• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Dear Computer Makers: I Want an Ubuntu Notebook!

I want to buy an inexpensive, low to medium-end notebook that comes preinstalled with Ubuntu. I want it to have hardware that is supported by the latest Linux kernel so I can put any GNU/Linux distribution on it that I want. I want it to look nice, you know, like all those fancy HP Stream notebooks and Chromebooks that you’re selling. I want it to cost $300 to $450.

Desktop

• Given The Choice, Consumers Prefer GNU/Linux

  We need that choice everywhere to make the world of IT a very different place. Go ahead, retailers, offer GNU/Linux and that other OS on more or less identical hardware and see what your customers want. Aren’t they always right? I believe when consumers first got a crack at GNU/Linux on the netbook, that movement should have spread to all PCs but was stifled by M$ and “partners”. It’s time that was revisited and the supply chain starts producing what the consumer wants.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds and the cults of niceness and diversity

  Sometimes in life YOU have to be the wolverine, and fight for what’s yours with tooth and claw! Reach inside and unleash your inner wolverine. It’s in there and it’s waiting for you to use it when the need arises to defend yourself or what’s yours. So if you go into open source or anything else, stand up for yourself when you need to and don’t let anybody walk all over you.

• Handheld Linux Terminal Gets an A+

  Are you all thumbs when it comes to Linux? If you follow [Chris]’s guide to building a handheld Linux terminal, that particular condition could work to your advantage. His pocket-sized machine is perfect for practicing command line-fu and honing your scripting skills on the go.

• Asynchronous Device/Driver Probing For The Linux Kernel

  While Google’s Chrome OS supports asynchronous device/driver probing, the mainline Linux kernel does not. However, patches are working toward this feat in order to speed up the kernel’s boot process for hardware/drivers that are slow at probing.

• Graphics Stack

  • Mesa’s Shader Cache Is In The Process Of Landing

    Intel developers are in the process of landing their GLSL shader cache into mainline Mesa.

Applications

• Proprietary

  • multimail: A rubberstamp endorsement

  • meterec: A halfhearted endorsement

  • nodau: Take note

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to block Facebook access on Linux desktop

  • Set up LVMiSCSI cinder backend for RDO Juno on Fedora 21 for Two Node Cluster (Controller&&Network and Compute)

  • siggen: Much to see, much to hear

• Games

  • Audiosurf 2 appears on Linux

    The sequel to the puzzle racer Audiosurf is now in the early-access phase and is also available for Linux.

    In the “classic” game mode MONO, the player controls a spaceship on a track that matches the music the player has selected from his music library.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Improving KDE’s support for Korean (and other CJK languages)

    In addition to my usual work on things like Plasma and Konversation, I’ve been hacking away on bugs that pose barriers to the use of the Korean language and writing system in KDE/Qt systems lately (I took up studying Korean as a new hobby last year). As a bonus, many fixes also tend to help out users of other CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages, or even generally of languages other than English.

  • GCI-2014

    These and more features and bug fixes are available on latest master version of Marble. It still needs some polishing and improvements but you can start using/testing it already.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • See How Sailfish OS’ RoadMap Looks like For 2015

    I just received an email on Sailfish Developer Mailing List regarding the Sailfish OS road map for 2015 which is a rather long one but worth reading. I decided to share it with you as it’s important to know where we’re going with our devices in the coming year.

  • Android

    • Android Lollipop vs. Android KitKat: New Features & Material Design Explored

      Android Lollipop is a HUGE update that sees Google taking its already mature platform several steps further. The Big G has tightened up nearly every element of its mobile platform, refining the look and feel of Android across the board, as well as touching up back-end tools and protocols to make the platform even more efficient.

    • Smartphones boost Huawei revenue by a fifth

First ownCloud lustrum

This weekend ownCloud turns 5 (5 years old, not 5.0 :P), congratulations to Frank Karlitschek and the entire ownCloud community!

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU LibreJS 6.0.8 released

• gnutls 3.3.12

Public Services/Government

• Castilla-La Mancha nurtures open source sector

  The government of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain) continues to strengthen the region’s free and open source ICT service providers. The region’s Technology Support Centre (BILIB) is helping companies pilot cloud solutions based on this type of software.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • ‘Open source’ textbooks provide many benefits

    When Professor Jonathan Tomkin went looking for a textbook to use in his introductory Earth Systems class, nothing was quite right.

    He couldn’t find a book that he felt was worth the high price tag for students. So he put one together with a few colleagues — for free.

Science

• Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others

  We next tried to define what characteristics distinguished the smarter teams from the rest, and we were a bit surprised by the answers we got. We gave each volunteer an individual I.Q. test, but teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success.

Health/Nutrition

• David Cameron and his freedom hypocrisy

  Before it was shadowed by the heinous attacks in Paris, France last week, it emerged that the NHS is in a grim state. Numerous hospitals across the UK declared major incidents.

• A Drug Warrior’s Inside Look at the War on Afghanistan’s Heroin Trade

  One of the many messes the United States is leaving behind as it formally withdraws from Afghanistan is that it’s more or less a narco state. Despite the United States spending nearly $8 billion to fight the Afghan narcotics trade, the country is producing more opium than ever. It’s unlikely to get better anytime soon: Last month, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported that counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan “are no longer a top priority.”

Security

• CENTCOM Hack Attack Exposes ‘Inept’ Pentagon Systems: Former CIA Analyst

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Months of Airstrikes Fail to Slow Islamic State in Syria

  Militant Group Has Gained Territory Despite U.S.-Led Strikes, Raising Concerns of the Obama Administration’s Mideast Strategy.

• Evidence Points to Syrian Push for Nuclear Weapons

  At 11 p.m. on Sept. 5, 2007, 10 F-15 fighter bombers climbed into the sky from the Israeli military base Ramat David, just south of Haifa. They headed for the Mediterranean Sea, officially for a training mission. A half hour later, three of the planes were ordered to return to base while the others changed course, heading over Turkey toward the Syrian border. There, they eliminated a radar station with electronic jamming signals and, after 18 more minutes, reached the city of Deir al-Zor, located on the banks of the Euphrates River. Their target was a complex of structures known as Kibar, just east of the city. The Israelis fired away, completely destroying the factory using Maverick missiles and 500 kilogram bombs.

  The pilots returned to base without incident and Operation Orchard was brought to a successful conclusion. In Jerusalem, then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his closest advisors were in a self-congratulatory mood, convinced as they were that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was seeking to build a nuclear weapon and that Kibar was the almost-completed facility where that construction was to take place. They believed that their dangerous operation had saved the world from immense harm.

• Gorbachev Interview: ‘I Am Truly and Deeply Concerned’

  In a SPIEGEL interview, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev discusses the dangers of poor relations between Russia and the West in the Ukraine crisis, saying there is a danger that things could get worse. Germany, he says, has a significant role to play.

• Chinese attacks cost U.S. Defense Department over $100M

  Chinese army hackers apparently caused more than $100 million worth of damage to U.S. Department of Defense networks, according to NSA research detailed in documents from the Edward Snowden cache.

• White House to explain changes to NSA surveillance

  Notwithstanding the president’s endorsement, a legislative attempt at rewriting the rules for metadata collection and storage by way of Congress came two votes short of advancing when the USA Freedom Act failed in the Senate in November.

  According to Volz, however, the forthcoming report will indeed include details about what’s been accomplished as far as adjusting policies for metadata collection goes, along with information concerning a proposed technological solution to the dragnet surveillance issue described in a report released on Thursday by the National Research Council. That report – assembled in response to the Presidential Policy Directive 28 the White House issued one year ago in concert with Obama’s Jan. 17 remarks – concluded that “no software-based technique can fully replace the bulk collection of signals intelligence, but methods can be developed to more effectively conduct targeted collection and to control the usage of collected data.”

• Former NSA Director Says US Private Sector Cyber-Retaliation Possible

  Allowing US private sector actors to conduct offensive, retaliatory cyber attacks deserve some consideration, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden said at a cybersecurity conference.

• FBI considered recruiting blogger who was killed in drone attack

  A CIA drone strike that killed Anwar Al-Awlaki also killed another US citizen, Samir Khan – the FBI had considered recruiting him as al-Qaeda informant.

• US drone strike kills seven in South Waziristan

  PESHAWAR: At least seven suspected militants have been killed while four others were injured in a US drone strike near the Pak-Afghan border in South Waziristan Agency.

• U.S. airstrike in Syria may have killed 50 civilians

  The civilians were being held in a makeshift jail in the town of Al Bab, close to the Turkish border, when the aircraft struck on the evening of Dec. 28, the witnesses said. The building, called the Al Saraya, a government center, was leveled in the airstrike. It was days before civil defense workers could dig out the victims’ bodies.

• U.S. Airstrike Inside Syria Reportedly Killed 50 Civilians

  Eyewitnesses and a Syrian opposition human rights organization claim an unannounced U.S. airstrike killed at least 50 civilians in in a government building located in a small city in the country’s north.

• Drone strikes in Pakistan declined: Report

  The number of drone strikes carried out in Pakistan by the United States dropped by more than 32 per cent in 2014 as compared with the previous year, according to the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies’ (PIPS) Pakistan Security Report 2014. A total of 21 strikes were reported last year, killing an estimated 144 and wounding 29 over a period of six months.

• The CIA finds targeted drone murders counterproductive

  When the U.S. targets a person for murder, it kills 27 additional people.

• While the world has been looking elsewhere, Boko Haram has carved out its own, brutal country

  You might not have noticed, but the world has acquired a new country. With its own capital, army and self-styled “emir,” this domain possesses some of the features of statehood. But don’t expect an application to join the United Nations: the consuming ambition of this realm is to reverse just about every facet of human progress achieved over the past millennium.

• Drones create terrorists & media ignores 2,000 killed by Boko Haram (E161)

• U.S. will investigate reports of civilian deaths in drone strikes against ISIL

  For more than a decade, there have been drone and aircraft strikes in countries including Yemen and Pakistan and allegations that hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of civilians have been killed. For the first time, the U.S. government has admitted that there may be civilian deaths in the campaign against ISIL as well. CCTV America’s Jim Spellman reported this story from Washington, D.C.

• Assassination Nation

  Imagine living in a town or neighborhood where a serial killer is on the loose. The killer’s primary weapon is a pipe bomb filled with small metal projectiles like BBs and nails. The bombs are designed to kill and maim those in the vicinity of the explosion. The killer’s weapons are usually aimed at male targets, but quite often several others in the vicinity are also killed, including women and children. Oftentimes, a note is sent to the media after the attacks warning of future attacks unless the people being targeted give in to the killer or killers’ demands. The fact of the attacks’ unpredictability has created a perennial fear in the region, leaving every resident uncertain of their future and their family’s safety.

• At least 10 killed in Niger protests against publication of cartoons

• Tear gas used at banned protest

  Security forces in Niger used tear gas to disperse hundreds of opposition supporters taking part in a banned demonstration in the capital Niamey.

  The political altercation came after 10 people were killed in two days of violent protests against a French publication’s cartoon depicting Islam’s prophet.

• Four dead and dozens wounded in protests in Niger against Charlie Hebdo cartoon

• How Targeted Killing Has Become Tactic Of Choice For Both Governments And Terrorists

  The U.S. might at this point retain close to exclusive control over deadly drone warfare but it has neverthless created an easy to imitate model of targeted violence where the claimed legitimacy of the violence is not defined by its instruments or the authority of its perpetrators but simply by the idea that the targets are not innocent.

• Mother ‘set fire to baby in road’

  A woman accused of setting fire to her newborn baby girl in the middle of a road has been charged with murder.

  Burlington County prosecutors said Hyphernkemberly Dorvilier, 22, of Pemberton Township, New Jersey, was in custody on 500,000 dollars (£331,000) bail. She tried to flee after starting the fire but was detained by residents, according to a witness.

• Bad policies make us more vulnerable to terrorists

  From the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union until that crisp September morning of 2001, Americans lived without the specter of fear. Our sense of security was shattered on that day and our country has spent the better part of the past decade striving and fighting to restore what was lost.

• What’s the Connection Between Suicide Bombers and Suicide Rates?

  Isolation and desperation are the likely cause of young men becoming “terrorists,” argues Larry Beck.

  The “terrorists” have struck again, offering up last week’s version of mindless violence in the name of some cause. When this happens, I am appalled at the violence, heartbroken that innocents usually die and always left wondering what it is about some causes that seemingly provide a framework for destruction. This is particularly so when I can’t figure out what the cause really is.

Transparency Reporting

• FAQ: Investigative journalism now – and its future

  1. How would you describe the current situation of investigative journalism in the UK?

  I think it’s a mixed situation as always. There’s certainly a lot of interest in investigative journalism, with a lot of people taking the initiative to launch their own projects. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been particularly notable in that respect, but also the work of Brown Moses stands out.

  Crowdfunding in particular is playing an increasing role (one of my distance learning students at Birmingham City University raised over $6000 for her investigation), but also campaigners and activists publishing their investigations, and data journalism techniques being used by a wider number of people.

• Charging Jeffrey Sterling but not David Petraeus captures the hypocrisy of government leaks

  One of the grossest hypocrisies of Washington officialdom is the willingness to denounce leaks of some classified information and to countenance leaks of other classified information. But the gap between indignant pretense and standard practice has widened into a chasm in recent years, with Barack Obama’s administration prosecuting leakers in record numbers while protecting its own. Selective prosecution of leaks in the name of national security has never been more extreme.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Dallas Safari Club follows controversial rhino hunt with bids to shoot elephant

  A Texas hunting club was once again scheduled on Saturday to auction off a chance to kill a large animal whose numbers are dwindling, a year after it faced international criticism over doing the same with a permit to shoot an endangered black rhino.

• Everything You Need To Know About Cyberterrorism In One Chart

  I don’t know how we missed this chart on its first go-around (it was created by Eli Dourado in May 2014, using data extrapolated from a 2013 op-ed by Jon Mooallem, who spent the summer of that year keeping track of power outages caused by squirrels), but it is everything, and you deserve to know that it exists.

Finance

• Searching for Radical Democracy in the Ruins of Capitalism’s Economic Depravity

  The future demands a new political consciousness. We can’t just wait for neoliberal economics to tear apart society and then build from scratch. Cultural critic Henry Giroux published his thoughts in the Truthout analysis article Authoritarianism, Class Warfare and the Advance of Neoliberal Austerity Policies. Author and cultural critic Henry Giroux holds the Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies.

• Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty

  For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

• Mitt Flips On The Very Poor

  Nearly three years after he famously said he was “not concerned about the very poor,” former presidential nominee Mitt Romney told Republicans in a speech Friday night the party must focus on helping “lift people out of poverty.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• CIA Admits to Congress the Agency Uses Mainstream Media to Distribute Disinformation: 1975 Video

  It has been verified by a source who claims she was there that then-CIA Director William Casey did in fact say the controversial and often-disputed line “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false,” reportedly in 1981.

  Despite Casey being under investigation by Congress for being involved in a major disinformation plot involving the overthrow of Libya’s Qaddafi in 1981, and despite Casey arguing on the record that the CIA should have a legal right to spread disinformation via the mainstream news that same year, this quote continues to be argued by people who weren’t there and apparently cannot believe a CIA Director would ever say such a thing.

• Eric Boehlert On MSNBC’s All In: Fox’s Muslim “No-Go Zones” Myth Is “Classic Propaganda”

Censorship

• Help! I’m censored on Famine sitcom by anti-censorship mag

  Here is what they say about themselves: “Index on Censorship is an international organization that promotes and defends the right to freedom of expression.”

  Reidy wrote a scathing article about me and others who dared to question the right of people to object to an Irish Famine sitcom. The idea for the sitcom was recently made public.

  Padraig waxed eloquently and with lots of anger against people who would dream of censoring such a remarkable project as a sitcom about Ireland’s Holocaust that Britain’s Channel 4 is considering.

  He continued his rant in the Irish Examiner newspaper during the week, slamming those who dared to think that the Famine was not a fit subject for humor.

  I decided to write a response to the Index on Censorship, given that he had certain facts wrong about my contribution, especially the one that I had called for the show to be banned.Help! I’m censored on Famine sitcom by anti-censorship mag

• Turkey Is Blackmailing Twitter Into Censorship (Again)

  Twitter and Turkey have a bit of a love-hate-hate-hate-hate relationship, insofar as Twitter users love to publish unflattering facts about the government, and the government hates that and tries to get Twitter to censor messages. In this particular case, the government is threatening to outright block Twitter unless it takes down “offending” messages.

• We must never censor ourselves for fear of offending the faithful

  On his way to the Philippines this week, the Pope was asked to pronounce on the question that has been on everyone’s minds: What limits should we draw around freedom of expression? The Pope answered, quite sweetly, that he would punch in the nose anyone who swore at his late mother. Then, more troublingly, he said, “One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people’s faith, one cannot make fun of faith. … There is a limit.”

• Censorship brings down democracy

  Regarding Leon Pitt’s letter (“The Interview,” Jan. 6 Review-Journal), it seems he would like some form of censorship for movies and how the media portray certain aspects of a war we did not ask for. The fact that he is able to express his opinion in a daily publication shouldn’t be lost on him.

  “Saturday Night Live” isn’t a movie, but every weekend since 1975, it has lampooned every sitting president, former presidents and many other elected officials. Although the show never did an assassination skit, the political skits aired on “SNL” would not be seen in North Korea — or many other countries, for that matter — because of the basic lack of freedom.

• David Cameron: There is a right to cause offense

  British Prime Minister David Cameron said that “in a free society, there is a right to cause offense about someone’s religion,” taking issue with Pope Francis’ assertion that there are “limits” to free speech.

• Mark Zuckerberg defends Facebook censorship despite Charlie Hebdo support

  Says his condemnation of Paris attack was to support freedom of expression but sees ‘tricky calculus’ in countries where that’s restricted

• Facebook’s hypocrisy, between the Charlie Hebdo massacre and China’s censorship

• China’s censorship of period drama cleavage provokes outrage

  China’s most popular television drama has been re-edited to get rid of the plunging necklines featured in the show.

• There Should Be No Censorship for Anyone Above 16 Years of Age, Says Shekhar Kapur

  Filmmaker Shekhar Kapur said there should be no censorship for anyone above the age of 16. The director, who was in Delhi for a panel discussion with FICCI Ladies Organisation, said if a person can vote, he can censor a film too.

• Sky News showcases Charlie Hebdo self-censorship in real time

  On Sky News, former Charlie Hebdo journalist Caroline Fourest was trying to explain how “crazy” it is that certain journalism mills in the United Kingdom won’t show the cover of the latest edition of the magazine. Well, Sky News provided a stronger explanation than Fourest ever could have. Watch some memorable seat-of-the-pants censorship, live.

• The French are honoring the satirists of Charlie Hebdo by prosecuting satirists

  In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, the principal message has been, quite rightly, to defend free expression and to condemn those who would use violence to respond to messages they dislike. Yet at the same time, the French Ministry of Justice has ordered prosecutors to enforce with “utmost vigor” a law that itself imposes violence, albeit of the state-sanctioned variety, on speech whose messages the French majority dislikes.

• On Charlie Hebdo Pope Francis is using the wife-beater’s defence

  On the day another cartoonist victim was buried at Père Lachaise cemetery, the pope came as near as dammit to suggesting that Charlie Hebdo had it coming. “One cannot provoke; one cannot insult other people’s faith; one cannot make fun of faith,” he said.

  Oh yes, you can. You may not choose to. It may not be wise or polite or kind – but you can. And to show you can, without being gunned down, Charlie Hebdo has just gone on sale in the UK, in bolder outlets, proudly defiant with an image of Muhammad on the cover – though with a tear and a kindly thought: “All is forgiven.”

• French Government Shows Stunning Hypocrisy on Free Speech

  Arrests for speech at a march in support of free speech? Mais oui!

• ​Saudi Arabia flogs free speech, Nigeria’s corrupt legacy & CIA goes on trial

  Abby Martin discusses the flogging of a Saudi Arabian blogger for insulting Islam and the State Department’s non-reaction to the event, plus the hypocritical arrest of a French comedian for his controversial social media comments in the wake of a mass demonstration in Paris defending free speech.

Privacy

• The Digital Arms Race: NSA Preps America for Future Battle

  The NSA’s mass surveillance is just the beginning. Documents from Edward Snowden show that the intelligence agency is arming America for future digital wars — a struggle for control of the Internet that is already well underway.

• U.S. kept secret law enforcement database of Americans’ calls overseas until 2013

  The U.S. government amassed a secret law enforcement database of Americans’ outbound overseas telephone calls through administrative subpoenas issued to multiple phone companies for more than a decade, according to officials and a government affidavit made public Thursday.

