A new kind of laptop, the SOL, is being designed for the great outdoors and it's powered by sunlight and it will be running Linux.
Chuckle. They must run a lot of GNU/Linux. There’s no way that other OS can be secure with such cuts because of the layers of cruft that M$ imposes. With GNU/Linux otoh, one guy can control an indefinite number of machines with SSH and package managers. Even in my home, I activate one script and it updates all the machines on my LAN in a few seconds.
IBM is now following in the steps of ARM Holdings and has decided to allow for licensing of their CPU architecture. IBM and a group of other companies wanting a stake in IBM's POWER architecture have also founded the OpenPOWER Consortium group.
Opsview is a global IT Systems Management software business. Our flagship product, Opsview Enterprise was released in 2009, based on the original Opsview open source project launched in 2003, and is in use in over 35,000 companies in 160 countries.
The Reiser File System (Reiser3) was created by Namesys in 2001 and added to the Linux Kernel in version 2.4.1. Reiser3 was the first Journaling file system included in the Linux Kernel.
Separate from the important Radeon DPM support in Linux 3.11 that can sharply lower system power usage when using this forthcoming kernel update, there's been other power-related changes in recent Linux kernel releases.
The OpenMP 4.0 specification has been unveiled as a major new specification for programming of accelerators, SIMD programming, and better optimization using thread affinity.
Let's start from the beginning, because even though Wayland has been in development for over five years there is still a lot of misunderstanding of what it is. Wayland is a display server protocol that is intended to replace the X Window System. We've had X for 27 years, and computing has changed a wee bit in that time. Back in the olden days we had text terminals and every little pixel was precious. Now we have great honking graphics cards with more processing power than the servers and workstations of yesteryear, multiple displays, smartphones and tablets, embedded devices, and users who are not going to settle for colorful ANSI displays, but want complex 3D graphics. And why shouldn't Linux lead the way in graphics rendering? Are we not overdue for holodecks? And who would ever want to leave their holodeck? Though, as figure 1 shows, you can make some cool color images with ANSI.
Orbital is a plugin/client for Wayland's Weston compositor that provides a custom shell for the next-generation display server. Orbital is made using Qt 5 and Qt Quick 2.
Giulio Camuffo announced his custom Wayland/Weston shell today on the Wayland development mailing list. He's been working on this shell for a while that's written using the Qt 5 tool-kit with Qt Quick 2. It's now in a comfortable state so he's decided to publicly announce Orbital.
The patches published one month ago for Nouveau NVIDIA Fermi Compute Support on the open-source driver have now been committed to master for the next Mesa release. More importantly this is the base work for implementing NVIDIA performance counters.
Version 7.2.0 of the xf86-video-ati DDX driver was released this morning. While the X.Org drivers aren't too exciting these days with most of the really great work happening within the DRM or Mesa/Gallium3D drivers, there's still an interesting number of changes to xf86-video-ati 7.2.0 for Radeon GPU hardware support.
The set of new patches were written by Intel's Damien Lespiau and allow for parsing a dark corner of the EDID information for being able to expose the 4K x 2K resolution modes to user-space. These ultra high-resolution modes are supported by the HDMI 1.4 specification.
Eric Anholt of Intel is currently working on some experimental Mesa code for shipping "Mega drivers", or building all of the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers together as a single shared object library file. There's some promise to this mega drivers concept in enhancing performance due to compiler/linker optimizations.
Marek Olšák, the well known Radeon Gallium3D contributor and AMD's newest open-source employee, has implemented multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) support for the "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver plus made other changes.
The X.Org Developers' Conference is already coming up next month and there's a lot of interesting topics to be discussed from DRM security to Mesa to reverse-engineering NVIDIA GPUs.
There doesn't appear to be much to get excited about right now, but it appears some Google developers working on Chrome/Chromium OS have begun working on some improvements to the Linux DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) kernel graphics drivers.
For this year's Google Summer of Code with the X.Org Foundation, three of the developers working on interesting X.Org/Mesa/DRM are on track while one student developer already dropped out.
At this week's X.Org Board of Directors IRC meeting there was an update on the GSoC projects. The meeting minutes in full can be found via the X.Org Wiki. Of the four projects, three are on track while one of the student developers has already quit/failed.
Going back to June on Phoronix there have been Ubuntu Mir/XMir performance benchmarks. Up to this point these benchmarks have only been done with Intel and Nouveau graphics drivers, since the AMD Radeon driver has been rather problematic with XMir. Sadly, this still appears to be the case.
Xubuntu, the Xfce-based flavor of Xubuntu, is presently evaluating the use of Canonical's Mir display server via the XMir X11 transition layer. For helping in the process and testing, the Ubuntu derivative has made public some Xubuntu XMir images.
Just days after the exciting news of Coreboot supporting the AMD "Kabini" APU, there's more good news for this open-source project... There's now Intel "Haswell" graphics firmware support!
We now know that the Linux 3.11 kernel has a heck of a lot of AMD Radeon performance potential through the new dynamic power management (DPM) support in its DRM kernel driver, but how's the Nouveau performance? Here's some new benchmarks.
Although discs are slowly becoming obsolete and being replaced by simple transfers or downloads over the Internet, there are still plenty of reasons for burning or copying some discs. In some cases, your Internet connection may not be sufficient enough to download the files you want. For example, distributing CDs/DVDs of Linux distributions is easier than telling computer-illiterate people to visit a website, download a large file, and burn it to a disc themselves. In any case, you need a trusty burning utility to do the job, and Brasero and K3b are your top choices.
Several years back, Songbird was going to be the newest, coolest, most-awesome music player ever to grace the Linux desktop. Then things happened, as they often do, and Linux support for Songbird was discontinued. I've been searching for a favorite music player for years, and although plenty of really nice software packages exist, I generally fall back to XMMS for playing music—until now.
Linux offers a vast collection of open source small utilities that perform functions ranging from the obvious to the bizarre. It is the quality and selection of these tools that help Linux stand out as a productive environment. A good utility cooperates with other applications, integrating seamlessly.
Gamers are in for a treat with this week with the new Humble Weekly Bundle offering games from Introversion, including popular simulator Prison Architect.
The new bundle launched today and includes four games from Introversion Games, including hacking game Uplink, real-time strategy game Darwinia and its multiplayer counterpart Multiwinia: Survival of the Flattest alongside strategy war game Defcon.
If you follow our planet, this is no news, but the recent advances in graphics, networking a other stuff from SuperTuxKart are quite nice. This is basically a result of them being accepted to this years Google Summer of Code.
I’ve often wondered what’s more upsetting; being set on fire only to have the fire put out with buckets of urine, or a new Humble Bundle for Windows only. Well, I’ve yet to be set of fire and put out with a firehose-style golden shower, but regardless of the fact, I’m infinitely disappointed by Windows-only Humble Bundles. However this latest bundle has almost been remedied by Guido Eickmeyer, Creative Director at Deep Silver. Just hours ago, Guido started a popular AMA thread over on Reddit.
