"The vast majority of us can do with smaller and cheaper computers," said blogger Robert Pogson. "It's obvious to anyone that a smartphone is a PC for most purposes, and all we have to do is add a larger screen, a keyboard and printing to do just about anything possible with larger more expensive PCs. I have no doubt that the future holds mostly all-in-one PCs with everything in the keyboard or mouse."
Eben Upton, a key player in the Raspberry Pi's genesis, said out-of-work graduates should get busy with computers in their spare time if they want to land a job. And he didn't mean logging into Facebook.
Speaking in a Google Hangout video chat conference call thing, Upton drew on his years of hiring newbies at chip giant Broadcom and his time teaching computer science at Cambridge University.
Linux Warehouse, the premier distributor of enterprise open source software for sub-Saharan Africa, today announced it has added the product sets of NetFort to its portfolio.
“NetFort addresses the business need to monitor what users are doing across their networks,” commented Jan-Jan van der Vyver, Managing Director of Linux Warehouse, “and complements our existing data centre stack.
(Sacramento, CA, USA: November 29, 2012) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization, applauds the release of the flagship report "The Information Economy Report 2012: The Software Industry and Developing Countries" by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The report provides specific recommendations on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for national policy makers and includes two examples of the value of LPI's training and certification programs for ICT development.
In our recent ZaReason UltraLap 430 review, Ars alum Ryan Paul lamented that even though putting Linux on laptops is easier today than ever, it's still not perfect. Some things (particularly components like trackpads and Wi-Fi chips) take some fiddling to get working. Major OEMs aren't yet putting forth the same concerted effort to build and support laptops with Linux as they are their more high-margin servers.
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The XPS 13 used in the Developer Edition features a number of upgrades over the pilot Project Sputnik hardware, including an Intel i5 or i7 Ivy Bridge CPU and 8GB of RAM (the pilot hardware used Sandy Bridge CPUs and had 4GB of RAM). The Developer Edition also comes with a 256 GB SATA III SSD, and retains the pilot version's 1366x768 display resolution. The launch hardware costs $1,549 and includes one year of Dell's "ProSupport." Additional phone support options aren't yet available.
This is the XPS-13 at $1549 in “developer version”. It’s an “Ultrabook”TM with that other OS. I guess it’s a nearly optimal notebook with GNU/Linux although I would prefer Debian GNU/Linux instead of Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
Linux fans may recall the excitement that greeted the launch of Dell's “Project Sputnik” earlier this year.
Made possible through an internal skunkworks effort, the project aimed to create an Ubuntu-preloaded laptop targeting developers, in particular, with what Dell has called a “client to cloud” solution.
Do you want a serious—I mean serious—developer laptop? Then Dell and Ubuntu have the system for you in the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition.
Dell has launched an Ubuntu version of its attractive XPS 13 ultrabook. The ultrabook is aimed at developers, offering them “the essentials they want” bundled up in a Linux-harboring device. The laptop is available for purchase now from Dell starting at $1,449. You can also nab a Windows version of the machine if Ubuntu isn’t your thing.
What once was just an internal skunkworks project, Dell's Project Sputnik has taken off with the release of the XPS 13 Developer Edition. The thin and light darling of the Ultrabook crowd is now shipping with a Precise Pangolin Ubuntu build pre-installed, along with feature-complete drivers that ensure maximum peripheral compatibility right out of the box.
Dell has launched its Ubuntu laptop for developers in the US. The project, which was first announced in May, uses an XPS 13 Ultrabook as the base for a customised Ubuntu 12.04 installation that is aimed at application developers and systems administrators. Dell has worked with Ubuntu sponsor Canonical and various hardware manufacturers to provide support for the hardware, and the system ships with additional features such as the sputnik command that allows developers to easily replicate their development environment on other machines.
According to IBM’s 2011 Annual Report, by September 2015 fully 50% of IBM’s profit is expected to come from its software group (SWG). On the surface, this is surprising, because software is a distinct minority of IBM’s total revenue. In 2011, SWG’s $25B represented less than a quarter of IBM’s revenues earned. Here is IBM’s revenue broken down by business unit (Finance and Other are omitted here).
The latest update of Rocks codename Emerald Boa is now released. Emerald Boa is available for CentOS 6.3 (Rocks 6.1). Rocks 5.6 will be released when CentOS 5.9 becomes available The Rocks-supplied OS rolls have all updates applied as of November 27, 2012.
We interview Jordan Brock from indie development house Hit the Sticks about Just Tactics which is a cross-platform turn-based strategy game.
LXF: Has the Linux desktop failed because there's too much choice? [Laughter]
Linus Torvalds: I don't think the desktop is doing too well, and there's technical reasons. You've probably seen my rants about how, to some degree, I think the desktop is going in the wrong direction, but the big reason is normal people don't want to install an operating system. You can't get a desktop unless you have pre-installs, and that hasn't happened. There are cases where, if you knew where to look, you could get Linux pre-installed if you bought Dell. But, realistically, nobody has done pre-installs.
