Although the PC market is in turmoil, it has never been easier to replace its out-of-date, often unsupported, bloated & infected preinstalled OS with a Linux alternative.
In this tutorial, I'll explain how to turn your PC into a Web kiosk. What's a Web kiosk? It's a PC that directs the public to a certain intended Web application. Imagine public computers found at a library or a cafe, these would be considered Web kiosks.
Chromebook shipments could spike in the second half of the year. That's not good news for Microsoft, which is seeing falling laptop deliveries.
Last December I wrote about an idea I call "One Server Per Person", the basic idea being that if every household included their own server, the Internet could make a return to being the decentralized, distributed, and open platform it was meant to be. Recent events have brought to light some pitfalls of cloud computing, and a call for privacy online make the concept of the One Server worth a revisit. I have three projects that I would like to talk about, and how they relate to bringing the datacenter home.
[...]
Transporter - If you took the Raspberry Pi setup above, put it in a nice plastic case, added a nice web interface and restricted its use to filesharing only, you might wind up with the Transporter from Connected Data. The Transporter is a tiny device that plugs into your home network and allows you to share your files with all of your computers and mobile devices, no matter where they are. It is like Dropbox, but hosted on your own personal server. The only drawback that I can see is that it is not open source (although I'd bet on it running Linux or FreeBSD under the hood), and it does require some form of cloud interaction with a central server to allow the connection back into your Transporter. However, as a proof of concept, it works well.
Linus Torvalds is well known for his use of colorful language on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) and he's not the only one that uses questionable language that some might considering threatening.
For the last 20 years, I can't remember anyone actually standing up to Linus (or the other colorful devs) saying that's just not right -- until today.
Sarah Sharp, Linux kernel developer at Intel, is making a stand against the verbal abuse.
Profanity and insults have long been management tactics of Linux creator Linus Torvalds. He once memorably gave the middle finger to Nvidia; separately, he announced that he would not change Linux "to deep-throat Microsoft." Torvalds has also shown no qualms about being rude to those who disagree with him.
There’s an interesting public spat going on in the world of Linux, where a Linux programmer from Intel, Sarah Sharp, has picked a fight with the Linux creator himself: Linus Torvalds.
Linus Torvalds is a man of many emotions. At times, he's got a great sense of humor - he did just name the 3.11 Linux kernel 'Linux for Workgroups', after all. Other times, and especially if you're a developer making his life harder, he can be less-than-pleasant, as has been evidenced time and time again. As much as I respect Linus, I've long believed that it wouldn't hurt to tone down his aggressiveness just a wee bit, and now, it's become clear that I'm not alone.
Sarah is completely right, and entitled to demand an abuse-free working environment. Thank you for making this explicit, and standing up against those that think it’s not necessary. You’re speaking for a silent crowd, that is now not so silent anymore.
[...]
Food for thought: If we want Asian hardware manufacturers to work with us on, e.g. drivers for their hardware, and do it upstream, it simply won’t happen in a rude atmosphere that is entirely incompatible with Asian culture (where critique has to be much more subtile). Of course it’s a general problem with cultural diversity.
The “Linus being Linus” issue comes up occasionally, and often with a hue and cry about how mean, nasty and ugly he can be. I’ve called him on things in the past — not that he cares (he doesn’t), but at the time I thought it merited discussion. But back to the latest edition of the blow up, which can be found here, here and here, and you’ll see wherein lies the rub.
A female kernel developer has told Linux creator Linus Torvalds that he should stop abusing and cursing developers on the main kernel mailing list, advising him to "keep it professional on the mailing lists".
In late February this year, I published a proof of concept demonstrating the XBMC Media Center on the Weston system compositor. It was basically a hack which used SDL’s existing wayland compositor support with a few additions required to make XBMC work. XBMC plans to drop SDL usage and use window systems directly, which makes a lot of sense, but it meant that this proof of concept would have to be largely rewritten.
XBMC developer smspillaz, the man responsible for the XBMC Weston hack a few months ago, is now rounding the final turns towards XBMC being fully compatible with Wayland. smspillaz reports that he will be doing a GSoC this year to move XBMC completely to Wayland–without the use of SDL.