I’ve always loved simulation games for as long as I can remember. They can involve so many different aspects of the topic in question and can keep you entertained for hours. However, a common downside to any great simulation game is the price to purchase it. Thankfully, there are open source equivalents which aim to replace their costly proprietary cousins — examples include FlightGear and LinCity-NG as alternatives to Microsoft’s Flight Simulator series and SimCity games respectively.
id software lost company president Todd Hollenshead earlier this year, and just after the most recent QuakeCon legendary developer John Carmack has announced his departure
Something I have been meaning to do an editorial about for a while is game demo's, spurred on by PuppyGames blog posts on it (here and here) about them not supplying demo's for any of their games.
Using the openSUSE Build Servive it's now easy to test the very latest Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5 advancements from the openSUSE Linux distribution.
Following in the steps of Project Neon, the initiative for providing daily packages on Kubuntu of KDE Frameworks 5, a similar push is underway in the openSUSE world.
I know 4.11 is still not released (will release today), but kde master is open.
So I started to add new feature in KDEPIM.
So while y’alls were frolicking at Akademy (with Dot coverage), I was on vacation. The choice between vacationing with my family or attending Akademy was a tough one: we also spent some time looking into getting the whole family to the conference, but the price tag and “what will the kids do there” tipped the scales. Maybe next year Akademy will be somewhere that fits in my summer vacation and is amenable to cycling.
We have just released version 0.6.3 of KDE Telepathy, the instant-messaging client for KDE.
Last week, I presented an idea about indexing messages from webmails in Nepomuk. The summary of this idea is to implement a browser extension for Firefox, Chrome and Konqueror. This extension parses the DOM tree of every page visited by the user that belongs to a webmail. When e-mails are found, they are extracted and stored in a temporary file. Nepomukfileindexer then quicks in and indexes these e-mails in the Nepomuk database.
Back in May I had to travel to Bariloche, my hometown, due to family issues. While there, I met Javier Barcenas, a local FLOSS advocate and developer.
Season of KDE is a community outreach program, much like Google Summer of Code that has been hosted by the KDE community for five years straight.
Well I think it's time for a small update on porting the FolderView applet to QML.
First of all, I've dubbed it QuickFolder for now, this is the name under which it exists in the kde-baseapps repo. The reason is that both codebases need to coexist for a while for me to carry over the old (existing) code to the new applet.
It’s that time of the year again for a new PIM sprint. I’ve been there the last two times now and it’s just one amazing bunch of people coming together and making massive progression in what they like doing most.
The free software world has been at risk of getting left behind. GeoClue, the location framework designed for these environments was in a state of flux for a long time with very little happening to it. But now we have GeoClue2, a rewritten implementation of the original idea.
After being released as a preview for GNOME 3.8, Photos has seen some progress in the 3.9.x cycle. Some highlights so far:
Flickr support. The ability to push to digital media renderers (or DMRs) using dLeyna. A new selection pattern and title bar.
The MATE Desktop, one of the popular forks of the GNOME 2 desktop environment, is seeking to support the Wayland Display Server as well as systemd -- two popular Linux technologies that have only been a focus for GNOME3.
Vinagre, an open source remote desktop connection and VCN client for the GNOME desktop environment, reached development version 3.9.5 a few days ago.
Vinagre 3.9.5 fixes credential access with libsecret, improves credential description, fixes a logic bug in utils.show_many_errors(), adds the recognize_file() API to VinagreProtocol interface, and uses the new recognize_file() API for parsing files.
At GUADEC last week besides drafting Wayland plans for GNOME, there was a BoF session for GNOME's toolkit. Here's some of the stuff that's upcoming for the GTK+ 3.10 tool-kit.
For end-users, GTK+ 3.10 is significant in that it should have near-complete HiDPI support -- the tool-kit playing nicely with retina-like displays. There's been a lot of work in recent months by GNOME on their HiDPI support throughout the desktop. The HiDPI blocker right now is just waiting on a new Cairo release.
We had a GTK+ meeting during the Guadec BoF days. It was a long and good discussion touching on many issues.
Last week when I wrote about the OpenMandriva Lx Beta delay I was a bit frustrated because I couldn't find any kind of release schedule for OpenMandriva Lx. Well, apparently I wasn't the only one because a long time contributor asked the technical committee for one. The answer was a bit disappointing I'm sure.
A while ago, I read Ken Stark's delicious rant because of a kernel regression.
Ah, those regressions can be real bothersome in the world of FLOSS. Even so, I had never experienced one. Therefore, the whole thing remained pretty much an abstraction to me... until two days ago, when I found my original thesis presentation and understood the frustration of those regressions.
Let me explain. When I was a student, computers were not as popular as they are today, let alone laptops. Thus, delivering a presentation meant that you had to borrow somebody else's laptop.
Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, has announced that it is expanding the reach of its embedded software program through a new partnership with Avnet Embedded, a business group of Avnet Electronics Marketing, an operating group of Avnet, Inc.
Red Hat is known to many people as the only U.S.-based public company that is exclusively focused on open source, and it has proven that its Linux-focused strategy is very profitable. But as I noted in a recent post, the cloud beckons for Red Hat. June was a big month for Red Hat in terms of advancing its cloud computing strategy, which the whole company is aligning around as an engine for future growth. The company unveiled the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure. It also introduced the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network and Red Hat Certified Solution Marketplace.
ok so you have a shiny new Fedora 19 installation, you’ve just installed it onto your computer/laptop, what’s next. Ok well here’s what I’ve done.
Well hi there, strangers. I’m sitting in Robyn’s keynote at Flock 2013, so obviously I need to do something other than listen to what happened to her this one time at band camp (yep, really)! Also, I need to write a blog post so Fedora Badges will pick it up. Fedora Badges is the awesome new gamification thing for Fedora which I told everyone who’d listen I was way too cool to get sucked into, so of course as soon as it went up I started refreshing the leaderboard every three seconds…
This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Fedora 19 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.
Two distinguished distributions are celebrating birthdays this week. The openSUSE project celebrates 8 years of open Linux development and distribution. At the same time, Debian is gearing up for their birthday celebration at DebConf13 on August 16. Both projects provide invaluable and incalculable contributions to the Open Software sphere and the world economy.
People get tired of hearing me say this, but I’ll say it again anyway: The CrunchBang Forums contain a wealth of information accented by a community of knowledgable and friendly — in equal portions — people volunteering their time to answer questions. The forums and the community are one of the things that make CrunchBang the great distro it is.
Still, this may come as a shock to some, but we don’t have all the answers.
Oh, we might have most of the answers. But from time to time in the CrunchBang Forums, we get questions about software that is not CrunchBang specific. And when answers aren’t quickly forthcoming, sometimes the original poster may become impatient or find that the community is lacking in some way.