Thousands of people contribute to Linux every day. As our annual “Who Writes Linux” paper reports, individuals from around the world are writing millions of lines of code every year. Equally important are the hundreds of companies supporting Linux every year, from sponsoring Linux kernel development to collaborating on technical initiatives to supporting The Linux Foundation.
Linux 3.7 supports ARM64, the processor used in the Raspberry Pi, and Intel's SMAP security feature. The next kernel release will also include new tools for tracing processes and improved collaboration with Microsoft's hypervisor.
In addition to the Samsung Exynos ARM SoCs being really attractive right now due to the impressive performance of the A15-based Exynos 5 Dual, the hardware is also nice for its open-source DRM graphics driver that keeps advancing.
Rocks, the RHEL/CentOS-derived operating system focused upon supporting Linux on real and virtual clusters, has delivered on its 6.1 release.
After earlier this week delivering a 12-way AMD Radeon graphics card comparison with the open-source Linux Gallium3D graphics driver, being published today is a similar comparison on the NVIDIA side. Tested for this article were eight NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards from multiple hardware generations while using the very latest open-source Nouveau driver code.
Recently I asked Ryan C. Gordon some questions about his work in porting games, the current state of gaming in Linux, and where he sees it in the future. For those of you who aren't familiar with his work, Ryan has been involved in porting many games and other software to Linux and Mac OSX. Most recently he has been working with the folks at Humble Bundle to ensure their games are cross-platform.
The game tells the story of Hoston, a young botanist who is on a quest to save his father from a mysterious illness. Along with his two best friends Alina and Edessot, the three friends embark on a quest seeking a rare herb to cure the illness of Hoston's father. Little do they know, it is the beginning of a winding journey that unravels his father's past and the mystery of Pier Solar and the Great Architects.
Follow the story of an atypical robot hero set out to rescue his robot-girlfriend, and in turn save the city and defeat the bad guys.
If you are an Indie game fan or a developer, you must have heard of IndieCity. IndieCity is an online Indie game store that allows developers to publish their own games and earn revenue/donations in return. Much like Steam, it had a client that users can use to download and play the games. But unlike Steam, people at IndieCity have announced that they will bring their own client to Linux, and its before their Mac version.
We've taken you through a tour of Window Managers in Linux, and now it's time to show you the Window Manager's bigger brother: the desktop environment, or DE for short. With a sea of choices out there, we can see where Linux newbies might feel a bit overwhelmed. Catch us after the break and we'll show you some of our favorites, along with a few honorable mentions.
While Qt 5.0 is hopefully being released in December, Digia has announced today the release Qt 4.8.4.
The development on KDE 4.10 is is on full swing (we have created a KDE 4.10 update page) and today the KDE project leader Aaron Seigo announe that the upcoming release of KDE will change how window grouping is handled in the task manager.
Currently multiple windows are grouped together in the task manager and this is indicated by a black arrow and a small number showing the number of multiple windows open.
Last Tuesday (November 27, 2012) was the 15th birthday of KDE e.V. (eingetragener Verein; registered association), the legal entity which represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters. We interviewed two of the founding members (Matthias and Matthias) on the why, what and when of KDE e.V. in the beginning and presented a video interview with emeritus board member Mirko Böhm. Today, we focus on the present with interviews with two current KDE e.V. Board members, Lydia Pintscher and Cornelius Schumacher. On the bottom, we've got a nice puzzle for you. And next week, we'll present an impression of the day to day activities of KDE e.V.
Hello ROSA users and just KLook fans. I have some great news for you. Several days ago we published on the our build system build system - ABF a new version of KLook with the many improvements. Most of these improvement have made in KLook architecture, so you will not see many visible changes, but you will felt them.
Thanks to Windows 8 and Valve, GNU/Linux may finally become a first class citizen for the gaming industry. So which desktop should be your preferred for Linux gaming? I will answer that question but first see how different is KDE when compared with it's cousins Unity and Gnome Shell.
Martin Gräßlin, a lead KDE developer, addresses some queries around a topic bugging Gnome and Unity users - the fallback mode. I recommend reading his 'abridged' post. Here I am picking the points that I found interesting for our readers. The questions is: will KDE retain the fallback in 4.10 and after?
Qt lead developer Lars Knoll has announced the release schedule for version 5.0 of the C++ GUI framework. According to this schedule, Qt 5.0 is due to arrive before the end of the year. The first "major" release in eight years was originally planned to be released in summer 2012, but its arrival has been delayed by the main developers' move from Nokia to Digia.
GNOME is changing, as every community driven project, GNOME is involved in a daily evolution.
I graphed the Gentoo Developer Web of Trust, as motivated by the (outdated) Debian Web of Trust.
According to all Linux distribution packages, Oracle Linux has a much smaller footprint than the Windows Server operating system. This means that if you want to maximize your storage space on a server, Oracle Linux could be a good option for you.
While it does not run on many older x86 machines like some of the really small Linux distributions, there is an Amazon E3 Cloud package for Oracle Linux that can be used if you are planning on using Amazon's very capable cloud based storage environment.
