06.28.14
Posted in Free/Libre Software, Mail, Microsoft at 5:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How the increased reliance of proprietary software for E-mails breeds abuse at the higher levels while hurting those who are vulnerable
COMPANIES and individuals who rely on Free software for their E-mail needs rarely lose any mail. The protocols, the software and the failovers are generally robust. They are well tested and widely used. There is usually redundancy built in and the costs of this redundancy is low.
When one relies on Microsoft for E-mails one can end up in prison and deported, as this recent case taught us. Microsoft’s E-mail infrastructure is ripe for surveillance abuses even by Microsoft itself. Blunders relating to lost mail often trace back to Microsoft and it’s too easy to see why. Any business that uses Microsoft for storing and relaying E-mail is settling for an office is almost as bad as Microsoft Office. It boggles the mind; why do people put such trash in offices? It’s a Trojan horse to communications. Most mail filtering and antivirus products are used specifically to tackle Microsoft issues (zombie PCs and Windows malware). Free software overcomes many of these complications and it is more efficient, economic, and robust.
“Free software overcomes many of these complications and it is more efficient, economic, and robust.”The other day offices that rely on Microsoft for mail came to a standstill. Any office that “relies heavily on Microsoft Outlook,” as the article put it, was unable to get anything done. “LOL,” wrote a reader of ours, “rely and Microsoft in the same sentence”.
This reader previously drew our attention to the way Microsoft’s broken mail software saved the Bush family from embarrassment (deleting evidence). Spot the pattern here. Here is another new report about Microsoft mail going down pretty badly and staying down for a whole business day. “In outages this week,” says the Microsoft-friendly site, “Microsoft’s online Exchange service was down for nine hours, crippling Office 365 and hosted Outlook accounts across North America and Mexico, just after its unified communications service also crashed.”
Microsoft’s hosted services can only be as reliable as the underlying software, which is simply not reliable. Why would anyone at all want to use hosted Microsoft services? Downtimes are just too frequent and we used to cover them regularly. Watch a Microsoft-affiliated site (Fool.com) thinking that Ubuntu users will give Microsoft their files for hosting. Only a fool would do that, or one whose goal is to have the files spied if not altogether lost.
Then subject of lost E-mail is very hot at the moment because of stories relating to the IRS and NSA, Microsoft’s special ally for well over a decade. Here is some of the latest:
During a hearing held yesterday by the House Oversight Committee, Committee Chairman Darrel Issa said that it was “unbelievable” that the IRS had lost the e-mails of former IRS official Lois Lerner. While Congressman Issa is not generally ignorant on tech issues, he’s clearly not familiar with just how believable such a screw-up is.
“A retention policy designed to ensure that mail is lost” is what our reader called it. Maybe they too used Microsoft, but it is hard to tell for sure. IRS recently signed a big Microsoft deal, so it is a Windows shop (we covered this at the time, only months ago).
The bottom line is, Microsoft’s E-mail infrastructure breeds abuse. It is easy to claim that some “computer crash” (read: Windows issues) made evidence of crime disappear and when one who is vulnerable uses Microsoft for mail it is clear that those in power will be able to retrieve a lot to be used against the individual. Proprietary software tends to work against its users and in favour of the software ‘masters’. E-mail is a great example of this. █
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Posted in Deception, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 5:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another step in the long struggle to cast proprietary as ‘open’, especially when it comes to Microsoft’s last remaining cash cow and Facebook’s core business of mass surveillance
Openwashing has been a key ingredient of Microsoft’s strategy as of late, pretending that its privacy violations and patent racketeering are somehow outweighted by some kind of goodwill. This is something that not only Microsoft does but also the (partly) Microsoft-owned Facebook is doing quite a lot these days. It is truly disturbing.
Angus Kidman said that “Open [sic] XML is the format which Microsoft Office has used to store Office documents since Office 2007″ even though it is untrue. Almost nobody used it at the time, so Microsoft bribed and corrupted so many people and organisations, hoping to universally impose OOXML on people, pretending it was “open” even though it was all about proprietary Office. Nobody was going to use something so unnecessary, so Microsoft bribed many people for this, including large companies, as compatibility with existing formats had improved and the goalposts needed to be moved. Here is LibreOffice’s Meeks, who was surrendering to Microsoft’s proprietary OOXML rather than adhering to standards like ODF, probably because he was paid by Novell at the time (and Novell was bribed by Microsoft specifically — as per the contractual agreement — to promote and openwash OOXML).
