08.09.13

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Applications

  • Games

    • Mac and Linux versions of Strike Suit Zero available now!

      Born Ready Games is happy to announce that both Mac and Linux versions of Strike Suit Zero are available to download through Steam today. Joining them will be the Raptor Strike Suit and Heroes of the Fleet DLC.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • KDE Konnect: control your KDE devices from your phone

      Today we are surrounded by ‘smart’ devices all around us – smartphones, tablets, TVs, PCs and many more. These devices naturally don’t interact with each other. There are some device specific apps developed by some companies but those work within the device spectrum of that company, for example Samsung All Share comes only for Samsung Android devices and work only with Samsung smart TVs.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • Maintenance Release: PCLinuxOS-KDE-FullMonty 2013.08

      PCLinuxOS KDE FullMonty 2013.08 (32/64 bit) is now available for download.

    • Porteus 2.1 final and Porteus Kiosk Edition 2.1 are out!

      The Porteus Community is pleased to announce the distribution release of Porteus 2.1 (Standard Desktop Edition), as well as Porteus Kiosk Edition 2.1! Major additions since our 2.0 release include restructuring our layout to have standalone iso’s for five desktop environments (KDE4, RazorQT, Mate, Xfce and LXDE) and adding optional prepackaged modules for Google-Chrome, Opera, Libreoffice, Abiword, print/scan support and development software, all available through a new download interface that allows users to build and download customized ISO’s at http://build.porteus.org.

  • Debian Family

    • 20 Years of Debian GNU/Linux

      Debian GNU/Linux celebrates its 20th birthday anniversary this month. I have been using Debian GNU/Linux only a few years and I regret not having known Debian earlier. The growth, vitality, and quality of the project has been amazing. With Debian GNU/Linux I have been able to do a lot with a tiny investment in IT. It is a force-multiplier for good Free Software.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Edge Passes $9 Million, Smashes Crowd-Funding Record

          Over $9 million has now been pledged to the Ubuntu Edge campaign on IndieGoGo, helping it smash yet another crowd-funding record.

          This figure, whilst $23 million short of the required $32 million goal, makes Ubuntu Edge the second largest crowd-funding campaign in history. It shunts the Ouya games console, which raised $8.5 million over a 30 day period, into 3rd place.

        • Canonical Pushes Linux to the Edge With Bloomberg Backing

          The goal is to raise $32 million in 30 days to build 40,000 Ubuntu Edge next-generation smartphones.

        • Canonical lowers Edge pricing, launches app contest

          Canonical dropped the Indiegogo price for its Ubuntu Edge phone from $775 to $695. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu project launched an Ubuntu App Showdown contest for the best Ubuntu for Phones app that can be developed between now and Sept. 15.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Mysterious countdown appears on elementary OS website

            It would appear that either yesterday, or the day before yesterday, a mysterious countdown was added to the elementary OS website. Or rather, the whole website was replaced by a countdown. So far, I haven’t found any definite indications of what exactly we’re counting down to.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Micromax Announces Artila ARM9 Linux Industrial Computer for Portable, Reliable Control

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Intel Education Tablets run Android on Atoms

        Intel announced two educational tablets that run Android 4.x on Atom Z24xx processors. The 10-inch and 7-inch Intel Education Tablets feature Intel educational software, dual cameras, temperature probes, magnification lenses, and stylus options.

      • Android tablet and smartphone shipments surge

        During the second quarter of 2013, shipments of Android tablets doubled those of iOS, with 62.6 percent worldwide market share, according to IDC, while DigiTimes expects Android tablets to out-ship iOS models for the first time in the second half of the year. Meanwhile, IDC reports that Android smartphone sales rose to 79.3 percent of the worldwide market, or six times the Q2 share of iOS.

Free Software/Open Source

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

  • Mozilla

    • New Tor Browser Bundles with Firefox 17.0.8esr

• BSD

  • PC-BSD 20130806 is out

• Public Services/Government

  • Tackling “thorny issues” of open government at the OGP London summit

    The Open Government Partnership summit in London is gaining momentum, as evidenced by the growing engagement from civil society organisations. The OGP is reaching an important milestone, with the closure of its first cycle of country commitments and independent assessments.

