01.16.14
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Security, Servers at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Reminder that Microsoft’s proprietary hosting environments have got holes in them, facilitating access even to guests (irrespective of the operating system)
ONE THING we know for sure, especially owing to Edward Snowden’s leaks, is that Microsoft and the NSA are two heads of the same hydra (one is privately-owned).
This morning we explained that Windows gets the latest back doors, whereas GNU/Linux gets endorsement from the British government (for internal use), so why would anyone want to make GNU/Linux dependent on (or a guest under) Windows hosts? Putting GNU/Linux on Azure is bad enough, but the same goes for hosting GNU/Linux as a virtual machine under Windows (a Trojan horse for the NSA), especially with Hyper-V (which is proprietary). According to [1], there are now vulnerabilities (read: back doors) in Hyper-V, so even the guests are being compromised (through the host). The same back doors that the NSA puts in Microsoft products (with Microsoft’s help) may turn out to be exploited by non-state actors [2], based on an example Bruce Schneier gave today.
There are other cases where anything from Microsoft should be strongly avoided. Cars are increasingly becoming surveillance devices [3], especially ones with Microsoft inside (instead of Linux inside) and we know this because of Microsoft's connection to Ford and Ford's own position on surveillance.
In short, those who value privacy should avoid everything from Microsoft, including the surveillance device which is Xbox (chat, camera, et cetera) and malware called Skype. When you use something from Microsoft you should assume to be under surveillance. Evidence provided by Edward Snowden should reassure you that you’re not being “paranoid”. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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As cars become more wired to the Internet and other communications services, the threat that your personal information and privacy could be exploited goes up exponentially.
You can understand the concerns since at least one study from Frost & Sullivan found that the market for telematics services provided by auto manufacturers in North America is expected to increase from 11.8 million subscribers in 2012 to 31.6 million in 2016.
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Posted in Microsoft at 11:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another day, another departing vice president at the company that made a pact with NSA after antitrust investigations over crimes
Microsoft has been losing a lot of top-level executives in recent years (we mostly kept track in 2009-2010) and here is the latest [1].
Citing this article from December, iophk (who gave the above link) asks, “is this an attempt to whitewash it of the association with Surface?
“Several tons of MS Surfaces are in the dump too, according to popular conception along side the ET cartridges.”
As we pointed out a few days ago, Xbox is losing in a very major way (to Sony) and Xbox (as a whole) has lost/cost billions of dollars to the monopolist (currently it seems like Xbox has a business model of spying on users in their houses through cameras and more [1, 2]). A lot of the Xbox management quit the company in droves years ago, leaving the product in disarray. Blair Westlake is just the latest to depart. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Blair Westlake has abruptly resigned from Microsoft, Variety has confirmed.
The former Universal television chairman joined Microsoft in 2004, to head media partnerships and oversaw the licensing of TV shows and movies for the company’s Xbox platforms. He was corporate VP of Microsoft’s Media and Entertainment Group.
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Posted in Apple, KDE at 10:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?”
–Steve Jobs
Summary: One of the companies most hostile towards Free/Open Source software (FOSS) is trying to approach those whose work it exploited and harmed
Apple is a liar that has done nothing for Free/Open Source software except take it and then sue its original developers (and/or their clients). Anyone who still believes the fiction of Apple as an “Open Source” supporter (as their Web site and PR agents/fans try to tell us) is just not keeping a grip on reality and may therefore fall for this schmoozing campaign from last week [1]. Yes, Apple is trying to approach KDE developers now. FOSS developers should send Apple’s E-mails where the sun does not shine. Apple does many other bad things, but we need not look further than just Apple’s betrayal and exploitation of FOSS in this context.
There is a new article right now [2] about Apple’s abuse of patents and lawyers, showing quite clearly that the company has nothing to do with innovation. Right now Apple is just suing Linux backers and trying to stop antitrust regulators from doing their job. KDE should take this as a hint; Apple is a crude, dishonest, manipulative company, just like its mean-spirited spiritual leader. █
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As detailed in a recent article in the New York Times, Apple is flipping out over an outside monitor nosing around in its business. The technology giant has spent the last several months pulling out all the stops to keep one Michael R. Bromwich, a Washington lawyer appointed by a federal judge to ensure Apple’s compliance with antitrust laws, from doing his job.
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Most absurd, Apple claims that if Bromwich is not stopped, the company will no longer be able to innovate and create new products. What a hoot! If Apple was really eager to innovate and create new products, perhaps it would stop doing stock buybacks to enrich executives and devote some of the Mt. Fuji of cash it is sitting on to R&D.