“When the press is trying to insinuate that Microsoft (Office) and Facebook are open there is clearly something wrong with the press.”So once again they are using “Open Source” to promote proprietary lock-in. This is not a novel concept, Microsoft did this with Novell (converter). Phoronix says: “This work may benefit some open-source document editors / office suite software, with more commentary being available from Michael Meeks’ blog.”
How is being reliant on OOXML beneficial to anyone but Microsoft shareholders? This is a trap. We need to reject this format. Google too should stop its unhelpful backing of OOXML, which is getting more detrimental by the day (more of it in the company’s latest event was disclosed, affirming Google’s lack of commitement to document standards).
As noted by some bloggers and writers for the European Commission’s Web site: “To ensure preservation of digital assets, it is essential that specific file formats are implementable in open source software, concludes Björn Lundell, associate professor at the University of Skövde in Sweden. He recommends this should be made a requirement for digital asset strategies of public administrations, thus minimising the risk of losing control over these assets.”
Well, there are patents in OOXML and complexity which shows that it’s really just designed around one implementation in a proprietary form (Office). OOXML should be rejected, especially in the public sector. There is nothing open about it. It’s a massive lie.
Nicholas Miller from VentureBeat and others play a role in a similarly-disturbing campaign that seeks to paint Facebook as “open”. With press release-oriented ‘journalists’ out there it has been quite easy. The Facebook openwashing that we recently wrote about is further promoted by pro-Facebook sites that use semantic jokes to get across this illusion.
When the press is trying to insinuate that Microsoft (Office) and Facebook are open there is clearly something wrong with the press. These are systematic and very persistent (especially this year) openwashing campaigns that everyone should push back against because these deceive and help derail real Free software. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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After earlier this week posting some fresh NVIDIA VDPAU video playback performance tests, here is some testing of the open-source AMD Radeon driver with R600 and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers while using the VDPAU state tracker for open-source, accelerated video playback using the graphics cards’ UVD engine.
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Applications
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Telegram is a an instant messaging service similar to WhatsApp. While there isn’t any official Telegram client for Linux systems, the users can use Telegram via the Unity Webapps Telegram Application (on Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 13.10 only) or via Sigram, a Telegram client developed in Qt.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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The Beta version of SteamOS, a Debian-based distribution developed by Valve to be used in its hybrid PC / console, has just received an update and numerous packages.
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Games
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Valve are pushing really quickly recently and have gathered together another list of games to allow on Steam. 36 of which are confirmed for Linux.
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In this week’s edition of our open source games news roundup we delve into the Steam Summer Adventure, hope that Together hits its Linux milestone, and more.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Jack Wallen addresses the stagnant, yet solid, state of the KDE desktop.
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That time of the year is arriving when we see major releases of GNU/Linux based systems. Ubuntu flavors have just announced the first alpha of for version 14.10 aka Utopic Unicorn. Only exception being Xubuntu which has not made any alpha’s available.
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Our top story on this Friday night is Andrew Smith’s blog post titled Linux is the quiet revolution that will leave Microsoft eating dust. Next up, Jack Wallen is probably answering Jos Poortvliet’s Where KDE is going in his post today on KDE. And finally today, Ryan “Icculus” Gordon speaks about the Linux gaming industry.
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Today we are releasing a new version of KDE Connect for Android phones and the Plasma desktop. This shiny new release includes some nice features contributed by great people in the KDE Community (and outside it). You guys are awesome!
The first feature I want to show you was contributed by Ahmed Ibrahim, and allows you to use your phone screen as a touchpad for your computer. Do you have a mediacenter or another setup where you don’t want to have a mouse and a keyboard always attached? With KDE Connect we will make you able to use your phone as a wireless input device!