With the release of Mesa 9.2 being a few weeks out, here's a current look at the OpenGL 3.x/4.x support levels within Mesa.
The current overview of the modern OpenGL functionality offered by Mesa can be found in the latest GL3.txt Git.
Chris Wilson has put out another speedy X.Org Intel graphics driver release, this time bumping it to version 2.21.12.
There's finally a new and visually exciting OpenGL benchmark to try out for Linux, OS X, and Windows users alike. The benchmark also supports OpenGL 3.x contexts for making testing more exciting with regard to the Linux graphics driver stack.
After 10 days of vacations, I’m now back at work for the rest of the GSoC period. Before my departure, I presented a syntax-highlighted query builder widget. It was based on a QTextEdit made to look like a QLineEdit, and a QSyntaxHighlighter subclass was responsible for the highlighting.
[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource GamesPress.]
If you love the MMORPG WAKFU, then get excited players, because now it is on Ubuntu! In WAKFU, gamers can climb mountains and adventure across unknown lands were they can become a warrior, merchant or whatever they choose!
It's been a while since Citrix updated their Receiver for Linux. The ‘Receiver for Linux 13.0 Tech Preview’ is intended for customers and partners to evaluate it in their environment. This Tech Preview provides the opportunity for partners to integrate the optimizations in their firmware in order to get the additional benefit of new enhancements with Citrix Receiver for Linux.
As we do every summer, we've pulled together our list of 101 of the "funnest" open source apps ever created. Of course, most of these are games, but there are also a few fun non-games at the end of the list.
This year, we've updated the list with quite a few new entries, as well as eliminating some of the older titles that are no longer being maintained.
Many commentators have noticed that open source and Linux are starting to attract more game developers. Hopefully, the trend will continue and we'll have even more open source games to consider for next year's list.
Shadow Warrior Classic Redux, classic first person action will be heading to Linux in a future version!
Christmas morning 2012, one of my Gmail accounts was hacked. The good news was that it wasn’t my main account. The bad news was that it was one I used for a fair amount of work-related communication. I was lucky that I caught it quickly and was able to button it up within an hour or so, but it was a surprisingly intense experience, leaving me feeling violated, humbled, vulnerable, and silly.
Since my last post quite some progress has been made in getting KWin working on top of a Wayland compositor. My main focus of work has been on the input stack. This is something I am not really familiar with as so far we did not have to care about it.
As some might know input handling in X11 is very insecure. Every application is able to listen to every key event. And in the KDE workspaces we obviously make use of these “features”. For example the global shortcut handling is implemented as a kded module listening to all key events and notifying the application via D-Bus that the shortcut got triggered. In a post-X11 world this will not work any more: applications are no longer able to listen to all key events.
At the Kubuntu Developer Summit we discussed various topics. The guys on the left are from a 15,000 seat Kubuntu rollout in Munich, we worked out a plan to supply LTS backport packages they need.
Open Source communities are amazingly innovative. Linux Defenders encourages them to document their ideas in the form of defensive publications, so that this body of knowledge becomes relevant prior art for later patent applications and patent invalidations.
Language data for Artikulate is growing. We currently have 19 units in basic course skeleton form which 18 are translated into Polish,
A quiet day for me at Akademy catching up on e-mail and learning how to make an apt archive so here's some more photos from the rocking party last night.
GNOME 2 is the Linux desktop environment that refuses to die. Three years after its last release, GNOME 2—or, to be precise, its successors—are collectively as popular as uncustomized GNOME 3. The GNOME 2 successors scored 18 percent to GNOME 3's 13 percent in the 2012 LinuxQuestion's Member's Choice poll, and 15 percent to GNOME 3's 21 percent in the Linux Journal Readers' Choice poll. Despite the half dozen desktops available today, GNOME 2's successors remain leading choices.
This persistent popularity is both a measure of the initial user dissatisfaction with the GNOME 3 release series and a triumph of branding. Initially, dissatisfaction with GNOME 3.0 caused many users to turn to Xfce. A long-time distant third to GNOME and KDE, Xfce closely resembles GNOME 2 but is generally lighter and faster.
