08.02.14

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Is the cloudbook the future of Linux?

    It’s impossible to deny the amazing rise of Chrome OS. The Chromebook has taken the consumer world by storm and is repeatedly the top selling laptop around. This Linux-based platform was the ideal solution at the ideal time. The cloud proved itself not only a viable option but, in many cases, the most optimal option. The puzzle was simple to solve…

• Server

  • AMD Launches ARM Server Developer Kit

    The chip maker’s offering includes its Opteron A100 “Seattle” SoC, its first chip based on the ARM architecture.

  • AMD Opteron 64-bit ARM-based ‘Seattle’ Dev Kits Are Shipping

    It is no secret that AMD plans to release SoCs (system on a chip) featuring ARM processor cores and that AMD and ARM have been collaborating on various projects for quite some time. A few months ago, AMD even released its low-power Beema and Mullins processors, which included on-die ARM-based Platform Security Processors which leverage the industry standard ARM TrustZone system security framework. Just yesterday though, AMD announced that it had made available development kits featuring AMD’s first 64-bit ARM-based processor, formerly codenamed “Seattle.”

  • What is Docker?

    If you have used Elastic Beanstalk from AWS or OpenShift from Red Hat you might be familiar with PaaS terminology, but if you haven’t then PaaS is a category of cloud computing services that provides a computing platform and a solution stack as a service.

    If you are a java developer, then you might need Apache tomcat application server with a PostgreSQL database as a backend and some sort of storage to develop and publish your application.

• Kernel Space

  • Stable kernel updates

    Stable kernels 3.15.8, 3.14.15, 3.10.51, and 3.4.101 have been released. All contain important fixes.

  • Linux Foundation’s free online intro to Linux class opens its doors

  • 10 Good Reasons To Learn Linux

  • Free Intro to Linux Online Course Starts Today

  • Free Introduction to Linux Course, Through edX, Is Online

    Today, the Linux Foundation “Introduction to Linux” course, which previously cost $2,400, is becoming available for free on the web. You can get the details and register here. The Linux Foundation has provided a very complete summary of what is found in the course, and it looks like an excellent offering that anyone can dive into online, without pressure. As we’ve noted many times, edX, which is hosting the class, has also emerged as one of the top destinations for online learning.

  • The Linux Foundation’s free Introduction to Linux class starts today

    In today’s open source roundup: The free Introduction to Linux class starts today and you can still register. Plus: Can LibreOffice 4.3 beat Microsoft Office, and Debian 8 will ship with Linux 3.16

  • Ottawa Linux Symposium needs your help

    Several economic changes conspired to put OLS into the financial bind it is today. You can read Andrew’s take about it on the Indiegogo site. I think the problems started before the temporary move to Montreal. In OLS’s growth years, the Kernel Summit was co-located, and preceded OLS. After several years with this arrangement, the Kernel Summit members decided that OLS was getting too big, that the week got really really long (2 days of KS plus 4 days of OLS), and that everyone had been to Ottawa enough times that it was time to move the meetings around. Cambridge, UK would be the next KS venue (and a fine venue it was). But in moving KS away, some of the gravitational attraction of so many kernel developers left OLS as well.

• Applications

  • XBMC Is Being Renamed To “Kodi”

    The XBMC project has shared with us that they’re renaming the project entirely to something very different in order to no longer reflect its past Xbox Media Center name.

  • XBMC becomes Kodi

    XBMC (Xbox Media Center) is undoubtedly one of the most popular media center products around. This open source project is now being rechristened as Kodi.

    [...]

    Personally, since I never owned or liked Xbox I really feel like installing an Xbox application of my system. Why would I install an application meant for Xbox on my Linux machine which has remotely nothing to go with Microsoft’s ‘me too’ game console? So I will be more inclined towards installing Kodi than some Xbox Media Center.

  • Calibre 1.47 eBook Reader and Editor Brings Improvements for Covers

    The Calibre eBook reader, editor, and library management software has been updated to version 1.47 and comes with a set of new features.

  • QEMU 2.1 Officially Released

  • cool-old-term: bring back the early days of the terminal

  • ClamTK 5.0.7 Review – An Anti-Virus for Linux

    ClamTk is a GUI frontend for ClamAV using Perl and Gtk libraries, and it was developed to provide on-demand virus scanning and detection. It might feel a little redundant, but you can never be too sure.

  • MyNotex Strikes an Almost Perfect Note

    Most note-taking applications I have used forced me to enter plain text and leave a reference to related files. With MyNotex, I can format as I enter the information and be done with it. For example, I can place graphics and photos within the note. Each note may have any number of attachments. I can manage paragraph alignment as well as bullets, numbered or alphabetic lists with automatic indentation.

  • codespell: Prevents embarrassing code

  • cclive (and clive): So that’s what quvi was for

  • Bonus: A dozen remainders

  • CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) 2.0 Beta 1 Now Available for Download

  • Samba 4.1.11 and 4.0.21 Security Releases Available

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to Get Started With GitHub

    • How to get nowhere in particular

    • How to install LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MariaDB & PHP-FPM) on a CentOS 7 VPS

    • How to install LAMP (Linux Apache, MariaDB & PHP) on CentOS 7

    • Predicting planetary visibility with PyEphem

    • How to install and configure Nvidia Optimus driver on Ubuntu

    • Troubleshooting TLS certificates on Linux servers

    • More GDB tips and tricks

    • How to Create Self-Signed SSL Certificates and Keys for Apache on RHEL/CentOS 7.0

    • Securing SSH with two factor authentication using Google Authenticator

    • How to Set up Server-to-Server Sharing in ownCloud 7 on Linux

    • How to install Libreoffice 4.3 in openSUSE

    • How to get latest software in openSUSE

    • Wicd tutorial

    • How To Install Joomla on CentOS 7

    • Ian Donnelly: How-To: Write a Plug-In (Part 1, The Basics)

    • ccan/io: revisited

    • How To Install Joomla on CentOS 7

    • How To Install Kernel 3.15.8 On Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

    • How To Install Kernel 3.14.15 On Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

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

    • How To Install Texmaker 4.3 On Fedora, OpenSUSE And Mageia

    • How To Change Hostname On OpenSUSE And Apply The Changes Without Restarting The System

    • co: The command organizer

    • colour: Something to build on to

  • Games

    • Did Linux become a gaming platform a long time ago?

      Linux has recently gotten a lot more attention as a platform for games, and this has caused a lot of joy among Linux gamers. But are we celebrating something that already happened a long time ago?

    • Vendetta Online 1.8.301 Space MMO Lands Multiple Fixes and Improvements

    • 3D Engine for Linux UNIGINE Now Features a Complex City Traffic System

      UNIGINE, a real-time 3D engine built to run on all major platforms, including Linux, has been updated again and its developers have implemented numerous features, including a comprehensive City Traffic System.

    • SteamOS Beta 126 Better Handles XBMC

      Valve has pushed another update out to SteamOS, with this time around there being benefits to fans of the XBMC multimedia software.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GSoC Project Progress – Visual Effects and Placemarks

      As you can see in both the screencast and these two screenshots, the edit dialog for placemarks has a couple of fields which are unavailable at the moment (label scale, ion color/scale). This is because Marble is designed in a way so that the data (such as coordinates, name, description, label/icon scale, etc) is kept apart from the objects which deal with the rendering and these objects don’t have an implementation for the unavailable options I mentioned above. However, they will be implemented soon. Also, I’m planning to implement another way of managing icons in the near future.

    • fonts in the current era

    • Test KDE Frameworks 5 On Your Fedora 20 KDE System Via Either Repository Or Unofficial KDE5 Fedora Spin

    • Plasma Media Center – DVB Settings Interface

      It’s been a while since my last update, but the DVB implementation for Plasma Media Center (PMC) is fully functional, so from now on I am polishing the user interfaces.

    • Of vectors and scalable things.

    • KDE 4.14 Release Candidate Ships

    • KDE Applications and Platform 4.14 RC Now Available for Testing

    • KDE Ships Release Candidate of Applications and Platform 4.14

      Today KDE released the Release Candidate of the new versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing.

    • Porting to KDE Frameworks 5

      Almost all Kubuntu software is ported already. Some of the applications even managed to go qt-only because of all the awesome bits that moved from kdelibs into Qt5. It is all really very awesome I have to say.

    • Utopic Alpha 2 Released

    • Ubuntu 14.10 Alpha 2 (Utopic Unicorn) Flavors Officially Released and Ready for Testing

      The second Alpha images of the upcoming Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) Linux distribution are now available for download and testing.

    • Release candidate of KDE Applications & Platform 4.14 available

      The release candidate for KDE’s Applications and Platform version 4.14 has been made available for testing.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Mate Desktop 1.8.1 available for openSUSE

      openSUSE is known for offering one of the most integrated experiences with the desktop environment it comes with. Their Plasma and Gnome desktops are par-excellence when it comes to polish and now those who still like the good old Gnome 2 UI can use the latest version of Mate in openSUSE.

    • WebKitGTK+ 2.5.1: Good bye WebKit1

      WebKitGTK+ 2.5.1 is the first version of this release cycle. It comes very late mainly due to the regressions introduced by the switch to CMake and the problems we found after removing WebKit1 from the tree. It also includes some new features that I’ll talk about in other posts, probably when 2.6.0 is released. In this post I’ll only focus on the breaks introduced in this release, in order to help everybody to adapt their applications to the API changes if needed…

• Distributions

  • Zorin OS 9 – Linux for Windows users

    Zorin OS 9 is based on Ubuntu Linux 14.04 which is the long term support release and this means you will get software updates until 2019.

