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The British spy agency GCHQ has secretly tapped more than 200 fiber-optic cables carrying phone and internet traffic and has been sharing data with the U.S. National Security Agency, according to a news report. One part of the operation, codenamed Tempora, has been operating for about 18 months and allows the agency to tap large volumes of data siphoned from the cables and store it for up to 30 days for sifting and analyzing. Each of the cables carries about 10 gigabits of data per second, which the paper likened to sending all of the information in all the books in the British Library through the cables 192 times every 24 hours.

A group of established business operators collude to lock a radical new upstart out of the marketplace (O’Toole, 2013). Does this sound familiar? It should: as proprietary software vendors tried to lock GNU/Linux out of the computer market, traditional car interests are trying to block Tesla Motors’ direct sales business model. In both cases, what is best for the consumer is a secondary concern to maintaining the old profit regimes.

Can Ubuntu smartphones and mobile devices connect with mobile carriers and telecom companies? Eager for a positive answer, Canonical has launched the Carrier Advisory Group (CAG) -- which aims to shape Ubuntu for the mobile industry. The move comes a few weeks after Ubuntu Founder Mark Shuttleworth told The VAR Guy that the world needs a Google Android alternative.

DAVE announced an SODIMM-style computer-on-module based on a Texas Instruments Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 system-on-chip, complete with dual CAN interfaces, Linux support, and two evaluation baseboard options. The Diva computer module is also available from U.S.-based Smart Embedded Systems, with turnkey support including Linux drivers and firmware for the processor’s programmable real-time unit (PRU).

Since the Computex launch of Intel's much anticipated Haswell processors at the beginning of the month, there's been much Linux coverage on Phoronix concerning the compatibility and performance of these new Intel processors from both the processing and graphics sides. Here's a summary of all of our discoveries and findings over the past few weeks.

Version 1.0 of the KScreen System Settings Module has been released for easy yet powerful RandR-based screen management from the KDE desktop. KScreen has been the talked about new way for KDE users for controlling your displays with support for preserving display configurations, setting up screens in a presentation mode, or virtually any other configuration you could desire for the KDE desktop.

One of the more painful areas of cross-platform computing is data sharing. While networking between Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux has gotten a lot easier thanks to SAMBA, disk sharing still feels like it’s in its infancy thanks to proprietary file systems and the unique legacy needs of the respective operating systems they run on.

After a brief respite, the Guardian newspaper has resumed its publication of leaked NSA documents. The latest round provides a look at the secret rules the government follows for collecting data on U.S. persons.

In recent years, the open source WordPress content management (nee Blog) platform has emerged to become the dominant player in the web CMS space. That's why when there is a security update you should RUN DON'T WALK to patch. WordPress 3.5.2 is out today fixing 12 flaws of varying severity.

Red Hat OpenStack was mentioned 32 times during the Linux company's Q1 2014 earnings call earlier this week. The open source cloud platform is receiving tons of hype. But here's the reality check: Red Hat (RHT) concedes OpenStack will NOT drive any material revenues, billings or bookings for the next 12 months. Does that mean customers can ignore OpenStack for now? Not necessarily. Here's why.

With the extensive coverage on Phoronix this month of Intel's new Haswell processors on Linux, many articles have shown that when using the latest components (e.g. Linux 3.10 kernel and Mesa 9.2) that the OpenGL performance is a whole lot faster. But are these changes specific to Haswell or benefit Intel's driver as a whole? In this article are new benchmarks from an older Intel "Sandy Bridge" system with HD 3000 graphics to see whether the performance there is also improving with the latest Linux code.

Companies buy Microsoft products for many reasons, but they all assume that the company is doing its best to protect them. The latest revelations shows that is a false assumption. A careless mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that special access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency have been secretly built into Windows.

With new code going into Mesa on a daily basis, here's the very latest benchmarks comparing the state of stable Mesa 9.1.3 against the Mesa 9.2 development code with all of the performance optimizations it brings to the Intel DRI driver for the latest-generation Haswell graphics hardware.

The public cloud's heyday has passed, and enterprises should focus on hybrid cloud investment. So say executives at Rackspace (RAX), the OpenStack-powered cloud hosting vendor. And if deals like the one Rackspace just announced with Fidelity Investments to build an OpenStack cloud is any indication, Rackspace's vision is on the mark. Here's the scoop.

Continuing in the weekly drops until Wine 1.6 is officially baked, Wine 1.6-rc3 was released this afternoon and has more bug-fixes. Since going into the release candidate phase two weeks ago, no new features are being introduced into the Wine trunk code-base but only bug-fixes under this code freeze.

One of the founders of file-sharing site Pirate Bay will apparently spend a couple more years in jail. Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was arrested last September on charges that he was part of a cyberattack against Logica, an IT outfit that manages tax documents and services for Swedish companies.

The Cheapskate's Corner: the place where we inform you about what you need to know to get the best deals in Linux games.

Xiph.Org is now working on Daala, a new general-purpose video codec designed to be next-generation beyond VP9 and HEVC. The project is still considered "pre-pre-alpha", but it gives hope to a new generation of open-source video support.

This article, on the cozy relationship between the commercial personal-data industry and the intelligence industry, has new information on the security of Skype.

Skype, the Internet-based calling service, began its own secret program, Project Chess, to explore the legal and technical issues in making Skype calls readily available to intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials, according to people briefed on the program who asked not to be named to avoid trouble with the intelligence agencies.

Sometimes the display brightness on laptops running Linux does not adjust properly or can't be controlled (it seems) from the desktop. Here's a solution that will work for some.