• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Format 187 – Escape Windows

Desktop

• Acer sees booming sales of Chromebooks, says CEO

  Acer has seen booming sales of Chromebooks, including government procurement orders for educational purposes in many countries, and therefore has asked supply chains to increase production to reduce supply shortages, according to company CEO Jason Chen, adding that global Chromebook shipments in 2014 are expected to increase 70% on year.

Kernel Space

• Meet the Linux Foundation’s System Administrators

  The Linux Foundation is honoring some of its very own SysAdmins in celebration of SysAdmin Day 2014 by profiling them here on Linux.com.

• Celebrating sysadmins in the cloudy future

  System administration can be a thankless job. To all of the tireless administrators out there who keep the systems we reply upon up and running, today is the day that we say thank you!

• SysAdmin Day 2014: Best Linux Foundation SysAdmin Quotes

  Happy SysAdmin Day 2014! Over the past three weeks we’ve been profiling the Linux Foundation’s heroic team of system administrators in honor of the amazing work they do behind the scenes to keep this organization and our collaborative projects humming. Here are some of their best quotes, which highlight just how talented, passionate and also fun-loving Linux SysAdmins really are.

• Graphics Stack

  • X.Org Foundation Still Works Towards Becoming An SPI Project

    For the better part of a year, the X.Org Foundation has been evaluating a possible merger with SPI. That work is still ongoing and could be put up for a vote in the weeks ahead.

• Benchmarks

  • Nouveau vs. Radeon vs. Intel Tests On Linux 3.16, Mesa 10.3-devel

    As the second part of our Linux graphics testing this week after a Radeon R600/RadeonSI performance update with the Linux 3.16 kernel and Mesa 10.3-devel are some comparative numbers that include Intel’s Haswell HD Graphics and various NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on the Nouveau driver.

Applications

• Rygel 0.23.2 Is a Free DLNA Media Server for Linux

  Rygel, a home media solution (UPnP AV MediaServer) that allows users to easily share audio, video, and pictures to other devices, is now at version 0.23.2.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Install Multiple Apps on Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu

  • How to Fix a Mangled Partition Table on Linux

  • How to use awk command in Linux

  • Getting the CCISS RAID controller to work on EL7

  • Fix “ImportError: No module named _tkinter” In Debian/Ubuntu and Derivatives

  • Sharing documents and calendars from ownCloud

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine Announcement

    The Wine development release 1.7.23 is now available.

    What’s new in this release (see below for details):
    - Better support for files drag & drop.
    - Improvements to the HTTP cookie management.
    - Initial support for 64-bit Android builds.
    - Fixes to crypto certificates management.
    - Various bug fixes.

  • Wine 1.7.23 Has Initial Support For 64-bit Android Builds

• Games

  • Gratuitous Space Battles 2 coming soon to PC, Mac, Linux

  • Steam Beta Update Fixes the Notification Animation

  • Linux Gaming: If You Build It, Will They Come?

    For long-suffering Linux users who have endured the dearth of high-quality action games on their open source desktops, the wait for better game developer support soon may be over.

  • Team Fortress 2 Gets Update That Adjusts Map Layout to Help Players Score More Points

  • GOG’s Mistaken Giveaway, Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, and Wayland in KDE

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Ships Third Beta of Applications and Platform 4.14

    KDE has released the third beta of the 4.14 versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. Your assistance is requested!

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME Control Center 3.13.4 Gets More HiDPI Improvements

  • GNOME Shell 3.13.4 Arrives with Improved HiDPI Support for Wayland

  • GNOME 3.13.4 released

    Here the new GNOME release just in time for GUADEC, this time from Strasburg!! Remember this is a development release, so go ahead and test it, break it, send bug report and patches!

  • GNOME 3.13.4 Continues Working On Wayland & More

  • Superb Point and Click Adventure Game The Journey Down: Chapter Two Finally Announced

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Global Knowledge Introduces Training for Red Hat® Enterprise Linux 7

    Global Knowledge , the world’s leading IT and business skills training provider, today announced the availability of new courses to support the recently launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 . Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 establishes the foundation for the open hybrid cloud and serves enterprise workloads across converged infrastructures – pushing the operating system beyond today’s position as a commodity platform.

• Debian Family

  • Tails, the OS of Snowden, has security vulnerability

  • Secure Linux Distribution Found To Contain A Privacy-Busting Flaw

    TAILS Linux, used by Edward Snowden to communicate with journalists, is patching holes in one of its network overlays

  • The security flaws in Tails Linux are not its only problem

    If you want to use Tor, then Tails is your best friend. Tails is a version of Linux that sends data through the Tor network.

    All Internet traffic to/from Tails goes through Tor, making it resistant to end user mistakes. Tails is not normally installed on a computer, instead it’s run from a bootable DVD, USB flash drive or flash memory card. Compared to the Tor Browser Bundle, Tails is unquestionably the way to go. Ed Snowden uses it.

  • Elive 2.3.4 Beta Is a Nice OS Based on Debian and Enlightenment – Screenshots

    Elive 2.3.4 Beta, a complete operating system for your computer, built on top of Debian GNU/Linux and customized to meet the needs of any user while still offering the eye-candy with minimal hardware requirements, has been released and is now available for download and testing.

  • Autonomous sub powers up with Wheezy on Haswell

    Cornell University’s Gemini AUV will compete in next week’s 2014 RoboSub competition. The sub runs Debian Linux on an Intel Core-based computer-on-module.

    The Cornell University Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (CUAUV) team’s Gemini AUV will enter next week’s 17th Annual International RoboSub competition with the help of Adlink, whose ‘Express-HL’ COM Express style computer-on-module will power the autonomous sub using a stripped down version of Debian ‘Wheezy’ Linux. The competition will be held at the Space and Naval Warfare Command Research facility in San Diego, from July 28 through August 3.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS Officially Announced by Canonical

        Canonical has announced that Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, the first point release in the new series, has been released and is now available for download.

      • Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS released

        In today’s open source roundup: Canonical releases an update to Ubuntu 14.04. Plus: The NY Times bashes open source for not making enough money, and a review of Deepin 2014

      • Apache HTTP Server Exploits Closed in Ubuntu OSes

        Canonical announces that a number of Apache HTTP Server vulnerabilities have been found and fixed in its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.

Devices/Embedded

• Wireless speakers stream audio from web and WLAN

  Denon debuted a line of Sonos-like wireless multi-room HiFi speakers that stream audio from both Internet and local sources, and run on embedded Linux.

  Like the similarly Linux-powered devices available from Sonos, Denon’s ‘Heos’ wireless streaming speakers offer multi-room (multi-speaker) synchronized audio, and can deliver multiple audio streams from disparate sources to individual speakers or stereo-configured speaker pairs distributed around the home. Subscription streaming sources initially offered by Denon include Rhapsody, Pandora, Spotify, and TuneIn, with additional services offering DRM-free tracks ‘coming soon,’ says the company.

CoreOS Stable Release

First off, Happy SysAdmin Day. We think we have a pretty good SysAdmin surprise in store for you today as we are announcing the CoreOS stable release channel. Starting today, you can begin running CoreOS in production. This version is the most tested, secure and reliable version available for users wanting to run CoreOS. This is a huge milestone for us.

CoreOS Experiences Its First Stable Release

CoreOS, the lightweight Linux distribution designed for clustered deployments and depends upon utilization of Docker/LXC software containers, has experienced its first stable release.

SaaS/Big Data

• SAP Extends Open Source Collaboration with OpenStack, CloudFoundry Support

  The future of cloud computing lies in open source. That’s the message this week enterprise software giant SAP, which has announced significant new endorsement of open source cloud projects OpenStack and CloudFoundry, as well as the release of related developer resources.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• On LibreOffice and the Challenge to Install Linux to the New Office Computer

  Anyway, I took the leap of faith and proceeded with the installation. OpenMandriva Lx worked like a charm: it took care of the partitioning (interestingly, it said “Moondrake” instead of “OpenMandriva” :D) and installed itself in less than 10 minutes. When we booted the machine (expecting a catastrophe, if I must be honest), none of our visions of doom panned out. GRUB2 picked up Windows 7, that OS was fully operational, and OpenMandriva also launched (desktop effects included, yay!).

• Dialogs and Coverity, current numbers

  We’ve now converted all but 54 of LibreOffice’s classic fixed widget size and position .src format elements to the GtkBuilder .ui format. This is due to the much appreciated efforts of Palenik Mihály and Szymon K’os, two of our GSOC2014 students, who are tackling the last bunch of hard to find or hard to convert ones.

Healthcare

• Google Joins Samsung, Other Tech Titans, in Open Healthcare Race

  Will the next revolution in healthcare be built on open source collaboration and principles? There are increasing signs that it will be, and that the old model of scientists and doctors pursuing breakthroughs behind closed doors might be broken. Samsung, for example, has announced the Samsung Digital Health Initiative, which will be based on open hardware platforms and open software architecture. The initiative has several arms, and one surrounds an open healthcare platform called SAMI. Apple, too, announced its HealthKit at this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference, although it remains to be seen how open that effort will be.

BSD

• FreeBSD Developing A New Automounter, Other Features

  The FreeBSD project has issued their latest quarterly status report that covers activities for the open-source operating system made between April and June of 2014.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Program Octave

  GNU Octave is a project started by James Rawlings and John Ekerdt, but its main developer is John Eaton, with the name inspired by the chemist Octave Levenspiel.

• Guix 0.7 Can Now Install The GNU Operating System

  The Guix package manager that’s designed to be a purely-functional package manager for GNU with an emphasis on being dependable, hackable, and liberating is out with its latest release.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • The Ai.Frame, an Open Source Humanoid Robot

Programming

• Bugcrowd Seeks to Streamline Reporting and Handling of Bugs

  “All software contains security flaws,” touts the homepage of Bugcrowd, a new site that seeks to streamline the way flaws are reported by enforcing crowdsourced “responsible disclosure” policies. The Bugcrowd statement is probably pretty close to correct, too. As we’ve reported, Google, Mozilla and other companies have had success offering cash bounties for people who find security flaws, and those who find them are often security researchers.

Security

• Security updates for Friday

• How Hackers Hid a Money-Mining Botnet in the Clouds of Amazon and Others

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Gaza to Afghanistan: Killing Machines and the Madness of Militarism

• Killing Machines and the Madness of Militarism: From Gaza to Afghanistan

• Vermont Navy veteran faces prison time for drone protest

  An 80-year-old local Navy veteran is facing a potential year in prison if convicted of charges stemming from his involvement in an anti-drone protest at a New York Air Force base in April.

• Drone Morality

  The results of this three-trillion-dollar effort included 4500 U.S. soldiers dead and another 32,000 seriously wounded;150,000 to 400,000 Iraqis killed; and another 2.3 million Iraqis turned into refugees.

• U.S. boosts Iraq drone flights to 50 daily from one monthly

  The United States has boosted the number of surveillance flights over Iraq to nearly 50 a day from one a month as it faces militants who control swaths of Iraqi territory, a top State Department official said on Wednesday.

• Phil McManus: Past policies ‘push’ child migration

  U.S. efforts to undermine democracy were spectacularly illustrated in Guatemala. Its “democratic spring” was ended by a CIA coup in 1954. A bloody, three-decade civil war followed. Hundreds of thousands, mostly non-combatants, were killed. Guatemala today is still characterized by extreme social inequality, pervasive drug violence and corruption, and impunity for human rights violations.

• It Turns Out Hamas Didn’t Kidnap and Kill the 3 Israeli Teens After All

  Repeated inconsistencies in Israeli descriptions of the situation have sparked debate over whether Israel wanted to provoke Hamas into a confrontation. Israeli intelligence is also said to have known that the boys were dead shortly after they disappeared, but to have maintained public optimism about their safe return to beef up support from the Jewish diaspora.

• Court rejects Eichmann files bid

  In 2006, the CIA released documents showing that it wrote to its West German counterpart in 1958, saying it had information that Eichmann “is reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias ‘Clemens’ since 1952″.

• Netanyahu’s Bloody Calculations

  As the Israeli killing of Palestinians spreads from Gaza to the West Bank, Prime Minister Netanyahu weighs his pursuit of military objectives against growing world outrage. But his trump card remains the fear of U.S. politicians to voice any criticism of Israel, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar notes.

• Has Washington outlived its usefulness?

  These past weeks, Israel has established its dominion possibly for the first time since A.D. 70 by destroying holes in the ground built by terrorists to kill them. Israel is no longer a Washington abstraction. It no longer asks Washington or anyone else for permission to be. It is now a Jewish place. Hamas fights for abstractions, as do Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Secretary of State John Kerry. Jews today fight for earth; filling holes of terror which go back to the Oslo Accords and to the “co-presidency” of Hillary and Bill Clinton in their fleeting moment of global arrogance which has cost the death of thousands.

• Truce as deaths in Gaza pass 900

  A 12-hour truce has begun in Gaza, as efforts continue to secure a longer ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and the scale of damage becomes clear.

• Mr. President, Your Own CIA Says What Russians Say. What Are We Gonna Do? – Paul Roberts

• US Intelligence on MH17: No Evidence Russia Did It

  After days of placing hostile blame for the downing of the Malaysian airliner on Russia, the White House permitted US intelligence officials to tell reporters that there is no evidence of the Russian government’s involvement.

• Reject ‘Cold War-style posturing’ over MH17 tragedy

  Both these politicians have shamelessly sought to exploit this terrible tragedy to step up their pro-war and imperialist propaganda and they have been urged on by the capitalist media.

• How smuggled U.S. weaponry is being used to kill Americans

• Air Algerie: British man killed in AH5017 crash – live

• Air Algerie crash: Sole Brit on board tragic flight named as David Morgan in leaked passenger manifest

• Black box found at Air Algerie jet wreckage site

• French troops guard Air Algerie jet crash site

  French soldiers recovered a black box from the Air Algerie wreckage site in a desolate region of restive northern Mali on Friday, officials said. Terrorism hasn’t been ruled out as a cause, although officials say the most likely reason for the catastrophe that killed all 118 people onboard is bad weather.

• Report: Israeli Drone Strike Kills Three in Sinai

  Israel has attacked targets in Sinai by drone previously, though such involvement is unpopular within Egypt, and the Egyptian Defense Ministry denied the reports, saying there were no drones in Sinai.

• Two Egyptian officers killed in Sinai attack

• Israeli drone kills three fighters in Egypt’s Sinai

• People and the State

  Jha begins by recounting the most important moment in Nepal’s contemporary history – the 2006 Jana Andolan, which forced the monarch King Gyanendra to step aside. He traces the development of the Maoist-led armed struggle from the first weapons they obtained: two rifles that the CIA airdropped in 1961 for Tibetans to use against the Chinese Government. He chronicles how the Maoist movement in Nepal then drew upon discontentment against prevailing conditions and power equations in society, as well as police abuses and disenchantment with ‘moderate left’ politics.

• JOHNSON: A conservative case against the death penalty

  A Gallup poll found that 79 percent of Americans think that the government should not use drones to kill other Americans — even if they are suspected terrorists. Why should it be any more palatable for the government to use lethal injections or electric chairs to kill other Americans — even if they have done horrifying things?

