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Snowden receives three-year Russian residence permit …

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By Alexei Anishchuk

MOSCOW Thu Aug 7, 2014 9:38am EDT

Fugitive former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden's refugee documents granted by Russia is seen during a news conference in Moscow August 1, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Maxim Shemetov

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, wanted by the United States for leaking extensive secrets of its electronic surveillance programs, has been given a three-year residence permit by Russia, his Russian lawyer said on Thursday.

Moscow's relations with the West are at Cold War-era lows over Russia's actions in Ukraine. Russia banned certain food imports from the United States, the European Union, Australia, Canada and Norway on Thursday in response to Western sanctions.

"The decision on the application has been taken and therefore, with effect from Aug. 1, 2014, Edward Snowden has received a three-year residential permit," Anatoly Kucherena said. "In the future, Edward himself will take a decision on whether to stay on (in Russia) on and get Russian citizenship or leave for the United States."

He said Snowden could apply for citizenship in 2018 after living in Russia for five years, but that he had not decided whether he wanted to stay or leave.

The spokesman for the White House National Security Council, Ned Price, said Snowden needed to return to the United States to face charges related to the leaks.

"Mr. Snowden faces felony charges here in the United States. He should return to the U.S. as soon as possible, where he will be accorded full due process and protections," Price said.

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Rivals Yahoo And Google In Joint Email Encryption Venture

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August 12, 2014

Eric Hopton for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Two tech world giants Yahoo and Google have put rivalry aside in an attempt to introduce a new joint email encryption system. With over 600 million unique email users between them, the two companies have a huge share of the global market and the ability to offer enhanced encryption will help cement their positions as leaders in the field. They are planning to have the new system up and running by next year.

Email encryption has become a burning issue in the wake of the Edward Snowden affair and the controversies surrounding his leaking of National Security Agency secrets in 2013. The Snowden revelations sparked a big increase in public demands for more secure email provisions.

For the new system to be successful it will need to offer greatly improved security and be user-friendly without the normal complexity and clumsiness of current encryption methods. Google and Yahoo believe they have the answer. The new tool will be an optional add-on with users able to turn it on and off at will.

As Stephanie Mlot of UKs PCMag reports, the announcement of the joint venture was made by Yahoos Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos at this years Black Hat security conference held in Las Vegas.

In the post-Snowden world Google has already beefed up its email security with new measures to enhance protection. Earlier this year the company announced that Gmail would be using encrypted HTTPS connection for all mail, replacing the less secure HTTP. HTTPS was always an option, but was turned on for everyone in 2010; however the option could be turned off. This option was removed in March. Google claimed that improvements to HTTPS had overcome initial objections that the system was slower than HTTP. The company followed this up with the launch of a trial of its End-to-End encryption tool extension. When End-to-End is up and running it will provide the option of an extra level of security for highly sensitive messages.

As Danny Yadron writes in his Wall Street Journal blog, the proposed Google/Yahoo tool will use existing Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) technology. Traditional email services depend on web companies holding users passwords and other security and identification data on their own servers. PGP, however, relies on each user having their own encryption key stored on their laptops, tablets and smartphones.

There are important legal implications for the PGP option. In the past the US courts have been able to force webmail companies into handing over their encryption keys most notably in the case of Lavabit, Snowdens own email provider at the time of his leaks.

Yadron points out that the new encryption method promised by Google and Yahoo would enable them to argue that they dont have the keys for their encryption service. If that looks like its leading to the next government versus the internet industry battle, then it seems that Yahoo at least is up for the fight. As Stamos puts it, Yahoo is a publicly traded multibillion dollar company with an army of lawyers who would love to take this argument all the way to the Supreme Court.

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Rivals Yahoo And Google In Joint Email Encryption Venture

How Yahoo email encryption could help your business

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If Yahoo gets it right, then the end-to-end email encryption the Internet company is promising would be a big help to companies concerned with privacy in the use of webmail, experts say.

Alex Stamos, chief information security officer for Yahoo, announced last week at Black Hat that the company was developing a browser plug-in for encrypting messages sent from Yahoo Mail.

[ Prevent corporate data leaks with Roger Grimes' "Data Loss Prevention Deep Dive" PDF expert guide, only from InfoWorld. | Stay up to date on the latest security developments with InfoWorld's Security Central newsletter. ]

[Yahoo! Encrypts! All! The! Things!]

The company planned to release the plug-in next year.

Stamos demonstrated the plug-in, which was "pretty clunky," Cameron Camp, a security researcher at anti-virus vendor ESET who attended the demo, said. However, the early-stage technology was expected to be much better by the time it's released.

The goal is to make end-to-end encryption (E2EE) easy enough that any company employee or consumer can send email over the Web that remains indecipherable until the recipient decrypts it.

