05.05.14
Gemini version available ♊︎Links 5/5/2014: Linux 3.15 RC 4, oRouter Introduced
Contents
GNU/Linux
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Asus Chromebox with Core i3 Haswell now available
Asus started selling its first Chrome OS desktop computers in March with the launch of the $179 Asus Chromebox M005U. The tiny desktop is small enough to hold in one hand, packs an Intel Celeron 2955U Haswell processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage and Google’s Chrome operating system.
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Kernel Space
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Linux 3.15-rc4
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Graphics Stack
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Intel HD Graphics On Linux 3.15 Brings Few Changes
Overall these results aren’t too interesting for the Linux 3.15 kernel when it comes to Haswell graphics, but in a few cases there were some slight performance changes as illustrated above. At least Linux 3.15 betters off the Broadwell support, there’s now per-process address space support for better security, and a variety of fixes and other improvements that landed for this kernel cycle.
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Eight Months Later, Intel X.Org 3.0 Driver Still In Development
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Mesa Now Supports Intel’s Performance Query Extension
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Applications
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smartmontools: A hard drive’s best friend
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XBMC 13.0 Gotham rises
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sntop: A simple, network kind of top
For as many *top programs as there are, it shouldn’t surprise me that there’s an sntop. It should surprise me that sntop is a little … different.
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sniffit: Makes sense to me
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qBittorrent 3.1.9.2 Arrives with a Fix for the Heartbleed Bug
qBittorrent, a multi-platform BitTorrent client developed in C++/Qt4 by Christophe Dumez, designed to run on all major platforms, is now at version 3.1.9.2.
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socat: You want it? socat’s got it
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soma: Done perfectly, in so many ways
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Instructionals/Technical
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How To Install gImageReader 2.93 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS And Pinguy OS
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Testing grouped environment support for supernova
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Disabling Baloo, the Arch way
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How To Install CutePad 0.1 On Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Pinguy OS 14.04 And Elementary OS 0.3
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Using mpv to escape start and end of videos (like in anime, tv shows etc)
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The 9 Best Free Fortran Books
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Install Android Studio in Ubuntu 14.04
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Start Practising Linux ip command and Avoid the Habit of Using ifconfig
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How To Install TextAdept 7.2 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS And Pinguy OS
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How To Install Warsow 1.5 On Your Linux System
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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Torque 2D 3.0 COMPLETE!
On February 5th, 2013, Torque 2D 2.0 was released to the world for the first time under an open source MIT license. Between then and now, over a year has passed with a lot of learning and adjusting to an open source development model. Slowly but surely, feature after feature was added to the engine, bugs were fixed, and documentation was written. Today we can proudly present to everyone Torque 2D 3.0.
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Steam Hardware Survey For April 2014, Linux Rises From The Ashes
We already know Steam’s stats system is a bit odd, sometimes things just don’t add up. It’s clear Steam is hiding plenty of distro’s since the ones they show don’t add up to the full figure they give, not even close to it.
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New Unreal Tournament In The Works, Will It See A Native Linux Version?
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Codemasters Looking At Supporting Linux, GRID Autosport Possible
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Sir, You Are Being Hunted FPS Stealth Game Hits The Big Release For Linux
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Next Unreal Tournament in the works, possibly with a Linux version
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Steam client beta update released: In-home streaming for all enabled
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Unvanquished Alpha 27 Has Shared Texture Packages
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Steam In-Home Streaming Enters Open Beta For All
Last week Steam announced that their new Steam In-Home Streaming is now available in open beta, and is available to anyone who opts into the Steam Client Beta and downloads the latest update, which was released last month and is dated April 30th.
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League of Geeks surpasses $200K Kickstarter goal to fund digital board game Armello
League of Geeks is also developing the game for Linux, Mac and Windows PC
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Yay I’m a GSoCer
I got selected for GSoC 2014. Thanks to my mentor and KDE team for giving me an opportunity to work on Marble Game project. My mentors are Torsten Rahn and Albert Astals Cid.
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Translated AppStream metadata for KDE!
AppStream is a Freedesktop project to extend metadata about the software projects which is available in distributions, especially regarding applications. Distributions compile a metadata file from data collected from packages, .desktop files and possibly other information sources, and create an AppStream XML file from it, which is then – directly or via a Xapian cache – read by software-center-like applications such as GNOME-Software or KDEs Apper.
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KDE forums and Baloo discussion
In a recent blog post, I have criticized the events around the inclusion of Baloo in KDE 4.13.0. Since then, I have removed the blog post again, since a nice person convinced me it would not bring any good.
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GSoC 2014 in Plasma Media Center
I am selected in GSoC 2014 \o/ , and what makes it even better is the organisation, KDE and my mentors Shantanu Tushar and Peter Grasch. My project is “Integrate Plasma Media Center with Simon”. The result of which will allow users to interact with PMC (Plasma Media Center) using voice commands.