• Justice Department Kept Secret Phone Database

• Court filing reveals secret database of phone records kept by Justice Department

  The database only stored metadata, which is the information regarding what phone number is calling where, when the call took place and the duration of the call. The content of the calls was not stored. The data was collected for the Drug Enforcement Administration to be able to monitor calls made by U.S. citizens connecting with people in countries “determined to have a demonstrated nexus to international drug trafficking and related criminal activities.”

• The DEA secretly snooped on American phone records for 15 years

  Yet another secret U.S. government database containing the phone records of American citizens has been revealed this week.

  Disclosed in a new court filing, a database maintained by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is said to contain a record of calls made to and from foreign countries by Americans. Metadata from the calls are collected through the use of administrative subpoenas, which can be issued by the DEA without prior judicial oversight.

• The New Imitation Game

  …fear that the spread of encryption globally would cause NSA to “go dark.”

• Democracy in the digital era

  We live in remarkable, transformative times. We have the library of Alexandria at our fingertips; all the recorded knowledge of the world is being digitized and made available through the Internet Archive, a free, non-profit digital library offering universal access to books, music, knowledge, news and web pages.

• The Criminalization of Cryptography

  Following the recent data breaches at Sony and the attacks at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, certain politicians have wasted no time calling for increased government surveillance, broader anti-hacking statutes (with stiffer penalties), and, in the case of British Prime Minister David Cameron, a call to limit non-government use of encryption technologies. Oddly enough, a leaked cybersecurity report from the U.S. government pointed out just how important crypto is to everyday internet functionality.

• Obama Sides with Cameron in Encryption Fight

  President Barack Obama said Friday that police and spies should not be locked out of encrypted smartphones and messaging apps, taking his first public stance in a simmering battle over private communications in the digital age.

• United States intelligence Agency,NSA, laughing at the rest of the world in The New Snowden documents

  New Snowden documents show that the NSA and its allies are laughing at the rest of the world. National Security Agency and its allies are methodically preparing for future wars carried out over the internet.The new documents presented by Der Spiegel show that NSA surveillance programs are at the foundation of efforts to create sophisticated digita

• New Snowden documents show that the NSA and its allies are laughing at the rest of the world

  A team of nine journalists including Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras have just published another massive collection of classified records obtained by Edward Snowden. The trove of documents, published on Der Spiegel, show that the National Security Agency and its allies are methodically preparing for future wars carried out over the internet. Der Spiegel reports that the intelligence agencies are working towards the ability to infiltrate and disable computer networks — potentially giving them the ability to disrupt critical utilities and other infrastructure. And the NSA and GCHQ think they’re so far ahead of everyone else, they’re laughing about it.

• The surveillance machine

  We meet a former FBI undercover agent, Edwards Snowden’s lawyer, and journalists including Andy Greenberg of Wired magazine and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, who are publicizing his findings. Greenberg speaks of a cat-and-mouse game in which the “mice” are challenging the secrecy of the surveillance state. We also meet and hear from Snowden himself, as well as officials from inside the intelligence community.

• Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf

  Incidentally, the NSA is only one of 16 US intelligence services, together employing perhaps some 200,000 spies.

• Universal Surveillance

  When it comes to intelligence, everybody, be they democracies, dictatorships, or in between, wants it all.

• Ex-NSA director: Support for insecure cryptography tool “regrettable”

• The Fallout From the NSA’s Backdoors Mandate

  It’s difficult to establish an exact dollar amount, but “experts have estimated that losses to the U.S. cloud industry alone could reach (US)$180 billion over the next three years. Additionally, major U.S. tech companies like Cisco and IBM have lost nearly one-fifth of their business in emerging markets because of a loss of trust,” said Robyn Greene, policy counsel at New America’s Open Technology Institute.

• NSA mathematician apologizes for agency’s support of flawed security tool

  ​A top NSA researcher has gone on the record to condemn the agency’s long-standing endorsement of a controversial cryptographic tool even after learning of its flaws – including a vulnerability that could be exploited by hackers and spies.

• NSA admits ‘regret’ over backing dodgy cryptography standard

  The US National Security Agency (NSA) has offered some sort of apology for pushing insecure cryptography solutions to businesses, describing it as a “regrettable” move.

  Michael Wertheimer, former director of research at the NSA, made the admission about the agency’s support of the widely criticised Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual EC DRBG) in a letter published by the American Mathematical Society (PDF).

• Clegg: UK terror laws need update but snooper’s charter implies guilt on all

  DPM backs ex-MI5 chief’s statement that UK needs to ‘retain the ability to intrude on the privacy’ of terrorists but rejects blanket power to retain records of every website visited by general public

• Indiana vs NSA: New Bill Would Ban “Material Support or Resources”

  With Congress not only failing to rein in National Security Agency (NSA) spying, but actually expanding its power in a recent funding bill, many privacy activists are looking to the states to take action to block warrantless surveillance programs. A bill filed this week in Indiana would not only support efforts to turn of NSA’s water in Utah, but have some practical effect in the Hoosier State should it pass.

• NSA-Led Panel Says There’s No Alternative To NSA Data Collection

  Surprise! An academic advisory panel, chaired by director of national intelligence James Clapper — yup, the same guy who lied to Congress — has concluded that there’s no alternative to bulk data collection. Sorry, citizens.

• Privacy advocates say NSA reform doesn’t require ‘technological magic’

  “The report doesn’t provide justification for continuing mass surveillance programs,” says Neema Singh Guliani, the American Civil Liberties Union’s legislative counsel.

• NSA: SO SORRY we backed that borked crypto even after you spotted the backdoor

  The NSA’s former director of research Michael Wertheimer says it’s “regrettable” that his agency continued to support Dual EC DRBG even after it was widely known to be hopelessly flawed.

  Writing in Notices, a publication run by the American Mathematical Society, Wertheimer outlined the history of the Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual EC DRBG), and said that an examination of the facts made it clear no malice was involved.

• A French Patriot Act? How not to pass anti-terror laws

  Metadata collection also failed to prevent attacks such as the Fort Hood shooting of 2009 and the 2013 Boston Marathon attack, and has proved massively detrimental to public trust.

• FBI Uses E-mail Communications Collected by NSA without Warrants

• Report: The FBI Oversaw the NSA’s Email Surveillance

  The 231-page report, obtained by the New York Times, explains that “in 2008… the F.B.I. assumed the power to review email accounts the N.S.A. wanted to collect through the “Prism” system.” It also developed the protocols that were used to ensure that the email accounts that were targeted didn’t belong to U.S. citizens.

• US drug squad cops: We snooped on innocent Americans’ phone calls too!

  Much like the secret NSA and FBI databases, the DEA got its information under subpoena from American telecommunications companies, irrespective of whether or not the target had committed any crime. The dialing and receiving number were stored, along with the data and time of the call, and who it was billed to.

• DEA maintained secret database of Americans’ phone calls

  The Drug Enforcement Administration formerly maintained a secret database of Americans’ telephone calls to some foreign countries, the Justice Department revealed this week.

• No, the NSA Isn’t Like the Stasi—And Comparing Them Is Treacherous

  Calling the Stasi “secret police” is misleading. The name is an abbreviation of STAatsSIcherheit, or State Security. Founded in 1950 as the East German Communist Party’s “sword and shield,” it never hid the fact that it was spying. By the late 1980s, more than 260,000 East Germans—1.6 percent of all adults in the country—worked for the organization, either as agents or as informants. (If the NSA employed as many analysts to spy on 320 million Americans, it would have 5 million people on the payroll.) It wanted you to constantly wonder which of your friends was an informant and, ideally, tempt or pressure you into the role of snitch too.

• The D.C. Public Library can teach you how to avoid NSA spying

  Do you want a hands-on lesson on staying clear of NSA snooping? If you live in the Washington, D.C., area, you’re in for a treat. Later this month, you could be part of a seminar on how to keep your personal information private.

• Want to hide from the NSA? Washington, DC public library can help

  Do you want to use the Internet without fear of the National Security Agency or other government operatives snooping on your business? The public library in our nation’s capital is here to help.

• Why David Cameron’s crusade against encryption could backfire on business

  A secret US cybersecurity report warned that government and private computers were being left vulnerable to online attacks from Russia, China and criminal gangs because encryption technologies were not being implemented fast enough.

• Charlie Hebdo shows why the NSA always wins

  As Sargent says, the Patriot Act is coming up for reauthorization this year (which may or may not be necessary to keep operating the dragnet). It would be relatively straightforward to design an NSA reform (or better yet, a top-to-bottom reorganization of the whole intelligence community) that preserves the ability to surveil genuine suspects while protecting innocent Americans’ constitutional rights. Indeed, there is a strong case that doing so would improve the quality of their work.

• Will NSA bulk phone records program continue after June 1?

• Contractors ‘raping’ government for profit, & do sanctions on Russia work?

• UK Banking System Sitting Duck For Cyber Attacks

  Although today’s agreement between the US and the UK to step up intelligence-sharing to defend their financial services sectors against cyber-crime, it is ironic that it is the taxpayers of both countries who are – once again – forced to step in and save the bankers, who have left themselves wide open by outsourcing data to save money and make profits.

• US, UK agree to closer collaboration on cyberwarfare

  The countries’ intelligence agencies will work together and conduct cyberwar games later this year to test the security of financial institutions.

• UK And US To Stage Cyber War Games To Test Banks

• UK startups join Cameron in Washington as he talks cyber warfare with Obama

  UK security startups like Darktrace and Surevine have been invited on the trip to discuss cyber terrorism and grow their businesses in the US.

• Cambridge company advises Obama on cyber security

• UK cyber security firm Darktrace to open US HQ early after Sony hack drives demand

  One of the UK’s fastest growing cyber security companies has pushed forward plans to open its US headquarters after seeing a surge in demand following the Sony cyber-attack.

• NSA, GCHQ plan to step up cybersecurity cooperation efforts in 2015

• GCHQ, NSA cyber war games will test bank security

• NSA leaker to speak via video

• NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to speak at Hawaii conference

  NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden lived in Hawaii before leaking classified information about the government’s secret surveillance programs.

• NSA Whistleblower Snowden to Speak at ACLU Hawaii Conference

• Boehner Credits NSA Wiretap for Capturing Cincinnati ‘Jihadist’

  The FBI claimed the man, Christopher Cornell, plotted to bomb the Capitol building, and had cited “tipsters” who told them about Cornell’s Twitter posts, crediting their own informants for the arrest. They never mentioned the NSA.

• “Shut it Down!” Fourth State to Consider Resource Ban to NSA, South Carolina

  A bill filed in South Carolina this week would not only support efforts to turn off NSA’s water in Utah, but would have practical effects on federal surveillance programs if passed.

  South Carolina Sen. Tom Davis (R-Beaufort) introduced the South Carolina Fourth Amendment Protection Act on Jan. 13. S.275 would ban “material support or resources” from the state to warrantless federal spy programs, making it the third state to introduce legislation similar to a bill up for consideration in Utah this year.

• Missouri Action Alert: Help Nullify NSA, Support HB264

• MN bill would ban NSA, local agencies from seizing electronic data without a warrant

• Leaked NSA document shows how GCHQ trailed iPhone users

  Leaked documents from the U.S.-based National Security Agency (NSA) published in a German weekly have shown that data from the famously malware-resistant iPhone can be accessed even when the device itself has not been compromised.

  The documents detailing ways employed by the British GCHQ to track targets through their phones revealed that when an iPhone syncs with a compromised computer, any data on the phone can be pulled out, reported The Verge.

• Court rules NSA doesn’t have to divulge what records it has

  The case served as an early test of the limits for researchers who had hoped to use the National Security Agency’s phone records collection program as a treasure trove for their efforts. But Judge James A. Boasberg, sitting in the federal district court in Washington, D.C., said the NSA is within its rights to refuse to say what kinds of records it has, and unless researchers can specifically prove the agency has them, the NSA doesn’t have to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests.

• Terrorists made their emails look like spam to avoid detection

  The NSA was obviously aware of the trick, and Wertheimer says they are constantly changing their algorithms, which means it is likely that nowadays spam email is the domain of bad marketeers rather than jihadists.

• Minnesota Legislation Would Send Question of Electronic Data Privacy to Voters

• Minnesota Bill Would Ban NSA Activity Called The “Biggest Threat Since The Civil War”

  Introduced by Sen. Branden Petersen (R Dist. 35), SF33 stipulates that “a government entity may not obtain personal identifying information concerning an individual without a search warrant

• Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions And Key Clients

  Since its founding in 2004, Palantir has managed to grow into a billion dollar company while being very surreptitious about what it does exactly. Conjecture abounds. The vague facts dredged up by reporters confirm that Palantir has created a data mining system used extensively by law enforcement agencies and security companies to connect the dots between known criminals.

• Here’s What Really Goes On Inside Palantir, The Secretive Data Analysis Company Used By The NSA And FBI

  Leaked documents obtained by TechCrunch have shed new light on Palantir, a secretive data analysis company whose tools are used more than a dozen U.S. government agencies, including the NSA and FBI.

• Leaked documents: Bernie Madoff convicted thanks to mysterious Palantir technology

• ProtonMail Is Making ‘NSA-Proof’ Encrypted Email A Reality

  Privacy has never been so important, but in a digital age where personal information made public is easily retrievable, and even private data isn’t necessarily safe, what alternatives have been produced to respond to the growing demand for online solitude?

• Obama Supports U.K. Request to Pressure Tech Giants on Security Cooperation

  During a joint press conference with Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday, President Obama agreed with his plan to pressure U.S. tech companies to cooperate with intelligence and law enforcement agencies in fight against terrorism.

• ​NSA develops cyber weapons, ‘attacker mindset’ for domination in digital war – Snowden leaks

  Mass surveillance by the NSA was apparently just the beginning. The agency is now preparing for future wars in cyberspace, in which control over the internet and rival networks will be the key to victory, documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveal.

  The National Security Agency’s aim is to be able to use the web to paralyze the enemy’s computer networks and all infrastructures they control – including power and water supplies, factories, airports, and banking systems, Der Spiegel magazine wrote after viewing the secret files.

• Patriot Act Idea Rises in France, and Is Ridiculed

  The arrests came quickly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. There was the Muslim man suspected of making anti-American statements. The Middle Eastern grocer, whose shop, a tipster said, had more clerks than it needed. Soon hundreds of men, mostly Muslims, were in American jails on immigration charges, suspected of being involved in the attacks.

• Justice Department Declassifies Additional Portions of Inspector General Reports on Using Patriot Act Section 215 for Business Records Collection

  In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The New York Times, the Justice Department has declassified additional portions of these two inspector general reports about the government’s use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which is the legal basis for the once-secret National Security Agency program that systematically collects records in bulk about Americans’ domestic and international phone calls.

• A guide to state surveillance, the ‘snoopers’ charter’ and government hacking

  A major row between the political parties is brewing over demands by David Cameron and the intelligence services for even more surveillance powers in the wake of the terrorist atrocities in Paris last week.

  David Cameron has promised new legislation so that terrorists no longer have “safe spaces” to communicate.

• David Cameron preying on our fears after Charlie Hebdo massacre with encryption ban calls

  Cameron is essentially calling on companies like WhatsApp and Apple to install backdoors in their systems to allow the UK authorities access them whenever they want.

  Not only is this a huge invasion of people’s privacy, it will also mean that such services will now be much more vulnerable to attack from everyone from cyber-criminals to hacktivists.

• Cameron Seeks Obama’s Help in Crackdown on Online Encryption

• Edward Snowden is an American hero

  The USA is called the land of the free, but there is no freedom in the analysis of a citizen’s conversation.

• StingRay, Dirtbox Tracking Order Template Authorizes U.S. Marshals to Investigate Any Identified Cell Phone

  The document at issue is not an order issued by a judge, but an order template used by law enforcement in San Bernardino County (CA) to draft anticipated order applications seeking authority to operate cell site simulators. It is common practice for law enforcement to create order applications from templates prepared by state or federal prosecutors. These templates have wording such as “Detective Name” and “Crime Definition,” which are replaced with case-relevant information before filing the applications in court. Requiring law enforcement to use templates, rather than letting them write their own legal documents, allows prosecutors to use preset legal strategies while defending the legitimacy of the resulting orders in court.

• Has terrorism already claimed its next victim in Britain: our right to privacy?

  Following last week’s tragic events in France, the world has spoken out in solidarity against religious extremism, and in support of the freedom of expression. But alongside this, another narrative has emerged. In the name of safety, British officials have begun arguing in favour of stronger powers for the security services to intercept personal data.

• DEA kept secret record of Americans’ phone calls before NSA program

  The US Department of Justice has been maintaining a secret record of all phone calls in and out of United States even before the start of its National Surveillance Programs, according to a new report.

• DEA kept records of US phone calls for nearly 15 years

  The NSA isn’t the only American government agency keeping track of phone call metadata… or rather, it wasn’t. A Department of Justice court filing has revealed that the Drug Enforcement Administration maintained records of every call made from the US to Iran and other nations for nearly 15 years, stopping only when the initiative was discontinued (prompted at least partly by leaks) in September 2013. The DEA didn’t get the content of those calls, but it also didn’t get court oversight — it used administrative subpoenas that only required the approval of federal agents. And unlike the NSA, this program was meant solely for domestic offenses like drug trafficking.

• The question of traitor or hero is pointless

  When the rights of a people are violated, what do you do? Do you do nothing, or do something, even if that something is unpopular or illegal. Edward Snowden chose to do something, making information that needed to be known public. In doing so he opened the eyes of the American people to living in a “fishbowl of constant surveillance” (Turley). Though many believe the leaks to be dangerous, the release of data was reviewed and contained little that could damage national security. It also opened debate on the legality of unconstitutional spying. But the discussion quickly switched to Snowden’s personality, an irrelevant and distracting subject. Whatever his personal motives, the information Snowden divulged will have ramifications for years to come.

• The Guardian view on mass surveillance: missing the target

  Kalashnikovs trained on free speech, police protection for Jewish schools and 10,000 troops out on “sensitive” streets in Britain’s nearest neighbour. The last few days in Paris stir searching questions about the nature of European society, the values it holds dear, and the right way to protect them. One might hope for answers reflecting fresh thinking, but the emerging response of SW1 is drearily familiar – mass surveillance on the assumption that “the gentleman from Whitehall knows best”.

  [...]

  The Paris gunmen had been on watchlists for years. Building up extra intelligence on all 66 million residents of France would not have helped; keeping an unflinching eye on the few thousands who provoke serious fears might have done. If the question were resources, the spies would deserve a fair hearing. But they seem more interested in the power to add hay to the stack, a perverse way to hunt the needle. For all the claims made for untargeted sifting, the sole “plot” that the US authorities can hold up as having been disrupted by it is a taxi driver’s payment of a few thousand dollars to al-Shabbab. Terrorists, from 9/11 to the Woolwich jihadists and the neo-Nazi Anders Breivik have almost always come to the authorities’ attention before murdering. Society can’t afford too many scruples about the privacy of those who provoke such suspicions.

• UK PM wants to ban unbreakable encryption! OK but only if …

  Presumably for anyone to use encryption in Cameron’s world would require escrowing decryption keys so the government could examine any and all communications as they pleased.

  [...]

  If Western governments want that kind of control over their citizens then it has to be symmetrical which would mean that all government activities other than those that could be proved to be truly in the national interest (for example, how to make nuclear bombs) should become, in turn, completely transparent. That means every government committee meeting, every government memo, every government phone call, every donation to any politician, every political deal, all of it … completely and immediately transparent with severe consequences for any kind of evasion or failure to do so. No more backroom deals, no more horse trading, no more obfuscation. And along with that all surveillance by a government would have to be justified and authorized and documented.

• Ecstatic NSA spooks delight in spying on spies who are spying on spies

  A trenche of fresh Snowden leaks published in Der Spiegel by Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum and others detail the NSA’s infiltration of other countries’ intelligence services, detailing the bizarre, fractal practices of “fourth-party collection” and “fifth-party collection.”

Civil Rights

• On press freedom, Eric Holder makes the right call

  On Wednesday, Mr. Holder announced revisions in Justice Department guidelines for issuing subpoenas and search warrants to journalists or for their newsgathering materials. The revisions are being made to an earlier update of the guidelines, an effort that followed the uproar over leak investigations involving the Associated Press and Fox News. The new revisions reflect nearly a year’s discussions between the Justice Department and a coalition of news organizations and journalists, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Newspaper Association of America, the Associated Press and this newspaper, among others.

• CIA manager testifies more than 90 knew about covert mission

  A CIA manager testified under cross-examination in a trial near Washington that more than 90 people knew about a covert Iranian mission that was leaked to the media.

• Caning of Saudi Blogger Is Delayed Amid Protests

  A lawyer in Saudi Arabia who founded a human rights group was sentenced to 15 years in prison. His wife, a women’s advocate who won a courage award from the State Department, says she is barred from leaving the country. Her brother, a writer who ran a liberal online forum, is also in jail and was sentenced to be caned regularly in a public square over the next few months.