Let’s be clear about something: If you’re looking for CrunchBang-specific answers — answers to questions solely about the distro or the way things work in it — those answers are usually quick to be answered, if they haven’t been answered already. In fact, I have seen disagreements crop up about which solution to a question is best, which is somewhat entertaining.
Ubuntu is no longer the basis of gNewSense – the famous GNU/Linux distribution comprised of entirely free software.
The distro, backed by open-source proponent Richard Stallman and endorsed by the Free Software Foundation, has switched to Debian as the base of its most recent stable release, gNewSense 3.0.
Canonical has reached the half-way mark in their campaign to fund the Ubuntu Edge smartphone.
Canonical needs money to fund the Ubuntu Edge smartphone. Crowdfunding isn't working. Is it time for Founder Mark Shuttleworth to sell Ubuntu to a big technology company?
In the last weeks I blogged a couple of times about how we want to get Ubuntu out to more and more users in a much much easier way. It would be great if we could have gotten all images built in the data centre, but unfortunately do redistributability issues (some firmwares, blobs and proprietary kernel modules) not allow us to redistribute them easily. Another issue were some short-comings in our infrastructure, which have to some degree been fixed already.
The first big rock is Image Based Upgrades. Today, when we "bless" a new image, one must use a tool on your desktop called "phablet-flash" to update to that new image. After August, the phone will download updates over wireless and install them without requiring a connection to the desktop. As you can see in the blueprint, this requires some deep changes to the way Ubuntu works (as well as to our automated testing) in order to do it as robustly as is necessary for this market (a.k.a. no "dpkg --configure -a"). The disks must be partitioned so that the system is total separate from user data. The server must calculate the binary diff of an update for that partition, and the diff must be applied safely and reliably.
Since this article was published Canonical has cut the Edge’s price to $695. See details at the end of this piece.
Canonical has lowered the price of its Ubuntu smartphone to $695 from $775 in a bid to reach its lofty $32 million crowdfunding goal in the next two weeks.
Canonical has done away with its complicated pricing scheme for the high-end Ubuntu Edge, instead setting the device at a fixed price point of $695 (about €£447, AU$762).
Canoncial has generated plenty of buzz with its $32 million crowdsourcing effort to build 40,000 of its Ubuntu Edge superphones, resulting in an impressive list of nearly 20,000 individual contributors. The problem, though, is campaign has only $8.8 million in the pot and just 14 days remaining.
Canonical remains optimistic that the Edge, a smartphone-PC hybrid that runs both Ubuntu for Desktop and Android, will see the light of day, for two reasons: First, the company has won over its first enterprise backer in financial information and news provider Bloomberg. Second, the company has managed to cut the price on the Edge to $695 a pop.
Canonical’s Ubuntu Edge croudfunding effort, though in many respects impressive, seems the most paradoxically ill-fated campaign ever: the largest all-or-nothing Indiegogo launch ever attempted, the Edge is somehow smashing records while showing absolutely no sign of reaching its $32 million goal. A limited number of pricy funding tiers probably hurt momentum, as did vague shipping promises. There is some good news for the folks at Canonical, though: Bloomberg LP pledged support yesterday for the Edge at the Enterprise level, equivalent to an $80,000 investment. That may’ve motivated the company to cut unit price to a mere $695 – a significant reduction. Is it already too late for the Edge, though?
Canadian telecommunications company WeWi will soon be launching a solar-powered notebook called the SOL Laptop. While it’s not the first of its kind, it has at least one impressive feature that makes it one to watch: WeWi claims that the built-in solar panels can charge the laptop in just 2 hours.
As expected with Canonical's plans to land the Mir Display Server with XMir in Ubuntu 13.10 where Unity 7 will run atop XMir by default for supported configurations, the various components have now landed in the Ubuntu 13.10 "Saucy" main archive.
Linux Deepin is the leading community distribution from China featuring the Deepin Desktop Environment based on GNOME Shell. Linux Deepin 12.12.1 was announced today as an enhancement (and also a bug-fix) of the previous 12.12 release. New functions include the deepin-notifications plugin for the desktop, where users can check the notifications sent by utilities or the OS. As an important component of the desktop, Deepin System Settings now supports wallpaper selection via the personalization module and automatic login via the accounts configuration module. The Software Center has been upgraded for more convenient software installation/uninstallation. The dmusic-plugin-baidumusic plugin has been developed for better online music experience. Last but not least, the Deepin team has been maintaining a weekly archive on recommended applications. Read the full release announcement (in Chinese) for further information including screenshots.
Elementary OS "Luna" is probably the most beautiful Linux distribution in existence, and the developers are preparing a new launch, most likely of the final version.
Lately, there seems to be a lot of fear, doubt and negativity about Xubuntu and Mir. Several news sites have even been releasing news saying that Xubuntu is the first operating system to run Mir. This is both correct and incorrect.
Scarcely a week after the Intel-backed Minnowboard.org project began shipping its $199 open-hardware single board computer, the AMD-backed GizmoSphere.org project released an unrestricted version of its $189 Gizmo SBC’s schematic and electronics distributor Digi-Key added Wandboard.org’s open, Freescale-based $83-144 boardset to its online catalog.
My android phone wakes me up with its stock alarm clock into a cold San Francisco summer morning. I lie around a bit, but eventually get up to enjoy yet another day. An hour later, I'm running in my dress shoes, tie waving in the wind like that of an anime superhero schoolboy, towards a light rail train stop. Twenty seconds before I get there, the train leaves, right before an unanticipated 20-minute break in the service. I eat a bagel I don't want in a cafe nearby to sit there and work while waiting; my day, having barely started, is already ruined.
We spoke to the creator of Rapiro, the Raspberry Pi robot, about open source, Kickstarter and the future
Amazon could dive into the video game arena with its own Android-based gaming console, according to the folks at Game Informer.
Citing information from sources with "knowledge of the in-development hardware," Game Informer said on Thursday that the console could reach consumers by the end of the year, mostly likely by Black Friday. The console would come with its own dedicated controller, say the sources, and would serve as a platform for the digital games already offered by Amazon through its Web site.
It's okay to love kernel source – you can admit it. Sony is pretty good to the open source community, and in keeping with that reputation, it has posted the open source files for the Sony Xperia M. Yay.
Continuing its commitment to open source software, Sony has taken to its developer portal to upload version 14.1.B.0.461 of its upcoming (yes, not even released yet) Sony Xperia Z Ultra. The embracing of the open source community by Sony is very much a welcome habit of theirs, and consequently it’s little wonder that last year they were voted best OEM.
One-click login hands over keys to Gmail, Google Drive et al, says researcher
BlackBerry is sharing its crown jewels - BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) - with non-BlackBerry devices for the first time: and the lucky punters are Samsung fandroids in Africa.