Leftovers

• Some Xerox Scanners Can Alter Documents by Accident

  On the scale of things too horrible to contemplate, “document-altering scanner” is right up there with “flesh-eating bacteria.” This week Xerox (XRX) acknowledged that some of its scanners can, with certain settings, change the numbers in scanned documents. On Wednesday it announced a fix for the problem, which a spokesman called “really an anomaly.”

  The problem came to light when David Kriesel, a German computer scientist, scanned a construction plan on a Xerox machine and noticed that the document that came out wasn’t identical to the one that went in: Numbers for some room measurements had changed. Kriesel alerted Xerox, wrote about the problem on his blog and began to investigate how widespread the problem is.

• Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Drone Warfare Makes Killing a Spectator Sport

    Oh, the serious news! I read it with ever-fresh incredulity. It’s written for gamers. It reduces us to gamers as it updates us on the latest bends and twists in the geopolitical scene. We’re still playing War on Terror, the aim of which is to kill as many insurgents as possible; when they’re all dead, we win (apparently). The trick is to avoid inflaming the locals, who then transition out of passive irrelevance and join the insurgency. They get inflamed when we kill civilians, such as their children.

  • Redefining Security and Intelligence in an independent Scotland

    Military and intelligence stories have been all over the news recently. Be it indiscriminate eavesdropping programs, WMD infrastructure, or our impending doom at the hands of terrorists if we vote “yes”, there is a common denominator in the statements of the high heid yins: these are issue for the big boys, the role set out for the rest of us is to cower in fear and not to hurt our wee brains trying to understand. In the independence debate, we are warned that an independent Scotland is going to be overrun by terrorists, disastrously cyber-attacked, or run out of money trying to prevent these disasters from happening. The catalyst of the recent wave of scare stories is a report by a bunch of military and intelligence insiders, the crowd treated in the mainstream media as holding an exclusive grasp of the serious issue of our national security. But this deference is exactly the type of elitist approach that led us into the intelligence SNAFU we are in at the moment – with the agencies at odds with the democratic process and public control. The independence debate is a chance for us to crack open the debate on intelligence and the military, and imagine what a security apparatus actually subservient to democracy might look like.

• Transparency Reporting

  • Snowden, Greenwald and Wikileaks are winning

    Americans are becoming more concerned that government ‘anti-terror’ programmes are actually restricting civil liberties.

• Finance

  • ‘We Won’t Pay’: Greek activists reconnect power to poverty-stricken homes

    With a Eurozone record of 27 percent of Greeks unemployed, people are taking a pro-active approach to the crisis. Activists from the ‘We Won’t Pay’ movement, which boasts 10,000 members, are illegally reconnecting power to hundreds of homes.

    Tough austerity measures have left many people in Greece unable to pay their electricity bills. The ‘We Don’t Pay’ movement which has over 10,000 members helps many of those by illegally reconnecting power to their homes, despite legal action against them.

  • Greece becoming new Kosovo as youth jobless hits 65pc

    Greek youth unemployment has soared to a record 64.9pc as the country’s downward spiral continues almost unchecked.

  • Watch as plutocrats mold us into a New America, a nation more pleasing to their sight

    Increasing wealth creates positive feedback, much like a hurricane moving over warm water. A more powerful 1% allows them to command the political and economic high ground of America, so that they can gain further wealth — and shape a New America more to their liking. This process has run for several generations; now the results are plain to see — for all that wish to look. Today we have first of three tales of New America.

  • Greg Palast: Why Are the Greek People Agreeing to Their Own Destruction?

    In his career as an investigative journalist, economist, and bestselling author – Vultures’ Picnic, Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy – Greg Palast has not been afraid to tackle some of the most powerful names in politics and finance. From uncovering Katherine Harris’ purge of African-American voters from Florida’s voter rolls in the year 2000 to revealing the truth behind the “assistance” provided by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to ailing economies, Palast has not held back in revealing the corruption and criminal actions of the wealthy and powerful. In a recent interview on Dialogos Radio, Palast turned his attention to Greece and to the austerity policies that have been imposed on the country by the IMF, the European Union, and the European Central Bank.

• Censorship

  • Microsoft’s Bing Removes Several Hundred Thousand “Pirate” Search Results

    Over the past month copyright holders and Google have clashed over infringing search results and how they should be dealt with. Due to its smaller market share Microsoft’s Bing has rarely been mentioned, but the company informs TorrentFreak that they also remove hundreds of thousands of infringing URLs each month. Interestingly enough, Microsoft itself is one of the most active senders of DMCA notices to Bing.