  International condemnation of the writer’s sentence, which also included a prison term and a heavy fine, has mounted since a video of him receiving his first round of blows appeared on YouTube, and the State Department and the United Nations have called for the caning to stop.

  The Saudi authorities did not administer the second round of blows as scheduled on Friday. But the case of the writer, Raif Badawi, has nonetheless drawn new attention to the Saudi government’s harsh treatment of dissidents for acts that are considered anything but criminal in the West.

• Woman Is Publicly Beheaded in Saudi Arabia’s Tenth Execution of 2015

  Gruesome footage circulating on social media shows Saudi authorities publicly beheading a woman in the holy city of Mecca earlier this week. The execution is the tenth to be carried out in country in the last two weeks; setting 2015 up to be even more bloody than last year, when 87 people were punitively killed by the state.

  Rare video of Monday’s killing shows the woman, a Burmese resident named as Lalia Bint Abdul Muttablib Basim, screaming while being dragged along the street. Four police officers then hold the woman down before a sword-wielding man slices her head off, using three blows to complete the act.

  In the chilling recording, Bashim, who was found guilty in a Saudi Sharia court of sexually abusing and murdering her seven-year-old step-daughter, is heard protesting her innocence until the very end. “I did not kill. I did not kill,” she screams repeatedly.

• Al-Marri’s End and the Failed Experiment of Domestic Military Detention

  In the coming days, Ali al-Marri, former enemy combatant, is scheduled to be released from federal criminal custody, clearing the way for his removal by immigration officials to Qatar, and thus ending a legal odyssey that began more than 13 years ago with Mr. al-Marri’s arrest by the FBI in Peoria, Illinois. [Disclosure: I served as al-Marri’s lead counsel in his habeas corpus challenge to his military detention]. Al-Marri’s case raised issues central to the war on terrorism, including the distinction between combatants and civilians, the legitimacy of responding to terrorism through a military, as opposed to law enforcement, approach, and the geographic scope of the armed conflict itself. Above all, al-Marri’s legal challenge raised the important question—never definitively resolved—whether the president’s detention authority under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) extended to individuals lawfully present in the United States. Below, I offer some lessons to be drawn from his case and suggest why it provides a cautionary tale against domestic military detention.

• Israel lobbies foreign powers to cut ICC funding

  Israel is lobbying member-states of the International Criminal Court to cut funding for the tribunal in response to its launch of an inquiry into possible war crimes in the Palestinian territories, officials said on Sunday.

  ICC prosecutors said on Friday they would examine “in full independence and impartiality” crimes that may have occurred since June 13 last year. This allows the court to delve into the war between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza in July-August 2014 that killed more than 2,100 Palestinians and 70 Israelis.

• Former NSA Condoleezza Rice testifies at CIA leak trial

  Sterling denies leaking any information to Risen. Defense lawyers say the leak could have come from anywhere and that Sterling has faced unfair suspicion because he sued the CIA for racial discrimination.

• Feds Paint Dark Image of Suspected CIA Leaker

• Saudi blogger’s wife says global pressure could force his release

  The wife of imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi has called on the international community to pressure the Saudi Arabian authorities to release her husband, after his public flogging was postponed this weekend.

• The New CISPA Bill Is Literally Exactly The Same As The Last One

  The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over expecting different results. That’s a cliche, but politicians often follow the hoariest routes to power, and attempting to enact change by doing the same thing repeatedly is one of them.

• The police rely on fear and lobbying to defeat reforms. Protestors can’t let them do so again

  For the first time in a long time, American police departments are on the defensive. They’re on the defense in New York, where, after the NYPD’s open insurrection against the mayor, 69% of New York “voters, black, white and Hispanic” disapprove “of police officers turning their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio at funerals for two police officers” according to a Quinnipiac poll – and now, even some cops have started openly airing their disgust with their own union leadership. They’re on the defense in Washington, where they’re “on the hot seat” at President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. And they continue to be on the defense in municipalities across the country, as every new police shooting sparks intense national scrutiny on social and in traditional media.

• Obama: Europe must better integrate Muslims

  “Our biggest advantage, major, is that our Muslim populations – they feel themselves to be Americans,” Obama told a joint press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron.

• The Paris March of hypocrisy

  Indeed, there are so many legitimate reasons questioning the moral credibility of the huge march.

• British complicity in US drone war could be ‘one step from illegal act’, warns MP David Davis

  Senior Conservative MP David Davis has issued a stark warning about Britain’s possible role in the US’s secret drone war against militants in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

  The former Shadow Home Secretary told the Bureau that any British complicity in the US drone campaign is “in the same moral space, as far as I’m concerned, as collusion in torture”.

• Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire with Love Peace and Nonviolence

  It is particularly appropriate that we are gathered here around International Human Rights Day and our theme is Peace and Living It. I believe that Peace is a Human Right for everyone, and its presence is necessary in order to protect and sustain all the other rights enshrined in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I am sure we can agree that although we have a Universal Declaration, we have a long way to go to ensure that our Governments implement and uphold all these rights. In spite of this I am full of hope because I believe that we, the human family, are at a turning point in history.

• EXCLUSIVE: Screenwriter mysteriously killed in 1997 after finishing script that revealed the ‘real reason’ for US invasion of Panama had been working for the CIA… and both his hands were missing

  When the skeletal remains of Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore were found strapped into his Ford Explorer submerged beneath the California Aqueduct in 1998 it brought an end to one of America’s most high profile missing person cases.

• Scottish police demand uncensored version of CIA torture report

  The police are poised to tell US authorities they want to see the uncensored version of a CIA torture report as part of their investigation into extraordinary rendition flights.

  Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, Scotland’s top prosecutor, has confirmed that the force has been “instructed to request and consider the unredacted version” of the US Senate study.

  SNP MSP Kevin Stewart urged the US authorities to co-operate fully with Police Scotland and “hand over an unadulterated copy”.

• CIA exonerates CIA of all wrongdoing in Senate hacking probe

• CIA board clears staff of snooping Senate computers

• CIA investigates CIA, says CIA did nothing wrong

• Behind whitewash of CIA spying: The trail leads to the White House

• White House Knew CIA Snooped On Senate, Report Says

• CIA finds no wrongdoing in agency’s search of computers used by Senate investigators

• The CIA Will Not Discipline Anyone For Spying On Senate Torture Probe

• The US has no excuse not to prosecute CIA torturers

• Revealed: Only 29 detainees from secret CIA torture program remain in Guantánamo Bay

• A list of the 28 detainees held by CIA’s detention program in 2006 – its ‘final’ year

• CIA torture programme cast a wide net

  Less than a quarter of the 119 detainees named in the US Senate’s summary report into the CIA’s secret torture programme remain in the military prison for the most ‘hardline’ terror suspects—Guantánamo Bay—the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has established.

• The Revenge of the CIA

  Hearing the testimony from CIA operatives, it’s clear that the agency is extremely eager to make an example of Sterling. Despite all the legalisms, the overarching reality is that the case against Sterling is scarcely legal — it is cravenly political.

• CIA-Friendly Jury Seen in Sterling Trial

  When the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling got underway Tuesday in Northern Virginia, prospective jurors made routine references to “three-letter agencies” and alphabet-soup categories of security clearances. In an area where vast partnerships between intelligence agencies and private contractors saturate everyday life, the jury pool was bound to please the prosecution.

  In a U.S. District Court that boasts a “rocket docket,” the selection of 14 jurors was swift, with the process lasting under three hours. Along the way, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema asked more than a dozen possible jurors whether their personal connections to the CIA or other intel agencies would interfere with her announced quest for an “absolutely open mind.”

• Times Reporter Prevails in Three-Year Fight Over CIA Leak

  New York Times reporter James Risen prevailed over the U.S. government in its three-year effort to force him to testify at trial about a confidential source as part of a CIA leak prosecution.

  The request by prosecutors that Risen be dropped as a witness capped a longer battle to avoid revealing his sources. The fight reached the U.S. Supreme Court, focusing attention on the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of leaks. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder reacted to the controversy by issuing guidelines last year restricting the use of subpoenas and search warrants for journalists.

• US reporter will not have to testify in CIA leak case

• The New York Times’ James Risen Won’t Go To Jail For Reporting This Spectacular CIA Screwup

  For the past seven years, New York Times journalist James Risen has been embroiled in a legal battle with two presidential administrations over his refusal to reveal an inside government source.

• Guantanamo Bay staff sergeant claims three men believed to have committed suicide were actually tortured to death

• Guantanamo guard claims CIA killed detainees, made it look like suicide

• Ex-Army Sergeant Claims CIA Killed Gitmo Detainees, Called It Triple Suicide (Video)

• How US Prison Officials Rubber-Stamped a CIA Torture Chamber

• New Evidence Shows CIA Held Prisoners In Lithuania

• CIA Held Detainees at Lithuania Black Site, Investigators Claim

  The CIA held prisoners in a secret Lithuanian prison despite official denials, a detailed investigation by human rights investigators claims to show.

• The CIA’s Willingness To Lie About Our Torture Regime: The Architecture Of Unbelief

  In the most recent New York Review Of Books, there’s an excellent interview about the now-largely-forgotten report from the Senate about how the United States government’s regime of torture was developed, and about how it was operated, with Mark Danner. Along with Marcy Wheeler, Jane Mayer, Charlie Savage and very few other reporters, Danner was one of the people who thought that this country’s decision to torture people — in contravention of treaties, American law, and over 200 years of military custom — was worthy of extended acts of journalism. In one of the more striking passages in the interview, Danner explains how a complicated infrastructure of mendacity was constructed and how it became equally as vital to the torture program as were the waterboard and the rectal feeding tube. Not only did the CIA arrange this infrastructure in order to lie to the American people about what was done in their name, but also the CIA built this infrastructure to provide an institutional basis for the American government to lie to itself.

• Local artist protests CIA torture, arrested in D.C.

  For the last three years, Bozeman artist Deb Vanpoolen has taken part in an annual fasting and protest against torture and perceived American imperialism in Washington, D.C. This was the first year she got arrested for it.

• Letter: Shut down the CIA

  You just renewed your oath to support the Constitution. Please make sure that things get done which are constitutional.

• Iranian Global Centre To Support Human Rights Exposes U.S. CIA Torture

  Human rights campaigners criticise American media hypocrisy

• Is Torture As Ineffective As It Is Abhorrent?

  As with the two protestors arrested on a “Torturers Tour” outside Dick Chaney’s residence on January 10th, we must place our hopes that Hoffman won’t be easily silenced, and he will be equally ruthless and fearless should the accusations against the APA hold true, whether the torture techniques were effective or not.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Net-neutrality rules are far too important to wait for Congress: FCC boss must act now

  At the annual Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, Chairman Tom Wheeler of the Federal Communications Commission made clear that his agency plans to re-enact strong net neutrality rules in late February.

DRM

• Movie DRM fails again as Oscar DVD screeners appear on torrent sites

  Remember when the entertainment industry was thrilled about its temporary defeat of the Pirate Bay? Well, the victory – such as it was – hasn’t stopped the pirates from removing the DRM that was supposed to protect this year’s Oscar movie screeners. Yep, the pirates simply stripped the watermarking and uploaded the files anyway to many other torrent sites.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Chromebooks spank Windows

  Last summer Microsoft talked its partners into trying to stop the growing popularity of Chromebooks in its tracks by making a big push during the holiday season. While full retail results won’t be in for a while, we do know the laptop sales results from the most important retailer of them all, Amazon. Guess what. With that retailer at least, Microsoft and its buddies failed. Miserably.

  Amazon reports that its top three computers sold over the holidays were — drum-roll, please — Chromebooks. It was that way last year too. Oh, wait, I’m wrong; Microsoft did worse this year. In 2013, one of Amazon’s top three sellers was a Windows machine, The Asus’ Transformer Book, a Windows 8.1 “2-in-1” device that transforms from a 10.1-in. tablet to a keyboard-equipped laptop.

• Collabora Improves Linux Support For Tegra-Based Chromebooks

  Collabora has been making improvements to the Tegra-based Chromebooks for running the non-ChromeOS Linux desktop.

  The Nyan Blaze and Big Tegra K1 powered Chromebooks should now work nicely with Linux given the eleven new patches done by Tomeu Vizoso of consulting firm Collabora.

Kernel Space

• Systemd-Import Expands Its Container Capabilities

  The systemd-import command is now more powerful after the latest batch of changes committed by Lennart Poettering prior to starting the weekend.

• Social Dyslexia

  Asked about diversity in the workplace, a current focus of many tech companies, Torvalds responded: “All that stuff is just details and not really important.”

• INTERVIEW: LENNART POETTERING

  Few pieces of software in history have been so fiercely debated as Systemd. Initially a replacement for Sysvinit, the boot scripts that start up a Linux installation, Systemd has grown into a hugely powerful – and sometimes complex – replacement for the “bag of bits” that make up the Linux base system. It’s growing all the time and now handles logging, device hotplugging events, networking, scheduled actions (like Cron) and much more. Almost every major Linux distribution has adopted Systemd, but there are still some unhappy campers out there, so Mike and Graham ventured to Berlin to meet the software’s lead developer and get his view.

• Version 3 Of KDBUS Posted For The Mainline Linux Kernel

  Greg Kroah-Hartman posted the thirteen KDBUS patches in their latest form on Friday to the kernel mailing list. This new version rewrites major parts of the meta-data implementation to allow for per-recipient namespace translations, KDBUS_ITEM_CREDS changes, removed KDBUS_CMD_CANCEL, monitors are now entirely invisible, compile warning fixes, and a variety of other changes.

• ToleranUX, Torvalds Walk-back, and Mageia’s Badluck

  Yesterday ArsTechnica.com quoted Linus Torvalds saying a focus on diversity is distracting and apparently it didn’t set well with some folks. Today Torvalds emailed ArsTechnica.com in an effort to explain what he meant more precisely. Elsewhere, a mock distribution seems to be poking fun at feminists and diversity crowd. In other news, Mageia 5 Beta 2 is out after a bit of bad luck that may delay the final.

• ToleranUX: Satirical Linux fork mocks calls for open source diversity

  On Friday, following comments made by Linux legend Linus Torvalds about diversity in the open source development community, a new Linux fork went online at Github, apparently to mock diversity advocates. Dubbed ToleranUX, the fork, created by a one-day-old Github account called The Feminist Software Foundation, was announced with a lengthy diatribe full of over-the-top mockery of feminist and diversity movements within the tech sector.

• The Creator Of Linux Has An Attitude And A Foul Mouth, And People Are Angry At Him (Again)

  Linus Torvalds, the internationally famous creator of the Linux operating system (which powers your Android phone and most of the internet), does not in way, shape or form suffer from Imposter’s Syndrome.

• Sfdisk Gets Redone, Supports MBR & GPT Disk Labels

  Prominent for Util-linux 2.26 is a “completely new” sfdisk command that’s now based on the libfdisk library. This new sfdisk command now supports MBR and GPT disk labels (along with potential but untested SGI and SUN disk labels). Those dependent on sfdisk, a partition table management program for Linux, are encouraged to re-test their scripts against this new version, per the official release information on 2.26-rc1.

• Intel Unveils ‘Internet of Things’ Open-Source Framework

• Linux Foundation debuts IoTivity open source project for IoT products and services

• IoTivity, it’s where developers do IoT activity

• IoTivity Open Source Project Announces Preview Release

• IoTivity is a new open-source attempt to establish Internet-of-Things standards

• Consortium Previews Open Standard for Internet of Things

• Graphics Stack

  • Wayland 1.7 Alpha Released Along With Updated Weston Compositor

  • [ANNOUNCE] wayland 1.6.91

• Benchmarks

  • 22-Way AMD/NVIDIA OpenCL Linux Benchmarks To Start Off 2015

    In having 22 graphics cards out for testing and swapping them all in the same system for the recent Unreal Engine 4 Linux benchmarking and 22-Way AMD+NVIDIA Graphics Card Tests With Metro Redux On Steam For Linux, I ran some OpenCL tests on all of the graphics cards.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Disable IPv6 In CentOS 7

  • Install OwnCloud 7 on CentOS 7

  • Bimini Upgrade

  • Customise The XFCE Desktop Environment

• Games

  • Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty Coming to PC, Mac & Linux February, Xbox One & PS3 in March

    Just Add Water have just revealed when PS3, Xbox One and PC gamers can get their anxious little mitts on their delicious remake of Oddworld Inhabitants PSX classic, Abe’s Oddysee. Titled Oddworld: New n’ Tasty, the completely rebuilt game stays true to the Abe’s Oddysee formula, adding a glossy sheen of much needed beauty.

  • Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee will be released for Linux

    The original game, which was released in 1997, was recently remade and fans of the puzzle platformer are patiently waiting for it’s release. Oddworld has already released remakes of some of their games, like Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD and Munch HD.

  • Scary Steam for Linux bug erases all the personal files on your PC

  • Severe Steam For Linux Bug Can Wipe Your Entire Home Folder

  • Scary code of the week: Valve Steam cleans Linux PCs (if you’re not careful)

    Linux desktop gamers should know of a bug in Valve’s Steam client that will, if you’re not careful, delete all files on your PC belonging to your regular user account.

  • Steam for Linux Can rm -rf Your /home Folder (Or Worse)

    Users have found out that Steam for Linux is capable of deleting the entire home directory under certain circumstances, which would present a major problem for users.

  • SteamOS Update 153 Brings Updated AMD/NVIDIA Linux Graphics Drivers

    While some are pondering the state of SteamOS and Steam Machines rumors, Valve has put out SteamOS Update 153 after being in the Alchemist Beta state for the past week.

  • A Closer Look At The Upcoming Cities: Skylines

    Cities: Skylines is an upcoming city-building game by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. It’s a sequel of sorts to the transportation-focused Cities in Motion franchise but with a much broader scope; it’s now a fully-fledged city simulation game. Zoning, construction, taxation and infrastructure management are some of the things that set apart the game from its predecessors. Some of you may be familiar with the game as GOL has covered it twice already (here and here) but the new information we’ve gotten in the past few months from the developers make it worth revisting.

  • Aspyr Media Are Close To Breaking Even On Linux Ports

    Aspyr Media, who are one of our favourite developers, has noted on reddit that they are getting close to breaking even on their Linux ports.

    If you are living under a rock: Aspyr ported Borderlands 2, Borderlands TPS, the latest two Civilization games and the newest Geometry Wars to Linux

  • 7 Interesting Crime-Solving Games for Android

    To summon your inner Sherlock Holmes or Nancy Drew, you don’t need to join a detective squad anymore. There are many new games that allow you to solve crimes, catch the bad guys, and prove to the world that there is a master detective in you waiting to be recognized. These games let you play as a detective or a cop for hours and make you rack your brain to come up with clues that will help solve the mystery.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE End of Year 2014 Fundraiser is over

    I want to thank publicly the 788 donors that helped us raise over 22000 euro.

  • € 22 885 raised

    The KDE End of Year 2014 Fundraiser has finished. Thank you everybody who supported us in this fundraiser. Go to the KDE donation page if you want to support us further.

  • The Gorilla and the Gibbon

    As a Krita developer, I’m not too happy comparing Krita to Photoshop. In fact, I have been known to scream loudly, start rolling my eyes and in general gibber like a lunatic whenever someone reports a bug with as its sole rationale “Photoshop does it like this, Krita must, too!”.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • MakuluLinux Xfce 7.0

    Once in a while I run into a Linux distribution that surprises me in terms of how much I enjoy using it. MakuluLinux is definitely one of those distros. I found an article about it when I was doing my usual news roundup article for my blog Eye On Open on ITworld. I was intrigued enough to want to do a full review here on Desktop Linux Reviews.

  • AntiX MX-14.3 review

    One of the things you can count on in the Linux community is love and understanding from the wider audience, especially if you write a less favorable review of a distribution favored by a particular segment of the community. The smaller they get the fiercer the response. Most people would decide the flak was not worth their time, file relevant distributions under the ignore label, and move on to friendlier crowds.

• New Releases

  • Parted Magic Now Has a Tool to Check the RAM Memory

    Parted Magic, an operating system that employs core programs of GParted and Parted to handle partitioning tasks with ease, has been upgraded to version 2015.01.13 and is now ready for purchase and download.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

  • Mageia 5 Beta 2 Finally Lands and Is Ready for Testing

    Mageia is a Linux distribution that distinguished itself in the past year or so with some very interesting releases, and the users expect to see the same kind of quality from the current ones as well. The developers know this and they want to provide the best experience possible, which is also the reason they had to delay this release for short while.

  • Mageia 5 beta 2 is out! A story of badluck

    After several delays the beta 2 version of Mageia 5 is finally out! You can find more information here.

