07.06.14
Posted in News Roundup at 7:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Like all things Linux and open source, users are spoilt for choice when it comes to selecting a desktop environment (or DE). But this choice that many perceive as freedom, others may also see as a little bewildering and confusing.
Right after making the soul-shaking decision of switching operating systems and installing an unknown system – by hand no less – a new Linux user is then greeted with weird sounding desktops to choose from with names like Gnome (a mini-desktop perhaps?), KDE (Isn’t that a double-glazing firm?) and Xfce (No idea). What veteran users herald as Linux’s crown jewels, to the innocent newcomer it’s like stumbling into a sci-fi convention where everyone is discussing a new TV series that you’ve never heard of but apparently it’s been around for years.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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The last Pixman stable release happened in November of 2013 while out this weekend is finally a new Pixman release.
While it’s been more than a half-year since the last stable Pixman release, the changes for the new v0.32.6 release aren’t particularly compelling but still worth pointing out.
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Applications
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Whether you’re producing podcasts or creating highly sophisticated sound recordings, one of these open source apps will suit your needs.
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There are several programs for video ripping and transcoding in Linux, allowing to choose from a wide number of formats and containers for the output video files. This is an overview of six applications which allow you do transcode videos.
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Mobile phone users should not regard their computer only as the means of recharging their phone, or transferring files to and from the phone’s storage. There’s a lot more than you can do with your Linux box. This article illustrates some good open source tools that let you manage your mobile phone.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Aeon Command has been on Linux for quite some time now, but it’s finally on Steam with hopes of getting more interest. The game is really quite good too, so be sure to check it out.
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VCMI is an ambitious project that aims to recreate the entire Heroes III engine and add new features, and has been in the works for a few years, and up to now it is in good shape.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Plasma NM is going to be part of kde-workspace and as you may know NMQt is a dependency for Plasma NM. Plasma 5 release is approaching and since we may not get NMQt ready for KF5 in time we decided to ship a snapshort of NMQt with kde-workspace so that Plasma NM compiles. In the future we will remove the snapshot and rely on the NMQt in KF5.
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This is the last but one update to the 2.8 series of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active released to fix recently found issues. The Calligra team recommends everybody to update.
Why is 2.8.4 skipped? Shortly before 2.8.4 release we discovered bug that sneaked in 2.8.2 version and decided to skip the 2.8.4 entirely and quickly release 2.8.5 instead with a proper fix. The bug is related to not showing file formats in Save dialogs.
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The KDE Community has announced the release of Calligra 2.8.5. “This is the last (and last but one) update to the 2.8 series of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active released to fix recently found issues. The Calligra team recommends everybody to update,” says Jarosław Staniek of Calligra community.
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Red Hat Family
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Students from tertiary institutions in seven Asian Pacific countries are invited to attend the 4th Regional Red Hat Challenge – a knowledge-based technology competition.
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Debian Family
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I can set the display backlight to zero via software, which saves me a lot of battery life and also offers a bit of anti-spy-acroos-my-shoulder support. WLAN and bluetooth work nicely.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 17 ‘Qiana’ KDE and Xfce editions were released late last month, just a few weeks after the main editions (Cinnamon and MATE) were put out. This release will have the same lifespan as the distribution which is based on, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, so it will be supported until 2019, for no less than five years.
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Linux Deepin Project has been officially renamed as “Deepin Project”.
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Deepin Linux 2014 is now available as the popular Chinese-developed derivative to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that features its own lightweight desktop powered using HTML5 and Go with Compiz. The updated desktop in Deepin 2014 is called Deepin Desktop Environment 2.0.
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The connected car is shifting into high gear, and the Linux Foundation wants an open-source platform in the pole position. The non-profit consortium recently announced the debut of Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a customizable, open-source automotive software stack with Linux at its core.
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A common, Linux-based software platform for the ‘connected car’ is one step closer, with the release of Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) this week.
AGL claims to be the industry’s only ‘fully open’ automotive platform, allowing carmakers to use a standardised single base upon which to build their own user experiences.
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Phones
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Android
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The app allows you to code through HTML, JavaScript and Dart – Google’s JavaScript-like language, so there is no Java at this time, but you do get Git support.
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In the next few months, Google will get some competition from Microsoft, Apple and a few startups in this space. For better or worse, none of them know as much about you as Google does, so it’ll be hard for them to replicate the Google Now experience. That should give Google a bit of an edge against the competition — unless the iWatch turns out to be so amazing that people will buy it even if it just shows the time and phone notifications.