The new 2013.07.11 Bluestar Full edition has been released and is available for download from the Bluestar Linux downloads area. This release introduces a number of new and useful features, including new icons for shutdown/reboot/logout/screenlock, and extended language installation options.
This version includes some misc features like:
Eltrans: This release includes a complete rewrite of the translator tool for Elive. With features like a grammar corrector and a proofreader mode, where the translator can modify the original sentences of the application itself, making it more userfriendly and intuitive. Backported Randr code from Enlightenment 18 to E17 which makes it easier to configure dual-screen and external monitors, special thanks to PrinceAMD and devilhorns.
Linux vendor Red Hat is updating its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL) platform with a new beta release.
RHEL 5.10 provides users with a variety of updated capabilities, including a new version of MySQL, improved management tools and enhanced security.
We’re excited to share that Red Hat has just been named by Business Insider as one of “The 25 Best Tech Companies to Work for in 2013.” The list was compiled using information gathered from Glassdoor.com, a free jobs and career community where employees and job seekers can provide anonymous information about different companies.
Fedora is one of those distributions I try from time to time but that ultimately fail to stay around, usually when it comes to the upgrade process. I last used Fedora 14, after brushes with 12 and 10, the KDE spin of which got slower with every point update to the desktop but whose LXDE spin actually got used for quite a few months. So let's see how Fedora 19 pans out, featuring GNOME Shell 3.8.2, and how/if that has improved since I last tried the Shell when it was freshly released on the unsuspecting public.
Beginning with Fedora 20, the Linux distribution is considering no longer installing rsyslog by default but would replace it with use of the systemd journal as the Fedora logging solution.
My son James (12) has presented me with two gifts he’s made at school recently. Both are terrific and he designed and made them himself.
MTN has joined the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group (CAG), a body which lets mobile operators shape Ubuntu’s mobile strategy.
Canonical announced the formation of the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group (CAG) on 18 June 2013.
Support for the alternative open source mobile OS developed by Linux shop Ubuntu increased this week as pan-African carrier MTN Group signed up to the cause.
Canonical announced that MTN has joined the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group, bringing another 21 countries across the African region into the fold.
Raspberry Pi embedded development firm Geekroo has surpassed its Kickstarter funding goal for a Mini-ITX board and case that extends the RPi into a full-fledged computer (SBC). The Fairywren is equipped with a 24-pin ATX power supply connector, a four-port USB hub, a 2.5-inch HDD bay, a serial port, an IR remote module, GPIO breakout, and sockets for a built-in XBee radio and Arduino Uno boards.
HTC One is a stunning device and the Taiwanese smartphone maker should be real proud of it, but being critically acclaimed doesn’t guarantee commercial success, and that exact same thing has been happening with HTC. The company’s popular flagship smartphone even though has had a positive impact on the finances, has not been enough to pull the company out of the crisis. Now analysts are suggesting that HTC should merge with the Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei.
The new family-friendly XO Tablet debuts July 16 on Walmart.com and will be in Walmart stores on August 1, and will provide kids with a fun and exciting new way to build, learn and dream at their own pace via a powerful Android tablet packed with free educational games, apps, videos, e-books and more. The flexible tablet also grows with the family offering up to three separate user accounts plus full-fledged Android tablet functionality with parental-controlled access to conventional Android apps and the Google Play store.
Successful Kickstarter project and highly publicized Android gaming console OUYA has ignited a feeding frenzy as competitors rise to fill the market.
BoxTone's enterprise mobility management platform is designed to bring Android security up to levels better-suited to the rigors of the business workforce, but in making Android enterprise-hardened, the company left Android's open source trappings intact.
As part of that EMM platform, BoxTone delivers its service in three categories of functionality, according to Brian Reed, the company's chief marketing officer and chief product officer. Mobile device management is generally the most well-known functional area; the second one is an emerging market called Web services management. The third category, mobile services management, focuses on reliability, service quality and cost efficiency.
To be presented and released at Black Hat, CrowdStrike's Tortilla delivers to researchers much-needed anonymity on Windows machines
A start-up named Broala has been formed to expand the open-source intrusion detection system known simply as Bro that has been used in high-speed research networks for about two decades.