  • Mageia 5 Beta 2 Finally Released, Mageia 5 Delayed To March

    After being challenged by delays, Mageia 5 Beta 2 was officially released on Friday. A revised release date for the Mageia 5 official ISOs has also been determined.

• Red Hat Family

  • Libinput 0.8 Improves Touchpad Support, Adds Axis Sources & Scroll Event Types

    Peter Hutterer at Red Hat has announced the release of libinput 0.8 and with this update comes many new features for the input handling library.

  • Red Hat Cut to Sell at Goldman Sachs

    Goldman Sachs downgraded shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) from a neutral rating to a sell rating in a research note released on Wednesday morning, TheFlyOnTheWall.com reports. They currently have $70.00 target price on the stock, up from their previous target price of $67.44.

• Debian Family

  • Polygons

    Diversity is something that society needs. In all aspects. Also within the Debian project.

  • Debian/m68k hacking weekend commencing soonish

    As I said, I did not certain events that begun with “lea” and end with “ing” prevent me from organising a Debian/m68k hack weekend. Well, that weekend is now.

Devices/Embedded

• Top 4 Raspberry Pi OS

  There was a spin of Fedora for the Raspberry Pi during the early days of its release, but that was quickly dropped in favour of Raspbian when it proved to be a bit slow and buggy. It was almost two years after this incident that a proper version of Fedora was released on the Raspberry Pi in the form of Pidora. An almost straight-up port of the codebase to the specific ARM architecture of the Pi, Pidora has had a few tweaks to let it run on Pi hardware without much loss in performance, at least.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Samsung to announce more Tizen devices in 2015, post Z1 launch

      South Korean tech giant Samsung seems to have some really big plans around the Tizen open source operating system this year. After launching its first commercially available Z1 Tizen smartphone in India, the company is now looking to launch numerous Tizen based devices throughout 2015, reports Phone Arena.

    • Samsung Targets Developing Market with First Tizen Phone

  • Android

    • Top 5 Android Smartphones — January 2015

      We brought you our last top 5 Android list back in October and, as it’s already the first quarter of this year, it’s time to revisit that list. There are certainly some new models to discuss, the G Flex 2 was just introduced during CES 2015, for example, but we’re also just a couple of months away from Mobile World Congress, where it’s almost certain that the following phones will be replaced by the next batch of flagships.

    • Tiny Android Box is Pretty Good for TV, Not So Much for Games

      Everyone and their mother (in Tech News) is monitoring Xiaomi, the *fourth largest smartphone maker in the world behind Samsung, Apple and Lenovo (owners of Motorola). But that doesn’t mean everything they put out is gold.

    • How to avoid WebView trouble on older Android devices

    • The ‘Android Of Virtual Reality’ Is Here, And It Could Be Exactly What Virtual Reality Needs

      When Google acquired Android back in 2005, Android quickly became the “open” mobile platform of choice, a haven for developers that didn’t like all of Apple’s rules and the walled garden of iOS.

    • Top 6 Essential Android And iOS Apps From This Week

      It’s time for this week’s Android and iOS app round-up. As usual, the apps included will be a combination of the best of what has been released this week, but also my favourite must-have apps that I’ve recently come across.

    • iOS versus Android. Apple App Store versus Google Play: Here comes the next battle in the app wars

    • Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Android Lollipop 5.0 Update Release Imminent

    • Google posts Android 5.0.2 factory images for Nexus 7, Nexus 10

    • Android 5.0.2 factory images available for Nexus 10 and 7 2013

    • OnePlus One to get CM-based Android 5.0 next month

    • VLC teases Android TV app, preview build available for download

    • Android Circuit: Nobody Loves Lollipop 5.0, Sony’s Sad For Sale Sign, Samsung’s Galaxy S6 Mistake

    • Google unleashes build-it-yourself ‘Ara’ SLABLET phones (in Puerto Rico)

      Google will this year launch its modular DIY smartphone, dubbed Project Ara, but only in the US territory of Puerto Rico.

      Ara, announced by Google 15 months ago, was developed by Motorola’s Advanced Technologies and Products (ATAP) group as a fully modular system where components such as batteries, screens, GPS and cameras, can be swapped in and out of a basic smartphone framework.

    • 8 great reasons to root your Android phone right now

      To root or not to root? It’s a question that most people don’t ever ask themselves, because Android devices are powerful and customizable from the get-go, and rooting can be risky.

      But it’s not that risky. And if you want to really unlock the full potential of your device—if you want to be able to control everything, backup everything, customize everything, and do all sorts of fun things like install custom ROMs and get Android Lollipop ahead of the pack—you’ll need to root your phone.

The 12 best free and open source apps for Mac OS X

Alachisoft Open Sources NCache Storage Tool for .NET Apps

NCache 3.1 Open Sourced

Citrix CDFMonitor is Now Open Source

Citrix announced that CDFMonitor – the Swiss Army knife of CDF trace collection – is being released as an open source project under the MIT license.

Facebook Offers Artificial Intelligence Tech to Open Source Group

Facebook open-sources new AI smarts

Facebook has released as open source some software modules that can speed image recognition, language modeling and other machine learning tasks, in a move to advance computer artificial intelligence for itself and others,

Facebook open-sources its deep-learning AI tools

​Facebook open sources AI tools, possibly turbo charges deep learning

Facebook Open-Sources a Trove of AI Tools

Facebook open sources its cutting-edge deep learning tools

Facebook open sources tools for bigger, faster deep learning models

Facebook (FB) to Open Source Deep-Learning Artificial Intelligence Tools

Open Source Gitrob tool scans GitHub Repository for sensitive information

Security researcher and member of SoundCloud security team, Michael Henriksen has developed a open source command line tool that can crawl the GitHub repositories and reveal sensitive information back to him.

Gitrob Combs Github Repositories for Secret Company Data

Free online code repositories such as GitHub provide a valuable collaboration service for enterprise developers. But it’s also a trove of potentially sensitive company and project information that’s likely to warrant attention from hackers.

Events

• Free Software Everywhere in the LibrePlanet 2015 program

  This year’s program showcases how free software is used around the world, from “Engaging Nepali kids with free software” to “Implementing electronic medical record systems in rural Haiti​”. We’re also taking a close look at how international treaties will affect free software users, with sessions from April — a French free software activist organization — and Electronic Frontier Foundation.

SaaS/Big Data

• WANdisco announces significant new contribution to Apache Hadoop open-source project

BSD

• LLVM 3.6 Is Branched, Trunk Code Is Now For LLVM 3.7

  Following last month’s LLVM 3.6 plans, the mainline code of LLVM was branched for preparing the 3.6 release so now the master/trunk code is for LLVM 3.7.

• FreeBSD Made A Lot Of Progress In The Past Few Months Of 2014

  The FreeBSD Foundation has issued their latest quarterly status report for covering from October to December 2014.

Project Releases

• Xen hypervisor v4.5 is slimmer and timelier

  An update of the open-source Xen Hypervisor to v4.5 brings reduced footprint, increased power efficiency, and new “experimental” real-time services.

• Xen 4.5 Released With Many Hypervisor Updates

• New release: Mock-1.2.4

Public Services/Government

• Sweden to boost open source through procurement

  Sweden’s public administrations will increasingly turn to open source and open standards, expect ICT procurement specialists at the National Procurement Services, the central purchasing body for the country’s public sector. The agency is readying a new approach for the acquisition of sofware and ICT services. When using these frameworks, only open standards and open source can be mandated. This greatly facilitates public administrations to prefer this type of software.

Openness/Sharing

• The future of Steam Machines, Scrabble in 3D, and more

Standards/Consortia

• Khronos Needs Your Help Designing Next-Generation OpenGL

  Since last year the Khronos Group and their partners have been busy working on “OpenGL-Next” as the first huge overhaul to the OpenGL API and designed to compete with AMD’s Mantle, Microsoft DirectX 12, and Apple’s Metal. They’re still working towards this new API but they need your help.

‘IN DOG WE TRUST,’ Says New Sheriff’s Rugs

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida has gone to the dogs. Well, at least its rugs have.

Department spokeswoman Cecilia Barreda said Wednesday that a new, $500 rug at the sheriff’s administration building said “In Dog We Trust” instead of “In God We Trust.”

Science

• The mystery of shellshock solved: Scientists identify the unique brain injury caused by war

  When the war poet Wilfred Owen wrote of “men whose minds the Dead have ravished” he was attempting to describe the mysterious effects of shellshock which started appearing during the First World War and of which he himself was a sufferer.

Security

• Friday’s security updates

• OpenSSL: trust and purpose

  Those following me on various Intarweb Media may have noticed I’ve spent half the week staring at openssl source code and weeping. Here’s one of the results of that.

  OpenSSL has two somewhat different mechanisms for deciding what uses a certificate is good for: trust and purpose. This is quite subtle and not terribly well documented, so I thought I’d write it up here.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Worried about Russia? Lithuania says ‘Keep calm and read the war manual’

  Lithuania is publishing a manual to advise its citizens on how to survive a war on its soil as concerns grow that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine heralds increased assertiveness in its tiny Baltic neighbors.

  “Keep a sound mind, don’t panic and don’t lose clear thinking,” the manual explains. “Gunshots just outside your window are not the end of the world.”

  The manual, which the Defence Ministry will send to libraries next week and also distribute at army events, says Lithuanians should resist foreign occupation with demonstrations and strikes, “or at least doing your job worse than usual”.

• Satellite Images Show Ruin Left by Boko Haram, Groups Say

  Thousands of buildings were burned, damaged or destroyed in northern Nigerian towns in recent days when Boko Haram militants stormed through, using scorched-earth tactics against civilians, according to a new analysis of satellite images by human rights groups.

  In a succession of attacks, fighters from Boko Haram, an Islamist insurgent group that has gripped northern Nigeria and battled the government for years, have swept through a cluster of villages along the shores of Lake Chad in a “systematic campaign of arson directed against the civilian population in the area,” according to Human Rights Watch.

• Musharraf Indicted Over Bugti Murder

  An anti-terror court on Wednesday indicted Pervez Musharraf over the 2006 killing of a separatist leader, the latest legal hurdle facing the former military ruler since his return from self-imposed exile two years ago.

  The charges by the court in Quetta are unlikely to cause any immediate problems for the 71-year-old, who has not attended a single hearing in the case since it began in 2013. He was previously indicted for treason in March last year over his imposition of emergency rule in 2007, but proceedings have stalled since then as the country’s civil authorities and judiciary appear to lack the will to take on the military.

  “The anti-terrorist court has indicted Musharraf along with former interior minister Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao and former home minister [of] Balochistan province Shoaib Nosherwani in Nawab Akbar Bugti’s murder case,” said public prosecutor Taimur Shah. He added the court would resume hearings in the case on Feb. 4.

  Baloch nationalist leader Nawab Akbar Bugti was killed in a military operation in 2006, sparking deadly nationwide protests and inflaming a separatist insurgency in resource-rich but impoverished Balochistan.

• Saudi Arabia Publicly Beheads Burmese Woman by Sword; Woman Shouts ‘I Did Not Kill, I Did Not Kill’

  Reports that emerged on Thursday evening that a Burmese woman was publicly beheaded in Mecca by Saudi authorities for allegedly killing her step-daughter has outraged social media users.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• And Now, a Word From Our Climate Denier…

  Is this the right way or the wrong way to cover the news of the record heat? That depends. Is the purpose of an article like this to convey how open-minded the New York Times is? If so, then the piece is a success, managing to give one-third of its quotes to a proponent of a fringe theory without giving any indication that his eccentric views are virtually absent from peer-reviewed science.

• There is less than a 1-in-27 million chance that Earth’s record hot streak is natural

  Although it may not have been warm where you live, scientists announced Friday that 2014 was the Earth’s hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880. The climate milestone was made possible in large part by exceptionally mild ocean temperatures and above-average temperatures on most continents.

  Remarkably, the warmth came without the assistance of an El Niño event in the tropical Pacific Ocean. These events are naturally occurring ocean and atmospheric cycles that tend to boost global temperatures. Previous El Niños have been responsible in part for the prior warmest years, such as 1998 and 2005, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

• Record! 2014 was Earth’s warmest year

  The planet’s warmest year on record was 2014, federal scientists announced Friday.

  “Humans are literally cooking their planet,” said Jonathan Overpeck, an atmospheric scientist from the University of Arizona.

  The global temperature from 2014 broke the previous record warmest years of 2005 and 2010 since record-keeping began in 1880.

  Two separate data sets of global temperature — from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — confirmed the record. Another data set released last week by the Japan Meteorological Agency also found 2014 was the planet’s warmest.

Finance

• Apple, Google give high tech workers an extra $90 million in “no-poach” suit

  On Thursday afternoon Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel filed a settlement in a class-action lawsuit [PDF] involving former employees of the companies, agreeing to pay them $415 million. The 64,000 employees and former employees who made up the class alleged that their employers had agreed not to cold call or poach each others’ employees, creating artificially low wages for the employees for years.

• Richard Wolff on the Greek Crisis, Austerity and a Post-Capitalist Future

  In the following interview, New School professor and economist Richard Wolff provides his analysis of the causes of the economic crisis in Greece and in the eurozone, debunks claims that the Greek economy is recovering and offers his proposal for what a post-capitalist future could look like for Greece and the world.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Sad Columnist Forced to Cover Sweaters and Torture

  “This isn’t an election–it’s a rerun,” he complains. He’s talking about all the people that are running or might be running who have run before or have relatives who have run.

Censorship

• Turkey Tells Twitter To Block Turkish Newspaper’s Feed; Twitter Plans To Push Back

  The Turkish government has been battling with Twitter for quite some time. It’s gone after citizens for comments on Twitter, blamed Twitter for social unrest and even tried (temporarily) banning Twitter entirely in the country. There was even a lawsuit by the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, filed with the Constitutional Court, over his own government’s “failure” to implement rules for removing content on Twitter.

• Alabama Legislators Say You Must Be A Salaried Employee Of Old School Media To Get Approved For Press Credentials

  The only people who still feel they can clearly define who is and isn’t a journalist are legislators. They’re almost always wrong. Journalism isn’t a career. It’s an activity. Anyone can do it and, thanks to the internet, anyone can find a publishing platform and readers. But, according to many politicians, it ain’t the press unless it involves one.

• Wrong Responses to Charlie Hebdo

  Leaders in Europe are justifiably trying to figure out what they should be doing to prevent terrorist attacks like the recent massacre at the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Regrettably, some politicians are proposing the kind of Internet censorship and surveillance that would do little to protect their citizens but do a lot to infringe on civil liberties.

  In Paris, a dozen interior ministers from European Union countries including France, Britain and Germany issued a statement earlier this week calling on Internet service providers to identify and take down online content “that aims to incite hatred and terror.” The ministers also want the European Union to start monitoring and storing information about the itineraries of air travelers. And in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron suggested the country should ban Internet services that did not give the government the ability to monitor all encrypted chats and calls.

• French Rein In Speech Backing Acts of Terror

  The French authorities are moving aggressively to rein in speech supporting terrorism, employing a new law to mete out tough prison sentences in a crackdown that is stoking a free-speech debate after last week’s attacks in Paris.

• Why porn is exploding in the Middle East

  More recently, the Saudi Arabian government announced that it had hacked and disabled about 9,000 Twitter accounts associated with the publication of pornography and arrested many of the handles’ owners. The move was organized by the Commission for the Promotion and Prevention of Vice, also known as Haia, the Saudi religious police.

• Saudi Arabia, Free Raif Badawi

  Raif Badawi was flogged in public 50 times last week. He has 950 lashes and nearly a decade in prison left to serve – simply for blogging about free speech.

• Governments Around the World are Cracking Down on the Latest Charlie Hebdo Cover

  The latest issue of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has ignited controversy in the Middle East and elsewhere due to a caricature of the prophet Muhammad depicted on its cover.

  Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed the journal’s central Paris headquarters last week and murdered 12 people, they said to avenge the publication’s regular lampooning of Muhammad. Many Muslims regard depictions of the Prophet as blasphemous and the decision to again publish a cartoon of Muhammed has caused widespread debate.

  The cartoon itself depicts the Prophet shedding a tear while holding a sign that says “Je suis Charlie” — the slogan which has become popular around the world as a declaration of solidarity with the victims of the attack — under a headline that reads “All is forgiven.” It was drawn by the weekly’s cartoonist Luz, who escaped the massacre because he was late arriving for work.

Privacy

• Special Rapporteur will study the use of encryption and anonymity in digital communications in his 2015 HRC report

• Lavabit founder condemns David Cameron’s ‘insane’ plan to ban encryption

  Ladar Levison, who ran Edward Snowden’s email account, said moves to allow government access to encrypted data would weaken safety online for everyone

• New Revelations U.S. Tracked Americans’ Calls for Over a Decade

  The Justice Department secretly kept a database of Americans’ calls to foreign countries for more than a decade, according to a new court filing and officials familiar with the program.

• Cover of darkness

  The cypherpunks are winning the second crypto-war against government spies. What will happen when everyone is anonymous?

• The curious case of Angela Merkel and her EU data retention ideas

  In the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called on the European Commission to deliver on its “promise” of a new EU-wide data retention directive to replace the one struck down by the EU’s highest court last year.

  Merkel wants to implement this new directive into German law. There’s only one problem: the Commission doesn’t seem to have promised any such thing, at least not in public.

• Andrew Bower: The encryption ban makes us look like the Thick Party

  This week the Prime Minister introduced a policy of banning strong encryption in the UK in order to deny terrorists ‘safe spaces’ in which to operate. Sounds robust, doesn’t it? In practice such a policy is impossible to implement and so would never yield any security benefit. It would, however, leave all of us vulnerable to trivial cyber-attacks and David Cameron’s vision of a Digital Britain in tatters.

• Government Releases Documents About Spying Just in Time for Christmas

  We’re usually very happy to see the government release documents shed light on unconstitutional surveillance. We’re less happy when the release is done Christmas week, in an attempt to ensure that they will get as little attention as possible.

• Latest EU Country With Legal Challenge To Blanket Data Retention: The Netherlands

  Last week we wrote about how a ruling by Europe’s highest court, the EUCJ, that blanket data retention was “invalid,” had received a further boost from an analysis by the European Parliament’s legal services. That, in its turn, made it more likely that more overbroad data retention laws in EU nations would be challenged, as has already happened in the UK and Sweden.

• I enjoyed my week in Google Glass, but those around me weren’t so keen

  Google’s smartglasses have ‘graduated’ from the company’s development lab placed under the control of the father of the iPod

Civil Rights

• Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

  Before the Law chronicles sixteen-year-old Kalief Browder’s arrest, three-year incarceration in the Rikers Island Correctional Facility, and the months following the dismissal of his case without a trial. On May 15, 2010, Roberto Bautista reported to the police that he had been robbed. The police detained Kalief, but he was not in possession of any of the stolen items. When they spoke with Bautista after the search, he changed the date of the robbery to two weeks prior. On Bautista’s inconsistent accusation alone, Kalief was arrested on multiple felony charges and held without bail.

• Murder in Guantanamo: As Cameron calls on Obama to release Londoner held for 13 years without trial, former guard claims his colleagues brutally murdered three inmates

  The prisoner could barely stand. He and a group of fellow detainees at Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, had started a riot in a cell and the unit of soldiers that I led, the Quick Reaction Force, had quelled the violence with whatever it took — fists, boots, clubs, shields and rubber bullets.

• Out-of-state prison population to dip below 400 this week

  That’s because the state’s contract with private prison corporation Corrections Corp. of America includes the stipulation that CCA can impose penalties on the state if the number of prisoners from Vermont drops below 380, Pallito said.

• President Obama Is Waging a War on Hackers

  Hanging out in an IRC chat room giving advice to people now makes you a member of a “criminal enterprise”, allowing the FBI to sweep in and confiscate all your assets without charging you with a crime.

• Rape Kit Testing – or Not?

  Some two years following her rape, Ripley attended a Salt Lake City council meeting and discovered that it was not only her case that had been brushed aside. Approximately 79% of SLCPD’s rape kits had never been sent to the lab for testing. Ripley’s kit was one of over 1,000 collected by the SLCPD in an eight year period – of these, 788 were either destroyed or still sitting on a shelf in the police department. Salt Lake City’s unprocessed rape kits make up only a small portion of the number across the United States – which, according to a January 2014 White House report total well over 20,000.

• Women’s college will no longer perform “Vagina Monologues” because it isn’t “inclusive”

  Mount Holyoke College, the historical women’s college in western Massachusetts, will no longer participate in the now-decades-old tradition of performing “The Vagina Monologues” in February, to raise awareness of gender-based violence, out of concern that the play is not inclusive of transgender students. The school, which recently changed its definition of “woman” to include male-to-female trans students, has become a site of controversy over the decision to retire Eve Ensler’s 1996 feminist classic permanently.