The Fedora 18 release date has been delayed about half dozen times in last couple of months. Other than a few snide remarks, Fedora has mostly been given a pass since one of the features causing delays is the new installer - and no one wants that too early. However, the release team recently released Fedora 18 Beta, giving users a preview.
Fedora 18 should be sporting a new package manager currently dubbed DNF, a fork of Yum 3.4. Yum and DNF will be included in Fedora 18, but early plans are to remerge the two eventually. One of the advantages of DNF for end users is increased performance and simplified operation. Check out Fedora's wiki for more technical information on DNF and the underlying library Hawkey.
Veteran Debian developer Bdale Garbee will give the third keynote at the Australian national Linux conference next year.
he developers of Linux Mint 14 haven't forgotten about their users and are porting some of the features for the previous 13 release.
Linux Mint 13 is an LTS or Long Term Support. This means that it benefits from five years of security updates. Why not benefit from other great features implemented in Linux Mint 14?
If in these days you take a look at the list of possible gifts/gadgets that will be hot in the next Christmas you’ll find almost for sure the Raspberry Pi.
This is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also able to play high-definition video and sending the output through an HDMI interface to a TV or a monitor and all of this at a starting price of around 25$.
I recently made a post comparing the specs of the A10 based MK802 to the RaspBerry Pi. For those who are unaware the MK802 is a low cost, Android based media PC you can pick up on Amazon for less than 40 USD. A little over a month ago I replaced my desktop sized media computer with an MK802 - today I would like to share with you my thoughts on the device.
A job ad posted by Nokia on employment network LinkedIn sees the company looking to hire a senior engineer to work on new mobile devices and software, but they’re not Windows Phones. It’s for Linux. Which is the core of Android.
The pair of Motorola smartphones will see a Jelly Bean update starting the first week of December.
PengPod plans to start shipping 7 and 10 inch tablets with support for Linux as well as Google Android in January. The company, founded by Neal Peacock, has been raising money to help support software development for the tablets -- and Peacock just wrote in to let us know the project has surpassed its initial $49,000 fundraising goal.
Whether you prefer open source or proprietary technology, there’s no shortage of virtualization hypervisors to choose from these days. With so many options, which solutions are enterprises selecting, and where will momentum in this channel lead in the future? I recently spoke with virtualization expert Jon Braunhut, who offered a lot of interesting observations and predictions on this topic based on his experience as chief scientist at KEMP Technologies.
Geeks often describe programs as being “open source” or “free software.” If you’re wondering exactly what these terms mean and why they matter, read on. (No, “free software” doesn’t just mean that you can download it for free.)
Beyond the most radically geeky segments of society, few Americans are likely to have thought of software when they counted their blessings this Thanksgiving. For most people, computers are hardly in the same category as food, shelter and loving friends and family. That said, a recent blog post got me thinking about the software projects and people to whom I do owe personal gratitude. My list comes a bit belatedly, since Thanksgiving 2012 has come and gone, but here are the five items that top it.
Whether you want to monitor your network bandwidth, secure your network against malware, or setup a simple mail server, there's an open source or free software available for the job. Presented here are more than 40+ of them
Here’s a fun experiment (if, like me, you’re a huge nerd): take an open source policy from your agency, company, whatever, and strike out the words "open source." Bam, you now have a much more sensible and reasonable "software" policy.
Using HTTPS doesn't just mean that your traffic is encrypted—encryption is only half of the story and it's useless without authentication. What good is it to encrypt something between two parties if you can't be sure of the identity of the person to whom you're talking? Consequently, being able to serve HTTPS traffic means you must posses a cryptographic certificate attesting to your identity. Acquiring such a certificate requires you prove your identity to one of many Certificate Authorities, or CAs.
Google has updated the Stable, Beta and Developer Channels of the desktop version of its Chrome browser with a number of bug fixes and improvements. The Stable Channel update closes seven security vulnerabilities, three of them rated High, and includes bug fixes. New stable Chrome versions for iOS and Android have also been released and include minor improvements. The iOS version of the browser now supports Apple's Passbook application.
Seamonkey is not the first name that comes to mind when you talk about browsers. Nor is it a fourth. In fact, it's not even a browser. But then, in those terms, neither is Opera. Seamonkey is an all-in-one cross-platform Internet suite, a collection of Web-facing programs all bundled into a single product. Worth your time? Perhaps, we will discover today.
hroughout its history, Mozilla has supported innovation on the web by investing in people and its own development. Today Mozilla is moving to the next stage in its evolution, formally investing in a mobile startup that could help to enable its nascent FirefoxOS platform.
Mozilla is participating in a $25 million series C funding round for Everything.me, which is an HTML5-focused mobile startup. Mozilla is joining the venture team of Telefonica Digital as well as SingTel Innov8 in the funding round.
While the phone Firefox OS was running on couldn’t take advantage of a mobile data network, the developer was able to tether that phone to another one. Obviously, this being pre-alpha software, things didn’t work as well or as smoothly as in the final version. But even in that early form and running on underpowered hardware, Firefox OS showed promise.