A lot of computer software now comes for free. It is called open-source software. Most open-source software has online communities of software developers around them who collaboratively write code. I always wondered who pays these people to work so hard and create such beautiful software and then give it away for free. Where do these people earn money? I was not surprised to find out that these were not conventional people bored with their desk jobs during the day who went home at night to write beautiful, intelligent computer software.
Avineon, Inc., a successful provider of information technology, geospatial, engineering support services, and Outage Restoration Management Software (ORMS) today announced the release of the Implementation Guide for the Outage Restoration Maturity Model (ORMM).
Boffin software reviewer revealed today its list of free label maker software for 2013. The Boffin reviewers have put to the test various label maker programs to identify the most efficient and reliable ones. The reviewers assessed the software based on efficiency, quality, speed and overall performance.
Trusted software review website announced today its top choices regarding free label maker software. CDROM2Go and MAgix Xtreme Print Studio made it to the Boffin hall of fame.
Last week Mark and I attended the Oxford University ICT Forum where we gave this workshop talk on “Getting the Maximum Benefit from Free and Open Source Software”.
Getting started in an unfamiliar open source project seems intimidating because it is intimidating; plunging into the unknown usually is. Navigating new territory is a lot easier with a guide—which is why I recently taught a seminar at Hacker School on "getting started contributing to open source" that mostly amounted to "first, find a mentor." The basic steps are:
Linaro has just published videos and slides from keynotes, technical presentations, and panel discussions at last week’s Linaro Connect Europe 2013 event held in Dublin, Ireland. The sessions spanned a wide range of topics, including Android, Builds and Baselines, Enterprise, Graphics and Multimedia, Linux Kernel, Network, Project Management Tools, Training, and more.
If you are going to be in Portland, Oregon in the next few weeks, I wanted to share some of the things I will be doing. If you want a meeting while I am at the Community Leadership Summit and OSCON, please get in touch and we can coordinate.
The SoCraMOB Open Space – hashtag #MOBenSpace – takes place roughly every second month and aims at people from the area around Münster, Osnabrück and Bielefeld. It has usually around 20-40 people and focuses on discussing modern and agile software development in these days, independent of the programming language. The background organization behind it is the German Softwerkskammer, an initiative to bring together software developers.
I've been putting Google's new version 28 of the Chrome browser through the paces, and so far I've come away impressed. In case you haven't followed the latest on this release, Google is at a major fork in the road with Chrome (so to speak), and has built in a brand new, in-house created rendering engine called Blink. We covered it in this post, and the Opera browser is also transitioning from the WebKit rendering engine to Blink.
The Spanish company is expanding from the developer market to the broader consumer market with the Peak+, a higher-end phone than other Firefox OS models on sale.
Cloud computing has become an integral part of IT for many organizations, and the competing open-source platforms are pushing for a role in advanced cloud management. The overarching goal of both CloudStack and OpenStack is to achieve logical cloud-layer management that presents numerous ways to control various workloads.
This is the first release candidate for FreeNAS 9.1.0. We have passed a great alpha and rolling beta cycle with many bug fixes and regressions fixed. At this point, only bug fixes and regressions will be addressed.
The FreeBSD Foundation has published their latest quarterly status report to make known the current state of the popular BSD operating system project.
Awk's features have advanced considerably in the last decade — such as the addition of a debugger and a profiler — all without removing any of the elegance or terseness of the fabled little language.
Support for aarch64 was just committed to lightning.
The open-source Eucalyptus cloud project has just released a new version that's improved its Amazon Web Service cloud interoperability.
Next.Data.gov is a sleeker site for government records, but will Americans use it?
The U.S. government’s portal for the data it creates, Next.Data.gov, is getting a revamp that should make it easier to view and reuse government data.
GovHack projects will be used to build upon and add new functionality to the data.gov.au website
The twelve Dutch provinces estimate that since 2009 they have saved 4.5 million euro by working together and by using open source software solutions for their Geographic Information Systems. The twelve are now looking to build communities around their open source tools.
I never thought how a simple photograph at a family birthday could capture the essence of an open education until my niece recently turned one year old.