• Oklahoma carries out first execution since botched lethal injection in April

  Oklahoma executed Charles Warner on Thursday night, the state’s first lethal injection since the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in April.

  Attorneys for Warner and three other Oklahoma inmates asked the US supreme court for a stay, but the court denied the request in a 5-4 decision. The lawyers argued that the first of three drugs in a lethal cocktail – midazolam – would not properly sedate a person, even if the drug were properly administered.

• Holder limits seized-asset sharing process that split billions with local, state police

  Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or criminal charges.

  Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.

• Local and state police can’t use federal law to seize assets anymore

• Asset Forfeiture and the Cycle of Electronic Surveillance Funding

• Eric Holder Cuts Off Program That Helped Spur Police Asset Seizure ‘Shopping Sprees’

• Security is Not a Crime—Unless You’re an Anarchist

  Riseup, a tech collective that provides security-minded communications to activists worldwide, sounded the alarm last month when a judge in Spain stated that the use of their email service is a practice, he believes, associated with terrorism.

• Report: Entry Allowed? The number of local authority staff with the power to enter your home or workplace

  The worst offenders include Northumberland and Leeds local councils, both of which have more than 500 officials with powers of entry, whilst Hertfordshire, Chorley and Cornwall all have more than 300.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Republican net neutrality bill allows ‘reasonable’ network management

  Draft net neutrality legislation released Friday by Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or selectively slowing legal Web content, but it would allow them to engage in “reasonable” network management.

  The proposal would give broadband providers wide latitude to engage in network management, with a management practice deemed reasonable “if it is appropriate and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management purpose.”

  The draft legislation would also prohibit the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from reclassifying broadband as a regulated public utility, and it would stop the agency from creating any new net neutrality rules.

• Republican net neutrality bill would gut FCC’s authority over broadband

  Net neutrality legislation unveiled by Republicans today would gut the ability of the Federal Communications Commission to regulate the broadband industry.

  As expected, the bill forbids the FCC from reclassifying broadband as a common carrier service, preventing the commission from using authority it has under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. This is the statute the FCC uses to regulate landline telephone providers.

• Netflix “refused” to answer encryption allegation, FCC commissioner says

  Ajit Pai, part of the commission’s Republican minority, has clashed with Netflix over its use of technology that is not compatible with “open caching software” used by Internet service providers. Netflix says that it “obscured certain URL structures to protect our members from deep packet inspection tools deployed to gather data about what they watch online,” which apparently had the side effect of forcing ISPs to use different caching systems. Netflix does offer caching appliances to Internet service providers, but the bigger carriers have refused, demanding payment for connections to their networks.

• Tucows Hopes To Kickstart U.S. Broadband Competition One Town At A Time

  Last month I noted how longtime domain registrar Tucows had decided to try and kick-start stagnant broadband competition by buying a small Virginia ISP by the name of Blue Ridge InternetWorks (BRI). Operating under the Ting brand name, the company said the goal was to bring a “shockingly human experience and fair, honest pricing” to a fixed-line residential broadband market all-too-often dominated by just one or two giant, apathetic players. Ting promised to offer 1 Gbps speeds at a sub-$100 price point, while at the same time promising to respect net neutrality.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Moving steam’s .local folder deletes all user files on Linux

Failing to add a check for an empty variable has left some Steam users on Linux running a recursive delete of their entire filesystem with user privileges.

6 Linux Apps to Watch For in 2015

The Linux landscape is ever changing. Over the last few years, the flagship open source tool has found levels of acceptance thought unreachable for software running on a free platform. That momentum isn’t going to let up. In fact, 2015 promises to be a very bright year in Linux land ─ from enterprise Linux all the way down to the desktop. In fact, the Linux desktop should find 2015 to be a rather exciting time.

Why? Applications. There are some outstanding projects on the horizon that could easily bring the Linux desktop into a realm of relevancy it has yet to enjoy.

Let’s take a look at six such projects and see what they have to offer.

Linux Investments Looking Up for 2015

Now that Linux has essentially gained parity with Windows across the enterprise, solution providers have a vested interest in where customers who will make use of the open-source platform in 2015 are headed. In a new survey of 115 customers, Red Hat finds that, in general, optimism concerning IT spending in 2015 is relatively high with investments in mobile computing and big data topping the priority list. Just over half those customers are planning new application deployments on Linux, but perhaps most interesting to the solution providers in the channel is the fact that 26 percent are planning on migrating application workloads from Windows to Linux and another 15 percent are planning to migrate from Unix to Linux. Most of the application workloads also appear headed for private or hybrid clouds rather than public clouds. Also of note to solution providers should be the fact that 33 percent either already have or plan to embrace containers as an alternative form of virtualization in 2015 for reasons, ranging from the ability to deploy applications faster to streamlining testing and development.

You’ll get sick of that iPad. And guess who’ll be waiting? Big daddy Linux…

After such a banner year of Linux releases it might seem overly pessimistic to pause and ask this question: is there a future beyond this?

The answer is, of course, “yes” – or rather it’s yes, but… The qualifying “but” can take many forms, depending on who you talk to and what their stake is in the game.

Even if you take the most optimistic outlook for the future of the Linux desktop, to what end do all these distros continue turning out all these great releases year after year? Are we waiting for the day when there are no more laptops or desktops left?

Desktop

• Why some Apple customers run Linux on Macbooks instead of OS X

  Apple has always had attractive and stylish hardware, but now it seems that some users are opting to run Linux instead of OS X on their Macbooks. A redditor asked about this trend and got some very interesting answers.

Server

• Disk expansion

  My current setup at home involves a HP Microserver. It has four drive bays carrying two SSDs (for home directories) and two Western Digital RE4 2TB drives for bulk data storage (photos, source tarballs and other things that don’t change often). Each pair of drives is mirrored. I chose the RE4 because I use RAID1 and they offer good performance and error recovery control which is useful in any RAID scenario.

• VIDEO: Interview with ESET about Windigo & Advanced Linux Server-Side Threats

  iTWire interviews ESET Malware Researcher Olivier Bilodeau, on his way to be one of the speakers at the 2015 Linux.conf.au conference, presenting on advanced Linux server-side threats.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds on why he isn’t nice: “I don’t care about you”

  Following his keynote speech at the Linux.conf.au Conference in Auckland, New Zealand, Torvalds opened a Q&A session by fielding a question from Nebula One developer Matthew Garrett that accused Torvalds of having an abrasive tone in the Linux kernel mailing list. “Some people think I’m nice and are shocked when they find out different,” Torvalds said in response (quoted via multiple Twitter accounts of the event). “I’m not a nice person, and I don’t care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel—that’s what’s important to me.”

• Linus Torvalds responds to Ars about diversity, niceness in open source

  On Thursday, Linux legend Linus Torvalds sent a lengthy statement to Ars Technica responding to statements he made in Auckland, New Zealand earlier that day about diversity and “niceness” in the open source sector.

  “What I wanted to say [at the keynote]—and clearly must have done very badly—is that one of the great things about open source is exactly the fact that different people are so different,” Torvalds wrote via e-mail. “I think people sometimes look at it as being just ‘programmers,’ which is not true. It’s about all the people who are more oriented toward commercial things, too. It’s about all those people who are interested in legal issues—and the social ones, too!”

• Torvalds Only Cares about the Kernel

• Linux Foundation Helps Launch IoTivity Collaboration Project

  If there is strength in numbers, there is a whole lot of strength in the open source movement for Internet of Things technology. On January 14, the IoTivity open source project announced a preview release of of its technology that is being developed as a Linux Foundation Collaboration Project.

  The Linux Foundation is also the home of the AllSeen Alliance IoT project that is based around Qualcomm’s open-source AllJoyn framework. It is unclear if there is any overlap between IoTivity and AllSeen’s inititiatives. The Linux Foundation did not respond to a request for a comment from Datamation on any potential overlap between the projects. That said, there has always been a lot of choice within the Linux and open source ecosystem and having multiple IoT options isn’t a surprise.

• Learning systemd

  Systemd is coming to a linux distro near you.

  In fact, if you’re using RHEL 7+, CentOS 7+, Fedora 15+ or Arch, you’re already using systemd. You can always stick to a distribution that stays clear of systemd, but chances are you’ll eventually run into systemd — so we may as well learn to get along with it.

• Linux Kernel 3.12.36 LTS Officially Released

  The latest version of the stable Linux kernel, 3.12.36, has been announced by Jiri Slaby and it has arrived with a fair number of changes and improvements.

Applications

• lpe: Perhaps I am not the target audience

• Your choice of NTP applications in Linux

  The official definition of NTP (Network Time Protocol) says that it is a “protocol designed to synchronize the clocks of computers over a network.”

  To participate in that synchronization of clocks, a computer must be running either an NTP daemon (server) or an NTP client. A computer providing NTP services to other computers is an NTP server, while the one syncing to an NTP server is an NTP client.

• Popcorn Time 0.3.7 Fixes TV Covers and Provides a Better VPN Client

  Popcorn Time is an app that allows users to stream movies and TV shows directly from torrents, without having to save the files locally. It’s still under development, but it’s quite stable and new features are being added all the time.

• JARVYS, Set It and Forget It Linux Backups

  Wouldn’t it be great if there was a cloud based file backup system that put Linux FIRST? One that made it so we didn’t have to use FUSE? One that didn’t put out a Windows client first and the Linux client was an afterthought? One that you could get installed and configured quickly and easily which would allow you to ‘set it and forget it’? Me too!

• Instructionals/Technical

  • 5 new guides for using OpenStack

  • How To Install Kernel 3.18.2 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivatives

  • How To Install Kernel 3.17.8 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install gFTP 2.0.19 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install LibreCad 2.0.7 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 And Derivative Systems

  • Always Show Menus Unity Feature Lands In Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet

  • Install LAMP (Linux Apache MariaDB and PHP) with phpMyAdmin on a Fedora 20 VPS

  • How to easily encrypt any file or directory with Mcrypt on Linux System

  • How to install ProFTPd with TLS on OpenSuse 13.2

  • Building sequences of numbers on the command line

• Games

  • ‘WWE Immortals’ Out Now Worldwide on Android

    The game has some minor tweaks to the structure compared to Injustice, but it’s overwhelmingly similar. Our Shaun Musgrave, a veteran of Injustice, wrote up a guide on how to play the game without spending money and discussing how to do well in the game. Blocking is very important with the combat being based around grappling. Defnitely check that out. If you never played Injustice and prefer wrestlers to superheroes, check this out regardless of the platform, it’s one of the better ways to do not just a mobile-friendly fighting game, but also a fair free-to-play game.

  • Fans Making Super Mario 64 Remake, Looking For Contributors

    Nostalgia junkies will be pleased to hear that Super Mario 64 is getting a complete overhaul as fans are rebuilding the game from scratch using the FOSS Blender Game Engine with a Linux release confirmed.

  • Puzzle Platformer ‘Oddworld: New ‘N’ Tasty’ Will Release For Linux Next Month

    The remake of the popular classic ‘Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee’ was released for PlayStation 4 last summer, and now the long wait for the Linux version of the game is coming to an end.

  • The Spectre Of Grim Fandango Looms! GF Remastered Now Available For Pre-Order On GOG (Updated!)

    With two weeks left until its January 27th release, Double Fine have announced that Grim Fandango is now available for pre-order via GOG.com. At the same time, a new Grim Fandango Remastered website has gone live, and a third episode of 2 Player Productions’ The Making of Grim Fandango documentary series has been released.

  • Shadowrun: Hong Kong Kickstarter Announced and Fully Funded in 24 Hours

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • ‘Goodbye Photoshop’ and ‘Hello Krita’ at University Paris 8

    According to François, “we don’t want to let ourselves be pushed around and make choices that go against our beliefs. This freedom of choice is exactly the advantage that a public institution has over a private school.” All other animation schools in France, fellow members of RECA (the network of French schools of animation), are watching ATI avidly to see how this new methodology works out.

  • Professional Software for Digital Painting Krita Receives Numerous Fixes

    Krita, an application that is used to make digital painting files from scratch, has been updated to version 2.9 Beta 2 and it comes with a large number of improvements and various fixes.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • gnome-battery-bench

    gnome-battery-bench is basically usable as is. The main remaining thing to do with it is to spend some time designing and recording a couple of sequences that better reflect actual usage. The current tests I checked in are basically just placeholders.

  • GNOME 3.15.4 unstable tarballs due

    Tarballs are due on 2015-01-19 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.15.4…

  • GNOME Puts Out A Laptop Battery Testing Program

    The newest GNOME application is for testing your laptop’s battery power use under various scenarios.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • SparkyLinux 3.6-dev2 LXQt + KWin

    SparkyLinux 3.6-dev2 is the second testing release of out spin with LXQt.

  • I’m delighted to announce the release of UberStudent 4.1 “Epicurus”, Xfce Enduser Edition!

    UberStudent is a Linux distribution for everyone, especially higher education and advanced secondary students, people who teach them, and their schools. It is designed for Linux beginners while being equally satisfying to advanced users.

  • Black Lab Linux KDE 6.0 Arrives with a Refreshing Desktop

    Black Lab Linux, a distribution based on Kubuntu and that uses one of the latest KDE packages, has been upgraded for version 6.0 and is now available for download.
    Users might associate the name of Black Lab Linux with a GNOME desktop, but the developer also had a KDE edition of the operating system, which they didn’t bother too much to upgrade. Now they have finally got around to it, and backed by popular demand, and they made quite a few improvements.

  • Black Lab Linux KDE 6.0 SR1 Released

  • Xen 4.5 Boosts Virtualization Security

  • ​New version of Xen hypervisor arrives for the cloud and enterprise

    Want a new and improved hypervisor for your cloud or data-center? Then consider the latest edition of Xen, Xen 4.5, from the Linux Foundation’s Xen Project Collaborative Project.

• Red Hat Family

  • Short Interest of Red Hat Inc Increases by 12.3%

  • Fedora

    • Chapeau 21 released!

      I am delighted to announce the release of Chapeau 21 “Obree”.

    • Fedora 21 review: Linux’s sprawliest distro finds a new focus

      Like most Linux distros, Fedora is a massive, sprawling project. Frankly, it’s sprawl-y to the point that it has felt unfocused and a bit lost at times. Just what is Fedora? The distro has served as a kind of showcase for GNOME 3 ever since GNOME 3 hit the beta stage. So Fedora in theory is meant to target everyday users, but at the same time the project pours tremendous energy into building developer tools like DevAssistant. Does that make Fedora a developer distro? A newbie-friendly GNOME showcase? A server distro? An obscure robotics distro?

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Elive Is a Debian and Enlightenment Distro Mix with Some Cool Features

      Elive, a Linux distribution based on Debian that uses Enlightenment as the default desktop environment, has been upgraded to version 2.5.2 Beta and is now available for download and testing.

    • Want to Stay Anonymous Online? Use the Tails 1.2.3 OS

      Tails, a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and that helps you use the Internet anonymously, is now at version 1.2.3 and is available for download and testing.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • `Caffeine` App Gets Its Indicator Back With New 2.8 Release

        Caffeine is a tool used to temporarily prevent the activation of the screensaver / lock screen / sleep mode when using full-screen windows. The application is useful when using video players that don’t do this automatically, when listening to music while not using the computer, etc.

      • Canonical Ports Unity Improvements from Ubuntu 14.10 to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

        It’s easy to think that Ubuntu developers are usually working only on the next version of the operating systems, but they also put a lot of effort into the distros they already released. For example, an important Unity update has been unveiled now for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

      • Firefox 35 Lands in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

        Canonical has updated the Firefox packages for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems. If you have this application already installed, you only need to update your system

      • Ubuntu Advances Juju Linux Magic Charms

        Juju first debuted in Ubuntu 11.10, the “Oneiric Ocelot,” back in October of 2011. The word “juju” is a word meaning magic in the African language from which the name Ubuntu itself was derived. Ubuntu Linux Server The promise of Juju is easier application and service deployment, which is enabled by way of a number of Juju components.

      • Proof Of Concept: LibreOffice’s Writer Tool Running On Ubuntu Touch

        While it already has many applications specially developed for it, Canonical’s Will Cooke has managed to make LibreOffice’s Writer tool (developed for X.org) run on Ubuntu Touch.

      • Ubuntu Touch’s Music App Is Yet Another Convergence-Ready Application

        For now, Ubuntu’s convergence concept has been previously demoed by Jono Bacon, Ubuntu’s former Community Manager, via the Weather App and the Karma Machine.

      • GParted Exploit Has Been Closed in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

        A single GParted vulnerability has been found and corrected in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin). The developers have issued a patch and the GParted app has been updated.

      • Ubuntu Devs Are Talking Whether to Let Software Update Delete Old Kernels

        One of the problems on Ubuntu platforms is that the Software Update tool doesn’t remove the old kernels after an upgrade, but the Ubuntu devs are now talking whether their tool should be used to perform this kind of cleaning.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Review: Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” Xfce

          Recently, the Xfce edition of Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” was released. It and the MATE edition are notable in featuring…Compiz! This really caught my eye, so I wanted to review it. There are several other changes too, so I figured that it would be worthwhile to review the Xfce edition rather than the MATE edition, given that I already tried the MATE edition of Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” not too long ago. Note that Ubuntu-based Linux Mint is sticking only to LTS releases, so a major release will roughly coincide (lagging by a month or so) with the Ubuntu LTS release, and then decimal point releases will be put out every 6 months or so and be given a new code name while still sticking with the last LTS release as its base. As far as this review goes, I tried this as usual as a live USB system made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what it’s like.

        • Introducing the MintBox Mini

          We’re starting 2015 with exciting news. Linux Mint and CompuLab will be announcing a brand new unit called “MintBox Mini” in Q2 2015.

        • The Linux Mint Project Announces the MintBox Mini PC

          The Linux Mint project has announced the MintBox Mini, which is a mini PC that is basically small enough to almost fit into a pocket.

        • MintBox Mini coming in Q2 for $295

          CompuLab’s MintBox computers have always had a relatively small form factor, and have gotten very positive reviews from customers on Amazon. But now they are getting even smaller with the upcoming release of the MintBox Mini. The MintBox Mini is expected to debut sometime in the second quarter of 2015 and will sell for $295.

          [...]

          Tails is a Linux distribution geared toward helping you protect your privacy and anonymity while you use the Internet. The latest release is version 1.2.3 and you can download it now.

        • MintBox Mini gives Linux users a pocket-sized PC

        • The MintBox Mini is a silent, quad-core Linux Mint PC that fits in your pocket

Devices/Embedded

• Open-source IoT software framework releases preview

  The OIC’s “IoTivity” project released a v0.9.0 preview of its open source IoT framework software, with ready-to-test builds for Arduino, Tizen, and Yocto.

  IoTivity is a project sponsored by the Open Internet Consortium (OIC), an industry association formed last July in order to develop open source standards and software for providing “interoperability and services” to potentially billions of Internet-of-Things devices.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Adobe Lightroom Comes to Android Phones

      Android: A while back, Adobe released a Lightroom companion app for iOS phones and tablets. Now, Android is catching up with a version of the app for phones. And it starts with a 30-day free trial.

    • Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile Comes To Android

      It’s no secret that Adobe hasn’t exactly done a stellar job at keeping parity between its collection of apps for iOS and Android. iOS users, for instance, enjoy Adobe Illustrator Line and Draw, Color CC, Premiere Clip, Brush CC, and many more that have yet to see the light of day on the Play Store.

    • HP reportedly set to release its Android and Windows tablets sometime this year

      Originally discovered by Notebook Italia, both tablets are powered by an Intel quad-core Bay Trail Atom Z3735F processor. Accompanying the processor package is 2GB of RAM, as well as 32GB of internal storage. Both the Pro Slate and Pro Tablet come with 10.1-inch displays, as well as 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC.

    • Where’s My Lollipop? When’s Your Phone Getting Android L?

    • ODG Wants To Put Android On Your Face For Less Than $1000 Later This Year

      In terms of specs, the tablet description isn’t far off. The consumer model is powered by a Snapdragon 805 system-on-a-chip, which frequently appears in flagship phones and tablets from Android OEMs. The current demo unit is running Android Kit Kat, though the final release will sport Lollipop.

    • OnePlus One Android 5.0 Lollipop Update Coming Next Month

      If you’re still waiting for your OnePlus One to make the official jump to Android 5.0 Lollipop we have some good news. The Cyanogen-powered phone is getting its own specialized version of Google’s latest mobile OS in February, according to Cyanogen founder Steve Kondik.

    • Android customization – how to use Android Device Manager to find your lost phone

      Last week on our Android customization series, we went a little crazy with device security, rigging things up using Tasker to take a photo of anyone accessing your device. We were sure to save the device’s current GPS coordinates as a part of the file name of the photo, making it as likely as possible you can recover a lost device.

