The actual cost of the laptop is being reimbursed by a group of "RockHound" professors at UT/Austin. Since the cost of this laptop had to come from my own pocket, I am grateful to these professors who helped us out. I am simply writing this at the behest of Sanjit Patel to thank you for helping him achieve his dreams. And from the directors and volunteers of Reglue, thank you for helping us do what we do.
Oh, and that old T60 Lenovo we gave Sanjit when he entered UT? The drive was wiped, a fresh install of Edubuntu installed and put back in the "ready" pile, waiting to be given to the next Reglue Kid.
Determining the best hardware for a self-hosted web environment is complicated, and fraught with danger. One of the most popular schemes in use is to purchase commodity hardware. Normally, the term “commodity hardware” is meant to include basic Intel pizza box servers that may not have the most power, and may not come with the best reputation for high mean time between failure for components, but are plentiful and cheap. The core concept is to avoid the need for larger, more expensive hardware by purchasing a lot of pizza boxes, and just adding on as you go.
Sometimes I’m sitting here, trying to come up with something to write and I’m coming up dry. It’s not because there’s nothing going on with Linux. Quite the contrary. Linux is always moving, changing. It’s hard to believe just how ubiquitous Linux is. It’s literally everywhere.
When our house was built a few years ago (after our house fire), one of the things I wanted was a house wired for Ethernet connectivity. Unfortunately, the contractor must not have realized that running CAT5e isn't the same as running power lines. Although my house did in fact have RJ-45 jacks in a few rooms, opening the wall panel exposed approximately three inches of untwisted wire crammed into the wall jack. Even worse, they stapled, yes stapled, the CAT3 cable to the wall studs.
At home, I use Linux primarily for video editing and automation of tasks, and lots and lots of testing. Linux is a fairly flexible operating system, and you truly get to appreciate the power and simplicity once you start digging under the surface. That said, I also happily use other, proprietary operating systems.
That makes the quoted comment a lie in 2013. It may have been true a decade ago but no longer. Folks like Munich who dug out of the hole they made by choosing M$ (as if they had a choice) years ago are laughing and the rest of the world are looking for the exits: cloud services or FLOSS. With widespread use of thin clients, corporations large and small can use whatever software they want any way they want and choosing ODF makes the office suite and the operating system a much simpler choice.
As I wanted to install Pisi Linux Sueño (Beta) to my laptop, I had to take the leap from GRUB to GRUB2. You know, Megatotoro warned me about the fact that Pisi has a bug and therefore installs its own GRUB2 menu on the MBR regardless of what you choose.
GNU/Linux has been languishing, according to StatCounter, at below 1% share until recently and I thought I would collect data to see how it fared on different continents.
A second SSD caching framework and support for the new Radeons' video decoder are two of the most important enhancements in Linux 3.10, which is now out. This version also includes several new and improved drivers and a change to the network stack to speed up HTTP connections.
Drivers are small programs that enable the kernel to communicate and handle hardware or protocols (rules and standards). Without a driver, the kernel does not know how to communicate with the hardware or handle protocols (the kernel actually hands the commands to the BIOS and the BIOS passes them on the the hardware). The Linux Kernel source code contains many drivers (in the form of source code) in the drivers folder. Each folder within the drivers folder will be explained. When configuring and compiling the kernel, it helps to understand the drivers. Otherwise, a user may add drivers to the kernel that they do not need or leave out important drivers. The driver source code usually includes a commented line that states the purpose of the driver. For example, the source code for the tc driver has a single commented line that says the driver is for TURBOchannel buses. Because of the documentation, users should be able to look at the first few commented lines of future drivers to learn their purpose.
Linux 3.10 kernel has been officially released on Sunday evening which makes the 3.10-rc7 the last release candidate of the latest kernel which yields the biggest changes in years.
In the past few days I delivered X.Org vs. XMir Ubuntu Unity benchmarks on Intel hardware and Nouveau / NVIDIA. The benchmarking also found that 2D was also slower with XMir than simply running an X.Org Server. Benchmarks now carried out of X.Org vs. XWayland show that the Wayland-based equivalent is generally faster, at least for 2D operations.
The next set of indie games to be Greenlighted on Steam has happened and here is the run down for you!
Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.11 Beta 2 are available for Kubuntu 13.04 and our Saucy development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Beta PPA for 13.04.
The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator first released in 1997 is a cross-platform emulator designed to recreate the old hardware that arcade game systems used, in the modern computers of today. MAME can currently successfully run thousands of ROM images originally found in many different arcade machines from 1970 till now.
Gnome Weather was introduced as a preview for Gnome 3.8 and is aiming to be complete and functionally coherent in the upcoming Gnome 3.10 version.
As I wrote in my last article about LXDE though being very efficient, is a bit tough for a Linux newbie to handle. I was very happy with the latest PCLinuxOS 2013.06 LXDE spin as it made LXDE relatively simpler by adding an integrated LXDE control center along with quite a few other customizations. This week I used another LXDE distro, ROSA 2012 R1 Desktop Fresh LXDE. Incidentally, both ROSA and PCLinuxOS are/were Mandriva based.
Peppermint OS is a project based on Lubuntu with sprinklings of Linux Mint tossed into the mix. The Peppermint project attempts to create a user friendly, fast and lightweight distribution. The project is focused on bringing web applications and services to the desktop without relying exclusively on Internet connectivity for basic functions. This makes Peppermint a bit of a hybrid, mixing the traditional desktop platform with cloud services. While Peppermint ships with a minimalist collection of packages and a LXDE desktop the project offers several software bundles to allow users to build a fully featured operating system using the Peppermint base. The latest release of Peppermint, version 4, is based on Lubuntu 13.04 and is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit builds.
I’m happy to announce a preview build of Manjaro 0.8.7 which we will release in late July. This first build is fully installable and stable. You will find only a minimalistic XFCE 4.10 Desktop on it. One of the biggest changes you might see is the use of Whisker Menu which replaces the standard XFCE menu. We fixed our Manjaro Settings Manager and updated Pamac (graphical package manager). The 32bit build will fit on a 700 MB CD, for the 64bit build you have to use a 800 MB CD.
ALT Linux has been around for quite some time, yet we rarely hear of it anymore. Some of my first impressions were of a nice desktop system that needed a bit of polish. Later ALT became available in desktop and enterprise editions. After nearly two years, today brought a new ALT Linux release.
Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 Alpha 1 (Saucy Salamander) is now available for download and a short screenshot tour is available on Softpedia.
The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the July 2013 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
Most people with at least basic knowledge of IT infrastructure have heard about Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT). The company provides one of the most widely-used operating systems for servers. The reason why many consumers may have not heard about this operating system is because Red Hat is mainly for organizations, especially those willing to pay a premium for improved security. Therefore, Red Hat isn't just another IT stock. The name is synonymous with security, reliability, and fast performance - three must-have success factors that many start-ups would love to possess. Although Red Hat's cash cow resides in its open source solutions, recently the company has been giving more importance to its cloud storage and virtualization solutions, a fierce business segment where Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE:RAX) has also been very actively.
So would I recommend Fedora over Ubuntu? Honestly, no, I wouldn't. I'm more inclined to recommend one of the options listed above instead, as I can better explain how I personally have benefited from each of them myself. Nothing against Fedora—it's fine—but it just simply doesn't have a well-defined niche these days.