A few years back, one of my classmates from a graduate course had a complaint. She told me that her school bought an expensive technology system, which included tablets and interactive whiteboards, to help improve the school’s technological environment. In her opinion the purchase of this high-priced equipment was not really necessary. She believed that instead of buying such expensive technology, her school should have investigated alternatives that are inexpensive or free, and require only minimal training.
GitHub has become one of the most important places for open source software developers to publish code and collaborate on projects. But, ironically, most projects hosted publicly on GitHub aren’t open source, at least according to the letter of open source law.
Aaron Williamson, a lawyer specializing in open source issues, analyzed over 1.7 million public GitHub code repositories earlier this year, and of these, only 14.9 percent had clearly specified an open source license, as reported by The Register.
GitHub has launched a new site – choosealicense.com – as a way to simplify selecting an open source licence for projects and has added new licence setting options when creating new repositories for those projects. The company has been criticised in the past for not reminding users that putting code up in public doesn't place it in the public domain, but leaves it as copyrighted and unlicensed code.
As I write these words in mid-February 2013, many Ruby on Rails developers are worried. The framework that so many of us have used and enjoyed for so many years, turned out to have some serious security flaws. It's not just the sort of flaw that can allow someone to modify your Web site either;these holes meant that a properly armed attacker could execute arbitrary code on your server. And nowadays, "properly armed" is not a very high threshold because of such tools as Metasploit, which make it laughably easy to launch an attack against an arbitrary computer on the Internet.
Lawyers for a man who alleges he was held in a secret CIA jail in Lithuania have accused the Baltic state of failing to give proper answers to judges considering the case at the European Court of Human Rights.
When the NSA can't break into your computer, these guys break into your house.
Business is booming at HyTrust, a maker of policy management and access control software for VMware virtual infrastructure, and whistleblower system admin Edward Snowden, who revealed the National Security Agency's web-spying PRISM project, is doing his inadvertent part to pump it up even further.
[...]
HyTrust has been saying that IT shops should adopt a second approval rule for a lot of things that go on inside the data center for the past year, and the Snowden episode just makes this necessity all that more clear (at least, from the point of view of companies and governments).
But Krasheninnikova thinks that “talking about soft power, we need to understand who developed it and for what purpose. If the concept of soft power still belongs to the U.S., we must learn the true meaning of this concept and understand how these mechanisms work. The main instrument of the cultural front of the Cold War was the "Congress for Cultural Freedom," with offices in 35 countries and dozens of publications and programs. The majority of these programs were conducted through foundations and non-profit organizations. Some funds were very real, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Asia Foundation, they exist today, and other funds were fakes, created specifically to transfer money and to clean the CIA as a source of funds for the organization. Non-profit organizations and U.S. funds are a mere extension of the U.S. state apparatus. If someone thinks that they are truly independent, then that person is deeply mistaken. As the author says, at one point in time there was a joke: "If any American philanthropic or cultural organization includes the words "independent" or "private" in their documents, most likely it is a cover for the CIA."
[...]
“We have no right to have illusions and have no right to make errors,” Krasheninnikova believes. “The U.S. may make mistakes because they have enormous economic, political and military weight, and their margin for error is wide. We have almost no margin for error. For example, the situation with Libya. We have made a decision, and Libya as a state does not exist. Our mistakes cost us too much. Therefore, we must, as experts, people who are involved in the processes of government, be responsible for the decisions, be responsible for the fate of the country. And so we must have the possibility of a deeper understanding of the current processes, understanding of history, as they provide a much more accurate prediction of the future, of the steps of the United States. America's not going anywhere, we have to deal with America for a long time, as long as we exist. Therefore, we need to know this actor exceptionally well.”
What's wrong with human resources officials of the CIA and U.S. Army intelligence? Their ineptitude is damaging the image of Western democracy by hiring people that let the truth out.
Yes, America, we tortured. And there is a step that Oregonians can take now to help ensure that U.S.-sponsored torture never happens again.
The torture in which our government engaged was illegal, abhorrent and cruel. Detainees died as a result of American torture, and former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew about it and were involved in authorizing it.