    The unique selling point for Zorin OS is that it is has multiple themes which make it look like the operating system that you are used to using. For instance if you are used to Windows XP then you are able to switch to an XP style interface and if you use Windows 7 you can switch to a Windows 7 interface.

  • Screenshots

    • Ubuntu MATE 14.10 Alpha 2

    • Bio-Linux 8.0.2

  • Red Hat Family

    • Fedora

      • New Fedora Security, Linus Cartoon, and the Open Source Forest

      • Answering questions regarding the Fedora Security Team

        Wow, I had no idea that people would care about the start of this project. There seems to be a few questions out there that I’d like to address here to clarify what we are doing and why.

      • Flock (You’re Not Too Late!), Unsigned Packages in F21, Security, Marketing, and Notifications (5tFTW 2014-07-29)

  • Debian Family

    • Raphaël Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in July 2014

      Now that tracker.debian.org is live, people reported bugs (on the new tracker.debian.org pseudo-package that I requested) faster than I could fix them. Still I spent many, many hours on this project, reviewing submitted patches (thanks to Christophe Siraut, Joseph Herlant, Dimitri John Ledkov, Vincent Bernat, James McCoy, Andrew Starr-Bochicchio who all submitted some patches!), fixing bugs, making sure the code works with Django 1.7, and started the same with Python 3.

    • VolksPC wants to crowdfund an Android/Debian Linux PC

      The folks at VolksPC started showing off a software solution that lets you run Android and Debian Linux simultaneously on an ARM-based computer. This lets you use the same machine to run full desktop Linux apps like LibreOffice or Firefox as well as Android apps including Netflix, Hulu Plus, and any number of video games.

    • Derivatives

      • Canadian Developers Are Making the Next Tails Privacy Software

        Whether it’s the NSA exploiting weaknesses in encryption software, the holes in Tor making it less anonymous, or the major problems with Tails—vulnerabilities are constantly testing the security and anonymity of computer users.

        But little known Montreal-based developers at Subgraph want to change all that, and have started working on a zero-day resistant Operating System (OS), protecting against infiltration.

        Subgraph takes the approach that overall computer security is critical to anonymity, targeting protection against zero-day vulnerabilities, the types of weakness unknown to the developers while they’re writing software.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) alpha-2 released!

        • Tomcat Vulnerabilities Closed in Ubuntu Systems

        • Ubuntu MATE 14.10 Alpha 2 Officially Released, Gets EFI Support and Ubuntu-Style Menus

          “Ubuntu MATE is a stable, easy-to-use operating system with a configurable desktop environment. Ideal for those who want the most out of their desktops, laptops and netbooks and prefer a traditional desktop metaphor. With modest hardware requirements it is suitable for modern workstations and older hardware alike,” reads the official website.

        • Ubuntu 14.10 Alpha 2 Has Been Released In The Traditional Flavors + The Mate One, Except For Xubuntu And Ubuntu Itself (Ubuntu Unity)

          Ubuntu 14.10 Alpha 2 implements new some under-development applications, so that the users can report bugs for the developers to fix in the daily images. For example, a RC version of Kernel 3.16 now runs on the Alpha 2 images, while Kernel 3.16 stable will be implemented on the final versions of Ubuntu 14.10.

        • Major South Korean Pharmaceutical Company Ditches Windows for Ubuntu

          Canonical published some very interesting details about a South Korean company called Bukwang Pharmaceuticals, which ditched most of its Windows OSes for Ubuntu and saved a lot of money. On top of the obvious savings, it also got a lot of good press, and other businesses found out that it can be done…

        • Bukwang Pharmaceuticals cut IT costs and created business value with Ubuntu

          Bukwang Pharmaceuticals has been developing and manufacturing drugs and personal hygiene products in South Korea since 1960. Today, it has over 600 employees based at various sites across the country.

        • Yes, Businesses Can Use GNU/Linux And Have Better IT For Less

          I’ve said it many times but it bears repeating that the price/performance of GNU/Linux that is widely accepted on servers can be had on desktops too. The licence says so. You can run, examine, modify and distribute the code, all those things that cost extra with that other OS and are a constant drain on resources.

        • The Clear Skies Desktop

          Ami Banerji’s Linux desktop is clean, simple, and pretty open. What it gives up in widgets it gets back in simplicity, and what’s a good thing. Here’s how to get the same look for your computer.

        • Ubuntu Developers Close Unity Bug That Allowed Users to Bypass the Lock Screen

          Canonical has published details in a security notice about a Unity exploit that has been corrected in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating systems.

        • Canonical Closes KDE-Libs Vulnerability in Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 12.04

          Canonical has published details in a security notice about a KDE-Libs vulnerability in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems that has been found and fixed.

          The Ubuntu developers have closed a small vulnerability with KDE-Libs that would cause kauth to be tricked into bypassing polkit authorizations.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Kubuntu 14.10 Alpha 2 (Utopic Unicorn) Is Out, Users Can Test the Beautiful Plasma 5 Desktop

            Kubuntu 14.10 Alpha 2 (Utopic Unicorn) is now ready for download and its developers provide both the KDE 4.14 branch and the new Plasma 5 for testing.

          • Second alpha of Kubuntu 14.10 and other buntus released

            The Ubuntu developers have released the second alpha of the Utopic Unicorn (to become 14.10). Since Ubuntu Unity doesn’t participate in alpha releases, the alpha includes ISO images for Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, UbuntuKylin and the Ubuntu Cloud. Xubuntu is once again missing from the alpha release.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Marvell lifts curtain on popular NAS SoCs

    Marvell has posted detailed datasheets on its previously opaque Armada 370 and XP SoCs, used in Linux-based NAS systems from Buffalo, Netgear, and Synology.

  • Linux-based home automation hub gains Android app

    The Revolv Smart Home Automation Solution is now available with an Android control app, greatly expanding its appeal beyond its core iOS user base. Until now, Android users have required an Insteon Remote in order to perform functions like assigning manual-triggered “Actions.” You can now use your Android phone to unify devices and customize automations based on four triggers, three of which are automatic: GeoSense, time of day, and device-to-device/motion sensor. The fourth is an On Demand manual trigger.

  • Kano – simple as Lego, powered by Pi

    For some time now, there has been much talk about the Raspberry Pi revolutionising the teaching of computing in schools. Linux User & Developer has devoted much space and attention to the growing number of Jamborees and the increasing attention teachers are giving to the small, £25 bare-bones machine. It is, say advocates, the perfect way to introduce children to the world of computing, allowing them to see and actually interact with the innards of the machines they are using. It is, they add, a great platform for programming and for creating all manner of electronic wonders.

  • Phones

    • Ballnux

      • What’s next for Samsung?

        The problem has been execution. The Samsung UI that was once known as TouchWiz has earned derision for being bloated, bloopy, and unintuitive, while the subscription-based Samsung Music Hub was recently shuttered due to lack of user interest. Ironically, Samsung’s now struggling with the same sort of software issues that gave it the opportunity to become a leading phone manufacturer in the first place.

    • Android

      • Google I/O 2014 App Source Code Now Available

      • Is Nokia secretly planning to sell Android phones again?

        Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia’s mobile division gave most of us the impression that Nokia was done with mobile phones. But suspicious job listings posted on LinkedIn recently may indicate that Nokia is planning a mobile comeback, and it might be based on new Android phones.

      • Nokia May Rejoin Smartphone Market With Android Devices, Tip Job Listings

      • Android media player supports 4K video, Miracast

        Hong Kong based reseller W2Comp, which previously introduced a dual-core Rockchip RK3066 based Probox2 Ultimate media player that runs Android 4.0, has now launched a faster model, called the Probox2 EX (Extreme), that runs Android 4.4 (“KitKat”). The new mini-PC is open for pre-orders at $150, with shipments beginning Aug. 8. There’s no mention of any support for Google’s upcoming remix of Google TV called Android TV, but the Probox2 EX would seem to have the advanced hardware to run it.

      • 5 Must have apps for rooted android devices

        So you have rooted your device and are now thinking what do I do? What was all the flashing, installing and wiping for? My phone still looks the same! Well, yes, rooting does not actually do much in itself but instead offers you the opportunity to customize and alter the device. The best way to do this is with root-only available apps and this list should help you to get to grips with the basics of root apps.

      • OnePlus is planning a Smartwatch

        OnePlus has generated a hell of a lot of hype over the last few months and seem to be using hype as an interesting marketing tool. The company’s flagship device, the ‘One’ generated enormous hype among techies and as a result has generated demand which clearly outweighed the company’s expectations and capabilities. Especially due to their notorious invite system. Last week there were suggestions OnePlus are already working on the OnePlus Two and now it seems hype is building around what very well could be a OnePlus Smartwatch…the OneWatch.

      • Android vs iPhone becoming a “one horse race”

        Android smartphones are becoming a seemingly unstoppable force, accounting for 85% of the worldwide market in the second quarter of 2014 according to new research.

Free Software/Open Source

• Mitro makes password manager open source as team heads to Twitter

  The team at Mitro Labs, the developer of a password manager, is joining Twitter, and its software is being released under a free and open source license, Mitro said Thursday.

• Mitro Releases a New Free & Open Source Password Manager

  Today, Twitter acquired a password manager startup called Mitro. As part of the deal, Mitro will be releasing the source to its client and server code under the GPL.