Running a pristine operating system is fun.
You may not know about Knoppix, but before there was Ubuntu and before there was Mint there was a time when Knoppix was among the few distros that hardly needed introduction. Linux enthusiasts knew about Knoppix in the same way they knew about Debian. While Debian was the largest distro on planet (in terms of number of packages), Knoppix was the first Live distro based on Debian. Although it wasn't the first Live distro, Knoppix popularized this concept and became the face of Live CDs. At the time when Debian was still difficult to install, especially by inexperienced or new Linux users, Knoppix gave people a way to "test" a Debian-based system before actually installing it. Knoppix even encouraged users to always use it as a Live CD, which made it popular as a rescue system that people could use to quickly salvage important files from their hard-drives and even fix their systems in the event of boot failure of the installed operating system.
The latest version of Ubuntu, Raring Ringtail, is billed as business and user-friendly. There are still significant obstacles to its widespread adoption in the enterprise, but if your employees only access applications via the browser, and your company doesn't use complex spreadsheet macros or document formats, then Ubuntu 13 might be worth considering.
Undeterred by the controversies that have struck its $35 tablet project, the Government has taken the first step towards the fourth version of the low cost Aakash tablet by releasing its mandated technical specifications.
Ubuntu sponsor Canonical plan to switch the distribution to the company's Mir display server sooner rather than later and this move is now causing disturbances within the wider Ubuntu ecosystem. This appears to be especially so with the developers of two of the official Ubuntu remixes, Lubuntu and Kubuntu.
Case in point: What if the Apollo 11 astronauts, instead of shooting for the moon, were just taking a road trip to New Jersey? Even if they made it ahead of schedule, they wouldn't exactly be making commemorative plates about it. (Though, now that I think about it, they should. I would absolutely buy a “Neil and Buzz go to Jersey” plate.)
It’s not a secret that KDE devs are not fond of Canonical's Mir, but the two sides never really discussed it seriously, until now.
Canonical, the company behind the open source Ubuntu Linux OS, set out earlier this year to create a radically new video display platform called Mir to help it steal a slice of the smartphone and tablet markets. Now, in a sign of just how serious the company is, it has announced a hiring push for developers to work on Mir and related projects.
Full Circle – the independent magazine for the Ubuntu Linux community are proud to announce the release of our seventy fourth issue.
I am in Florence at B and B Hotels right now. I have to leave the hotel at 12 o’clock tomorrow. I find it very hard to wake up in the morning. Who is going to guarantee me that I will wake up in time and be ready to leave the hotel?
One of the reasons for comparatively low Linux adoption rate can be blamed on the fact that very few PCs come preinstalled with Linux. However, Linux Mint tried to solve this issue and last year they teamed up with CompuLab to make MintBox.
Like Linux Mint? Want it in a plug and go PC? CompuLab may have the computer for you: the new MintBox 2.
Here's the third review of the Linux Mint Olivia family. We already had two reviews of the Cinnamon version, one on a rather generic laptop with Intel graphics, plus SSD, and the other on a slightly more complex box featuring Nvidia graphics and Broadcom Wireless. So far, Olivia has shown really awesome results, near perfect in almost every sense of the way.
HTC One customers will be rejoiced to know that their Smartphone is going get an OTA update to Android 4.2.2 soon, and if you are in Taiwan you might already have the update available. A HTC One (International Model) user in Taiwan reported that Android 4.2.2 update has arrived for his phone.
We saw Android 4.3 build for Samsung Galaxy S4 ‘Google Edition’ getting leaked last week. It was then soon ported for the original Samsung Galaxy S4 without any hassle. Considering the leaked build to be real, we found that there were not much superficial changes, instead, many under the hood changes are being observed eventually. ‘Notification Code Service’ is the new change under the light.
FOSS fans have been predicting for years that Android would ultimately come to the desktop, and last week there was concrete evidence. Following on a similar announcement from Acer earlier this month, HP has now debuted an Android-based desktop tablet of its own. "Well, it's happening!" enthused Google+ blogger Rodolfo Saenz. "Mobile and stationary hardware and software are merging."
I'm sorry this took so long, but I've finally got a dedicated page done for all the Oracle v. Google trial transcripts. So if you want to know what any of the witnesses had to say, you can find it on that page. You'll also find the trial exhibits and the jury verdict and the judge's order and final judgment, as well as links to Groklaw's coverage from the courtroom. For everything else, of course you'll find it on the Oracle v. Google Timeline page.
In the on-site listing for a refurbished Nexus 10ââ¬Â³ tablet he noticed a familiar-looking image in the product gallery: Ubuntu Touch for tablets.
Android/Linux customized with local language and a simple layout of the GUI for young children has been working well to bridge the digital divide in Thailand. Since the goal is to equip as many students as possible with small cheap computers to aid education, that other OS need not apply.
In a sense, open source software is a victim of its own success.
"Ten years ago, open source—notably Linux—was often labelled a ‘fad’ or destined for the ‘hobbyist’ market,” said Mark Bohannon, Vice President for Corporate Affairs & Global Public Policy at Red Hat.
"Fast forward to today. Owing not only to the benefits of the technology, but also to the benefits of the collaborative innovation model, open source software has by any measure become mainstream and vital to enterprise and government IT architecture."
In the Public Sector, Bohannon notes that most governments now are more likely to engage on how open source can help them achieve the innovation they need to be able to serve their citizens today and in the years to come.
MITRE Corp. has unveiled new open source software that works to protect data stored in mobile devices and helps organizations develop security applications.
MITRE built the secure virtual mobile platform to allow customers to store sensitive data in a cloud platform, as well as collaborate with the open source community to secure smartphones running on Android operating system, MITRE said June 20.
Announcement: OPTIMIS project now on phase three which provides service providers with plug-ins for open cloud as project nears its end
There's no doubt that engineers like the idea of open-source hardware. There are an increasing number of open-source hardware board designs – Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Beagleboard and many others – that enable hobbyist projects and the reuse of board designs in commercial products. And many engineers are putting a lot of time into enabling these movements via collaborative work online and through the creation of vibrant online communities.
Well, it is time for me to update my eCommerce site. I get to play with nearly every kind of cart when writing my ecommerce user manuals, so you'd think this would be an easy decision, or that I would do it often. Not so! I've had an ecommerce site for over 10 years, selling downloadable user manual ebooks, and it had snowballed into a crazy mess of old files, old outdated product photos, old outdated products.
Well, Back to the Future Part II promised us hoverboards in 2015, and that means we’re running out of time. But, there’s someone who still believes all hope is not lost, and they’re looking for $1,000,000 to make the impossibl happen. Shame they don’t have a copy of Grays Sports Almanac.
When you want to seamlessly stream music from a mobile device or computer to a speaker or other device, it doesn't get much easier than with Apple's AirPlay service. While there are a myriad of other options to wirelessly stream music from non-Apple devices to speakers (Bluetooth being the most commonly-used one), none of them have been able to replicate the simplicity of AirPlay. DoubleTwist, the company behind a suite of well designed apps for Android, hopes to change that with its new open source MagicPlay service.
The world of open-source software, by design, is something of a collective. Instead of well-defined teams of developers working on a project for pay, open-source software is the result of an amorphous community making contributions – some good, some bad. Everyone is part of the project, everyone has a stake.