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After two weeks and almost 1400 casted votes we’re finally ready to announce the 3 winning wallpaper submissions:
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You can tell everybody that they will get even better KDE software, software that runs on almost all platforms and in the future on even more and software that everybody can use and share. Concretely this means that at the end of September 2014 you will get an updated KDE Book that helps you to work with KDE Frameworks 5, a more stable Kdenlive, a first port of KMyMoney to KF5, a glimpse at Amarok 3, another beta of GCompris based on Qt, a reinvigorated Gluon Games Framework, at least a first idea of the KDE SDK and much more. Isn’t that worth it?
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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We do know open source giant Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) raised $28.9 million in equity. The company disclosed the news in a securities filing today.
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Fedora
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The Gnome team has announced the release of version 3.13.3, which is now available for download and testing. Those who don’t know, these snapshots are released as the team works toward the final release of the next version so 3.13.x branch is actually the development work going towards 3.14 branch.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Martin Wimpress (Mate developer) and Alan Pope (Canonical developer) are working at creating an Ubuntu image that uses MATE as the default desktop environment (called Ubuntu MATE Remix), but the project is only in its early development stage.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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The war between Samsung and Apple is nothing new. But here comes a fresh attack! According to Jae Shin, Vice President of Samsung’s Knox mobile security group, the situation when people would just go by the looks of something and not give importance to what’s inside is on the brink of being passé. He feels that people have changed and now have something he called know-how.
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Android
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These smart watches as well as all devices running Android Wear only works with smartphones running Android 4.3 or newer, representing less than 24% of all the Android devices on the market today (as of early June 2014). In contrast, Sony’s SmartWatch 2 – which uses a proprietary software – is compatible with older Android 4.0 devices.
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Companies face an inherent tension between being open or proprietary, but we’ve seen, again and again, that open systems can act as catalysts for entirely new businesses built on top of a popular platform.
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Parking app Sweetch has open-sourced its code this morning in an effort to solve the parking crisis in San Francisco. The free, open-source project, called Freetch is open to any developer willing to work on solving parking problems for the city.
City Attorney Dennis Herrera called out Sweetch and other parking apps earlier this week in a cease-and-desist letter it sent to MonkeyParking. The letter specifically warned Sweetch and ParkModo, both of which the city believes “…similarly violate local and state law with mobile app-enabled schemes intended to illegally monetize public parking spaces.”
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SaaS/Big Data
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Scheduling means different things depending on the audience. To many in the business world, scheduling is synonymous with workflow management. Workflow management is the coordinated execution of a collection of scripts or programs for a business workflow with monitoring, logging and execution guarantees built in to a WYSIWYG editor. Tools like Platform Process Manager come to mind as an example. To others, scheduling is about process or network scheduling. In the distributed computing world, scheduling means job scheduling, or more correctly, workload management.
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BSD
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or those curious about the performance of LLVM Clang in its current development form when testing the common code generation options for optimizing the performance (and in some cases size) of the resulting binaries, here’s some fresh compiler benchmarks.
Just as some extra benchmarks for the weekend while finishing out the month, I ran some new benchmarks comparing common optimization levels for LLVM/Clang with the latest 3.5 development code as of earlier this month. The configurations tested for this article included.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Health/Nutrition
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Even before those revelations, the Taliban in Pakistan had already opposed Western-backed vaccination campaigns, claiming that they were secret efforts to sterilize Muslim children. But the CIA’s actions helped fuel an armed backlash against immunization workers, reportedly killing 56 people between December 2012 and May 2014. The victims include not just medical workers but police officers assigned to guard them.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Posada, a longtime CIA asset, escaped after being arrested for the bombing in Venezuela, surfacing in El Salvador, where he helped oversee the Reagan administration’s illegal efforts to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. Since 2005, he’s been living in the United States, which refuses to extradite him to either Venezuela or Cuba.
Though it remains the deadliest act of air terrorism in the Western Hemisphere, Cubana Flight 455 is rarely brought up as a precedent for threats against air travelers. Perhaps that’s because corporate media like to maintain the fiction that terrorism is always something done by “them” against “us.”
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Until now, the information available publicly about the targeting and killing of American citizens abroad came to us through leaked documents and unauthorized statements by government officials. As a result of these leaks, President Obama’s drone policy has been hotly debated.