• GSA CIO calls for open source to be considered first

  Open source and open data solutions now should receive top consideration at the General Services Administration.

  Sonny Hashmi, the GSA chief information officer, said Thursday during an online chat with Federal News Radio that he recently signed out a memo requiring agency software developers to look at open source before they consider traditional commercial solutions.

• SDN blogs: Open source SDN; SDN adoption pace remains high

  This week, SDN bloggers took a look at how open source SDN continues to take shape among vendors, how SDN adoption rates are higher than initially predicted, and all you need to know about OpenFlow.

• New day dawns for open source

  One of the major driving forces behind the plethora of technological innovations in the cloud computing arena is the concept of open source software. With nearly one million open source projects related to the cloud believed to be in progress, new technologies such software as a service are on the rise.

  Companies are contributing more in terms of time, money and support for user-led open source initiatives, with big business benefits such as operational cost reductions, application flexibility and boosts to competitive advantage being on offer.

  Vendor-led development initiatives are gaining ground too, buoyed by massive collaboration projects on a global scale. The increasing ‘democratisation’ of the open source world is a major contributor to its burgeoning success.

• Open source IT is the way forward

  A PRESENTATION by the European nuclear research organisation CERN at the recent open source convention (OSCON) has provided a glimpse at where IT organisations are going to have to go in order to remain competitive. They will need to leave old legacy proprietary approaches behind and adopt open source.

  CERN collects huge volumes of data every day from thousands of detectors at its nuclear collider ring located under the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva. It organises and archives all of this data and distributes much of it to research scientists located throughout the world over high-speed internet links. It presently maintains 100 Petabytes of legacy data under management, and collects another 35 Petabytes every year that it remains in operation. One Petabyte comprises one million Gigabytes.

• Bitnami Changes the Face of Application Deployment

  Brescia said that Bitnami’s goal is to make it as easy to deploy an application on a server as it is to install an application on an endpoint computer. Bitnami has more than 90 different open-source applications and development environments in its software library that can be deployed with one-click installer packages on desktop, virtual machine and cloud deployments.

• Belkin’s WRT54G Router Successor Is Crap On The Software Front So Far

  Belkin revived the Linksys WRT54G in a new 802.11ac model earlier this year and one of its selling points has been the OpenWRT support as what made the WRT54G legendary. However, OpenWRT developers and fans are yet to be satisfied by this new router.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Want Firefox without Australis? Try Pale Moon

      If the release of Firefox’s Australis interface got you down, there are Firefox-based alternatives out there with a more traditional Mozilla UI. One such alternative is Pale Moon and here’s how you get it.

• SaaS/Big Data

  • Contributing back as an OpenStack operator

    Paying talented developers to write high quality code isn’t cheap; why on Earth would you then turn around and give that code to your competitors? Turns out, there’s probably a competitive advantage in doing so.

  • ownCloud 7 Arrives with New Features and Improvements

    ownCloud Inc, the popular open source enterprise file sync and share project, has launched the latest ownCloud 7.

  • Cash and Development Resources are Heading Fast for Hadoop

    June and July brought lots of big news surrounding enterprise analytic data management powered by the open source Hadoop platform. Cloudera, focused on supporting enterprise Hadoop, announced in June that it raised a staggering $900 million round of financing with participation by top tier institutional and strategic investors. It also firmed up a partnership with Dell and Intel to launch a dedicated Dell In-Memory Appliance for Cloudera Enterprise that facilitates Hadoop-driven analytics.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Open Source Storage Adds Oracle, Sun Veterans to Executive Team

    Open Source Storage (OSS), the recently relaunched company that bills itself as “the only true end-to-end open source storage solution,” added two new executives this week who bring experience from Oracle (ORCL), Sun and elsewhere.

  • LibreOffice 4.3 Open-Source Office Suite Enhances the User Experience

    In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the new features in LibreOffice 4.3.

• CMS

  • TechCrunch Open Sources Its WordPress Async Task Library

    Back in early 2012, when the TechCrunch developer team (Nicolas Vincent, Alex Khadiwala, Eric Mann, and John Bloch) started working on the TechCrunch redesign, one of the main goals was to improve site performance. During the development process, we implemented several tools to help achieve that goal.

• BSD

  • FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter, July 31, 2014

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • FSF at CommonBound conference on economic equality

    The FSF is happy to building bridges to new communities, and exploring the role of free software in social justice and economic change.

  • GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry: 18 new GNU releases!

    A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance: please see https://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you’d like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at https://www.gnu.org/help/help.html. To submit new packages to the GNU operating system, see https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.

  • Recap of Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup: August 1

    Join the FSF and friends every Friday to help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones.

• Public Services/Government

  • Open-Source Space

    As I write this, NASA has just passed another milestone in releasing its work to the Open Source community. A press release came out announcing the release on April 10, 2014, of a new catalog of NASA software that is available as open source. This new catalog includes both older software that was previously available, along with new software being released for the first time. The kinds of items available include project management systems, design tools, data handling and image processing. In this article, I take a quick look at some of the cool code available.

    The main Web site is at http://technology.nasa.gov. This main page is a central portal for accessing all of the technology available to be transferred to the public. This includes patents, as well as software.

  • CQC sticks with open source for data capture needs

    The commission’s consideration of open source options for content management was based on Cabinet Office requirements for public sector organisations to look at potential alternatives to proprietary systems dating back to 2010.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Careers in Open Source Week features professionals’ tips and lessons learned in the field

  • OpenStack as the future of the cloud, CoreOS, and more

  • What you need to know about Stellar, the new open-source solution to international currency exchange

  • WWI Linux shooter Verdun, ChuChu Rocket clone Duck Marines, and more

    It’s that time again. In this week’s edition of our open source games news roundup, we take a look at a WWI shooter for Linux where trench foot is conspicuously, blessedly missing from the feature list, as well as a remake of one of my favorite Dreamcast joints, ChuChu Rocket!

  • Open Data

    • Kenya: Q&A – How Open-Source Tools Can Help Map Crisis Data

      In this podcast, we talk to Chris Albon, director of the global crisis data arm of Ushahidi, an open-source data mapping organisation that originated in Nairobi, Kenya.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Commentary: Open source content and freedom of ideas vital to society

      Perhaps the most rewarding experience of education is self-direction. Here, the individual fully enjoys his or her own labor. Whatever one’s interests are, self-direction is achieved on one’s own terms.

      Self-directed education promotes initiative, creativity, co-operative/mutual labor and healthy academic competition in one’s field to cultivate a learning network.

      This is the very basis of the scientific method. We are encouraged to doubt and question the existing order, to follow self-direction and formulate our own hypotheses to work toward possible conclusions.

  • Open Hardware

    • MakerBot expands European operations

      MakerBot has launched MakerBot Europe in order to pave the way for desktop 3D printing beyond the United States.

• Programming

  • What’s that? A PHP SPECIFICATION? Surely you’re joking, Facebook

    A group of Facebook developers has decided to break with 20 years of tradition and release a formal specification for the PHP programming language.

  • Group Test: Linux Text Editors

    If you’ve been using Linux long, you know that whether you want to edit an app’s configuration file, hack together a shell script, or write/review bits of code, the likes of LibreOffice just won’t cut it. Although the words mean almost the same thing, you don’t need a word processor for these tasks; you need a text editor.

    In this group test we’ll be looking at five humble text editors that are more than capable of heavy-lifting texting duties. They can highlight syntax and auto-indent code just as effortlessly as they can spellcheck documents. You can use them to record macros and manage code snippets just as easily as you can copy/paste plain text.

  • August 2014 Issue of Linux Journal: Programming

    Programming always has been that “thing” people did that I never understood. You’ve heard me lament about my lack of programming skills through the years, and honestly, I never thought I’d need to learn. Then along came the DevOps mentality, and I started introducing programmatic ways of managing my system administration world. And you know what? Programming is pretty awesome.

  • Text Editors, Note Takers, and Program Languages

    Today in Linux news, Jack Germain has a look at the perfect note taker. The Linux Voice has a comparison of text editors for programmers and the Linux Journal introduces their current issue on program languages. In other news, XBMC becomes Kodi and Linux.com has 10 reasons to take the Linux Foundation’s Introduction to Linux edX course.

Leftovers

• Agreement reached to advance Rail Baltica

  During his visit to Estonia on June 21, the President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso emphasized that it is vital to reach an agreement on the Rail Baltica project, reports Eesti Paevaleht.

• Science

  • First observations of methane release from Arctic Ocean hydrates

    Just a week into the sampling program and SWERUS-C3 scientists have discovered vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor of the Laptev continental slope. These early glimpses of what may be in store for a warming Arctic Ocean could help scientists project the future releases of the strong greenhouse gas methane from the Arctic Ocean.

• Health/Nutrition

  • See These Cocoa Farmers Taste Chocolate for the Very First Time

    Take the case of cocoa farmers in the Ivory Coast, the world’s leading exporter of cocoa beans. (The country produces more than 30% of all the beans grown worldwide.) As this CNN infographic explains, only 3% of the money you pay for a chocolate bar makes it back to the farmers who grow the beans. The rest goes to the people further up the supply chain, the ones who transform the beans into chocolate and sell it it stores across the globe. Ivory Coast farmers make roughly $10 a day, putting a $2 chocolate bar out of reach.