Earlier this week, another “advocacy site” (which I will not link here, as I don’t believe he advocates, nor does he deserve the traffic, for his shoddy “journalism”) posited that volunteering to work on a smaller Linux distribution, such as Solyd or Cloverleaf or Crunchbang, or any other smaller distribution, was akin to pissing in the wind, and possibly career suicide. Ignoring the falsehoods he spread about my own project of choice (Cloverleaf Linux), as I don’t believe they deserve a response, since they would fall on deaf ears, I would like to offer a counterpoint to his postulate.
[...]
Working on smaller distributions and projects a waste of time? Hardly.
Historically held in Australia OSDC covers a wide range of Open Source technologies from low level development and frameworks up to the business value of Open Source technologies.
And while we’re 2 weeks within the opening of SFD 2013 registration a lot of things are happening. First we saw an amazing 103 teams registered from 39 countries! We are currently producing team packs for those early registered SFD teams i.e. the packs will be delivered to teams that registered on or before July 21th. If you haven’t registered your SFD event yet, simply create your team page and complete the registration form. All information and links are of course available from SFD website.
Google today announced it has enabled its VP9 video codec by default on the Chrome dev channel. The addition means users of the company’s browser can expect to see the next-generation compression technology available out-of-the-box before the end of the year.
The first Firefox OS smartphones, the Alcatel One Touch Fire and the ZTE Open, will hit the market “soon” Mozilla has confirmed this morning, promising imminent launches from Duetsche Telekom and Telefonica. The two new handsets run Mozilla’s own alternative to Android, Firefox OS, taking a web-centric perspective on apps and services in order to keep costs down and make the phones more appealing to developing markets. According to Telefonica, the first device will hit this week.
Mozilla today launched Firefox 22, the first stable version of the popular browser that supports the WebRTC protocol and includes support for the organization’s asm.js JavaScript subset that offers near-native performance for web apps.
With their booths just 20 meters apart in the cavernous Shanghai New International Exhibition Center at Mobile Asia Expo, it wasn't hard to see that open source champions Mozilla and Ubuntu share similar ambitions.
Both are working on a low-cost mobile handset operating system (OS) aimed at helping carriers and vendors break the duopoly of the big two platforms, Apple Inc.'s iOS and Google's Android. (See 5 Challengers to Apple & Android.)
Do you think people will flock to another OS for phones? I think some will want to try it, but unsure if they will keep it. A while ago, I read Ubuntu starting a phone OS based on their wonderful Dubian Linux. I was excited to see what they had to offer. Well, for those who know more of Firefox then you might just want to try out the Firefox OS.
A month ago or so I was sent an email to Beta Test Firefox’s new phone with their new OS. Due to not being with the carrier that the phone was being tested on, I couldn’t get my hands on one. I was excited to see another OS pop up because I love to play with Linux, really just anything new.
Just last week, Mozilla released version 22 of the Firefox browser, and you can get the details on what is under the hood here. Already, though, in keeping with Mozilla's rapid release cycle, the first beta version of Firefox 23 is available. With version 23, Mozilla is calling out to developers to build around its Social API, integrating social services and websites with Firefox.
The Mozilla Summit is coming! On June 15th, 50 Mozillians got together for a planning session and I discovered just how much Mozillians focus on getting great things done!
Intel's MD of worldwide professional services Aaron Davies-Morris has been speaking at the Hadoop Summit 2013 in San Jose about his firm's drive to work with the open source Hadoop Java-based programming framework.
Teradata's enterprise customers have a fresh set of options for integrating Hadoop into their environments.
The company this week rolled out a new "Teradata Portfolio for Hadoop," featuring a set of products, consulting services, training and support options for customers seeking to harness Hadoop for big data applications.
Everyone has data. It's always growing, and you should have ownership of everything that touches your data. You need to have the ability to see and make changes to the code managing your storage system. Having ownership of your data gives you control of your own destiny.
"Couchbase 2.0 was a huge release for us, and with that release we became a document database and we added cross data center replication, " Couchbase CEO Bob Weiderhold told Database Journal. "A lot of this release is about refining capabilities that we first delivered in the 2.0 release."
The new Couchbase 2.1 release builds on the improvements that first landed with the Couchbase 2.0 release in December 2012.
The LibreOffice Project has been building an impressively rich and strong infrastructure in just a few years’ time. Today, I’d like to highlight not so much the quirks and the processes that support the everyday development or the flow of contributions, but rather the presence of the LibreOffice community on social networks and micro-blogging services.
If you're interested in implementing a powerful EHR environment but don't want to pay commercial prices, this article contains some great resources.
NHS England is considering offering cash to trusts to develop “open source” software which it says offers flexibility and speeds up their development of electronic patient record systems.
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center (AFHSC) have released the Suite for Automated Global Electronic bioSurveillance (SAGES), a collection of flexible, open-source software products developed for electronic disease surveillance in all settings.
GhostBSD, a FreeBSD-based operating system that relies on GNOME, LXDE, and Openbox desktop environments, is now at version 3.1.
This Wednesday, 26 June 2013, the members of the joint committee (CMP) for the French bill on higher education and research —from both the National Assembly and the Senate— confirmed the legislation that gives priority to Free Software in the Public Service for Higher Education. April especially welcomes this vote and congratulates the Deputies and Senators. April also thanks all the persons who mobilised and contacted the Parliament Members.
The French called it the cabinet noir – the “black chamber”. Set behind the General Post Office in the Rue Coq Heron, its job was to take letters of interest, open them, read their contents and then seal them again without detection by their intended readers or disruption to the postal service. “It is in the secret holes and cellars that the unsealers of letters, like the coiners of false money, carry on their dark labour,” wrote a visitor from London in 1828, describing a room full of steam, staffed by 20 or 30 agents. Created under the monarchy, the cabinet noir survived the transition to the revolutionaries, and then Napoleon. Each railed against it in turn and then, on taking power, suddenly found it indispensable.
For organisations considering procuring a solution that includes OSS, very little can be expected in the way of warranties, and a clear understanding of exactly which OSS licences apply will be needed. It may also put more pressure on contracted support services if something goes wrong, and some would argue that a supplier of OSS support services has less commercial incentive to get to the bottom of a problem than someone who has invested a lot of time and money in developing and marketing proprietary software.
To many in this group, the difference between “copyleft” licenses such as the GPL and “permissive” open source licenses are minimal. They note the differences, and take great pains to choose a license that suits their needs, but there is no great philosophical rift between the notion of free software (FOSS) licenses and other open source software (OSS) licenses. Nor do they see the irony in the fact that “permissive” licenses may end-up producing restricted, proprietary software, such as how Apple’s closed OS X is partially built on code freely obtained from FreeBSD and NetBSD.
As conversations about responsible energy use increase, many energy industry experts have championed the use of smart grid technology as a means of delivering energy in an efficient, economical, and environmentally-sound manner. Recognizing the need for more accessible education on the smart grid, Bismarck State College National Energy Center of Excellence, in partnership with the Energy Providers Coalition for Education (EPCE), developed a free, open-source course as part of the National Training & Education Resource (NTER) initiative, created with assistance from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Charging an electric vehicle can take approximately forever. And unless you fork over some serious cash for a Level 2 charger, there's basically nothing you can do about it. Except now is one thing you can do: you can build your own, cheaper Level 2 charger based on an open source design now on Kickstarter.