  • Pirate Party Reports IT Minister to the Police for Copyright Infringement

    As the crackdown on copyright infringement in Sweden continues, the local Pirate Party has today held up a mirror to the politicians who support the tough enforcement regime. Marking the ten-year anniversary of The Pirate Bay, the Pirate Party have reported Sweden’s IT Minister to the police after she was spotted infringing copyright online on a number of occasions.

• Privacy

  • Lavabit email service abruptly shut down citing government interference

    The email service reportedly used by surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden abruptly shut down on Thursday after its owner cryptically announced his refusal to become “complicit in crimes against the American people.”

    Lavabit, an email service that boasted of its security features and claimed 350,000 customers, is no more, apparently after rejecting a court order for cooperation with the US government to participate in surveillance on its customers. It is the first such company known to have shuttered rather than comply with government surveillance.

  • After Lavabit shutdown, another encrypted e-mail service closes

    Silent Circle, a company that specializes in encrypted communications, said it is preemptively turning off its Silent Mail product. It’s doing so despite no urging at all from the government—no subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else, company co-founder Jon Callas wrote in a blog post today. “We see the writing on the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now.”

  • Silent Circle Preemptively Shuts Down Encrypted Email Service To Prevent NSA Spying

  • Edward Snowden’s Email Provider Shuts Down Amid Secret Court Battle

    A pro-privacy email service long used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden abruptly shut down today, blaming a secret U.S. court battle it has been fighting for six weeks — one that it seems to be losing so far.

  • Snowden’s email provider, Lavabit, shutters citing legal pressure

    An email provider reportedly used by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shut down on Thursday, citing an ongoing court battle that it could not discuss.

    Lavabit, which launched in 2004, specialized in providing a high-security email service that employed advanced encryption. It was designed to thwart the kind of surveillance techniques that Snowden revealed in June were used by the U.S. government.

  • Encrypted email service linked to Edward Snowden shuts down

    An encrypted email service believed to have been used by American fugitive Edward Snowden was shut down abruptly on Thursday amid a legal fight that appeared to involve US government attempts to win access to customer information.

  • After Lavabit, Silent Circle also shuts down email service

    “We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now,” Silent Circle wrote in a blog post on Friday in reference to the closure by Lavabit.

  • With NSA and NYPD under scrutiny, is tide turning on surveillance?

    On Wednesday, the New York Police Department agreed to expunge more than a half million names from its stop-and-frisk database – another blow to the embattled crime-fighting tactic that Mayor Michael Bloomberg has hailed as a key policy in the city’s plunging crime rate.

  • NSA Searches All Messages To and From US

    That doesn’t mean they don’t target us, of course, it just means they need to find a loophole. Today we learned one of those loopholes is to collect literally all emails and other text-based messages that involve a foreigner, figuring that if pressed they can insist the foreigner, not the Americans were the “target.”

  • US NSA to cut system administrators by 90 pct to limit data access

    The US National Security Agency, hit by disclosures of classified data by former contractor Edward Snowden, said it intends to eliminate about 90 percent of its system administrators to reduce the number of people with access to secret information.

    Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, the US spy agency charged with monitoring foreign electronic communications, told a cybersecurity conference in New York City that automating much of the work would improve security.

  • CIA Gun-running, Qatar-Libya-Syria.

    A report from CNN’s Jake Tapper has reintroduced “Benghazi-Gate” to the US media spotlight. The report claims that “dozens” of CIA operatives were on the ground in Benghazi on the night of the attack, and the CIA is going to great lengths to suppress details of them and their whereabouts being released. The report alleges that the CIA is engaged in “unprecedented” attempts to stifle employee leaks, and “intimidation” to keep the secrets of Benghazi hidden, allegedly going as far as changing the names of CIA operatives and “dispersing” them around the country.

  • In His Majesty’s CIA

    So, why did you join the CIA? To be mobster Henry Hill, shoved into an Agency witness protection program? Except, unlike Hill, it isn’t you who’s being protected. It’s the president, higher-ups, and the Agency itself. You — you’re more a prisoner than a pampered witness. Remember the 60s’ cult classic Brit TV series, The Prisoner? Once you’re in the Agency, you’re never out.

  • Ex-CIA Chief Praises Official Leaks for Letting Terrorists ‘Know We’re Alert’ After Condemning Snowden For Doing the Same

    Lots of people are asking good questions about the veracity of the Obama administration’s claims regarding this latest terrorist attack that they foiled by intercepting electronic communications between Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of core al Qaeda, and Nasir al Wuhayshi, a high level operative in the Yemeni affiliate.

