It’s been around for quite some time and it’s still played by many gamers, even today. A new major release is in the making and the first Beta has been released.

  • The Itch Games Store Are Working On An Open Source Client

    The Itch.io games store has always been nice, but icing on the cake is that they are now creating an open source desktop client in Qt 5.

    It’s in the very early stages, but could be something to give it a boost over other smaller stores. Desura is also working to bring their re-open sourced client back to Linux, and GOG are bringing out a closed source client. Looks like desktop clients are becoming a big thing again.

  • New Desura Client Available For Linux, Open Source Again

    Finally, Desura has a new client available for Linux. Bad Juju Games haven’t officially announced it anywhere on Desura yet, but it is available to download.

    It has been open sourced again thanks to Bad Juju Games who moved it to the GPL3 license, and removed the need to sign a contributor agreement, but the Desura name and logo are still subject to certain terms (fair enough).

  • TIMEframe, A Game Played In Slow Motion Plans A Big Update With Linux Support

    TIMEframe was originally created for the Ludum Dare game jam competition by Random Seed games and an updated version has been in development.

    It looks like a pretty interesting concept, and they need help by getting votes on Steam Greenlight. Sadly, the original doesn’t have Linux support, so it’s great the updated version will.

  • Remixing open source games with Creative Commons content

    One of the great things about open source is that you’re free to modify and redistribute it in whichever way you like. This is real creative freedom that I support. All of my apps and games are open source. A while back, I helped fund the opening of some game music and art assets to the public. Being in the public domain (or having a Creative Commons license, as these art assets now do) allows for public remixing and free use of the content. Gotta love that.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Ben Jennings on UN climate change talks – cartoon

  All leaders must rise to the challenge for December 2015, warns outgoing EU climate chief

• Bonus: More from the deepest depths of Debian

• Bonus: 2014 in review

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Yet another way to make your app support StatusNotifierItem

  • Round 2

    Well the first two laps of my first SoK is over and now I finally enter into the final lap. In the first month I had finished with the design of the site but it was just plain and simple HTML/CSS and as we all know that is not enough. So the next question that arises is – what do we need ? And the answer to that will be a framework.

  • [SoK] Cantor Python backend status update

    There were not many commits from my side to the Cantor project during the last month, but most of stuffs that are related to porting the Python 2 backend to Python 3 have been done.

  • MUP, a Markup Previewer

    MUP is a markup previewer. It supports multiple markup formats. You can use it to read markup text, but it is also useful when writing markup text to check how your work looks, thanks to its refresh-as-you-save feature.

  • What’s going on with measures in Marble

    Here in the Marble world, we are working hard on expanding the current functionality with new features. Today I would like to show you some stuff we’ve recently introduced as part of the Measure tool. The measure tool is basically a multifunctional georuler, that allows to perform a variety of measurements. For instance, now you can easily measure distances on trivial paths or areas of complicated polygon shapes.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Builder, an IDE of our GNOME

    Bastian Hougaard and Jakub Steiner put together a wonderful video for the campain. Thanks guys!

    I’ve funded the last 4 months of development to give you and idea of what you are funding and reduce your risk. I also wanted to prove to you that I’m capable of taking on this project. I hope you agree and are willing to keep me going.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Deepin Linux 2014.2 Is Out and Is One of the Most Beautiful Distros in the World

    Deepin, a Linux distribution that provides a unique, fun, and interesting experience to its users has been upgraded to version 2014.2 and is now ready for download.

  • OpenELEC Can Turn Every PC into a Powerful Media Center with Kodi 14.0

    OpenELEC is a bleeding-edge embedded operating system built specifically to run the Kodi media player hub. It has just been upgraded to use the latest version of Kodi and it packs a ton of improvements.

  • ZevenOS 6.0 – Goodbye Edition

    I am proud to announce the release of ZevenOS 6.0 – Goodbye Edition.
    Goodbye Edition therefore because its released at the end of this year and will be the last ZevenOS Version for a long long time.
    This release is based upon Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and will be supported for 5.0 years.

• Screenshots

  • NixOS 14.12 Screenshot Tour

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Us Versus Them

      On some levels this makes sense. Red Hat is the single largest entity in Fedora and many (if not most) of the movers and shakers in Fedora are Red Hat employees. A quick glance at the Fedora 21 System Wide Changes shows many more Red Hat employees than not. Is it any wonder that individual contributors can feel a bit like a sailboat in the way of an aircraft carrier?

    • A good year for Ansible users

      Today I’d like to take a look at where Ansible is, a year later, using last year’s report as a benchmark. I think it’s fair to say that we’ve done pretty well for our users in 2014.

• Debian Family

  • Status on Jessie (December 2014)

    The next timed change of the freeze policy will apply per January 5th. After that date, we will only accept RC bugs fixes. Which means it is final chance for translation updates.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • These Are the Essential Apps for Tweaking Ubuntu and Unity

        Ubuntu can be easily tweaked and it’s not all that difficult to make some visual changes to it. People think that Unity is not all that flexible, but that’s definitely not the case and users need just two apps to make all the changes they want.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Samsung to use Tizen across ALL of its TV starting 2015

      The HOT News of the day is that Samsung have decided to start shipping Tizen on ALL of their upcoming Smart TVs starting 2015. According to industry sources, Samsung have taken this bold move following a meeting that took place on 29 December, and decided to only use Tizen across its complete upcoming TV line in an effort to boost its own Tizen TV ecosystem.

  • Android

    • Kodak focuses on Android-powered smartphone cameras

      After a lengthy corporate restructuring, the indomitable Kodak is applying its brand and expertise to a new market: smartphones. The imaging company announced its intention to launch a range of Android smartphones aimed at transitioning technophobes in partnership with mobile device manufacturer Bullitt Group.

    • The best Android phones of 2014

      This last year has been a big one for Android. Displays have started moving beyond 1080p, devices keep getting bigger, and Android 5.0 brings the most fundamental change the platform has seen in a very long time. Some of the phones that were released in 2014 were huge successes, and other fell short of expectations, but which one was the best? That depends on how you frame the question, so let’s split it up a few different ways and find out.

    • How Android beat iOS in 2014, and vice versa

      In most areas, Google is already beating Apple, or at least catching up to it. Yet Apple still has a stranglehold in specific areas, ones that aren’t easy to break, including the enterprise as well as the hearts of independent developers and startups.

    • Here’s what finally pushed a longtime Android fan to switch to an iPhone 6 Plus

      Earlier this week, we brought you the story of Jason Kallelis of Writing About Tech, a longtime Android fan who had grown so frustrated with Android’s user experience recently that he felt tempted to switch to the iPhone 6 Plus. Well, it’s just one day later and Kallelis has already decided to take the plunge and has bought himself Apple’s giant new phablet as an experiment to see if he likes it better.

    • Nexus 7 Android L 5.0.2 Update Released For Wi-Fi Edition, Fixing Memory Leak on Android Lollipop 5.0 and 5.0.1

      Android 5.0.2 has rolled out for Nexus 7 users, and the latest incremental update aims to fix a few lingering bugs that were still crawling around the Android 5.0 Lollipop operating system after launch.

    • Nexus Android 5.0 Lollipop Problem Fix Confirmed

      Google’s new Android 5.0 Lollipop operating system delivered tons of new features to Nexus smartphone and tablet users. However, it also delivered a number of Android 5.0 Lollipop issues to owners of the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9, Nexus 10, and Nexus 7, Lollipop problems that Google’s been trying to iron out over the last month and a half.

    • Android 2.3 Gingerbread—Four years later, the OS just won’t die

      December was the fourth anniversary for Android 2.3 Gingerbread—an eternity for smartphones—yet the OS stubbornly refuses to die. The OS that originally shipped in 2010 is still clinging on to 9.1 percent of active devices, and in developing markets it still ships on new devices. Android 2.3 has even outlasted newer versions of Android, like 3.0 Honeycomb (0 percent) and 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (7.8 percent).