Mozilla is trying to fix a problem that's bugging its Android users running Firefox. Since Adobe doesn't support Flash for Android or any other mobile devices, Firefox users were not able to play H.264 encoded videos.
Widenius told The Reg he's scared about the future of MySQL. He said he is concerned that if the database giant further breaches its commitments to the EU, it will produce an irreconcilable fork: with MySQL at Oracle going one way and those extending MySQL – such as Widenius's MariaDB and Facebook and Twitter – going another.
Kohei Yoshida is a well-known individual on the LibreOffice project. To many, he is considered as one of the core group of developers who have contributed to the steady development and code improvement of the project, and one of the leaders of the calc component. Kohei takes a little time out from his busy schedule to let us know a little more about himself and why the LibreOffice project appeals to him.
VA is continually evolving the health care we deliver to Veterans, from enhancing treatment for Traumatic Brain Injury and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to enabling clinicians and patients to use mobile devices to improve care. The VA Innovation Initiative (VAi2) supports this constructive evolution by tapping the talent and expertise of individuals inside and outside of government for creative solutions and providing a method for new ideas to be evaluated, tested, and deployed.
The Open Source CRM project Zurmo has released Zurmo Version 0.8.0, which allows users to send emails directly from within the application.
Ah, open source ... so free, so transparent, so egalitarian, but not always. Increasingly, vendors are slapping the label "open source" on products that do not offer customers the freedom and control originally intended and instead lock them in, reports Simon Phipps at InfoWorld.
Acquia, a U.S. startup that advises enterprises on open source content management system Drupal, said it has raised $30 million from Investor Growth Capital and other venture firms to finance its expansion.
So, please consider supporting one or two of your favorites projects. On my side, I’m installing Ubuntu, just to buy Uberwriter, and I have contributed a little with Ubuntu at the time of downloading it. And I have already made my very small contribution to the Debian Handbook.
New round of funding will help build and expand the operations of open source enterprise content management system vendor Acquia.
A focus on young people in the open source world is just starting to become a priority, and we're also starting to see more larger corporations demonstrating their commitment to open source. Open source is indeed spreading as more and more people understand the value of the open source way.
Today PLOS Computational Biology launched a collection of seven existing Software articles which present novel biological insights on an open access platform and break new ground by sharing the open source software that enabled the featured discoveries. This combination of Open Access and Open Source can only help push the development of computational biology’s many diverse fields – and create a model for other scientific disciplines.
Build Your Own Arduino-Powered Bicycle Lights, Turn Signals, and Odometer for Safe Night RidingBuild Your Own Arduino-Powered Bicycle Lights, Turn Signals, and Odometer for Safe Night Riding Riding a bicycle at night is a bit dangerous, but electronics blogger Jenna DeBoisblanc shows off how to build a system that includes turn signals, a strobe light, speedometer, and brake lights to keep you safe.
The LLVM compiler infrastructure is frequently talked about on Phoronix whether it be about its Clang C/C++ compiler or one of the innovative use-cases for LLVM such as with the LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver or as a JIT engine within some free software projects like Mono. However, for those that don't understand much of the internals of LLVM, here's a brief overview.
Some of the would-be cool kids of software say we are in the "post open source" world. Several weeks ago, James Governor, founder of analyst firm RedMonk, put it this way on Twitter: "younger devs today are about POSS - Post open source software. f*** the license and governance, just commit to github."
But as Outercurve Foundation's CTO Stephen Walli replied, "promiscuous sharing w/out a license leads to software transmitted diseases." Since then, I have heard more and more people mention this trend of regarding the copyright and collaboration terms of a project as irrelevant bureaucracy. Appealing as it may be to treat the wisdom of the years as pointless, doing so creates a problem for the future.
Genode OS, the very interesting research operating system, is out with a new release that boasts some interesting features.
Genode OS is one of the early non-Linux operating systems that ported Gallium3D and GEM for its graphics drivers, provided a Gallium3D LiveCD, and then grew ambitions to become a general purpose OS. In its latest release it was ported to ARM and picked up other features, but now it's been even more improved.
If there’s one valuable thing Twitter holds, it is the company’s vast treasure trove of billions of tweets. It is an opus of thoughts and utterances, all made in real time, that make up the company’s most precious asset — the “interest graph.”
Twitter knows this. And for years now the company has had agreements with a number of third-party companies, giving them access to the “firehose,” or the raw stream of Twitter data flowing through the company’s pipes. These companies comb through the scores of tweets to find meaningful insights, and resell that information to companies across multiple industries. It’s a “big data” economy, built entirely around Twitter’s never-ending flow of information.
In a piece called Intel kills off the desktop, PCs go with it SemiAccurate reports that Japan's PC Watch has reliable, but unidentified reports that Intel has told OEM's that Intel will decline to offer pluggable processors for the Broadwell architecture (which will appear after 2013's Haswell architecture.) Instead OEMs will recieve ball grid array multi-chip modules (BGM MCM). These modules will be installed onto the motherboard by soldering, effectively making the CPU part of the motherboard.
Readers please remember that this isn't an Intel press release. This news is only off-the record reports from manufacturers who have been talking to Intel. Intel also has a history of changing their plans.