Finance

• Conservative Media’s Favorite Economist Caught Distorting Facts About Taxes And Job Creation

  Heritage Foundation chief economist Stephen Moore was caught using incorrect statistics to mislead readers about the relationship between tax cuts and job creation in the United States.

• Republicans must abandon corporate welfare and learn to leave Americans alone if they want to win elections

• Beyond New York: What Lies Ahead for Bitcoin

  According to the proposed 17th July bitcoin regulation from New York State, the public now has 45 days to comment and then a 45-day grace period prior to full adoption. But what’s after 17th October? More importantly, what’s after New York?

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Morning Plum: Only Republicans and conservatives support lawsuit against Obama

Censorship

• Ofcom report shows consumers don’t want filters

  Ofcom has just published a report that shows that some 60% of households are actively switching off filters despite the best efforts of companies. ISPs that aren’t pushing filters are reporting even lower stats, with well over 90% declining filters. Ofcom’s report on Network Level Filtering Measures was based on survey questionnaires sent to the big four ISPs: BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media.

• Don’t Read This Book: A History of Literary Censorship

  Earlier in 1967, Kermode had resigned from the co-editorship of Encounter magazine over revelations – which came as news to just about no one – that its original backer, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was in turn being funded by the CIA.

• ‘Right to be forgotten’ ruling is backfiring, says Data watchdog

  Google’s interpretation of the European Court of Justice’s “right to be forgotten” ruling is prejudicing the intention of the court, the State’s data protection watchdog said yesterday, as regulators and search engine giants met in Brussels to discuss the matter.

Privacy

• Terrorism watchlist: secret US rules revealed

• Why the NSA Keeps Tracking People Even After They’re Dead

  You may be dead, but the U.S. government won’t take you off its terrorist roster.

  That’s according to newly leaked internal guidelines from last year that reveal intimate details regarding the government’s process for determining whether an individual should be designated as a possible terrorist suspect.

• The NSA is monitoring dead people

• One Unelected Official Can Put Entire ‘Categories’ of People on US No-Fly Lists

• OVERNIGHT TECH: Lawmakers await Senate NSA bill

• Exclusive: Private Internet Access talks warrants, canaries, transparency

• Plaintiffs file opposition to government’s motion to dismiss NSA spying case

• EFF & ACLU Join Woman’s Case Against NSA

• Sikh Coalition Outraged by NSA’s Use of ‘Raghead’ in Internal Memos

• The Judges Approving the NSA’s Surveillance Requests Keep Buying Verizon Stock

• Spy talk: NSA seeking spokesperson

  According to an online job posting, the spy agency is looking for a new director of strategic communications who will serve as its primary representative and walk the fine line between transparency and the necessary secrecy for an intelligence agency.

• NSA man: ‘Tell me about your Turkish connections’

  Spooks ask Dabbsy to suggest a nice hotel with pool

• A Clear-Eyed Look at Mass Surveillance

  The actions of the US and UK stand in stark contrast to a groundbreaking and forceful report released last week by the UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, about privacy in the digital age. Many of her findings directly challenge US and UK arguments defending secret, mass surveillance.

• Proliferation of new online communications services poses hurdles for law enforcement

  Federal law enforcement and intelligence authorities say they are increasingly struggling to conduct court-ordered wiretaps on suspects because of a surge in chat services, instant messaging and other online communications that lack the technical means to be intercepted.

• Press Less Thrilled With Obama Now, As Transparency Goes Dark

  The president who promised an unprecedented level of transparency has been disturbingly opaque during his current fundraising trip to the West Coast, as far as reporters are concerned. As Barack Obama meets with large, influential private donors like Costco co-founder James Sinegal and Silicon Valley moguls, the media is being denied even moderate access. Christi Parsons, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, told Politico: “We think these fundraisers ought to be open to at least some scrutiny, because the president’s participation in them is fundamentally public in nature.”

• iOS services intended solely for diagnostics: ‘I don’t buy it for a minute’

• Apple, Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) Employees Can Extract iPhone Owners Data

  The same techniques to circumvent backup encryption could be used by law enforcement or others with access to the “trusted” computers to which the devices have been connected, according to the security expert who pushed Apple’s admission.

• Apple Admits Encrypted iPhone Personal Data Can Be Extracted From ‘Trusted’ Computers

• Is the White House website tracking your data?

  The White House and the NSA have something in common; they both track website user data. But it looks like the folks at the White House might not have known it was happening, and the tracking could be a violation of the White House privacy policy.

• UK tribunal hears evidence of mass surveillance

  A five-day hearing before the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) on the operations of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) spying operations concluded July 18.

  Civil liberties and human rights organisations, including Privacy International, Amnesty International, Liberty and the US Civil Liberties Union, brought the legal case before the Tribunal. They are attempting to establish whether GCHQ’s massive state surveillance operations are a violation of British and international law.

• Can we get an American Civil Liberties Union in Australia, please?

• 4 senators raise alarm about NSA collection of Americans’ e-mails, phone calls

  Four Democratic senators have sent a letter to the director of national intelligence expressing concerns about the scope of the collection of Americans’ e-mails and phone calls under a National Security Agency program that targets foreigners overseas.

• Law enforcement, intelligence agencies want to ‘like’ you on social media

  Law enforcement and intelligence agencies want to be able to wiretap social media, instant message and chat services. But building in ways to wiretap these kinds of communication can lead to less secure systems, say technical experts, including former National Security Agency officials.

• Kim Dotcom promises to ‘abolish mass surveillance’ with his NZ political party

• Google doesn’t want you to limit its ability to follow you around the internet

• Former NSA director says Edward Snowden’blew the whistle’ on US spying

  In a recent debate on Rethinking the U.S. National Security Apparatus, Michael Hayden, a retired general and the former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, said that Edward Snowden “blew the whistle” on the NSA’s use of the Patriot Act’s Section 215 to collect phone records of nearly every American.

• Whistleblowers could face up to 10 years’ imprisonment in Australia

• Hacking Tor, And What It Means For Our Online Privacy

• Russia Is Offering a $100,000 Reward to Anyone Who Can Crack Tor

• Russian Interior Ministry offers $111k to crack TOR network

• Russia Posts Open Bounty to Break Tor in Two

• Russia announces $111,000 bounty to identify Tor users

• Russia Offers $100,000 for Cracking Tor

• Russia Offers 4 Million Rubles to Crack the Tor Network

• Russia Interior Ministry offers 3.9 million rubles for Tor crack

• Russia Offers $111,000 to Any Citizen Who Can Crack Tor Anonymity Network

• Russia publicly joins war on Tor privacy with $111,000 bounty

• Putin sets his sights on exposing Tor network

• Russia Offers Reward To Anyone Who Cracks Tor

  The Russian government is offering four million roubles (£65,000) to anyone who can crack the anonymous Tor network.

• Russia offers bounty to infiltrate Tor

  In an effort to increase surveillance and censorship efforts, the Russian government is putting up a bounty to anyone who can make significant inroads to reveal users on Tor, the anonymizing network for privacy seekers.

  Tor, most often accessed via the Tor Browser, is a network that encrypts user browsing data and redirects it randomly across multiple servers (known as ‘chops’) before reaching its destination. This keeps the location, IP address, and identity of the user relatively anonymous, though the fact that Tor is being used won’t be secret.

• Can you really be identified on Tor or is that just what the cops want you to believe?

• On NSA’s Subversion of NIST’s Algorithm

• Cyber bills cued up for house – Not so fast on NIST-NSA split, staffers say – USA FREEDOM update expected next Tuesday

• German Report: NSA Tracks Users Researching Privacy Software Online

  A warning to those who might do a little online research about Internet privacy software: The NSA is tracking you, a report by the German public broadcasting group ARD concludes, according to a story published by The Independent.

• U.S. spies in Germany spell the end of trust

  The question to bear in mind, when reading this whole sorry tale, is this: if Americans are, on average, no stupider than Germans, then why are their intelligence services so stupid?

• Germany begins spying on Britain, US

• US-German relations at low point over US spying

• US-German Relations in the Wake of NSA Surveillance of German Citizens

• David Ignatius: Rebuilding a spy partnership

  Given recent German indignation about the National Security Agency, it has been easy to overlook the fact that for decades the German government has cooperated extensively with the NSA on surveillance activities. But after a high-level meeting in Berlin this week, this long-standing but veiled cooperation may have a firmer legal and political base.

  The two countries’ past partnership became so extensive that they even developed a special logo for their joint signals-intelligence activity, known by its initials, ‘JSA.’ It shows an American bald eagle against the colors of the German flag, next to the words Der Zeitgeist, or ‘the spirit of the age.’

• Germany Awake, America Asleep?

  On a visit to Munich, Germany, wildly differing views between the European Union and the U.S.A. are immediately apparent on the frequently talked about (over here) subjects of information capitalism, NSA spying, and American ‘dominance.’ They can teach a lot about ourselves. The German and French perspectives on issues pose genuine cognitive dissonance.

• The CIA Fears the Internet of Things

  …embedding of computers, sensors, and Internet capabilities into more and more physical objects.

• Muslim group seeks pardon for Marine vet convicted in Iran

  Hekmati, a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen born in Arizona and raised in Michigan, was arrested in August 2011 and sentenced to death for spying. Iran’s Supreme Court annulled the sentence. He later was convicted of ‘cooperating with hostile governments’ and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Civil Rights

• Dead Is Dead: Drone-Killing the Fifth Amendment

• Undue Process in Washington

  And while you’re at it, don’t photograph the water tower in Farmer’s Branch, Texas (as professional photographer Allison Smith found out), or planes taxiing to takeoff at the Denver airport (if you have a Middle Eastern look to you), or that dangerous “Welcome to Texas City” sign (as Austin photographer Lance Rosenfield discovered when stopped by BP security guards and only let off after “a stern lecture about terrorists and folks wandering around snapping photos”), or even the police handcuffing someone on the street from your own front lawn (as Rochester, New York, neighborhood activist Emily Good was doing when the police cuffed and arrested her for the criminal misdemeanor of “obstructing governmental administration”).

• Senator Wyden Toying With The Idea Of Releasing The Senate’s CIA Torture Report

  Senator Ron Wyden is apparently getting tired of waiting for the White House to use up its buckets of black ink in redacting everything important in the Senate’s big torture report. He’s publicly pondering the idea of using Senate privilege to just release it himself.

  As you may recall, the Senate Intelligence Committee spent years and $40 million investigating the CIA’s torture program, and the 6,000+ page report is supposedly devastating in highlighting (1) how useless the program was and (2) how far the CIA went in torturing people (for absolutely no benefit) and (3) how the CIA lied to Congress about all of this. The CIA, not surprisingly, is not too happy about the report. At all. Still, despite its protests, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify the executive summary of the report.

• The NSA’s New Partner in Spying: Saudi Arabia’s Brutal State Police

• NSA Cooperates with ‘Human Rights Violator’ Saudi Arabia – Report

• NSA Partnering With Saudi Regime – Snowden Leak

• The NSA’s New Partner in Spying: Saudi Arabia’s Brutal State Police

  The National Security Agency last year significantly expanded its cooperative relationship with the Saudi Ministry of Interior, one of the world’s most repressive and abusive government agencies. An April 2013 top secret memo provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden details the agency’s plans “to provide direct analytic and technical support’ to the Saudis on “internal security” matters.

  The Saudi Ministry of Interior “referred to in the document as MOI” has been condemned for years as one of the most brutal human rights violators in the world. In 2013, the U.S. State Department reported that “Ministry of Interior officials sometimes subjected prisoners and detainees to torture and other physical abuse,” specifically mentioning a 2011 episode in which MOI agents allegedly ”poured an antiseptic cleaning liquid down [the] throat” of one human rights activist. The report also notes the MOI’s use of invasive surveillance targeted at political and religious dissidents.

• After CIA gets secret whistleblower email, Congress worries about more spying

  The CIA obtained a confidential email to Congress about alleged whistleblower retaliation related to the Senate’s classified report on the agency’s harsh interrogation program, triggering fears that the CIA has been intercepting the communications of officials who handle whistleblower cases.

• Congress alarmed by possible CIA access to confidential whistleblower emails

  The CIA obtained a legally protected, confidential email between whistleblower officials and Congress this spring, raising questions over whether the agency illegally has access to other communications regarding whistleblowers, McClatchy reported.

  It is unclear how the CIA got hold of the email and other unspecified communications between Daniel Meyer – the intelligence community’s top official for whistleblower cases – and lawmakers, people familiar with the matter told McClatchy.

• Web Use to Be Unmonitored for Congress

  The executive branch will not eavesdrop on the computer keystrokes and Internet use of members of Congress and legislative staff members with security clearances as part of its stepped-up efforts to prevent unauthorized disclosures of classified information, the nation’s top intelligence official told lawmakers on Friday.

  The director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., made that promise in a letter to Senators Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. The lawmakers had raised constitutional concerns about a new ‘insider threat’ detection program amid a controversy over the C.I.A.’s search of computers used by Senate staff members who were at a C.I.A. site preparing a report on agency interrogation practices during the Bush administration.

• How spy agencies keep their ‘toys’ from law enforcement

  A little over a decade ago, federal prosecutors used keystroke logging software to steal the encryption password of an alleged New Jersey mobster, Nicodemo Scarfo Jr., so they could get evidence from his computer to be used at his trial.

  The technique was classified and FBI technicians warned prosecutors that if the case went to trial, details about the tool could get disclosed in court.

• Poland May Appeal Human Rights Court Ruling

• Poland says may appeal European court ruling on CIA jail

• European court ruling ‘premature’ on CIA renditions in Poland?

• Poland May Appeal European Court Ruling on CIA Jail

  Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Friday Warsaw will probably appeal against a European Court of Human Rights ruling that Poland hosted a secret CIA jail.

• Trojan horse and the unbearable silliness of the denialists

  One of the most frustrating and depressing aspects of following extremism-related stories in the UK is the predictable frequency with which the denialist brigade rush to the fore to hush things up.

• Political Islamism an occupation

  While Gazans, their Hamas leadership and pro-Palestinian supporters around the world condemn Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, it’s time Muslims examined the other occupation: the inexorable advance of political Islamism over Islam.

• Govt blockaded as protestors take Gaza fight to Whitehall

• Rand Paul launches defense of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution

  Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is looking to defend the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution not just from the Obama administration, but from states that are finding it too easy to seize private property without first charging and convicting property owners.

• Ukrainian, Bulgarian Governments Fall

  Plus, Europe’s top rights court slams Poland over CIA renditions and two more anti-Putin protesters receive long prison sentences.

• Wyden Ponders Release of CIA Torture Report Without White House Consent

  A senior Senate Democrat is firing a warning shot at the White House against stalling the release of a report about the past use of torture by the U.S. intelligence community.

  Sen. Ron Wyden is talking with his colleagues about the possibility of using a seldom-invoked procedure to declassify an Intelligence Committee report on the use of torture in the event the White House does not move ahead quickly.

DRM

• Amazon’s $126 million quarterly loss scares investors

  Amazon has reportedly warned of slower sales in the current quarter after it incurred a loss of 126 million dollars in the second quarter. According to the BBC, Amazon forecast third quarter sales of between 19.7 billion dollars and 21.5 billion dollars, which could mean sales growth of as little as 15 percent – well down on previous quarters.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Chromebooks Emerge as Major New Linux Force on Notebooks

  The Linux faithful have mixed opinions on the success of Google’s Linux- and Chrome browser based Chrome OS. The lightweight OS came along years after Fedora, Ubuntu and other Linux distros, and shares relatively little of their mainstream Linux codebase. Some dismiss it as a limited, browser-only platform — a complaint often applied to Firefox OS — while others warn that Google is co-opting and subjugating Linux, a process already begun with Android.

