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Microsoft Corp. was recently in advanced discussions with Nokia Corp. about a purchase of the Finnish company's device business, according to people familiar with the matter, in a marriage that could have reshaped the mobile-phone industry.

The talks have faltered, they said. One person said talks took place as recently as this month but aren't likely to be revived....

A plus factor in the negotiations was the possibility of Microsoft using offshore cash to fund a deal. The company has about $66 billion of cash held in offshore subsidiaries-a stockpile that would be tough to bring back to the U.S. without incurring a large tax bill. - WSJ

A tool for securing communications between a client and a DNS resolver.

Description dnscrypt-proxy provides local service which can be used directly as your local resolver or as a DNS forwarder, encrypting and authenticating requests using the DNSCrypt protocol and passing them to an upstream server, by default OpenDNS who run this on their resolvers.

The DNSCrypt protocol uses high-speed high-security elliptic-curve cryptography and is very similar to DNSCurve, but focuses on securing communications between a client and its first-level resolver.

While not providing end-to-end security, it protects the local network, which is often the weakest point of the chain, against man-in-the-middle attacks. It also provides some confidentiality to DNS queries. - DNScrypt

Grassley asked: "Does the FBI own or currently use drones and for what purposes?"

"Yes, for surveillance."

Grassley continued: "Does the FBI use drones for surveillance on U.S. soil?"

"Yes, in a very, very minimal way, and seldom."

Moments later, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) said drones were a huge privacy threat to Americans. The director was unprepared to answer Feinstein's questions on what "privacy strictures" are in place to protect Americans' privacy in connection to FBI drone use. - David Kravets, Wired

Kim Dotcom has accused the US government and Leaseweb, one of the hosting providers of former file-sharing site Megaupload, of deleting millions of personal files "without warning."...

The information stored on the dormant servers - "petabytes of pictures, backups, personal & business property" - was what Dotcom called evidence in the case US authorities launched against him in January 2012. Dotcom is wanted in the US on criminal charges for facilitating copyright fraud on a massive scale.

"This is the largest data massacre in the history of the Internet," Dotcom wrote on Twitter. Lawyers representing his former company "have repeatedly asked Leaseweb not to delete Megaupload servers while court proceedings are pending in the US," he added.

[PJ: Now I know what cloud company never to trust with my personal documents. This is worse, to me, than copyright infringement. At least with that, you still have your stuff.] - RT

Oracle accidentally changed the licence of MySQL manual pages from the previous GPLv2 licence to a non-free licence. The change was revealed by Colin Charles, MariaDB evangelist, in a post on the MariaDB Foundation's blog. But as the news spread, a bug report in Oracle's issue tracker revealed that what had been found was actually a problem in the build system.

Oracle's Tomas Ulin explained that the bug would be fixed and that corrected releases of the MySQL GPL/Community packages would be rebuilt and made available. "We apologize for the confusion this has caused," added Ulin, who invited any users concerned about changes to file bugs as "Reporting a bug is always a good way to communicate with us".

[PJ: MariaDB should have contacted Oracle before posting this. And we as journalists should be cautious the next time MariaDB makes a claim, and we should verify before repeating it.] - The H

In a message which seemed designed for her domestic audience, Merkel told Obama that balance was essential in government monitoring of Internet communications.

"I made clear that although we do see the need for gathering information, the topic of proportionality is always an important one and the free democratic order is based on people feeling safe," said the 58-year-old chancellor.

Obama countered that the U.S. had thwarted at least 50 threats because of its monitoring program, including planned attacks in Germany.

"So lives have been saved and the encroachment on privacy has been strictly limited," he said. - Reuters

Dozens of civil liberties organizations and Internet companies-including the Electronic Privacy Information Center, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, ThoughtWorks, and Americans for Limited Government-today joined a coalition demanding Congress initiate a full-scale investigation into the NSA's surveillance programs. This morning, we sent an updated letter to Congress with 115 organizations and companies demanding public transparency and an end to illegal spying....

It's been less than two weeks since the first NSA revelations were published in the Guardian, and it's clear the American people want Congress to act. The first step is organizing an independent investigation, similar to the Church Committee in the 1970s, to publicly account for all of the NSA's surveillance capabilities. This type of public process will ensure the American people are informed, once and for all, about government surveillance conducted in their name. Our letter tells Congress:

"This type of blanket data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy. This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution..." - EFF

An anonymous reader writes "As reported earlier on Slashdot it appeared the license covering the MySQL man pages was changed from the GPL to something less good. However, as speculated, this appears to be a bug." The build system was grabbing the wrong files, oops. The fix should be coming shortly: "Once the fixes have been made to the build system, we will rebuild the latest 5.1, 5.5, 5.6 releases plus the latest 5.7 milestone and make those available publicly asap." - Slashdot

On Thursday, June 13, 2013, the ACS National Convention Gala Dinner featured introductory remarks by ACS President Caroline Fredrickson and Judge Nancy Gertner, a former Judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and Harvard Law Professor. Senator Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) gave a keynote address following an introduction by Judge Gertner. ACS Board Member Judith Scott then introduced the second speaker, Senator Jeff Merkley (Ore.). The Gala Dinner also featured the Student Chapter Awards and remarks by ACS Board Chair Peter Edelman. - American Constitution Society

Testimony of Professor Lessig about increasing "sovietization" of social life by digital technologies. [Full Congressional hearing on Privacy Rights of Public Figures here.] - C-Span

The Linux Foundation produces more than 15 events a year....But we don't want only "known" or "known to us" experts to apply to speak at our events. We are anxious and motivated to reach out to new people: new developers, new users, new communities....