The use of open source hardware and software will continue to grow among both professional engineers and the hobbyist community in 2013, according to the results of a new survey from element14.
Open Rights Group participated in two international conferences in Uruguay last week. We were invited to cover the junction between privacy and open data, an area under increasing scrutiny as governments implement transparency programmes.
Making Open Access (OA) a reality has proved considerably more difficult and time consuming than OA advocates expected when they started out. It is now 19 years since cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad posted his Subversive Proposal calling on researchers to make their papers freely available on the Web; and it is nearly 12 years since those who took part in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) coined the term Open Access, and agreed on a definition.
Open standards has been a recurring theme here on Open Enterprise. It's also been the occasion of one of the most disgraceful U-turns by the European Commission. That took place in the wake of the European Interoperability Framework v1, which called for any claimed patents to be licensed irrevocably on a royalty-free basis.
[...]
>So that raises a crucial question: is the European Commission serious about ending lock-in in the European Union? If it is, it should lead from the front, and break that outrageous and costly 20-year monopoly that the US company has enjoyed at the heart of European power. The Commission should start immediately to deploy open source solutions throughout its many organisational units - specifically, on the desktop, and not just server-side - and draw up a plan to enable the entire IT system to break free of this egregious lock-in in the shortest time possible.
The European Commission (EC) recently published an important report, officially a Communication: Against lock-in: building open ICT systems using standards. The Communication introduces and explains the need for the accompanying: Guide for procurement of standards-based ICT—Elements of Good Practice, which was released at the same time.
A federal appellate court today gave the green light to a defamation lawsuit filed against the late conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart by former U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod. A three-judge panel affirmed a court order denying Breitbart’s motion to dismiss the case under the District of Columbia’s law barring strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs.
Local lawyers hoping for a conclusive ruling on whether the anti-SLAPP law applies in federal court will have to keep waiting. In the ruling this morning, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided the case on procedural grounds.
The Monument To Nothing and The Ten Commandments will now sit side-by-side in front of the courthouse.
Technical barriers to grafting one person’s head onto another person’s body can now be overcome, says Dr. Sergio Canavero, a member of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group. In a recent paper, Canavero outlines a procedure modeled on successful head transplants which have been carried out in animals since 1970.
The one problem with these transplants was that scientists were unable to connect the animals’ spinal cords to their donor bodies, leaving them paralyzed below the point of transplant. But, says Canavero, recent advances in re-connecting spinal cords that are surgically severed mean that it should be technically feasible to do it in humans. (This is not the same as restoring nervous system function to quadriplegics or other victims of traumatic spinal cord injury.)
A huge, toxic plant that can burn skin and cause permanent blindness has been found for the first time in eastern Ontario, prompting calls for a federal response to contain the spread of the poisonous plant as fear grows no province is immune.
Our health system is under constant pressure: the conditions it deals with are increasingly chronic and degenerative; ever busier doctors face ever more stretched resources. That people today are living longer is positive news, and thanks to a high-quality and dedicated medical sector. But it also creates new challenges, and calls for new changes. The answer may lie in eHealth – using digital technology for health and wellbeing.
It’s a question that keeps crop scientists up at night: How are we possibly going to feed the world over the next few decades?
Former CIA and National Security Agency Director, Michael Hayden, has said the United States does conduct espionage on citizens and countries.
Imagine that you are a powerful player who straddles two worlds – the Dept. of Defense and the private sector where corporate defense-contractors live and flourish.
The Soviet Union was behind the claim the U.S. government masterminded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Furthermore, because of their chosen careers, CIA employees are made justifiably paranoid about "security violations" -- for instance, if you absent-mindedly took a classified document from your office, placed it in your briefcase or purse, exited the building, and then remembered you had it while walking to your car, the Office of Security could slap you with a security violation. (Pro tip: Don't take a suitcase or large purse to work.)
His comments come as the UK government is locked in a battle to avoid revealing what GCHQs policy is on providing intelligence to support CIA drone strikes.
“Drone attacks are violating our sovereignty as well as international laws. Drone attacks must stop. We have protested many a time. This is simply unacceptable,” Sharif was quoted as saying in a statement issued by his office on June 8.
The resolution also takes the government to task for the “extrajudicial” use of weaponized drones overseas that have killed many innocent people.
So revered is Nelson Mandela today that it is easy to forget that for decades he was considered a terrorist by many foreign governments, and some of his current supporters.
The Muslim Lawyers Association (MLA) in South Africa Sudáfrica (MLA) has filed a suit before the Supreme Court against US President Barack Obama for war crimes and acts against human rights, according to press reports.
The MLA requested Obama's detention for ordering the death of numerous suspects abroad, which is considered enough reason for him to be subject to investigation and judged in a South African court, according to Africa Herald Express newspaper.
The officers are seen quickly approaching Rosby, who shows no signs of resisting and puts his hands behind his back before he is handcuffed.
We have discussed cases of the use of tasers or pepper spray as first responses by police when alternatives seem obvious. This video shows a confrontation between an officer and a squirrel where the officer pepper sprays the squirrel over the objections of onlookers.
If the Obama administration's case against Bradley Manning was really about "aiding the enemy," as opposed to controlling information, then Manning would not be the government official subject to criminal prosecution. The government is biggest leaker of all, even anonymously leaking allegations that recent "leaks" about NSA domestic surveillance (which are really whistleblowing disclosures) have hurt national security. But, only government employees who reveal information the government wants to hide from the public are prosecuted under the Espionage Act or dubious charges like "aiding the enemy" by disclosure. The government's overzealous prosecution of Manning - even after he offered a plea that could land him 20 years in prison - is very clearly NOT intended to stop all "leaks" of information, rather its purpose is to stop whistleblowers from revealing information that the government does not want the public to know.
Village of South Holland police Officer Chad Barden and other unknown officers are being sued in federal court over another dog shooting. In this case, the police arrived at the scene of a report of a dog off its leash in a suburb of Chicago. While they had dog catching poles, one of the officers shot Randy Green’s Cane Corso dog, Grady, who was sitting on the front porch of his family home when they arrived. Green says that a videotape shows that the dog did not threaten or lunge at the officers before they and Barden shot him three times.
Police were at the scene for 20 minutes before the shooting. Grady reported got up and walked past them a couple times. There was no report of the dog being vicious or threatening people. At no point did the officers alert the family or use the dog catching poles according to the complaint.
It's 2013 and Guantanamo Bay is still open, insanely. Newly released Army documents obtained by Gawker shed light on life inside America's most infamous prison, where classified documents are burned in coffee cans, American guards are converted to Islam by the suspected terrorists they watch over, and wily detainees wage their own counterintelligence campaigns.
Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Gawker has obtained a cache of documents detailing internal U.S. military espionage investigations conducted at Guantanamo Bay from 2005-2006. These were carried out by INSCOM, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command. One of INSCOM's duties is to protect American forces against espionage from its enemies, known in Army parlance as Subversion and Espionage Directed Against the US Army, or SAEDA.