    • HTC One M9 rumors: ‘Hima’ boasts Android 5.0 Lollipop with Sense 7 UI?

      Another reliable tipster confirmed that the HTC One M9 “Hima” will be released in March boasting the latest Android 5.0 Lollipop OS overlaced with the HTC Sense 7 user interface.

    • OnePlus Release Official Alpha Version Of Their Stock Android 5.0 Lollipop ROM – Download Included

      The news of a OnePlus ROM was not new news, as it had been reported months ago that the company was working on its own version of close-to-stock android. More recently, the company announced a competition in their forum asking members to suggest a name for their ROM. Well, if you have been waiting to see what OnePlus could bring to the ROM table then it looks like the wait is over. OnePlus today have released the first version of their very own ROM. At the moment, the ROM name has still not been decided (or at least made known) and instead is simply going by ‘Android Lollipop Alpha’. As the name suggests, this ROM is based on Android 5.0 (Lollipop) and is now available to download and install. However, before you all click download, you do need to know that this is a very early build. Quite often builds are referred to as “early” or “alpha”, but this is seriously early and OnePlus has therefore released this as a ‘community preview’ version (similar to what we saw from Google with the L preview a few months ago). OnePlus make this point in their blog post stating “It’s so early, in fact, that this build contains no extras beyond the stock features of AOSP Lollipop”. So you’ve been warned. You should expect things not to work, bugs and other nasties associated with early and alpha ROM builds.

    • OnePlus One Android 5.0 Lollipop Alpha Build Now Available

    • Android 5.0 Lollipop Update: Samsung May Send Out New Google Software To Galaxy S5 And Others In January

      Samsung Electronics Co. may be ringing in the New Year with a fresh new system update for its devices. The manufacturer reportedly plans to begin sending out the Android 5.0 Lollipop update to its devices in January, according to a Reddit user claiming to be a Samsung employee.

    • Amazon now has 33 paid Android apps available for free

      If the 40 free applications that Amazon gave away last week wasn’t enough to satiate your hunger for new apps, the company is back today with even more goodies for your Android device.

      Amazon is now offering 33 paid Android apps for free as part of its latest Free App of the Day Bundle. There are games and utilities packed inside of the bundle, including big names like Monopoly, République, Thomas Was Alone, Lyne, and Angry Birds Star Wars.

    • Google’s Efforts Could Soon Lead To Unlocking Android Riches In Google Play

      Android is the most used mobile operating system in the history of the world. Google’s mobile OS shipped on 84% of all global smartphones in Q3 2014, a level that has grown consistently over the last several years. In contrast, Apple’s iOS has lost quarterly share in a growing market, showing up in 11.7% of all smartphone shipments in the third quarter.

    • HTC One M7 Lollipop Update: Android 5.0.2 Available Via LiquidSmooth ROM

      While Google has yet to release the Android Lollipop for the HTC One M7, users of the smartphone can try out the latest version by installing the Android 5.0.2 Lollipop update on their phones thanks to LiqiudSmooth ROM.

    • Build a Wi-Fi Webcam from an Old Android Phone

      Instructables user depotdevoid took his old Droid Razr Maxx and decided to turn it into an always-on, internet-connected webcam he could monitor at any time. If you want to do the same, you’ll need a few things to make this project work. A copy of IP Webcam (Free, $4 Pro) from Google Play, and a soldering iron (if you don’t want to just use USB power—depotdevoid’s Maxx has a broken USB charging port) to add external power, and a mount for your phone are all it really takes. He uses his to watch his 3D printer when he’s not in his garage workshop, but you can use it to keep an eye on package deliveries, watch your pets during the day, or just see the view from your home window.

    • OnePlus vs Micromax: Dream of Google-less Android now further away

      An obscure court case in India appears to have dented hopes of the mobile industry weaning itself off Google dependency – and has raised questions about the goals of Cyanogen and its backer, a Silicon Valley VC firm with close ties to Google.

      In the cosy world of Menlo Park VC firms, Andreessen Horowitz (or “A16Z”) is as close to Google as anyone. Together, they teamed up to create the “Glass Collective”, while its head, Netscape founder Andreessen, appear to go to battle in Google’s wars against media companies, as Michael Wolff reminded us this week.

    • Samsung Galaxy S4 and Note 2 to receive Android 5.0 Lollipop OS update

    • Lollipop’s memory leak bug confirmed, will finally be fixed in future Android release

      Although it can be exciting living on the bleeding edge of tech, sometimes being first to a software update can prove to be more harmful than good. Just ask Nexus (or even iPhone) owners who’ve, over the years, learned the hard way that initial updates — especially when it comes to major Android versions — can often times be riddled with bugs and other general weirdness. It’s this very reason it appears there was such a long delay in the rollout of Android 5.0 Lollipop for the Nexus 5.

    • Checking up on 2014’s crowdfunded Linux and Android devices

      What became of the crowdfunded projects we covered in 2014? Two earned more than $2 million each, about a third went unfunded, and half had shipping delays.

      Ten years ago if somebody were to tell you you’d soon be able to collect thousands and even millions of dollars for your product idea simply by posting a summary and some pictures on a web page, you might have been inclined to check their meds. Then Kickstarter launched in 2009, and small-scale investing changed forever.

    • Best Android Smartphones 2014: Your Favorite Devices And The Features That Made You Love Them

      While it may seem to most consumers that all smartphones are pretty much the same — and for Apple users, they are — Android phone manufacturers brought a diverse array of hardware to the market in 2014. The theme of the year was standout features, including large (and even curved) displays, water-resistant designs and powerful cameras. Manufacturers competed fiercely to win the favor of consumers, and many handsets stood out for very specific reasons. Below is a rundown of the best Android devices of 2014 and their best features.

    • Android KitKat x86 Updated With Linux 3.18, Better Suspend/Resume

      Android 4.4 “KitKat” has been ported to Intel/AMD x86 processors for a while in stable form while kicking off the New Year is the second stable release of Android-x86 4.4

      Android-x86 4.4-r2 is the second stable update to KitKat for Intel/AMD processors. This update has various x86-specific improvements targeted for tablets and netbooks.

    • Nokia N1 Android Tablet Release Date in China Set for January

      Nokia has confirmed the launch date of its first Nokia-branded Android tablet, the N1, which will first hit the Chinese market on Jan. 7, 2015.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • News: OLPC releases a farm version.

    The One Laptop Per Child project, still going strong in 2015, provides a new version of the nearly indestructable XO laptop which is specifically geared toward children in farming communities.

    The XO Tablet is an Android tablet designed for children 3-12 years old that brings OLPC’s expertise to both the educational . It features a 7-inch screen and over 150 applications.

2015: Open Source Has Won, But It Isn’t Finished

At the beginning of a new year, it’s traditional to look back over the last 12 months. But as far as this column is concerned, it’s easy to summarise what happened then: open source has won. Let’s take it from the top:

Supercomputers. Linux is so dominant on the Top 500 Supercomputers lists it is almost embarrassing. The November 2014 figures show that 485 of the top 500 systems were running some form of Linux; Windows runs on just one. Things are even more impressive if you look at the numbers of cores involved. Here, Linux is to be found on 22,851,693 of them, while Windows is on just 30,720; what that means is that not only does Linux dominate, it is particularly strong on the bigger systems.

Cloud computing. The Linux Foundation produced an interesting report last year, which looked at the use of Linux in the cloud by large companies. It found that 75% of them use Linux as their primary platform there, against just 23% that use Windows. It’s hard to translate that into market share, since the mix between cloud and non-cloud needs to be factored in; however, given the current popularity of cloud computing, it’s safe to say that the use of Linux is high and increasing. Indeed, the same survey found Linux deployments in the cloud have increased from 65% to 79%, while those for Windows have fallen from 45% to 36%. Of course, some may not regard the Linux Foundation as totaly disinterested here, but even allowing for that, and for statistical uncertainties, it’s pretty clear which direction things are moving in.

Is Open Source Collaboration the Key to Better Communication?