• Google targets students with new Chromebook ad

  Google is all geared up to push Chromebooks to students in the US. They have uploaded a new ad on YouTube targeting students. The video titled Chromebook: For Students shows student lockers and a very clear text ‘everything a student needs in a laptop’.

• Celebrate Chromecast’s first birthday with 3 months Google Play Music free

Server

• Docker Acquires Orchard Laboratories to Manage Containers

  With the rise of containers as an alternative to virtual machines in Linux environments, IT organizations that make that shift will need a way to potentially manage thousands of containers. Looking to become one of the vendors that not only supplies those Linux containers but also manages them, Docker today announced it has acquired Orchard Laboratories Ltd.

Kernel Space

• Linux Developers Jump Quickly On ACPI 5.1, Helps Out ARM

  Fresh off the release of ACPI 5.1 by the UEFI Forum, Linux developers are updating their support against this latest revision to the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface. In particular, ACPI 5.1 is supposed to help out ARM.

  While accessing the ACPI/UEFI specifications still require jumping through some hoops, the ACPI 5.1 update is reported to fix major gaps in supporting ACPI on ARM. Hanjun Guo has already laid out patches for providing Linux ARM64 support compliant with the ACPI 5.1 specification. ACPI 5.1 has “major changes” to the MADT, FADT, GTDT, and _DSD for bettering up this non-x86 platform support.

• Linux Foundation SysAdmin Eric Searcy Lives By Regex

  Eric Searcy is the IT Infrastructure Manager at the Linux Foundation. Here he tells us how he got started as a sysadmin and at the Linux Foundation, describes his typical day at work, and shares his favorite sysadmin tools, among other things.

• Linux Foundation SysAdmin Aric Gardner Avoids a GUI at All Costs

  Aric Gardner is a Linux Foundation SysAdmin who works on the OpenDaylight collaborative project. Here he tells the story of how became a sysadmin, shares his specialty in scripting and automation, and describes a typical day at work, among other things.

• Graphics Stack

  • Open-Source AMD Hawaii Support Should Now Be Working!

    While the Radeon R9 290 series is now mature in the marketplace, the open-source Linux driver support has lagged. The Hawaii support had been broken for months (no working 3D on the open-source driver, but will work under the Catalyst Linux driver) and the few open-source AMD developers weren’t tasked with fixing it over not being sure why it wasn’t working and having no immediate business cases for fixing the support. Fortunately, with a bug comment made tonight, it seems things might be in order.

Applications

• man: Man, oh man

• hangman: Wait a little while

  I’ve gotten a little tired of typing out ls vimwiki/ | shuf -n1 all the time, and that’s usually proof positive that it’s time to give it an alias. So it’s in my .bashrc now as “tokolosi,” and here’s what the little demon dragged home today:

• Calibre 1.46 Brings Third-Party Plugin Support for eBook Editing

  The Calibre software provides some important functions for its users, like the ability to read, edit, and manage eBooks. The developer has issued a new update and the new version brings a few major features.

  Even if people mostly use Calibre for converting eBooks from one format to another or as a reader, the application is also capable of editing books as well. This new function was implemented recently and the developer is still adding features and fixes for it.

• Photocrumbs is Now Mejiro

  Photocrumbs has served well as a working name for my spare-time coding project. But the time has come to give my forgetful photo publishing PHP script a proper name. It took me a while to come up with a good name. I wanted a short and catchy name that reflects my deep interest in Japan. While trawling the web, I stumbled across the Japanese white-eye bird called mejiro in Japanese. It’s small, it’s cute, and it has a short name that sounds unmistakably Japanese — in other words, exactly the name I was looking for. So here it is, Photocrumbs is now Mejiro.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Share a directory quickly on Ubuntu using Boa webserver

  • How To Install Gis Weather 0.6.4 On Ubuntu, Debian And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Gis Weather 0.6.4 On Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Mageia And OpenMandriva Systems

  • X11 forwarding request failed on channel 0

  • How To Install LibreOffice 4.3 RC3 On Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Mageia, OpenMandriva And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install LibreOffice 4.3 RC3 On Ubuntu, Debian And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Skippy-XD 0.5.1 On Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems, All Using Either LXDE Or XFCE

  • How To Install Dropbox 2.11.2 On The Most Popular Linux Systems

  • Creating Apache Virtual Hosts with Enable/Disable Vhosts Options in RHEL/CentOS 7.0

  • EasyEngine – An Auto Installer Script For Managing WordPress-Nginx Websites On Ubuntu, Debian

  • Take (Keyboard) Control of the Web with uzbl Web Browser

  • Secure WordPress Login With Two Factor Authentication Using privacyIDEA

• Games

  • GOG.com Now Supports Linux!

    A while ago, we’ve announced our plans to add Linux support as one of the features of our digital platform, with 100 games on the launch day sometime this fall. We’ve put much time and effort into this project and now we’ve found ourselves with over 50 titles, classic and new, prepared for distribution, site infrastructure ready, support team trained and standing by, and absolutely no reason to wait until October or November. We’re still aiming to have at least 100 Linux games in the coming months, but we’ve decided not to delay the launch just for the sake of having a nice-looking number to show off to the press. It’s not about them, after all, it’s about you. So, one of the most popular site feature requests on our community wishlist is granted today: Linux support has officially arrived on GOG.com!

  • GOG.com announces Linux support with more than fifty games

  • GOG.com Launches Linux Support, Ahead Of Schedule

  • GOG.com Offers Its First 50 Linux Games

  • P-p-pick Up A SpaceChem: GOG Now Supports Linux

    “The year of the Linux desktop” is a phrase people have tossed around with increasing irony since the nineties, but it was never going to arrive explosively. Linux has slowly grown and spread into homes through friendly distributions like Ubuntu and Mint, installed as easy and safer alternatives to Windows or to freshen up old duffers (my netbook is Minty fresh now). Games have followed.

  • GOG.com Officially Starts Rolling Out Linux Games

  • GOG to offer 50 games for Linux! It’s huge

    If you have been following our coverage of the gaming scene, then you might remember us speculating on the possibility of Good Old Games (GOG.com) going to introduce Linux games. A few days following that article, GOG actually confirmed that they did indeed plan on getting Linux as another platform where they would introduce games regularly and promised about a 100 games by fall of this year. Now it seems that GOG managed to push their worker elves and the penguin folks hard enough that they are ready to release about 50 of the promised games for Linux.

  • An original RPG made by Astronauts, Project Tools

    The game is set to release on Linux, Mac, Windows, Xbox One, PS4 & Wii U simultaneously. More information can be found over at the Project Tools website, along with the different game packages.

  • Interview With Aspyr Media About Civilization V & Linux Gaming

  • Yet another storefront to sell your Linux games

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • No Gmail integration in 4.14 after all

    I’m sorry to bring bad news, but after trying to fight some last minute bugs in the new Gmail resource today, I realized that pushing the resource into KDE Applications 4.14 was too hurried, and so I decided not to ship it in KDE Applications 4.14. I know many of you are really excited about the Gmail integration, but there are far too many issues that cannot be solved this late in 4.14 cycle. And since this will probably be the last 4.x release, shipping something that does not perform as expected and cannot be fixed properly would only be disappointing and discouraging to users. In my original post I explained that I was working on the Gmail integration to provide user experience as close as possible to native Gmail web interface so that people are not tempted to switch away from KMail to Gmail. But with the current state of the resource, the effect would be exactly the opposite. And if the resource cannot fulfil it’s purpose, then there’s no point in offering it to users.

  • Plasma’s road to wayland

    With the Plasma 5.0 release out the door, we can lift our heads a bit and look forward, instead of just looking at what’s directly ahead of us, and make that work by fixing bug after bug. One of the important topics which we have (kind of) excluded from Plasma’s recent 5.0 release is support for Wayland. The reason is that much of the work that has gone into renovating our graphics stack was also needed in preparation for Wayland support in Plasma. In order to support Wayland systems properly, we needed to lift the software stack to Qt5, make X11 dependencies in our underlying libraries, Frameworks 5 optional. This part is pretty much done. We now need to ready support for non-X11 systems in our workspace components, the window manager and compositor, and the workspace shell.

  • KDE Developers Continue Working Toward Wayland Support

    KDE’s Sebastian Kügler has provided an update regarding KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 support for Wayland as an alternative to running on an X11/X.Org Server.

  • A wild “monday” report appears …

    The work on revisiting and expanding the Human Interface Guideline on tooltips has begun. If there’s something that has always bothered you about how tooltips in KDE Applications and Plasma look and feel consider to join in. The work is still in its early stages, so now would be the best time to voice your concerns. [https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=285&t=121892]

  • Cutelyst 0.3.0 is now C10K ready!

    Cutelyst uWSGI plugin now has support for –thread, which will create a QThread to process a request, however I strongly discourage its usage in Cutelyst, the performance is ~7% inferior and a crash in your code will break other requests, and as of now ASYNC mode is not supported in threaded mode due to a limitation in uWSGI request queue.

  • Kate “master” branch now KF5 based!

    from today on, the master branch of kate.git is KF5 based.

    That means, for the next KDE applications release after 4.14, Kate will use the awesome KF5 stuff!

    The KTextEditor framework is already in a good shape and most active KatePart development is since months pure KF5 based.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Week 2, 3 and 4: Implementing History View and Revamping the UI of Gnome-Calculator

  • Interview with Nathan Willis, GUADEC Keynote Speaker

    GUADEC 2014 is almost upon us, and we are talking to the three keynote speakers who are lined up for this year’s conference. Nathan Wills – LWN editor, typeface designer and author – is one of these keynote speakers. His talk, titled Should We Teach The Robot To Kill, addresses issues relating to Free Software and the automative industry. We caught up with him to find out a bit more about this fascinating subject, as well as his views on Free Software conferences.

Distributions

• Distro Watch: The Best Linux Distributions For 2014

  We’re halfway through 2014, and a handful of Linux distributions have already made a big splash in the community. Which distributions are the best ones for this year? Let’s take a look.

• Forget About BackTrack, Get the New Kali Linux 1.0.8 Penetration Testing Distribution with EFI Support

  Kali Linux 1.0.8, a more mature, secure, and enterprise-ready version of BackTrack Linux, has been announced by Offensive Security and brings support for EFI systems, among other updates and changes.

  The developers of Kali Linux 1.0.8 took advantage of this version change and decided to make other improvements to the operating system, although you will need a user account to see exactly what has been modified.

• 2014′s Best Distros, Buncha New Games, and Fedora Delayed

  In today’s news feeds is MakeUseOf.com’s top five Linux distributions for 2014. One of their picks is said to vulnerable to attack and the proof has been posted. In other news, GOG.com has rolled out support for 50 DRM-free Linux games. And finally tonight, Fedora 21 has been delayed.

• Red Hat Family

  • Oracle Strengthens Linux Platform Hand

  • Oracle Linux 7 Makes Its Debut

    Oracle sees continued potential for growth as it rolls out its latest Linux distribution release.

  • Oracle Unveils Linux 7 for Enterprise Open Source Cloud and Data Center

  • Oracle rolls out Linux 7

  • Red Hat, Cisco Extend Cloud Collaboration In India

  • Fedora

    • FESCo Election Results, F21 Delayed 3 Weeks, Behind the Scenes for Flock, Help with AppStream, and Joining Fedora

      Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for July 22nd, 2014:

    • No True Fedora 21 Release Without a Three-Week Delay

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Reminder: Export All Your Ubuntu One Data Until The 31st Of July

      • Unity 8 and Mir Updates Promoted by Ubuntu Developers

        Canonical is working on the upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 (Utopic Unicorn), but its developers are also trying to improve some technologies that haven’t made it just yet to the desktop version, such as Unity 8 and the Mir display server.

      • Canonical Closes acpi-support Exploit in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

        Canonical has revealed details in a security notice about an acpi-support vulnerability in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system that has been found and corrected.

      • Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS released

        The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS…

      • Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS Released

        The first stable point release update to the Long Term Support Ubuntu 14.04 is now available.

      • Unity 8 And Mir Have Received Important Updates

        Canonical is working in parallel at both the desktop and the mobile versions of Ubuntu, Ubuntu Touch already using Unity 8 and Mir as default, since the development branch was based on Ubuntu 13.10.

      • Ubuntu 14.10 is Now Using Kernel 3.16 RC3 As Default

        Recently, the developers have implemented the Kernel 3.16 RC3 as default on the unstable branch of Ubuntu 14.10, scheduled for release on the 23rd of October, 2014.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi Model B+ review – a new evolution

  Over the past two years we’ve come to really grow fond of the design of the Raspberry Pi. It’s almost iconic in a way, and we don’t think we’re the only ones to believe this: as you can have see with the Banana Pi review on the previous page the layout is almost identical to the standard model B.

• Raspberry Pi-based signage player sips 7 Watts

  TinyGreenPC launched a Raspberry Pi and Linux based digital signage player that runs on just 7 Watts, and offers optional WiFi and an OPS interface.

  The Pi Media Player is one of the most power-efficient signage players on the market, according to TinyGreenPC, a subsidiary of UK-based embedded manufacturer and distributor AndersDX. It helps that the 7 Watt, Raspian Linux-enabled signage player runs on a Raspberry Pi.

• Dive in, penguins: Upstart builds Linux virtual SAN

  Three Bulgarian engineers who co-founded a firm called StorPool – which builds a virtual SAN using the aggregated storage of Linux KVM servers – are aiming to expand the reach of their three-year-old project.

  Boyan Ivanov, CEO, Boyan Krosnov, chief product officer, and Yank Yankulov, the chief tech officer, started the firm in November 2011 with $261,600 seed funding. In February this year they raised an undisclosed amount of cash in an A-round. We’d guess it’s in the $1m – $2.5m area.

• Phones

  • Android

    • 35 Free Android Apps for Business

    • Best Android Apps for Disney Fans

      Disney movies have the uncanny ability to make us laugh, cry, and dance with joy at the same time. Whether you are a young kid or an adult, these films have a special place in many people’s hearts. Apart from winning many Oscars, these movies have garnered fans across all generations. From overbearing grandmas to unapologetically brash kids, Disney movies are so irresistible that they can make anyone laugh or cry. That’s why today we have for you a list of some of the best Android apps out there that are made for Disney fans.

    • Xiaomi unveils Mi4 flagship smartphone and Mi band fitness tracker

    • How open sourcing Android made it a mobile market leader

      About 10 years ago, when I got my first mobile phone, I hardly knew anything about its operating system or its processor. Even its screen size didn’t matter. I was just happy to have a ‘mobile’ phone.

      Today, the mobile phone paradigm has shifted from feature phones to smart phones. When people consider purchasing a new mobile phone, they examine its operating system, its configuration, and its screen size. Increased attention to these details can be attributed to technological advancements—and, more importantly, to the slew of new mobile operating systems available today. In this highly competitive market, Android has obtained about 80 percent of the global market share, making it the clear leader among mobile operating systems.