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Distributions
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Summit 2014 DevOps Round Up: The role of open source in converging business needs
With the growth of the cloud market, developers choose PaaS because of its flexibility and speed. Red Hat often paves the way for enterprises to use to create applications and to use an open cloud application platform that best fit their business needs. At this year Red Hat Summit, Red Hat addresses the current DevOps challenges facing the adoption of enterprise and provides a cloud application platform with built-in secure and scalable multi-tenancy, proven enterprise-grade application containers, middleware services and the latest technologies.
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Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst doubles as a cloud computing evangelist and entrepreneur advisor
Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of open-source software developer Red Hat, is more than the guy who brought a tech giant to downtown Raleigh.
He’s an entrepreneur-advising, cloud-computing evangelist who once aspired to be a pro football player.
Whitehurst, a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education enthusiast, took the time to give us our own education into what makes him tick.
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Debian Family
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KDE team looking for Debian contributors
On behalf of the KDE team, Maximiliano Curia has recently called on the Debian contributors for supporting them with integrating KDE into Debian. Citing the main reason behind the request as shortage of enough people to contribute to all the necessary areas, the KDE team points out that they are overloaded with the many packages they maintain and the kinds of bugs they have to deal with. They do have automation tools but that is simply not enough. And hence the pledge to the Debian developers to work in collaboration with KDE and help them shape up KDE for Debian.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Numix GTK Flat Theme Looks Amazing on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Now, the Numix GTK theme has been updated to work with the latest version of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and it seems to integrate very well with the system. As usual, it’s not enough to just download the theme, you will also have to activate it. This means that you also need another application, such as Unity Tweak.
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Canonical stops ‘Ubuntu for Android’ development
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Ubuntu for Android is dead
Every now and then a company comes up with a scheme that sounds great at first, but then it dies a slow death once the company realizes that the project just doesn’t make sense. It looks like Ubuntu for Android has become one of those dead products, according to Muktware.
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Solar Powered Ubuntu Laptop Readies US Release
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Devices/Embedded
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The oRouter Is A Tor-Powered Linux Box That Secures Your Internet Connection
Longtime TechCrunch Disrupt NY hackathon participants, Kay Anar and Gilad Shai showed off their hardware hack today called the “oRouter” – a Linux-powered, Raspberry Pi-like computer offering secure Wi-Fi access via the Tor network. The idea is to offer an affordable alternative to downloading the Tor software to your computer, as well as a way to more easily connect to Tor over mobile devices like an iPhone.
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Enea Signs 1.8 MUSD Bridged Services Deal with US Medtech Company
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Raspberry Pi Case Created Using An Old Cassette Tape
Raspberry Pi owners who are looking for a more unique case to protect their $35 mini PC, might be interested in this unique Raspberry Pi cassette tape case.
Michele Alessandrini is responsible for the idea to adapt an old cassette tape to fit the Raspberry Pi which provides a very unique casing for the awesome mini PC, and if like me you have plenty of cassettes in the attic allows you to put them to use.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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HTC One Mini 2 press render leaked
HTC launched their much anticipated flagship HTC One M8, and it has already gained praise from the critics just like its predecessor, for brilliant design, innovative features, beautiful UI and lot of power under the hood. As expected, the ‘mini’ version of the flagship is due for release and @evleaks has revealed a press render of the ‘HTC One Mini 2.’
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Android
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Best Android Phones of the season [May 2014]
The first quarter of this year has seen many new top end Android smartphones being launched. Currently, with so many flagship phones in the market consumers are spoilt for choice. We will try to figure out what are the best smartphones that your money can buy right now. We will just not focus on the costliest and carrying the latest hardware, but also consider their performance and value for money.
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Put portable pwning power in your pocket with the Pwn Phone
Mobile technology has made it possible for people to do an amazing amount with tablets and smartphones within the workplace—including hacking the living daylights out of the corporate network and other people’s devices. Pwnie Express is preparing to release a tool that will do just that. Its Pwn Phone aims to help IT departments and security professionals quickly get a handle on how vulnerable their networks are in an instant. All someone needs to do is walk around the office with a smartphone.
Pwnie Express’ Kevin Reilly gave Ars a personal walk-through of the latest Pwn Phone, the second generation of the company’s mobile penetration testing platform. While the 2012 first-generation Pwn Phone was based on the Nokia N900 and its Maemo 5 Linux-based operating system, the new phone is based on LG Nexus 5 phone hardware. However, it doesn’t exactly use Google’s vanilla Android.
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Free Software/Open Source
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More Mainstream Businesses Depend on Open Source
More than 1,200 industry influencers took this year’s survey, answering questions about OSS trends, opportunities, key drivers of open source adoption, community engagement and the business problems OSS solves — both now and in the foreseeable future.
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Famo.us, AngularJS pairing brings out the best of JavaScript
JavaScript developers soon will have a way to blend the organizational tools of AngularJS and the cross-platform, animation-rich rendering capabilities of Famo.us.
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Famo.us JavaScript Library Goes Open Source to Public, Brings Free Lessons to Community
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Orion Client Portal Goes Open Source
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Smart, Ateneo make SHINE open-source platform
SMART Communications, Inc. (Smart) has forged an alliance with the Ateneo Java Wireless Competency Center (AJWCC) to enhance and make Secured Health Information Network and Exchange (SHINE) an open-source platform next year, allowing users to contribute modules and plug-ins.