If your Android smartphone is performing at a grindingly slow pace, it could be due to apps running in the background that are chewing up available memory. Task killers aren't really sufficient -- these background apps don't stay dead for long. However, Watchdog Task Manager lets you see exactly which apps are gumming up the works, letting you decide whether to kill -- or perhaps delete them.
Android news/rumors: The end of an era, plus giant robots annoyed as LG removes "optimus" title from latest release, Android's continued domination and why people think it's doomed, and a Moto X engineer hates back on critics
You see, there is Google Android, the project that Google builds and shares with its handset partners, then there is the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The two are not exactly the same. One of them includes proprietary technologies that are not available as open source (guess which one?).
Jean-Baptiste Quéru, the maintainer of AOSP abruptly quit his post this week, throwing into question the viability of Android as an open-source effort.
"There's no point being the maintainer of an Operating System that can't boot to the home screen on its flagship device for lack of GPU support," Queru stated in a G+ post.
The challenge that Queru is referring to is the ability of AOSP to boot on the Nexus 4 and 7 devices. Apparently there are some proprietary bits that silicon vendor Qualcomm is not making available as open source, without which AOSP will not boot.
Taiwanese personal computer maker Acer Inc. said it plans to offer fewer Microsoft Inc. products and more Chromebooks and Android-based mobile devices, after it posted a surprise second-quarter loss on lower sales and rising expenses.
You can have any kind of flagship phone, so long as it's 4.7 inches or larger.
Today in Open Source: Giant Android phones. Plus: Strike Suit Zero released for Linux, and is Apache the most important open source project?
Google's maintainer of the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP), has quit the project out of being frustrated with the lack of open-source ARM GPU drivers. In particular, Google's flagship devices not working with the Android open-source project over no vendor-backed open-source graphics drivers.
A year ago, BusinessWeek published a story called "It's Official: Google Is Now a Hardware Company." And since then, Google's involvement with hardware has been transformative. Chromebooks (portable computers running Chrome OS) are one of the few bright spots in the portable computing market, Google is spreading out with its Motorola Mobility phone strategy, and the company is getting buzz around its new Chromecast dongle for streaming video content to TVs.
The NVIDIA SHIELD portable gaming device/console was released at the end of July and now NVIDIA has come forward with the source-code to the whole operating system in hopes of encouraging enthusiasts to modify and improve the platform.
Another round of bug-fixes for the Radeon Dynamic Power Management code has been submitted for the Linux 3.11 kernel.
Motorola has designed a phone meant to be customized, even to your voice. It's imperfect, but could return the company to its former glory
That the Moto X doesn’t feature the absolute fastest mobile processor doesn’t matter much. It’s all about simplicity, comfort, and some forward-thinking features. It’s a friendlier Android phone for people who would typically go for an iPhone.
The new devices run on Atom chips, include customized educational software, and offer a number of learning accessories.
Asus is responsible for both the original Nexus 7 and the refreshed edition, so it's clear the Taiwanese manufacturer has a good working relationship with Google. The refreshed Nexus 10 will reportedly be available "in time for the holiday season" through both Google Play store and Best Buy. Although he's unsure of the exact announce date, Holly tells us that Best Buy is already preparing for the tablet internally.
Google's Web Lab exhibition has had a decent run at London's Science Museum, but all of that web-linked hardware is being packed up for good after the doors are closed this Sunday. Google's hoping that at least some of it will live on, though, and has teamed up with research and design firm Tellart to open source two of its most popular experiments.
The disclosures by Edward Snowden will have a huge impact on our society and by that also on free software. I do not think that we can continue as we used to do, but that we have to adjust our software to fit the new reality, to make our software a true opponent to the surveillance state we live in and to return to 1983.
I started my technology career in the late '80s working as a bench tech at a small computer repair shop. The first major malware infection I remember was a virus called 'stoned,' which spread by sharing floppy disks between computers and replicating itself. It was hidden in the master boot record but not terrible difficult to find and repair. A computer infected by stoned simply displayed the message, “Your computer is now stoned, Legalise (sic) Marijuana.”
Philosophies on how to approach things in life, for example Open Source Versus Closed, run in cycles. In the 1970s hobbyists would be carefully typing BASIC code from there enthusiast magazine. Commodore, Apple or the highest podge of C/PM machines.
What's been your summer blockbuster favorite? Wolverine? Lone Ranger? Pacific Rim?
You ain't seen nothin' yet! Our favorite summer blockbuster comes out September 16 with an exclusive showing only in New Orleans: LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America taking place September 16-18, 2013 at the Hyatt New Orleans.
This is the largest gathering of Linux and cloud professionals in North America. Deeply technical content has been produced in partnership with the Linux Plumbers Conference to extend the opportunities for learning and collaborating unlike ever before. We hope you will join us.
Single sign-on (SSO) mechanisms offer the promise of users having a single credential (the sign-on) in order to log into multiple sites and services. When it comes to the Web, there are multiple sources of identity to power SSO, and open-source browser vendor Mozilla wants to be one of them.
Mozilla launched its BrowserID effort in 2011 and renamed the consumer-facing technology bits Persona in 2012. Just to confuse us all, the core specification behind Persona is still known as BrowserID.
Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 23.0 today with several new features to the popular open-source cross-platform web-browser.
The Palm pioneer has turned to neuroscience and big data to create a path to truly intelligent machines -- a path open to the community's contributions
Last week, I covered some comments from a couple of tech industry heavyweights having to do with the OpenStack cloud computing platform. Specifically, former Microsoftie and noted tech blogger Robert Scoble put up a Google+ post saying that OpenStack would be sidetracked by any attempt to build in API compatibility with Amazon Web Services (AWS). And, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said that his company's strategy is to "support OpenStack" despite the fact that the platform is "immature."
Keeping the DB alive outside Larry's grasp? Sounds good to Choc Factory
Drupal 7.23, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) is now available for download. See the Drupal 7.23 release notes for a full listing.
Late Thursday afternoon, premier hosting provider and domain registrar ITX Design announced the upcoming launch of complimentary phpBB open source forum software with all new hosting and VPS accounts. The Virginia based company now guarantees the service where the customer won't ever need to purchase an additional server or pay for web hosting.
This year Arianna Huffington delivered the commencement address at Smith College and dared the female graduates (it's still a female college) to change how society has been defining success for women from money and power to wonder, wisdom, giving back, and community.
Issue_contents
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (Who will guard the guards themselves)?
Apache THRIFT: A much needed tutorial
A closer look at the changes in PC-BSD/TrueOS 9.2 – Part 1 – ZFS Boot Environments
An email gateway with FreeBSD to prevent malware and undesirable messages
The Service Spawner
FreeBSD Programming Primer – Part 7
PKGNG: The future of packages on FreeBSD and PC-BSD
Make sure you have rtmpdump installed and enter this command into your terminal emulator:
The world of open source licenses is really quite interesting if you give it a chance. The premise of taking the restrictive presumption of copyright law and using it to do the opposite, that is, grant a broad range of rights creates some interesting license language, to say the least. Although legal concerns around may be new to many people still, some of the licenses have storied pasts. Here's a sampler of open source license trivia to memorize for your next local pub quiz night.