      What makes Android so popular? Why has the mobile market swung toward Android lately? Let’s take a quick look at how Android has achieved this, as well as the role of open source in the Android story.

    • OnePlus AOSP stock ROM for those who don’t want CyanogenMod

      OnePlus have developed quite a buzz over the last few months with the release of their first device the OnePlus One. Part of the allure is the incredibly low asking price of $300 – which is typically half the cost of its on-spec rivals. However another feature which has greatly attracted attention is the OnePlus One comes with CyanogenMod (CM) custom ROM as stock out of the box.

Events

• Keynotes from OSCON 2014 Day 3

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Chrome Beta receives dedicated Material Design updates

    Today Google announced Chrome Beta has received a relatively major update. Chrome Beta is the testing version of Chrome. To all purposes it is the same as Chrome although the Beta version incorporates all the small tweaks and experimental aspects Google are testing. By using the Beta version the user gets a first glimpse at features which quite likely will be available on the standard Chrome and also provides Google with the necessary test data.

• Mozilla

  • Among Reasons to Get Firefox 31, Previous Versions Have Security Holes

  • Firefox 31 Brings New Tools to Developers

  • Firefox 31 available in Fedora

    Mozilla recently released Firefox version 31, and now this updated version of the Fedora default web browser is available for download in Fedora 20.

SaaS/Big Data

• SAP Stamps Cloud Foundry and OpenStack with Meaningful Endorsements

  SAP may not be on every individual user’s radar, but the company is a giant global force in running enterrprise back-end systems, new forays into the cloud and other new platforms, and managing enterprise class applications. Now, SAP has announced that it is committing to Cloud Foundry and OpenStack, providing a clear path forward for an open cloud ecosystem.

• Let’s party!

  Yesterday, we released ownCloud 7. You might have read that somewhere on the internet – it was widely announced and broadly picked up. If you do not have ownCloud yet, you really should try it now, and if you are one of the people happily using ownCloud for a while, update soon!

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 4.2.6 RC2 Now Ready for Testing

  The Document Foundation has announced that the second Release Candidate version of LibreOffice 4.2.6 is now available for download and that users can test it.

Education

• Open source education for lifelong learners

  In the world of the Internet, where everything is so easily available, it seems like all technology is a benefit to online learners. For those who aren’t able to use the available traditional resources for various reasons, open source technology specifically is a huge boon. Let me share my seven-year journey of using open source and how it helped me add more value to both my personal and professional lives.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Nginx Plus r4 Improves Web Server Security

    Nginx, the lead commercial sponsor behind the open-source Nginx Web server, is out today with a new release of its Nginx Plus server. The Nginx Plus r4 release provides users with new security and load balancing features.

BSD

• Pkg 1.3.0 Released To Improve Package Management On FreeBSD

  After more than a half-year in development and working on tens of thousands of lines of code, Pkg 1.3.0 has been released by FreeBSD developers.

  Pkg 1.3.0 introduces a new solver to automatically handle conflicts and dynamically discover them, pkg install can now install local files and resolve their dependencies via remote repositories, sandboxing of the code has happened, improved portability of the code took place, the pkg API has been simplified, improvements to the multi-repository mode, and a ton of other changes and fixes took place.

  More on the pkg 1.3.0 release for improved package management on FreeBSD can be found via this mailing list post.

• FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report – Second Quarter 2014

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• We Have Strayed from the Original Ideas of Unix

  In some ways we have actually made improvements to the Unix Philosophy with Richard Stallman’s GPL. We also have a mostly standardized graphical system with the X Window System. I can’t find any overt references to sharing of source code from the early days of Bell Labs but it clearly did happen even if it was de facto
  rather than de jure.

• GNU Guix 0.7 released

  We are pleased to announce the next alpha release of GNU Guix, version 0.7.

  This release is an important milestone for the project since it is the first to provide an image to install the GNU system from a USB stick.

Public Services/Government

• City of Toulouse moves to LibreOffice, saves €1 million

  The United Kingdom recently made an announcement about its decision to adopt the Open Document Format (ODF) as its in-house standard for all new documents. And now, Microsoft has lost another important fight in yet another European city.

  Toulouse, France’s fourth largest city, has ditched Microsoft Office in favor of LibreOffice.

Licensing

• An Interview with Karen Sandler

  Karen Sandler is a veteran of the free and open source software world. Having completed an engineering degree, she has worked as a lawyer for the Software Freedom Law Center, was Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, and recently accepted a position as Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. I interviewed Karen via email to ask her about her background and insight into various issues in the free and open source world.

Openness/Sharing

• How do team dynamics relate to open source?

  Recently I had the opportunity to watch a soccer game (football to the majority of the world). This game was one of the most amazing displays of team effort I’ve ever had the privilege of watching. (Here’s an obligatory link if you don’t know to which game I refer). Almost every score was predicated with a series of passes and touches by various players. There was a level of unselfish play and team spirit I don’t often see when observing professional sports.

• Open source product development most effective when social

  Benetech started out in the 90s without even understanding the meaning of the term open source. They just “needed an easy way to interface with different voice synthesizers” to develop readers for people who are blind and “shared the code to be helpful.”

Programming

• PHP 5.5.15 Officially Released

  PHP 5.5.15, an HTML-embedded scripting language with syntax borrowed from C, Java, and Perl, with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in, has been released and it’s now available for download.

Toppled crosses in China spur defiance

The battle started when a government-hired crew tore down the metal cross atop the one-room church in this village surrounded by rice paddies last month.

Science

• CIA ‘kidnapped’ Soviet mooncraft for detailed study

  As the world celebrates the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, a revelation has come to fore that during the Cold War race to the moon between the US and the former USSR, the former had “kidnapped” a Soviet mooncraft in the 60s called Lunik, studied it in detail and returned it intact.

Security

• Security updates for Thursday

• Homeland Security gets into software security

  Personally, while I still think the DHS is an unlikely sponsor for this project — the National Security Agency (NSA) or NIST seem like its more natural home — I think the SWAMP sounds like a very useful one-stop for anyone wanting to double-check their pre-production code for errors before release.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Judicial Watch Sues DOD for bin Laden FOIA Request Records

  Judicial Watch announced today that on June 17, 2014, it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the United States Department of Defense (DOD) to obtain records of communications relating to its May 2, 2011, FOIA request for bin Laden death photographs and videos (Judicial Watch v U.S. Department of Defense (No. 1:14-cv-01027)).

• Libya’s rogue general, an ex-CIA asset, vaunts his anti-extremism services

• President Obama to issue privacy rules on drone use in U.S.

• How the U.S. Stumbled Into the Drone Era

  The birth of the armed-drone program underscores two central ironies. First, the weapon that the U.S. deployed so eagerly after 9/11 was a hot potato that it juggled around internally beforehand. (Indeed, the George W. Bush administration devoted most of its lone pre-9/11 cabinet-level meeting on al Qaeda—convened on Sept. 4, 2001—to wrangling about the drone program.) Second, for a program now so widely criticized in the Muslim world for killing civilians, pre-9/11 policy makers were actually driven toward armed drones because the more traditional alternatives involved unacceptable risks of collateral damage.

• Why We Know More About Drone Strikes in Pakistan Than in Afghanistan

• Who is dying in Afghanistan’s 1,000-plus drone strikes?

  The UK, which has carried out over 300 drone strikes in the country, has consistently stated it is aware of only one incident in which non-combatants died: a March 2011 strike that killed four farmers. In December 2013, three months after the Watapur strike, then defence secretary Philip Hammond reiterated this claim in a Guardian op-ed.

• Don’t Ask Who’s Being Killed by Drones In Afghanistan

  On the afternoon of September 7 last year, in the Watapur region of Afghanistan’s Kunar province, a farmer named Miya Jan heard a buzzing overhead. He looked up to see a drone, he told the Los Angeles Times, and minutes later, he heard an explosion.

• Bureau study reveals vacuum of information around Afghanistan drone strikes

  Afghanistan has been targeted by more drone strikes than any other country in the world, yet almost nothing is known about where those attacks took place, or who they killed.

  A new study by the Bureau’s drones team, published today, examines the official opaqueness that surrounds drone operations and explores how outside organisations – such as the Bureau – might be able to lift this veil of secrecy.

• Local Navy veteran faces prison time for drone protest

  An 80-year-old local Navy veteran is facing a potential year in prison if convicted of charges stemming from his involvement in an anti-drone protest at a New York Air Force base in April.

  Andrew Schoerke, of Shaftsbury, is a retired U.S. Navy captain and a member of Veterans for Peace Will Miller Green Mountain Chapter. On April 28 he was part of a group of 300 protesters at the Hancock Field Air National Guard Base which shares space with the Syracuse Hancock International Airport in Syracuse, New York.

• Grandmother Gets a Year in Prison for Taking a Picture

  On July 10, 2014, in New York State, Judge David Gideon sentenced Mary Anne Grady Flores to a year in prison and fined her $1,000 for photographing a peaceful demonstration at the U.S. Air National Guard’s 174th Attack Wing at Hancock Field (near Syracuse) where weaponized Reaper drones are remotely piloted in lethal flights over Afghanistan. – See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/07/187788/grandmother-gets-year-prison-taking-picture%E2%80%A8#sthash.34Km49MC.dpuf

• Peaceful protester sentenced to prison for “harassing the drones”

  On July 10, 2014, in New York State, Judge David Gideon sentenced Mary Anne Grady Flores to a year in prison and fined her $1,000 for photographing a peaceful demonstration at the U.S. Air National Guard’s 174th Attack Wing at Hancock Field (near Syracuse) where weaponized Reaper drones are remotely piloted in lethal flights over Afghanistan. Dozens have been sentenced, previously, for peaceful protest there. But uniquely, the court convicted her under laws meant to punish stalkers, deciding that by taking pictures outside the heavily guarded base she violated a previous order of protection not to stalk or harass the commanding officer.

• Harassing the Drones

• “We Are Going through Hell” – Report from Gaza

• More BBC Dross

  “Do you honestly believe that this land is yours because God said so?”

• Inside the Most Insanely Pro-Israel Meeting You Could Ever Attend

  The supporters of CUFI moved up the convention center escalators and took their seats for a plenary session. Onstage were the first guests, all recognizable from Fox News—Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Bill Kristol, onetime CIA director James Woolsey, and the Council on Foreign Relations fellow Elliott Abrams, a presidentially pardoned veteran of foreign policy disasters on two continents. Sitting right next to them was John Hagee, the burly Christian Zionist pastor who founded CUFI in 2006 He leaned into a microphone, passionately explaining why supporters of Israel should not be tricked by casualty reports.

• Recent Iraqi Air-strikes Killed 75 Civilians: Human Rights Watch

  Iraq’s security forces have killed at least 75 civilians and wounded hundreds of others in indiscriminate air strikes on four cities since June 6, according to Human Rights Watch. The New York-based human rights watchdog says it documented 17 airstrikes, the majority in the first half of July, in which barrel bombs were used.

• 50 Israeli Reservists Refuse To Serve in Gaza War

  More than 50 former Israeli soldiers have refused to serve in the nation’s reserve force, citing regret over their part in a military they said plays a central role in oppressing Palestinians, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

  “We found that troops who operate in the occupied territories aren’t the only ones enforcing the mechanisms of control over Palestinian lives. In truth, the entire military is implicated. For that reason, we now refuse to participate in our reserve duties, and we support all those who resist being called to service,” the soldiers wrote in a petition posted online and first reported by the newspaper.

  While some Israelis have refused to serve in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, the military’s structure is such that serving in any capacity forces one to play a role in the conflict, said the soldiers, most of whom are women who would have been exempted from combat.

• Students offered grants if they tweet pro-Israeli propaganda

  In a campaign to improve its image abroad, the Israeli government plans to provide scholarships to hundreds of students at its seven universities in exchange for their making pro-Israel Facebook posts and tweets to foreign audiences.

  The students making the posts will not reveal online that they are funded by the Israeli government, according to correspondence about the plan revealed in the Haaretz newspaper.

• Gates worried about notion of US disengagement

  Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he’s worried there’s a perception of the United States “disengaging” from global affairs.

  Gates, who also once headed the CIA, says he recognizes the ocean-to-ocean diplomacy the Obama administration has been carrying out in the Mideast and Eastern Europe and other world hot spots like Africa.

• Summary of Adam Curtis Part 1 The Power of Nightmares

  “Rise of the Politics of Fear”: “The first part of the series explains the origin of Islamism and Neo-Conservatism. At the same time in the United States, a group of disillusioned liberals, including Irving Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz, look to the political thinking of Leo Strauss after the perceived failure of President Johnson’s “Great Society”.

• Russia Saved US From ‘Catastrophe’ In Syria – Former CIA Officer

  “I think Russia saved us in Syria. If we had rushed in surface-to-air missiles to the Syrian opposition and they were then stolen by ISIS and they were now shooting down civilian airliners it would have been a different story,” Baer said.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• UN official: Yemen could be ‘first country to run out of water’

  Since the political crisis erupted in Yemen in 2011, the country has begun to move towards democracy. Many challenges remain in the country, wracked by civil unrest and widespread water and food insecurity, says Bishow Parajuli, the UN World Food Programme’s representative in Yemen.

• Grand Canyon ‘threatened’ by development

  Plans for a cable car attraction and a shopping and entertainment complex mean the Grand Canyon is facing the biggest threat in its history, the US National Parks Service claims

Finance

• Tables Turned: Madoff Letter to U.S. Judge Appears to be Fake

  Bernard Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme relied on reams of fake trading documents to fool regulators for decades.

  Now he may be the victim of a forgery himself, after a U.S. judge on Wednesday denied a bizarre motion supposedly filed by Madoff that claimed the U.S. int

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Dem Rep. to C-SPAN Caller: Maybe Watch ‘A Little Less Fox News’

  Democratic congressman Jim Himes was on C-SPAN early this morning, and was on the receiving end of an angry complaint by a Republican caller over basically everything that anyone has ever said negatively about the Obama administration in the past four-plus years. Himes’ response? Suggesting this person maybe not watch so much Fox News.

  The caller, Bob, went on a rant about issues from Benghazi, the NSA, Fast & Furious, Syria, Obamacare, the EPA, the government shutdown, Eric Holder, Van Jones, et cetera, et cetera. He concluded, “Any other president would have been laughed out of office right now.”

• Who’s banned from editing Wikipedia this week? Congress

  Most members and staffers of the US House of Representatives won’t be able to edit pages on Wikipedia for more than a week. Administrators of the popular Web encyclopedia have imposed a 10-day ban on the IP address connected to Congress’ lower house.

Privacy

• Dropbox for Business Beefs Up Security [just PR and damage control]

• Dropbox advises users with privacy concerns to add their own encryption

• Apple “inadvertently admitted” to iOS backdoor: forensics expert

  Apple has “inadvertently admitted” to creating a “backdoor” in iOS, according to a new post by a forensics scientist, iOS author and former hacker, who this week created a stir when he posted a presentation laying out his case.

• NSA has access to every iOS device

  Privacy has always been one big issue when it came to using smartphones, but no one knew precisely why. Many of us feared social networks and apps that required private information and payed less attention to the actual device and its OS system. It would seem Apple’s iOS features a so called “backdoor” that allows agencies like the NSA to have almost complete access to every iOS running device. Forensic scientist and writer Jonathan Zdziarski, presented some slides at the HOPE conference in New York, in which he proved that, in general, the iPhones are well secured, specially the iPhone 5S that runs iOS 7, but they will never be protected from the government or Apple itself.