Deploying that level of secrecy today is difficult and is not user friendly, which hampers adoption by all but the most security conscious organizations.

"It's really hard to do," Camp said of E2EE. "Their (Yahoo's) goal is to make it easy enough, so anyone can do it."

Based on the demonstration, a person who wants to send an encrypted message would compose it through the plug-in, as opposed to on the regular Yahoo Mail interface.

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How to Overcome Hidden Barriers to Open Source Adoption

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Your organization may be unintentionally biased against free software.

Ten years ago, open source advocates faced an uphill battle when they tried to implement free software in an organization, while proprietary vendors such as Microsoft spoke out publicly and fiercely against it. Barriers to implementation included worries about security, support, warranties and indemnities, and concerns that the quality of software that was freely available would be inferior to that produced on a commercial basis and licensed for a fee.

A decade later, the landscape has changed considerably. The open source model is well-established and far better understood, and a huge proportion of companies use open source software somewhere in their IT operations.

[ Tips: How to Run Your Small Business With Free Open Source Software ]

One reason is that many of the concerns have disappeared. A recent Future of Open Source Survey found that 72 percent of respondents use open source software because they believe it provides better security than proprietary alternatives, and 80 percent believe it offers better quality than proprietary software.

These survey findings correspond with the day-to-day experience of IT professionals such as Mark Winiberg, whose company, Charter Software, offers open source deployment and training. "Ten years ago, open source software was a hard sell," he says. "These days, I am simply not seeing the same level of opposition to it."

Procurement Policies Often Biased Against Open Source

That's not to say that barriers to open source software have disappeared completely. There's evidence, for example, that many organizations' software procurement policies are still designed for a world of proprietary software and therefore make open source solutions problematic to use.

Examples of this are policies dictating that any prospective vendor's financial figures be scrutinized, and that the vendor must have been in business for three years. How do you scrutinize the financials of an open source project?

Clearly, this type of policy needs updating to reflect the reality of the open source world and to prevent open source software from being effectively ruled out, says Simon Phipps, the president of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), a nonprofit that advocates open source software.

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How to Overcome Hidden Barriers to Open Source Adoption

@ThingsExpo | @Citrix To Present "Crash Course" in Open Source #Cloud

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In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mark Hinkle, Senior Director, Open Source Solutions at Citrix Systems Inc., will provide overview of the open source software that can be used to deploy and manage a cloud computing environment. He will include information on storage, networking(e.g., OpenDaylight) and compute virtualization (Xen, KVM, LXC) and the orchestration(Apache CloudStack, OpenStack) of the three to build their own cloud services.

Speaker Bio: Mark Hinkle is the Senior Director, Open Source Solutions, at Citrix Systems Inc. He joined Citrix as a result of their July 2011 acquisition of Cloud.com where he was their Vice President of Community. He is currently responsible for Citrix open source efforts around the open source cloud computing platform, Apache CloudStack and the Xen Hypervisor. Previously he was the VP of Community at Zenoss Inc., a producer of the open source application, server, and network management software, where he grew the Zenoss Core project to over 100,000 users and 20,000 organizations on all seven continents. He also is a longtime open source expert and author having served as Editor-in-Chief for both LinuxWorld Magazine and Enterprise Open Source Magazine. His blog on open source, technology, and new media can be found at http://www.socializedsoftware.com.

Cloud Expo's giant Silicon View billboard which is viewed by more than 1.3 million motorists per week

The 15th InternationalCloud Expo has just expanded its conference program, to bring together Cloud Computing, APM, APIs, Security, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps and WebRTC at one location.

The show now has three tracks devoted exclusively to the IoT (with WebRTC present in one of the tracks), a full single track focusing on Big Data, and a two-track DevOps Summit, in addition to four tracks devoted exclusively to Cloud Computing in the enterprise.

Cloud Expo is the single show where delegates and technology vendors can meet to experience and discuss the entire world of the cloud.

With Cloud Computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to learn about the latest technology developments and solutions.

Attend Cloud Expo Nov 4-6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA. Craft your own custom experience. Learn the latest from the world's best technologists. Find the vendors you want and put them to the test.

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New Open-Source Tool Makes it Easy to Tap Into Docker, the Cloud’s Next Big Thing

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Your new app is brilliant; the code youve spent six months writing is beautiful. But when you upload it from your laptop to the web server, it just doesnt work. You know why: your laptops is configured slightly differently than the server, and now youre now going to have to spend hours maybe days figuring out what you need to change to make it run properly.

This is one of the biggest headaches for software developers. Its something that a popular piece of open source software called Docker can help alleviate. And now Docker has a helper of its own, an open-source project called Panamax that makes it easier to use Docker on the cloud.