It could all be speculation because it would be silly to solder a very expensive processor onto a cheap motherboard. What's more likely is that in 2014 Intel will focus on delivering hi-frequency Haswell chips for the desktop, while it reserves the next-generation Broadwell chips for low-power applications. This would explain the rumors of why there will be no socketable Broadwell chips. So, Intel simply skips a single generation for the Desktop sockets. No more, no less.
A study published this week in the Environmental Science & Technology journal, "Novel and High Volume Use Flame Retardants in US Couches Reflective of the 2005 PentaBDE Phase Out," reveals that 85% of couches purchased in the United States between 1985 and 2010 contain chemical flame retardants. The most prevalent include polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), tris (1-3-dichloroisopropyl) phosphate (TDCPP), and the newer Firemaster 550 (FM 550) mixture, as well as tris (4-butylphenyl) phosphate (TBPP), which according to the study has not been reported to be used as a flame retardant until now.
Drone crashes at overseas civilian airports have increased significantly over the past two years, according to a new report by The Washington Post...
This can’t go on. American drones have taken lives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines. Meaningful public review of this most secretive of government programs is long overdue. We don’t need a new rule book; we just need the existing rules — international human rights and humanitarian law — to be applied.
Warren, who the court said was a rising star in the agency, was accused of drugging and then sexually assaulting a married Muslim woman while working as a high-level official for the U.S. embassy in Algeria in 2008. He targeted the woman because he believed her religion and local customs would keep her from reporting the assault, the sentencing judge concluded, according the ruling. Later that year, the woman reported Warren’s conduct to an official at the embassy, according to the ruling.
W ith the new vacancy on the fifth floor at Langley, a robust debate has resumed over whether the Central Intelligence Agency should continue trending toward paramilitary activity and targeted killings, or return to its traditional focus on sending spies to recruit agents and collect human intelligence. The controversy was foreseen as early as 2003, when Robert Kaplan essentially argued one side of the discussion now underway. He pointed to the "old rules" whereby small groups of men overthrew large governments, and asserted that future technological developments will "make assassinations far more feasible, enabling the United States to kill rulers like Saddam Hussein without having to harm their subject populations through conventional combat." His contention: Such acts are morally preferable to war, and that "the war on terrorism will not be successful if every aspect of its execution must be disclosed and justified."
Judicial Watch announced today that it has received documents from the U.S. State Department pertaining to the targeting and assassination of U.S. born terrorist Anwar al-Aulaqi by a U.S. drone in Yemen on September 30, 2011. In 2010, President Obama reportedly authorized the assassination of al-Aulaqi, the first American citizen added to the government’s “capture or kill” list, describing the radical Muslim cleric as “chief of external operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).”
Bottom line: It is fraught with discrepancies and outright contradictions, and it gives a good sense of why the number of civilian casualties in general is such a disputed subject.
That's an astonishingly low rate of civilian deaths. And it's fiercely contested by researchers who have tracked the CIA drone program.
A recent opinion piece in The Daily Athenaeum declared that the Obama administration’s continued use of the drone strike program, originally developed and implemented under President Bush and expended by President Obama, is unethical, given the civilian casualties attributed to the strikes and the legal questions raised by several international figures. This piece represents one side in the debate involving a subject that has been gaining increasing attention in the national consciousness since the past election. Although those opposed to the program raise very valuable questions, they generally fail to provide viable alternatives. The question they raise about the authority of a government to carry out military operations within the borders of another sovereign country, especially without that country’s consent, is an issue of utmost importance if the United States is to have any hope of achieving tangible victories in the upcoming phases of what is commonly called "the war on terror."
...jailed for protesting drone strikes.
It seems to me to be flat-out wrong to take out people who pose a threat to us, killing alongside these presumed threats their families and neighbors.
"This waste of money is even more shameful when you consider millions and millions of Americans out of work or losing their homes and here's 'Mr. Green Jeans' Obama spending money to duplicate what's already being done by his own government and the private sector," said political consultant Mike Baker.
The Columbia study is quick to critique the drone data compiled by the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal, yet it devotes negligible attention to potential shortcomings in the Bureau's reporting. The study repeatedly applauds the Bureau's investigative practices, analysis criteria and the breadth of its sources. It offers the most guarded criticism, writing only, "we do not agree with the Bureau's analysis of media sources in all cases." Upon reading Columbia's "Counting Drone Strike Deaths," one is led to conclude that the Bureau's casualty estimates are both methodologically rigorous and empirically sound.
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Columbia only analyzed reports for 2011, but had they continued on with their research, they would have found that these problems pervade the Bureau's reporting on strikes from 2004 through 2012.
As President Barack Obama enters his second term, the nation will likely scrutinize the president’s actions to improve the economy and implement certain “Obamacare” initiatives while foreign policy takes the backseat. Obama’s use of drone strikes in Pakistan, however, is unmistakably the biggest failing of his administration thus far and deserves more attention.