Native elders to lead a spiritual gathering to heal land, air, water and all living forms harmed by world's largest industrial project
In 2012, U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) contended that acceptance of climate science was at odds with Christianity – never mind that many Christian leaders and institutions take climate change very seriously. "My point is, God's still up there," he told Voice of Christian Youth America. "The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."
Australia has effectively killed the last of its vaunted on-the-ground projects in Indonesia to restore and protect forests and peatland for the carbon dioxide they store.
In a small note on the AusAid website, the Commonwealth government has confirmed a $47 million project to restore 25,000 hectares of peatland on the Indonesian island of Kalimantan will end before most of its major milestones are met.
Shortly after 50,000 bees were found dead in an Oregon parking lot (read more here), a staggering 37 million bees have been found dead in Elmwood, Ontario, Canada. Dave Schuit, who runs a honey operation in Elmwood has lost 600 hives. He is pointing the finger at the insecticides known as neonicotinoids, which are manufactured by Bayer CropScience Inc. This also comes after a recent report released by the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) that recorded its largest loss of honeybees ever. You can read more about that here. The European Union has stepped forward, having banned multiple pesticides that have been linked to killing millions of bees. You can view the studies and read more about that here.
Several North American river turtles (also known as cooters) were born at the San Antonio Zoo last week, but Thelma and Louise were the only ones born with this rare condition.
Company to operate in a region inhabited by indigenous people extremely vulnerable to any contact with outsiders
Is life too easy for the unemployed? You may not think so, and I certainly don’t think so. But that, remarkably, is what many and perhaps most Republicans believe. And they’re acting on that belief: there’s a nationwide movement under way to punish the unemployed, based on the proposition that we can cure unemployment by making the jobless even more miserable.
[...]
Nonetheless, the state’s government has just sharply cut aid to the unemployed. In fact, the Republicans controlling that government were so eager to cut off aid that they didn’t just reduce the duration of benefits; they also reduced the average weekly benefit, making the state ineligible for about $700 million in federal aid to the long-term unemployed.
Former MF Global Chief Executive Jon Corzine was charged Thursday for his role in the failure of the futures brokerage.
A top U.S. regulator blaed blaming the former Goldman Sachs co-chief executive with being a key actor in one of the country's 10 biggest bankruptcies.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission said on Thursday it will seek in a civil case to ban Corzine and former Assistant Treasurer Edith O'Brien from the industry, and also seek penalties against the two.
“Mr. Corzine is charged with being more than a passive actor in the downfall of MF Global,” CFTC enforcement head David Meister said on a call with journalists. “He lacked good faith and … violated his supervision obligations.”
Google has passed Apple as the most valuable technology company in the world—on one measure.
It's the silence that puzzles me. Last week the chancellor stood up in parliament to announce that benefits for the very poor would be cut yet again. On the same day, in Luxembourg, the British government battled to maintain benefits for the very rich. It won. As a result, some of the richest people in the country will each continue to receive millions of pounds in income support from taxpayers.
As Techdirt has observed, investor-state dispute resolution (ISDR) is turning into a major weapon that corporations can deploy against nations in order to claim damages for some alleged loss of future profits as a result of government action -- for example, stricter health or environmental regulations. Last year alone, 62 new investment arbitration cases were initiated against nations, and a record award of $1.77 billion was made against Ecuador.
Some EU policymakers said talks for a free trade agreement between Washington and the EU should be put on ice until further clarification from the United States over revelations that American spies wiretapped European Union buildings in Brussels and Washington.
81.5% of Money Created through Quantitative Easing Is Sitting There Gathering Dust … Instead of Helping the Economy
It must be summer. In anticipation of fall course schedules, several people have asked what I think someone who wants to be a journalist should study.
The Spanish government has approved a plan to sell a quarter of its state-owned properties in an attempt to raise hundreds of millions and fill the government’s empty coffers.
Some 15,000 properties, from office buildings to agricultural land, will be put up for sale over the next seven years.
The government’s decision to end the overseas domestic worker visa has given bad employers opportunity to abuse, argues Paul Donovan.
In October 2012, nine U.S. state legislators went on an industry paid trip to explore the Alberta tar sands. Publicly described as an "ALEC Academy," documents obtained by CMD show the legislators were accompanied on a chartered flight by a gaggle of oil-industry lobbyists, were served lunch by Shell Oil, dinner by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, and that the expenses of the trip were paid for by TransCanada and other corporations and groups with a direct financial interest in the Alberta tar sands and the proposed Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has vetoed a budget provision that would have radically changed the state's pre-trial justice system and another that would have kicked an independent journalism outfit off of University of Wisconsin campuses.
That is an odd characterization of Occupy, which most of the time tried to stress that the problem with banking interests controlling the political process was bipartisan. It's not that he's wrong, but the emphasis seems a little off.
But his characterization of the Tea Party is wrong about the target of their anger, as well as the political motivations behind that anger. How many people watched the Tea Party protests and thought, "Boy, are they mad at the Republicans!"? Clearly the bulk of the energy behind that movement was directed at Democrats and the Obama White House.
Government asks Twitter to set up 'representative office' inside Turkey in move that could presage censorship of service
When Claire Perry MP held her parliamentary inquiry into “Protecting Children Online”, I was invited to appear as a witness on behalf of the adult industry. I was happy to attend the inquiry and advocate against censorship - not simply because I was selling porn online, but because I have always been an ardent advocate of free speech.
I was disturbed, shocked even, to find that the free speech advocates at that inquiry consisted of myself (a porn vendor) and one other person, Jim Killock, of the Open Rights Group, a small campaigning body. Here was an all-party group of MPs considering whether it would be right to introduce Internet censorship for an entire democratic country, and the entire “free speech lobby” appeared to consist of myself and Jim. Such an inquiry in the US would have threatened the First Amendment to the Constitution, and would have provoked activism and legal action. Was Britain really so weakly defended against censorship?
Senior European Union officials are outraged by revelations that the US spied on EU representations in Washington and New York. Some have called for a suspension of talks on the trans-Atlantic free trade agreement.
America's NSA intelligence service allegedly targeted the European Union with its spying activities. According to SPIEGEL information, the US placed bugs in the EU representation in Washington and infiltrated its computer network. Cyber attacks were also perpetrated against Brussels in New York and Washington.
The United States has said it will respond to demands for answers over a report claiming the National Security Agency bugged EU institutions. US officials say they will discuss the matter directly with EU leaders.
The NSA would also obviously be able to intimidate/blackmail anyone who has had an extra-marital affair, which could be a corrupting influence on a future Bill Clinton in office.
Corporate media coverage of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has enjoyed the supposed irony of his reportedly seeking asylum in Ecuador, a country that U.S. journalists depict as failing to measure up to their standards of freedom.
The disclosure triggered strong reaction from EU leaders who demanded full and speedy clarification from the US.
As regular readers know, I am very interested in the scope of the plain view exception for computer searches. In physical searches, if the government comes across evidence unrelated to the search it is lawfully conducting, the government can seize that evidence as long as its incriminating nature is immediately apparent. I have argued that this rule is troublesome in the context of digital searches because everything comes into plain view in computer searches. A computer warrant for anything becomes a warrant for everything, making every computer warrant a general warrant in practice. To counter that dynamic, I have argued that the plain view exception should not apply to digital searches. See Orin Kerr, Searches and Seizures in a Digital World, 119 Harv. L. Rev. 531 (2005).