In February, CivSource reported on an effort by engineer Philippe Plagnol to open up the tracking and supply chain data contained in the barcodes on consumer products. Since then, Product Open Data (POD) has garnered the attention of the French government, private sector partners and the GS1, the organization responsible for creating and housing data on each unique barcode. In this interview, we talk to Dr. Mark Harrison, Director of the Auto-ID Lab at the University of Cambridge, who works with the GS1 and recently started looking at projects like POD in an effort to bring more openness to GS1.
The Academic Senate of the University of California passed an Open Access Policy on July 24, 2013, ensuring that future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public at no charge.
Arduino-powered satellites arrive at International Space Station on Saturday
Open-source PCs like the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoard are finding interesting uses
Single board or “open-source” PCs have become a hot market, with the Raspberry Pi selling in the millions and competitors getting in on the act, including Intel’s recently announced MinnowBoard (shown above).
The video above shows how this laptop with a very modular design can be quickly disassembled without the use of tools. If you’ve ever taken apart a laptop, you know the pain and frustration that comes from trying to find and keep track of the nigh infinite number and variety of screws that hold these things together. As these students demonstrate, it just does not have to be this way. Interestingly, there may not be much of a need for a modular designed laptop as long as the components themselves were sufficiently modular. This is the kind of thing I’ve come to expect to be uploaded to Thingiverse.
The truth is, kids can’t use general purpose computers, and neither can most of the adults I know. There’s a narrow range of individuals whom, at school, I consider technically savvy. These are roughly the thirty to fifty year-olds that have owned a computer for much of their adult lives. There are of course exceptions amongst the staff and students. There are always one or two kids in every cohort that have already picked up programming or web development or can strip a computer down to the bare bones, replace a motherboard, and reinstall an operating system. There are usually a couple of tech-savvy teachers outside the age range I’ve stated, often from the Maths and Science departments who are only ever defeated by their school laptops because they don’t have administrator privileges, but these individuals are rare.
It took an out-of-this-world arrival to get that perfect chemical combination for water to fill our planet
When the Obama administration announced July 2 that it would give a breather to employers affected by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), angry unionists noticed a pattern.
Even before this delay, “every corporate interest that’s asked for regulatory relief has gotten it,” said Mark Dudzic, chair of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer, “but the concerns of union plans have been overridden.”
The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) will next week meet in Ethiopia to discuss strategies for resistance against genetically modified (GM) seeds.
AFSA is a Pan African platform comprising networks and farmer organisations working in Africa including the African Biodiversity network, Coalition for the Protection of African Genetic Heritage, Comparing and Supporting Endogenous Development Africa, Friends of the Earth- Africa, Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee and Participatory Ecological Land Use Management Association.
The rest are Eastern and Southern African Small Scale Farmers Forum, La Via Campesina Africa, World Neighbours, Network of Farmers’ and Agricultural Producers’ Organisations of West Africa, Community Knowledge Systems, Plate forme Sous Régionale des Organisations Paysannes d’Afrique Centrale and African Centre for Biosafety.
When Twitter rolled out two-factor authentication back in May, it hinted that the SMS authentication would be merely a first step in a more robust security solution. Today, WIRED got a better look at the company’s just-announced new system that relies on application based authentication–which means it can provide a complete end to end security without relying on third parties or codes sent via SMS.
Lavabit offered Snowden—and other customers—512-bit security on stored e-mails.
Judicial Watch has filed a law suit against the CIA, claiming that during his speech at a June 2011 awards ceremony the former CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed “top secret” information in the presence of Zero Dark Thirty filmmaker Mark Boal. The conservative watchdog group seeks to investigate whether the White House put the national security at risk only to provide Hollywood directors with facts to make a “pro-Obama” film.
But if you go and read the Jane's report you might wonder what exactly is going on here. The report clearly puts almost no stock in the idea that this facility has anything to with a desire to launch missiles armed with nuclear warheads–that would make sense only to "those who believe Iran's rulers are messianic fanatics who are intent on destroying Israel as soon as possible with no regard for the consequences."
In fewer than two weeks, Hellfire missiles launched by U.S. drones have killed at least 31 people in Yemen. At least 14 of the victims were believed by President Obama — the launcher-in-chief — to be al-Qaeda militants.
A senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Friday praised the Obama administration’s policy of using of drones in the evolving war on terrorism, saying he has no problem with the precedent being set by the legally controversial policy and would not be bothered if other world powers — specifically Russia — began using drones to kill terrorists.
An Israeli drone strike killed five suspected Islamic militants and destroyed a rocket launcher in Egypt's largely lawless Sinai Peninsula on Friday, two senior Egyptian security officials said, describing a rare Israeli operation carried out in its Arab neighbor's territory.
A report from CNN’s Jake Tapper has reintroduced “Benghazi-Gate” to the US media spotlight. The report claims that “dozens” of CIA operatives were on the ground in Benghazi on the night of the attack, and the CIA is going to great lengths to suppress details of them and their whereabouts being released. The report alleges that the CIA is engaged in “unprecedented” attempts to stifle employee leaks, and “intimidation” to keep the secrets of Benghazi hidden, allegedly going as far as changing the names of CIA operatives and “dispersing” them around the country.
The second-in-command of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) says that the toppling of Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria is the largest threat to United States national security and may help al-Qaeda acquire chemical weapons.
The online magazine speculates that the mom of two will be returning to the small screen as the lead of a new CIA drama written by Alexi Hawley, the supervising producer of Fox's "The Following."
Heigl would reportedly take on the role of an adviser or communications liaison for the United States president, while the storylines would focus around CIA operations around the world.
Baer said at the beginning of the interview he arrived in Sarajevo by helicopter with three other agents on January 12 1991. He said that their jobs had been to keep an eye on the supposed Serbian terrorists, suspected of preparing an attack on Sarajevo.
He said that they had information about a group called “Serbian Supreme” and their plans to attack key buildings in Sarajevo with the aim to make Bosnia leave Yugoslavia.
However, he said, such group has never existed and he and other agents were tricked by their central command. They were actually given the task to warn people and raise panic amongst the politicians in Bosnia. They, as he said, basically just filled their heads with the idea that Serbs will attack. Eventually they realized they were spreading stories and fear about a group that did not exist.
The operation was called “Istina” (The Truth) which is exactly what it had not been, he said. He was given another task and left Sarajevo after two weeks for Slovenia on another job. The operation in Bosnia continued for another month or two.
A jury has cleared the city of Portland, Oregon and two police officers of using excessive force during an Occupy protest in November 2011, when a demonstrator was struck in the throat with a baton and sprayed with pepper spray into her open mouth.