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Imagine that Vladimir Putin began using drones to kill Ukrainians who opposed Russia’s annexation of Crimea. If Putin claimed the targets were “members of anti-Russian terrorist groups,” what credibility would the United States have to condemn such strikes?
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On March 17, about 50 people staged a protest at the Iowa Air National Guard base in Des Moines and attempted to deliver a statement and talk with someone there about the use of drones for warfare. No one was willing to talk with the group or receive the statement, and the seven were ultimately arrested for civil disobedience.
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The Western-backed Al-Qaeda offshoot ISIS, has made its way to Iraq through Turkey and over the northeastern border of Syria. This new terror campaign appears to have been rolled out with a decades old objective, which is wrought with violence, propaganda and destabilization funding from the usual sponsors…
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The U. S. military has confirmed that some surveillance drones in Iraq have been armed with air to surface missiles. The purpose of arming the drones is to provide protection for U. S. military who are in the country. Confirmation came from Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby. He noted that some U. S. personnel were venturing outside the embassy to assist Iraqi military, exposing the U. S. personnel to increased risk.
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The US military says it has deployed armed manned and unmanned aircraft over Iraq to protect its soldiers, and may consider targeting “high value individuals”.
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The uproar in the mainstream U.S. news media over the barbarity of Islamic militants in Iraq downplays or ignores the brutality of the U.S. invasion and occupation that unleashed the ethnic and sectarian hatreds in the first place, as Danny Schechter notes.
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Drones was not a half-bad idea for a low-budget film. I can see what the filmmakers were trying to do here. It had the potential to be a compelling, Rear Window-esque story, told entirely from inside a little drone operating center somewhere in Nevada with a real-time window into a world on the other side of the planet. Given the setting, the premise is predictable but compelling: two drone pilots (Eloise Mumford and Matt O’Leary) are monitoring the home of a high-priority terrorist operative. People start showing up at the house and the action begins as they try to decipher who is there, what their intentions are, and where the bad guy is. As they sift through possible explanations and try to make the best judgment possible, they confront the moral-quandary side of the coin. Just how sure are they that this is their man, that he’s a threat, and that taking him out is justifies killing his family in the process? Human lives hang in the balance, drama runs high.
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The new report, issued through the nonpartisan Stimson Center, a think tank specializing in global security, concludes that U.S. drone policy, however well-intentioned, creates potentially troubling precedents in the areas of strategy, international law and human rights. Other states could follow the U.S.’s lead by adopting U.S. arguments for drone use and engage in their own targeted strikes, the task force said.
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Drone attacks are not turning “killing into a video game,” study says.
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A new report faults a control glitch and the drone’s operators for an unusual November mishap where the telemetry target crashed into the cruiser Chancellorsville during at-sea testing, sidelining the ship for months and causing millions in damages.
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Din’s parents were both killed in a drone strike approximately two years ago—shortly after he adopted Moti as his pet. “We [siblings] were sleeping in a different room when we heard an explosion in our house,” he said. “When we looked, it [drone] had killed both my parents.” Din, who has three younger brothers, said his father had been a vegetable vendor when he was killed. “We moved in with our uncle and his family after that,” he added.
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The United States has long funded governments that systematically abuse human rights. Over the weekend, Secretary of State John Kerry showed how that is still true when he visited Egypt and pledged American support for a regime that came to power in a coup.
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On June 22 he meets with Sisi, who overthrew Morsi in a military coup, and in his short term thus far as Egyptian president has murdered and imprisoned large numbers of the Muslim Brotherhood, cracked down heavily on liberal and dissenting demonstrations, and the day after Kerry’s departure jailed three reporters from the Al Jazerra network for alleged subversion. Morsi remains in jail. This is a suitable background for the renewal of military aid to the government and the whitewashing/legitimation of its actions. We find Kerry, from Swift Boat fame to toadying to military dictatorships, Obama indulgently looking on—no, authorizing, as is his wont and prerogative in the case of drone assassinations, support for repression. Here the New York Times, in a surprisingly balanced statement, offers context for the visit, in David Kirkpatrick and Michael Gordon’s article, “Kerry Says U.S. Is Ready to Renew Ties With Egypt,” (June 22), which begins, Kerry “signaled Sunday that the Obama administration was ready to repair relations with Egypt under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former general who led last year’s military takeover.” Given The Times’s sympathies in the matter, be thankful for the last clause.