As regular readers know, I am very interested in the scope of the plain view exception for computer searches. In physical searches, if the government comes across evidence unrelated to the search it is lawfully conducting, the government can seize that evidence as long as its incriminating nature is immediately apparent. I have argued that this rule is troublesome in the context of digital searches because everything comes into plain view in computer searches. A computer warrant for anything becomes a warrant for everything, making every computer warrant a general warrant in practice. To counter that dynamic, I have argued that the plain view exception should not apply to digital searches. See Orin Kerr, Searches and Seizures in a Digital World, 119 Harv. L. Rev. 531 (2005).
Today, Senators Wyden and Udall wrote to General Keith Alexander urging him to correct inaccurate and misleading statements in the NSA's recently released fact sheet on Section 702 of Foreign Intelligence Survelliance Act (FISA).
Researchers say that over a third of iPhone apps still access a device’s unique identifier.
Police officers knew for years about the crucial security breach – but did nothing
The debate over the U.S. government’s monitoring of digital communications suggests that Americans are willing to allow it as long as it is genuinely targeted at terrorists. What they fail to realize is that the surveillance systems are best suited for gathering information on law-abiding citizens.
Minister questions legality of mass tapping of calls and internet and demands to know extent to which Germans were targeted
The US government pulls out all stops to prosecute, hound, and capture those who reveal classified data. This plus constant control and surveillance makes it impossible to keep anything private or secret, Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges told RT.
Consumers should be able to retake control of data collected by websites and data brokers, Brill says
The PRISM scandal engulfing US and UK intelligence agencies has blown the debate wide open over what privacy means in the digital age and whether the Internet risks becoming a kind of Stasi 2.0. The extent of the UK's involvement in this type of mass surveillance—which already appears exhaustive—shows just what a potential intelligence goldmine social media data can be.
President Obama said Thursday he won't engage in "wheeling and dealing and trading" to get NSA leaker Edward Snowden extradited to the U.S., but he remains "concerned" over what other classified information Snowden may still try to disseminate.
Twelve of the 14 judges who have served this year on the most secret court in America are Republicans and half are former prosecutors
Many large Web companies have failed to adopt a decades-old encryption technology to safeguard confidential user communications. Google is a rare exception, and Facebook is about to follow suit.
While he will still continue to represent Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, Baltasar Garzón has chosen not to act on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's behalf. According to Spanish media, Garzón, who is a renowned former human rights "superjudge", announced on Wednesday that his firm has declined to represent US intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Metadata for non-US conversants have been collected en masse since 2001.
Several vulnerabilities have been found in the National Security Agency (NSA) website.
Although now reported and fixed, a report found that there were cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities on the main NSA forward facing web server. The report claimed that two vulnerabilities were found in "shoddily outsourced third party software written in ColdFusion", which Rustle Research researcher Horace Grant said could be used to impersonate NSA personnel and web traffic.
Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg is calling for a new Church Committee to probe the “abuses of American intelligence agencies” and “restore the protections in the Bill of Rights."
Today we released a new version of Norton Mobile Security for Android devices that contains our new Norton Mobile Insight technology. Mobile Insight has analyzed over 4 million Android applications and processes tens of thousands of new applications every day. Through automatic and proprietary static and dynamic analysis techniques, Mobile Insight is able to automatically discover malicious applications, privacy risks, and potentially intrusive behavior. Further, Mobile Insight will tell you exactly what risky behavior an application will perform and give you specific, relevant, and actionable information.
Public outcry has emerged over British and American monitoring of global communications. But the German government has so far been reserved in its criticism, partly because the country receives data from such monitoring.
The US Prism revelations show that the sovereignty of all European Union data is under threat, argues Caspar Bowden
If the NSA's surveillance capabilities make the Stasi's spying seem completely underwhelming, the Indian government's efforts in the same arena threatens to make our men and women at the NSA look as if they're just not applying themselves.
The revelations about the activities of American and British spy agencies are so egregious that even the online ad industry is up in arms. As well they should be — it threatens their livelihood.
Vladimir Putin has for the first time floated the idea of the US whistleblower Edward Snowden remaining in Russia, a move that would enrage the Washington as it continues to lobby for his extradition.
Every time I think I've read the least well-thought out luddite argument, someone comes along to top it, and today we have columnist Robert Samuelson in the Washington post with what might be the silliest, most lacking-in-thought argument for why we should get rid of the internet. The short version: yes, the internet has provided us with some good stuff, but because there's a yet unproven risk that it might also lead to some cyberattacks that might lead to as yet undetermined problems, we should scrap the whole thing. Oddly, the WaPo had put different titles on the piece online and in the print newspaper. Online, it's entitled: "Beware the Internet and the danger of cyberattacks." In the physical paper, they apparently went with the much more ridiculous: "Is the Internet Worth It?"
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden should be given political asylum in France, party leaders from across the political spectrum have said in the wake of the latest US spying allegations.
Former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden has broken his silence for the first time since he fled to Moscow eight days ago to say he remains free to make new disclosures about U.S. spying activity.
In a letter to Ecuador seen by Reuters, Snowden said the United States was illegally persecuting him for revealing its electronic surveillance program, PRISM. He also thanked Ecuador for helping him get to Russia and for examining his asylum request.
European officials are even more shocked and outraged today than they were yesterday at the revelations in Der Spiegel that the US government has been spying on the EU’s offices in Washington and New York. “These are disturbing news if proven true. They demand full clarification,” the EU said in a terse statement today. French president François Hollande said that the revelations might threaten a big round of trade talks scheduled for next week in Washington. “We aren’t in the Cold War anymore,” said Steffen Seibert, chief spokesman for German chancellor Angela Merkel, at a news conference in Berlin.
But while America’s European allies may be shocked, they can’t be surprised. Anyone familiar with the spy-versus-spy games in global diplomatic hubs knows that everyone has been spying on each other for decades.
Some offices at the UN are probably being bugged by more than a dozen foreign governments, according to a former head of FBI counter-intelligence. He says governments are spying on each other so much in Washington and at the UN that it’s surprising their spooks and technicians don’t bump into each other more. At any given time, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division is investigating dozens of potential breaches of security.
Two US officials familiar with American electronic espionage programs told Bloomberg that “multinational institutions are routine targets for both technological and human intelligence by virtually all nations that are members of them.” And the State Department cables leaked by Wikileaks show that US diplomats have essentially been required to spy on their counterparts for years.
[...]
If anything, Washington spies on its friends more than its enemies because it has more access, and needs to know whether it can trust them on key strategic deliberations, according to Peter Probst, a former senior CIA and defense department official.
For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country. The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.
In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.
Update: And... just as I finished this post, Manjoo tweeted that they'd changed the text to "has been." However, that's not what it was originally. Here's a screenshot of it from my screen with the wrong "have been" in there.
Former president George W. Bush criticized Edward Snowden and expressed confidence that the Obama administration would appropriately handle the controversy about its surveillance tactics in an interview filmed Sunday with CNN in Zambia.
Speaking to CNN’s Robyn Curnow, Mr. Bush said Mr. Snowden, the former CIA employee who leaked classified National Security Agency information, had “damaged the security of the country.” Mr. Bush said he was sure the administration would “deal” with the aftermath of the leaks, and said he approved of the NSA’s tactics. “I think there needs to be a balance, and as the president explained, there is a proper balance,” he said. The full interview is airing later Monday.