AT least nine suspected militants, including two foreigners, were killed in Pakistan's lawless tribal region in a US drone strike and a separate Pakistan military operation, security officials have said.
At least 19 suspected militants, including two foreigners, were killed in Pakistan's lawless tribal region overnight in a Pakistani military operation and a separate U.S. drone strike, security officials said on Sunday.
Read more: U.S. drones, Pakistan military attacks kill 19 militants - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_23658987/u-s-drones-pakistan-military-attacks-kill-19#ixzz2ZL0sPsmq Read The Denver Post's Terms of Use of its content: http://www.denverpost.com/termsofuse Follow us: @Denverpost on Twitter | Denverpost on Facebook
Despite needed cuts to big ticket US defense programs, an investigation into Northrop Grumman’s lobbying efforts reveals the military contractor kept its costly Global Hawk drone flying despite the Pentagon’s own attempt to kill the project.
The strategy employed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to discourage a CIA hit job has been likened to a tactic employed by the U.S. and Russian governments during the Cold War.
Earlier this week we got our first look at actor Benedict Cumberbatch playing Julian Assange in the forthcoming WikiLeaks film The Fifth Estate — but Assange himself has some particularly harsh words for the production. In a speech before the Oxford Union, Assange revealed that a draft of the script for the Dreamworks project had in fact been shared with WikiLeaks, and he called it "a mass propaganda attack against WikiLeaks the organization, and the character of my staff and our activities, and so on."
Barrett Brown is a journalist imprisoned without bail, facing over 100 years of potential jail time, much of it for posting an http link to a public forum. He had been writing about several private intelligence companies and set up a Wikipedia-like site, ProjectPM, for crowdsourced analysis of the documents released by Anonymous after several hacking attacks. Some people are petitioning for Brown's freedom from what they view as a politically targeted prosecution, but this article will concentrate on what the information Brown has uncovered can do to explain how PRISM and related spying programs may be used against Americans. The official government line has been that PRISM is targeted at foreign terrorists, but it's just as likely that the program will be used to frustrate expressions of political opinion at home.
As long as workers could wrest gains from capitalism, the system was safe. But with production offshored, that bargain blew up
TPP talks held in British Columbia in June were kept secret, but Canadian activists learned about them the day before from an article in the Peruvian media. Opponents hustled to hold an emergency teach-in and to project messages about the TPP on downtown Vancouver buildings. More talks will take place July 15-25 in Malaysia. Photo: Citizens Trade Campaign. - See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/2013/07/secret-tpp-deal-would-void-democracy#sthash.yPy3NTN9.dpuf
Despite widespread public opposition to the education privatization agenda, at least 139 bills or state budget provisions reflecting American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) education bills have been introduced in 43 states and the District of Columbia in just the first six months of 2013, according to an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy, publishers of ALECexposed.org. Thirty-one have become law.
New York Times reporter Peter Baker has a piece today (7/16/13) about Barack Obama and Dwight Eisenhower that presents a somewhat confusing picture of both.
The article is about how Obama wields power–or, in the eyes of some critics, fails to take advantage of the "bully pulpit."
This is not exactly a huge vote of confidence in the National Security Agency's institutional safeguards against wrongly invading Americans' privacy. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D.-Mich, told reporters Tuesday that he wouldn't want someone like notorious FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to have the NSA's powers to spy on U.S. citizens.
"If this technology were in the hands of J. Edgar Hoover, would I feel comfortable? No," Levin declared at a breakfast with reporters organized by the Christian Science Monitor. "But on the other hand, I wasn't comfortable with J. Edgar Hoover with his technology."
Levin, who also sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he had been "adequately informed" about the NSA's program of collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans. That program and a parallel program to intercept online communications, known as PRISM, were the focus of revelations by Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor.
A lawsuit disputes a new interpretation of the Patriot Act allowing routine, bulk collection of phone data by the NSA
A group of 19 consumer and privacy groups has sued the National Security Agency (NSA), arguing that the agency's data collection processes violates the law and the Constitution.