• Apple coughs on iOS diagnostic capabilities in response to ‘backdoor’ allegations

  APPLE has shed some light on the diagnostic capabilities in its iOS operating system, in a response allegations that it purposefully installed a “backdoor” on its mobile devices.

• Apple’s half denial confirms iOS ‘back door’

  A US researcher has mounted a very strong case that Apple has deliberately left security holes in iOS. Apple’s response is underwhelming.

• Back doors in Apple’s mobile platform for law enforcement, bosses, spies (possibly)

• Comment: Backdoor discovered in Apple iOS devices that undermines iPhone security

• Know how the US government creates its terrorist watchlist

• U.S. Government Doesn’t Need Evidence to Call You a Terrorist

  A key government document obtained by The Intercept confirms that the Obama administration does not require “concrete facts” or “irrefutable evidence” to brand Americans or foreigners as suspected terrorists.

• Greenwald’s the Intercept reveals how government creates no-fly list

• Leaked Gov’t Document Explains Secret Rules About How Suspects Are Placed on Terror Watchlists, Even if They are Dead or Aquitted

  The 166-page “sensitive security information” document that details how the government decides whether someone should be on a terrorist watchlist has been leaked to the press.

• Terrorism watchlist: secret US rules revealed

• Watch This: The Intercept Publishes The Government’s Guide To The No-Fly List

  The Intercept on Wednesday published the U.S. government’s 166-page rulebook that guides the creation of its famous internal “terrorist watchlist.”

  Both the Bush and Obama administrations have resisted spelling out how individuals, including its own citizens, wind up on the list, or how they can be removed. The registry supplies the names for the no-fly list that has grounded many a confused traveler, and includes thousands of names of those who are merely suspected of possibly having ties to others who may themselves be suspected of ties to terrorism.

• Leaked Rulebook Reveals Loophole-Ridden Criteria for Placing Individuals on Terrorist Watchlists

  “Immediate family of suspected terrorists,” according to Scahill and Devereaux, such as “their spouses, children, parents or siblings,” may be placed on a list “without any suspicion that they themselves are engaged in terrorist activity.”

• Leaked manual shows how US agencies put millions on “suspected terrorist” list

  As Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux point out in their analysis, the document is positively Kafkaesque, allowing agencies to add you to the watchlist if you are suspected of associating with a person who is suspected of being under suspicion of being a terrorist — and “terrorist” has been redefined to include “people who damage government property,” and people who seek to “influence government policy through intimidation.”

• Open letter to Senate leadership: Mass surveillance is censorship

  As writers and artists, we join PEN American Center in urging Congress to act to end mass surveillance. We recognize the need for strong protections for U.S. national security, and acknowledge that such measures will sometimes entail difficult tradeoffs. However, the NSA’s shockingly broad and indiscriminate surveillance programs threaten our most cherished democratic ideals and violate our constitutional and international human rights to free expression and privacy. The Washington Post’s recent report that nine out of 10 individuals whose communications are being intercepted are not the intended targets of investigation underscores the total lack of proportionality of NSA mass surveillance, and the need for reform.

• Requests For Telecom Subscriber Data Average 1.13 Million Per Year, Docs Show

  Canadian government officials requested subscriber information from telecoms at least 1.13 million times per year between 2006 and 2008, according to documents obtained by e-commerce law expert Michael Geist.

• Intelligence security initiatives have chilling effect on federal whistleblowers, critics say

  In early April, Sen. Charles E. Grassley summoned FBI officials to his Capitol Hill office. He said he wanted them to explain how a program designed to uncover internal security threats would at the same time protect whistleblowers who wanted to report wrongdoing within the bureau.

• MPs move to cut DRIP data flows at the source

  Civil rights group Liberty is representing MPs Tom Watson and David Davis in a fresh case challenging the UK government’s recently passed Data Retention and Investigatory Powers (DRIP) bill.

• DRIP displays British ‘intelligence’ in dealing with the world

  After recent comments in Moscow by Edward Snowden about the extent to which private telecoms data is used by the UK and US governments, you might have expected British lawmakers to think twice about the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers bill.

  A yarn attributed to Sean McBride recounts an interview from the 1950s when, while serving as Irish Foreign Minister, a journalist asked him: “What about the role of British Intelligence in Dublin?”

  “If the British had some intelligence, that’d be great,” replied the man who once led Amnesty International.

• Tails Linux Still at Risk Despite Security Fixes

• Firm says vulnerability in Tails contained in I2P component

  A vulnerability broker published a video demonstrating one of several flaws it has found in the privacy-focused Tails operating system, which is used by those seeking to make their Web browser harder to trace.

  Exodus Intelligence of Austin, Texas, said its short clip shows how the real IP address of a Tails user can be revealed using the flaw. The company said it hoped publicizing its findings would serve as a warning to users about putting “unconditional trust” in a software platform.

• A Response to Tor’s Founding Director

  Putting aside certain rhetorical devices that have cropped up in this debate, like name-calling or guilt-by-association, let’s examine some of Shava’s points to see if we can take the conversation in a constructive direction.

• I2P component contains ‘Tails’ vulnerability

• Tails-hacking Exodus: Here’s video proof of our code-injection attack

• Tor Project makes efforts to debug dark web

  The co-creator of a system designed to make internet users unidentifiable says he is tackling a “bug” that threatened to undermine the facility.

• Landmark Safe Harbour case might affect US-European trade

  Max Schrems’s case against the Irish Data Protection Commissioner is likely to have profound implications

• Security, the Edward Snowden Way

  Whether you think NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is a hero or a traitor, you have to admit: The guy knows how to keep his information secure.

  The fact that Snowden isn’t sitting in Guantanamo right now with ankle cuffs and a bag over his head demonstrates his ability to avoid detection.

• Dutch spy agencies can receive NSA data, court rules

  Dutch intelligence services can receive bulk data that might have been obtained by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) through mass data interception programs, even though collecting data that way is illegal for the Dutch services, the Hague District Court ruled Wednesday.

• Court rejects claim against state over intelligence sharing

  The Dutch intelligence services AIVD/MIVD may exchange information with the US NSA…

• US warned: surveillance reform hinges on change to Reagan executive order

  John Napier Tye, a former State Department official, says Americans’ data remains vulnerable until executive order that provides NSA with a path to collect data is reformed

• Privacy watchdog’s next target: the least-known but biggest aspect of NSA surveillance

  An independent privacy watchdog agency announced Wednesday that it will turn its focus to the largest and most complex of U.S. electronic surveillance regimes: signals intelligence collection under Executive Order 12333.

• Freedom Act ‘Close’ One Year After Amash’s NSA Attempt

• Senate May Pass NSA Reform Bill Before Upcoming Recess

• Senator ‘within inches’ of NSA reform deal

• Congress should act to close the metadata gaps

• Leahy Nears Deal on NSA Reform

  A deal between the Senate and the Obama administration on NSA reform legislation may be in sight. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Board will get an earful from privacy advocates today. The House passed a bill to reauthorize the satellite TV law STELA, but the Senate has more ambitious plans for the must-pass legislation. Yahoo pays a visit to the FCC to talk about net neutrality.

• White House, senators near deal on surveillance reform

• State needs dedicated, stand-alone intelligence service

  Angela Merkel’s old mobile phone is an icon of our time. A Nokia 6210 Slide – it was accessed and monitored by the US spy agency the National Security Agency.

  The US monopoly over much of the world’s information and communication technologies gave the NSA – piggybacking on a complicit private sector – one-click instant access to her policy musings and personal whims.

• Dark Mail: Email that hides from the NSA

  But Dark Mail takes the extra step of cloaking your email’s metadata, which includes the subject line and the ‘To’ and ‘From’ fields. That way, spies can’t easily identify who’s sending emails.

• In search of better email encryption

  Since the Snowden revelations, it has become clear that email as a basic internet protocol is essentially insecure, and other options — texting, messaging apps, and the like — are not much better.

• Gigglebit: NSA in da house

  Gigglebit is Siliconrepublic’s daily dose of the funny and fantastic in science and tech, to help start your day on a lighter note.

• Germany begins spying on Britain and America for the first time since 1945

• Exclusive: Germany To Spy On U.S. Intel, Other Allies

• Germany to ‘spy on US and UK intelligence gathering’ for the first time in 45 years

• US spying is galling to Germany

  I arrived in Berlin last week, hoping to see something rare: A country that is prosperous, well-governed and even happy, if only because it had just been crowned champion of the football World Cup.

• Germany to watch U.S. agents after spy scandal

• Exclusive: Germany To Spy On U.S. Intel, Other Allies

  The decision comes in response to Snowden’s NSA revelations, and follows two recent cases of German officials accused of spying for the U.S.

• Spy for a spy: Germany to monitor US, UK agents

  Germany will monitor US and UK agents as part of its long discussed counter-espionage ’360 degree view’ plan, shifting its focus from China, Russia, and Iran, according to local media.

• Germany to add US and Britain to list of surveillance targets

  Germany’s intelligence services have been instructed to add the US embassy in Berlin to its list of surveillance targets in retaliation for US spying on the German government and communication.

• U.S.-Germany Tensions Sway EU Sanctions on Russia

  Tensions between the U.S. and Germany over American intelligence gathering could have a decisive impact on whether the European Union adopts harsher sanctions on Russia.

• Germany Secretly Planning On Joining BRICS-Jim Willie

  Willie contends, “Here’s the big, big consequence. The U.S. is basically telling Europe you have two choices here. Join us with the war against Russia.

  Join us with the sanctions against Russia. Join us in constant war and conflicts, isolation and destruction to your economy and denial of your energy supply and removal of contracts. Join us with this war and sanctions because we’d really like you to keep the dollar regime going.

• President Obama Needs to Cancel Executive Order 12333

  We’re all too familiar with the bulk collection of cellphone metadata—information on whom you contact and when—that Edward Snowden revealed. However, Executive Order 12333 from 1981 (thanks, President Reagan) allows the NSA to collect the actual content from phone calls and Internet communications if they are amassed from outside U.S. borders. John Napier Tye, former section chief for Internet freedom in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, recently wrote about this issue in The Washington Post.

• Could NSA Spying Operations Impact Bitcoin Safety?

  Bitcoin is safe, except when it is not. It can become not safe when the devices that hold them are compromised. Just as bitcoins stored on an exchange are only as secure as that exchange, bitcoins stored on your computer or cell phone are only as secure as those devices.

• New user tracking technique used by many top sites

  Advertisers really want to track you. Your browsing history is one of the best clues as to what ads you are most likely to see. Perhaps more nefariously, advanced tracking methods can help other entities (like the NSA) know what privacy-oriented web surfers are doing on the web.

• Russian Internet Freedom In Doubt As Putin Signs New Laws Targeting Facebook, Twitter

  Russian President Vladimir Putin has authorized a new law that forces Internet companies conducting business in the country’s borders to store Russian citizens’ data there, further tightening the government’s grip on Russians’ online activity.

• The Mixed Messages of Nancy Pelosi

  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi opposed ending bulk collection of telephone records by the NSA in 2013, and in 2014 tells President Obama that no Congressional approval is needed in order to take action in Iraq.

• Idaho woman appeals NSA surveillance lawsuit

• Parallel Construction: Unconstitutional NSA Searches Deny Due Process

  The NSA sits at the nexus of violations of both the Fourth and Fifth Amendments with a legal dodge called Parallel Construction.

  Parallel Construction is a technique used by law enforcement to hide the fact that evidence in a criminal case originated with the NSA. In its simplest form, the NSA collects information showing say a Mr. Anderson committed a crime. This happens most commonly in drug cases. The conclusive information is passed to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), who then works backwards from the conclusion to create an independent, “legal” body of evidence to use against Mr. Anderson.

• What will it take to end mass surveillance in the EU?

  Given the importance of the privacy rights established in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, which include an explicit right to the protection of personal data, the EU institutions’ actions were appropriate. The treaties that underpin the EU’s authority further emphasise that the Union’s international relations must be “guided by” basic democratic principles and respect for human-rights laws.

• Sikh Coalition Files FOIA Request for NSA and FBI ‘Raghead’ Emails

• Arthur Cyr – U.S. intelligence blunders pile up

  No-nonsense German police on July 10 searched the home and office of a military employee who is accused of passing sensitive secrets to the U.S. government. Just before this event, there was an announcement that a member of German BND intelligence has been arrested, accused of selling an estimated two hundred documents to the CIA. They reportedly contained details of investigations by a German parliamentary panel into the vast electronic surveillance of European populations by the NSA, which included hacking Chancellor Merkel’s cell phone.

• MIT Wants You To Own Your Own Data, Not Give It Away

  The new system, called OpenPDS, protects your privacy while still letting apps access information they need to work.

• New Surveillance Whistleblower John Tye Says NSA Violating U.S. Constitution

  Move over Edward Snowden, there’s a new surveillance whistleblower on the scene. His name is John Napier Tye and he’s warning Americans about illegal spying. John Tye claims he filed a complaint with the State Department before leaving. In other words, he’s no leaker like Edward Snowden.

• Before Snowden: The Whistleblowers Who Tried To Lift The Veil

  Bill Binney worked at the National Security Agency nearly three decades as one of its leading crypto-mathematicians. He then became one of its leading whistleblowers.

  Now 70 and on crutches, both legs lost to diabetes, Binney recalls the July morning seven years ago when a dozen gun-wielding FBI agents burst through the front door of his home, at the end of a cul-de-sac a 10-minute drive from NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md.

• Project Zero: Show Google’s bug-hunting scheme some love

  So Google reminds us that it has invested heavily in security, including encrypting data as it moves between datacentres, and is now looking towards securing stuff by other people on the Internet.

• In Seattle, Barack Obama talks of unease about world

  People don’t tend to vote on foreign policy. But reflecting on the crises in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and Iraq that followed him as he headed to the West Coast for a fundraising swing, President Barack Obama acknowledged that they’re adding to an anxiety that’s feeding cynicism that could hurt his party in the midterms.

• Rebuilding a spy partnership: David Ignatius

  Given recent German indignation about the National Security Agency, it has been easy to overlook the fact that for decades the German government has cooperated extensively with the NSA on surveillance activities. But after a high-level meeting in Berlin this week, this long-standing but veiled cooperation may have a firmer legal and political base.

• Building a better Internet, one Tor relay at a time

  You’ve probably heard about Tor. Technically speaking, it is a global mesh of nodes, also known as relays, which encrypt and bounce traffic between client computers and servers on the Internet. That encryption and bouncing of traffic is done in such a way, that it is practically impossible to know who visited a web site or used a network service in general. To put it simply, anytime I choose to surf the web using Tor it’s impossible for the administrators of the sites I visit to know my real IP address. Even if they get subpoenaed, they are just unable to provide the real addresses of the clients who reached them through Tor.

• Kim Dotcom: ‘The Internet party will abolish mass surveillance’

Civil Rights

• Matt Bai: On Bush-era torture report, confrontation ahead

• European court rules Poland violated human rights of CIA terror suspects

  Europe’s top human rights court ruled Poland violated the rights of two terror suspects by allowing the CIA to secretly imprison them on Polish soil from 2002-2003 and facilitating the conditions under which they were subject to torture.