Docker packs applications into software containers, which contain everything required to run the application. This makes it much easier to move an application from a developers laptop to a server, or to migrate the app from one server to another. Since its first public release in January 2013, the software has been downloaded over 8.7 million times and attracted over 553 contributors. There are now over 10,000 Docker related projects on the code hosting and collaboration platform GitHub.

But even though Docker makes it easier to run apps in the cloud, setting up the cloud that those applications will actually run on is still a pain. Thats because even though its simple to have two or more Docker containers on the same server talk with each other, enabling communications between containers that are spread across multiple servers is a bit of a nightmare. You can do it, but its something of a dark art, says Lucas Carlson, the founder of the cloud computing company AppFog, which was acquired by CenturyLink last year.

Thats why Carlsons team at CenturyLink built Panamax, a new open source tool designed to make it a snap to build and maintain Docker clouds.

Panamax is based around bundles of Docker containers called templates, which are pre-configured sets of apps that are ready to communicate with each other. For example, if you wanted to run a WordPress blog on your Docker cloud, you could install a Panamax template that includes both the WordPress application and the required database server. Once a template has been created, it can be instantly deployed with the Panamax interface.

In many ways, Panamax resembles a platform-as-a-service or PaaS much like Heroku, Google App Engine, or a growing number of Docker-based systems like Flynn and Deis. But Carlson says Panamax isnt a PaaS. I already built a PaaS, and I dont want to build another one, he says. Instead, he describes Panamax as a cloud builder. You could even use it to install a PaaS on your server, if you wanted.

Panamax already has many supporters in the container community, including Docker itself. I think its pretty exciting, says Docker vice president of services James Turnbull. Panamax helps with service composition and its very point and click which is awesome as a front-end to Docker.

Its very point and click which is awesome as a front-end to Docker

In some ways, Panamax looks like it could compete with Docker, the company. After all, selling premium management and configuration tools is a standard way to build a business around open source cloud technologies. But Dockers vice president of services James Turnbull says the company has different objectives from Panamax.

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Report: Snowden allowed to stay in Russia for three more years

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Grant Gross | Aug. 8, 2014

The former NSA contractor gets a three-year residency permit from the Russian government.

The Russian government will allow Edward Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor who leaked details of the agency's worldwide surveillance programs, to stay in the country for three more years, according to Russia news reports.

Snowden, living in Russia for the past year, was granted temporary asylum that expired July 31, but the Russian government on Aug. 1 granted him a three-year residency permit, according to Russian news site RT.com.

Snowden is "homesick," and has not made up his mind on whether to apply for Russian citizenship, lawyer Anatoly Kucherena told reporters. Snowden has not asked for political asylum, he said.

Snowden would be eligible to apply for Russian citizenship in five years, RT.com reported.

Snowden faces charges of espionage and theft of government property in the U.S.

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Report: Snowden allowed to stay in Russia for three more years

Russia gives Edward Snowden asylum for three more years

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Russia has extended Edward Snowdens residency permit, allowing the fugitive U.S. intelligence contractor to remain in the country for three more years, his lawyer said Thursday.

Snowden, who is wanted in the United States for leaking information about National Security Agency surveillance practices, was stranded in the transit lounge at a Moscow airport in June 2013 while trying to flee to Latin America. Russia eventually granted him a one-year temporary asylum permit that expired on Aug. 1.

Snowden asked the Russian authorities last month to allow him to stay and finally got an answer this week. "A decision about the application has been taken," Anatoly Kucherena, a Russian lawyer who advises Snowden, said on Thursday.

"Accordingly, from Aug. 1, 2014, Edward Snowden has received a residency permit in Russia for three years, he added. Under the terms of the permit, Snowden can move around Russia and pay visits of up to three months to other countries, "depending how he plans his time," Kucherena told reporters in Moscow.

The document carries a three-year extension option. However, Snowden had not been granted political asylum that would allow him to stay in Russia indefinitely.

Political asylum could only be granted by presidential decree and was a "completely different procedure," Kucherena said. Russias decision to give refuge to Snowden strained relations with the United States.

Relations have been further strained by Russia's annexation of Crimea and support for Ukrainian separatists. The United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions on Russia, which retaliated Wednesday with a ban on certain agricultural and food products from the U.S. and Europe.

Although the United States has sought Snowden's extradition, Kucherena said there were no legal grounds to return him. "He has not committed any crimes. There are no accusations against him in the Russian Federation," the lawyer said.

A Justice Department spokesman called on Snowden to turn himself in.

It remains our position that Mr. Snowden should return to the United States and face the charges filed against him, said the spokesman, Peter Carr. If he does, he will be accorded full due process and protections.

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