Read more: http://www.itproportal.com/2013/07/17/long-time-enemy-eff-sues-unconstitutional-nsa-to-stop-dragnet-spying/#ixzz2ZI9iDaxE
A group of 19 consumer and privacy groups today sued the National Security Agency (NSA), arguing that the agency's data collection processes violates the law and the Constitution.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013 -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today joined eighteen other activist and advocacy organizations in challenging the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of telecommunications in the United States with a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The recently revealed surveillance program intercepts and catalogs the time, place, and participants of all calls on Verizon's phone network over a defined period. This includes calls made between advocacy organizations and their supporters.
The cycle of leaks and discussion around the NSA and its post-9/11 role in American society has had an impact on the degree to which companies can talk about their efforts to resist corporate intrusion. One result of these leaks has been additional information on Yahoo’s efforts to protect its US users. For years, Yahoo fought the government’s attempts to compel it to turn over private data, even though gag rules prevented it from ever discussing the case. The EFF just acknowledged the company’s silent battle with a sparkling gold star of “special distinction,” despite the fact that the company’s challenges ultimately failed.
The Federal Migration Service confirmed he had completed the relevant paperwork at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, where he has been for the past three weeks.
Edward Snowden has applied for temporary asylum in Russia, according to a pro-Kremlin lawyer. Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier said Snowden would leave Russia "as soon as he can" but also accused the US of "trapping" the intelligence leaker in Russia. Snowden is spending his fourth week in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. In a closed-door meeting, Snowden said he plans on finding a way to travel legally to Latin America after filling for asylum in Russia.
The Russian President claims the former CIA computer technician turned down an offer of asylum contingent on him leaking no further classified information
A parliamentary oversight committee in Berlin would like to know how much the German government really knows about NSA spying activities in Germany. Their leverage, however, is limited.
A parliamentary panel has questioned Germany’s interior minister about what Berlin knew about a US spy program known as Prism, before it became public knowledge. He now faces a second day before the committee.
"If we’re lucky, we might even be able to see a real NSA spy," event page says.
There are many people around the globe who want to stay strictly anonymous when using the web and electronic messaging systems, and there are also lots of people who simply want to follow best practices for protecting their online privacy to the extent that they can. In some parts of the world, opressive government regulations threaten free speech, and that has produced an extensive list of technologies that people use to avoid online detection.
Vásquez made his apology after handing over the note in the ministry, although he also reiterated that his government never denied Morales' plane permission to fly over Spanish airspace as it returned from Russia.
Merkel’s center-left opponents have seized on disclosures of National Security Agency surveillance programs by leaker Edward Snowden to assert that she hasn’t been doing enough to confront Washington and protect Germans’ personal data — and to cast doubt on officials’ assertions that they didn’t know of the programs.
The opposition apparently hopes that the issue will breathe life into a so-far stumbling and gaffe-prone campaign for Sept. 22 parliamentary elections. A healthy economy, low unemployment and perceptions that Merkel has managed Europe’s debt crisis well have bolstered the chancellor.
Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) has issued a report into the legality of the intelligence gathering and information sharing by using the NSA’s PRISM program. Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/17/parliamentary-committee-rules-gchq-spying-program-nsas-prism-was-legal#ikmYhTcpO1Q0Thcm.99
Facebook continues to be an intelligence operative's best friend. Many of its users subvert any sort of expectation of privacy simply by leaving their accounts on the default settings. (This also works out well for Mark Zuckerberg.) Anything set to the public default can and, apparently, will be seen.
Attorneys for the Electronic Frontier Foundation have sued the Obama administration and are demanding the White House stop the dragnet surveillance programs operated by the National Security Agency.
Several House members call on the NSA to end its program collecting the phone records of US residents
It makes some interesting points, about the role of government in open source projects, and the whole Snowden affair has thrown a spotlight on the way major software companies have (inevitably?) co-operated with government…
The National Security Agency revealed to an angry congressional panel on Wednesday that its analysis of phone records and online behavior goes exponentially beyond what it had previously disclosed.
Unlikely coalition takes NSA – and the telecoms firms who own much of the web's infrastructure – to court over bulk surveillance
If you’re using Google’s “back up my data” feature for Android, the passwords to the Wi-Fi networks you access from your smartphone or tablet are available in plaintext to anyone with access to the data. And as a bug report submitted by an employee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on July 12 suggests, that leaves them wide open to harvesting by agencies like the NSA or the FBI.