Launched in 2011 in consultation with the Department of Health (DOH) and various stakeholders, SHINE is the first cloud-based electronic medical record and e-referral system in the country, readily deployable in any area with Internet coverage.
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Open Source for an Open Publishing Ecosystem: Readium.org Turns One
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Indian Railways online services more reliable and scalable with open source and open standards
The Indian Railways’ online ticketing system has reached a record number of ticket bookings during peak hours with help from open source platforms. Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) – the Railways’ IT arm – was awarded for this project in the Infrastructure category at the Red Hat Innovation Awards last month.
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Open Source’s Cult Of Personality Is Dying—Thankfully
Well, community did, for starters. I realize I’m making a somewhat subjective assertion here, but over the roughly 15 years I’ve been involved in open source, I’ve seen a gradual shift away from tightly-controlled free software projects to more loosely joined open-source communities, often with significant corporate interest.
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SHMsoft, Inc. Offers FreeEed as Pre-packaged Open Source Software for eDiscovery
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7 cool free open source projects you need to check out
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How to ratify & audit open source security
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Project Management Framework Goes Open Source with the Praxis Framework
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What is the best social structure for an open source project?
The detail and scope of reviews decrease and increase, respectively, as they travel up the hierarchy. A famous example is the Linux kernel, where Linus Torvalds delegates to lieutenants for the various sub-systems of the kernel.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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Unboxing The First Firefox OS Tablet
Want to play with this? Find me at one of the many conferences I’m attending or speaking at this summer.
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Mozilla launches ‘The Web We Want’—an open letter video featuring kids seeking a safer World Wide Web
As we enter an era of the digital age, the internet helps us in work related to everything from education and travel to healthcare and surveillance. With so much of online human existence at stake and numerous threats to online security and safety, experts and crusaders have been fighting for ‘internet security and cyber safety’.
According to Wikipedia, Internet safety, or online safety, is the knowledge of maximising the user’s personal safety and security risks on private information and property associated with using the internet, and the self-protection from computer crime in general.
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Is Firefox’s Free Download on Android worth a shot?
Mozilla Firefox has been around for over a decade, providing users with a worthy replacement for the default Internet Explorer, and establishing itself as one of the best browsers both on Linux and on Windows. That being said, the days of desktop exclusivity are long gone. Mozilla Firefox is available as a free download on Android-based devices, through the Play-store. Just how good is this mobile browser, and should you bother with it at all?
Read more: http://www.gamerheadlines.com/2014/05/is-firefoxs-free-download-on-android-worth-a-shot/#ixzz30queeL1u
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Databases
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CMS
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David Fout: Aquilent Aims to Help Agencies Go Open Source With New Drupal Tool
Aquilent has unveiled a new Drupal-based architecture to help government organizations manage and deliver online content in a cloud environment.
The Drupal Platform works to help agencies use open-source technology to secure digital communications and engage with the public, Aquilent said Thursday.
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What’s New in May for Open Source CMS
Joomla kept its promise to release the latest version of its open source content management system (CMS) in April with yesterday’s launch of Joomla 3.3.
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A year after its Kickstarter debut, Ghost reveals what’s in store for its open-source blogging platform
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Business
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Foundry
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ActiveState to Sponsor Growing Foundation Set to Govern Cloud Foundry Open Source Project
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Intel, GE and Verizon among new batch of Cloud Foundry Foundation members
Software provider Pivotal and its open-source PaaS platform the Cloud Foundry announced the addition of eight new members to the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
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Cloud Foundry is turning into an open source platform that’s worth watching
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Bitcoin
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Bountysource Now Lets You Fund Open-Source Projects with Bitcoin
Bountysource, a funding platform for open-source software, has finally integrated bitcoin payments.
The site allows open-source developers to earn money by completing jobs posted by ‘backers’ who offer ‘bounties’ – payments, in effect.
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Department of Defense to study bitcoin as possible terrorist threat
A division within the Department of Defense is investigating whether the digital currency bitcoin is a possible terrorist threat.
The Combatting Terrorism Technical Support Office is spearheading a program that will help the military understand how modern technologies could pose threats to national security, including bitcoin and other virtual currencies, the International Business Times reported.
A memo detailing some of the CTTSO projects states, “The introduction of virtual currency will likely shape threat finance by increasing the opaqueness, transactional velocity, and overall efficiencies of terrorist attacks,” as reported by Bitcoin Magazine, according to IBTimes.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Nominate a free software initiative for the Chris Nicol FLOSS Prize!
The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) has established the Chris Nicol FLOSS Prize, which recognizes initiatives that are making it easy for people to start using free software. The prize will be awarded to a person or group doing extraordinary work to make free software accessible to ordinary computer users.
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ProjectCenter build parser fixes
I was long plagued GNUstep’s IDE ProjectCenter had problems with parsing the compiler’s output. This made “clicking” on the warning or error often impossible. I never dug into the details, but it happened more and more often and was worse on different systems than others.