Is open source collaboration the key to communication? No silver bullet exists that provides organizations with everything they desire in a single solution. With that said, commercial open source collaboration solutions help companies future proof their investment and give them what is needed to fit their unique requirements. So, if what you are seeking is better security and privacy, improved flexibility and greater control over your collaboration solution, then you should consider open source.

Events

• 2015: the Year of Open Source with Chinese Characteristics?

  The rise of China is hardly a secret – by some metrics, the Chinese economy is already the largest in the world. But in recent months, it has become clear that Chinese technology companies are also about to have a major impact on the rest of the planet – and that includes the world of open source.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox private browsing directly

    I use the private mode of firefox quite often, for example when I want to test an application while being authenticated in one windown and not authenticated in another window.

SaaS/Big Data

• 2014 and 2015

  In just a few hours 2014 ends. This is a great opportunity to look back at what happened this year in the ownCloud world and in my personal life. This was an absolutely crazy 12-month so this blog post is now way longer that I planed. A huge thanks you to everyone in the ownCloud community. It´s a blast to work together with so many clever and friendly people from all over the world.

Project Releases

• GWorkspace 0.9.3

  New Year’s Eve Edition: GWorkspace 0.9.3 released!

• rfoaas 0.0.5

  A new version of rfoaas is now on CRAN. The rfoaas package provides an interface for R to the most excellent FOAAS service–which provides a modern, scalable and RESTful web service for the frequent need to tell someone to eff off.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • OpenTAC hardware in manufacture

    A bit of news on the development of OpenTAC – the Open Hardware Test Automation Controller.

Programming

• Perl ‘issues’

  I just watched a CCC talk in which the speaker claims Perl is horribly broken. Watching it was fairly annoying however, since I had to restrain myself from throwing things at the screen.

Standards/Consortia

• ODF Plugfest showcases innovations on document collaboration

  The ODF Plugfest that took place in London on 8 and 9 December showcased innovative ways to work with electronic documents. The most striking idea is the borrowing of techniques commonly used in software development, promising many news ways to create and collaborate on documents.

  At the two-day workshop in London, the Berlin-based ODF expert Svante Schubert proposed to borrow techniques commonly used in software development, to manage revisions from many different sources. He suggests to exchange only the changes made in a text, instead of the much more cumbersome sending back and forth of an entire document. “Using files for collaborating on documents is a relic from the era of floppy discs”, developer Schubert says. “It forces a recipient to read the entire document and try to understand what has been changed by others.”

Japan: ‘Solo weddings’ for single women

A travel agency in one of Japan’s most beautiful cities, Kyoto, has started organising bridal ceremonies for single women.

Why Singles Should Say ‘I Don’t’ to The Self-Marriage Movement

Security

• Lizard Kids: A Long Trail of Fail

  The Lizard Squad, a band of young hooligans that recently became Internet famous for launching crippling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the largest online gaming networks, is now advertising own Lizard-branded DDoS-for-hire service. Read on for a decidedly different take on this offering than what’s being portrayed in the mainstream media.

• FBI Waking Up To The Fact That Companies With Itchy Trigger Fingers Want To Hack Back Hacking Attacks

  It’s no secret that some in the computer security world like the idea of being able to “hack back” against online attacks. The simplest form of this idea is that if you’re a company under a denial-of-service attack, should you be able to “hack” a computer that is coordinating those attacks to stop them? More than two years ago, an LA Times article noted that some cybersecurity startups were marketing such services. Related to this, when the terrible CISPA legislation was being debated, one concern was that it would legalize such “hack backs” because, among other things, CISPA would grant immunity to companies “for decisions made based on cyber threat information.” Some interpreted that to mean that companies would have immunity if they decided to hack back against an attacker.

• Security advisories for Wednesday

• Security advisories for Monday

• Tuesday’s security updates

• Want to have your server pwned? Easy: Run PHP

  More than 78 per cent of all PHP installations are running with at least one known security vulnerability, a researcher has found.

  Google developer advocate Anthony Ferrara reached this unpleasant conclusion by correlating statistics from web survey site W3Techs with lists of known vulnerabilities in various versions of PHP.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Oliver Stone: Ukraine’s revolution was CIA ‘plot’

  US director Oliver Stone has called Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution that ousted president Viktor Yanukovych a CIA “coup” and claimed that the West played a role in fostering anti-government protests in the country.

  The filmmaker, who is not new to conspiracy theories around world events, posted the bizarre theory on Facebook after a four-hour interview with Yanukovych, whom he called “legitimate president of Ukraine until he suddenly wasn’t on February 22 of this year”.

• Oliver Stone Says Ukraine’s Revolution Was Actually A CIA Plot

  Acclaimed film director Oliver Stone on Tuesday claimed that the overthrow of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych earlier this year was the result of an American plot.

  Stone, who is known for his left-wing politics, made the claim via a post on his Facebook page. In it, he revealed that he’d spoken to the ousted ruler for “4 hours in Moscow for new English language documentary produced by Ukrainians.” Stone did not provide many details on the documentary but said it “seems clear that the so-called ‘shooters’ who killed 14 police men, wounded some 85, and killed 45 protesting civilians, were outside third party agitators.”

• ‘CIA fingerprints’ all over Kiev massacre – Oliver Stone

  The armed coup in Kiev is painfully similar to CIA operations to oust unwanted foreign leaders in Iran, Chile and Venezuela, said US filmmaker Oliver Stone after interviewing Ukraine’s ousted president for a documentary.

• Oliver Stone Meets Toppled Ukrainian President Yanukovych, Accuses CIA of Sparking Coup

• Mashable: Oliver Stone says CIA was behind Ukraine revolution in bizarre Facebook rant

• Ukraine Massacre has CIA Fingerprints Says Oliver Stone

• Oliver Stone: U.S. Behind Ukraine Revolt, Has ‘CIA Fingerprints on It’

• Famous US Director Oliver Stone to Shoot a Documentary on 2014 Ukraine Coup

  Hollywood film producer Oliver Stone has said he wants to make a four-hour documentary telling the “dirty story” of the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in what he believes was a “coup” organized with the help of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency.

• Ukraine Wants Action, But U.S. Sends Hashtags Instead

  As Russian troops amass along the Ukraine border and take over military facilities in the Crimea region, the United States has distanced itself from any boots-on-the-ground intervention.

  The U.S. won’t send troops or weapons, but it will send hashtags.

  While Congress approved an aid package for Ukraine and sanctions against Russia this week, the State Department pushed a Twitter campaign under the hashtag #UnitedForUkraine, which calls on people to share their support for the country.

  President Obama had great success using social media during his campaigning days, but does that same mindset work for foreign affairs?

  “I don’t know what effect this is supposed to have,” said former State Department diplomat James Lewis. “It’s a hashtag. What’s it going to do? For this situation, it’s not a useful tool.”

  To get the momentum going on the hashtag, top officials posted their own photos. Among the most notable was the State Department’s chief spokesperson Jen Psaki, who was once in the running for the Obama’s press secretary.

• Idaho woman shot dead by two-year-old son was nuclear scientist

  The woman who was accidentally shot dead by her two-year-old son in an Idaho Walmart is described by those who knew her as a gun lover, a motivated academic and a successful nuclear research scientist.

  “She was a beautiful, young, loving mother who was taken much too soon,” Veronica Rutledge’s father-in-law, Terry Rutledge, told the Spokesman-Review. “She was out on what was supposed to be a fun-filled day with her son and nieces.”

  Rutledge was shot at about 10.20am on Tuesday, in the electronics department of the Hayden, Idaho, Walmart. Kootenai County sheriffs said her son, sitting in the front of a shopping cart, reached into Rutledge’s purse, found her weapon and shot his mother.

  “I mean, this is a pretty tragic incident right now that we’re dealing with,” Kootenai lieutenant Stu Miller told reporters on Tuesday. “When you have young children, small people, holiday season – it’s not a pleasant experience.”