  • CYBER SECURITY: NSA, FBI, CIA Want Company Cooperation

    The leaders of the top three U.S. intelligence agencies made an unusual joint public appearance Thursday to make a pitch for companies to cooperate more with the government in cybersecurity efforts, and defended the work their agencies do amid controversy over vast data mining programs that critics say invade Americans’ privacy.

  • White House publishes preliminary list of cybersecurity incentives

  • Email Company Reportedly Used By Edward Snowden Shuts Down Rather Than Hand Data Over To Feds

    When Edward Snowden emailed journalists and activists in July to invite them to a briefing at the Moscow airport during his long stay there, he used the email account “edsnowden@lavabit.com” according to one of the invitees. Texas-based Lavabit came into being in 2004 as an alternative to Google’s Gmail, as an email provider that wouldn’t scan users’ email for keywords. Being identified as the provider of choice for the country’s most famous NSA whistleblower led to a flurry of attention for Lavabit and its encrypted email services, from journalists, and also, apparently, from government investigators. Lavabit founder Ladar Levison announced Thursday that he’s shutting down the company rather than cooperating with a government investigation (presumably into Snowden).

  • Lavabit, the secure email service Edward Snowden uses abruptly shuts down

    Lavabit, a US company offering extremely secure and privacy protecting email service, has suddenly shut down. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reportedly used the service to securely send emails without government interception.

  • Are small-fry encrypted email ISPs using feds as excuse for closure?

    ISPs and email hosting providers need to be willing to and plan for the need to work with government officials.

  • Building a panopticon: The evolution of the NSA’s XKeyscore

    How the NSA went from off-the-shelf to a homegrown “Google for packets.”

  • What It Means to Be An NSA “Target”: New Information Shows Why We Need Immediate FISA Amendments Act Reform

    An important New York Times investigation from today reporting that the NSA “is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country,” coupled with leaked documents published by the Guardian, seriously calls into question the accuracy of crucial statements made by government officials about NSA surveillance.

    The government has previously tried to reassure the public about its use of FISA Amendments Act Section 702 surveillance practices, emphasizing that, under Section 702, the government may not “intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States.” Indeed, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee Senator Feinstein, in a letter to constituents who wrote to her expressing concern about the NSA’s spying program, said this: “[T]he government cannot listen to an American’s telephone calls or read their emails without a court warrant issued upon a showing of probable cause.”

  • NSA reading content of Americans’ international communications

  • How the NSA plans to avoid future leaks: replace employees with machines

    NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander might have had a difficult time recruiting hackers at the Def Con and Black Hat security conferences, but he might not need to recruit again anytime soon. Speaking at a cybersecurity conference in New York City — where he sat down with the heads of the FBI and CIA — he told an audience that he’d like to replace the vast majority of his employees and contractors with machines. No joke.

  • NSA gets burned by a sysadmin, decides to burn 90% of its sysadmins

  • The NSA Intends To Fire 90% Of Their System Administrators To Eliminate Future Leaks

  • NSA chief suggests replacing humans with machines to stop future Snowdens

  • NSA head: Replace would-be Snowdens with computers to stop future leaks

  • NSA To Lay Off 90 Percent Of Its System Administrators

  • General Keith Alexander: NSA will cut 90% of system administrators

  • Apple, Google and AT&T meet Obama to discuss NSA surveillance concerns

    Silicon Valley companies concerned at effect on business as revelations over US government spying spread more widely

  • Deutsche Telekom snubs U.S. email servers after snooping scandal

    Germany’s leading telecoms operator will channel email traffic exclusively through its domestic servers in response to public outrage over U.S. spy programs accessing citizens’ private messages, Deutsche Telekom said on Friday.

  • 5 Sneaky Ways The NSA Spies On Americans

    The U.S. government needs only three degrees of separation to look at Kevin Bacon’s phone records.

    [...]

    5. The NSA assumes you’re foreign until proven otherwise.

    The NSA tries to determine whether communication is foreign through strategies like matching known phone numbers against an internal database. Whenever an attempt to determine one way or another fails, the program assumes the person in question is foreign and continues unabated.