The case of Elizabeth Nichols came to an end on Friday when a lawsuit against the city and police was thrown out of court. Nichols took part in an Occupy Portland protest several years ago and ended up becoming one of the highest profile instances of alleged police brutality against the Occupy movement.
Tomas Garcia was a father of seven who would have turned 50 this December. He was a husband, father, brother, and community leader, serving as an auxiliar and on his community’s Indigenous Council. On Monday, July 15, his life was brutally taken away by the Honduran military when a soldier shot and killed him at close range in broad daylight in front of 200-300 people. He did not have a gun, he did not hurt anyone. His crime? Opposing the construction of a hydroelectric dam being constructed in his Indigenous Lenca community's territory against their will, in violation of ILO Convention 169 and the Honduran government's promises to consult Indigenous communities about projects in their territory. Why Tomas? He was one of the first to arrive, leading the delegation that had come to deliver a message to the companies constructing the dam at their installations in Rio Blanco. A soldier fired at him not once, not twice, at least three times from only 6 or so feet away, according to eyewitnesses.
Some of the people who were most concerned about Internet privacy, and were using the Tor anonymous Internet service to protect it, may have been the most exposed.
So the potentially most damaging part of Manning's disclosures was that the war kills civilians–and that U.S. enemies could use that fact to recruit others.
If that's the standard– that the killing of civilians might rally people behind the cause of Al Qaeda–then shouldn't someone be talking to George W. Bush about ordering the invasion that caused all the killing? Of course not–the only person facing punishment is the person who thought the rest of the world should know about it.
We–and certainly many others–have made the point that the prosecution of Manning should be treated seriously by journalists and press freedom advocates– especially now that the government is laying out its case about what it considers to be the harm done by WikiLeaks.
It should go without saying that Putin’s treatment of whistleblowers and journalists in his own country is deplorable, but that does not delegitimize Snowden’s asylum claim in any way. Right now, he is walking around a free man, able to contribute to the ongoing debate in the US if he so wishes. That almost certainly “feels safer” than being locked in a cage, held incommunicado, possibly surrounded by violent criminals, and facing life in prison, as he would be if he came home.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/07/31/ripples-of-the-bradley-manning-verdict/the-bradley-manning-prosecution-sends-an-antidemocratic-message
The federal government is prosecuting leakers at a brisk clip and on novel theories. It is collecting information from and about journalists, calling one a criminal and threatening another with jail. In its failed effort to persuade Russia to return another leaker, Edward J. Snowden, it felt compelled to say that he would not be tortured or executed.
"Citizen Koch," a highly regarded documentary about the billionaire Koch brothers and the growing influence of money in politics after the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, suffered a major setback earlier this year when PBS pulled the film and the $150,000 in funding that had been promised. Scrambling to find a way to distribute their film, Academy Award-nominated filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin turned to Kickstarter in a highly successful move that recently surpassed the funds they had previously expected to receive from public television.
As of Thursday, the "Citizen Koch" crowdfunding effort had attracted around $170,000 from nearly 3,400 donors. The average donation was just over $50, with contributions ranging from $1 to $5,000. The campaign -- which catapulted past its initial $75,000 goal after just three days last month -- has quickly become one of Kickstarter's most successful.
Producers say the funds raised on Kickstarter will be used to pay for the final sound mix, the film’s score and graphics, color correction, creating mastered elements for distribution, licensing archival footage and music rights and other post-production and distribution costs.
Look at it any way you want, and if you’re not a booster of fossil fuels on this overheating planet of ours, it doesn’t look good. Hardly a month passes, it seems, without news about the development of some previously unimaginable way to extract fossil fuels from some thoroughly unexpected place. The latest bit of “good” news: the Japanese government's announcement that natural gas has been successfully extracted from undersea methane hydrates. (Yippee!) Natural gas is gleefully touted as the “clean” fossil-fuel path to a green future, but evidence is mounting that the newest process for producing it also leaks unexpected amounts of methane, a devastating greenhouse gas. The U.S. cheers and is cheered because the amount of carbon dioxide it is putting into the atmosphere is actually falling. Then Duncan Clark at the British Guardian does the figures and discovers that “there has been no decline in the amount of carbon the U.S. is taking out of the ground. In fact, the trend is upwards. The latest year for which full data is available -- 2011 -- is the highest level on record.” It’s just that some of it (coal, in particular) was exported abroad to be burned elsewhere.
About 50,000 liters of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Thailand on July 27 from a pipeline operated by PTT Global Chemical Plc. The oil spill reached Samet island off Rayong province which is a popular tourist destination.
Oil companies have quietly brought the controversial practice of fracking to the coast of California, causing some state legislators to wig out. They're now asking for a federal probe of an issue that hasn't gotten the same amount of attention as the fracking that takes place on land.
Wall Street's biggest banks are currently under the gun for their massive role in global commodities markets. But what many don't realize is the vast expansion of that role was, in large part, an unintended consequence of the chaos of the financial crisis.
Should we be shocked that the ramifications of the financial crises are still reverberating years later with unexpected repercussions? Not in the slightest.
Where there is no social program, there’s always a violence program. For the Clinton/Gore administration welfare reform and expansion of the police state were not only means to trump the Republicans; they were also essential to economic policy. Intense competition for jobs at the lowest rungs would depress wages, pit poor and working-class people against each other and, where workfare recipients displace municipal workers, weaken labor unions. The spectre and reality of incarceration would have the traditional effect of suppressing the dangerous classes, at a time when the wage gap between the rich and the poor grew wider than at any time in recent history.
A federal judge has for the first time ruled that Bitcoin is a legitimate currency, opening up the possibility for the digital crypto-cash to soon be regulated by governmental overseers.
United States Magistrate Judge Amos Mazzant for the Eastern District of Texas ruled Tuesday that the US Securities and Exchange Commission can proceed with a lawsuit against the operator of a Bitcoin-based hedge fund because, despite existing only on the digital realm, “Bitcoin is a currency or form of money.”
Australia has twice the minimum wage as the US and Big Macs cost roughly the same.
The top lobbying issue for both Apple and Amazon is reforming the tax code. Unlike Apple and Facebook, however, Amazon is playing a major role in lobbying for vendor collection of Internet sales taxes. Apple’s second and third major focus areas are telecommunications and copyright, patent, and trademark – likely because its lawsuit with Samsung, with which Google is also involved.
A technical decision made by Sky in implementing website blocking has lead to the blocking of news site TorrentFreak
Website blocking has become a hot topic in the UK in recent weeks. Opponents of both voluntary and court-ordered blockades have warned about the potential collateral damage these blocking systems may cause, and they have now been proven right. As it turns out blocked sites can easily exploit the system and add new IP-addresses to Sky’s blocklist. As a result TorrentFreak has been rendered inaccessible to the ISP’s four million customers.