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Taking a look back at the week in news across the Android world, this week’s Android Circuit focuses on Samsung’s new Galaxy handsets; Android tops the US market share; the Android ‘L’ changes; Google Play Services’ update for Android Wear support; Android Wear apps arrive in the Play Store; the battle for the home screen continues with Aviate; and what happens next in the smartphone world.
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Science
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Hong Kong has one of the world’s best subway systems. It has a 99.9 per cent on time record – far better than London Underground or New York’s subway. It is owned and run by MTR Corporation, which also runs systems in Stockholm, Melbourne, London and Beijing. MTR is now planning to roll out its AI overseer to the other networks it manages.
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Health/Nutrition
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And efforts to make the most of precious farmland have been hampered by decades of urban sprawl, which has accelerated since Y 2011 when the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak led to a security vacuum.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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A cellphone video depicting a California Highway Patrol office punching a woman along the side of a freeway Tuesday evening has the agency investigating accusations of excessive force.
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The Washington Post has published an exclusive report about the US National Security Agency’s surveillance activities, but withheld information of “considerable intelligence value,” including a secret overseas nuclear project.
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In reacting to Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine, President Obama has reassured exposed NATO members Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia of firm U.S. support. But he has shown little inclination to show needed leadership by putting another integral element of NATO policy on the agenda of September’s Cardiff summit — enlargement of the alliance.
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If Official Washington were not the corrupt and dangerous place that it is, the architects and apologists for the Iraq War would have faced stern accountability. Instead, they are still around – holding down influential jobs, making excuses and guiding the world into more wars, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar notes.
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A 41-minute documentary has been produced and is online, “Ukraine Crisis Today,” interviewing “terrorists” (as our side calls them) who have been bombed by the Ukrainian Government. We — that is, the United States — installed this Ukrainian government, on February 22nd, in a coup (falsely presented as a democracy movement, but run actually by the U.S. CIA and two Ukrainian fascist parties) against Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych. The government that we installed is now bombing the areas of Ukraine where the voters had voted overwhelmingly for Yanukovych, in Ukraine’s last national election, which took place during February 2010. Our side calls the residents of the Yanukovich-supporting areas “terrorists.” Those are the people our Ukrainian regime bombs.
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The mainstream U.S. media continues to sell the American people a one-sided storyline on the Ukraine crisis as the Kiev regime celebrates a key military victory at Slovyansk, an eastern city at the center of ethnic Russian resistance to last February’s violent coup that ousted elected President Yanukovych.
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Halliburton, which offers a myriad of services, including oil field work, plus construction work, benefits when countries are “bombed to the stone age,” since those same countries need to be rebuilt. Angelo Young describes the war-profiteering in Cheney’s Halliburton Made $39.5 Billion On Iraq War…
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Transparency Reporting
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Finance
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At the beginning of 2014, 13 states increased their minimum wage. Of these 13 states, four passed legislation raising their minimum wage (Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island). In the other nine, their minimum wage automatically increased in line with inflation at the beginning of the year (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington state).
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It might sound like an oxymoron, but this is a positive article about public services. So effectively has the coalition rebranded an economic crisis caused by private greed as the consequence of public ownership, that nationalisation has come to be seen as a universally discredited hangover from bad old Labour. So while current Labour is considering taking back parts of the rail network into public ownership the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, last weekend was intoning the neoliberal catechism: “I don’t want to go back to the nationalisation of the 1970s.”
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Censorship
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Files which may be linked to child abuse claims seem to have been lost “on an industrial scale” at the Home Office, the chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee has said.
The Home Office has said its own review last year found that 114 potentially relevant files could not be located.
Keith Vaz MP said it was “a huge surprise” that so much potential evidence had gone missing.
Lord Tebbit said he hoped any review would be conducted quickly.
Number 10 has rejected calls for an over-arching public inquiry into historical child abuse claims.
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Newspapers are now accusing Google of censoring their articles every time that a search result is being removed in relation to one of their articles. However, what the very lazy journalists are not doing is testing the search results to see if any of the key figures are likely to have gained the redaction, at least not before telling the world about it.
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A law against being annoying in public was recently approved by the British House of Commons and sent to the House of Lords, which vetoed it. This was no surprise since Lords themselves are horribly annoying, with their castles and silly titles. (For example, does “Lord Privy Seal” means what it says, which is “Lord Toilet Sea-Mammal”?)
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We will all die, and we will all be forgotten, in the end. I’m still unsophisticated enough to find that sad. But society seems fairly stoical about it, to say the least. These days thousands are campaigning for “the right to die” and “the right to be forgotten” as if they’re genuinely worried it might otherwise not happen.
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Privacy
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Noticeably absent from the trial and much of the media attention are the phone companies. Did they know their networks could be so systematically abused? Did they care?