• Landmark rulings expose Poland’s role in CIA secret detention and torture

• Sikorski: ‘Poland unfairly slammed over CIA black sites’

• Poland found to be complicit in US torture programme

• Poland violated rights of detainees of CIA secret prisons – ECHR

• European court rules against Poland over secret CIA jail

• European Court Rules Against Poland Over Secret CIA Prisons

• European court slams Poland over CIA ‘black site’ detentions

• Poland broke EU human rights laws with CIA rendition

• Court: Poland violated human rights by allowing CIA to torture suspects at secret prison

• Poland says European court ruling on CIA jail seems premature

• 1ST LEAD Poland complicit in CIA renditions, European court rules By Clare Byrne, dpa

• European court condemns Poland for hosting secret CIA prisons

• European court rules against Poland over secret CIA jail

• ECHR Rules Poland Violated Human Rights by Stationing CIA Prisons – Reports

• European court slams Poland for helping in CIA renditions

• European court finds Poland complicit in torture at CIA secret prison

• Poland broke human rights convention on al-Qaida suspects held by the CIA

• Human Rights court condemns Poland over CIA extraordinary rendition flights

• Poland Violated Rights in CIA Rendition Case, Court Says

• ECHR: Poland’s Role in CIA Black Site Violated Detainees’ Human Rights

• EU Court Rules Against Poland in CIA Case

• European court orders Poland to pay damages to two prisoners held in secret CIA jail

• Court rules Poland complicit in CIA renditions

• European Court Rules Poland Complicit In CIA Rendition Of Terrorism Suspects

• Poland assisted US in torture, Europe’s rights court rules

• Rights court finds Poland complicit in CIA detentions

  Europe’s top human-rights court ruled Thursday that Poland allowed the CIA to detain two terrorism suspects at a secret prison on its territory where they were exposed to “torture and inhuman or degrading treatment.”

  [...]

  The court ordered Poland to pay $175,000 to Zubaydah and $135,000 to Nashiri.

• ‘CIA ran secret jail in a Polish forest’

• CIA Ran Secret Torture Jail In Poland, Rules European Court Of Human Rights

• Court condemns Poland over CIA torture prisons

  Europe’s top human rights court condemned Poland on Thursday for hosting secret CIA prisons, saying Warsaw knowingly abetted unlawful imprisonment and torture of two Guantanamo-bound detainees.

  The European Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of a Palestinian and a Saudi national locked up in a US “black site” for several months in Poland in 2002-2003 before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where they are still being held.

• European Court Says Poland Complicit in CIA Detainment Compensation

• Court faults Poland on program tied to CIA

• EU Court Rips Poland over CIA Black Sites

• European rights court condemns Poland for hosting secret CIA prisons

• European Court Rules Against Poland In CIA ‘Black Sites’ Case

• Court rules CIA ran jail in Poland

• CIA held 2 suspects at Poland jail

• European court censures Poland over CIA rendition program

• European Court Assails Poland Over Role in CIA ‘Black Sites’

• Poland pays for CIA’s dirty secret

• President bemoans ECHR judgment on CIA torture in Poland

• Black sites

• European Court of Human Rights Holds Poland Responsible for Allowing CIA Torture & Rendition

• EU Court Fines Poland for Hosting CIA ‘Black Sites’

• The CIA’s Global Torture Operations: Disclosure under Barack Obama, the Most Secretive President in U.S. History

• Poland illegally helped CIA in torture, court rules

• European court condemns Poland over secret CIA torture prisons

• Poland: Landmark Rulings on CIA Torture Complicity

• U.S. Tortures, Poland Pays

• European Court Rules CIA Ran Secret Al-Qaeda Jail in Polish Forest

• Court: Poland violated rights in allowing CIA to torture terror suspects at ‘black sites’

• Poland illegally helped CIA in torture of two, court rules

• Poland Let CIA Run ‘Black Site’, Torture Men: Court

• Court rules Poland complicit in CIA secret rendition, detention and interrogation

• Europe’s human rights court rules Poland allowed CIA to torture prisoners

• Poland violated rights by aiding CIA renditions, European court rules

• Poland Fined for Complicity in CIA Torture of Detainees

  In the first rulings of their kind, the European Court of Human Rights found Poland liable for enabling the CIA torture of two suspected terrorists in a forest north of Warsaw, and letting them be sent to Guantanamo Bay to potentially face a “flagrantly unfair trial” by military commission.

• Terror suspects tortured at CIA ‘black site’ in Poland win payouts from European court

  Europe’s top human rights court has ruled that Poland violated the European Convention on Human Rights by allowing the CIA to imprison and torture two alleged terrorists on Polish soil.

  The court in Strasbourg, France, said that Poland failed to stop the “torture and inhuman or degrading treatment” of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah, who were taken to Poland in 2002.

• Botched injection prompts calls for new execution methods

  A US man was left gasping for air for almost two hours after his lethal injection execution went wrong, leading to calls for the return of the firing squad.

• ‘The only thing I’m going to do is shoot it’: Michigan lawsuit claims cops coldly executed dog

  A heartbroken woman is suing the city of St. Clair Shores and police after officers shot her dog dead in November. The encounter was filmed by the cops’ dashboard camera.

• XML co-founder Tim Bray: Beware of spies in your software

  Governments are a key offender, he stresses, advising use of HTTPS and OpenPGP to block software-based security threats

• Jamaica and US human rights record

  Former Prime Minister Bruce Golding, while eschewing extrajudicial killings, says the United States lacks the moral authority to cite human-rights abuses as reasons to withdraw support from the Jamaican security forces. Golding complained that the US has a long history of carrying out heinous actions against other countries, and the drone strikes which are aerial vehicles remotely controlled by CIA operatives are tantamount to extrajudicial killings.

• Britain’s latest counterterrorism disasters

  The truth about renditions and detentions at the island of Diego Garcia has to be revealed.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • University Sets Fines & Worse For Pirating Students

    There are many ways to tackle the issue of online piracy and Louisiana State University has decided on its approach. At the bottom end, offenders will experience a temporary Internet disconnection, with repeat offenders receiving fines and potentially career-damaging notes on their education records.

  • YouTube star Michelle Phan sued over copyright breach

    A leading YouTube entrepreneur is facing legal action for alleged copyright infringement in her videos.

  • Online piracy no longer a criminal offence in the UK

    The British government has now decriminialised the piracy of films, music and games – meaning that users caught downloading and sharing pirated material will no longer be fined or prosecuted.

  • UK Decriminalises Sharing

    In a blatant act of democracy that would make Mussolini spin in his grave, the UK government reluctantly conceded that if everybody does it, it probably shouldn’t be a crime.

    Instead, as a nod to the intellectual monopoly gangsters, those dastardly “pirates” (i.e. everyone) will receive four spam letters a year from the Content® manufacturing industry, in a futile attempt to convince the rigidly bored audience to pay for Hollywood’s increasingly derivative and uninspiring garbage.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

MakerBot Offers Lessons in Open Source Innovation with Linux

Earlier this month, Home Depot began selling MakerBot’s Linux-based 3D printers in a handful of stores across the U.S. after a 3-month trial run online. The big box pilot is not only testing consumer appetite for 3D printing hardware, but also the viability of open source design among a general population of consumers.

Together with the Replicator printers’ relatively small size and price tag, MakerBot’s design software and online Thingiverse community lower the barrier to creation and sharing for thousands of professionals and hobbyists alike. As a result, the MakerBot open source design community has quickly grown – though not without some difficulties.

Desktop

• Chrome OS to get comple overhaul with ‘Project Athena’

  If Google have not had their hands full with the official announcement of the soon-to-be released Android L, as well as Android TV, Auto and Wear it now seems Chrome OS is also on the agenda to receive a full overhaul.

• Chromebooks are freaking out Microsoft in a very big way

• Schools Are Gobbling Up Chromebooks: 1 Million Sold in 3 Months

  Schools purchased more than 1 million Chromebooks — budget laptops that run Chrome OS — in the second quarter of 2014, Google announced on Monday.

• Bridgeport Public Schools chooses Google for Education to bring affordable technology to their students

  Schools bought more than 1 million Chromebooks in the second quarter of 2014. Today’s guest blogger, David Andrade, the CIO for the Bridgeport Public Schools district, which serves 23,000 students in Connecticut, shares why they selected Chromebooks. Learn more about going Google and follow our Google for Education Google+ page to see a selection of tips from David.

• Freeing Education Via GNU/Linux

• Why Chromebook Sales Are Surging in Schools, Enterprises

  Chromebook sales have risen sharply over the past several months, according to a recent report from research firm NPD. Chromebook sales in the commercial channel increased 250 percent compared with the prior year and accounted for 35 percent of all U.S. channel notebook sales during the January-May period. Chromebooks, in other words, were extremely popular during the period and continue to be so. Exactly why and how Chromebooks have been achieving such sales success, however, are not so readily known. When the devices, which run Google’s Chrome OS Web-based operating system, were first announced, many market observers believed that they had little chance of winning a significant share of the PC market. And that seemed to hold true in the first couple of years after Chromebooks hit the market in mid-2011. But the latest data shows that Chromebook sales are adding to the competitive headwinds that Windows notebooks are experiencing these days. This eWEEK slide show looks at the impact that rising Chromebook sales is having on the U.S. PC market.

• Google Chrome takes big chunk of commercial notebook sales

  Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Chrome operating system has grown to become a legitimate third platform in the personal computer market behind Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows and Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) Mac OS, new data show.

Server

• QEMU 2.1.0-rc3 Has More Bug Fixes

  If all goes according to plan the QEMU 2.1 release will happen next week but before that can happen some last-minute testing is encouraged with the new release of QEMU 2.1-rc3.

• ‘Munich city council shields Limux against Mayor’

  The council of the German city of Munich continues to support the city’s open source IT strategy, and opposes the newly elected mayor and a deputy mayor, reports Heise, a German IT news site. CSU party members of the deputy mayor shrug off his negative comments as “an irrelevant individual opinion”.

• Docker acquires London startup Orchard Laboratories

  The open source engine Docker announced Wednesday that it has acquired London-based Orchard Laboratories, makers of the Orchard and Fig applications. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.17 To Fix Up ASPM, Bring Other PCI Changes

  Bjorn Helgaas, the PCI subsystem maintainer for the Linux kernel, sent in a very early Linux 3.17 kernel merge window pull request due to being on holiday the next few weeks.

• Development Continues For Supporting EXT4 On NVDIMMs

  The large set of 22 patches for supporting the EXT4 file-system on non-volatile DIMM memory is now up to its eighth revision.

• diff -u: What’s New in Kernel Development

  Once in a while someone points out a POSIX violation in Linux. Often the answer is to fix the violation, but sometimes Linus Torvalds decides that the POSIX behavior is broken, in which case they keep the Linux behavior, but they might build an additional POSIX compatibility layer, even if that layer is slower and less efficient.

• Kernel 3.16 RC6 Has Been Released. And Linus Torvalds Is Unhappy, Again!

  For now, the kernel patches are not that big to make the Linux godfather too unhappy, but Linus Torvalds has announced that he will keep an eye on the development process and he will call the developers names, if things go on the wrong way.

• CPUFreq Ondemand Could Be Faster, Use Less Power With Linux 3.17

  Improvements to the CPUfreq ondemand governor could lead to faster performance in low to medium workloads with the Linux 3.17 kernel while also consuming less power overall.

• Graphics Stack

  • Watch out for DRI3 regressions

  • Intel Adds BPTC Texture Compression To Their Mesa Driver

    Intel has introduced BPTC texture compression support to Mesa and specifically their Intel HD Graphics driver along with the Mesa software rasterizer.

  • Libinput 0.5 Improves Pointer Acceleration, Adds A Configuration API

    Libinput, the input library designed for use by Wayland compositors and other environments for having common input device handling on Linux, is out with a significant update.

  • AMD R600g/RadeonSI Performance On Linux 3.16 With Mesa 10.3-devel

    As the first part of an upcoming series of tests benchmarking the latest open-source and closed-source Linux graphics drivers for AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce hardware, here’s some benchmark results for several recent Radeon GPUs when tested on the current Git version of the Linux 3.16 kernel and a recent Mesa 10.3-devel snapshot.

  • BPTC Texture Compression Comes To Nouveau After Intel’s Work

    Just hours after Intel added BPTC texture compression support to Mesa and their DRI driver, frequent Nouveau contributor Ilia Mirkin added BPTC support to Gallium3D and wired it up for the “NVC0″ Fermi/Kepler Gallium3D open-source NVIDIA driver.

  • Intel Is Getting Very Close To OpenGL 4.0/4.1/4.2 Mesa Support

    As brought up in the discussion following yesterday’s article about Intel adding BPTC support to their Mesa driver, several Phoronix readers are filled with happiness over Mesa nearly support not just for the OpenGL 4.0 specification but also OpenGL 4.1 and 4.2 aren’t far out of reach.

  • Eric Anholt Makes Progress With Broadcom VC4 Graphics Driver

    One month ago Linux developer Eric Anholt left Intel to work at Broadcom. Eric, a long-time contributor to the open-source Linux graphics stack, is now tasked at Broadcom with developing a DRM driver and Mesa/Gallium3D driver for Broadcom’s “VC4″ graphics hardware, which is found within the Raspberry Pi.

  • Intel 3.0 X.Org Driver Still Baking, New Development Release

    Chris Wilson announced the release this morning of the xf86-video-intel 2.99.913 driver as the latest development version in the nearly year-long process of releasing xf86-video-intel 3.0.

• Benchmarks

  • KVM Benchmarks On Ubuntu 14.10

    For those wondering about the modern performance cost of using KVM on Ubuntu Linux for virtualizing a guest OS, here are some simple benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 14.10 in its current development stage with the Linux 3.16 versus running the same software stack while virtualized with KVM and using virt-manager.

Applications

• QEMU 2.1.0 RC3 Open Source Virtualization Software Is Now Out and Available for Testing

  QEMU, a generic open source emulator and virtualizer that can run OSes and programs made for a different machine, is now at version 2.1.0 RC3 and is getting much closer to a final release.

• GitLab 7.1 Arrives with Group Milestones and Other Major Features

  GitLab, a fast, secure, and stable solution based on Ruby on Rails & Gitolite and distributed under the MIT License, is now at version 7.1 and is ready for download.

• Cantata 1.4.0 Music Player Features Improved Interface

  Cantata 1.4.0 can be compiled with KDE support or as a pure Qt4 application. It’s been a few months since the previous release and quite a few changes have been made in the meantime.

• Xen Unveils Mirage OS 2.0 for Open Source Virtual Cloud Apps

  The open source Xen Project believes it has made it easier than ever to “compile your own cloud” with the release of MirageOS v2.0, which simplifies and optimizes deployment of cloud-based apps running on the Xen virtualization hypervisor.

• Xen Unveils Mirage OS 2.0 for Open Source Virtual Cloud Apps

  The open source Xen Project believes it has made it easier than ever to “compile your own cloud” with the release of MirageOS v2.0, which simplifies and optimizes deployment of cloud-based apps running on the Xen virtualization hypervisor.