This is why we're calling on new speakers to submit a proposal to speak at one of our Linux events. (And if you've spoken before you are welcome, too!) Coming up we have LinuxCon and CloudOpen in North America September 16-18 in New Orleans. The CFP for both LinuxCon and CloudOpen closes on June 20th so please get them in now: CFP for LinuxCon North America; CFP for CloudOpen North America.

Shortly after that we'll be hosting LinuxCon Europe, CloudOpen Europe, Embedded Linux Conference Europe and Automotive Linux Summit in Edinburgh in October. You have until July 21 to submit your talks for LinuxCon Europe and CloudOpen Europe.

If you've never spoken at one of our events or any event for that matter, we invite you to make this the year you do. Open source is only as strong as the people sharing and exchanging code and information, and we need your contributions. If you've been intimidated or hesitant about public speaking, this is your opportunity to try it out in a community with a shared sense of purpose and support. - Amanda McPherson, Linux.com

Lucy Koh uncaged! Wowza. Her honor just went on a rant against the imperfect patent exam/re-exam/do-over system. [At Silicon Valley Four Seasons for patent troll panel: Judge Koh, Cisco GC Mark Chandler, Peter Detkin of Intellectual Ventures.] - Ginny LaRoe, Twitter

You'll need a Pi (of course), an Ethernet cable, a Wi-Fi adapter with an antenna, an SD card loaded with the Raspbian operating system, and a power supply. You can buy all these from Adafruit in the company's Onion Pi Pack, but the components are pretty standard and could be obtained from many other sources. A portion of sales through Adafruit will go to the Tor Foundation.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is excited about the project, saying it could let users "Foil the NSA and Prism with a Tor proxy." Using Tor routes your Internet traffic through several relays in an attempt to hide your location and identity.

"Using it is easy-as-pie," Adafruit wrote. "First, plug the Ethernet cable into any Internet provider [sic] in your home, work, hotel or conference/event. Next, power up the Pi with the Micro USB cable to your laptop or to the wall adapter. The Pi will boot up and create a new secure wireless access point called Onion Pi. Connecting to that access point will automatically route any web browsing from your computer through the anonymizing Tor network." - Jon Brodkin, ars technica

If you have been on the internet in the past couple of years, you're likely quite aware that the Raspberry Pi is a cheap, tiny, machine of barely adequate power and wonders. One problem you may have encounter with the Pi is that, though cheap and easily obtainable, you have no idea what to do with it once you get it, or don't have the time or gumption to create something useful. If you fall into the latter camp, the folks over at Adafruit have created just the mini-project for you: Onion Pi, a Raspberry Pi turned into a Tor proxy and access point. - Geek.com

Citing the NSA telephone dragnet, a federal judge ordered the United States government to deliver telephone records demanded by a man on trial for an armored car robbery in which a Brink's employee was killed....

In light of the recently revealed National Security Agency surveillance program, Brown's attorneys challenged the government's claim that it has no access to records of Brown's phone calls. Prosecutors claimed they were missing records of calls to and from two of Brown's telephones before Sept. 1, 2010. They claimed Brown's service provider, MetroPCS, no longer had the records. - Courthouse News

Speaking to the FT prior to the Ascend P6 launch in London, Huawei's Richard Yu said: "We are considering these sorts of acquisitions; maybe the combination has some synergies but depends on the willingness of Nokia. We are open-minded".

At the same time, Yu was critical of the "weak" Windows mobile phone platform, adding that its license fee is a significant turn-off from Huawei's point of view. - The Register

Now that the IT industry has matured, we expect more security "out of the box." This has become possible largely because of two technology trends: cloud computing and vendor-controlled platforms. The first means that most of our data resides on other networks: Google Docs, Salesforce.com, Facebook, Gmail. The second means that our new internet devices are both closed and controlled by the vendors, giving us limited configuration control: iPhones, ChromeBooks, Kindles, Blackberries. Meanwhile, our relationship with IT has changed. We used to use our computers to do things. We now use our vendor-controlled computing devices to go places. All of these places are owned by someone.

The new security model is that someone else takes care of it - without telling us any of the details. I have no control over the security of my Gmail or my photos on Flickr. I can't demand greater security for my presentations on Prezi or my task list on Trello, no matter how confidential they are. I can't audit any of these cloud services. I can't delete cookies on my iPad or ensure that files are securely erased. Updates on my Kindle happen automatically, without my knowledge or consent.

[PJ: You have no control on the feudal internet, but you don't have to live there. You do have choices.] - Bruce Schneier, Harvard Business Review

As a former Article III judge, I can tell you that your faith in the FISA Court is dramatically misplaced.

Two reasons: One ... The Fourth Amendment frameworks have been substantially diluted in the ordinary police case. One can only imagine what the dilution is in a national security setting. Two, the people who make it on the FISA court, who are appointed to the FISA court, are not judges like me. Enough said. - ThinkProgress

Eunice Huthart, who says she worked as a stunt double for Angelina Jolie, has filed a lawsuit against News Corp. for intercepting her voice-mail messages.

The complaint was filed in California last week and is believed to be the first claim brought by a victim in the U.S. over the ongoing hacking scandal that has been haunting Rupert Murdoch's company. - Hollywood Reporter

Given the threat software patents pose to all free and open source developers, it's important to use every defence available as well as to unite to frustrate patent aggressors. To that end, the MariaDB Foundation has become a licensee of the Open Invention Network, a patent non-aggression community with a number of facets including patent pooling, cross-licensing and defensive filing. While the impact on MariaDB may not immediately be huge, the Board felt this gesture of solidarity was important. - The MariaDB Blog