Autumn Manning, wife of one of the survivors, Staff Sgt. Shawn Manning, is claiming via Twitter that the Defense Department is "slapping victims with gag orders" along the lines of this: Don't talk to the press following testimony in the Hasan trial.
The arbitrary resetting of people’s ‘privacy settings’ is a behaviour one might expect of Facebook, not the NHS.
During a Friday afternoon press conference, President Barack Obama said that he would work with Congress to declassify more information about the National Security Agency's (NSA) secret surveillance programs.
At the same time, Obama denied that it was disclosures by Edward Snowden that moved this issue to the forefront. The reforms were already in the works, he insisted; Snowden's revelations were made in "the most sensationalized manner possible" and unduly scared people.
The Administration released a White Paper on Friday that summarized its claimed legal basis for the bulk collection of telephony metadata, also known as the Associational Tracking Program under section 215 of the Patriot Act, codified as 50 U.S.C. section 1861. While we’ll certainly be saying more about this analysis in the future, the paper makes one central point clear:
The NSA’s metadata program was put into place with virtually no public debate, a worrisome precedent made worse by erecting unnecessary barriers to public understanding via denials and misleading statements from senior administration officials.
The National Security Agency created a "secret backdoor" so its massive databases could be searched for the contents of U.S. citizens' confidential phone calls and e-mail messages without a warrant, according to the latest classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
The National Security Agency can search for U.S. citizens’ names and other information under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according a document Edward Snowden leaked to The Guardian.
As President Obama was laying out his "plan" in response to the public's concerns over NSA spying, both the DOJ and the NSA released some documents defending the various programs. I would imagine it will surprise none of you that these documents are chock full of hilarious and misleading claims. Let's highlight a few, starting with the NSA's document, which is shorter, more general and covers all the various programs more broadly. It's also a complete joke. We'll get to the DOJ one in another post.
[...]
The NSA has absolutely no credibility on this subject, and the claims in this document are simply laughable.
President Obama announced a series of new reforms to increase public confidence in the National Security Agency’s controversial Internet and telephone surveillance program. The press conference (live at whitehouse.gov/live) is still on-going. Here are the 4 reforms he’s proposed.
Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Friday said the Intelligence Committee will hold a series of hearings in the fall to examine National Security Agency surveillance programs.
President Barack Obama says US "can and must be more transparent" about surveillance programmes and promised to work with Congress to put constraints on government spying.
For more than a year, two US senators on the intelligence committee have fought a lonely, unsuccessful battle to prevent the National Security Agency from combing through its vast email and phone records databases for Americans – a battle waged almost entirely in the shadows.
The global backlash against the National Security Agency’s cyber spying picked up a notch on Friday as Germany’s leading telecom company announced that all email flowing among three of the nation’s email services will remain on German servers at all times. The move reflects powerful differences in the way that Americans and Europeans view privacy—and just happens to coincide quite nicely with the commercial interests of European Internet companies, who have yet to achieve anything close to the scale of Google Inc. or Amazon.com Inc.
Material provided to the Guardian by US whistleblower Edward Snowden and released last week includes the fact that the US National Security Agency (NSA) paid the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at least €£100 million over the past three years.
In 2009 the NSA gave GCHQ €£22.9 million, increasing that figure to €£39.9 million the following year—including €£4 million for GCHQ’s work for NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Newly leaked National Security Agency documents published by the Guardian reveal that the NSA can scour vast databases of personal information by searching for the names, email addresses and other identifiers of United States citizens.
Canadians’ personal data could end up in the hands of U.S. intelligence agencies if American telecom giant Verizon is allowed to operate here, warns the union representing communications workers.
The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada charged Friday that Verizon’s recently revealed co-operation with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in its clandestine collection of telephone records of millions of U.S. customers could extend north under a federal policy that eases the sector’s foreign ownership restrictions.
A website launched to allow the public to thank Prism whistleblower Edward Snowden for his actions gained 10,000 posts within just a few hours of going live.
The website was launched by digital rights group Fight for the Future on 7 August, shortly before it was announced President Obama would cancel a meeting with President Vladimir Putin over Russia's approval of Snowden's asylum. Thousands of messages poured in in those first few hours, reaching 10,000 by the time a statement was released from the White House over the Putin meeting.
On Monday the foreign ministers of Mercosur, including Venezuela’s Elias Jaua, met with the general secretary of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, in New York, to express their rejection of “global spying” by the United States.
The Mercosur ministers from Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, were referring to information about the US government’s PRISM global spying program revealed by Edward Snowden in June.
The US government’s spying “absolutely violates international law, countries’ sovereignty, and the fundamental human rights of the citizens of the world,” Jaua said.
He also told Ban that Mercosur countries are concerned about the “attempt to put pressure and conditions on countries who have offered asylum to Mr Snowden”.
The White House Press Corps just completely botched the one opportunity we had to learn details about the National Security Agency’s spying program, and the rationale for sweeping government surveillance. During the hour-long press conference President Obama held specifically to answer questions about the NSA, not a single journalist asked him details about the NSA. As a result, we learned precisely zero information from something slated to be critically informative.
President to work with Congress to reform NSA's Fisa court and Patriot Act but made clear that mass surveillance would continue
Thursday saw yet another revelation in the ongoing exposure of a cluster of unconstitutional surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies of the US government. In a front page article, theNew York Times revealed that vast quantities of emails sent and received by Americans communicating with people abroad are swept up, “cloned,” and combed through by NSA analysts, on the basis that the messages contain certain words or phrases deemed suspicious by the government.
Earlier today, President Obama held a press conference to address the growing public concern over the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices. We are glad to see that the Administration has been forced to address the matter publicly as a result of the sustained public pressure from concerned voters as well as the ongoing press coverage of this issue. Obama acknowledged that Americans were uncomfortable with the surveillance that has been leaked to the media (and noted that he would be as well, if he weren’t in the government). He made four commitments to transparency and reform during the press conference, and also published a whitepaper describing the legal interpretation of the PATRIOT Act that is used to attempt to justify bulk surveillance.
In the wake of the shutdown of two secure e-mail providers in the United States, three major German e-mail providers have banded together to say that they’re stepping forward to fill the gap. There’s just one problem: the three companies only provide security for e-mail in transit (in the form of SMTP TLS) and not actual secure data storage.
'Relevance' cited in surveillance of Americans' calls
The leaks continue to pour forth revealing the totalized surveillance of American communications by the National Security Agency. Now, it appears that the communications of individual U.S. citizens can be specifically targeted, not just swept up in the spy dragnet. On Friday, the Guardian published the latest revelation, based on information gleaned by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, namely that a legal loophole enables the NSA to search through the vast hoards of data it keeps on communications within and going out of the U.S., and can search for U.S. citizens’ emails and phone calls. The findings stand at odds with claims in recent weeks by government officials that Americans are not targeted by the NSA’s vast surveillance programs.