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Two Palestinian men suspected of being militants were killed in an Israeli missile strike in Gaza on Friday, according to the military and witnesses, and Israel’s minister of defense warned that he would not tolerate rocket fire from Gaza against Israel or any other attempt to harm Israeli civilians and soldiers.
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In new wave of Israeli escalation against Gaza Strip, an Israeli air strike targeting a car in Gaza City on Friday, killed two Palestinians and wounded two others, Palestinian medical and security sources said.
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The spokesman for the Israeli army for his part said in a statement that “Militants like Hassumi and Fasih, attacking Israel from Gaza, are not safe, do not have immunity, and will not be free to plan, plot and operate. We will continue to strike the instigators and agitators with patience, determination and precision. Gaza rocket terrorism does not pay.”
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While the three are Democrats, they have been critical of the Obama administration on a number of issues related to intelligence, including the bulk collection of data by the NSA and more openness on drone attacks.
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On the day Awlaki was killed in the strike, President Obama referred to him as “the leader of external operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” claiming that it was Awlaki who was responsible for a failed underwear bomb attack on an airliner while it was flying over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.
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David Small, a lecturer at Canterbury University in New Zealand, said the killing of his countryman, Muslim bin John, who used the alias Abu-Suhaib al-Australi, by a US predator drone in Hadramout in November 2013 was not lawful.
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Media reports claiming the DPRK threatened war over a Seth Rogan and James Franco movie are flat out wrong.
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TODAY’S “FREEDOM FIGHTER” IS TOMORROW’S “RADICAL JIHADIST”
One of the occupational hazards of being a hypocritical warmonger slavishly serving the needs of the American military-industrial complex is you have to surrender pretty much every shred of credibility you ever had …
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The question is a good deal more complicated and involves answers to future questions that we might not know the answer. In the 1980s, Osama bin Laden rose to power partly because of the vacuum of power left by the U.S. in Afghanistan and the CIA who supported young jihadists, who included bin Laden, to fight the Soviets. Who is to say a similar event could not happen in Iraq?
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President Barack Obama is seeking $500m from US lawmakers to train and equip “vetted” Syrian rebels, the White House says.
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With the threat of Sunni extremists associated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) taking over more land in the Middle East, President Obama requested $500 million from Congress Thursday to train and arm the moderate opposition in Syria. The request was part of the 2015 war-funding request, which totaled nearly $60 billion.
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The U.S. hopes to use $500 million to train and arm ‘moderate’ factions of rebels, but some say it is too late.The U.S. hopes to use $500 million to train and arm ‘moderate’ factions of rebels, but some say it is too late.
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Enough to supply them with weapons and training worth $500 million. The US Congress wants to arm these brave freedom fighters, you see.
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Events are moving rapidly in Iraq. Before the Obama administration gets involved any further, Congress and the public should be consulted. Nearly three-quarters of Americans think the last Iraq war was a mistake. Let’s not repeat it by sliding into a new military intervention in Iraq under the guise of sending advisers.
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But I don’t think Obama believes that anymore, and I think he’s far more willing to stand up to establishment pressure these days. This is why I’m not too worried about the 300 advisors he’s sent to Iraq. A few years ago, this might very well have been the start of a Vietnam-like slippery slope into a serious recommitment of forces. Today, I doubt it. Obama will provide some limited support, but he simply won’t be badgered into doing more. Deep in his heart, he now understands that Iraq’s problem is fundamentally political. Until there’s some chance of forging a genuine political consensus, American troops just can’t accomplish much.
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Former general and CIA chief David Petraeus (shown), a key figure in the globalist Council on Foreign Relations and the shadowy Bilderberg network, boasted at a recent conference that the United States of America is set to be merged into the continental regime being erected under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Speaking at the Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty last week in London, the ex-commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq essentially celebrated the end of U.S. independence — and by extension, the demise of the Constitution.