    • Nexus 7 (2013) and Nexus 10 Android 5.0.2 factory images arrive

      Back in December, the Nexus 7 (2012) received a new factory image with the build number LRX22G, containing an update to Android 5.0.2. Now the Nexus 7 (2013) Wi-Fi and Nexus 10 are following suite, as factory images have just landed for both of these tablets.

​Facebook open sources AI tools, possibly turbo charges deep learning

The plain English takeaway is that faster training of neural networks will now be widely available via open source project Torch.

Events

• First Berlin meetup of the year!

  Next week will be the first Berlin ownCloud meetup of 2015.

• Kolab Summit, openSuse Conference keynote

• Linux Foundation Announces Keynote and Session Lineup for New Storage and Filesystems Conference, Vault

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • A coincidence? Mozilla teams unite during work week

    L10n teams are incredibly diverse in nature, and Mozilla is no exception. At the meetup, I had a chance to meet people of many different cultures and languages who are all working to enable their Mozilla products. Michael Bauer, for example, works on Scottish Gaelic, a language spoken by less than 100,000 people. Michael’s efforts helped Scottish Gaelic be present on several applications.

  • Firefox 36 Beta Announced, Add-on Developers Must Make Important Changes

SaaS/Big Data

• Three Essential OpenStack Deployment and Validation Tools

  As predicted, 2015 is turning out to be the year when many IT departments are moving from evaluation stage to deployment stage for OpenStack cloud instances.

BSD

• DigitalOcean Launches FreeBSD Cloud Servers, Answering Developers

  As countless user surveys have shown, Linux is a predominant platform for many cloud deployments, with Ubuntu reigning king. In fact, many surveys show that more than half of OpenStack deployments are built on Ubuntu.

• Not Just Linux: DigitalOcean Adds FreeBSD Cloud Hosting Option

Openness/Sharing

• Stop human trafficking, Arduinos in Antarctica, and more

Science

• How today’s young IT talent is different from previous generation

  For the past 10 years, I’ve had a front row seat to the transition of they way young adults approach IT work. As a professor teaching software architecture at the National Technology University, I’ve witnessed a lot of changes in students today.

  First, I need to point out that my class is an elective for students in the final year of their degree. They typically enroll in my “IT Project Architecture” class because they want to learn and they want to get a job after they graduate, which tends to eliminate any slackers from my class.

Security

• Docker Security Questioned

• Android Malware Increasing, Getting Smarter

  Most Americans still don’t worry about malware on their mobile devices. But the halcyon days of Android innocence are fast coming to a close, according to a new report by San Francisco-based mobile-security-software developer Lookout, Inc.

• How to protect Android from the WebView bug: Prevent hackers taking control of your mobile device

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Jeremy Scahill to CNN: Network “Terrorism Experts” are “Largely Frauds”

  In a follow-up to coverage on Democracy Now! over the past few days, the news network CNN has been given some direct, on-air criticism of its use of so-called terrorism “experts” for discussion of violent attacks like the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Speaking to CNN, The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill was asked about his comments during a Democracy Now! interview on Monday in which he criticized corporate media coverage of the attack’s aftermath. Scahill called out CNN and other networks for using pundits he said have no right to call themselves “terrorism experts.”

• Did Gitmo “Suicides” Cover Up Murder? U.S. Sgt. Speaks Out on Deaths & Prison’s Secret CIA Site

• Four top Secret Service executives told to leave their posts in agency shake-up

  The Secret Service is forcing out four of its most senior officials while two others are retiring…

• Operation Merlin: The Russian’s Case Officers

• Jeffrey Sterling: The Government’s Circumstantial Case

• The U.S. military is back training troops in Iraq, but it’s a little different this time

  Years after the U.S. military tried to create a new army in Iraq — at a cost of over $25 billion — American trainers have returned to help rebuild the country’s fighting force.

• Fox Reporter To Address Gun Group That Says Violence Against The Government Is An Option

  Emily Miller, the chief investigative reporter for Washington, D.C.’s Fox affiliate WTTG, is scheduled to speak at a rally organized by Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), a far-right pro-gun group. VCDL has previously published racially charged content in its newsletter and suggested violent action against the government may be an “option” for gun advocates.

• Obama Vows to Veto Bipartisan Bill on New Iran Sanctions

  “Congress needs to show patience,” Mr. Obama said during a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain. “There is no good argument for us to try to undercut, undermine the negotiations until they have played themselves out.”

• Obama: ‘we can do better’ on surveillance programs respecting privacy – as it happened

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Hottest year on global record was Canada’s coolest in 18 years

  Last year broke another global heat record, becoming the hottest since 1880. But did it feel that way to you? Probably not, since it was Canada’s coolest in 18 years.

  NASA and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced today that last year broke the global temperature record for the third time in a decade.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Only ‘No-Go Zones’ Are Found in Fox News’ Fantasyland

  Fox News pundit Steve Emerson drew international ridicule for claiming Birmingham, England, was a “no-go zone” for non-Muslims (FAIR Blog, 1/12/15). But he was far from alone on Fox in advancing this xenophobic fantasy of urban areas lost to Western civilization.

• First Female S.F. Chronicle Editor-In-Chief Speaks Out On The Industry’s Glass Ceiling

  Audrey Cooper does not believe it should have taken a century and a half for the San Francisco Chronicle to name its first female editor-in-chief.

  And she should know. She’s that editor.

  Cooper, who was named to the top post at the Chronicle on Wednesday, said a glass ceiling still exists at news organizations and she’s personally had experiences where she felt she wasn’t treated equally because of her gender.

  “Obviously there is (a glass ceiling),” Cooper said. “I think all of the coverage of [New York Times editor Jill Abramson's 2014] departure laid bare a lot of things that other female editors felt but hadn’t really articulated. They’re much more subtle than people might think. Sexism in general is a lot more subtle than it used to be 20 years ago. Yes, I’ve had the experiences that I think that I was not treated the same as men based on my gender.”

Censorship

• Pope Francis: Free expression doesn’t mean right to insult others’ faith

  Weighing in on last week’s terror in France and the debate over freedom of expression it stirred, Pope Francis said en route to the Philippines that killing “in the name of God” is wrong, but it is also wrong to “provoke” people by belittling their religion.

• Charlie Hebdo’s Defiant Muhammad Cover Fuels Debate on Free Speech

  Immediately upon unveiling its new cover — a depiction of Muhammad — the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Tuesday reignited the debate pitting free speech against religious sensitivities that has embroiled Europe since 12 people were killed during an attack on its Paris offices by Muslim extremists a week ago.

  The cover shows the bearded prophet shedding a tear and holding up a sign saying, “I am Charlie,” the rallying cry that has become synonymous with support of the newspaper and free expression. Above the cartoon on a green background is the headline “All is forgiven.”

Privacy

• Mass surveillance not effective for finding terrorists

  In response to the terrorist attacks in Paris, the UK government is redoubling its efforts to engage in mass surveillance.

  Prime minister David Cameron wants to reintroduce the so-called snoopers’ charter – properly, the Communications Data Bill – which would compel telecoms companies to keep records of all internet, email and cellphone activity. He also wants to ban encrypted communications services.

  Cameron seems to believe terrorist attacks can be prevented if only mass surveillance, by the UK’s intelligence-gathering centre GCHQ and the US National Security Agency, reaches the degree of perfection portrayed in his favourite TV dramas, where computers magically pinpoint the bad guys. Computers don’t work this way in real life and neither does mass surveillance.

  Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered 17 people, were known to the French security services and considered a serious threat. France has blanket electronic surveillance. It didn’t avert what happened.

• FBI has its fingers deep in NSA surveillance pie, declassified report shows

  The FBI had, and most likely still has, a much closer involvement with the NSA’s mass surveillance programs than previously thought – with access to raw foreign intelligence and data on Americans gleaned from the PRISM program.

  The 231-page report, from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, was obtained – albeit in a heavily redacted form – after a Freedom of Information request by The New York Times, a request made possible using key details leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

  The report finds that in 2008 – almost since the inception of the PRISM program, which allows the NSA access to citizens’ information stored by Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yahoo! among others – the FBI had access to slurped private data.

• BBC uses RIPA terrorism laws to catch TV licence fee dodgers in Northern Ireland

  It has invoked the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to catch viewers evading the £145 charge.

  The Act, which regulates the powers of public bodies to carry out surveillance and investigation, was introduced in 2000 to safeguard national security.

  But a series of extensions mean it can now be applied to investigate minor offences, including not paying the licence fee.

• Activist pulls off clever Wi-Fi honeypot to protest surveillance state

  The chairman of the youth wing of the Swedish Pirate Party successfully fooled attendees at a major Swedish security and defense conference into connecting to an open Wi-Fi network that he controlled—as a way to protest mass digital surveillance.

• Thousands of German spies at risk after double-agent stole list of identities

  Double agent working for US, identified only as Markus R, may have sold top-secret details of 3,500 German intelligence officers posted abroad, according to Bild newspaper

  [...]

  An employee of the BND, Germany’s equivalent of MI6, Markus R worked in the registry section of its overseas operations department, where he had access to top secret documents including the identities of operatives posted abroad.

• The Inside Information That Could Have Stopped 9/11

  That the CIA did block him and Doug Miller, a fellow FBI agent assigned to the “Alec Station,” the cover name for CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, from notifying bureau headquarters about the terrorists has been told before, most notably in a 2009 Nova documentary on PBS, “The Spy Factory.” Rossini and Miller related how they learned earlier from the CIA that one of the terrorists (and future hijacker), Khalid al-Mihdhar, had multi-entry visas on a Saudi passport to enter the United States. When Miller drafted a report for FBI headquarters, a CIA manager in the top-secret unit told him to hold off. Incredulous, Miller and Rossini had to back down. The station’s rules prohibited them from talking to anyone outside their top-secret group.

• How terrorism breeds bad thinking

  As we try to process our rage and grief after attacks like the one on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, Chris Hayes examines how we are susceptible to mistakes that can have devastating consequences.

• End of the Google Glass? – Can I say I told you so?

  It’s academic, Google Glass is reported to now be on the way out. I remember in May 2014 I voiced my concerns about the product, the dislike of its camera pointing at you and also mentioned the fan boys/girls who defended the device with cries of “Glass Hater”. Seems I was right, because the views I aired appear to have been echoed by potential consumers (or the lack thereof).

• Oscar Nominations 2015: Laura Poitras on the Uncertainties Surrounding ‘Citizenfour’

  Laura Poitras’s “Citizenfour,” about Edward J. Snowden’s leak of National Security Agency documents, has long been seen as the front-runner for the best documentary Oscar. It plays out like a thriller while touching on one of the rawest nerves of our time – government surveillance of private citizens.

  Of course getting the actual nomination is another thing altogether. What had been seen as “Citizenfour’s” biggest challenger, the Roger Ebert film “Life Itself,” failed to get a nod.

• British Government Wants To Outlaw Secure Communication (To Keep You Safe)

  In the wake of recent terror attacks in Europe, British Prime Minister David Cameron has called for an end to secure communications technology.

  In other words, he wants to ensure that you will never again be able to use encryption technology to maintain privacy.

• Secret US cybersecurity report: encryption vital to protect private data

  A secret US cybersecurity report warned that government and private computers were being left vulnerable to online attacks from Russia, China and criminal gangs because encryption technologies were not being implemented fast enough.

Civil Rights

• Justice demands equal treatment: Opposing view

  The Obama administration has used the Espionage Act to wage an unprecedented war on national security whistle-blowers.

• Wyden Statement on CIA Accountability Board Report on Agency’s Secret Search of U.S. Senate Files

  “Both the CIA Inspector General and the review board appointed by Director Brennan have now concluded that the CIA’s unauthorized search of Senate files was improper. It is incredible that no one at the CIA has been held accountable for this very clear violation of Constitutional principles. Director Brennan either needs to reprimand the individuals involved or take responsibility himself. So far he has done neither.

• CIA Won’t Punish Employees Who Spied On Senate Intel Committee

  The Central Intelligence Agency will not discipline any of the five agency employees who accessed Senate Intelligence Committee computer systems last year during the Senate investigation of abusive interrogation tactics by the CIA.

  While the CIA’s decision was in line with a review that the agency commissioned, it contradicts the agency’s own internal watchdog, the CIA Office of the Inspector General, which had concluded that the employees accessed Senate computers “improperly” and didn’t respond with candor when questioned.

• CIA officials cleared in Senate spying flap

  No Central Intelligence Agency personnel will be disciplined for intruding into computers being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee as part of a highly-sensitive investigation into the agency’s use of harsh interrogation techniques against terror suspects, the agency said Wednesday.

• Reports detail White House role in CIA-Senate ‘spying’ flap

  Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan’s decision last year to quietly flag White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough to a developing showdown with the Senate drew repeated warnings at the time from a CIA lawyer who said such contact was unwise because it might undermine a criminal investigation or appear to do so, a report released Wednesday revealed.v

• White House Knew CIA Snooped On Senate, Report Says

  Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan consulted the White House before directing agency personnel to sift through a walled-off computer drive being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to construct its investigation of the agency’s torture program, according to a recently released report by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General.

  The Inspector General’s report, which was completed in July but only released by the agency on Wednesday, reveals that Brennan spoke with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough before CIA employees were ordered to “use whatever means necessary” to determine how certain sensitive internal documents had wound up in Senate investigators’ hands. The conversation with McDonough came after Brennan first issued the directive, but before he reiterated it to a CIA attorney leading the probe.

• Condoleezza Rice testifies in CIA leaks trial

  Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a highly unusual public appearance Thursday — taking the witness stand for the prosecution in a criminal case against a former CIA officer on trial for leaking details of a top-secret spy program.

  Rice, who once traveled the globe as America’s top diplomat, found herself describing another type of diplomacy to a federal court jury: the Bush administration’s effort in 2003 to kill a New York Times story that threatened to reveal a CIA effort to undermine Iran’s nuclear program by secretly providing Tehran with flawed plans for an atomic weapon.

• Condoleezza Rice Testifying at Sterling CIA Whistleblower Trial on WMD Claims

• John Brennan Exonerates Himself with Sham Investigation

  The outrageous whitewash issued yesterday by the CIA panel John Brennan hand-picked to lead the investigation into his agency’s spying on Senate staffers is being taken seriously by the elite Washington media, which is solemnly reporting that officials have been “cleared” of any “wrongdoing“.

• The Revenge of the CIA: Scapegoating Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling

  This week, in a federal courtroom, I’ve heard a series of government witnesses testify behind a screen while expounding on a central precept of the national security state: The CIA can do no wrong.

• U.S. Moves Five Yemenis From Guantánamo

  The United States transferred five more detainees — all of them Yemenis — from the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Wednesday, the Defense Department announced. Their release intensified the dispute between the Obama administration and several Republican senators over President Obama’s recent flurry of transfers as he seeks to empty the American-run prison.

• Freedom of the Press a Key Issue in Trial of Former CIA Officer Jeffrey Sterling

  In the aftermath of a series of brutal terrorist attacks that claimed the lives of 17, including eight journalists at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, police officers and hostages at a kosher food market, more than three million people marched in Paris in solidarity with the victims and in support of freedom of the press. Forty heads of state also joined the march, but as many critics pointed out, some of the nations they represented, such as Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Russia and Israel, have poor records when it comes to press freedom at home. The U.S., criticized by some for not sending a high-level representative to participate in the Paris march, also has a flawed record on freedom of the press.

• Glenn Greenwald: With Calls to Spare Petraeus, Feinstein Plea Shows that Not All Leaks are Equal

  The FBI and federal prosecutors have recommended felony charges against former CIA director David Petraeus for allegedly providing classified information to a woman with whom he had an extramarital affair. Petraeus resigned in 2012 after admitting to cheating on his wife with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. The recommendation of charges stems from a probe into whether Petraeus gave Broadwell access to his CIA email account and other sensitive material. Attorney General Eric Holder was supposed to have decided by the end of last year on whether to indict. According to The New York Times, the delay has frustrated some federal officials “who have questioned whether Petraeus has received special treatment at a time Holder has led a crackdown” on government whistleblowers. On Sunday, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California urged the Department of Justice not to bring criminal charges against Petraeus, saying “the four-star general of our generation” and “very brilliant man” has “suffered enough.” We are joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who calls Feinstein’s comments “one of the most disgusting you will ever hear. What she’s actually saying is that because David Petraeus is a really important person, that he should be immunized from consequences for his lawbreaking … Dianne Feinstein has called for the prosecution of all sorts of leakers, and yet she exempts David Petraeus.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• China expands Internet backbone to improve speeds, reliability

  Even as China cuts access to some foreign online services, it is laying more fiber optic cables to improve its connection to global Internet networks.

  China recently added seven new access points to the world’s Internet backbone, adding to the three points that connect through Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced on Monday.

• Obama wants to help make your Internet faster and cheaper. This is his plan.

  Frustrated over the number of Internet providers that are available to you? If so, you’re like many who are limited to just a handful of broadband companies. But now President Obama wants to change that, arguing that choice and competition are lacking in the U.S. broadband market. On Wednesday, Obama will unveil a series of measures aimed at making high-speed Web connections cheaper and more widely available to millions of Americans. The announcement will focus chiefly on efforts by cities to build their own alternatives to major Internet providers such as Comcast, Verizon or AT&T — a public option for Internet access, you could say.

• Get coding or you’ll bounce email from new dot-thing domains

  Expansion in DNS means you may struggle to handle email from Chinese or Arabic domains

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Mayor of city that threw out Microsoft told to end attacks on Linux

The mayor of Munich, the city that replaced Windows with Linux, is told his public attacks on the move to open source are hampering efforts to end the authority’s IT staffing shortage.

Desktop

• Soon You’ll Be Able to More Easily Install Windows and Linux on a Chromebook

Server

• World record set for 100 TB sort by open source and public cloud team

  In October 2014, Databricks participated in the Sort Benchmark and set a new world record for sorting 100 terabytes (TB) of data, or 1 trillion 100-byte records. The team used Apache Spark on 207 EC2 virtual machines and sorted 100 TB of data in 23 minutes.

  In comparison, the previous world record set by Hadoop MapReduce used 2100 machines in a private data center and took 72 minutes. This entry tied with a UCSD research team building high performance systems and we jointly set a new world record.

• Running your servers in Linux Containers [sponsored post]

Kernel Space

• The Companies That Support Linux: Micron Technology Inc.

  Storage industry technologies are undergoing a major shift and operating systems must evolve to keep pace with the change. That’s one reason why Micron Technology, a global leader in advanced semiconductor systems including DRAM, NAND and NOR Flash, recently joined the Linux Foundation as a corporate member.

• AtomicRNG: Feeding The Linux RNG With Java & Alpha Ray Visualizer

  AtomicRNG is an open-source project started by a Phoronix reader that’s an experimental random number generator that feeds the Linux entropy pool and is based on an Alpha Radiation Visualizer.

• Kernel build times for automated builders

  Over the past year or so various people have been automating kernel builds with the aim of both setting the standard that things should build reliably and using the resulting builds for automated testing. This has been having good results, it’s especially nice to compare the results for older stable kernel builds with current ones and notice how much happier everything is.

• New Patches Will Have Cherryview & Broadwell Owners Looking Toward New Kernel

  While Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center has publicly had Broadwell Linux GPU driver code to post public since the end of 2013 and they’ve already started on Skylake enablement, there’s still yet-to-be-mainlined patches for the Linux kernel to benefit Broadwell graphics performance.

• Graphics Stack

  • Running X11 On 64-bit ARM Hardware Is Sort Of Working

    Marcin Juszkiewicz, the ARM developer at Red Hat responsible for a lot of RHEL/Fedora ARM work, has finally managed to get an X11 Server running on real AArch64 hardware.

  • NIR Lands In Mesa, New IR Started By High Schooler Intern At Intel

    NIR aims to be lower-level than GLSL IR but still high enough to be device-independent and support generic optimizations. NIR is flat, type-less, GLSL-like features, native support for SSA, and uses much less memory than GLSL IR.

  • Started X11 on AArch64 (hardware this time)

    Took me some time but finally I managed to workaround all issues and got X11 running on real AArch64 hardware.

• Benchmarks

  • Unreal Engine 4 Linux Tests With AMD & NVIDIA Graphics Drivers

    This week there was a 22-way graphics card test of Metro Redux on Linux using GeForce and Radeon hardware with the latest AMD and NVIDIA proprietary drivers. Today the newest Linux gaming test candidate to look at is the AMD/NVIDIA Linux performance with the latest Unreal Engine 4 demos. In this article is a look at the UE4 Linux performance on AMD and NVIDIA graphics hardware running with Ubuntu.

  • PC-BSD 10.1 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 vs. Fedora 21 Benchmarks

    For your viewing pleasure today are some benchmarks of PC-BSD 10.1 compared to Ubuntu 14.10 and Fedora 21 when testing with both the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers.