• Security

  • Thursday’s security updates

  • Security advisories for Friday

  • USB SECURITY FLAW LEAVES OPEN DOOR FOR HACKERS

  • USB Hardware Easily Subverted, Researchers Claim

  • Researchers uncover fundamental USB security flaw, no fix in sight

  • Warning: Hackers can tap USB devices

  • USB sticks or the keys to the kingdom? Hackers turn USBs into security threats

  • USB Drives Contain Undetectable Security Flaw Allowing Hackers Take Control of Your Computers

  • Virtually untraceable and undetectable computer virus gives control of computer to third parties, infects through memory devices and even keyboard connections

  • USB Hardware Easily Subverted, Researchers Claim

  • USB Devices Could Leave You Vulnerable to Hackers

  • Should You Be Worried About Malicious Things On Your USB Devices?

  • PANIC! Stop using USB (it’s ”fundamentally broken”) #BadUSB

  • This thumbdrive hacks computers. “BadUSB” exploit makes devices turn “evil”

    When creators of the state-sponsored Stuxnet worm used a USB stick to infect air-gapped computers inside Iran’s heavily fortified Natanz nuclear facility, trust in the ubiquitous storage medium suffered a devastating blow. Now, white-hat hackers have devised a feat even more seminal—an exploit that transforms keyboards, Web cams, and other types of USB-connected devices into highly programmable attack platforms that can’t be detected by today’s defenses.

  • Massive, undetectable security flaw found in USB: It’s time to get your PS/2 keyboard out of the cupboard

  • USB devices can be hacked maliciously

  • BadUSB: Big, bad USB security problems ahead

  • New Flaws in USB Devices Let Attackers Install Malware: Black Hat

  • How Dianne Feinstein Misled Congress About How ‘Useful’ NSA Spying Authorities Were In Stopping Plots

    We’ve been following the case of Adel Daoud for a little while now. He’s one of the many people arrested for “terrorism” in one of the FBI’s dozens of “home grown plots” in which they create their very own terrorist plot, dupe someone into “joining” and then arrest (and then relish in the headlines about stopping a terrorist “plot” that was never a real plot in the first place). In Daoud’s case, the made up “plot” involved blowing up a Chicago bar. But the Daoud case got a lot more attention, because in the big “debate” over the renewal of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) in late 2012, Senator Dianne Feinstein directly described the Daoud “plot” as an example of why the FAA and Section 702 were necessary.

  • Mail did not reveal to PCC or Leveson that News of the World hacked staff

    Four Mail on Sunday journalists were told by the police in 2006 that their mobile phones had been hacked

• Defence/Police/Secrecy/Agfression

  • NYT’s Iran Correction Needs a Correction

    Iran does not have a “nuclear weapons program.” It has a uranium enrichment program; some politicians claim it also has a weapons program it is concealing. This has never been substantiated by international inspections. Unfortunately it is often treated as a fact by journalists. The original Times piece had it right, referring to Iran’s “suspected efforts to design a weapon.”

  • Counting the droned

    The debate about drone strikes can now be settled. Even the US no longer has the temerity to repeat the canard that the attacks do not cause civilian casualties. A years-long investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been able to track down the names of more than 700 people killed in drone strikes and found that nearly half of them were civilians. This comes as no surprise. The idea that intelligence is so good and the targeting so perfect that missiles will only kill militants was always a scarcely believable fiction. Even the figure that half the dead were civilians is most probably understating the count. So far, through its painstaking work, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been able to put names to less than one-third of the total victims. It stands to reason that militants would be easier to identify since the US, and the Pakistan authorities, are interested only in trumpeting the militants the US has killed and hiding any known details about civilian casualties. The typical press release issued after a drone strike only notes the number of militants killed and never mentions civilians. Journalists have little access to the areas where drone strikes are conducted, making identification a difficult task. The only logical deduction, then, is that a vast majority of unidentified drone victims may be civilians.

  • 700 drone victims identified

  • Naming the Dead records names of more than 700 killed by drones in Pakistan

  • Nearly half of identified drone strike victims in Pakistan are civilians: report

    An investigative project shows that 323 out of a little over 700 identified victims of US drones in Pakistan are reported to be civilians, including 99 children.

  • 700 killed in US drone strikes in Pakistan identified

    The United Kingdom-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been able to record the names of more than 700 people reportedly killed by the CIA-operated drones in Pakistan and nearly half of them are stated to be civilians.

  • Drone casualties: Report names 323 civilian victims

  • US drone strikes in Pakistan

    Some 32 people died in three CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, making this the bloodiest month since July 2012. This was stated by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, United Kingdom, in its report on the drone strikes for July 2014. It said the strikes all reportedly occurred in and around Dattakhel in North Waziristan.

  • Erdogan goes to revolting extreme

    Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s anti-Semitism is getting the better of him. Once again, the Turkish prime minister has trotted out the Hitler analogy in relation to Israel and what it has done in Gaza. “They curse Hitler morning and night,” he said of the Israelis. “However, now their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”

  • Probe into UK arms sales to Israel

    At least 1,600 Palestinians – most of them civilians – have been killed and 8,000 injured during the assault, while Israel has lost 63 soldiers and three civilians.

  • International Media Scurry to Anti-Israel Demonstration Only to Find a Handful of Protesters

    Photos obtained by Breitbart News showcase the struggle far-left activists are facing in persuading the public to support their anti-Israel rallies. A rally hosted by Code Pink on Wednesday in front of the Israeli embassy appeared to be more populated by journalists covering the protest than protesters themselves.

  • Israel bombards Gaza as it searches for missing officer believed seized by Hamas

  • From Texas to Gaza, Reaping What We Sow

    The children are coming from three Central American countries—Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Is it just a coincidence that these are all countries in which the American hand has weighed particularly heavily? Guatemala we just wrecked starting in 1954, with the CIA-directed coup against land reformer Jacobo Arbenz that led to a military dictatorship and, eventually, 36 years of civil war that ended in 1996. El Salvador was, with Nicaragua (more on it later), the focus of Ronald Reagan’s “keep the commies out of Harlingen, Texas” doctrine; a few billion Yanqui dollars poured into the country to arm death squads and perpetuate another wrenching civil war, which took 75,000 lives and ended in 1992.

  • Gaza and Israel

    I wish to express my extreme displeasure at the ongoing incremental genocide of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis, the knee-jerk military support of the US government, and their apparent encouragement of the Zionist quest to solve the “Palestinian problem” in the same the way the Turks did the Armenians.

  • Some of MSNBC’s Most Prominent Journalists Are Ignoring Gaza — Why?

    This doesn’t square with a review of Serwer’s record. Since arriving at MSNBC from Mother Jones in 2013, Serwer has written on issues pertaining to the Afghanistan war, the aborted US military intervention in Syria, Barack Obama’s drone strike program, the international fallout from Edward Snowden’s NSA disclosures, the ongoing turmoil in Iraq, and more — all subjects with clear “foreign affairs” dimensions.

  • Now it’s AIPAC’s War

    Think about it. When it comes to Israel, the United States is the ball game. It provides Israel with the money, the weapons, and the United Nations’ vetoes that enable both the occupation and its multiple wars (like this one) to preserve it. And that shows no sign of changing.

    Watch the television coverage. For three weeks the killing of children and other innocents in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military has dominated the news. We see the bombs dropping. We see the destroyed schools, hospitals and mosques. We see the parents wailing over the deaths of their children and children wailing at the deaths of their parents and siblings.

    But it makes no difference to the United States government which can stop the slaughter with a few words. (Five of those words are “your $3.5 billion aid package.)

  • Book Review: ‘Chasing Shadows’ and ‘The Nixon Tapes’

  • Tonkin and Watergate

    Fifty years ago in August, the US contrived an incident that led to the escalation of the US war on Vietnam. That incident, known historically as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, was said to involve an unprovoked attack by northern Vietnamese forces on two US Navy boats. As it turned out, the Vietnamese were repeatedly provoked before the incident and the US had fired first. Nonetheless, Lyndon Johnson and the US Congress used the events as a reason to intensify the war on the Vietnamese. Like so many times since, the rush to war swept all dissent aside.

  • Scott Van Wynsberghe: The ghosts of Tonkin, 50 years later

    U.S. military chiefs came under great pressure to clarify the fracas of the 4th. The NSA, Hanyok reports, produced what it claimed was the text of a North Vietnamese assessmdnt of the “battle,” although this material was at least unreliable and perhaps fraudulent. On the Turner Joy, as reported by writer Eugene Windchy, only those sailors who believed the “battle” was real were allowed to talk to Pentagon investigators. On the Maddox, great uncertainty hardened into qualified belief. It was enough for President Johnson.

  • Anti-Drone Activist’s One-Year Sentence Will Not Deter Movement

    Like most of her supporters in the courtroom, I was enraged when I heard N.Y. Judge David Gideon sentenced Mary Anne Grady-Flores to one year in jail on July 10. But a deep hope prevailed, which characterizes the local anti-drone movement in New York and is no small part of the impact we’ve had.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Colorado’s now averaging 2 oil and gas spills per day

    The state’s drilling boom is bringing more spills — many of which go unreported to residents

  • 1 in 10 US Beaches Not Fit for Swimming

    Now that summer is here, a trip to the shore should bring familiar smells: seawater, sunscreen and, depending on your beach of choice, sewage.

    One in 10 recreational beaches in the United States isn’t fit for swimming, according to a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

  • Fracking ban court decision pushes conversation toward constitutional rights

    While the Court appreciates the Longmont citizens’ sincerely-held beliefs about risks to their health and safety, the Court does not find this is sufficient to completely devalue the State’s interest, thereby making the matter one of purely local interest.