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Today’s Iraq is divided in three parts: Kurdistan, in the northeast, an autonomous and mostly peaceful haven; from Baghdad southwards, the country of Shia Muslims; in the west and northwestern parts, that of the Sunni Arabs. As the French political specialist Pierre-Jean Luizard says of the state created by the British from the rubble of the Ottoman Empire in 1921, it was “built against its society,” 55% Shia, 25% Kurdish and 16% Sunni.
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I bet that headline stopped you short. It’s not exactly true – yet. But with the announcement by the president yesterday that he is seeking $500 million for “vetted” Sunni rebels in Syria, the US risks becoming the Shia air force in Iraq and a major patron of Sunni militias in Syria.
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In what would be the biggest boost yet by US President Barack Obama’s administration to the rebels in the three-year conflict, the White House has asked US lawmakers to release $500 million to train and equip the moderate opposition led by Jarba. The assistance would go to what the White House has called “appropriately vetted” members of the Syrian opposition. Although the US has provided some $2 billion in humanitarian aid, Obama has so far shied clear of providing heavy weapons, fearful they could fall into the hands of jihadists on both sides of the Syria-Iraq border. Jarba visited Washington in May to plead for arms, especially anti-aircraft missiles, to help the rebels defend themselves from air strikes and barrel bombs being unleashed by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. While US officials normally refuse to comment on details of training for opposition groups, National Security Adviser Susan Rice acknowledged early this month that the Pentagon was providing “lethal and non-lethal support” to Syrian rebels. About $287 million in mainly non-lethal support has been cleared for the rebels since March 2011, and the CIA has participated in a secret military training programme in neighbouring Jordan for the moderate opposition.
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Officials familiar with the situation are faulting the CIA’s lack of intelligence on Iraq in the lead-up to the ISIS offensive, saying the agency let most of its huge spy network rot on the vine after the occupation ended.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Finance
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In the first quarter of this year, General Motors sold significantly more cars in China than it did in North America. And high time, too, if we are to believe a report by the global consulting firm McKinsey. It notes that the flows of goods, services and finance across international borders has increased by some 50% since 1990, and now accounts for more than a third of global GDP. The report predicts that such international transactions could double or triple by 2025.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Team USA may be through to the last 16, but for some, the suspiciously popular game with the round ball is leftie nonsense
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Censorship
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On Dec. 31, 2005, the C.I.A.’s acting general counsel, John A. Rizzo, received an urgent phone call from the White House about a chapter in James Risen’s coming book, “State of War,” detailing a botched C.I.A. operation in Iran.
The administration wanted Mr. Rizzo to contact Sumner Redstone — the chairman of Viacom, owner of the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster — and ask him to keep the book off the market.
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Supporters of a pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, known as Occupy Central with Love and Peace, may be unwittingly revealing their personal information to the CIA, reports the local Wen Wei Po
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Privacy
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The streets of Chicago will soon host high-tech lamp posts to track where people are walking. As part of a program called Array of Things, the city will begin collecting data through automated sensors installed on light poles this summer.
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Standagainstspying.org, a coalition that includes The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Greenpeace, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and other groups, flew a 135-foot thermal airship over the million-square-foot NSA facility in Bluffdale, Utah today.
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These examples demonstrate the higher one’s elective or appointive position, the more immune one is to lawbreaking. Speaker Boehner’s track record of blindness about “ faithfully executing the laws of our country” is evidence his motive for the lawsuit is not what he says.
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The US supreme court’s unanimous 9-0 opinion this week requiring police to get a warrant before searching your cellphone is arguably the most important legal privacy decision of the digital age. Its immediate impact will be felt by the more than 12m people who are arrested in America each year (many for minor, innocuous crimes), but the surprisingly tech-savvy opinion from Chief Justice John Roberts may eventually lead to far more protection than that.
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Internet users in China are rallying to retaliate against the United States Congress, which is threatening to rename part of the street in front of the Chinese embassy after the political dissident Liu Xiaobo. The most common Chinese counter-suggestion is to name the street where the US embassy in Beijing is located after the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, but there are many more.