Ecuador is not considering Edward Snowden's asylum request and never intended to facilitate his flight from Hong Kong, president Rafael Correa said as the whistleblower made a personal plea to Quito for his case to be heard.
Barack Obama sought to defuse growing international tension on Monday over fresh revelations of US surveillance programmes on its allies by claiming European countries are also spying on him.
Amid an outcry among EU leaders at alleged diplomatic espionage including the bugging of embassies and parliament buildings, the president insisted the US was behaving no differently from other countries.
Edward Snowden, the former NSA employee who blew the whistle on a huge spying programme by US authorities, has accused the American government of “persecution” and thanked Ecuador for standing against it. And in a separate statement, released by WikiLeaks, he accused the US of putting pressure on world leaders over his case.
The National Security Agency could be rejigged as a self-funded entity fulfilling its missions while saving taxpayers billions of dollars and also providing them with a host of useful services.
< Chancellor Angela Merkel accuses Washington of 'unacceptable Cold War behaviour' /blockquote>
The latest leak from Snowden alleges the NSA has been eavesdropping on US allies, including the European Union offices in Washington, which would fit in with the agency's ability to scoop up any conversation or email relevant to "foreign targets."
Created after World War II to avoid another Pearl Harbor-style surprise attack, the NSA "has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created," wrote author James Bamford, whose books helped lift the lid on the agency's work.
One of the ways the NSA is doing this is by tracking a large list of flagged key words that are pretty common to everyday conversation. Sites like Motherboard.tv’s “Hello, NSA” takes that list of terms and automatically generates a phrase using a few of them that you can then post all over the Internet. The purpose is to basically skew all of the NSA’s efforts by going out of your way to mention these terms — thus making them less unique to terrorism (I mean, if they really were unique to terrorism in the first place.)
When the NSA whistleblower melted into Hong Kong's streets, many thought he would stay and fight his case. Instead, he ran
The whistleblower behind a series of leaks that revealed the United States was spying on its allies has applied for political asylum in Russia, it has emerged, as the French President François Hollande threatened to call off EU negotiations on a major trade deal unless the snooping stopped.
Edward Snowden presents Moscow with an intriguing dilemma. On the one hand, his subversion of surveillance techniques and his role as a whistleblower go against everything that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the clique of former KGB officers around him stand for. On the other hand, of course, his leaks are aimed against the US, and thus a chorus of Russian officials who would find a Russian whistleblower doing the same thing repulsive has been lining up to praise Mr Snowden.
THE REACH of the US PRISM snooping scheme extends into Germany and as many as 500,000 citizens.
According to Der Spiegel, reporters have seen more documentation about the US National Security Agency (NSA) PRISM communications surveillance programme, and found that it extends to European governments and citizens.
Microphones were put in building and computers compromised as spooks targeted EU in Washington and UN offices in New York
The fugitive U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, believed to be in legal limbo in the Moscow airport, is expanding his requests for asylum to another 19 countries, including China, according to WikiLeaks.
There is a linguistic gobbledegoo going on about what it is that Edward Snowden has committed that was made possible by the “advocacy journalism” of Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian. While many, in the US and around the world, seem to believe that Snowden committed a “heroic act” by blowing a loud whistle on the global spying by the US, the established order keeps insisting—noop, it’s “treason.”
A smoking gun shows Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is a big liar -- and it's not the first time
Questions of privacy, security and control have occupied me for a long time, both personally and professionally. In fact it was a significant aspect of my decision to switch focus from the Free Software Foundation Europe to Kolab Systems: I wanted to reduce the barriers to actually putting the principles into practice. That required a professional solution which would offer all the benefits and features people have grown accustomed to, but would provide it as high quality Open Source / Free Software with a strong focus on Open Standards.
Vladimir Putin has for the first time floated the idea of the US whistleblower Edward Snowden remaining in Russia, hours after the fugitive applied for political asylum in the country.
Where oversight and accountability have failed, Snowden's leaks have opened up a vital public debate on our rights and privacy
These days, despite state-corporate control and manipulation of the mainstream media, many see through the charade of today’s ‘liberal democracy’ and the ‘pack of lies’ which underpin it. The more the US lacks control over ‘the message’, the more it has to resort to violence and restrictions on freedoms. The more paranoid it becomes, the more penetrating and widespread the surveillance and ‘information gathering’ is. It is the type of insecurity that derives from an empire in decline. It is the type of oppression that derives from an empire that is ideologically and militarily fighting for its continued existence (10).
Again I hate to cast any skepticism on what seems to be a great story of a brave spy coming in from the cold in the service of American freedom. And I would never raise such questions in public if I had not been told by a very senior official in the intelligence world that indeed, there are some news stories that they create and drive – even in America (where propagandizing Americans is now legal). But do consider that in Eastern Germany, for instance, it was the fear of a machine of surveillance that people believed watched them at all times – rather than the machine itself – that drove compliance and passivity. From the standpoint of the police state and its interests – why have a giant Big Brother apparatus spying on us at all times – unless we know about it?
The NSA revelations highlight the role sophisticated algorithms play in sifting through masses of data. But more surprising is their widespread use in our everyday lives. So should we be more wary of their power?
As soon as the media reports about alleged spying and eavesdropping on EU premises and delegations were made known, the Commission asked the European External Action Service to immediately raise the matter with the US authorities in Washington DC and in Brussels to verify the veracity of these reports.
Even the weekend news cycle is not immune to new developments in U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and UK spying allegations, with headlines upon headlines of new news and reactions to Edward Snowden’s revelations.
The New York Times' Kevin O’Brien writes, “Europe was in an uproar Sunday over a magazine’s charge that Washington bugged European Union offices in the United States,” but adds that, “the backlash on another type of intrusion has been surprisingly muted, namely the disclosure that U.S. technology leaders…may have shared EU citizens’ personal data with an American surveillance program called PRISM.”
Thomas Drake, a whistleblowing predecessor of Snowden, published a written testimony in the Guardian news explaining how the information that Snowden is releasing is exactly what he saw during his time working at the NSA.
There are few world leaders who would risk standing for the human rights of an individual against the most powerful government on earth, and the bravery of Ecuador and its people is an example to the world.
I must express my deep respect for your principles and sincere thanks for your government's action in considering my request for political asylum.
The government of the United States of America has built the world's largest system of surveillance. This global system affects every human life touched by technology; recording, analysing, and passing secret judgment over each member of the international public.
While the international press plays up the information leaked by Edward Snowden as a revelation concerning the PRISM surveillance program, feigning to have discovered what everyone should already have known for a long time, Thierry Meyssan is particularly curious about the meaning of this rebellion. From this perspective, he attaches more importance to the case of General Cartwright, who has also been indicted for espionage.
Could the latest target of President Obama’s aggressive war against leakers of government secrets be a recent, and very high-level, member of the country’s military power structure?
Edward Snowden has been characterized as many things in recent weeks, but journalists' discounting him as a "high-school dropout" speaks volumes about media portrayals of education.
Around 70 people attended our PRISM and Tempora event in Parliament last Thursday...