  While shopping with her son and nieces in the store, Rutledge carried a loaded small-caliber handgun zippered in a pocket in her purse. The purse was a Christmas gift from her husband, Colt Rutledge, one designed specifically for concealed carry, the Washington Post reported.

• Killer Drones Are a Lethal Extension of American Exceptionalism

  In his 2009 acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, President Barack Obama declared, “Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct. And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war.” By the time Obama accepted the award, one year into his presidency, he had ordered more drone strikes than George W. Bush had authorized during his two presidential terms.

  The Bush administration detained and tortured suspected terrorists. The Obama administration has chosen to illegally assassinate them, often with the use of drones. The continued indefinite detention of men at Guantánamo belies Obama’s pledge two days after his first inauguration to close the prison camp there. However, Obama has added only one detainee to the Guantánamo roster. “This government has decided that instead of detaining members of al-Qaida [at Guantánamo] they are going to kill them,” according to John Bellinger, who formulated the Bush administration’s drone policy.

• Congress AWOL on predator drone killings

  Evidence in the public domain suggests that predator drone strikes are doing more harm than good.

  That is not surprising. The Senate Intelligence Committee report released recently similarly showed that post-9/11 torture did not work on al Qaeda detainees and facilitated international terrorist recruitment.

  Yet Congress has been derelict in failing to conduct comprehensive oversight hearings to appraise the predator drone program. They would probably provoke legislation to terminate the professedly targeted killings because they create more terrorists or terrorist sympathizers than they eliminate.

• Opinion: The dirty side of ‘clean’ warfare

  The German public has reacted with surprise to headlines that the Bundeswehr passed on so-called “kill lists” of Afghan “terrorists” to the US. Admitting the truth can be painful at times, says Kersten Knipp.

• Noor was ‘on NATO kill list’: Spiegel

• Merkel pressured over targeted killings in Afghanistan

  German weekly Der Spiegel published secret NATO documents revealing a list of around 750 suspected Taliban officials, some of whom were killed without charge or trial.

  Opposition parties demanded an explanation from Chancellor Angela Merkel Tuesday after a German newspaper published secret documents suggesting Germany had provided intelligence for targeted killings of Taliban members in Afghanistan.

• Merkel pressured over targeted killings in Afghanistan

• Renaming Afghan War, renaming murder

  The U.S.-led NATO war on Afghanistan has lasted so long they’ve decided to rename it, declare the old war over, and announce a brand new war they’re just sure you’re going to love.

  The war thus far has lasted as long as U.S. participation in World War II plus U.S. participation in World War I, plus the Korean War, plus the Spanish American War, plus the full length of the U.S. war on the Philippines, combined with the whole duration of the Mexican American War.

• Social Control in America, Police Enforcement of “Minor Crimes”

  In the United States in 2014, you may be arrested for selling loose cigarettes, jumping turnstiles, dancing on the subways, and having small amounts of marijuana, but not for assassination, torture, anal rape, illegal surveillance, or invading, occupying and bombing sovereign countries.

• “Distancing Acts:” Private Mercenaries and the War on Terror in American Foreign Policy

  At the time, Weiss was one of at least 48,000 corporate soldiers working in Iraq for more than 170 private military companies (PMCs), with another 30,000 to 100,000 serving in Afghanistan at any given point during the war along with thousands more who performed menial tasks like cooking and cleaning for marginal pay.2 Though the Pentagon claims not to keep records on mercenary fatalities, over 1,000 mercenaries are estimated to have been killed in Iraq and another 2,500 in Afghanistan, including eight who worked for the CIA, with thousands more wounded.3 A 1989 UN treaty, which the U.S. did not sign, prohibits the recruitment, training, use and financing of mercenaries, or combatants motivated to take part in hostilities by private gain, with PMCs claiming exclusion on the grounds that they play a combat support role.4 This essay details the role of PMCs in America’s long Iraq War in light of a century-long history of U.S. use of mercenary and clandestine forces throughout the world. It shows the multiple ways of mercenary war as a means of concealing military intervention from public view. The Bush administration carried these practices to extreme levels, particularly in financing organizations which profit from war and hence are dedicated to its perpetuation.

• It’s Not the Koran, It’s Us

  The corporate media chorus willfully ignores that U.S. actions, not Islam, fuel jihadism.

• Ukraine’s Year of Precarious Triumph [Revisionism]

• 153 killed by drone strikes in Pakistan in 2014

  At least 153 people have been killed in 25 U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s restless tribal belt in 2014, according to figures from a Pakistan-based think tank.

• Peace Activist Kathy Kelly Heads to Prison for Protesting U.S. Drone War

  Peace activist Kathy Kelly is about to begin a three-month prison sentence for protesting the U.S. drone war at a military base in Missouri earlier this year. Kelly, along with another activist, was arrested after offering bread and an indictment against drone warfare. Kelly is the co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, a campaign to end U.S. military and economic warfare.

• Gaza’s children struggle to overcome nightmares of war

  Muntasser survived an Israeli strike on Gaza this summer which killed his young brother and three cousins. Five months and a suicide attempt later the Palestinian boy remains haunted by the memory.

  Just a week into the deadly 50-day July-August war, two Israeli missiles slammed into a beach in Gaza City where Muntasser Bakr, 11, was playing football with relatives.

• The latest blockbuster from CIA Pictures: The Interview

  Co-directors Seth Rogen (who also plays a leading role) and Evan Goldberg and screenwriter Dan Sterling have created a work that consists largely of a series of unconnected vulgar jokes and gags strung over a plot that glorifies state murder. One of the sharper characterizations of the film is to be found in the emails from Sony executives, who panned The Interview as “desperately unfunny and repetitive.” The studio officials termed the film “another misfire” by Rogen and [actor James] Franco, in which “Franco proves once again that irritation is his strong suit.”

• Stranger than Fiction: The Interview and U.S. Regime-Change Policy Toward North Korea

  Representations of North Korea as a buffoon, a menace, or both on the American big screen are at least as old and arguably as tired as the George W. Bush-era phrase, “the axis of evil.” Along with the figure of the Muslim “terrorist,” hackneyed Hollywood constructions of the “ronery” or diabolical Dr. Evil-like North Korean leader bent on world domination, the sinister race-bending North Korean spy, the robotic North Korean commando, and other post-Cold War Red/Yellow Peril bogeymen have functioned as go-to enemies for the commercial film industry’s geopolitical and racist fantasies. Explaining why the North Korean leader was the default choice for the villain in his 2014 regime-change comedy, The Interview, Seth Rogen has stated, “It’s not that controversial to label [North Korea] as bad. It’s as bad as it could be.”1 Indeed, one-dimensional caricatures of North Korea flourish in the Western media in no small part because “[w]acky dictators sell.”2 Yet when it comes to Hollywood’s North Korean regime-change narratives, the line between fact and fiction, not to mention the distinction between freedom of expression and government propaganda, is revealingly thin. Whether in Hollywood or Washington, the only permissible narrative for North Korea is what Donald Macintyre, former Seoul bureau chief for Time magazine, has called “the demonization script.”3 Not only have the dream machines of the entertainment industry long played an instrumental role within American theaters of war, but also, U.S. officials and political commentators often marshal the language of entertainment—for example, the description of U.S.-South Korea combined military exercises as “war games” and the Obama administration’s references to the Pentagon’s “playbook” with regard to North Korea—when describing U.S. military maneuvers on and around the Korean peninsula.