    Instead, the Court finds this matter of mixed local and state interest

    [...]

    Longmont’s ban on hydraulic fracturing does not prevent waste; instead, it causes waste. Because of the ban, mineral deposits were left in the ground that otherwise could have been extracted in the Synergy well.”

• Finance

  • Actually, Some Material Goods Can Make You Happy

    It’s been the refrain of behavioral economists and, in my case at least, my wise husband for years: Spend your money on experiences, not things. A vacation or a meal with friends will enrich your life; new shoes will quickly lose their charm.

    That’s true, but it’s not the whole story, argue psychologists Darwin A. Guevarra and Ryan T. Howell in a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Not all goods, they say, should be lumped together.

  • Don’t believe false information

    Maybe she should question the fact that large corporations and the extremely wealthy do not pay their fair share of the taxes. Oil companies actually receive subsidies after showing record profits.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • ALEC Offshoot Takes Aim at Local Government

    After forty years of pushing corporate-friendly policy in state legislatures, this week the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is launching its new project aimed at doing the same at the local level.

  • Koch-Backed Small Business Front Group Added to ALEC Board

    The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), a big business-funded group that claims to be the “nation’s leading small business association,” has joined the corporate board of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or “ALEC.” It marks perhaps the final step towards the NFIB abandoning any pretense of being a nonpartisan representative of small business owners.

  • Endorsing Obama’s Assassination Isn’t Enough To Keep This Voice Off Of Fox News

  • Fox News Recycles Old News Of Planned Bin Laden Strike To Attack Clinton

  • Bill Clinton: I could have killed bin Laden

  • Uncovered audio: Hours before 9/11, Bill Clinton said he could’ve killed bin Laden, but didn’t

  • Bill Clinton revealed hours before 9/11 attacks that he had a chance to kill Osama bin Laden

• Censorship

  • New Russian law represses social media, bloggers

    New online speech restrictions are taking effect Friday in Russia, making it more difficult for bloggers to remain anonymous and requiring social-networking sites like Facebook to retain user data for at least six months.

  • Russia: RIP freedom of speech?

    Over the past decade, governments around the world have tightened their control over the free flow of information to address what they see as potential security concerns. The US has its Patriot Act and PRISM programme developed by the National Security Agency or NSA, and the UK has its Data Retention and Investigatory Powers (DRIP) surveillance law.

    [...]

    The Russian government has also felt compelled to tighten the editorial line of its foreign language broadcaster, Russia Today (RT), which until recently used to offer a fresh alternative perspective to mainstream media. Following the biased reports on the shooting down of the Malaysia Airlines plane over Ukraine, Sara Firth, a London correspondent for the network for five years, tendered her resignation letter; she said that the coverage of the MH17 tragedy was “the most shockingly obvious misinformation”. Two of her colleagues, Liz Wahl and Abby Martin, also either resigned earlier this year in protest of RT’s coverage of the conflict in Ukraine.

  • Russian Politician Slams David Cameron for Saber Rattling

  • ​‘British PM backs the Ukrainian Nazis and threatens Moscow with a new war’ – open letter to Cameron

  A prominent Russian politician Sergei Stepashin has condemned UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent anti-Russian statements saying they mark a new phase of the escalating Ukrainian crisis aimed at drawing the European Union into war against Russia.

  • France biggest user of ‘right to be forgotten’ Google EU ruling

    Google has released the first figures to show which countries have been busy wanting us to ‘forget’, with France being the source of more than 17,500 ‘right to be forgotten’ requests.

    The internet search giant is continuing its push towards transparency since the revelations of the US electronic surveillance PRISM programme became apparent and that the US National Security Agency had been using companies such as Google to find information about its users.

• Privacy

  • Inside Citizen Lab, the “Hacker Hothouse” protecting you from Big Brother

    “When it comes to Citizen Lab, what you have is methodical, careful, but passionate people,” says Gus Hosein, the director of the UK-based Privacy International and a longtime acquaintance of Deibert’s. “That is what I wish every academic research institution was, but clearly they’ve been allowed a degree of freedom that others in academia aren’t given.”

  • Meet the white hat hackers keeping you safe from Big Brother

  • Surprise, surprise: Here’s a new way Facebook is trying to control its users

    The social network is requiring that mobile users install Messenger for chatting. Don’t like it? Too bad!

  • Sprint Will Sell a $12 Wireless Plan that Only Connects to Facebook or Twitter

    For about $12, Sprint will soon let subscribers buy a wireless plan that only connects to Facebook .

    For that same price, they could choose instead to connect only with Twitter , Instagram or Pinterest—or for $10 more, enjoy unlimited use of all four. Another $5 gets them unlimited streaming of a music app of their choice.

    The plan, offered under the company’s Virgin Mobile brand of prepaid service, comes as wireless carriers are experimenting with ways to make wireless Internet access more affordable for the poorest consumers by offering special deals on slices of the Web.

  • Inquiry by C.I.A. Affirms It Spied on Senate Panel

    An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program.

    The report by the agency’s inspector general also found that C.I.A. officers read the emails of the Senate investigators and sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information, according to a summary of findings made public on Thursday. One official with knowledge of the report’s conclusions said the investigation also discovered that the officers created a false online identity to gain access on more than one occasion to computers used by the committee staff.

  • CIA admits to spying on Senate staffers

  • CIA Admits Spying on Senators

  • CIA admits it broke into Senate computers; senators call for spy chief’s ouster

    An internal CIA investigation confirmed allegations that agency personnel improperly intruded into a protected database used by Senate Intelligence Committee staff to compile a scathing report on the agency’s detention and interrogation program, prompting bipartisan outrage and at least two calls for spy chief John Brennan to resign.

  • CIA apologizes for spying on U.S. Senate

  • CIA Apologizes for Searches of Senate Computers

  • Iyengar: Why doesn’t the CIA tweet an apology?

  • Obama Backs CIA Chief John Brennan

    President Obama said U.S. intelligence officials “crossed a line” after the 9/11 attacks and “tortured some folks” during the George W. Bush administration, conclusions he said on Friday will be described in a long-awaited report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, portions of which he and his counsels have agreed to declassify.

  • Will the Senate Push John Brennan to Resign From the CIA?

    Democratic Sens. Mark Udall and Martin Heinrich both called for CIA Director John Brennan’s resignation late Thursday after the spy agency admitted it had improperly hacked into Senate staffers’ computers used during a review of the agency’s Bush-era interrogation practices.

  • Heinrich says CIA director must go

  • Reid: CIA Snooping on the Senate ‘Appalling’

  • Does John Brennan Know Too Much for Obama to Fire Him?

    When John Brennan assured the country that the CIA hadn’t improperly monitored the Senate team that compiled a report on Bush-era torture, he fed us false information. That much is clear from Thursday’s news that “the C.I.A. secretly monitored a congressional committee charged with supervising its activities.” Either the CIA director was lying or he was unaware of grave missteps at the agency he leads. There are already calls for his resignation or firing from Senator Mark Udall, Trevor Timm, Dan Froomkin, and Andrew Sullivan, plus a New York Times editorial airing his ouster as a possibility.

  • Editorial: Congress must rein in the CIA if the president won’t

    The latest scandal at the Central Intelligence Agency reads as if torn from the pages of one of the late Tom Clancy’s spies-know-best novels: Noble CIA agents, unhappy that weak-kneed U.S. Senate oversight staffers were pussyfooting around its detention and torture records, hack the Senate’s computers to find out what its minders have discovered. The Constitution? Never mind.

  • Obama should fire John Brennan

    In March, at the Council on Foreign Relations, CIA Director John Brennan was asked by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell whether the CIA had illegally accessed Senate Intelligence Committee staff computers “to thwart an investigation by the committee into” the agency’s past interrogation techniques. The accusation had been made earlier that day by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who said the CIA had “violated the separation-of-powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution.” Brennan answered:

  • It’s About the Lying

    I don’t want to understate how seriously wrong it is that the CIA searched Senate computers. Our constitutional order is seriously out of whack when the executive branch acts with that kind of impunity — to its overseers, no less.

  • Don’t Wait For Resignation, Say Critics, Obama Should Fire CIA’s John Brennan

  • CIA director John Brennan lied to you and to the Senate. Fire him

    Private apologies are not enough for a defender of torture, the architect of America’s drone program and the most talented liar in Washington. The nation’s top spy needs to go

  • CIA Spying On The Senate Went Much Further Than Originally Reported

  • After CIA Angrily Denied Spying On Senate, CIA Admits It Did And Apologizes

    Here’s a surprise. An internal investigation by the CIA has determined — just as Senator Dianne Feinstein charged — that the CIA illegally hacked into the network of Senate Intelligence Committee staffers in order to spy on what they were doing with regards to a report on the CIA’s torture program. They did this despite an earlier instance of a similar problem after which the CIA promised it would not touch the Senate Intelligence Committee network any more.

  • On the CIA Inspector General’s Findings

  • French Company That Sells Exploits To The NSA Sat On An Internet Explorer Vulnerability For Three Years

    Thanks to Snowden’s leaks and a host of other information proceeding those, it’s become clear that intelligence agencies — despite their constant and loud “worrying” about cyberattacks — are more than happy to make computers and the Internet itself less safe by purchasing, discovering and hoarding vulnerabilities. These are exploited to their fullest before being reported to the entities that can patch the holes. In the meantime, the NSA and others make use of security holes and vulnerabilities, leaving millions of members of the public exposed.