The judge who appointed the monitor is not amused by Apple’s antics. The NYT reports that at a Jan. 13 hearing in Manhattan, Judge Denise Cote “told Apple and its lawyers to stop wasting time and start cooperating with the monitor.” Apple’s lawyer retorted that the company planned to continue its fight to unseat Bromwich with an appellate court. This is getting quite nasty. The Wall Street Journal huffed that the judge was mean and bad, too. If only these people would go back to doing nothing and leave big business in peace.
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Posted in America at 10:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How the large cable companies, which also control the corporate (mainstream) media in many cases (or receive funds from the same sources), deceive the public on net neutrality
COVERAGE THAT we have found about net neutrality in the corporate media (media which is also in the business of cable, e.g. Comcast/CBS) has been superficial and deceiving, but almost nobody was as biased as Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, as we already noted yesterday. Propagators of “trickle-down” and “free market” nonsense are truly happy this week, but they try to at least appear as though they’re sympathetic with the public and they cannot just ignore the news (it would harm their perceived legitimacy). A lot of good coverage from bloggers and online rights groups is virtually being drowned out by disinformation from the corporate media. This is very bad. It may also affect a similar crossroad in Europe [1], which also debates net neutrality these days.
Consider decent coverage like [2-7] and then consider the corporate media doing its coverup [8-11] (ranging in strategy from defeatism to misinformation). The whole episode shows that by moving from the analogue world to digital we are actually losing our freedom [12] because corporations take over (e.g. MPAA in W3C).
The most disgusting coverage continues to come from Murdoch’s biggest publications. He continues his assault net neutrality with biased coverage [13], having recently acquired yet more news sources [14], and even used his propaganda channel, Fox ‘news’, to beam out endorsement of Obama assassination [15]. How can anyone get away with this? It seems like nothing, even crime like cracking a dead girl’s phone, can put such oligarchs in jail, ever. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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A few weeks before a crucial vote on the future European Regulation on the Single Market of telecommunication in Civil Liberties (LIBE) committee, La Quadrature du Net just sent the following email to all the members of this committee, inviting them to propose strong amendments in favour of fundamental rights to the lead committee on this dossier, the Industry (ITRE) committee.
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The ruling this week by a federal court on the Open Internet (Net Neutrality) Order may turn out to be, as one commenter called it, “a terrible idea,” or, as another observer put it, a source of “a lot of overheated rhetoric.” Education, for its part, could well see major changes to how it’s able to deliver learning content to students online while at the same time positioning itself to become a major alternative supplier of broadband in this country.
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Almost everyone I’ve spoken to (on both sides of the net neutrality debate) more or less expected the ruling that came down this morning in the DC circuit, in which the appeals court struck down the FCC’s net neutrality rules because the the FCC had no mandate under the rules it used to issue that ruling. Basically, this is exactly what lots of us said at the start of this whole process. I’ve seen a bunch of reports overreacting to this today, from people saying that it’s “the death of the internet.” It’s not. There are problems on both sides here. The telcos absolutely do want to abuse things to effectively double charge both sides. And that could clearly create significant issues with the basic end-to-end nature of the internet.
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When the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order Tuesday—dealing what is being broadly interpreted as a fatal blow to net neutrality— it highlighted the urgent need for the FCC to develop a smarter and more assertive approach to protecting citizens and consumers in the digital age.
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The court did leave it up to the FCC or Congress to refashion a net neutrality regime. The new FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, has made noises favoring net neutrality, but he also sounds like someone who’s not so committed to the principle.
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A court loss for “net neutrality” could mean either a new era of innovation or preferential treatment and higher costs.
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Claims that the internet will “democratize” the global village are not supported by research published in the International Journal of Electronic Governance. Instead, non-democratic governments simply exploit the networks to spy on and control their citizens more effectively and efficiently than they did before.
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Rupert Murdoch’s media company NewsCorp has bought Storyful, an Irish “social media news agency”.
The Dublin-based firm has been acquired for $25 million (£15.3m).
Storyful specialises in licensing and distributing social media content to major news organisations such as the Wall Street Journal and BBC.
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Days after he wrote a column endorsing the assassination of President Obama, Fox hosted Michael Scheuer to accuse Hillary Clinton of effectively murdering the Americans who died during the 2012 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya.
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Posted in Action, Africa, Asia at 10:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Stories about military interventions (analysis of the present)
Syria and Libya (Weapons)
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The absence of immediate alarm inside the American intelligence community demonstrates that there was no intelligence about Syrian intentions in the days before the attack. And there are at least two ways the US could have known about it in advance: both were touched on in one of the top secret American intelligence documents that have been made public in recent months by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.