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Openness/Sharing
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Accelerating development of mpayment apps with open source
One area that new software providers are all too familiar with, and one which legacy organisations are starting to embrace to help accelerate software development, is the use of open source. Indeed, a recent study carried out by IT analyst firm Forrester of 542 developers suggested that as many as 92% of banks have been using open source software (OSS) to develop mobile apps.
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Open-source Banking Emerging at a Rapid Pace
It was KB Kookmin Bank that adopted open-source banking for the first time in Korea. It introduced the system in H2, 2011, followed by Woori Bank in April last year.
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Open Source Seed Initiative: ‘Free The Seed!’
Last year we wrote about the idea of open-sourcing DNA for use in GMOs that were not subject to patent control — a key problem with the technology, leaving aside other concerns about its application. The newly-launched Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) avoids the controversy surrounding GMOs by using traditional plant breeding, but still makes the results freely available.
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Open sourcing agriculture one seed at a time
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Open Hardware
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Open Source RhinoBOT DIY Robot Powered By Arduino UNO (video)
If you fancy building your very own robot you might be interested in the PrintBot RHINO which is an educational robot that has been designed to be able to push objects with this 3D printed dozer attachment as well as take part in “sumobots fights”.
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Standards/Consortia
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Cisco adds to RDK with open-source routing technology
Cisco announced that it will make its service provider customer premise equipment (CPE) routing software available in open-source format.
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Cisco to Provide Foundation for New Open-Source Framework for Broadband Services
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Cable Show 2014: Cisco goes open-source for RDK integration
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Leftovers
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Acrobats Fall 40 Feet During Circus Show
A platform collapsed during an aerial hair-hanging stunt at a circus performance Sunday, sending eight acrobats plummeting to the ground. Nine performers were seriously injured in the fall, including a dancer below, while an unknown number of others suffered less serious injuries.
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Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter speaks on modern ethics of journalism
As 21st century reporters become increasingly confronted by issues regarding journalistic ethics, the newest generation of workers in this field will need to establish ways to face obstacles like WikiLeaks, whistleblowers, NSA surveillance and data mining.
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Hardware
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The Day U.S.-Supported Fascists began Murdering Civilians A Day that will Live in Infamy
Those of us who grew up in the west after WWII believed that supporting anything resembling fascism was unthinkable.
The moral degeneration of the U.S. state and its Nato allies since that time is almost beyond belief. So too is the degeneration of the Washington Post, New York Times, and other corporate media which have helped to delude large numbers of Americans into believing that Russia, which has killed or attacked no one, is somehow the aggressor in Ukraine.
In reality, and on the ground, the U.S. government – with no mandate from the American people – is supporting a fascist/oligarch unelected Ukrainian ‘government’ installed in a coup spear-headed by two openly fascist parties, Svoboda and Right sector.
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CIA and FBI specialists assisting Ukrainian government in Kiev, report says
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The US Failed Plan for Ukraine is to Incite Russia to Intervene. The Kiev Coup Government is Already a Dying Entity
Two days ago a mob, supported by the fascists Right Sektor, killed over 30 federalist Ukrainians in Odessa by pushing them from their camp into a building and then setting fire to it. Those who escaped the massacre, not the perpetrators, were rounded up by police. Today pro-federalism people besieged the police headquarter in Odessa until the police released those it had earlier arrested.
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Putin Should Send Troops Into Ukraine
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Can Ukraine be pulled back from the brink?
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Another NYT ‘Sort of’ Retraction on Ukraine
The mainstream U.S. media likes to talk about Ukraine as an “information war,” meaning that the Russians are making stuff up. But the false narratives are actually being hatched more on the U.S. side, as a new New York Times story acknowledges, writes Robert Parry.
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America Backed Ukraine Neo-Nazis In the Immediate Wake of World War II
American Government Backed Ukrainian Nazis … Same Group Supported By the Leader of the Protests which Toppled the Ukrainian Government In February
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Ukraine Crisis Accelerating the Restructuring of the World
The Ukrainian crisis has not radically changed the international situation but it has precipitated ongoing developments. Western propaganda, which has never been stronger, especially hides the reality of Western decline to the populations of NATO, but has no further effect on political reality. Inexorably, Russia and China, assisted by the other BRICS, occupy their rightful place in international relations.
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F35 deal a gift to world’s biggest arms dealer
Serious concerns about spiralling costs and design faults have been voiced by its chief customers — the governments of the US, Canada and Denmark — the company that is still developing the F35, Lockheed Martin, reported a 23% increase for its first quarter profits this year.
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In ongoing protest: Anti-drone demonstrators continue monthly campaign
For three years, they’ve watched the sky turn from black to blue — the sun rising over the Sierra Nevada range — as they denounce drones at Beale Air Force Base.
The protesters gather monthly, flashing signs at the airmen driving onto base.
“You can’t bomb the world to peace.”
“Kill the drones, not innocent people.”