  • Bug spotting: Germans hold ‘nature walks’ to observe rare NSA spy

    One morning last July, the German intelligence service knocked on Daniel Bangert’s door. They had been informed by the US military police that Bangert was planning to stage a protest outside the Dagger Complex, an American intelligence base outside Griesheim in the Hesse region. Why hadn’t he registered the protest, and what were his political affiliations? they asked.

  • NSA notably uninvited to speak at Vegas hacker conferences this year

  • Backbytes: Black Hat to the NSA – ‘Your name’s not down, you’re not coming in’

  • British MPs come out in support of whistleblowers like Edward Snowden

    An influential cross-party group of British MPs have come out in support of whistleblowers, such as ex-CIA contractor Edward Snowden and others who have exposed wrongdoing in major institutions. They report some incidents of treatment of whistleblowers as being “shocking” and subject to “victimisation”

  • Snooping ‘unacceptable’: India bluntly tells US

  • Snooping not Acceptable, India Tells US

  • Friends don’t snoop on each other: India’s stern message to Obama administration

  • Sushma conveys India’s anguish over NSA snooping

    External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Thursday conveyed to US Secretary of State John Kerry the ‘anguish’ of people of India over media reports on authorisation of his country’s National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on the Bharatiya Janata Party.

    “I raised this issue with Secretary Kerry. I told him that when this news appeared in newspapers, people of India were agitated and expressed their anguish. I told him that I want to make him aware of that anguish,” Swaraj said, addressing a joint news conference with Kerry after they co-chaired the fifth annual strategic dialogue between the two nations.

  • Opinion: Germany’s rejection of Snowden is cowardly

    The German chancellor claims to have learned a lot of interesting facts through Edward Snowden. The fact that Germany is now refusing to take Snowden in shows a lack of political courage, writes DW’s Jens Thurau.

  • What Does Corporate Responsibility Mean When It Comes To the NSA?

    Details about the National Security Agency’s “Prism” surveillance program have entered the news in dribs and drabs since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked revealing documents about the program to the Guardian and the Washington Post in June of last year. The unsettling insights revealed by Snowden generated quite a stir in the press, and large tech and telecom companies faced a wave of consumer backlash in the wake of the ongoing story.

  • Has CIA slipped from institutional control?

  • John Brennan Faces Calls to Resign After CIA Admits to Spying on Senate Torture Probe

    Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan is facing calls to resign after admitting CIA officials spied on a Senate panel probing the agency’s torture and rendition program. The allegation surfaced in March when members of the Senate Intelligence Committee openly accused CIA officials of illegally monitoring their staffers’ computers. The Senate report has yet to be released but reportedly documents extensive abuses and a cover-up by CIA officials to Congress. At the time, Brennan denied the spying allegations and said those who make them will be proved wrong. But he reversed his stance this week after an internal CIA inquiry found the spying indeed took place with the involvement of 10 agency employees. Brennan apologized to lawmakers in a briefing earlier this week. The White House is standing by Brennan, citing President Obama’s “great confidence” in his leadership. But at least two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Democrats Mark Udall of Colorado and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, are calling for his resignation. We speak with the reporter who first broke the news of the CIA’s admission to spying on Senate computers: Jonathan Landay, senior national security and intelligence correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers.

  • Xiaomi Suspected to Leak Data to Chinese Servers, Points to Growing Instances of International Spying Using Gadgets and Software

    The recent accusation against Xiaomi for having allegedly planted spying software in the smartphone’s firmware that secretly transfers data to the company’s Beijing servers brings to light the new dimension of international spying in the tech savvy times of today. What is even more intriguing is that turning off the MiCloud service on the smartphone that is believed to be the culprit does not help things either.

  • Get a TOP SECRET job at the NSA… through LinkedIn?

    The NSA is looking for a Director of Strategic Communications on LinkedIn. Why is it even advertised?

  • ‘NSA-proof’ Email ProtonMail Launching Mobile App

    Rather than seek out traditional Silicon Valley funding, the Switzerland incorporated startup chose to crowdfund the development costs because, “unfortunately, too many VCs nowadays are just looking for a quick profit,” says cofounder Andy Yen, who’s based at MIT with half the team.

  • Yes, Hackers Could Build an iPhone Botnet—Thanks to Windows

    A reminder to Apple and smug iPhone owners: Just because iOS has never been the victim of a widespread malware outbreak doesn’t mean mass iPhone hacking isn’t still possible. Now one group of security researchers plans to show how to enslave an entire botnet of Apple gadgets through a perennial weak point—their connection to vulnerable Windows PCs.

  • The NSA can’t hear you now: How to easily encrypt calls on your iPhone

    This week, that changed. Whisper Systems, makers of the widely-lauded Android encryption app RedPhone, released a voice encryption application designed specifically for iPhone. It’s called Signal, and if you’re in the market for a voice encryption app (and you should be) then look no further.

  • Leahy bill would curb NSA spying

  • Sen. Cruz Co-Sponsors Bill to Ban Bulk Record Collection

  • Strengthened Senate NSA Reform Measure Is ‘A Good First Step’

  • Enemy of the Good

    Privacy advocates aren’t happy with an NSA reform bill that only gets part of the job done.

  • Restore privacy-national security balance

    The federal government has been brazenly violating citizens’ privacy rights in the name of national security. The nation’s spy apparatus has gone so far as to spy on members of Congress, with the CIA admitting on Thursday the agency had gone into Senate computers.

  • Leahy’s USA FREEDOM Act Gains Early Support And Praise

  • Barack Obama Appoints Non-American Officer To Be In Charge Of The U.S. Army In Europe

  • Twitter laments government roadblocks in fifth transparency report

  • Twitter account info requests surge 46%

  • Twitter Troubled With Rise In Government Requests To Access User Data

    Twitter Inc. (TWTR), the San Francisco-based social media company, has been receiving a plethora of requests from governments to access its user data. The company has reported in its biannual transparency report that it received 2058 requests from governments in the first half of 2014, which marks a 46% increase from 2013.

  • Snowden-endorsed SpiderOak doesn’t want the key to your private info

  • Americans’ liberties in the balance

    There appears to be a clear bipartisan consensus that the NSA has gone too far with its bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. The question is how far Congress will go to restore a balance between individual liberty and national security.

  • Will $1 million protect you from Keith Alexander?

    Nice intranet you’ve got there. Shame if something should happen to it.

  • Former NSA director Keith Alexander may have sold classified info for $1M per month

  • Why Is the NSA Hiding Keith Alexander’s Financial Disclosures?

  • Journalist Sues NSA For Former Head Keith Alexander’s Financial Records

    Investigative reporter Jason Leopold is suing the National Security Agency for refusing to release the financial disclosure statements of recently retired director Gen. Keith Alexander.

  • Want to make $1 million per month? Retire from the NSA

    Former NSA director Keith Alexander will charge companies up to $1 million a month to keep them safe from online hackers, Foreign Policy reports. Apparently Alexander and business partners from IronNet Cybersecurity have founded a new firm after leaving the government and military in March. The company supposedly offers a new technology that has a “unique” approach when it comes to detecting hackers online.

  • Former NSA Chief Keith Alexander Is Profiting on Cybersecurity. But Is It Legal?

  • Keith Alexander’s Unethical Get-Rich-Quick Plan

  • Senate bill strikes a balance between core intelligence needs and civil liberties

    The centerpiece of the NSA debate after Edward Snowden has been the bulk collection of the call logs of U.S. citizens. The Senate bill would end the government’s practice of collecting and saving vast storehouses of U.S. calling data. In its place, the proposal would require government agents to identify a particular target — and to get a judicial order. Any information collected under this program that is superfluous to a legitimate intelligence investigation would have to be discarded, and the inspector general would do more to monitor the application of these rules.

  • Key must come clean on NSA/GCSB interception site – Greens

  • Papers reveal possible U.S. spy site in New Zealand: lawmakers

    New Zealand lawmakers demanded Friday that the government reveal whether the United States National Security Agency (NSA) had set up an interception site on New Zealand’s only international fiber optic communications cable.

  • Govt called to account for spy claims

    The statement said they don’t use the term SSO and what is being referred to is a “cable access programme”. However, there is no explanation of what that is, or why someone was in New Zealand from the NSA to discuss it.

  • Govt denies SSO spyware installation

    The New Zealand Herald yesterday reported an engineer from the US National Security Agency’s Special Source Operations (SSO) unit visited New Zealand last year to talk to the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) about electronic spying.

  • END OF THE ROAD FOR THE GÜLEN MOVEMENT

    On July 22, 2014, police officers arrested over 100 members of law enforcement as part of an ongoing investigation regarding widespread illegal wiretapping and invasion of privacy without just cause. The probe dated back to a massive eavesdropping scandal that the authorities uncovered back in February 2014 relating to the surveillance of thousands of journalists, academics, politicians and senior government officials. Although scores of police officers and members of the judiciary have since been reassigned or suspended, the July 22 operation marked the first concrete response from the Turkish judiciary. An Istanbul court has subsequently ordered the formal arrest of key police officers on charges of espionage, document fraud and illegal wiretapping. As such, the Gülenist shadow state has come under an unprecedented level of public and legal scrutiny.