On 29 August, the Washington Post published excerpts from the annual budget for all national intelligence programmes, agency by agency, provided by Snowden. In consultation with the Obama administration, the newspaper chose to publish only a slim portion of the 178-page document, which has a classification higher than top secret, but it summarised and published a section dealing with problem areas. One problem area was the gap in coverage targeting Assad’s office. The document said that the NSA’s worldwide electronic eavesdropping facilities had been ‘able to monitor unencrypted communications among senior military officials at the outset of the civil war there’. But it was ‘a vulnerability that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces apparently later recognised’. In other words, the NSA no longer had access to the conversations of the top military leadership in Syria, which would have included crucial communications from Assad, such as orders for a nerve gas attack. (In its public statements since 21 August, the Obama administration has never claimed to have specific information connecting Assad himself to the attack.)
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The Times article, based on dozens of interviews in Benghazi, asserts that the attack that killed four Americans, including US Ambassador Christopher Stevens, was carried out by Libyans who had previously been allied with the US government in the 2011 war that overthrew and murdered Gaddafi. Times correspondent David D. Kirkpatrick writes that the attack was not organized by Al Qaeda or any other group from outside Libya, but “by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi.”
Ed: Reports from last year, which are based on leaks, indicated that Benghazi had been used to funnel weapons to Syria. The leak’s coverage started in CNN and as the British press put it, “The television network said that a CIA team was working in an annex near the consulate on a project to supply missiles from Libyan armouries to Syrian rebels.”
PJ Harvey Brings Guests to BBC
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January 05, 2014 “Information Clearing House – When I travelled in Iraq in the 1990s, the two principal Moslem groups, the Shia and Sunni, had their differences but they lived side by side, even intermarried and regarded themselves with pride as Iraqis. There was no Al Qaida, there were no jihadists. We blew all that to bits in 2003 with ‘shock and awe’. And today Sunni and Shia are fighting each other right across the Middle East.
Iraq
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Ten years after the US invasion began, a stable democracy in Iraq seems further away than ever
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Africa
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New biography of Darcus Howe claims struggle is ignored because it does not fit idea of Britain as ‘utopia of fair play’
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U.S. media coverage of Nelson Mandela’s legacy celebrates the late icon’s forgiveness. They mean his ability to reconcile with some of the leaders of South Africa’s apartheid years, of course; but one area that gets relatively little attention is US support for the racist government Mandela fought against.
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Designed to compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, this “female” robot could be the precursor to robo-astronauts that will help colonize Mars.
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For a memorial service it was a remarkably jovial scene: Barack Obama, David Cameron and Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the Danish prime minister, huddled together for a smart phone photograph.
But one person looked distinctly less amused by the world leaders’ “selfie” – Michelle Obama.
The First Lady stared straight ahead, hands clasped in her lap, while her husband laughed with the Europeans at Nelson Mandela’s memorial in Johannesburg.
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The US president was the first of six foreign heads of state to address the crowd assembled in Johannesburg’s FNB Stadium. Filled with demagogic phrases about “struggle,” “liberation,” “freedom” and “revolution,” the speech’s attempt to cloak Obama in the legacy of Mandela’s years of sacrifice, imprisonment and persecution was an obscene exercise in hypocrisy.
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Most telling of all is the BBC’s reference to Libya – another nation destroyed by Western military aggression that saw both Russian and Chinese interests crumble overnight and replaced by Western corporations. While South Sudan’s chaos is being orchestrated more covertly by the West, the final goal of pushing out the Chinese and taking over is the same.
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Draft plans for a European Union military mission in the Central African Republic envisage the deployment of hundreds of ground troops to buttress African and French forces struggling to prevent a bloodbath there, according to diplomats briefed on the proposal.
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In 2011, the U.S. midwifed the creation of a new nation, South Sudan. Though at the time Obama invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King speaking about Ghana (“I knew about all of the struggles, and all of the pain, and all of the agony that these people had gone through for this moment”) in officially recognizing the country, many were more focused on the underlying U.S. motives, isolating the rest of Sudan as part of the war on terror, and securing the oil reserves in the south for the U.S. The State Department rushed to open an embassy in South Sudan, and U.S. money poured in to pay for the new government. Like his counterparts from Iraq and Afghanistan when the U.S. was still in charge of those places, the new South Sudan president was brought to the White House for photos, all blithely pushed out to the world via the Voice of America. The two leaders were said to have discussed “the importance of maintaining transparency and the rule of law.”
Eastern Tensions
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Zhongye (Pag-asa) Island, the second largest in the South China Sea’s Spratly Islands, has an area of 0.33 square km, and is of great strategic significance for China if it wants to control a vast part of the South China Sea that it claims to be its territorial waters.
As the Island is located roughly in the middle of the area, if China builds an air force and naval base there, it will more easily control the sky and sea in the claimed area.
The “Nazi” Smears and WW2 Recalled
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The vast majority of students are exposed to marketing campaigns by food and beverage companies at their schools, usually for unhealthy products, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics.