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As U.S. and German officials meet this week to discuss privacy and security in the cyber realm, a German official is calling recent revelations of NSA spying on his country the “biggest strain in bilateral relations with the U.S.” since the controversy surrounding the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
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The release of the “transparency report,” issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, follows an order a year ago from President Barack Obama to declassify and make public as much information as possible about certain sensitive surveillance programs.
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The word “targets” has multiple meanings, according to the document. The reports identifies targets thus: “For example, “target” could be an individual person, a group, or an organization composed of multiple individuals or a foreign power that possesses or is likely to communicate foreign intelligence information that the U.S. government is authorized to acquire by the above-referenced laws.”
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Schindler might be advised to keep his dick in his pants, but he should keep his apology between him and his wife. Because his enemies—and his online mistress—don’t deserve one.
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Kuhn was chief of staff to Ohio GOP Rep. Steve Stivers, at least until a former porn actress – who describes herself as a “Pornstar Pundit and debate lover” – posted an explicit photo of him online.
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Westmacott’s comments follow a long line of detractors, who have claimed Snowden’s leaks have turned the US (and other Five Eyes partners) into terrorists’ playgrounds, when not trawling through history in an attempt to compare leaks spread worldwide by journalists to the selling of sensitive documents to unfriendly nations. That’s when they’re not suggesting Snowden’s residence in Russia will inevitably turn him into an alcoholic.
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On July 2nd, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) will release a report on the government’s use of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to execute surveillance. The NSA’s PRISM program, for example, is legally grounded in Section 702.
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Moreover, numbers are given for business records requests; instance where business records were specifically requested by the US government. While only numbering in the hundreds (178), the word “target” is used once again, which the US defines in an extremely loose way. As such, once more, it’s unclear exactly how many US citizens were affected and how.
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We already know that the Los Angeles Police Department, the Sheriff, and police departments including Long Beach’s use rooftop vehicle-mounted cameras that have collected millions of photos of the license plates and precise locations of innocent SoCal drivers. That info sits in a databank that law enforcement can use to track your car’s movements over a period of years.
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The NSA isn’t disclosing in its transparency report how much metadata it is actually collecting.
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The US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has published the NSA’s first “transparency report”, revealing the number of “targets” spied on by the agency.
Its definition of the word transparency, however, makes the data somewhat hard to fathom.
“Within the Intelligence Community, the term ‘target’ has multiple meanings,” the report [PDF], published today, notes.
“For example, ‘target’ could be an individual person, a group, or an organization composed of multiple individuals or a foreign power that possesses or is likely to communicate foreign intelligence information that the U.S. government is authorized to acquire by the above-referenced laws.”
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Privacy groups are sounding the alarm that a new Senate cybersecurity bill could give the National Security Agency access to even more personal information of Americans.
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Opposition politicians on Friday demanded government clarification of reports German secret services spied for the NSA. It came as intelligence chiefs confirmed closer surveillance of social network users.
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A draft U.S. Senate bill aimed at making it easier for organizations to share cyberthreat information poses serious threats to personal privacy, several rights groups said in a letter to Congress on Thursday.
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The National Security Agency in response to a Freedom of Information Act request repeated its assertion this week that former contractor Edward Snowden never raised any legal or ethical concerns to agency superiors before leaking classified intelligence documents last year.
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One month after Snowden revelations alleging NSA phone call surveillance, the US government has given generic replies and the story has had little impact.
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For tech-savvy Britons, the debut in this country of Google’s Glass headset on Monday was greeted with much fanfare.
Yet less than a week since the release, the device has run into potential trouble with Britain’s tough data protection rules.
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A free app that promises to help you send surveillance-proof, self-destructing, encrypted messages has just secured $30m (£17m) in funding.
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“Good people don’t hide; bad people have to hide because they are planning evil things like trying to bomb this auditorium,” said Glenn Greenwald during a presentation at Carnegie Hall in New York City earlier this week.
He explained that he took that line from former CIA director Michael Hayden, who kept on repeating that warning during a debate in Toronto a couple months ago.” In that debate, Greenwald took on two grumpy old men, one who looked like Eric Forman’s father from That ‘70s Show and the other who claimed to be a liberal democrat who believes that we can have enough surveillance that is consistent with liberty. Needless to say, Greenwald destroyed them both with his secret weapon: the NSA’s own files, which he received from Edward Snowden in what has become one of the greatest government leaks in history.