Prior to President Obama’s press conference on potential surveillance reform today, two important stories were published showing National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance has gone farther than government officials have admitted publicly. Now that the President has promised transparency on NSA surveillance, it’s time for the NSA to come completely clean to the American public. They can start by explaining—in detail—how and why they are obtaining the content of communications transiting telecom networks, which then go into the databases behind NSA programs.
Today the Guardian reported that a change to section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) appears set to allow for the searching of communication information of United States citizens. Previously, section 702 was restricted to communications of foreign individuals who were located outside of the United States at the, to quote the Guardian, “point of collection.”
United States citizens were outside the scope of section 702 authorization. However, that appears now to be potentially changed.
The European Union is ranked as a key priority in a list of spying targets for the US National Security Agency, German weekly Der Spiegel said Saturday, citing a document leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
This week's DEA bombshell shows us how the drug war and the terror war have poisoned our justice system
According to German news magazine Der Spiegel, the American National Security Agency placed monitoring of the European Union as one of the top priorities of the organization's activities. The report is based on documents that were allegedly leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The ability for US intelligence agencies to access internet data was used as a bargaining tool by a Telecom-owned company trying to keep down the cost of the undersea cable from New Zealand.
Lawyers acting for Southern Cross Cable quoted a former CIA and NSA director who urged the Senate to "exploit" access to data for an intelligence edge.
The founder of the WikiLeaks website said on Saturday that President Obama’s announcement of changes to the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance program this week vindicated Edward Snowden’s release of information about the program.
Google and Microsoft have slammed a proposed bill that would compel United States providers to assist New Zealand agencies with interception as potentially harmful to the country's IT industry and incompatible with international privacy laws.
Government employees editorializing entries isn't uncommon. In fact, there's an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to the subject. But editorializing by editors using government IP addresses rarely goes unnoticed. Now, whoever did this may feel Snowden is a traitor but the verdict is still out (quite literally) on that. He's been charged with espionage but until there's actual court proceedings, he's nothing more than a "dissident" (although that term has its problems as well), albeit one the government would like to have back in the US as soon as possible.
We are writing to you as free speech and media freedom organisations from around the world to express our strong concern over the response of the US government to the actions of whistleblower Edward Snowden. We urge you to take immediate action to protect whistleblowers and journalists. - See more at: http://www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/37194/en/letter-to-obama-to-stop-the-prosecution-of-snowden#sthash.d0xebm8X.dpuf
We are concerned that surveillance conducted by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) under Section 702 of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and other legal authorities is inconsistent with international human rights norms and U.S. international commitments, as embodied in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)[1] and resolution 20/8 of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) [2]. We are particularly concerned about the human rights and civil liberties of non-U.S. persons, as defined under FISA, and urge you to give full consideration to the rights of non-U.S. persons in your findings and recommendations. Human rights are universal and must be guaranteed to all persons. We strongly advocate that current and future legal provisions and practices take this principle into consideration.
Clear restrictions on electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency is the best way to avoid economic damage to U.S. tech companies tainted by revelations of massive data collection on U.S. and foreign citizens, experts say.
Less than 24 hours after researchers disclosed a new attack that can pluck secrets from webpages protected by the widely used HTTPS encryption scheme, the US Department of Homeland Security is advising website operators to investigate whether they're susceptible.
Due process is law our authorities must obey in all circumstances. The constitution doesn’t call for any exceptions.
A New York Times journalist whose claim he shouldn't have to testify in a leak prosecution was rejected, 2-1, last month by a federal appeals court panel asked Friday that the full bench of that court rehear the case.
Hours after the Department of Justice and 33 U.S. states proposed a set of remedies for Apple following its July loss in the e-books price-fixing case, the company came back with its own set of terms and called the government's proposals vague, overreaching, and unwarranted.
[...]
A federal judge last month ruled that Apple violated antitrust laws, following a trial in the Southern District of New York. Judge Denise Cote said the Justice Department proved that publishers conspired together to eliminate price competition for e-books, and that Apple played a central role in that conspiracy. Apple has said it plans to appeal the decision.
The Public Patent Foundation today asked the Supreme Court to rule part of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011 unconstitutional. Specifically, PUBPAT filed a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court in Public Patent Foundation v McNeil-PPC, a case brought by PUBPAT in June 2009 against the manufacturer of Tylenol for falsely marking and advertising its acetaminophen products as patented, challenging the provision of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, passed in September 2011, that retroactively eliminated PUBPAT's standing to bring the case against McNeil. PUBPAT asked the Supreme Court to answer the following question, "Does the retroactive application of the AIA’s changes to the false marking statute to this case violate Petitioner’s Due Process under the Fifth Amendment?"
Today The Pirate Bay celebrates its 10th anniversary. Founded in 2003 by a collective of hackers and activists, the small Swedish BitTorrent tracker grew to become a global icon for online piracy. We’ll take a look at how it all came to be, from a tiny community running on a 1.3GHz machine with 256MB RAM, to Hollywood’s arch rival serving millions of users from a cloud-hosted hydra.
There has been lots of talk about copyright reform in Washington over the past few months, as evidenced by the announcement from the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee that that panel would undertake a comprehensive review of the copyright law. The first hearing for that review was held back in May. As Mike Masnick from TechDirt noted, the Registrar of Copyrights is supportive of the effort but “still focused on bad ideas.” More recently, the Department of Commerce Task Force on Internet policy issued a “Green Paper” last month that helps us see what is right and what is wrong with the current attention in D.C. on copyright reform.
The Task Force recommended three broad categories of reform: updating the balance of rights and exceptions, better enforcement of rights on the Internet, and improving the Internet as a marketplace for IP through licensing. These last two are straight out of the legacy entertainment industries’ wish list, of course, and they would do nothing at all to better realize the fundamental purpose of copyright to promote creativity and innovation. As for the first, it all depends, of course, on where one thinks the balance has gone wrong. The Task Force includes as a priority the reform of the library exception in section 108, which is a favorite goal of the Copyright Office right now, but it is not at all likely that anything the Office cooks up would be better than leaving the current 108 alone. The Green Paper also seeks “input” about digital first sale and remixes; note that input is a much weaker commitment than the task Force is willing to make to such things as online enforcement, reform of 108, or — another industry favorite — the extension of the public performance right for sound recordings.
In response to growing fears of government spying, yesterday Kim Dotcom announced that parts of his company will relocate to Iceland if that means keeping customers’ data secure. Speaking with TorrentFreak, Dotcom says that continued broad surveillance will have serious financial consequences. “Mass surveillance and copyright extremism will cost the US economy more than any terrorist attack or piracy,” he predicts.
High-IP industries are far smaller than those that have low copyright protection.
Records at the Illinois Secretary of State show that Prenda Law was "voluntarily dissolved" on July 26. The move isn't surprising and is largely a formality. A key lawyer for the embattled "porn troll" had already said it was "winding down" its operations.