And now, living in a world of instant everything, I worry about huge number of people who blindly read and believe almost anything posted, pinned, linked or Tweeted. It scares me.
As the mainstream American press goes after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, the leakers' revelations are becoming an afterthought.
The recent Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act is bound to bring voter ID laws back into the media discussion. And, unfortunately, that means some of these discussions will suffer from a familiar problem: The unwillingness to point out that the problem such laws are allegedly fighting–voter fraud–doesn't exist.
That platform is more likely belongs to someone like Cohen–who, in 1986, wrote a column defending store owners in Washington, D.C. who refused to allow young black men to enter their stores because of a fear of crime. The Post apologized to readers. This time around they probably won't.
But what the NDAA has done is essentially codified the elimination of one of the most important restrictions on state power. These restraints — that the burden of proof is on the state, that nobody can be locked in a cage without due process, that only the civilian police force is allowed to make arrests — are some of the most revolutionary legacies of Western liberalism and represent one of the starting points of anything resembling a free society.
But thanks to the president's stroke of a pen and a Congress that resembles the rubber-stamping body of the Roman Empire, these constitutional restrictions, written by men who combed through history for the devices that were intended to keep state power in a box, have been legislated away.
The Obama Administration and the U.S. military are asking a federal judge to put a hold on his order blocking groin searches of Guantanamo Bay prisoners in connection with attorney visits.
For centuries, the act of refusing food has turned human bodies into effective political bargaining chips. And so it's no surprise that the prisoners desperate to leave Guantanamo after, in some cases, nearly a dozen years there, have turned to hunger strikes on and off since 2005 to try to win their release.
For years, the Pentagon officials who run the detention camp have responded by prisoners. Currently, some 45 of the 104 hunger-striking captives are receiving the procedure, as many people learned this week when a graphic video featuring Yasiin Bey, the rapper and actor formerly known as Mos Def, went viral. While Bey's performance may be part publicity stunt, doctors say it does help expose the unethical treatment and some of the pain of the Gitmo detainees subjected to force-feeding.
Antonio Petalcorin, President of the Network of Transport Organisation (NETO) has been shot dead on his way to a union meeting. Antonio is one of twenty trade union leaders to have been murdered over the course of the last decade, and one of up to 1,000 politically motivated killings in the Philippines.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit has dealt a terrible blow to Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky and the other activists and journalists suing to prevent the indefinite military detention of American citizens.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday threw out a lawsuit targeting a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 that opponents argue could be used to indefinitely detain American citizens on mere suspicions of terrorism.
The journalists and activists who brought the case argued that the NDAA unconstitutionally gives the president the authority to detain anyone he suspects of teaming up with al Qaeda or the Taliban, anywhere. They argued that even those who merely spoke with terrorists -- like former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges -- might be in danger.
On Tuesday of last week I announced a package of measures to be presented in September – for a telecommunications single market, bringing down barriers to support a sector critical for our future growth.
The focus of some of the immediate reactions to this speech has been on mobile roaming. Operators have long resisted attempts to stop them charging well over the odds on roaming rates. And it appears that they are continuing to do so.
"It's no secret that copyright holders are trying to take down as much pirated content as they can, but their targeting of open source software is something new. In an attempt to remove pirated copies of Game of Thrones from the Internet, HBO sent a DMCA takedown to Google, listing a copy of the popular media player VLC as a copyright infringement. An honest mistake, perhaps, but a worrying one. ... Usually these notices ask Google to get rid of links to pirate sites, but for some reason the cable network also wants Google to remove a link to the highly popular open source video player VLC. ... The same DMCA notice also lists various other links that don't appear to link to HBO content, including a lot of porn related material, Ben Harper's album Give Till It's Gone, Naruto, free Java applets and Prince of Persia 5."
The VLC 2.1 media player update is due out in the coming weeks and with it will come several new features for the open-source program.
After the excitement this morning about the VLC port to Qt 5 nearly working, I decided to check in on the state of VLC 2.1 -- the next major release for the project -- and what features it shall possess.