  • Reclusive Snowden bides time in Russia

  • Russia keeps fugitive whistle-blower Edward Snowden in legal limbo

  • Edward Snowden: after one year in Russia, what now for the NSA whistleblower?

  • Is Russia letting Snowden twist in the wind?

  • Russia: Whistleblower Edward Snowden trapped without legal protection

    The reports that Edward Snowden has been living in Russia with precarious “temporary leave to remain” rather than under any formal asylum protection is further evidence he must be allowed to travel to and seek asylum in the country of his choice, said Amnesty International today.

  • Snowden’s asylum status in Russia ends

  • Edward Snowden continues life as a recluse after one year of asylum in Russia

    Fugitive US intelligence agent Edward Snowden marked on Thursday one year of political asylum in Russia, where he continues to live a life shrouded in mystery amid a dearth of public appearances.

  • Snowden’s temporary asylum status expires in Russia

  • Snowden’s Russia Asylum Has Expired But He Will Stay Put Until Authorities Approve Reapplication

  • The CIA Returns to Black Hat 2014

    Past decades offer an endless trail of evidence: Operation Gladio, Operation Mockingbird, Project MKUltra, Operation Wheeler/Wallowa, Watergate, Operation CHAOS, COINTELPRO, Operation Northwoods, P2OG (the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group), Iran-Contra, etc.

  • Austrian law student sues Facebook…again

  • Facebook Faces European Class Action Lawsuit Over Privacy

  • Student starts global class action against Facebook

    Austrian law student Max Schrems appealed to a billion Facebook users around the world on Friday to join a class-action lawsuit against Facebook’s alleged violations of its users’ privacy, stepping up a years-long data-protection campaign.

  • Austrian Student Leading Class Action Lawsuit Against Facebook Over Privacy

  • Student Files Privacy Class Action Suit Against Facebook

  • Facebook Hit With Privacy Class-Action Suit

  • Facebook sued by law student Max Schrems for privacy violations

    Facebook is facing a class-action lawsuit from Max Schrems, an Austrian law student and data privacy activist who announced Friday that he will sue social networking site. Mr. Schrems claims Facebook violated Europe’s privacy laws and its own terms of agreement during its participation in NSA spying programs.

  • Austrian student sues Facebook again

  • Austrian Law Student Sues FB Over Violation Of Privacy Laws

  • Privacy campaigner begins class-action against Facebook

  • Privacy campaigner begins class-action against Facebook

  • Facebook Facing New Class Action From Max Schrems

  • Stop The Presses! Facebook Inc (FB) Was Down Today!

    As major crisis surround the US and world, the real issues that matter involve the inability to like, comment or post on Facebook

  • South Africans should watch their back doors

    But recently it was leaked that the NSA pried its way into the servers in Huawei’s sealed headquarters in Shenzhen, China’s industrial heartland. According to documents provided to the NSA by former contractor Edward Snowden, the NSA obtained information about the workings of giant routers and monitored communication of the company’s top executives.

  • Carnegie Mellon engineers aim to unmask anonymous surfing software

    Governments in the United States, Russia and Britain have worked for years to unmask users of Tor, which, according to the British Broadcasting Corp., has been linked to illegal activity including drug deals and the sale of child-abuse images.

• Civil Rights

  • Houston grand juries: too white, too law-and-order, and too cozy with cops

  • Saturday’s letters: The status quo

    What do I hold Obama accountable for? The NSA spying on just about everyone. His war on whistleblowers, which is really a war against an informed citizenry. His very troubling use of drones.

    Before his first election, Obama supported a public option for health care, but the first thing he did when negotiations began was yank it off the table. He made statements supporting net neutrality, but then installed cable lobbyist Tom Wheeler as head of the FCC.

  • White House Finishes Review Of CIA Terror Report: Feinstein Wants To Know Why It’s Basically All Blacked Out

    We’ve been joking the last few weeks about how everyone was waiting for the White House to dump buckets of black ink on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report. As we’d noted, for reasons that still don’t make any sense, the CIA was given first crack at redacting the 480 page declassified executive summary of the 6,300 page, $40 million Senate Intelligence report into the CIA’s torture program. Once the CIA was done with it, it was handed over to the White House to exhaust reserve stores of black ink.

  • Fox Gives Liz Cheney A Platform To Attack Obama For Mentioning Torture

  • Obama has called it ‘torture’ before — why this time was different

  • Hayden ‘Disappointed’ Obama Used Word ‘Torture’ at News Conference

    President Barack Obama admitted on Friday that the U.S. “tortured” some al-Qaida detainees captured after the 9/11 attacks — but retired Gen. Michael Hayden was disconcerted at Obama describing the controversial CIA practice that way at a news conference.

  • Obama Admits ‘We Tortured Some Folks’ But Doesn’t Seem Too Concerned

  • CIA Torture Report Reveals That State Department Officials Knew About Torture; Were Told Not To Tell Their Bosses

    We continue to wait and wait for the White House to finish pouring black ink all over the Senate’s torture report, before releasing the (heavily redacted) 480-page executive summary that the Senate agreed to declassify months ago. However, every few weeks it seems that more details from the report leak out to the press anyway. The latest is that officials at the State Department were well aware of the ongoing CIA torture efforts, but were instructed not to tell their superiors, such that it’s likely that the top officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, may have been kept in the dark, while others at the State Department knew of the (highly questionable) CIA actions.

  • Omar Khadr and double standards

    The charge against Khadr is that he was an “unprivileged belligerent” — meaning he was not a soldier — and so had violated the “US common law of war” by fighting the invading American forces in Afghanistan. Now a US Department of Justice memo to the US Department of Defence implies that the case against Khadr is bogus. The memo was sent in July 2010 and dealt with the status of CIA agents who are not soldiers but who operate drones and kill people. Are they guilty of war crimes?, the Department of Defence asked. The Justice Department responded that war criminality depends on a person’s actions, not on whether he or she is a part of an army. The memo was only disclosed now on the order of a court in a case initiated by the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times.

  • ​UK hacker warned of US-extradition risk if he visits sick father in Scotland

    Gary McKinnon, the computer hacker who won a 10-year battle to avoid extradition to the US, has been warned not to visit his ill father in Scotland, for fear America will mount fresh bids for his arrest.

  • Forcing the CIA to admit some ugly truths

    George Tenet, who presided over the CIA when terrorist suspects were waterboarded and subjected to other forms of brutal “enhanced interrogation,” has set himself a near-impossible task. He is leading an effort to discredit an impending Senate committee report expected to lay out a case that the intelligence agency tortured suspects and then misled Congress, the White House and the public about its detention and interrogation program.

  • Obama admits CIA indulged in torture after 9/11

    US President Barack Obama hasacknowledged that the CIA had tortured suspects detained in the immediate aftermath of September, 11 terror attacks.

  • Obama admits CIA tortured suspects after Sept /11 attacks

  • Obama on CIA after 9/11: “We tortured some folks.”

  • Obama says after 9/11, US ‘tortured some folks’

  • Obama Defends CIA Torturers

  • Obama: U.S. ‘crossed a line’ and tortured after 9/11 attacks

  • The Senate Is Not Happy That the CIA Censored Its Report on CIA Torture

  • Obama Says Under Former President Bush Inhumane Torture Methods Used on 9/11 Suspects

  • Senate report will set the record straight on torture

  • Bayh heading review of CIA search of Senate computers

  • How to make torture worse: pretend it’s a PR problem

  • US Senate report to suggest harsh CIA interrogations were unnecessary

  • We tortured some folks after 9/11: US President Barack Obama

  • Obama Admits CIA ‘Tortured Some Folks’ After 9/11

  • Obama admits CIA ‘tortured some folks’ but supports spying CIA director

  • ‘We Tortured Some Folks,’ Obama Says

  • Barack Obama admits ‘we tortured some folks’ after 9/11 attacks

  • Denver Post: CIA director must go

  • Bloomberg View: Time to rein in the CIA

  • A law unto themselves: The CIA and the torture cover-up

  • Spies run wild

  • CIA spying on overseers shows deep problems

  • Issa on Latest CIA Senate Spying Scandal Revelation: It’s Still ‘Treason’

  • Flashback: Issa Called CIA Spying on Senate ‘Treason’

  • CIA director under fire from lawmakers after agency’s search of Senate computers

  • Obama: Senate report will show ‘we tortured some folks’

  • Obama admits to post-9/11 torture

  • US ‘tortured some folks’ after September 11: Obama

  • Obama has ‘confidence’ in CIA director, criticizes GOP

  • Obama has “full faith” in DCIA who doesn’t know what CIA is up to

  • CIA spies on computers of Senate investigating its spies

  • Obama: After 9/11 we ‘tortured some folks’

  • Dianne Feinstein says intelligence officials ‘significantly redacted’ torture report

  • Obama expresses “full confidence” in beleaguered CIA chief

  • Obama admits CIA ‘tortured some folks’ but stands by Brennan over spying

  • Obama Says U.S. Tortured Suspects

  • Obama: US shouldn’t be ‘too sanctimonious’ about torture

  • After 9/11, ‘we tortured some folks: Obama

  • Obama Backs CIA Chief Apologizing to Senators Over Search

  • CIA apologizes, admits it improperly searched Senate computers

  • Obama: We Tortured Some Folks

  • Obama On Post-9/11 CIA: “We Tortured Some Folks”

  • I Have “Full Confidence” In CIA Director, Obama Says Day After Senate Spying Disclosed

  • Does Anyone Have Oversight Authority Over the CIA?