Poland, among the staunchest U.S. allies in Europe, said on Tuesday it will demand an explanation from Washington about allegations from ex-intelligence contractor Edward Snowden that U.S. agencies spied on European Union communications. - See more at: http://www.tidewaterreview.com/news/national-world-news/sns-rt-us-usa-security-snowden-sikorski-20130702,0,688495.story#sthash.Bi8J50Lu.dpuf
Turkey and Japan have joined other countries in tightening the screws on Washington over the latest NSA leaks which suggested that the American agency extensively spied on its allies.
The National Security Agency’s widespread surveillance of communications by Americans may have caused a scandal when it was revealed last month, but it was hardly the first time the sprawling, super-secret entity was caught snooping on American citizens. In fact, the NSA was caught spying on Americans, for decades, long before the 2001 attacks on the U.S. persuaded authorities to create mass eavesdropping programs in an attempt to catch terrorists.
The EU must stop cosying up to the US, protect its citizens and investigate the possibility of espionage by a foreign power
Fresh details about Prism have emerged after the Washington Post published four more leaked slides detailing the US internet surveillance programme.
The paper says the documents indicate the FBI has installed equipment on the property of certain US-based tech firms and passes on retrieved data to the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA).
European Commission requests for clarification from the American and British governments relating to espionage allegations remain unanswered as more revelations continue to stoke European political indignation.
German magazine Der Spiegel reported on Saturday (29 June) that the US National Security Agency (NSA) bugged EU offices and gained access to EU internal computer networks.
President Obama defended U.S. intelligence-gathering tactics Monday in the wake of a report that the United States conducted electronic monitoring of European Union offices and computer networks.
Revelations from European leaders on Monday that the National Security Agency bugged European Union offices in Washington and hacked into its computer network bring to light hypocrisy on the part of the U.S. government.
In 2011, the Pentagon released its first formal cyber strategy, which called computer hacking from other nations an "act of war," according to the Wall Street Journal. In late June of this year, WSJ reported that Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, released information alleging the U.S. government was hacking Chinese targets "that include the nation's mobile-phone companies and one of the country's most prestigious universities."
U.S. allies are turning on the Obama administration over the latest revelations from National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.
French politicians from the right and the left and a leader of Germany’s Green Party called for their countries to grant amnesty to Snowden on Monday amid continental outrage over reports America bugged offices of the European Union.
Some people are deeply upset about the latest incursions into our privacy. But as a society, we don't seem to care all that much.
In a refracted media world where information comes from everywhere, the line between two “isms” — journalism and activism — is becoming difficult to discern. As American news media have pulled back from international coverage, nongovernmental organizations have filled in the gaps with on-the-scene reports and Web sites. State houses have lost reporters who used to provide accountability, so citizens have turned to digital enterprises, some of which have partisan agendas.
In the course of both, I referred to one example I had recently learned of created by Palantir. The specific technology essentially builds an audit trail to the core, so any use of data by, say, a gov’t official, is perfectly tractable.
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce the newest member of its Board of Directors: renowned security expert Bruce Schneier.
Raffaela has already posted on both the House of Representatives‘s and the Senate‘s versions of this year’s NDAA–highlighting their differences with regards to Guantanamo detentions and transfers. But I wanted to emphasize the point, which seems to me both very important and potentially offering a major breakthrough in the politics of Guantanamo.
IN May 2010, I received a brown envelope. In it was a CD with an encrypted file containing six months of my life. Six months of metadata, stored by my cellphone provider, T-Mobile. This list of metadata contained 35,830 records. That’s 35,830 times my phone company knew if, where and when I was surfing the Web, calling or texting.
The truth is that phone companies have this data on every customer. I got mine because, in 2009, I filed a suit against T-Mobile for the release of all the data on me that had been gathered and stored. The reason this information had been preserved for six months was because of Germany’s implementation of a 2006 European Union directive.
On 30th June 2013 WikiLeaks’ legal advisor in the Edward Snowden matter, Sarah Harrison, submitted by hand a number of requests for asylum and asylum assistance on behalf of Edward J. Snowden, the NSA whistleblower.
Snowden, a former defense contractor in the United States, has been charged with treason by America for leaking secret documents on the country’s massive surveillance program.
The other countries to which Wikileaks has applied for asylum include: Austria, Bolivia, China, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Venezuela, Ecuador and Ireland.
The police in Mayfield Heights, Ohio are clearly put out that the Supreme Court has ruled out checkpoints for drugs. They have come up with what they believe is the next best thing: fake drug checkpoints. They are effectively threatening an unconstitutional stop to see which drivers flee . . . and then searching their vehicles. It turns out that Police Chief Fred W. Bittner has support from the local prosecutors in threatening police abuse as a basis to stop cars.
Egypt set for a military coup if Muslim Brotherhood President clings to power
That's an unofficial number, of course. But that's the unofficial number of people who are out protesting against the government of Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood today. Thirty-three million all over Egypt. The largest protest in the history of the world.
Bank of America pushed for the prosecution of Olson on vandalism charges for writing his First Amendment opinions on public sidewalks (and in one case on Bank of America pavement). In fact the elected conservative SD City Attorney, Jan Goldsmith, didn't even initiate charges against Olson until months after he wrote in chalk on sidewalks in front of three Bank of America branches in SD. It was only after the local security officer for Bank of America relentlessly prodded the City Attorney's office that Olson was charged with the 13 counts of vandalism.
When we start talking about his war crimes, we might as well be talking about a figure from a history textbook, for all the emotion we show. If we were on a television program and you were watching us with the mute button pressed, you would imagine I was asking about his grandchildren. Instead I am asking about how he murdered other people's grandchildren.
But here's the problem: DRM itself is what allows "walled gardens" and "closed apps." So, if they truly believe that's not good, they should be against adding DRM to HTML 5. The argument made here is truly bizarre. It also presupposes that the web needs content companies more than the content companies need the web. That's almost certainly incorrect. Whenever the content companies have chosen to go in the other direction and to wall off things and lock them up, that's when you see the content flow through to the open web in an unauthorized manner. The way to stop that is for content companies to learn to embrace the web and to recognize, as many in the music world finally did, that DRM is a waste of time. It doesn't stop or even slow down copyright infringement. It just acts as a huge pain in the ass for those who acquired the works in a legitimate and authorized manner.
The question for Jazz now becomes whether competitors will be induced to compete, lowering prices, once the 7-year tax cut expires. Price competition seems unlikely, since it currently has only 10,500 customers and a competitor would have to gamble that it can take market share from Jazz.
Question for taxpayers: how long will this ripoff continue?
Negotiators at the World Intellectual Property Organization have finalized terms on a copyright treaty that would provide more book access to the world’s blind and visually impaired.
In a major new ruling in the Google Books case, the Second Circuit decertified a class action and told Judge Denny Chin to rule on whether Google’s book scanning is fair use.
2013 is a momentous year for UK copyright law. This month, the Intellectual Property Office has released eight draft Statutory Instruments (SI) for copyright exceptions, among them education, libraries/archives and quotation. These drafts have been produced off the back of the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property which recommended changes to copyright law in areas where the current law is confusing or has not kept pace with developments. So what exactly is being proposed and what implications will these exceptions have on the higher education community?
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Proxcool.com
2013-07-08 10:00:27
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