    FreeBSD 10.1 was released back in November along with PC-BSD 10.1 and its new TrueOS. It took a bit of time though to get some benchmarks completed of FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.1 due to running into issues loading the updated OS on a few test systems I frequently use for Linux testing. In particular, disk/SATA issues on multiple systems when booting the PC-BSD 10.1 installer. Fortunately, I came across one of the powerful workhorse systems that played nicely with PC-BSD 10.1

Applications

• Photo Editing Suite jAlbum 12.4 Brings Better RAM Management

• Proprietary

  • New Opera Beta for Linux Fixes Facebook Annoying Bug

    A fresh Beta version of the Opera Internet browser has been released by its developers and the Linux users can test it along with everyone else. It brings quite a few minor changes, but there are also two major improvements that really stand out.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • 20 Unix Command Line Tricks – Part I

  • How to dual-boot Kali Linux 1.0.9 and Windows 7/8 on a PC with UEFI firmware

  • How to Manage Network using nmcli Tool in RedHat / CentOS 7.x

  • Create a daily reading list with calibre

  • icdiff: Visibility by default

  • Encrypt DNS Traffic In Ubuntu With DNSCrypt [Ubuntu PPA]

  • UAT on RTL-SDR update

  • Duplicate ISOs to multiple USB drives with MultiWriter

  • Install Jenkins on an Ubuntu 14.04 VPS

  • Boot Linux from an NFS server

    While movies like to think they’re still common, the concept of a mainframe with dumb terminals is a bit of an obsolete concept now. The proliferation of high-powered machines made it easier to give everyone their own system and that hasn’t really changed.

• Games

  • Steam Machine: Just a living room PC?

    However, according to the CEO of Origin PC, the Steam Machine is “pretty much dead” and is just a new term for a living room PC.

  • Chivalry: Medieval Warfare Starts Open Beta Testing on Steam for Linux

    Chivalry: Medieval Warfare is a brutal multiplayer game that pits players against one another, but using medieval weapons and tactics. It’s insanely fun and now Linux users can also play it.

  • Gunslugs 2 Is a Contra 2-like Action Game for Linux

    Gunslugs 2, a new 2D side scrolling arcade shooter that draws its inspiration from games like Contra, has been published on Steam and is also available for Linux users.

  • Retro Action Platformer ‘Gunslugs 2′ Released, And The First Game Is Now Also On Linux

    The sequel to the popular run ‘n’ gun platformer is now out, and as a last minute surprise, the developer OrangePixel also made the first game available for Linux today. We have played the follow-up, and it offers the same enjoyable action frenzy as the original, but in a more accessible package.

  • Pillars Of Eternity, The RPG Aims For A Same-day Linux Release On March 26th

    Pillars of Eternity will be officially released on the 26th of March this year, and we have it confirmed that they are aiming for a same-day Linux release.

  • Shadowrun: Hong Kong Is a Big Hit on Kickstater, Features Linux Support

    Shadowrun: Hong Kong, a new turn-based action game from the famous Harebrained Schemes studio, has been announced for the Linux platform and it’s already making quite an impression on Kickstarter.

  • JumpJet Rex Is a 2D Platformer with 16-bit Graphics

    JumpJet Rex, a new 2D platformer developed and published by TreeFortress Games, has been released on Steam and is now available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X platforms.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Applications 14.12.1 Released with More than 50 Bugfixes

    The developers from the KDE project have made some important changes and you might have noticed that it no longer says KDE Applications and Platform, jus KDE Applications. Also, you might have spotted the fact that KDE SC is also gone. The project has been split into KDE Frameworks, KDE Plasma, and KDE Applications and they are now quasi-independent.

  • Release Schedule For KDE Applications 15.04

    KDE Frameworks 5.6.0 was released a few days ago and Plasma 5.2 will be out later this month. Meanwhile, the KDE Applications release is coming out in April.

  • KDE Plasma Desktop Massive Update with New Login Manager and Theming for GNOME Apps

    Plasma, the desktop for the KDE project, has been updated once again and the KDE Community has detailed all the wonderful improvements and numerous fixes that have been implemented.

  • Plasma 5.2 Beta available for Fedora testers

    On Tuesday KDE has released first beta of the upcoming Plasma 5.2. Plasma 5.2 is adding many new features and improvements and we would welcome testers to help find and fix bugs before the final release.

  • KDE Applications 15.04 Release Schedule

  • Sok Status Report Part 2

    Been a while since my last post. Exams came in and threw my momentum off. But now I’m back on track. I’ve been working on porting Baloo to use lucene instead of Xapain using Lucene++. Lucene++ is a C++ port of the java Lucene.

  • Calligra 2.9 Beta 2 Released

    We are happy to announce the second beta release in 2.9 series of Calligra Suite for you to test. We are focusing on fixing issues including those that you’d report so please continue to work with us. The next beta (3) is expected in February 2015.

  • Krita 2.9 Beta 2 is Out!

  • Professional Software for Digital Painting Krita Receives Numerous Fixes

    Krita, an application that is used to make digital painting files from scratch, has been updated to version 2.9 Beta 2 and it comes with a large number of improvements and various fixes.

Distributions

• Linux Distros We’ll Never See

  A few days ago, I was cleaning my desk in the lab and happened upon a printout of a fake distro called Chuck Norris Linux — more commonly known as CHUX — which casually mentions that “…if Chuck Norris wrote Linux, you couldn’t boot it, it would boot you.”

• My business has been saved by Zorin OS

  You could only imagine how old that was, it’s a Dell Dimension 3000. It still has the old boob tube type monitor. Quickly I said Yes! It had Windows XP on it. I went out to the local computer store and spent money I didn’t have to obtain all the necessary software to keep my business going.

• Find out what the best distros and open source software is in Linux User & Developer 148

  Our Ultimate Distro & FOSS Guide 2015 is joined by our introduction to becoming a Linux Foundation Certified Sysadmin

• New Releases

  • Elive Is a Debian and Enlightenment Distro Mix with Some Cool Features

    Elive, a Linux distribution based on Debian that uses Enlightenment as the default desktop environment, has been upgraded to version 2.5.2 Beta and is now available for download and testing.

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo Needs to Focus on Distros We’ll Never See

    Today’s tiptoe through the newsfeeds found a list of distributions we’ll never see. Elsewhere, Phoronix.com said Fedora leadership is still planning releasing version 22 on time. Bruce Byfield has the advantages and disadvantages of popular Linux desktops and Jon maddog Hall shares his road to Open Source success. Over in Gentooland developer Donnie Berkholz says Gentoo needs focus to stay relevant and Andreas Hüttel has started a new blog series highlighting Gentoo derivatives.

  • Gentoo needs focus to stay relevant

    After nearly 12 years working on Gentoo and hearing blathering about how “Gentoo is about choice” and “Gentoo is a metadistribution,” I’ve come to a conclusion to where we need to go if we want to remain viable as a Linux distribution.

  • Cool Gentoo-derived projects (I): SystemRescueCD

    Gentoo Linux is the foundation for quite some very cool and useful projects. So, I’m starting (hopefully) a series of blog posts here… and the first candidate is a personal favourite of mine, the famous SystemRescueCD.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Downgraded by Goldman Sachs to Sell

    Goldman Sachs cut shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) from a neutral rating to a sell rating in a research report sent to investors on Wednesday morning, TheFlyOnTheWall.com reports. The firm currently has $70.00 price target on the stock, up from their previous price target of $67.44.

  • Red Hat CEO Expects Growth From Cloud, Storage

    Analyst concerns about Red Hat’s growth prospects appeared to all but disappear last month after the enterprise software company reported third-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street views.

  • Red Hat’s David Egts: Gov’t Can Use Linux Containers to Support Virtualization

    Red Hat‘s David Egts says government agencies can use Linux container technology to support virtualization efforts in an effort to efficiency and flexibility of their information technology systems.

    Egts, the chief technologist at Red Hat’s public sector business, wrote in a piece published Tuesday on GCN that Linux containers include applications that agencies can deploy as a single package through isolated host systems.

  • Red Hat updates Satellite 5 to version 5.7

    RED HAT has announced an update to Satellite 5, promising new features, improvements to security and automation, and a “refreshed” interface.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora’s FESCo Makes A Bold Move To Try To Release Fedora 22 On Time

      This morning I wrote about Unless Fedora 22 Is To Be Delayed, GCC 5 Might Not Make It due to needing a mass rebuild of all the Fedora packages and the time involved on the short time-line. The Fedora FESCo committee convened today and their outcome is a bit surprising.

    • Unless Fedora 22 Is To Be Delayed, GCC 5 Might Not Make It

      While Fedora developers have been trying hard for Fedora 22 to be released on time and be stricter about time-based releases with Fedora releases currently being notorious for delays, there’s already some challenges with the fresh Fedora 22 plans for releasing in mid-May.

    • Fedora 22 To Use Libinput On X.Org, Change Console Font & Have Local DNS Resolver

      Besides deciding to stick to Fedora 22′s time-based release schedule, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee also approved some new features for Fedora 22.

    • Trusting additional CAs in Fedora / RHEL / CentOS: an alternative to editing /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt (or /etc/pki/tls/cert.pem)

• Debian Family

  • 80%

    Depending on what one is looking for, it should be much easier to find. There’s now a high-level status overview given on the landing page, maintainers can learn how to make their packages reproducible, enthusiasts can more easily find what can help the project, and we have even started writing some history.

  • Derivatives

    • SteamOS Arrives with New NVIDIA and AMD Drivers and Better 32-bit App Performance

      Valve has just released a new update for the stable branch of SteamOS and they’ve updated a ton of important packages, including the proprietary drivers and the Linux kernel.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Git Vulnerability Closed in Ubuntu OSes

        Canonical published some details about a Git vulnerability that has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

      • Announcing snappy Ubuntu Core on Vagrant cloud

        Last month, Canonical announced snappy Ubuntu Core, the new, transactional version of Ubuntu, designed for public clouds. So far, snappy Ubuntu Core images are available on Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, and Amazon AWS.

      • Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) Is Now Using Linux Kernel 3.18.2

        Canonical is hard at work building Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) and they are implementing all sorts of important updates, including for the Linux kernel and other core components.

      • Ubuntu Phone: The little phone that could

        I predicted it would fail. Honestly, I didn’t want it to — I was fairly sure the Ubuntu Phone would be just the mobile interface we really needed, but it just seemed Canonical and the Ubuntu Phone were both on a collision course with vaporware-dom. However, like that little train in that adorable children’s story, the Ubuntu Phone seemed to keep moving forward. In a few weeks, thanks to bq, the Ubuntu Phone will finally be given a chance on the marketplace… at least in Europe.

      • Ubuntu Phone Launches Pushed Until Early Next Year

        There isn’t much time left in 2014 so we suppose it comes as no surprise that Canonical, the parent company behind Ubuntu, recently confirmed that the first Ubuntu-powered smartphones have been delayed until “early” next year. The first Ubuntu-powered devices were originally scheduled to launch sometime in 2014.

        “Canonical continues to work closely with its first selected hardware partners, Meizu and bq, to bring Ubuntu phones to market in Europe and China,” Canonical’s vice president of mobile Cristian Parrino recently told PCWorld, without discussing rollouts to other markets such as the United States. The phones are expected to cost somewhere between $200 and $400 when they do launch.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • CompuLab MintBox Mini is a cute and diminutive Linux Mint computer

          When it comes to Linux desktops, there are a few routes to go. The most common is to buy a Windows desktop and either replace Microsoft’s operating system or partition the drive with your favorite Linux distro. If you are a bit more technical, you can build your own machine, but this can sometimes be costly (depending on your needs).

        • MintBox Mini: Compact Linux Mint PC coming soon for $295

          The MintBox Mini is a small form-factor desktop computer that comes with Linux Mint software preloaded. If the computer looks familiar, that’s because it’s a version of CompuLab’s fitlet, a line of small, fanless desktops introduced this week.

          What makes this model a little different is that it’ll have a green case and come preloaded with the popular Linux Mint operating system.

        • Linux Mint Unveils Pocket-Sized ‘MintBox Mini’ PC

          Linux Mint has announced that a new PC in its ‘MintBox’ line of PCs is coming in the spring: the ‘MintBox Mini’.

Devices/Embedded

• Make A Handheld Linux Terminal With A Raspberry Pi

  Robinson’s build uses a Raspberry Pi A+, a USB hub, battery, touchscreen, charger, backlit keyboard and a few other random parts. The whole thing is housed inside of two plastic hard drive enclosures that are connected with a piano hinge. You’ll need some extra tools, including a drill, a soldering iron and some wire cutters, but Robinson’s guide is otherwise pretty straightforward.

• Fitlet: A Linux-Friendly, Fanless PC Smaller Than A NUC

  CompuLab is the Israeli PC manufacturer of industrial computers, single-board computers, etc. Given the industrial focus of the company, Linux is important to them and generally their hardware plays great with various Linux distributions. Over the years at Phoronix I’ve reviewed their Intense-PC, Utilite, Trim-Slice, and their other interesting petite PCs.

• Phones

  • Are More Deaths Looming in Smartphone Bloodbath? Sony & Blackberry might be sold soon

    Originally I wrote this about Sony (hence the long analysis) and before I posted it, I learned about Blackberry. So we have TWO potential deaths in the Bloodbath now pending. Lets do quick analysis of both. First up

  • Tizen

    • The Intel Tizen Compute Stick?

    • Samsung Tries Out Tizen in India

      “The Indian market has shown incredible smartphone growth, and we believe migration from feature phones to smartphones will increase,” a Samsung spokesperson said in a statement provided to LinuxInsider by Ashley Wimberley.

      “India’s mobile market is … open to new smartphone platforms that are open source, can provide unique local solutions, and are adaptable across multiple brands,” the spokesperson noted.

    • Samsung debuts its first Tizen phone — the Z1– in India

      After much expectation and many false starts, Samsung finally launched the Tizen-based “Samsung Z1″ smartphone into India’s vast and rapidly growing market.

    • Samsung brings Tizen to India: Does it stand a chance against Google?

      After a string of rumours and amidst much fanfare, Samsung finally launched its first Tizen phone in India dubbed Z1. This time around, it’s the software that’s being talked about instead of the specs or design. And, why not? With Tizen, Samsung is trying to take on its long-time partner Google.

    • Samsung Unveils Smartphone Powered by Android Rival Tizen

    • Samsung targets India with smartphone in bid to cut Android ties

    • Gen-2 SmartThings hub will run Tizen

      The SmartThings hub was a great home automation hub, and now it is time for the next version, the upgraded model with new new sensors, battery backup, optional cellular, and premium services … oh and it will be running Tizen.

      When Samsung first acquired SmartThings, the company told of its plans to move from an embedded RTOS (real-time operating system) to Linux, which we hoped at the time was Tizen as it kinda made sense at the time. Now a SmartThings rep has told LinuxGizomos that “We will be moving to Tizen over time.”

    • http://www.tizenexperts.com/2015/01/tizen-tizen-big-picture/

      Tizen is an important part Samsung’s Internet of things (IoT) strategy as BK Yoon, the company’s CEO, highlighted at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that all Samsung devices will be IoT-ready in five years. We know that many of these devices will be running Tizen and with over 665 million devices last year alone, that will be a lot of Tizen Linux devices.

  • Android

    • Xiaomi’s $30 Android streamer looks exactly like a phone charger

      In addition to the phablet and headphones announced today, Xiaomi also threw in a little surprise. And by “little” we do mean literally, because this new Mi Box Mini is much smaller than the company’s earlier Android streaming devices; it’s so small that when it’s plugged into the power socket, you’d easily mistake it as a USB phone charger.

    • Android/Linux Is The New PacMan

      As the map below shows, Android/Linux has overtaken desktop operating systems over much of the world, a huge swath through Asia and most of Africa. Along with skipping lock-in to Wintel, many folks are skipping copper and cable and satellite for WiFi. Further, a huge chunk of the world has Android/Linux in second or third spot. The PC may not be dead yet but it’s certainly changed.

    • Satechi Smart TV Box review: Android-based set-top box does a lot, but doesn’t make it easy

      Every streaming device, from your aging Blu-ray player to your Roku, has limitations. At some point, you’re going to want to stream a service that your device doesn’t support. When that happens, your only big-screen option is to plug a laptop, tablet, or smartphone into your HDTV. That way, you get a real operating system with complete flexibility.

    • Google’s Project Ara Smartphone Puzzle Is Coming Together

      Google has shed fresh light on Project Ara, its modular Android smartphone initiative, including plans to pilot the project in Puerto Rico through food truck-style stores.

      Project Ara will offer a smartphone endoskeleton; users will be able to add the functionality they want piece by piece, rather than being confined by the hardware configurations determined by operators and providers.

      Google debuted the project’s first functional prototype, known as Spiral 1, in 2013.

    • ​Lightroom mobile app now available for Android

    • Adobe Launches Lightroom Mobile For Android Phones

    • Adobe Lightroom for Android Smartphones Is Now Available, Tablet Version Coming Later

    • Adobe’s new Lightroom Mobile for Android phones works almost the same as the iPhone app; a tablet version would be ideal

      Adobe has put plenty of energy into the mobile side of its Creative Cloud marketplace. However, this concentration has thus far been focused on the iOS side of the equation. That is about to change with the launch of Lightroom Mobile for Android, available free on the Google Play Store.

    • Livescribe’s smartpen app will soon work with Android devices

      Livescribe’s amazing smartpens currently only work with iOS, but the company is hard at work on an Android version of its app. Since Livescribe’s smartpens communicate via Bluetooth Low Energy, the company had to wait for Android to support it first, before making the new app.

    • Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile Arrives On Android

    • Adobe Lightroom mobile comes to Android, but it’s only for phones

    • Samsung Releases Galaxy S5 Update For Android 5.0 In UK, No Word On US Release Of Android L

      Samsung released the Android 5.0 update in the U.K. on Tuesday, following an international rollout throughout other parts of Europe and Asia. Also called Android L, or Lollipop, Google’s latest version of its operating system includes the “material design” makeover in addition to a number of other changes.

    • First look video: VLC is coming to Android TV

      The popular media player app VLC is coming to Android TV: VLC developers have released a preview version that already looks pretty neat — here’s a first look.

    • LG G2 Android 5.0 Lollipop Update: What You Need to Know

      LG still isn’t talking about the LG G2 Android 5.0 Lollipop update, but they’re making progress and working hard to deliver it to eager customers. And while we haven’t heard anything since last year about the update coming soon, this week more details have surfaced along with a full video showing the LG G2 Android 5.0 update running rather smooth.

    • Nexus 5 Android 5.0.1 Lollipop Update Breakdown

    • Android fans will absolutely hate Samsung’s explanation for why Tizen is so great

      Samsung has been releasing a lot of Tizen-based devices lately including smart TVs, smartwatches and now smartphones. To explain the benefits of Tizen, Samsung has written a new post explaining what the software platform has to offer the world… and it’s something that will no doubt annoy any Android fan who’s ever owned a Samsung device.

    • This Easy Android Trick Will Keep Your Home Screen Clutter-Free

      So you won’t need five different home screens anymore

    • HTC rolls out Android Lollipop One M8; still fantastic after one year

      One of the promises of the HTC Advantage program was Android software updates for up to two years. HTC officials publicly stated it will try to deploy these updates within 90 days of release and HTC is doing everything it can to stick to the plan.

    • Motorola Droid Turbo Android update to Lollipop

      Yesterday, an engineer at Motorola by the name of Luciaono Carvalho revealed that Android 5.0.2 Lollipop will be coming real soon to all Motorola devices from 2013 and 2014. That means that a Motorola Droid Turbo Android update is also to be expected, although the phone being a Verizon exclusive, it might take longer for the OTA to hit. The Droid Turbo is a highly acclaimed smartphone which boasts with great performance and battery life, and even has an international version called the Moto Maxx.

    • Here’s a video of Android Lollipop running on an HTC One M8

      The Android 5.0 Lollipop update that HTC One M8 owners have been waiting for is about to arrive – or is arriving now, depending what version of the phone you have.

      For users with the developer or unlocked editions of the HTC flagship, Android Lollipop has already begun rolling out, according to Android Central.

    • Android apps will run on Tizen-powered Samsung Z1, via OpenMobile ACL

      What do you do if you are trying to establish an ecosystem of apps for your mobile operating system, or are simply trying to bolster the numbers a bit in order to look more attractive to consumers? If you’re Jolla or Blackberry, the answer is adding Android app compatibility. It’s something we are seeing more of as of late when it comes to smaller players in the mobile OS market, and it seems that Samsung is now getting on this train too — well, sort of.

Tag heats up mobile games tools market with open source ChilliSource engine

Best known for its game development work with the like of BBC (Doctor Who), Ubisoft (Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes) and Mindy Candy (Moshi Monsters Village), Dundee studio Tag Games is now getting into the tools business.