Janie Kesselman, a peace activist from North San Juan, said the group’s goal is to end the “remote-controlled murder of innocent people.”
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Obama doesn’t deserve deference on drone deaths
Killing American citizens and foreign nationals without procedural and substantive protection runs contrary to our bedrock legal and democratic principles. Worse, the justifications for doing so are shrouded in secrecy, and the intellectual authors of those policies are shielded from accountability. The executive branch has repeatedly proved it cannot be entrusted with unbridled power to secure the nation without violating human and constitutional rights.
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Paul starts new drone war
Rand Paul has warned Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that he will place a hold on one of President Obama’s appellate court nominees because of his role in crafting the legal basis for Obama’s drone policy.
Paul, the junior Republican senator from Kentucky, has informed Reid he will object to David Barron’s nomination to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals unless the Justice Department makes public the memos he authored justifying the killing of an American citizen in Yemen.
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Activists Re-enact Yemen Wedding Bombed by U.S. Drones
Activists gathered in front of the White House on Sunday to stage a re-enactment of a wedding in Yemen attacked by U.S. drones. Twelve civilians died when U.S. aircraft bombed their wedding procession in December. The killings sparked a ban on U.S. military drone strikes in Yemen, but they continue under the CIA.
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Israeli pr attempts aside, drones deadly weapon
Major S., deputy commander of Israel’s unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV, or drone) squadron, began his military career at the Israeli Army Computer Center, but was looking for “action” and transferred to the air force. In 2007 S. joined the training course to operate drones. 99% of course participants are those who dropped out of the air force’s pilot training course.
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Why it is hypocritical to boycott Israel
We’re not normally called upon to justify a decision to travel abroad. Few people would challenge me if I were visiting China, despite that country’s appalling human rights record, repression of free speech, and colonisation of Tibet. If I was travelling to America, even though Predator drones kill thousands of innocent people each year, and even though Guantanamo Bay still holds 154 detainees, nobody would complain.
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Secret CIA arms cache most likely kept in Texas
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CIA’s Secret ‘Midwest Depot’ Arms Cache Really in … Texas?
Thomson, who says he wasn’t privy to information on the depot’s location during his CIA career, says the facility’s history should be examined. “I have worried about the extent to which the US has spread small arms around over the decades to various parties it supported,” he says. “Such weapons are pretty durable and, after the cause du jour passed, where did they go? To be a little dramatic about it, how many of those AK-47s and RPG-7s we see Islamists waving around today passed through the Midwest Depot on their way to freedom fighters in past decades?” His research can be found on the website of the Federation of American Scientists. Unsurprisingly, the CIA and Pentagon declined to comment on the matter but whatever the camp’s true purpose, documents reveal that there have been quite a few new warehouses built at the site in recent years, the NYT notes.
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Venezuela: Wealthy stir violence while poor build new society
Before Hugo Chavez became president of Venezuela in 1999, the barrios of Caracas, built provisionally on the hills surrounding the capital, did not even appear on the city map.
Officially they did not exist, so neither the city nor the state maintained their infrastructure. The poor inhabitants of these neighbourhoods obtained water and electricity by tapping pipes and cables themselves. They lacked access to services such as garbage collection, health care and education.
Today, residents of the same barrios are organising their communities through directly democratic assemblies known as communal councils ― of which Venezuela has more than 40,000.
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White feather or bowler hat? Charlie Chaplin and the first world war
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Drones banned at Yosemite National Park
Park Service says drones are noisy and “can impact the natural landscape.”
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Selling Hydraulic Fracking: The Myth Of Energy Independence Used To Hoodwink The American People
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Shrimper Catches Rare Goblin Shark
Goblin sharks do resemble some prehistoric species, and Carlson said Moore made a “pretty important find.” They’re not seen anywhere all that often, though the coast of Japan boasts the shark’s share of recorded sightings.
“We don’t know a lot about deep water fauna,” Carlson said. “We know little about (goblin sharks), how long they live, how fast they grow.” One thing that’s fairly certain: At their size, goblin sharks have few natural predators, according to Carlson.
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Finance
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Jacob Zuma’s palatial folly sparks anger and resentment amid poverty
Nicholas Ngonyama gazes across the valley and his eye settles on a palatial cluster of sand-coloured buildings whose thatched roofs glow in the autumn sunshine. “I’m not happy,” mutters the homeless, jobless man. “The country is not happy. Too much money was spent on one man’s home. That money could have been spent improving the lives of the people. It feels like he is spitting in our face.”
President Jacob Zuma’s personal Xanadu, complete with stately pleasure-dome, has imposed itself on the landscape of one of South Africa’s poorest areas, Nkandla, in KwaZulu-Natal. It covers the equivalent of eight and a half football pitches and has swallowed 246m rand (£13.7m) of taxpayers’ money. “Nkandlagate” has become the defining scandal of Zuma’s five-year reign and left him fighting for his political life in this week’s elections.
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Welcome to Plutocrat-geddon! Obama and Thomas Friedman flatter our new billionaire overlords
With the children of today’s baby boomers scheduled to inherit $30 trillion in the next several decades, politicians and the press are hard at work flattering plutocrats of all ages by portraying them as paragons of wisdom.