• mpstat: Quickdraw processor statistics

• iftopcolor: Please do not feed the bloggers

• IPv6 Improvements Hit NetworkManager

  While NetworkManager has already supported the IPv6 protocol for some months now, several IPv6-related improvements were pushed to its code-base on Wednesday.

• Proprietary

  • Skype for Linux Redesign Is Ugly but Functional

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Install Linux Multimedia Studio in Linux Mint 17

  • Install Linux Multimedia Studio in Ubuntu 14.04

  • Install Linux kernel 3.14.13 in Ubuntu 14.04

  • Linux / Unix logtop: Realtime Log Line Rate Analyser

  • Securing SSH On Centos 7 With WiKID Two-Factor Authentication

  • Install Google Docs on Linux with Grive Tools

  • Quick-start guide to gst-uninstalled for GStreamer 1.x

  • enhance your screencasts with key-mon on Fedora

  • How To Install SVN With Apache dav_svn On CentOS 7

  • Xen hypervisor: Assign Virtual Disk to a Virtual Machine

  • Backtick (`) symbol in Linux Shell Scripting

  • icanhazip and CORS

  • What is preloading?

  • Etsy reminds us that information security is an active process

  • How To Install KPhotoAlbum 4.5 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Pinguy OS, Deepin 2014 And Other Ubuntu 14.04 Derivatives

  • How To Install Nomacs 2.0.0 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Thunderbird 31.0 On The Most Popular Linux Systems

  • Assigning IP addresses to Docker containers via DHCP

  • GNU/Linux graphic sessions: suspending your computer

• Games

  • Valve Is Still Hiring For SteamOS, Linux Work

    Valve has been poaching Linux developers for years and there’s no sign of them slowing down, but in fact are still hiring.

  • Unigine Develops City Traffic System, A Driving Simulator

    While the Unigine Engine sadly hasn’t fully rode the Linux gaming wave with there still being very few games powered by this visually stunning engine that has supported Linux for many years, they are at least finding commercial success in other areas — namely around simulation and industrial licenses. One of the company’s recent endeavors is with a driving simulator.

  • Warhammer Eternal Crusade MMO Will Gain A Linux Version

    An upcoming MMO in the Warhammer series is set to gain a Linux version thanks to comments made from the lead developer.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE’s the Best, Wallen Interview, and Why Linux Rules

    Today in Linux news, Bruce Byfield says the best Linux desktop continues to be KDE’s Plasma. Steven Ovadia at My Linux Rig snagged a short interview with Jack Wallen. eWeek has nine reasons Linux rules on supercomputers. And venture capitalist Sonatype says most companies don’t audit Open Source software components they’re using for vulnerabilities and security flaws.

  • KDE’s semantic desktop: Nepomuk vs. Baloo

    One of the most disliked features of the early KDE SC 4 releases was the developers’ attempt to establish the semantic desktop. The tools to further this goal are Nepomuk and Akonadi. While Nepomuk tries to interconnect meta data from different desktop applications, Akonadi is a service that stores and retrieves data from PIM applications like mail, calendar and contacts. Together, they pave the road to allow users to find data, structured and connected by tags, ratings and comments, covering different file formats. On top of that, Strigi performs the indexing that enables users to find data with simple search terms in KDE’s file manager Dolphin.

  • Netrunner 14 – KDE for the Everyday Linux User

    There are two versions of Netrunner available. This article looks at the Standard Release which is based on Kubuntu 14.04. The other version is a rolling release based on Manjaro.

  • KDE 5 Delivers New Linux Desktop Environment

    The K Desktop Environment (KDE) is among the most popular and long-lived open-source desktop environments for Linux and Unix users. Dating back to 1996, KDE is one of the earliest Linux desktop environments, predating the GNOME desktop environment, which got started in 1999. KDE has gone through multiple evolutions, the most recent being KDE Plasma 5, which was officially released on July 15. With the Plasma 5 desktop, KDE is providing users with both under-the-hood enhancements and user-facing improvements. Plasma 5 is powered by the open-source Qt 5 cross-platform user interface framework. Hardware acceleration for graphics is now supported with the OpenGL graphics API. With Qt 5 and OpenGL, Plasma 5 is able to provide users with not only improved graphics performance, but also a more fluid user experience. Plus, the new Kickoff application launcher enables users to rapidly find and access applications and content on a system. KDE as a desktop environment is available on multiple Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, KaOS and openSUSE. In this slide show, eWEEK examines some of the key features of KDE Plasma 5.

  • It’s Aliiiiive!

    On February, I wrote a blog post entitled “Leveraging the Power of Choice“, in which I described an idea I had discussed with Àlex Fiestas about making it easy for users to choose between different Plasmoids for the same task (e.g. different application launchers, task managers, clocks, …). At the time of my writing the blog post, Marco Martin already had ideas about how to implement the feature, though he said that he wouldn’t have time to implement it before the Plasma 5.0 release. Shortly after Plasma 5.0 was released, Marco started implementation as promised. We decided it would make sense to start a thread in the VDG forum to collect ideas for the UI’s design. Together with several other forum users (most notably rumangerst and andreas_k) we fleshed out the design, which currently looks like this:

  • What’s new in kf5 porting script: port_to_autogenerate_export_header.sh and others

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME Shell Gets Wayland HiDPI Fonts, Mutter Gets Touch Gestures

    New releases of the GNOME Shell and Mutter are available today in preparation for the GNOME 3.13.4 development milestone this week.

Distributions

• Black Lab Linux 5.1 Alpha 2 Gets Firefox 31 and VLC 2.1.3

  Black Lab Linux 5.1 Alpha 2, a distribution that aims to rival Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, is now ready for testing.

• Quelitu 14.04 Devs Think Their OS Can Replace Windows XP or Windows Vista

  Quelitu, a multilingual operating system based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Lubuntu LTS, which aims to power antique computers and to replace all the recent Windows releases, is now at version 14.04.

• Updated xorg, linux kernel, systemd and graphics driver groups of packages …

  This move includes updates or rebuilds of the packages that are related to xorg, the linux kernel and graphics drivers, as well as various other packages that were updated in the meantime and are made available now. In total, more than 400 packages are moving to stable.

• OpenELEC 4.2 Beta 2 Is Now Based Linux Kernel 3.15.6

  OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, has advanced to version 4.2 Beta 2 and is available for download and testing.

  OpenELEC devs usually wait until a new version of XBMC Gotham is officially released, but this time they have jumped the gun a little and they’ve released an update for their distro. Interestingly enough, it’s based on XBMC 13.2 Gotham Beta 2, but regular users will have to wait for the official announcement on that one.

• Screenshots

  • Kali 1.0.8

• Red Hat Family

  • EPEL 7 now contains syslog-ng

  • Oracle Linux 7 Released Today As Its RHEL7 Clone

    In case you didn’t hear already, Oracle announced the release of Oracle Linux 7 as the latest version of its Linux OS cloned from the open-source Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 code-base.

  • Oracle showcases its Open Source prowess with Oracle Linux 7

  • Oracle Linux 7 released

    Oracle has supported Linux almost from day one. But it wasn’t until 2006, when Larry Ellison got into a disagreement with Red Hat, that Oracle decided it had to have its “own” Linux distribution — a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone, Oracle Linux. It’s eight years later, and Oracle is still copying RHEL with its release of Oracle Linux 7.

  • Attack of the clones: Oracle’s latest Red Hat Linux lookalike arrives

    For each new Red Hat Enterprise Linux release, a new version of Oracle Linux is never far behind, and RHEL 7 is no exception.

  • Oracle Linux 7.0

  • Clone Attack, Tails Rebased, and Banana Pi?

    Today in Linux news, Oracle Linux 7 was released today. Softpedia.com reports that Tails now features a “Windows 8 camouflage mode.” MakeUseOf.com has five reasons to love Deepin and LinuxUser & Developer has a review of the Banana Pi. This and more in tonight’s Linux news review.

  • In odd coupling, OpenStack purist Mirantis join with Oracle against common enemy Red Hat

    The move seems odd at first glance since the Mountain View startup fashions itself as the “number one” pure-play provider of software and services for OpenStack, a community-led project aimed at establishing a common standard for cloud environments. That goal runs counter to Oracle’s vertically integrated platform approach, which consists primarily of homegrown components. To make matters more confusing, Oracle recently introduced its own distribution of the free platform that competes directly with that offered by Mirantis.

  • Red Hat and Cisco extend cloud collaboration in India

    To provide customers and partners with an opportunity to review their cloud frameworks and experience how they can deliver cloud innovation within their organizations

  • Fedora

    • Users Warned About Possible Regressions With DRI3

      Users of Fedora 21/Rawhide, Arch Linux, or other bleeding edge distributions where DRI3 is in play with the Intel Linux graphics driver, be forewarned about possible regressions.

    • Elections Results for Summer 2014 FESCo Special Election

      The elections for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) Summer 2014 Special Election have concluded, and the results are shown below.

    • The ARM Arc

      Beginning in 2011, Red Hat began providing assistance to the fledgling Fedora ARM distribution. I was Red Hat’s project manager for this initiative. Back then it was a humble secondary architecture under the stewardship of Seneca College. Seneca was working on an OS distribution for the Raspberry Pi, a promising educational tool. Red Hat partnered with Seneca, provided resources to advance development and helped build a community, the open source way. Though Linux had been used on ARM for many years, kernel ports tended to exist in different source trees. Likewise, many userspace packages had been written without multi-core, thread-safe ARM code, so there was a lot of work to be done.

    • Fedora 21 Has Been Delayed By Three Weeks

      Due to many of the Fedora 21 changes/features not being ready in time, the release schedule has been pushed back by three weeks.

• Debian Family

  • Two Years With Debian GNU/Linux – An Average Guy’s Verdict

    I used to be quite the Linux enthusiast, trying new distributions almost daily, keeping up to date with news and software versions, just generally participating in the whole scene, though as a technical know-nothing really. I kinda got tired of it after a while and decided to settle on one distribution that would be low on bandwidth needs, extremely stable, and able to do all the things, admittedly a rather limited array of things, that I need it to do. I had been playing with Debian GNU/Linux’s Wheezy iteration (yes, they use “Toy Story” character names) since late 2011, when it was still the “testing” version, and noticed after a year or so that it was in a frozen state, largely set for final release, which ultimately happened, in typical molasses-slow Debian fashion, in early May of 2013. So I guess I’ve been using it as my one and only OS for the better part of two years, rarely if ever booting into any of the dozen or so other distributions I still have installed or into Windows 7. I have it fine tuned to my liking and it does every single thing I need it to do. It’s been reliable and stable, exactly as expected.

  • Tails 1.1

  • Testing PHPNG on Debian/Ubuntu

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Microsoft imitates Ubuntu, will create one Windows to run on all screens

        Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, for long pursued a single dream — that of acheiving a unified family of experiences on smartphones, tablets, PCs, and TVs through one operating system and one interface, Unity, which will adopt to the connected device. As Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical and Ubuntu’s founder said at last year’s OSCon, “Convergence is the core story. Each device is great, but they should be part of one family. On any device you’ll know what you’re doing. One device should be able to give you all the experiences you can get from any one of them.”

Devices/Embedded

• Exclusive interview with Agustin Benito Bethencourt on joining Linaro

  Linaro is growing fast so I am currently focused on management and development processes. Together with the technical leads and the project managers, my goal is to keep high levels of efficiency within the Group while growing, keeping the Free Software culture that has made Linaro so successful.

• Banana Pi review – tastier than Raspberry?

  Does the first of the true Raspberry Pi clones have what it takes to come out from the shadow of its highly-successful inspiration?

• Phones

  • It’s now easier to install SailfishOS on Android devices

    Sailfish OS is a new venture by ex-nokia employees which aims to bring a new independent partner friendly mobile operating system to wireless devices. However, as the mobile ecosystem today is quite fragmented, a new OS brings in a lot of work for developers to port the new OS in their existing devices. The Sailfish OS team knew this problem and have come out with a Hardware Adaptation Dev kit which will help developers to port and run Sailfish OS on any device capable of running Cyanogen Mod 10.1.x.

  • Android

    • Android Open-Source for ARMv8-A Starts 64-Bit Avalanche

      I have no doubt that the next generation of premium smartphones and tablets will be based on 64-bit processors. To provide the power and features needed for new features such as UltraHD video, LTE-Advanced, and 3D products (such as Google’s Tango), mobile devices will need a big boost in processing power.

      New 64-bit SOCs such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 processor are expected to begin shipping this year, and the first products are expected to be commercially available in the first quarter of 2005, just in time for the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona.

    • Best Android Camera Apps 2014

      Taking photos with an Android phone can be a very satisfying endeavor. Or it can be a study in frustration and ruined photo opportunities. Why? Because while all Android devices are powered by Google’s GOOGL +0.33% OS, phone makers are free to develop their own camera apps, adopting or omitting photo features as they see fit. Simply put, some companies do this better than others. One of the best ways to improve your photography experience then, is to use a third party camera app instead of the one that came installed on your phone.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • What kind of tablet do you use?

    There are also a number of other Linux-based tablets out there which do not rely on Android. Most any tablet computer which is capable of running an x86 version of a Windows operating system, for example, can be upgraded to a Linux distribution of your choice, with a number of graphic interface options available. Some distributions are now targeting other architectures as well.

  • Nvidia debuts Shield tablet for gamers

  • Gaming oriented Nvidia Shield Tablet wins early praise

    The Android 4.4.3-based Nvidia Shield Tablet won early praise with its Tegra K1 SoC, Kepler-based graphics, new stylus, and WiFi Direct gaming controller.

The VAR Guy Poll: Cloud Computing, Open Source a Good Team

In our most recent The VAR Guy poll, we asked you whether you thought open source would take on a larger role in cloud computing. Based on reader responses, it looks as though open source has a bright future in the cloud computing sphere.

How open source launched my small business

Open source hardware has truly changed my life. It allowed me to launch my own business. “How so,” you might ask? Well, let’s take a little stroll down memory lane, shall we?

Here’s a low-barrier way to help improve FLOSS apps – AppStream metadata: Round 1

Do you love free and open source software? Would you like to help make it better, but don’t have the technical skills to know where you can jump in and help out? Here is a fantastic opportunity!

This is the golden age of open source

Matt Asay is dead wrong to call the current era of the software industry “post open source,” as he did in InfoWorld last week. We are currently in the open source age, enjoying all the practical flexibility that open sources licenses bring. What may be confusing him is that people are no longer obsessed with arguing about software freedom — they take it as given.

Big Switch Unveils Big Cloud Fabric for Data Center SDN

Company officials want to bring the benefits of networking innovation from Google and Facebook to the broader enterprise space.

Open-source Approaches To Ensure IoT Success

Certainly, the Internet of Thing goes beyond connected television, surveillance cameras, smart gadgets and wearable technology. And as the adoption of the Internet of Things increases and becomes widespread in several different markets, issues on its lack of interoperability and integration cost have been raised along with its consistent escalating growth. Nonetheless, innovators from all over the world try to create different solutions such as Hypercat, in an attempt to bridge these gaps. At the IoT 2014 Conference held in Singapore, Juha Lindfors, Co-founder of OpenRemote USA, spoke about a case study on Open Source Approaches to IoT Solutions. During the presentation¹, Linfords pointed out three points that prove the value of this openness in ensuring the success for the IoT – Interoperability, Integration and Ecosystem.