The drone strikes, which began under former President George W. Bush in 2004, use unmanned weapons to remotely target hostile militant leaders. The technology is fairly new, and carries extreme risks, as the drones have proven to be very dangerous to civilians. Since Obama took office, as many as 53 civilians have been killed in attacks directed toward militants. The number of militants in Pakistan who died in drone strikes since 2009 is 2,681.
The definition of militant is not without question. The president defines “militants” as “all military-age males in a strike zone.” It is an utterly transparent tactic to lower the number of reported civilian deaths. Because of the murky definition of “militant” it is hard to know exactly how many actual civilians are killed by drone strikes.
Donilon’s statement also came about a month after United Nations Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights Ben Emmerson announced in a conference at the Harvard Law School that the UN Human Rights Council will form early next year a unit that will investigate drone attacks that also caused civilian deaths.
The official storyline is that Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense on 14 November, 2012 because, in President Barack Obama’s words, it had “every right to defend itself.”
In this instance, Israel was allegedly defending itself against the 800 projectile attacks emanating from Gaza since January of this past year.
The facts, however, suggest otherwise.
From the start of the new year, one Israeli had been killed as a result of the Gazan attacks, while 78 Gazans had been killed by Israeli strikes. The ruling power in Gaza, Hamas, was mostly committed to preventing attacks. Indeed, Ahmed al-Jaabari, the Hamas leader whose assassination by Israel triggered the current round of fighting, was regarded by Israel as the chief enforcer of the periodic ceasefires, and was in the process of enforcing another such ceasefire just as he was liquidated.
Looking beyond the Assange/WikiLeaks case, it’s worth noting that, unless one clings to a relatively neutered view of leadership, be it in the nonprofit sector or elsewhere, it is only risk-takers who possess the capacity to change a collective worldview. That kind of leadership can be obnoxious and hard for others to take—so much so, in fact, that many won’t recognize it as leadership at all. But without the risk-takers, where would we be? Have you taken any risks lately? Were they worth the price you may have had to pay?
As a Canadian, perhaps I should feel a surge of patriotic pride now that Mark Carney has been designated the new head of the Bank of England – quite a step up for the current governor of the Bank of Canada. There is no question that Mr. Carney is a market-savvy guy (he did, after all, work for the vampire squid), and his experiences as Chairman on the Financial Stability Board (FSB) suggests that he is sensitive to the ongoing systemic risks present in our increasingly complex global banking system.
An Army private charged in the biggest security breach in U.S. history has testified that he felt like a doomed, caged animal after he was arrested in Baghdad for allegedly sending classified information to the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks.
In his most extended interview in months, Julian Assange speaks to Democracy Now! from inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been holed up for nearly six months. Assange vowed WikiLeaks would persevere despite attacks against it. On Tuesday, the European Commission announced that the credit card company Visa did not break the European Union’s antitrust rules by blocking donations to WikiLeaks. "Since the blockade was erected in December 2010, WikiLeaks has lost 95 percent of the donations that were attempted to be transferred to us over that period. ... Our rightful and natural growth, our ability to publish as much as we would like, our ability to defend ourselves and our sources, has been diminished by that blockade." Assange also speaks about his new book, "Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet." "The mass surveillance and mass interception that is occurring to all of us now who use the internet is also a mass transfer of power from individuals into extremely sophisticated state and private intelligence organizations and their cronies," he says. Assange also discusses the United States’ targeting of WikiLeaks. "The Pentagon is maintaining a line that WikiLeaks inherently, as an institution that tells military and government whistleblowers to step forward with information, is a crime. They allege we are criminal, moving forward," Assange says. "Now, the new interpretation of the Espionage Act that the Pentagon is trying to hammer in to the legal system, and which the Department of Justice is complicit in, would mean the end of national security journalism in the United States.
In the glittering Knightsbridge district, in the heart of London, just behind the famous Harrods department store, there is a red-brick building guarded day and night by Scotland Yard agents and by one or two large police vans equipped with cameras keeping a watchful eye. Refuge has been taken here at the Ecuadorian Embassy by the man who infuriated the White House and diplomats all around the world, by exposing war crimes and secret deals: Julian Assange. It is in this embassy that l'Espresso met the founder of WikiLeaks, who has been holed up in this building since the 19th of June. A hundred and sixty-five days, in addition to the eighteen months he spent under house arrest forced to wear an electronic manacle around his ankle.
When it comes to progress on climate change negotiations, the best thing for Canada to do is to stay home and stop sabotaging the process, says the leader of the Green Party.
"Canada continues to be a country that pushes other countries to do less. Our role is not just an embarrassment, it's reckless and brings our once good national reputation into disrepute," argued Elizabeth May at a news conference in Ottawa today.
World governments are in Doha, Qatar working out a new deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of this year. Canada announced it was pulling out of the Kyoto process last year but is still officially involved in the Kyoto process until Dec. 15.
Five registered non-profits run by super-lobbyist Rick Berman's for-profit PR firm, Berman & Co., are the target of an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) complaint filed this month by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).