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Too Big to Jail Continues: DOJ May Charge Two Banks with Criminal Acts, But Not Hold Them Criminally Accountable
In a recent breathlessly written “we have the inside scoop” article, The New York Times would have you believe that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is finally getting serious about filing criminal charges against a couple of banks.
Technically, the Times may prove to be right, but on a practical level, the actions it is predicting would be more of the same kid-glove treatment of too-big-to-fail banks we’ve seen in the past. As BuzzFlash at Truthout noted in commentaries last year, Attorney General Holder has officially stated his concern that prosecuting the largest banks would have adverse affects on our economy.
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ABC funding: Protesters call on Abbott government not to cut money
Hundreds have attended rallies in Melbourne and Sydney to call on the Abbott government not to cut funding to the public broadcaster ABC.
There are fears that funding cuts will be made to the nation’s public broadcaster in the May budget after the Abbott government announced an efficiency review of the ABC and SBS
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A letter to fans of Workfare
It doesn’t matter how much reactionary rhetoric the right-wing press spew about the unemployed, nor how often government ministers and DWP employees call people without jobs “idle” or “scrounger” and complain that they are getting “handouts” – thier bile doesn’t make mandatory labour confiscation schemes any less wrong or any less economically illiterate.
The tendency to vilify the unemployed is a classic example of the “blame the symptom, not the cause” propaganda strategy.
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Bring rail under state’s control to win back power, Ed Miliband told
Ed Miliband has come under pressure to bring the rail network back into national ownership if Labour wins the next election, as more than 30 of his party’s parliamentary candidates call for a bold new policy to improve services and control train fares.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Bill Clinton’s Critics Are…Who, Exactly?
The Times is obviously aware of the existence of critics to Clinton’s left. Chozick mentions that some argue that Clinton’s policies “might have exacerbated the current inequality,” and writes that “some policy experts argue that the era of centrist Clinton economics may have expired.” But instead of quoting them, the Times goes back to Bill Clinton, one more time, for a challenge to that argument.
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A letter to fans of Workfare
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Censorship
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Freedom House survey: Only one in seven people live in a country with a free press
According to US-based watchdog Freedom House global press freedom has fallen to its lowest level in a decade with just one in seven people around the world living in a country which has a free press.
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WPFD 2014 focuses on importance of ‘independent media’
The media in The Gambia, led by the Gambia Press Union in collaboration with UNESCO and TANGO, over the week-end held the annual symposium to mark World Press Freedom Day 2014.
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EU Supporting Development Of Community Radio Stations In Mozambique
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Privacy
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Can the Police Seize Your Cellphone?
Think about your smartphone for a minute. Imagine all of the information about your life that’s available on that one small device.
Now imagine the police having access to all of that information – without a warrant. It’s a scary thought, considering how intertwined our private lives and our phones have become.
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John Kerry Claims US Is On The ‘Right Side Of History’ When It Comes To Online Freedom And Transparency
Once you’ve ceded the high ground, it’s very difficult to reclaim it. At this time last year, the Secretary of State could have gotten away with the following remarks, but just barely. The NSA documents had not yet been revealed, but the US government had been giving up chunks of free speech high ground for quite some time.
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Obama Seeks Immunity for Telecom Companies in NSA Data Sweeps
The Obama White House is seeking immunity for telecommunications companies that have complied with government orders to hand over customers’ data. However, there may be more than meets the eye with the president’s proposed reform.
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California lawmakers look to pull plug on NSA snooping
A new bipartisan bill would prohibit California’s cooperation with warrantless snooping by the National Security Agency.
Senate Bill 828 is by state Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Redondo Beach. Invoking the Bill of Rights’ Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, SB828 would affect the state, its employees, its governmental subdivisions and even corporations providing services for the state.
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Michael Hayden’s Unwitting Case Against Secret Surveillance
The former head of the NSA asserted that one can’t know whether spying is legitimate or not unless one knows all the details about it.
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Germany to thwart internal NSA probe – reports
The German government plans to limit their level of cooperation with a recently formed parliamentary panel investigating mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency, Der Spiegel reports.
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Tracking People from Smartphone Accelerometers
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The Web’s newest anti-tracking tool is backed by its fiercest privacy advocate
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Everyone is under surveillance now, says ex-NSA tech Snowden
Privacy of the masses is being violated no matter whether there are chances of any suspicious activities or not, says the former contractor of NSA.
The former contractor and the famously known whistleblower Edward Snowden has given a warning to the whole of the masses rather than the individuals that they are under continuous surveillance for no reason.
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Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft Boost Data Request Disclosure Rules
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Major tech firms will be sending user notifications about subpoenas
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The White House Big Data Report: The Good, The Bad, and The Missing
Last week, the White House released its report on big data and its privacy implications, the result of a 90-day study commissioned by President Obama during his January 17 speech on NSA surveillance reforms. Now that we’ve had a chance to read the report we’d like to share our thoughts on what we liked, what we didn’t, and what we thought was missing.