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The United States federal government issued more than 19,000 National Security Letters–perhaps its most powerful tool for domestic intelligence collection–in 2013, and those NSLs contained more than 38,000 individual requests for information.
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A small software app called Onionshare offers the most secure file sharing available. So why hasn’t anyone heard of it? Well, mostly because it was released with just a tweet from its creator, and you have to go to Github to download it. But don’t let its underground status fool you — this is a very important app.
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By “libel”, the court is referring to a critique of the British government which the King or his ministers didn’t like … they would label such criticism “libel” and then seize all of the author’s papers.
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It has been a year since NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden began dominating the headlines around the world after he leaked information on the vast amount of programmes of electronic surveillance conducted by the US government, the UK and other nations.
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Former US presidential candidate and Congressman Ron Paul called on Libertarians to “work with the left” on certain issues, saying that the NSA issue and recent Supreme Court ruling in favor of privacy are two excellent examples. Ron Paul, however, disagreed with a key tenet of a Supreme Court Justice’s opinion on “sacrifice of anything” to protect constitutional liberties.
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Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) doesn’t trust that former NSA director Keith Alexander is reportedly being paid $600,000 a month by the largest banking trade groups in the country merely for his advice on cyber security issues.
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This administration will be remembered for redefining terms like “open” and “transparency.”
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Civil Rights
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A U.S. military judge has upheld a ruling ordering the Obama administration to release tightly held secrets about the CIA’s covert prisons overseas. The government had appealed an April ruling ordering the CIA to release details about its treatment of USS Cole bombing suspect Abd al-Nashiri, including the names of personnel at the so-called “black sites” where he says he was tortured. But in a newly disclosed ruling, Judge James Pohl upheld his original decision calling for the information to be released to defense attorneys. The Obama administration could now decide to bring the case before a military appeals court rather than comply.
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Senior UN officials urged [press release] the international community on Thursday to end the practice of torture in celebration of the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture [official website]. “As we honour the victims on this International Day, let us pledge to strengthen our efforts to eradicate this heinous practice,” said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon [official website].
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A Google-owned robotics company is withdrawing an award-winning rescue robot from a military competition to concentrate on getting it ready for sale.
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Evidence that racism is thriving in the US arrives on a regular basis. There are the ongoing stories of institutional racism that media often fail to frame as being about racism are there: underfunded schools, drug wars, sentencing differentials, stop and frisk, lending disparities–the list goes on and on.
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In what has been billed as an anti-colonial protest, the Bolivian government of President Evo Morales has changed the direction of the clock hands on the Congress building in La Paz. It will now go widdershins.
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There are now 5,000 laws on annoying behavior in the US, the Wall Street Journal reported.
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Surveillance. It’s in the headlines and on the tips of tongues. As technology offers new possibilities for connection, it also offers new means to keep tabs on people. Surveillance has become seemingly ubiquitous, from the NSA reading emails to drones in the skies. As a nation that has for 66 years been ruling over an indigenous population by force, one of the main countries practicing surveillance is Israel. And it is the Israeli defense industry that has been reaping the profits off of the oppression and surveillance of the Palestinian people.
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Was the programming prodigy, Reddit partner and information activist Aaron Swartz hounded to death by the U.S. government? Did the government’s legal drone attack and threat of a 35-year prison stretch drive Swartz to take his own life at age 26 last year?
If you see Brian Knappenberger’s provocative and gripping documentary “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,” you’ll believe it. You’ll also think it’s no wonder NSA bete noir Edward Snowden fled the United States rather than face such legal persecution.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Parker Higgins has a troubling story over at Medium about how he received a bogus copyright takedown on a recording of the famous “Houston, we have a problem” audio snippet from the Apollo 13 mission, which Higgins had uploaded to his Soundcloud page. As Higgins notes, the audio is clearly, without any doubt, in the public domain and free from any and all copyright restrictions — yet it was still taken down. This is particularly stupid on a variety of levels.
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