A press release from a conservative think tank criticizing the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) provides crucial insight into how the organization works -- and helps illustrate that while ALEC says its purpose is to facilitate an exchange of "practical, state-level public policy issues," it sells access by the private sector to lawmakers and essentially sells policymaking to the highest bidders. The release documents how the "exchange" that happens at ALEC is more like a stock exchange rather than a free marketplace of ideas.
As a Russian immigrant whose grandparents were killed by Nazis, Irina Chevaldina appreciates the First Amendment better than many Americans.
That is why she is refusing to back down against one of the richest men in Miami, Raanan Katz, a minority owner of the Miami Heat who also owns more than 6,000,000 square feet of retail space in Miami.
If Parliament votes on the press, the press isn’t free. To split hairs between statutory underpinning and statutory regulation is not an acceptable distinction in a free and democratic country.
Looking closely at the continuing Internet blackout in Syria, we can see that traceroutes into Syria are failing, exactly as one would expect for a major outage. The primary autonomous system for Syria is the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment; all of their customer networks are currently unreachable.
The Internet has always been guided forwards by collaborative, open approaches. We believe that these approaches are one of the reasons why the Web has become and remained the wonderful, powerful and empowering place we know today. In the coming weeks, this successful model of governing and shaping the future of the Web will be at risk.
Today, we’re launching a kit of tools and resources to inform and mobilize the Internet community about what’s happening at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and support people in taking grassroots action. Mozilla stands behind transparency in Internet governance, but a free and open Internet depends on you.
On December 3rd, nations from around the world will be meeting in Dubai for the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), a meeting of the ITU. These governments will be meeting behind closed doors to determine if an old treaty will be amended to allow countries the power to more fully regulate and control the structure of the Web.
Remember Raanan Katz? The Florida real estate mogul and part-owner of the Miami Heat, made some news earlier this year for suing Google and a blogger for copyright infringement after the blogger posted an "unflattering" photo of Katz. Katz, who was clearly annoyed at the blogger -- a former Katz tenant who is (to put it mildly) not a fan of Katz -- for blogging critical stories about Katz (including highlighting some earlier lawsuits Katz had been involved with and posting the related legal documents). In addition to suing for defamation, Katz purchased the rights to the "unflattering" photo the blogger, Irina Chevaldina, had posted of him, and then sued for copyright infringement. Google was included on the case for refusing to take down the photo. While Google was later dropped from the case (one assumes that someone somewhere finally realized that, perhaps that end of the suit wasn't going to end well), Katz has continued his case against Chevaldina.
Earlier this month, the judge in the case signed off on a ridiculously broad injunction against Chevaldina, that not only says that she can't "trespass" on Katz's properties, but that she can't blog anything that is intended to "otherwise cause harm" to Katz. That doesn't seem even remotely constitutional. Criticizing someone is protected speech, even if it may (or is intended) to cause harm to someone's business. And the "trespass" injunction may seem like no big deal, especially since trespassing is already illegal. But, in this case, the court has indicated that by "trespassing" they mean that Chevaldina cannot even go to any of the properties that Katz owns -- which includes stores and shopping malls.
We've written a few times about how the FBI has been doing a bang up job foiling its own terrorist plots, so we're a bit skeptical every time we see headlines of some giant "terrorist bust." Almost every time, once you dig into the details, it involves some gullible, confused suckers who had no actual connection to terrorists, but were led along by FBI agents and informers until they were "convinced" to take part in a "plot" that was entirely concocted by the FBI. The latest headline-grabbing case of "arrested terrorists" actually appears like it may have slightly more substance, however, in that they may have actually had some sort of connection to al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The trial of former CIA agent and whistle-blower John Kiriakou has prompted many Americans to strongly criticize the Obama administration and its lack of oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies. Kiriakou, who uncovered the torture program that was started under President Bush and continued under President Obama, will face 30 months in jail and lose his government pension. Since his trial began in April, whistle-blowers such as Kirk Wiebe and William Binney, both of whom worked at the National Security Agency and then left because of mismanagement and corruption, have warned that intelligence agencies are abusing the Constitution and lavishing private companies with expensive contracts in exchange for subpar data processing and analysis systems.
The only reason to redact is embarrassment.
A Senate committee on Thursday unanimously backed sweeping digital privacy protections requiring the government, for the first time, to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain e-mail and other content stored in the cloud.
nited States (US) State Department spokesperson on Thursday demanded Pakistan to release Dr. Shakil Afridi, a CIA spy who helped in locating al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden in Abbotababad, a garrison town of Pakistan.
Yesterday I attended the first of the Department of Justice's Advisory panel meetings on the new Data Protection regulation laws being proposed at the EU.
The new laws are already the subject of intense lobbying and pressure. The key changes are designed to strengthen the privacy rights of citizens, in several ways:
A couple of months ago, Julian Sanchez wrote about the ridiculous situation in which he filed a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to reveal the latest semi-annual report from the Justice Department concerning how it was implementing the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. As we've been discussing, for a while, how the FISA Amendments Act broadly expanded the ability of federal law enforcement, in particular the NSA, to spy on everyone. While there is some language that suggests it's only supposed to be used on foreigners, it's been revealed that there is a secret interpretation of the bill, that likely allows them to use a loophole (plus the secret interpretation) to collect and review tons of data on Americans. The FAA is up for renewal, and it's likely that Congress will rush through a five year extension -- despite overwhelming evidence that many in Congress don't know how the NSA is interpreting the bill (and even making statements that directly contradict the evidence of how the bill is being used).