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Green politicians launch legal challenge over GCHQ surveillance
Two politicians have launched a legal action to challenge the government’s ability to spy on parliamentarians.
The pair allege that GCHQ is violating a long-established rule that bans intelligence agencies from eavesdropping on MPs and peers. They say their communications are likely to have been intercepted by GCHQ, which gathers and stores data on millions of people “on a blanket basis”.
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Editorial: Clapper’s U.S. intelligence directive is the opposite of trust-building
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wants complete control over all Intelligence Community contact with the media, even as he has his own history of “least untruthful” sworn answers to Congress.
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Civil Rights
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Homeless Grandmother Arrested 59 Times for Sitting on Sidewalk
Here’s an interesting use of public resources: as part of a decade-long effort to “clean up” Skid Row in Los Angeles (i.e. run the homeless out of the area to ease development), the city of LA has spent at least a quarter of a million dollars arresting, prosecuting and jailing just one homeless woman, 59-year-old Ann Moody, mostly for sitting on a public sidewalk.
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OIL, GAS AND SPY GAMES IN THE TIMOR SEA
Gusmão was also told of a simultaneous raid on the Canberra home of Timor-Leste’s key secret witness in the dispute. This former Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) agent had reportedly provided an affidavit alleging that Australian spies bugged the Timor-Leste government’s cabinet room in order to secure a commercial advantage for Australia during treaty negotiations in 2004. His passport had been confiscated in the raid, preventing him from travelling to The Hague, where the Permanent Court of Arbitration was due to hear Timor-Leste’s application to overturn the treaty.
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The violence of the State & the crime of peaceful protest
The .01% (the very very rich) keep their place and assert their will through capture of the political process — payments to their retainers in the three branches of government via money and other goods (judges are bribed by “other goods,” as you’ll read below). The NSA and other agencies of the Deep State (FBI, CIA, Homeland Security) spy on your every move in order to “keep order,” a nicely theoretical phrase.
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“Disappearing” What Irks You — College Rape, Iraq, Spying
Today, we “disappear” issues.* They are rendered non-issues through a related process of collective sublimation. It does leave traces, physical ones in archives and psychic ones at some level of mind among the few who have motive to maintain conscious awareness. However, so far as public discourse or political action is concerned, they have been reduced to a zombie status that renders them innocuous. This is a subtle process requiring the tacit cooperation of politicos, pundits, media types, and intellectuals whose complicity takes shape despite diverse purposes and diverse professional roles. The permissive factor is a public that prefers to have these matters swept out of sight and out of mind.
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Protests Force Condoleezza Rice to Cancel $35K Rutgers Speech
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced Saturday that she is backing out of delivering the 2014 graduation commencement address at Rutgers University after protests by Rutgers faculty and students over her role in the Iraq War and torture. Rice was a leading hawk in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.
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Campus Activists Shut Down Condoleezza Rice Speech At Rutgers
As a reminder of her central role, this first video is Condoleezza Rice openly defending the torture tactics implemented under George W. Bush, who himself stated to a British newspaper that it was “damn right” that he had authorized them.
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“I’ll never apologize for my white privilege” guy is basically most of white America
A college student who doesn’t believe in the existence of structural racism or white supremacy wrote an essay about why he would “never apologize” for his white privilege, and Time magazine thought it would be a really cool idea to publish it. Probably because Princeton University freshman Tal Fortgang speaks for many white Americans when he says that racism and white privilege aren’t real.
Tired of being told to “check his privilege” by others at his college, Fortgang goes through his family’s history and concludes that he deserves to go to an Ivy League school and live in a wealthy suburb of New York City and share his ridiculous baby tantrum thoughts on a national news site because his family made smarter and better choices than other families.
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How a Fatal Disaster at Mt. Everest Has Turned Into a Full-Blown Labor Struggle
Mount Everest is known as a place that defies gravity, but it’s also a place for upturning social order. To the climber, it’s the pinnacle of a glorious trekking experience. To the anonymous laborer who supports the Westerners’ ascent, it’s a precarious front in a Global South class struggle.
A fatal disaster on April 18 turned the underlying tensions into a full-blown stand-off: an avalanche near the Base Camp in the perilous Khumbu Ice Fall swallowed sixteen local guides and workers, mostly ethnic sherpas. Since then, the trauma has set off the collapse of the climbing season.
The labor relations of Everest expose the ethical twists of the international adventure industry. Sherpas, who identify as an ethnic group as well as a professional community of guides and porters, do make a relatively good living, pulling in several thousand dollars each season (much more than what they’d earn farming). But the risks tend to be higher than the rewards. Statistically speaking, the fatality rate of sherpas is roughly twelve times higher than that of Iraq war soldiers, and avalanche is a leading cause of sherpas’ deaths.
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93 Countries Who Have Changed Their Minds About Obama
The 2013 USGLP report includes a caveat that Europe and other areas were surveyed in early 2013, soon after Obama’s reelection and before revelations of NSA wire-tapping, so the improved 2013 figures may reflect a fleeting revival of hope rather than a favorable response to U.S. policy.