Three Interesting Open Source Projects for 2015

Maybe you’re looking for new open source tools that your business can use to take it to the next level. Or maybe you’ve made use of countless solutions over the years and feel as though it’s time to give back.

Events

• Regional Technology Partnership Presents “Mandatory Considerations before using Open Source Code”

  Join the Regional Technology Partnership at 5:30 pm on January 28 for our event located at the Bonita Springs Chamber of Commerce, 25071 Chamber of Commerce Dr., Bonita Springs. “Mandatory Considerations before using Open Source Code” is sponsored by The McDonough Law Office, P.L., and the featured presenter will be William McDonough. This event is free for RTP Members and $25.00 for future members. Registration, sponsorship opportunities and additional details are available at www.swfrtp.org.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Launches Thunderbird 31.4.0 with Better Add-on Manager

    The Mozilla community has just released a new update for the Thunderbird email client and the developers have made a couple of important changes to the application and corrected a few security problems.

  • Firefox 35 Gets Performance Boost, Bug Fixes

    The first Mozilla browser release of 2015 brings Firefox Marketplace and improved performance to desktop users.

  • Firefox 35 released

    In today’s open source roundup: Firefox 35 is now available. Plus: Linux distros we’ll never see, and Peppermint 5 reviews

SaaS/Big Data

• A cloud management tool for simple deployments

  For the past few years, cloud has been one of the biggest buzzwords among technology enthusiasts. Whether you want data accessibility across devices or need computation power for your business or even develop applications—cloud can help you.

  With growing adoption for cloud computing, almost everyone from individuals to large corporations are leveraging it. For example CERN, the famous European nuclear lab, uses OpenStack to manage their IT infrastructure. Several open source projects related to cloud computing have also come up in last few years, prominent among them are ownCloud, OpenStack etc.

• Google Opens Up Cloud Monitoring Service to Developers

  Featuring full integration of the technology from Google’s acquisition of Stackdriver last year, Google Cloud Monitoring has arrived. It’s a tool that developers can leverage to monitor the performance of application components. If you’re a Google Cloud Platform customer you can try it out for free beginning immediately. Here are more details.

• Leverage MapR’s Resources for Getting Big Data Right

  As the Big Data trend marches forward in enterprises and as Hadoop becomes a true open source star driving the trend, MapR Technologies doesn’t get quite as much attention as some other players. However, the company offers a slew of informative and helpful posts, videos and educational offerings that can help any enterprise get smart about leveraging Big Data tools, including many free, open source applications.

Databases

• ​Why MariaDB says MaxScale will make life easier for developers and admins

  MariaDB says its newly-released MaxScale software, which acts as a gateway between databases and apps, will transform life for admins and developers.

  MaxScale, available for MySQL as well as the MariaDB fork, is an open-source proxy that allows databases and apps to be fully decoupled, enabling admin processes to run without affecting apps and for apps to evolve without hampering underlying databases.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• French Ministries and Munich Give Back By Joining TDF

• The Document Foundation: a personal outlook for 2015

  2015 has started and I realized that in between the New Year and last week’s tragedy, I hadn’t had the time to discuss what’s on the table for the Document Foundation in 2015. This is purely a personal opinion and does not represent any sort of official statement by the Foundation. Let’s try to keep this somewhat synthetic. LibreOffice_external_logo_200px

Education

• What Makes a Man? – What did maddog study for a career in computer science?

  This brings up one major point of education: Education is often best when it is proactive, and you receive the education before you need it.

Funding

• Neo Technology Bags $20M As Graph Databases Get Hot

  Creandum led the round joined by Dawn Capital and current investors Fidelity Growth Partners Europe, Sunstone Capital and Conor Venture Partners.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GNU Radical

  It seems like all those arguments (about Twitter, about implementing support for proprietary systems on Free Software, and others) are ultimately about reaching users that would otherwise remain ignorant of the Free Software philosophy. And how can someone have counter-arguments for this? It is impossible to argue that we do not need to take the Free Software message to everybody, because when someone does not use Free Software, she is doing harm to her community (thus, we want more people using Free Software, of course). When the Free Software Foundation makes use of Twitter to bring more people to the movement, and when I see that despite talking to people all around me I can hardly convince them to try GNU/Linux, who am I to criticize the FSF?

• Radicals And FLOSS

  The word, “radical”, has been in the news a lot lately. Often it’s associated with some bad news like problems caused by radical this that or the other.

• GNUnet Dev Mumble

  we are happy to announce today’s GNUnet developer mumble taking place

Public Services/Government

• NGA goes open source with a public geospatial tool kit

  Financial pressures have pushed the intelligence community (IC) to relinquish control of some of its data to cloud based services provided by the private sector. And along with trying to tie its 17 agencies together on a single platform, the IC has been forced to adapt to emerging technology trends as well as growing realities.

Openness/Sharing

• FreeLSS Open Source 3D Printable Scanning System Powers DIY Scanners Like the ATLAS 3D

  While the 3D printer has garnered an enormous amount of attention, performing new and heroic tasks on almost a daily basis, the 3D scanner has not historically received a proportionate amount of time in the spotlight, necessary tool that it often is to achieving the desired result in the maker’s world.

• Open Hardware

  • Crowdfunded Open-Source Vibrating Dildo Seems Like Ambitious Project

    How does one crowd-source a dildo? I wondered, until I realized that the makers of The Mod are actually crowdfunding their toy, and open-sourcing the design. And the design is phttp://www.montanalinux.org/firewalld-info.html retty fancy.

  • Razer Looks To Bring Virtual Reality To Masses With $200 Open-Source Goggles

    Facebook’s Oculus VR, Samsung Electronics and Sony are pressing ahead into virtual reality, but they’re going to have some company in the form of gaming accessories manufacturer Razer, which is testing a headset that will retail for $200.

Programming

• Open source tool trawls Github repositories for sensitive data

  Michael Henriksen, a member of the SoundCloud security team, has been recently tasked with creating a system that will constantly check the company’s GitHub organizations (i.e. repositories) for unintentionally leaked sensitive information.

• C Framework For OpenCL Now Supports Device Fission & Native Kernels

  The C Framework For OpenCL has reached version 2.0. CF4OCL allows the rapid development of OpenCL host programs in C/C++ while making it easier to provide OpenCL, simplify the analysis of OpenCL environments, etc.

• Weblate UI polishing

  After releasing Weblate 2.0 with Bootstrap based UI, there was still lot of things to improve. Weblate 2.1 brought more consistency in using buttons with colors and icons. Weblate 2.2 will bring some improvements in other graphics elements.

Standards/Consortia

• OIC Releases Software Framework for IoT Standard

  The group on Jan. 14 unveiled the preview release of IoTivity, an open spec designed to make it easier for the growing number of sensors and devices that will make up the Internet of things (IoT) to connect to each other and exchange data. IoTivity is now an open-source project under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.

Videos: UNIX and Linux Ancient History

I’m a sucker for history videos… and I enjoyed the trip back in time that these were. While I was aware of the feuds that existed in UNIX-land and UNIX-GUI-land back from the early days I didn’t witness it personally… so the first two expose some of that. The third video shows what moving from Windows 95 to Windows 98 was like… including the Linux alternative with an interview with Linus himself. Enjoy!

Science

• Pitcher plants ‘switch off’ traps to capture more ants

  A worker ant collects sweet nectar from the trap of an insect-eating Nepenthes pitcher plant. Research from the University of Bristol, UK, has found that, by ‘switching off’ its traps for part of the day, the plant ensures ‘scout’ ants survive and are able to lead large numbers of followers to the trap. When the trap gets wet, it suddenly becomes super-slippery and captures all visitors in one sweep. Credit: Dr. Ulrike Bauer, University of Bristol, UK

Security

• Old News Anew: Fixing Zen Cart for SSL v3 Vulnerability

• Security advisories for Thursday

• Hacked Wi-Fi Routers Causing Latest Lizard Squad Attacks

  Routers belonging to thousands of homes, universities and businesses could have been used to run LizardStresser DDoS attack service

  Notorious hacking group Lizard Squad has apparently been using unsecured home internet routers to power its LizardStresser service, new research has discovered.

  LizardStresser, which offers paying customers the chance to take down websites using DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, was reportedly run by the group as part of a widespread ‘marketing campaign’ for Lizard Squad.

• Security advisories for Wednesday

• Researcher builds $10 USB wall charger which can read data from any Microsoft wireless keyboard

  KeySweeper a $10 spy tool disguised as Wall Charger which can read data from any wireless Microsoft Keyboard

• White House Backs Raft of New Cyber Security Laws

  The Personal Data Notification & Protection Act is another swing at a long postponed Federal data breach notification law. The Act would clarify and strengthen laws that obligate businesses to notify customers when their personal information has been exposed. Among the changes would be a uniform, federal 30-day notification requirement from the discovery of a breach. The illicit trade of stolen identifies would also be criminalized.

• Tails 1.2.3 is out

  On January 3rd, the SSL certificate of our website hosting provider, boum.org, expired. This means that if you still are running Tails 1.2.1 or older, you will not get any update notification. Please help spreading the word!

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The Russian Empire

  I am working very hard on getting Sikunder Burnes into shape for publication. Just ten weeks left to achieve that. Still hacking a lot of draft material out of the text. This passage on the Russian Empire was written before the tragic events in Ukraine.

• Conservative and ‘Liberal’ Islamophobia Find Common Ground

  USA Today has a feature called “Common Ground,” which is a back-and-forth involving Cal Thomas, “a conservative columnist,” and Bob Beckel, billed as “a liberal Democratic strategist” but more accurately described as a Fox News Democrat with a lucrative sideline as a corporate lobbyist.

• The FBI Considered Recruiting an American Blogger Later Killed in a Drone Strike

  Before Samir Khan was killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in 2011, the FBI had hoped to capture and prosecute the blogger on terrorism charges. But Khan, a US citizen who wrote about violent jihad and was the founding editor of al Qaeda’s glossy English-language magazine Inspire, somehow slipped out of the United States in 2009 and eluded capture.

  The new revelations about the government’s investigation into Khan were detailed in heavily redacted FBI files obtained by VICE News under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Previous documents revealed that the FBI launched an investigation of Khan in 2006 after the bureau discovered his incendiary blog, Inshallahshaheed, an Arabic phrase that means “Martyr, God willing.” Less than a year later, according to the set of records, the FBI’s “primary goal” was to determine if Khan “Is influencing/did influence anyone to commit an act of terror.”

• A Terrorist Massacre The News Barely Covered

  A brutal attack on a Nigerian town by the militant group Boko Haram that killed as many as 2,000 people has been given relatively little attention by the U.S. media.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The Logic of Divestment: Why We Have to Kiss Off Big Carbon Now

  As climate-change activists pressure public institutions to dump their fossil-fuel investments, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do

Censorship

• Pope on Charlie Hebdo: There Are Limits to Free Expression

  Francis spoke about the Paris terror attacks while en route to the Philippines, defending free speech as not only a fundamental human right but a duty to speak one’s mind for the sake of the common good.

• The biggest threat to French free speech isn’t terrorism. It’s the government.

  Within an hour of the massacre at the headquarters of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper, thousands of Parisians spontaneously gathered at the Place de la Republique. Rallying beneath the monumental statues representing Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, they chanted “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”) and “Charlie! Liberty!” It was a rare moment of French unity that was touching and genuine.

• France Arrests a Comedian For His Facebook Comments, Showing the Sham of the West’s “Free Speech” Celebration

  Forty-eight hours after hosting a massive march under the banner of free expression, France opened a criminal investigation of a controversial French comedian for a Facebook post he wrote about the Charlie Hebdo attack, and then this morning, arrested him for that post on charges of “defending terrorism.” The comedian, Dieudonné (above), previously sought elective office in France on what he called an “anti-Zionist” platform, has had his show banned by numerous government officials in cities throughout France, and has been criminally prosecuted several times before for expressing ideas banned in that country.

Privacy

• Software Insecurity: The Problem with the White House Cybersecurity Proposals

  The White House has announced a new proposal to fix cybersecurity. Unfortunately, the positive effects will be minor at best; the real issue is not addressed. This is a serious missed opportunity by the Obama adminstration; it will expend a lot of political capital, to no real effect. (There may also be privacy issues; while those are very important, I won’t discuss them in this post.) The proposals focus on two things: improvements to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and provisions intended to encourage information sharing. At most, these will help at the margins; they’ll do little to fix the underlying problems.

• David Cameron’s Plan to Ban Encryption in the UK

  This is similar to FBI director James Comey’s remarks from last year. And it’s equally stupid.

• Hilarious: Activists Turn Tables On Political Surveillance Hawks, Wiretap Them With Honeypot Open Wi-Fi At Security Conference

  Activists from the Pirate Party’s youth wing have wiretapped high-level political surveillance hawks at Sweden’s top security conference. They set up an open wi-fi access point at the conference and labeled it “Open Guest”, and then just logged the traffic of about a hundred high-ranking surveillance hawks who argue for more wiretapping, and who connected through the activists’ unencrypted access point. They presented their findings in an op-ed in Swedish this Tuesday.

• Zombie Cookie: The Tracking Cookie That You Can’t Kill

  An online ad company called Turn is using tracking cookies that come back to life after Verizon users have deleted them. Turn’s services are used by everyone from Google to Facebook.

• David Cameron seeks cooperation of US president over encryption crackdown

  David Cameron is to urge Barack Obama to pressure internet firms such as Twitter and Facebook to do more to cooperate with Britain’s intelligence agencies as they seek to track the online activities of Islamist extremists.

• Washington DC’s Public Library Will Teach People How to Avoid the NSA

  Later this month, the Washington DC Public Library will teach residents how to use the internet anonymization tool Tor as part of a 10 day series designed to shed light on government surveillance, transparency, and personal privacy.

  A series called “Orwellian America,” held by a publicly funded entity mere minutes from a Congress and administration that ​allowed the NSA’s surveillance programs to spin wildly out of control certainly seems subversive. But the library says it wasn’t really intended that way.

• Facebook at Work pilot debuts on the web, Android, and iOS

  Facebook today debuted Facebook at Work, a new pilot program the company is testing to try its hand at social networking in the business world. The product is only available to select partners on the web, as well as Android and iOS apps available on Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

• Denmark mulls new EU-defying session-logging law

  Danish authorities look set to bring back mandatory internet session logging despite an EU ruling last year that blanket data retention is illegal.

  Last May the European Court of Justice (ECJ) concluded that the EU Data Retention Directive was “a particularly serious interference with fundamental rights”, meaning countries across the EU were forced to re-evaluate their national laws on data retention.

• The All-Women Hacker Collective Making Art About the Post-Snowden Age

  “There is something about the internet that isn’t working anymore,” is the line that opens filmmaker Jonathan Minard’s short documentary on Deep Lab—a group of women hackers, artists, and theorists who gathered at Carnegie Mellon University in December to answer the question of what, exactly, that disquieting “something” is. The film premieres on Motherboard today.

• Hopefully the last post I’ll ever write on Dual EC DRBG

  I’ve been working on some other blog posts, including a conclusion of (or at least an installment in) this exciting series on zero knowledge proofs. That’s coming soon, but first I wanted to take a minute to, well, rant.

  The subject of my rant is this fascinating letter authored by NSA cryptologist Michael Wertheimer in February’s Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Dr. Wertheimer is currently the Director of Research at NSA, and formerly held the position of Assistant Deputy Director and CTO of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for Analysis

Civil Rights

• Saudi blogger faces next 50 lashes as government ignores global protests

  Raif Badawi, the Saudi liberal convicted of publishing a blog, has been told he will again be flogged 50 times on Friday – the second part of his 1,000-lash sentence which also includes a 10-year jail term.

• Saudi Arabia’s history of hypocrisy we choose to ignore

  Sir William Hunter was a senior British civil servant and in 1871 published a book which warned of “fanatic swarms” of Sunni Muslims who had “murdered our subjects”, financed by “men of ample fortune”, while a majority of Muslims were being forced to decide “once and for all, whether [they] should play the part of a devoted follower of Islam” or a “peaceable subject”.

• At Silk Road trial, federal agent explains how he trapped Ulbricht

  More people were using the mail to get high, and Jared Der-Yeghiayan knew it.

  “We hadn’t seen ecstasy being seized in letter-class like that in a long time,” said the Homeland Security special agent. “Since I’d been at O’Hare.”

  Der-Yeghiayan was speaking on Wednesday from the stand in a Manhattan federal courtroom, where 30-year-old Ross Ulbricht stands accused of being the mastermind in the most successful drug-dealing website of all time, the Silk Road.

• Judge Not Too Concerned That 68-Year-Old Woman’s House Was Raided Because Someone Used Her Open WiFi To Post A Threat

  We’ve written before about faulty legal activities based on nothing stronger than an IP address. An IP address is not a person, but many entities have decided it’s “close enough.” Fortunately, the judicial system has (occasionally) stepped in to correct this assumption, usually in the context of copyright infringement lawsuits.

  There are those in the law enforcement arena that know an IP address can’t be used as an identifier. Careless statements get made about the “danger” of open WiFi connections, or it’s suggested that accessing open networks should be illegal. This doesn’t have much to do with keeping citizens safe, but it does have everything to do with easing law enforcement’s investigative workload.

• Los Angeles Cops Unimpressed With Pranksters’ YouTube ‘Coke’ Sale

  The Los Angeles Police Department isn’t laughing about a videotaped prank involving a “coke” sale that they say misused police resources, was misleading and potentially dangerous.

  The video, titled “Coke Prank on Cops,” was posted to YouTube on Monday with the caption, “officer we have some coke in our trunk.” By 3 a.m. ET Thursday the video had been watched more than 440,000 times.

• The Paris Mystery: Were the Shooters Part of a Global Terrorist Conspiracy?

  On Friday, shortly after the gunmen were killed by French forces in a raid on a printing plant outside of Paris, a source from within al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) provided The Intercept with a series of messages and statements taking responsibility for the attacks, asserting that AQAP’s leadership “directed” the raid on the magazine to avenge the honor of the Prophet Mohammed.

• Neo-Nazis in American Politics: Follow the Money

  According to public records, at least 58 U.S. politicians have accepted campaign contributions from David Duke supporters. This includes candidates for federal office, current and former Members of Congress, and one former president. Oh, and one Democrat. This information is all accessible in public records and we’ve presented it here at the bottom of this article.

• Record 346 inmates die, dozens of guards fired in Florida prisons

  The United States has a prison crisis of epic proportions. With just five percent of the world population, but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, the United States has, far and away, the highest incarceration rate, the largest number of prisoners, and the largest percentage of citizens with a criminal record of any country in the world.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Net neutrality debate reaches India as telcos look to charge extra for VoIP

  Most eyes have been on the US arrangements, due to be announced at the end of February, but quite a storm has emerged on the Indian sub-continent almost overnight, forcing one of the world’s fastest growing economies to face up to decisions on the future of the internet on its own soil, reports Techdirt.

• Net Neutrality Under Threat In India

  We recently reported on extraordinarily wide-ranging censorship imposed on Internet users in India. That’s rather obscured another story that’s been playing out there: an attempt to undermine net neutrality in the country.

  [...]

  That’s a clear attack on the principle that all IP packets should be treated equally, and prompted the creation of the site Net Neutrality India to raise awareness of what’s at stake, as well as vague promises from the Indian government to “look into it.”

• President Obama Gets It: Net Neutrality Begins at Home

  We’ve been saying for months that while the FCC may have a role to play in promoting and protecting an open Internet, Internet users shouldn’t rely entirely on the FCC. That’s because, at root, the “neutrality” problem is a competition problem. Internet access providers, especially certain very large ones, have done a pretty good job of divvying up the nation to leave most Americans with only one or two choices for decent high-speed Internet access. If there’s no competition, customers can’t vote with their wallets when ISPs behave badly. Oligopolies also have little incentive to invest, not only in decent customer service, but also in building out world-class Internet infrastructure so that U.S. innovators can continue to compete internationally. Even in cities like San Francisco and New York, we pay more for slower connections than people in many Asian and European cities.

• Broadband Needs Obama’s Help

  The U.S. broadband market has failed. It’s time for the people to step in.

• Marriot hotels do U-turn over wi-fi hotspot blocks

  Hotel group Marriott International has announced it will stop blocking guests from using personal wi-fi kits.

  The firm was fined $600,000 (£395,000) last year by a US watchdog after a complaint that it had jammed mobile hotspots at a hotel in Nashville.

• Marriott Abandons Quest to Block Personal Wi-Fi Hot Spots

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • MPAA Links Online Piracy to Obama’s Cybersecurity Plan

    Hoping to deter and stop the ongoing threat of ‘cyber’ attacks President Obama unveiled new cybersecurity plans yesterday. While the plans don’t reference copyright infringement, the MPAA notes that Congress should keep online piracy in mind as it drafts its new cybersecurity bill.