Lessons from an open source entrepreneur

Like many of the great games programmers from the 1980s, when open source software entrepreneur Freddy Mahhumane describes his background formal education doesn’t really play much of a part in it.

“I wasn’t good at much at school,” he says, “Except for computers and programming.”

Born in Mpumalanga, Mahhumane moved to Gauteng at the age of six and lived variously in Kempton Park and Thembisa while he was growing up. Sitting in front of a group of business hopefuls at the inaugural Startup Grind Johannesburg, he sounds almost embarrassed by the trappings of success.

Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money

Events

• Keynotes from OSCON 2014 Day 1

• Keynotes from OSCON 2014 Day 2

Web Browsers

• What are the best browsers for Linux?

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 31 tightens download security, adds search box to new tab page

  • First Commercial Web Games Launch Leveraging Mozilla-Pioneered Technology

    Mozilla is proving the Web is a powerful gaming platform by creating new technologies and developer tools that enable game creators to port their popular titles to the Web. One of the trailblazers using these technologies is Trendy Entertainment, which is leveraging Emscripten and asm.js to bring its highly popular Dungeon Defenders title to the Web. Trendy announced today it will release a version of Dungeon Defenders Eternity featuring the same visuals and gameplay as the native desktop version, but available on the Web at near native speeds. Later today, the full game will be available to buy on Steam.

  • Mozilla Firefox 31 Officially Lands in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

    Canonical has published details about a number of Firefox vulnerabilities in its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems, and release a new version of the Internet browser in the repositories.

  • Firefox 31.0 And Thunderbird 31.0 Are Both Available Via The Default Repositories Of Ubuntu 14.04

    As you may know, both Firefox 31.0 and Thunderbird 31.0 have been added to the default repositories of Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr and derivative systems.

  • Firefox 31 comes with better download security

  • Firefox 31 Brings Developer Tools and Security Fixes

  • Firefox OS-based Chromecast Competitor Coming Soon

    The details were unclear back in late June, but it looked like Mozilla may have been playing some role in delivering a competitor to Google’s popular Chromecast dongle, with Mozilla’s based on the Firefox OS platform. The rumors abated shortly after they arose, but some people missed the fact that Mozilla confirmed the news in a recent blog post, noting the following: “Mozilla is working with Panasonic to develop next generation SmartTVs running Firefox OS, and Abitcool will launch an HDMI streaming device later this year that allows the user to fling content from compatible mobile or Web apps to an HDTV.”

  • Firefox 31 Stable Has Been Released + Installation Instructions For The Most Popular Linux Systems

    Among others, it comes with an enhanced search bar, allowing the users to carry targeted searches in the search engines directly from the new Favorites tab, the users now get access to the most visited websites by clicking on the thumbnails, some features for developers have been implemented and the memory management of the browser has been improved.

SaaS/Big Data

• Catbird 6.0 Provides OpenStack Cloud Security Policy Automation

  Enterprise adoption of OpenStack is taking off, and value-added security solutions for the open source cloud computing operating system are close behind. This week, Catbird announced version 6.0 of its cloud security platform, which it describes as the channel’s first “security policy automation for private and hybrid cloud environments.”

• Take control of your ‘cloud’ with ownCloud 7

  The best cloud is the one that you own. Once ownCloud was founded I never used public cloud offered and hosted by a company to keep my files. I do use Dropbox and Google Drive, but the primary purpose is to share files with a set of people. With each release ownCloud is becoming a very serious contender to these commercial offerings when it comes to file storage, syncing and sharing. OwnCloud Documents are already an impressive alternative to Google Docs and offer full ODF support which is missing from Google Docs.

• ownCloud 7 Brings Server-To-Server Sharing

  The seventh version of ownCloud has been released this morning with some interesting new features for this personal, open-source cloud software.

• ownCloud 7 is out!

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Moving to LibreOffice saves Toulouse 1 million

  Toulouse, France’s fourth largest city, has saved 1 million euro by migrating all its desktops to LibreOffice, an open source suite of office productivity tools. “Free software and open source in general is now an established part of the city’s comprehensive digital policy, and the open model promotes economic development and employment in the region”, according to a study published by the Open Source Observatory and Repository today.

• Go, Toulouse! City Saves €1.000.000 Via LibreOffice And That’s Not All They Do With FLOSS

CMS

• Open source evangelists host North East’s first DrupalCamp conference

  Businesses working in web development are invited to Sunderland Software Centre to learn more about how they could benefit from using Drupal

Education

• The Modernization Of Computer Science Education

  Working on open source puts CS students at the heart of the software industry. Open source enables everyone involved to work in development and create new infrastructure and designs without being forced to start from scratch. And unlike in school, where a project might just be theoretical, or relevant only in context of the class, an open-source contribution makes immediate impact on the ecosystem.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • SAP supports open source Cloud Foundry and OpenStack for cloud

    Well, this is surprising. SAP had been pushing forward with bringing its enterprise software suite to the cloud for some time. But no one expected to see SAP really putting its muscle behind the open source cloud and that’s exactly what they’re doing.

  • New openQRM Cloud 5.1.4 release out today offers new Cloud portal, Android OS support and real-time management overview

  • Colosa Updates ProcessMaker Cloud BPM/Workflow Suite

    Colosa has rolled out a new version of its open source business-process management (BPM) and workflow platform, ProcessMaker, which is available in the form of both a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering and a software download that users can install directly on their bare-metal or virtual servers.

Funding

• Open-Source Projects Failing To Pass IRS Nonprofit Muster

  Though organizations that produce nonprofit software have long been granted tax-exempt status, the Internal Revenue Service recently denied it to two applicants. One had waited more than four years for a determination—and found the reasons for denial alarming.

  [...]

  The report comes a few months after OpenStack Foundation was denied a nonprofit 501(c)(6) designation. (A 501(c)(3) designation is generally set aside for groups with charitable, literary, or educational goals; a 501(c)(6) generally applies to business groups.)

• PredictionIO Raises $2.5M for Open Source Machine Learning Software

  PredictionIO, the open source machine learning platform, has received a big boost with the announcement of $2.5 million in seed funding, which it plans to use to make its automated data interpretation and prediction platform widely available to open source developers.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Icecat, the big absent

  GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser, a lot of people know this browser but it seems few used. It is a free software like Mozilla Firefox but Icecat main advantage is the ethical one because does not distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons.

Public Services/Government

• France parliamentary committee: ‘encourage European open source software market

  Europe should encourage the market for free source software solutions, using public procurement and by making open standards mandatory, recommends a French parliamentary committee. Using free software is strategic as it increases IT security, reduces economic dependencies and fights rent-seeking by closed source software vendors. To avoid straining innovation, the committee also advises against European patents on software.

• European Citizens’ Initiative: public demo available for the Online Collection Software.

  The ECI Register lists all Open Initiatives. Each Initiative promotion site provides a link “vote” that point to an OCS in production. The ECI Register provides also detailed information about how to launch an Initiative and the requirements to prepare your Online Collection System.

Openness/Sharing

• Tesla, pharma, and the state of open source patents

  In a shocking move last month, Tesla “open sourced” its patents, while more recently, pharmaceutical companies have adopted aggressive patent lawsuits reminiscent of the tech industry.

• Open Data

  • FoundationDB, DataRPM Partner on NoSQL Big Data Analytics

    In a deal centered on combining NoSQL data storage with cognitive, natural-language Big Data discovery and analytics, FoundationDB and DataRPM have announced a partnership that will bring their platforms together.

  • EU tenders for Open Data platform

    The EU has just issued a tender document for what is likely to be the world’s biggest Open Data project.

• Open Access/Content

  • OpenCurriculum Looks To Foster Open-Source Education By Releasing Free Online Library

    Aimed at providing teachers with educational materials by making them open and competitive, OpenCurriculum, which launched in Pittsburgh, curates and organizes material from sites such as teacher blogs and lesson material publishers. Teachers can create lesson plans and more through OpenCurriculum.org.

  • Science embracing the open opportunity

    Today I was proud to receive the Open Access Advocate Award from BioMed Central – recognising those who have promoted open science through their work.

• Open Hardware

  • Open Source Wireless Garden Kits: Cooking Hacks Open Garden

    Open Garden is an Arduino-based DIY kit that has everything you need to create a connected, automated garden. It’s a product of Cooking Hacks, the online IoT component store and open source hobbyist community run by Libelium (See our interview with Alicia Asín Pérez the CEO and co-founder here).

  • Develop & Share Open-Source Hardware Projects

  • Open-Source Could Be A New Avenue For Manufacturers

    Open-source means that a program, firmware, or hardware is free to the public, with the encouragement to improve the product, so long as they don’t sell the improved/updated version and continue the openness. While this seems counter-intuitive to making money, many companies have found success in the model – I would argue that manufacturers could see a new market open up from business models like this.

  • 3D printed humanoid robot goes open source

    Small, child-like Poppy robot takes two days to assemble and program from open-source, off-the-shelf and additive manufactured components.

Programming

• Cisco Spending “Tens of Millions” on Developers

  Cisco is putting substantial resources behind its DevNet developer effort, which is supported at the highest levels of the company.

• Pike Programming Language

  A C-like language with all the OO trimmings, garbage collection, strong data types, and excellent string processing makes a powerful tool for Web programming.

Security

• Tuesday’s security updates

• Security advisories for Wednesday

• Tor Project working to fix weakness that can unmask anonymous users

  Developers of Tor software believe they’ve identified a weakness that was scheduled to be revealed at the Black Hat security conference next month that could be used to de-anonymize Tor users.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Activist group to debut barcode-scanning boycott Israel app

  The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is about to come out with a smartphone app that will help people carry out boycotts against Israel, according to the International Business Times. The beta version of this app is slated to be ready in the near future.

• Israeli propaganda war hits social media

  The whole point of such efforts is to look like they are unofficial, just everyday people chatting online…

• Ceasefire My Arse

  Some lives matter more than others, apparently.

• Are People Who Shoot Down Passenger Planes ‘War Criminals’–or ‘Hard to Fault’?

  When the Navy shot down Iran Air 655 over the Persian Gulf in 1988, killing all 290 people on board (Extra!, 7/88), the Times editorial (7/5/88) insisted that “while horrifying, it was nonetheless an accident. On present evidence, it’s hard to see what the Navy could have done to avoid it.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Rush Takes Credit For Finding That U.S. Leads Globe In Climate Denial

  New Study Shows Americans Have “The Highest Amount Of Doubt About The Conventional Wisdom Of Climate”

Finance

• You can now pay someone’s delinquent Detroit water bill online

  The Detroit Water Project, a platform to help donors pay the delinquent water bills of people in Detroit, started with a Twitter conversation.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• WI GOP Endorses Basis for Walker Criminal Probe

  For months, supporters of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker have insisted the John Doe criminal probe into his 2012 campaign is “baseless,” because the alleged coordination under investigation did not involve ads that expressly told viewers to elect Walker or vote against his opponent. As long as an ad doesn’t include such express advocacy, Walker and his allies have claimed, it is beyond the reach of Wisconsin campaign finance law.

Censorship

• German Government Tries To Censor Publication Of Its List Of Censored Websites

  A few weeks ago, an anonymous internet user was able to acquire and subsequently extract a website blacklist used by Germany’s Federal Department of Media Harmful to Young Children (Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien [BPjM]). This un-hashed list was posted to the user’s Neocities blog, along with some analysis of the blacklist’s contents and a rundown on the minimal protective efforts used for the list.

• New broadband users shun UK porn filters, Ofcom finds

  The vast majority of new broadband customers in the UK are opting out of “child friendly” filters when prompted to install them by service providers.

• Department of Dirty

Privacy

• Cowbuilder and Tor

  You’ve installed apt-transport-tor to help prevent targeted attacks on your system. Great! Now you want to build Debian packages using cowbuilder, and you notice these are still using plain HTTP.

• The world’s most secure OS may have a serious problem

  The Tails operating system is one of the most trusted platforms in cryptography, favored by Edward Snowden and booted up more than 11,000 times per day in May. But according to the security firm Exodus Intelligence, the program may not be as secure as many thought. The company says they’ve discovered an undisclosed vulnerability that will let attackers deanonymize Tails computers and even execute code remotely, potentially exposing users to malware attacks. Exodus is currently working with Tails to patch the bug, and expects to hand over a full report on the exploit next week.

• RT Breaking the Set — interview about spies with Abby Martin

• Why Dropbox Is Tying Its Future to Microsoft Office

  Hot startups don’t often stake their reputation for innovation on how well their technology works with Microsoft Office, but that’s exactly what Dropbox is doing today. The file-syncing service, one of the most valuable venture-backed private companies on the planet, is rolling out several Office-related features for businesses, including full-text search of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, among other file types, and the ability for multiple users to simultaneously edit Office documents via Dropbox.

Civil Rights

• Government agents ‘directly involved’ in most high-profile US terror plots

  In particular, Human Rights Watch examines the extent and impact of law enforcement’s use of terrorism informants, who can both steer people into attempted acts of violence and chill religious or civic behaviour in the communities they penetrate.

• France’s New Anti-Terror Bill: All Presumed Terrorist Until Proven Guilty?

• The Secret Government Rulebook For Labeling You a Terrorist

  The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that requires neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept.

  The “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government’s secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings. The new guidelines allow individuals to be designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place “entire categories” of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists. It broadens the authority of government officials to “nominate” people to the watchlists based on what is vaguely described as “fragmentary information.” It also allows for dead people to be watchlisted.

• Can Twitter activism #BringBackOurGirls?

  Three months ago, the conversation about Nigeria’s kidnapped girls was electric online. Now, much of the digital chatter around the girls has faded. On April 15, more than 200 girls were taken from their school in Chibok by the extremist group Boko Haram. Nearly 60 girls have managed to escape their captors since then, but the majority of them are still being held.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Comcast memo on viral cancellation call: It was “painful to listen to”

  When a call to cancel Comcast service descended into “a stunning display of hysteria and desperation,” pretty much everyone who listened to a recording of the phone call agreed: it was painful to listen to.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Adobe Says Piracy is Down, But Photoshop Still Rules Pirate Bay

    Last year Adobe announced a shift away from boxed products in favor of a cloud-based subscription model. Now the U.S.-based company says that not only does it have more than 2.3 million cloud subscribers, but it has also seen a drop in piracy. Exactly how much is “hard to measure” but Adobe products still lead the way with pirates.

  • Colombian Student Faces Prison Charges for Sharing an Academic Article Online

    In many parts of the developing world, students face barriers to access academic materials. Libraries are often inadequate, and schools and universities are often unable to pay dues for expensive, specialized databases. For these students, the Internet is a vital tool and resource to access materials that are otherwise unavailable to them. Yet despite the opportunities enabled by the Internet, there are still major risks to accessing and sharing academic resources online.

  • Porn studio sues immigrant who has “no idea how BitTorrent works,” wins big

    Lawsuit-happy porn studio beats a “poor sap” whose pleas of ignorance fail.

  • Megaupload Wants to Freeze MPAA and RIAA Lawsuits Until 2015

    Megaupload’s legal team has asked the federal court of Virginia to place the cases filed by the music and movie companies on hold till April next year. The request comes after the extradition hearings of Kim Dotcom and his colleagues were postponed in New Zealand.