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Sweden’s Justice Minister Beatrice Ask has been criticized for sharing a satirical article about legalized marijuana killing scores of people in the US and tying it to her anti-narcotics stand as a youth politician. Her critics did not hold back.
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It is a story with deep roots: The chaos and destruction of World War II left a horribly fragmented cultural world: art lost forever in the confusion or destroyed in battle; art declared “degenerate” and destroyed by Hitler (whose opinions on racial purity were mirrored in his opinions on purity in art); art seized throughout the continent and carted back to Germany; and art stolen from or sold under duress by Jewish collectors. It’s now almost 70 years since the war’s end, but European authorities and the descendants of the original owners of looted art are still attempting to put the pieces back where they belong.
Close to 1,400 of these missing pieces were found in the home of 80-year-old Cornelius Gurlitt, a recluse who has been painted by the media as tragic, bizarre and potentially culpable. He inherited the art from his father, one of only four art dealers licensed by Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, to purchase and sell “degenerate” art during the war.
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“There are so many unburied soldiers, it will take decades to find them. There will definitely be work for our grandchildren,” says Marina. “But nature is working against us. The remains are decomposing and it is getting harder to find the bones, ID tags and army kit.” The more years that go by. The less information there is.
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An Alfred Hitchcock documentary about the Holocaust which was suppressed for political reasons is to be screened for the first time in the form its director intended after being restored by the Imperial War Museum, reports the Independent.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Valve has been hard at work lately, and they have released an update to the SteamOS to improve its performance. The changes to the GPU and CPU come via reduced demands. According to a post on the Steam Community Group, the change we’re excited about includes, “Reduced CPU and GPU usage while games are running by interrupting Big Picture and overlay rendering.” The update also fixes some tearing issues, (vertical lines running through the screen) that were experienced on AMD platforms under strenuous gaming.
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It’s also another data point that suggests 2014 could be a big year for virtual reality. Developers have put out games and demos that operate in virtual reality since the release of the Oculus Rift development kit, but there are few tools available to launch each game without taking off the headset and interacting with a standard screen. User interface, the place you spend your time between games, is an unsolved problem.
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When SteamOS released at the end of last year, there were some features missing. Not just Steam features either, as drivers and support for AMD and Intel chipsets were also missing. There were work arounds for it, however Nvidia cards were clearly the best way to use the new OS. This situation hasn’t lasted long though, as SteamOS has been updated to now support these neglected cards.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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I recently wrote about the Linux swap device and what it’s used for. This tutorial covers the basics of actually managing the swap devices and/or files on your system. Topics covered include how to enable and disable swap, how to create (and remove) additional swap space, and how to measure swap usage.
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This article proposes a new way to construct Linux® and Windows® images for private clouds built with the OpenStack cloud operating system.
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I use ssh everyday and it’s my main tool to connect and manage servers, so I’m always interested in articles about ssh.
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In part 5 of this Gtkmm tutorial I will be showing you how to use the treeview control and markup in a label. In this simple application there is a text entry used for entering text into a treeview. The label next to the text entry will turn red if there is no text entered in the text entry when the button is pressed.
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The battery recently died in my old Asus Netbook which gave me some fire to finally get together a functional filesystem for the Samsung Chromebook I’ve had for a little over a year. I published a rough file system with install instructions here last December. Since then a few things have changed in the structure of ChromeOS and the install script/file systems needed some updates.
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I had the pleasure of meeting Russell Pavlicek, who shares Xen community management responsibilities with Lars Kurth, at SUSECon last November and he, along with Dario Faggioli of the Xen community, poked me about writing a blog post describing the state of Xen support in libvirt. I found this to be an excellent idea and good reason to get off my butt and write! Far too much time passes between my musings.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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A music streamer lets you share your music, photos and videos with your network. If you have a Network-attached storage (NAS) device, it is likely that you already have the technology built-in to share your media. Using a NAS is a neat solution as it can be left on all the time, consuming very little power. However, this is only one method of sharing your multimedia around a home network.
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In the age of mobile computing and browser based mails like Gmail and Outlook.com, most users won’t bother about opening up a desktop mail client to check emails. However, there are certain situations where desktop email clients are much better than browser based clients and help gain productivity at workplace. Linux desktop has a number of desktop email clients. Although, they are not spoilt for choices like Mac and Windows users but there are mail clients are as good as Apple Mail or MS Outlook. Below is a list of email clients for Linux desktop which are the best in business.
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Back in the mid-1990s, a college friend (hi Russ!) and I would put our old 8088 computers to work rendering ray-traced images for days—literally. The end result would be, by today’s standards, incredibly low resolution and not terribly interesting. Still, the thought of a computer system creating realistic photos from nothing more than math equations was fascinating. As you probably already guessed, Russ and I weren’t terribly popular.
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