• CIA releases statement on the 5 year anniversary of the murder of seven CIA agents in Afghanistan

  The suicide bomber had been recruited as a CIA informant and taken to Afghanistan to infiltrate the upper ranks of al-Qaeda. For months, he provided the Agency with independently verifiable intelligence on the terrorist network, and he promised to lead the CIA to the group’s most senior members. Instead, the asset was an al-Qaeda double agent…”

• Ecuador: CIA justifies Reyes ‘targeting’ in 2008

  According to a secret study released by the WikiLeaks group on Dec. 18, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) considers the killing of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) second-in-command Raúl Reyes by Colombian forces in Ecuadorian territory on Mar. 1, 2008 an example of ways that assassinations of rebel leaders “can play a useful role.” In addition to the Reyes case, the paper reviews the use of “high-value targeting (HVT)”—the killing or capture of top leaders—in fighting rebels in Afghanistan, Algeria, Colombia, Iraq, Israel, Peru, Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka. HTV can have “negative effects,” the study concludes, but the practice can “contribute to successful counterinsurgency outcomes” if used strategically. The July 9, 2009 study, marked “secret” and “NOFORN” (“no foreign nationals”), is entitled “Making High-Value Targeting Operations an Effective Counterinsurgency Tool”; it apparently forms part of a “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency” series.

  Reyes, the FARC’s chief spokesperson and negotiator, was killed when the Colombian military launched a nighttime air raid and then an incursion against a rebel encampment in Ecuador’s northeastern Sucumbíos province about three kilometers from the Colombian border. Some 19 FARC members were killed in the operation, as were four Mexican students who had been visiting the encampment while in Ecuador to attend a leftist conference. Although the Colombian government and the media treated the attack as a simple raid against a group of rebels, the CIA study refers to it as part of a number of “successful HVT strikes against top insurgent leaders in early 2008, in conjunction with earlier strikes against second and third-tier leaders and finance and logistics specialists.” Reyes’ death “is likely to have seriously damaged FARC discipline and morale, even among its leadership, according to a CIA field commentary.” As an example of the operation’s success, the CIA noted that “[p]ublic support for the Colombian government solidified in the wake of the killing…with President Alvaro Uribe’s approval rating increasing from the mid-70% range to as high as 84%.”

Finance

• Police dismantle soup kitchen for London homeless, evict activists

  Social justice activists determined to feed the homeless have faced eviction for the second time following their attempts to open a soup kitchen in Westminster, in the heart of London. They were forcibly ousted by police Tuesday night.

  Following their eviction from a listed Victorian building near Trafalgar Square they had been occupying in the run-up to Christmas, the group decided to set up a soup kitchen outside.

  Since December 25, they had been distributing food, coffee and tea outside the vacant offices to people sleeping rough on the streets of London.

• American Democracy Under Threat for 250 Years

  But these old works do invite us to live questions that they lived, which many of us had complacently forgotten, and which Pikettymania was an effort to remember. These are the inescapable questions of a world where the economy, including global ecology, does not take care of itself, and where it may come into conflict with democracy. They are questions for a world where we need to get clearer on what we mean by democracy, and what we lose when we neglect or betray it.

• French ‘rock-star’ economist Thomas Piketty refuses country’s highest honor

  France’s star economist Thomas Piketty, who shot to fame and topped best-seller lists in 2014 with his controversial book on wealth and inequality, has declined the country’s highest award, the Legion d’Honneur, local media said on Thursday.

  “I refuse this nomination because I don’t think it’s up to a government to say who is honorable,” Piketty told AFP news agency. “They would do better to focus on reviving growth in France and Europe.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Brands pay Twitter to falsely appear in your following list

  A Twitter advertising technique is perturbing people. Promoted brands like MasterCard and IFC are appearing in the list of accounts some users follow, even if they don’t actually follow them.

  Sources familiar with the company’s advertising strategy tell me this has been occurring since early 2013, but the public has only just now cottoned onto it thanks to actor William Shatner (of Star Trek fame). Shatner brought attention to it after he saw that “MasterCard” appeared in his following list despite the fact that he didn’t follow it. He did a little investigation and discovered that the same promoted account appeared on Dwayne Johnson’s follower list, looking a little out of place given “The Rock” only followed one other account.

• Murdoch, Scaife and CIA Propaganda

  The rapid expansion of America’s right-wing media began in the 1980s as the Reagan administration coordinated foreign policy initiatives with conservative media executives, including Rupert Murdoch, and then cleared away regulatory hurdles, reports Robert Parry.

Censorship

• Air Canada Blocks Access To Any Google Hosted RSS Feed (Including Techdirt) For No Good Reason

  The block here is clearly not directed at Techdirt, but rather at Google’s Feedproxy service — which was formerly Feedburner, a company Google bought years ago. Many, many, many sites that have RSS feeds use Google’s service as it makes it much easier to manage your RSS feed and to do some basic analytics on it.

  In this case, it appears that Air Canada has (for reasons unknown) wasted good money on a company called “Datavalet” which offers “Guest Access Management” for companies who offer WiFi access to customers. Datavalet proudly highlights Air Canada and famed Canadian donut chain Tim Hortons among its customers.

• China Echoes America’s NSA in Fresh Crackdown on Gmail

  Some users were also able to access Gmail via cell phone clients on Google’s Android, the top mobile operating system in China.

Privacy

• The Android Apps That Collect the Most Data on You

  Apps often need permission to access other stuff on your phone to work. What is less obvious is the breadth of information collected, and why it gets scooped up. Vocativ put together a list of common permissions from popular Android apps, calling it a “barometer of what app makers think they can get away with.”

• How Facebook Killed Our Class Reunion

  I remember being excited senior year of high school when thinking about our future class reunion. My excitement stemmed from a movie I had watched. In the movie, the star was the ugly duckling growing up. When he arrived at his class reunion, he was a rich hunk with a gorgeous bride. I couldn’t wait to be “that guy”. I also couldn’t wait for all of the “popular kids” to show up at this future class reunion fat and strung out. It was going to be GREAT.

  As it turns out, I was entirely wrong. NOBODY showed up at our class reunion. Because we never had one. And I blame Facebook. The social media giant has helped us all become closer apart.

• Tor de farce: NSA fails to decrypt anonymised network

  A new round of NSA documents snatched by master blabbermouth Edward Snowden appeared online late on Sunday, revealing spooks’ internet security pet hates.

  The latest dump of PDFs published by Der Spiegel appeared to show what the Five Eyes surveillance buddies – the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – see as obstacles posed by internet security protocols.

• Snowden files reveal NSA had ‘major problems’ tracking Tor dark web users and cracking encryption

  Although it’s now well known that US spy agency NSA and its British cousin GCHQ were able to monitor, collect, and analyse our digital communications, a new report reveals which encrypted programmes gave the spy agencies a headache.

• Leaked NSA Documents Reveal The Best Way To Stay Anonymous Online

  It’s not easy to truly be anonymous online. Sure, there are plenty of chat apps and secret-sharing sites that claim to offer you privacy, but it’s tricky to know whether US intelligence agencies have a backdoor in them or not.

  The best way to stay anonymous online has been to use Tor, a special kind of web browser developed to help US government employees hide their tracks online.

• Leaked NSA Documents Reveal How To Hide From The NSA

  If you want a truly anonymous life, then maybe it’s time you learned about Tor, CSpace and ZRTP.

  These three technologies could help people hide their activities from the National Security Agency, according to NSA documents newly obtained from the archive of former contractor Edward Snowden by the German magazine Der Spiegel.

• Latest Snowden Revelations Expose Scope Of NSA Interceptions

  But perhaps more significantly, the revelations culled from the trove of documents leaked by Edward Snowden show the forms of encryption the NSA struggled to break (at least at the time of the documents in 2012). That list includes PGP, Tor, CSpace, OTR and ZRTP.

  [...]

  Another alarming statistic from the article is the number of https connections, the type of secure connections used by sites like Facebook, that the agency intercepts. One document showed that by late 2012, the NSA was cracking 10 million such connections a day.

• EFF: What we learned about NSA spying in 2014 and what we’re fighting to expose in 2015

  After a banner year for shedding light on the NSA’s secret surveillance programs in 2013, the pace of disclosures in 2014 — both from whistleblowers and through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits — slowed significantly.

• Google tells WikiLeaks about emails it handed to NSA two years ago

  Google delivered a boob of a Christmas present to WikiLeaks by informing the organisation that it turned over an email account to the National Security Agency [NSA] following a request over two years ago.