  • Obama Stands Behind Secretary Kerry and CIA’s Brennan Amid Criticism

  • Obama on CIA Scandal: ‘We tortured some folks.’

  • Obama Defends CIA Chief After Senate Computer Hacking Scandal

  • Obama: ‘I Have Full Confidence in John Brennan’

  • CIA Admits It Snooped On US Senate Computers

  • US officials ‘tortured some folks’ after 9/11: Obama

  • ​President Obama: “We Tortured Some Folks” After 9/11

  • Obama Says America Tortured, but That’s Not Enough

  • Editorial: Is CIA out of control? Don’t ask the director

  • With Confirmation of CIA Spying on Senate, It Is Time for Serious Oversight

  • Key Republican defends CIA head

  • Senator Mark Udall wants CIA chief to resign for spying on Senate

  • Senator Udall Calls for CIA Director John Brennan’s Resignation, Cites Failure of Leadership, Grave Errors

  • The CIA Should Be Very Worried

  • Senator: The White House Should Launch a Criminal Probe of the CIA

  • NYT calls for CIA shake-up

  • CIA concedes it spied on US Senate probesters

  • CIA spied on US Senate, internal review finds

  • CIA ‘tortured some folks’ after 9/11

  • Rand Paul: Fire Brennan

  • CIA Admits Fault for Snooping on Senate Computers (Updated)

  • Obama backs CIA chief, admits US torture

  • President Barack Obama: the US “used torture” after 9/11

  • Obama Says He Has ‘Full Confidence’ In CIA Chief John Brennan

  • Obama says has full confidence in CIA Director Brennan

  • Obama Expresses Confidence in C.I.A. Director

  • New York Times Editorial Calls for Resignation of CIA Director

  • Obama defends under-fire CIA director

  • Obama should jettison CIA director

  • Report finds CIA spied on Senate

  • Jeff Merkley: CIA director should resign if Senate finds out he lied about spying

  • CIA Director Should Resign If He Knew Of Search, Says Merkley

  • Obama ‘Torture’ Comments Reopen Debate

  • Experts Call for CIA Torture Report Release as Obama Says U.S. Tortured After 9/11

  • Should Obama Fire His CIA Chief for Misleading the Public About the Senate Spying Scandal?

  • CIA chief lost credibility

  • President Obama: ‘We Tortured Some Folks’

  • CIA Director Reverses Himself on Senate Spying

  • Obama Condemns But Also Rationalizes CIA Torture During Press Conference

  • Ayotte Says Brennan’s CIA Post at Risk in Computer Probe

  • Flashback: CIA Director Adamantly Denied Senate Hacking Allegations Months Ago

  • Bad Day For The CIA

  • CIA tactics kept secret

  • Barack Obama admits US officials ‘tortured some folks’ after 9/11 ahead of report on alleged CIA abuses

  • Obama defends CIA chief after agency spied on Senate

  • John Brennan Needs to Leave the CIA, One Way or Another

  • CIA chief’s job could be at risk over Senate probe

  • Obama admits United States ‘tortured some folks’ post-9/11

  • Obama on CIA’s post-9/11 tactics: ‘We tortured some folks’

  • Obama: U.S. “tortured some folks” after 9/11 attacks

  • We tortured some folks, admits Obama

  • Obama’s first response to CIA spying shouldn’t be to praise its director

  • CIA Employees Think They May Be Thrown Under The Bus After The ‘Torture Report’ Comes Out

  • Senate Report to Suggest Harsh CIA Interrogations Were Unnecessary

  • President Barack Obama said ‘we tortured some folks’ in the immediate aftermath of 9/11

  • Obama: U.S. “Tortured Some Folks” after 9/11 Attacks

  • Other Views: The CIA’s reckless breach of trust

  • Obama says of CIA after 9-11, U.S. ‘tortured some folks’

  • Feinstein delays release of heavily redacted CIA torture report

  • Citing redactions, Feinstein delays release of report on CIA interrogations

    The Obama administration censored significant portions of the findings of an investigation into the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation methods on suspected terrorists, forcing the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee to delay their release “until further notice.”

    The postponement added to serious frictions over the investigation between the administration and lawmakers, who have been pressing for the swiftest, most extensive publication of the findings on one of darkest chapters in the CIA’s 65-year history.

  • Senate Now Mad at CIA Director? How About When He Was a Leaker on National Security?

    Two Democratic senators, Mark Udall (D-CO) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM), have called on CIA Director John Brennan to resign after he admitted that the CIA had spied on Senate computers used by Senate staffers to research a report on the agency’s interrogation and detention practices during the Bush administration. Brennan apparently called Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to apologize. Despite this admission, however, neither President Obama nor Feinstein has called for Brennan’s resignation and the likelihood is the president won’t.

    Why? Because Brennan wasn’t asked to resign for a major intelligence breach that was far worse than anything that happened with the Senate’s computers. As we explain in our new book, Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department, despite White House denials, John Brennan was apparently responsible for the outing of a Saudi Arabian intelligence agent inside the Yemen branch of Al Qaeda.

  • Rex Smith: A lesson of Watergate, 40 years on

    It was the release of the so-called “smoking gun tape” on Aug. 5, 1974, that prompted even Nixon’s most ardent defenders to agree that he must go. On the tape, you hear Nixon, just six days after the Watergate break-in, order aides to get the CIA to tell the FBI to back off its investigation by claiming a bogus national security connection.

  • Book review: ‘The Nixon Defense’

  • Book review: ‘The Invisible Bridge,’ fall of Nixon and rise of Reagan, by Rick Perlstein

  • Court allows groin searches at GITMO

    Military guards may continue to touch the groins of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, when they search for contraband before the prisoners are moved to speak with their lawyers, a federal appeals court ruled Friday. Because of the procedure, which was put in place in May 2013, some inmates have stopped meeting with or calling their lawyers.

  • I was a Watergate addict

    So it was with deep regret that I watched Nixon’s televised address on Aug. 8, 1974, and heard him utter words never spoken before in the Oval Office — “Therefore, I shall resign the presidency … ” At that historic moment, I felt heartily sorry.

    Not sorry for Nixon, especially not when he swaggered across the White House lawn the next day and mounted the helicopter, smirking triumphantly and brandishing the double-V victory sign as if he had just won another election. Nor was I sorry for his minions, although they would do jail time for their lockstep loyalty to the commander-in-chief while he would emerge with a full, free and absolute pardon.

  • True confessions of a very bad Jewish boy

    Also on my list of bad-Jew sins is my complete disinterest in religion, and apparently religion plays a small role in Jewish life – it’s not just eating gefilte fish and controlling Hollywood. Not so long ago, a dear old Jewish friend passed away, and at her funeral service all the men had to go in a separate room and read from a Hebrew prayer book – but I can’t read Hebrew so I hid up the back of the group, cowering behind a guy with a 50-centimetre full-bush Jew-fro. Then the rabbi came in and said, ‘‘When we pray, we must face Jerusalem … so let us all turn to the east!’’ and every man in the room spun 180 degrees, so I went from being at the back, to being at the front, with everyone staring at me like I was about to give a Zumba class. I had to pretend-pray for the next half-hour, the focus of the entire ceremony, making up my own Hebrew language – part Yiddish words I heard Fran Drescher use on The Nanny, part Honey-Boo-Boo hillbilly drawl.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • FCC Chief ‘Deeply Troubled’ by Verizon Plan to Slow Traffic

    In a letter sent to Verizon CEO Dan Mead on Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said he is “deeply troubled” by the cell phone carrier’s announcement. He demanded more details about the plan and questioned whether it’s legal.

  • The Switchboard: FCC calls Verizon’s new data throttling plan a ‘disturbing’ development

    U.S. cellphone users frequent victims of ‘cramming’: Senate study. Reuters reports: “U.S. mobile phone users have likely paid hundreds of millions of dollars in unauthorized charges “crammed” onto their bills, according to a report released by the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday to coincide with a hearing on the topic.”

• DRM

  • Congress Just Fixed A Crazy Law That Made Unlocking Your Cell Phone A Crime – But There’s A Catch

    Soon, the government won’t be able to throw you in jail for “unlocking” your iPhone to use it with a new wireless phone company.

    Late last week Congress passed a bill that rolled back draconian penalties for unlocking a mobile phone or tablet purchased on a wireless carrier contract. It is now waiting for the President to sign it into law.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Kerry Wants Co-operation From India

    Visiting US Secretary of State John Kerry has urged the Indian leadership not to oppose global trade reforms in the coming days. The senior US official, currently on an official visit to the South Asian country, told the local media in New Delhi that India should show its commitment to carry on economic liberalisation process by backing the protocol.

  • Indo-US Strategic Dialogue: India refusal on WTO deal a wrong signal, says John Kerry to Narendra Modi

  • Copyrights

    • Your Wireless Router Is Broken—Help Us Fix It At DEF CON

      As part of our Open Wireless Movement, we set out to create router software that would make it easier for people to safely and smartly share part of their wireless network. Protecting hosts, so their security is not compromised because they offer open networks, is one of the goals of the router software we released. However, as research published by Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) and others has shown, almost every popular home router has serious security flaws.

    • Minister: Sue Mums, Dads, Students To Send Anti-Piracy Message

      Just as discussion moves away from the punitive measures that did little to curtail piracy in the last decade, an Australian minister has urged a return. Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull says that in order to send a clear message, rightsholders need to “roll up their sleeves” and strategically sue some “moms, dads and students.”