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Once again, this seems to raise questions about the process here -- and how much of it really has to do with law enforcement officials being careful... and how much of it is purely political, seeking to hide damaging information that might impact the FAA renewal.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says all the necessary physical infrastructure for absolute totalitarianism through the internet is ready. He told RT that the question now is whether the turnkey process that already started will go all the way.
Earlier this summer, we wrote about Syria briefly deleting itself from the internet. We wondered about the logic behind this, seeing as other countries who attempted this -- namely, Egypt and Libya -- had regime change follow quite closely after such a decision. Furthermore, not too long ago, reports were that the Syrian government was trying to use the internet to get its own story out. Of course, a lot has happened in Syria in the interim. So perhaps views have changed.
It turns out that this holy grail of nicknames is apparently worth suing over, at least in the eyes of a musician. Apparently Mark Durante, a man that the TMZ link describes as a "1980s musician" (meaning he made his bones before Kevin Durant could tie his own shoes), claims he had trademarked the term "Durantula" long ago and has been using it to sell mechandise for years. As such, he is taking Durant, along with Durant's private company, Nike, and Panini America Inc. (ostensibly so that the trial will be catered with delicious sandwiches), to court over the mark.
HONEY OBSESSED anthropomorphic bear Winnie the Pooh made headlines this month for all the wrong reasons. Pooh, of Pooh Corner, the Hundred Acre Wood, has apparently carved out something of a niche for himself as a model and no longer stresses about honey, attempts to cheer up a donkey, or takes an interest in the machinations of a piglet. Nay, instead he is lending his face to children's laptops these days.
One of those laptops was confiscated from a nine year old girl this month, simply because she might have downloaded one CD.
About ORG: a digital rights campaigning organisation. We care about the impact of technology and technology policy on our rights, on society and the public. We work across privacy, government surveillance, open data, and freedom of expression.
We were founded in 2005 and are sustained by around 1,500 paying supporters and grants from institutions like Open Society Foundation, Sigrid Rausing and Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.
Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Dell and Imation are suing the Dutch government over new levies on hard disks, smartphones, tablets and MP3 players that are meant to compensate the music and movie industries for losses caused by home copying.
"The companies now hold the State liable for all damages caused by the levies," the hardware vendors said in a joint news release on Wednesday. Trade association FIAR Consumer Electronics, which has as members companies such as Samsung, Sharp, Sony and LG, is also a party to the litigation. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in the District Court of The Hague.
Thank you for your letter on November 23rd, 2012, (which we have reposted below in its entirety, minus your contact info) in which you mistakenly suggest that Techdirt has infringed the copyrights of your company, Human Synergistics, via its post from October 5th, 2012, entitled Copyright As Censorship: Author Removes Blog Post After Being Threatened For Quoting 4 Sentences. First of all, it is astounding that you do not appear to recognize the irony of threatening us over a blog post that goes into detail as to why someone else's use of a tiny snippet of your company's work was quite clearly fair use under US copyright law. In fact, it leads one to wonder if you even read the post in question before sending your letter.
Even if we ignore the question of whether or not that original blog post by Patti O'Shea constituted fair use, I can assure you that Techdirt's use is fair use. Furthermore, your claim that a lack of permission to quote your silly exercise (solely for the purpose of explaining your overaggressive use of copyright law to censor people against your own best interests) is somehow "a direct violation of our copyright" is absolutely false. It is not just false, but an exaggeration of the rights you hold under copyright law -- a situation called "Copyfraud" by legal scholar Jason Mazzone.
Over the past few days, a post concerning copyright claims began making the rounds on Facebook, presumably written in response to the news that Facebook would no longer be letting its users vote on site policies. This announcement arrived with the news that Facebook would also be combining profiles across various other services like Instagram.
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The simple fact that this semi-viral post is completely wrong shows how colossally screwed up our current copyright system is. People are still under the impression that copyright needs to be "declared" (usually with the ۩ symbol). Many also seem to think that if they "declare" copyright and trot out a million limitations, everyone approaching their copyrighted content is obliged to follow every stipulation. Facebook users are picking up the clues that maximalists are dropping and cobbling together legal-sounding threats with nothing behind them. What Facebook users really want isn't the same thing maximalists want. Behind this flawed statement is the feeling that Facebook "gave" users a place to share their photos, etc. with friends and family, but now it wants to turn uploaded content into marketing tools.
We know that when music streaming services became available in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, illegal downloads were halved. The BPI's obsession with punishing illegal download sites blinds it to the fact that Google plans to launch a far better way of dealing with them: not through extrajudicial censorship in the form of doctored search results, but simply by offering something that people are happy to pay for. The UK recording industry should be embracing new ventures like Google Play Music wholeheartedly, not using them as bargaining chips in its pointless fight over search results.