  A Twitter post by WikiLeaks stated that Google contacted the group on Christmas Eve to inform them the Gmail mailboxes and account metadata of an employee were handed over to law enforcement authorities after a US federal warrant had been issued, Ars Technica reports.

• If the Supreme Court tackles the NSA in 2015, it’ll be one of these five cases

  Roughly a year and a half since the first Snowden disclosures, there’s already been a judicial order to shut down the National Security Agency’s bulk metadata collection program.

  The lawsuit filed by Larry Klayman, a veteran conservative activist, would essentially put a stop to unchecked NSA surveillance. And at the start of 2015, he remains the only plaintiff whose case has won when fighting for privacy against the newly understood government monitoring. However, it’s currently a victory in name only—the judicial order in Klayman was stayed pending the government’s appeal.

• This privacy-protecting app cocktail is the NSA’s worst nightmare

  The agency has identified one anonymity method that’s impossible to crack. By combining several services including Tor, VPNs, CSpace and ZRTP, Internet users would give the NSA a “catastrophic” headache, as their communications would be virtually impossible to intercept.

  This cocktail leads to a “near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications, presence,” as the NSA explains.

• NSA has VPNs in Vulcan death grip—no, really, that’s what they call it

  The National Security Agency’s Office of Target Pursuit (OTP) maintains a team of engineers dedicated to cracking the encrypted traffic of virtual private networks (VPNs) and has developed tools that could potentially uncloak the traffic in the majority of VPNs used to secure traffic passing over the Internet today, according to documents published this week by the German news magazine Der Speigel. A slide deck from a presentation by a member of OTP’s VPN Exploitation Team, dated September 13, 2010, details the process the NSA used at that time to attack VPNs—including tools with names drawn from Star Trek and other bits of popular culture.

• NSA’s Vulcan Death Grip on VPNs

• What’s in the files the NSA dribbled out after its Xmas dump?

  Patrick writes, “The NSA dumped its IOB reports on Christmas Eve, except that it was short 15 files, I pointed that out, next dump was silent but an additional 12 files, I pointed out the three missing files, and as of today, the three extra files were added, but the extra 3 files have a different naming convention.”

• NSA IOB Dump Finally Complete!

  The “Christmas Eve” NSA file dump that you will see reported at: NSA Waited Until Christmas Eve To Release Details Of Its Illegal Surveillance On Americans, What you need to know about the NSA document dump, and, U.S. Spy Agency Reports Improper Surveillance of Americans, repeated by various other sources, which never mentioned the dump being incomplete, is now complete.

  I reported in Merry Christmas From the NSA! Missing Files about 15 missing files, which by my report of: NSA IOB Report Dump – Still Missing Files had become 3 missing files and when I checked today, the NSA file dump is complete, all being silent corrections to the file dump.

• The NSA’s Ongoing Efforts to Hide Its Lawbreaking

  Every quarter, the National Security Agency generates a report on its own lawbreaking and policy violations. The reports are classified and sent to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board. It’s unclear what happens once they get there.

• A New Year’s resolution for Obama: Dismantle the NSA

  Here’s a perfect New Year’s resolution: Let’s abolish the National Security Agency and prosecute its agents for spying on us. It’s perfect because it’s the right thing to do — and because it’s a promise that’s probably impossible to keep.

  On Christmas Eve, the NSA, complying with a Freedom of Information Act request from the American Civil Liberties Union, released documents showing that intelligence agents used the incredible resources of the NSA to spy on their wives, husbands, and girlfriends.

• New Documents Reveal What the NSA Can’t Crack Yet

• Tor, TrueCrypt, Tails topped the NSA’s ‘most wanted’ list in 2012

  Three out of three? That could be the score for the U.S. National Security Agency’s cryptographic “most wanted” list of 2012.

  In January 2012, it saw Internet traffic anonymizing tool Tor (The Onion Router), Linux distribution Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) and disk encryption system TrueCrypt as the biggest threats to its ability to intercept Internet traffic and interpret other information it acquires.

  Since then, flaws have been found in Tor and the FBI has unmasked Tor users and a vulnerability was found in Tails allowing attackers to determine users’ IP addresses.

  And while a source-code audit gave TrueCrypt a relatively clean bill of health in April, TrueCrypt’s anonymous developers inexplicably abandoned the software a few weeks later, warning it was insecure.

• Tor, TrueCrypt, Tails topped the NSA’s ‘most wanted’ in 2012, per newly revealed Snowden leaks

• New Snowden Documents Reveal That The NSA Can’t Hack Everyone

• New NSA leaks: does crypto still work?

  Some of the new leaks imply that the NSA is able to compromise core cryptographic Internet protocols like TLS and IPSEC. This is scary news indeed: if the underlying mathematics of crypto are compromised, then in some important sense, all bets are off. But as Green shows, the NSA does not appear to be attacking the math: instead, it has infiltrated and subverted big companies in order to steal their cryptographic certificates, which means that the companies can’t be trusted, but the math can be (probably).

• Infiltrate the NSA

  The story of John Ashcroft and James Comey’s hospital-bed heroics has by now been told many times. On March 10, 2004, President Bush’s White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and chief of staff, Andrew Card, went to the intensive care unit of George Washington University Hospital to try to persuade the ill attorney general, Ashcroft, to sign off on continuing massive collection of Americans’ Internet “metadata,” a program started in October 2001. Comey, then the deputy attorney general, had refused to reauthorize the program; its most recent authorization was scheduled to expire the next day. Comey got to his boss first, and Ashcroft refused to sign. Though pushed hard by Gonzales and Card, and also by Vice President Dick Cheney and his counsel, David Addington, Comey and several of his Department of Justice colleagues stood their ground and declined to ratify this domestic metadata collection based on the president’s bare say-so.

• NSA spying in Vienna detailed at Chaos meet

  Austrian journalist Erich Möchel delivered a presentation in Hamburg at the annual meeting of the Chaos Computer Club on Monday December 29, detailing the various locations where the US NSA has been actively collecting and processing electronic intelligence in Vienna.

• Despite Backlash, German Govt Still Working With NSA

  The Edward Snowden leaks and the revelation of wholesale NSA surveillance of the entire planet hit a lot of people hard, but particularly in Germany, where the public knows all too well the dangers of a surveillance state. The backlash was huge, and the German government promised major changes to their relationship with the US spies.

• Backlash in Berlin over NSA spying recedes as threat from Islamic State rises

  In a crescendo of anger over American espionage, Germany expelled the CIA’s top operative, launched an investigation of the vast U.S. surveillance programs exposed by Edward Snowden and extracted an apology from President Barack Obama for the years that U.S. spies had reportedly spent monitoring German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone.

• Online privacy and the Edward Snowden documentary

  Laura Poitras’ new documentary about mega-leaker Edward Snowden, “Citizenfour,” makes no pretense at being evenhanded. It’s a polemic against the National Security Agency’s effort to spy on people in the United States and around the world – innocent, guilty, or simply suspect – all in the name of national security.

• Topeka man, 89, files suit against Edward Snowden, documentary producers

  When Horace Edwards saw a recent showing of the documentary “Citizenfour,” which chronicles former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s leak of classified documents, he was aghast.

• Secret report cited in NSA surveillance lawsuit, gov’t silent on its existence

  Civil rights and federal attorneys sparred at a hearing over a case involving domestic dragnet surveillance by the federal government. The plaintiffs argued the searches are illegal, while the government said opponents don’t have enough evidence to know.

  The hearing, requested by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for a partial summary judgment, concerns the class action lawsuit, Jewel v. NSA, which was filed six years ago. It claims the National Security Agency (NSA) acquired AT&T customers’ e-mail and other data using surveillance devices attached to the company’s network.

• Snowden reveals how to go ‘level 5′, give the NSA fits

  Civil rights and federal attorneys sparred at a hearing over a case involving domestic dragnet surveillance by the federal government. The plaintiffs argued the searches are illegal, while the government said opponents don’t have enough evidence to know.