  • Obama’s former adviser ridicules statement that NSA doesn’t spy on Americans

    United States President Barack Obama insists his government isn’t in the business of domestic surveillance, but one of his former advisers says that’s contrary to the truth.

    “Everybody knows I love this president, but this is ridiculous,” former-Special Adviser for Green Jobs Van Jones said Wednesday on CNN. “First of all, we do have a domestic spying program, and what we need to be able to do is figure out how to balance these things, not pretend like there’s no balancing to be done.”

  • Snowden leaks: Germany sent massive amounts of data to the NSA

  • Cost-Benefit Analysis Of NSA Surveillance Says It’s Simply Not Worth It

    A new study suggests that the direct losses to US tech companies from people and companies fleeing to other services (often overseas) is likely to be between $22 billion and $35 billion over just the next three years. Germany is already looking at pushing for rules in the EU that would effectively ban Europeans from using services from US companies that participate in NSA surveillance programs (which is a bit hypocritical since it appears many EU governments are involved in similar, or even worse, surveillance efforts).

  • For NSA, Americans’ Emails Are an Open Book

    “President Obama is certainly being creative with the truth,” said Yasha Heidari, managing partner in the Heidari Power Law Group. Allowing the NSA’s activities to take place calls into question the president’s adherence to basic principles of the American Constitution, he suggested. “As a former Constitutional law professor, it is hard to believe that he does not know this.”

  • Deutsche Telekom reacts to NSA spying with initiative to protect German emails

  • It Doesn’t Count as Outreach When Obama Talks About the NSA in Secret

    On Thursday, Obama met behind closed doors at the White House with tech company executives and privacy groups to discuss his administration’s system of surveillance. The context was radically different from the last conversation he participated in on the subject, his chat with Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. But both conversations reinforce the ongoing problem with that surveillance: informed, public debate on the subject appears to be impossible.

    [...]

    An open, public, informed conversation on surveillance has been the president’s stated goal since shortly after the Edward Snowden leaks began. How authentic that desire is isn’t clear. But how possible it is isn’t either.

  • Study: NSA leaks could cost U.S. $22-35 billion

  • NSA’s Overreach Weakens US Diplomatic Position With EU

    For German companies, industrial espionage has historically been a problem related to the east, with Russia and China topping the list of security concerns year in and year out. But not so much anymore.

  • Can Australia’s digital spooks escape an NSA-level backlash?

    Lavabit and Silent Circle’s secure email services have been shut down as part of a generational-scale anti-surveillance pushback, but only US and UK agencies are under the microscope. Why not Australia?

  • No, this isn’t a scene from Minority Report. This trash can is stalking you

    Smartphone-monitoring bins in London track places of work, past behavior, and more.

  • White House talks privacy, surveillance with tech CEOs, Vint Cerf, and others

    The White House hosted a closed-door meeting with a number of tech luminaries and executives on Thursday to talk about privacy issues. Apple CEO Tim Cook, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, and Vint Cerf (the co-inventor of TCP/IP) were reported to be in attendance, according to Politico.

  • President Obama: “The Odds of Dying In a Terrorist Attack Are a Lot LOWER than They Are of Dying In a Car Accident”

    The Jewish Daily Forward noted in May that – even including the people killed in the Boston bombing – you are more likely to be killed by a toddler than a terrorist. And see these statistics from CNN.

• Civil Rights

  • Feds Instruct Law Enforcement to Cover Up Investigations of Americans

    Agencies of the federal government are sharing the massive database of personal information being obtained by surveillance, and police are being taught how to hide the details from judges and lawyers, a Reuters report reveals.

  • Sen. Feinstein During ‘Shield’ Law Debate: ‘Real’ Journalists Draw Salaries

    I can see this stipulation working against whoever the government feels is worthy of the title “journalist.” News develops. It seldom has a distinct starting point. Of course, if someone is a journalist, it stands to reason that they’re always “planning” to publish their findings. But that might be a lot harder to prove when the government starts slinging subpoenas.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Cable and TV Networks Fee Fight Fallout— Who Pays? The Public

      Public Knowledge has a couple of pieces up on the fight between CBS and Time Warner Cable over TWC’s payment for the right to rebroadcast broadcasts and then charge the public link here and link here. CBS has already been amply rewarded through advertising on its over the air broadcasts free use of the public airwaves. But in the current fight, it wants still more money. Congress set this up in 1992 legislation which allowed the networks to charge for retransmission permission of its broadcasts.