A closer look at the U.S.-Global Leadership Project report reveals an erosion of approval for U.S. leadership in countries all over the world since 2009. The specific question Gallup asks is, “Do you approve or disapprove of the job performance of the leadership of the United States?” Large numbers in some countries refuse to answer or express no opinion, masking unvoiced disapproval behind fear, deference or politeness. I don’t believe that 71 percent of Vietnamese really have no opinion of U.S. global leadership. But the approval figures are probably not as flawed as the disapproval ones.
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Senate Dems antsy over W.H. release of CIA report
Wondering what happened to the controversial CIA interrogation report that the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify a month ago? So are many Senate Democrats.
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Working the Dark Side
A. The U.S. prison system. “The physical, mental, and sexual abuse glimpsed at Abu Ghraib is part of the daily experience for two million people caged in American prisons,” she writes. For example, here in Chicago, where I live, a police commander was convicted in 1991 of presiding over the torture of several hundred criminal suspects.
B. Vietnam. During that disastrous war, the U.S. government “imprisoned those Vietnamese it considered ‘the enemy’ in tiger cages, subjected them to physical abuses, deprived them of food and water, and, as if all that was not bad enough, poured lye on them to burn and scar them,” Power writes.
C. Latin America. Our involvement in our “backyard” over the decades has included collusion with and training of torturers in both military and police forces in many of the countries south of our border. The notorious School of the Americas has long stood as a symbol of such involvement.
D. Slavery. Remember that? It was a way of life in the United States for a long time, and even after it ended, the dehumanization and repression of African-Americans continued. Lynchings were so common in the South they inspired a song, “Strange Fruit,” which Billie Holiday turned into a soul-haunting hit.
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Afghanistan’s ‘Torturer In Chief’ Now Lives Comfortably In The LA Suburbs – And No One Knows How He Got There
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After Failed Peace Talks, Pushing to Label Israel as Occupier of Palestine
More than a year after Palestine was upgraded to become a nonmember observer state of the United Nations, the attributes of statehood exist mainly on official Palestinian letterhead.
Now, with the collapse of the American-brokered Middle East negotiations, the Palestinian leadership is focusing on its diplomatic and legal struggle for international recognition of Palestine as a state under occupation and for Israel to be held accountable as the occupier.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Free Culture Activist Begins One Year ‘Net Fast’
Daniel Strypey Bruce is a writer, performer, activist, GNU/Linux user, permaculturist, Occupier, facilitator, and community developer based in Ōtepoti/ Dunedin. A student of Te Reo Māori and tikanga Māori, he acknowledges the mana whenua of hapū and iwi in Aotearoa. An early advocate of online activism, he was a founder of Aotearoa.Indymedia.org, and CreativeCommons.org.nz, and has been blogging on free culture in all its form at Disintermedia.net.nz for over 5 years. Over the last two years he has served as Co-Director of Circulation Festival, a Council member for Permaculture in NZ, and Communications Offer for the Pirate Party of NZ, for whom he is now Orientation Officer.
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Save the Internet! Prevent Mega-corporations from Destroying Internet Freedom
To ensure the Internet is open to all on an equal basis we must act now to prevent mega-corporations from destroying Internet Freedom
Update: Actions every day starting on Wednesday, May 7th, at noon and 5 pm. To Save The Internet, we are building a People’s Firewall against the FCC’s proposed rule that will create a ‘pay to play’ Internet by ending net neutrality. The FCC is located at 445 12th Street, SW, Washington, DC 20554.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Obama Blasted for Lumping Critics of Trade Deal Secrecy with ‘Conspiracy Theorists’
‘If the president is concerned that people don’t know what’s going on in the negotiations then the president should release the text and remove it from being a state secret.’
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Copyrights
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Kim Dotcom: RIAA, MPAA, DOJ deserve some thanks for Mega’s explosive growth
Kim Dotcom’s latest venture, MEGA, has seen explosive growth in the last six months, with uploads tripling and now totaling 500 million per month.
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HOW TO CRACK THE FACADE IN ANY COPYRIGHT MONOPOLY DISCUSSION
In my last column, I explained how the copyright monopoly is fundamentally incompatible with private communications as a concept, and how we must weigh a silly distribution monopoly for one of many entertainment industries against such vital functions of society as whistleblower protection, freedom of the press, and the ability to hold a private conversation in the first place. While this argument is strong, it does require a bit of intelligence and the ability to see how two ideas conflict, so it can be hard to get across to copyright monopoly pundits.
The threat against private communications isn’t the only thing wrong with the copyright monopoly, of course. I have previously argued here on TorrentFreak that there’s really nothing defensible about the monopoly at all. But in order to break the spell of “publishers have always told me that the copyright monopoly is good and I have never had any reason to question their self-interest in the matter”, there are other tricks of honest, effective argumentation.
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Court Tells Ex-Wife Of Husband Who Killed Himself To Use Copyright To Delete Anything He Ever Wrote Online
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