  The hearing, requested by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for a partial summary judgment, concerns the class action lawsuit, Jewel v. NSA, which was filed six years ago. It claims the National Security Agency (NSA) acquired AT&T customers’ e-mail and other data using surveillance devices attached to the company’s network.

• Prying Eyes: Inside the NSA’s War on Internet Security

  When Christmas approaches, the spies of the Five Eyes intelligence services can look forward to a break from the arduous daily work of spying. In addition to their usual job — attempting to crack encryption all around the world — they play a game called the “Kryptos Kristmas Kwiz,” which involves solving challenging numerical and alphabetical puzzles. The proud winners of the competition are awarded “Kryptos” mugs.

Civil Rights

• The law will protect any member of Congress who releases the full torture report. Someone needs to step up

  In 1971, I entered the full text of the top-secret Pentagon Papers – a history of how the US became mired in the swamp of the Vietnam War – into the Congressional Record, even as the Federal Bureau of Investigation was hunting for Daniel Ellsburg (who gave the papers to the New York Times) and President Richard Nixon and his Justice Department were filing injunctions against newspapers to prevent their publication. Subsequent case law affirmed that members of Congress may reveal any government “secret” to the public without fear of prosecution because of the “Speech and Debate” clause of the constitution, from which members derive their duty to inform the people about the actions of their government.

• Off-Duty Cop Wrestles, Slams Woman Into Car After Fender-Bender

  After video of a man wrestling a woman and throwing her against a car came to light Tuesday, the San Jose Police Department issued a warrant – for the woman’s arrest.

  Of course the man “being assaulted” was none other than an off-duty San Jose Cop in plainclothes. The officer reportedly approached the woman – without identifying himself as a police officer – after a fender bender between their cars.

• The Dissenter’s Top Films of 2014

  Steve Rogers, who is Captain America (Chris Evans), awakens from decades of suspended animation, to find himself in the present day when the global war on terrorism is being waged. He works for SHIELD, a powerful paramilitary spy agency that now has military drones called “hellicarriers,” which allow for assassination. As Rogers says, “I thought the punishment usually came after the crime.” Part of the reason why the agency has turned to assassination is because the agency was infiltrated, and Captain America spends the movie dealing with this.

• Police: Man was locking, not stealing from cars

  It seemed an unlikely excuse from a man suspected of breaking into cars at an auto yard. But police say it appears a Norwalk man was being truthful when he insisted he was just checking the vehicles to make sure they were locked.

  Employees at Coating’s Auto Body caught 20-year-old Alexander Louis Friday and held him for police.

• An Open Letter to People Who Think the Police Accountability Movement is Built on Hate

  This is a message to Allen Clifton, co-founder of Forward Progressives, and anyone else who labels the police accountability movement dangerous and hateful. Us “anti-government activists” as you called us, protesters, cop watchers, cop blockers, members of the civil rights movement; we are not hate groups as you recently proclaimed, despite being thoroughly told you are wrong in the comment section of your own article. You join the ranks of other “journalists” like Bill O’Reilly who recently attacked Cop Block and others who film the police.

• The CIA Phoenix Program: US Government is No Stranger to Torture

  From 1967 to 1971, the Central Intelligence Agency ran a secret government operation called Phoenix. (4) At the time, the program was classified and, due to the unpopularity of the Vietnam War, it received wide public scrutiny. In fact, many war protesters called it an illegal assassination program. (5)

  The Phoenix Program’s official stated purpose was to gather intelligence on the communist Viet Cong and share that information with South Vietnamese military and government leaders. The program has been heralded a success due to its ability to “gain detailed knowledge about the Viet Cong and to disrupt that organization”. (5) So what does “disrupt” mean, exactly?

  To many detractors, it means exactly what it sounds like: assassination. In fact, the program is known to have resulted in about 20,000 deaths. (4)

  One of those is a South Vietnamese interpreter by the name of Thai Khac Chuyen. (6) Chuyen was accused of being a double agent and killed by six Special Forces soldiers in 1969, but those soldiers were never held accountable for their actions because U.S. political leaders didn’t want key witnesses to testify. Therefore, a trial for the soldiers could not be staged. This event led to Daniel Ellsberg copying key documents and releasing them to the press.

  Rightly or wrongly, the U.S. developed a reputation for murder on the battlefield, an irony not lost on political conservatives who have criticized journalists for losing the Vietnam War merely by reporting on ugly incidents like Chuyen’s assassination, and his treatment prior, and the My Lai Massacre. (7)

• Report Implicates U.S. In Brazilian Dictatorship’s Torture Practices

  The scope of CIA torture revealed in this week’s Senate Intelligence Committee report has come as a shock to many, but America’s involvement with torture predates the terrorist attacks on 9/11. This week Brazil published its very own torture report as part of an investigation into the crimes perpetrated during the country’s 21 year-long U.S. backed military dictatorship. It confirms what historians have been writing about for years: that torture and other human rights abuses were systemic within the regime, and that the military received extensive training by the U.S. and the U.K. on torture and other repressive techniques.

• CIA Torture’s Immeasurable Damage to U.S. Global Leadership

  Last month’s revelations about CIA torture have hurt U.S. credibility worldwide. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA Interrogation concluded the program “created tensions with U.S. partners and allies…complicating bilateral intelligence relationships.” It said the program caused “immeasurable damage to the United States’ public standing, as well as to the United States’ longstanding global leadership on human rights in general….”

• Udall Urged to Disclose Full Torture Report

  Sen. Mark Udall has called for the full release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture. However, as a still-sitting member of Congress, he has a constitutional protection to read most of the still-secret report on the Senate floor — and a group of intelligence veterans urges him to do just that.

• The Secret CIA Document That Could Unravel Case For Torture

  As the public grapples with the gruesome realities put forth in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s damning report on the CIA’s torture program, the agency has dug in to defend itself. The CIA claims the torture tactics it used in the years following 9/11 were legal and saved American lives. And despite what the Senate study alleges, the agency insists it never lied about the torture program.

• Outgoing senator urged to release full CIA torture report

  Calls for Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colorado) to reveal the entire, unredacted CIA torture report have increased, with a group of former intelligence analysts issuing a memo that urges the outgoing legislator to read the report on the Senate floor.

• Britain’s murky role in CIA torture

  Not long ago, in a bid to find out how effective the CIA really was at counterterrorism, U.S. President Barack Obama released a rabbit into a forest and challenged the agency to find it. The CIA spent months planting informers in the forest, interviewing forest creatures, and examining all the forest intelligence. Nothing. Finally the agency went into the forest and dragged out a soaking wet, badly beaten brown bear screaming: “Okay, okay! I’m a rabbit, I’m a rabbit!”

  [...]

  For years, the British government denied that its territory had been used for so-called “rendition” flights, in which terror suspects were illegally transported across the globe by the CIA to countries where they could be tortured. It also denied that British intelligence agencies had any involvement or knowledge of the CIA’s brutal program. The denials were supported by an ISC investigation in 2007 that gave the intelligence agencies and government a clean bill of health. The ISC reiterated its findings in 2010. – See more at: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/2014/Dec-30/282569-britains-murky-role-in-cia-torture.ashx#sthash.I6TN3xGP.dpuf

• Our New Politics of Torture

  New York Review contributor Mark Danner has been writing about the use of torture by the US government since the first years after September 11. Following the release this month of the Senate’s report on the CIA torture program, Hugh Eakin spoke to Danner about some of the most startling findings of the investigation and what it reveals about the continued political debate surrounding the program.

• The CIA’s Torture Program Breeds Hate

  Norman Pollack: The antecedent question, not did the CIA deceive these administrations about the efficacy of EITs, but, as the Senate Report claims, were the administrations even aware of the programs? The Senate Report is seeking to give Obama deniability—i.e., that he was kept in the dark—lest he be held accountable for war crimes. I am in no position to judge whether EITs yielded relevant information. But on solidification of security, no; if anything, torture has turned much of the world against America, and has created the basis for the rise of militant groups and the desire for retribution.

• Nothing ‘awesome’ about CIA torture – Ramzy Baroud

  But CIA torture being a “stain” on an otherwise flawless record doesn’t suffice either. In fact, in some way, this logic is the heart of the problem, since it blocks any attempt at honest reading of whatever “values” Washington stands for, and tries to achieve, using “soft diplomacy” of “rectal feeding.”

  What is equally worrying to what the report has contained is the existing mindset in the US, among the ruling class and the media.

  This reality can be best summarised in the words of a Fox News show co-host, Andrea Tantaros: “The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome,” she exclaimed.

  “The reason they want to have this discussion is not to show how awesome we are. This administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we’re not awesome.”

  With such overriding thoughtless mindset, there is little evidence to show that such “awesomeness” will cease any time soon, even if at the expense of many innocent people. – December 27, 2014.

• ​Gitmo command ordered inmates chained to ceiling, degraded, tortured – ex-FBI specialist

  The recent CIA torture report revealed the agency’s inhumane practices of interrogation during the War on Terror. However, some people claim the information gathered through torture proved valuable and saved lives – but is that so? Is information gathered this way even reliable? Will the CIA stop its practices now the truth is out? And what about the inmates of Guantanamo Bay? What has been done to them? To find answers to these questions and many more, we speak to former FBI criminal profiler Jim Clemente on Sophie&Co today.

• View from abroad: US loses moral high ground after CIA report

  When the US Senate report on the CIA’s torture campaign was released recently, the State Department sent out a warning to US missions abroad to beware of a possible backlash. In the event, beyond indignant newspaper editorials, the international reaction has been somewhat muted.

• There is no debate about torture

  The Senate Intelligence Committee’s scathing torture report not only described the brutality of the CIA’s interrogation methods, but also demonstrated their ineffectiveness. Led by ex-Vice President Dick Cheney, former Bush administration officials have rushed to the airwaves to defend the CIA.

  “I would do it again in a minute,” Cheney said on NBC’s Meet the Press, claiming that Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs) produced “actionable intelligence that kept us safe from attacks”.

• He was tortured for three years. Now he’s fighting against it — and denouncing the CIA

  Nearly four decades later, Perico Rodriguez recalls his torture. He fought to breathe. Prison guards had blindfolded him and chained him to a bunk-bed. They tied his hands behind his back and shoved his face into a bucket of water.

  The technique was known as El Submarino, a cousin of waterboarding used during Argentina’s “Dirty War”. His lungs, he said, never recovered.

• Ministers STILL won’t tell truth about torture: Foreign Office refuses to give details of UK meetings with team behind CIA dossier

  Ministers faced fresh accusations of a cover-up last night after refusing to reveal crucial details of British meetings with US politicians investigating CIA torture.

  Home Secretary Theresa May was one of several British politicians and envoys who paid 24 visits to senior members of the Senate Intelligence Committee as it investigated barbaric techniques used on terror suspects.

  The disclosure has fuelled claims that the Government desperately lobbied to keep allegations of Britain’s complicity in torture out of the committee’s damning report

• Letter: CIA and torture

  Mr. Olszewski states that millions of Americans who died protecting our freedom would have no problem with a little physical and psychological torture.

  I would like to know who or how many of these Americans who died elected him to act as their spokesman regarding their mindsets about torture.

  For your edification, Mr. Olszewski, these fun and games the CIA played resulted in a detainee meeting his death by drowning from hypothermia while being waterboarded. A second detainee died from hypothermia while being handcuffed to his cell wall without any clothing in freezing temperatures.

  We hanged German leaders who were responsible for torturing people, after they were found guilty of these crimes at the Nuremberg trials.

• Numbers Game: What CIA Torture Report Has Shown (Other Than Torture)

  ‘American people have a right – indeed, a responsibility – to know what was done in their name; how these practices did or did not serve our interests; and how they comported with our most important values,” says John McCain. But he seems to be alone among pro-torture, CIA-supporting politicians.

  Indeed, McCain’s views on the subject seem highly unpopular in the Republican Party. Reactions pretty much sum up to various forms of denial, fear mongering and finger-pointing. ‘This release could endanger the lives of Americans overseas, jeopardize U.S. relations with foreign partners, potentially incite violence, create political problems for our allies, and be used as a recruitment tool for our enemies,’ say Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Jim Risch. One might argue that most of the world suspected the CIA of torture anyways, not to mention a level of anti-American notions in certain parts of the world that have been stable for a long time, but who cares, let’s panic.

• The Prosecution of the CIA Whistleblower Who Revealed Waterboarding to the World

  CIA Torture Program Whistleblower John Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison while those he exposed still remain free.

• Human rights act stops CIA abuses, says former Attorney General

• Senior Tory defends Human Rights Act as a bastion against abuses like those exposed in the CIA torture report

  Former attorney general Dominic Grieve has said “egregious” behaviour like the CIA torture techniques would not occur in Britain because of the European Convention on Human Rights.

  His intervention comes amid a bitter dispute within the Conservative party over the leadership’s plan to stop British laws being overruled by European judges.

  Mr Grieve has criticised his party’s proposals for a new Bill of Rights which proponents said would give UK courts and Parliament the final say over Europe.

• European Convention on Human Rights ‘stops egregious acts’

• CONVENTION ‘STOPS EGREGIOUS ACTS’

• Employees who expose wrongdoing pay a price

  When Ilana Greenstein blew the whistle on mismanagement at the CIA, she tried to follow all the proper procedures.

  First, she told her supervisors that she believed the agency had bungled its spying operations in Baghdad. Then, she wrote a letter to the director of the agency.

• CIA whistleblower being treated like ‘traitor’

  A former CIA case officer has gone public with claims of retaliation against her from the bureau after she tried to report her concerns over the misconduct of colleagues in the intelligence service.

  “I don’t believe in breaking the law, I don’t believe in leaks, I don’t believe in divulging classified information,” stated Ilana Greenstein in a video interview released by McClatchy DC, a Washington-based journalistic bureau on Tuesday. “What I believe in is a good internal system, where people who have concerns can voice those concerns without recrimination.”

• New developments concerning report on CIA torture

  Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, accused the CIA of having operated this torture-based conditioning program to fabricated the evidence that provided the rationale for going to war against Iraq [2].

• Ireland seeks clarification from US on Shannon flights

  Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan is seeking clarification from the US government on whether evidence was uncovered in a recent US Senate intelligence committee report of Shannon Airport being used by the CIA for extraordinary rendition.

• Ireland seeks clarification from US over Shannon

  The Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade has confirmed he is seeking clarification from the US Government whether any evidence of Shannon Airport being used by the CIA for extraordinary rendition was uncovered in a recent U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report.

  Minister Charlie Flanagan had been asked by Dublin South West Sinn Féin TD Seán Crowe whether he was aware of the report and revelations about CIA torture of detainees.

• CIA rendition flights and Shannon

  Simon Carswell’s article on Shannon Airport and renditions (“Bush assured Irish State Shannon not used for rendition flights”, December 22nd) provides an important insight into the concerns that two former Irish ministers had in relation to the CIA’s torture and renditions programme.

  Dermot Ahern was minister for foreign affairs and Michael McDowell was minister for justice when a report by Dick Marty for the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe identified Ireland and Shannon as a stopover point for rendition flights. Nonetheless the government failed to take decisive action, apart, it would seem, from asking the US government if it was taking prisoners through Shannon. The US government’s response to such questions can hardly have been a surprise to the ministers.

• U.S. policy hypocrisy evident in CIA torture

  We practiced tortures that we have prosecuted after real war and condemned when used by other countries that could as legitimately claim “national security” as we did. So, it’s not a question of Congress not clearly prohibiting torture, it’s we as a nation allowing our representatives to turn a blind eye to it.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2015?

    Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years—an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1958 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2015, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2054.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in other countries are different—thousands of works are entering the public domain in Canada and the EU on January 1.