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Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) on Sunday formally lodged its protest with the United States over the spying of the largest political party by the National Security Agency (NSA), a private TV channel reported.
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Berlin Letter: Spy scandals have returned a Cold War atmosphere to the German capital
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In the US, Germany’s NSA scandal doesn’t make the headlines.
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A suspected German double agent has worked for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), German newspaper “Bild am Sonntag” reported on Sunday.
The case was first uncovered on Friday. A 31-year-old employee of Germany’s Foreign Intelligence Service (BND) was reportedly detained Thursday in suspicion of having spied on a German investigation committee inquiring into U.S. surveillance on behalf of an American intelligence service.
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I’ve heard it whispered in certain literary quarters that American novelists have failed to adequately respond to a post-9/11 world. That their fiction lacks sufficient imagination and indignation towards their government and its policies. I think this is a whisper of weak foundations. While the terror of drones, the NSA and the NRA are certainly worthy of tomes, I’m actually more intrigued with the terror of ordinary life. And few American writers I know capture this as masterfully as Joshua Ferris.
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Nadim Kobeissi wants to bulldoze that steep learning curve. At the HOPE hacker conference in New York later this month he’ll release a beta version of an all-purpose file encryption program called miniLock, a free and open-source browser plugin designed to let even Luddites encrypt and decrypt files with practically uncrackable cryptographic protection in seconds.
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For more than a year, NSA officials have insisted that although Edward Snowden had access to reports about NSA surveillance, he didn’t have access to the actual surveillance intercepts themselves. It turns out they were lying.1 In fact, he provided the Washington Post with a cache of 22,000 intercept reports containing 160,000 individual intercepts.
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Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by the Washington Post.
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“Every single American embassy is an intelligence collection facility. The really second in charge of every embassy is the CIA station chief,” Scott Rickard, former US intelligence linguist, said in a Saturday interview with us.
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Pakistan’s main opposition, Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), has formally protested to the United States ambassador in Islamabad over media reports that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was spying on the party in 2010 when it was ruling the country, the party’s spokesman said Sunday.
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Apparently, the NSA has been watching some networks to try to build up their user profile data. The government agency has been targeting the Tor anonymising system to spy on its users.
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An alleged double agent did not spy on Germany’s parliamentary NSA inquiry, according to the panel’s chairman. The suspect is accused of selling sensitive documents to a US intelligence agency.
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They mailed copies of the documents they lifted to Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger, who broke the story. NBC News reporter Carl Stern later uncovered the FBI’s illegal Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which sought to destroy, discredit and harass civil rights and anti-war groups and activists.
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In honor of the Fourth of July, let’s talk a little about how horrifically paranoid and counterproductive the US government has become. And I’m not even talking about Congress! Instead I mean our old friend the No Such Agency, who, it turns out, have been singling out for special treatment anyone who displays any interest in tools which might make the NSA’s life more difficult.
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The former secretary of state tells The Guardian in a video interview that if whistle-blower Edward Snowden is “serious” about joining the debate over “the tension between privacy and security,” he can come home. “But that’s his decision,” she adds.
To Clinton, the likely 2016 presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, Snowden broke the law; however, as a lawyer she holds that “he has a right to mount a defense. And he certainly has a right to launch both a legal defense and a public defense, which can of course affect the legal defense.” She claims, however, to be unaware of what the former NSA contractor would be charged with upon return since the indictments are “sealed.”
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But this revelation about the NSA is something that appears investors are not paying enough attention to. I’m relatively certain, global buyers of network gear have a different perspective. Obviously, the NSA could have been intercepting gear from all the network providers, but being France based is certainly a positive for Alcatel’s forward orders. No matter how the spotlight has shown on the matter or the fact that Cisco did not appear to work in concert with the NSA, wouldn’t you agree that global buyers of gear, especially those sensitive to privacy, will be more likely to turn to the France based Alcatel-Lucent now, or the Sweden based Ericsson (ERIC)?
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Civil Rights
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The regime has repeatedly carried out artillery and air attacks on city centers, creating a humanitarian catastrophe—which is all but ignored by the US political-media establishment.
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His CIA career included assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the most perilous posting for Jeffrey Scudder turned out to be a two-year stint in a sleepy office that looks after the agency’s historical files.
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One of the standard criticisms of Edward Snowden is that he should have tried harder to air his concerns via proper channels. This is fairly laughable on its face, since even now the NSA insists that all its programs were legal and it continues to fight efforts to change them or release any information about them. Still, maybe Snowden should have tried. What harm could it have done?
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An award-winning American journalist says the US government’s spying operations targeting the entire Muslim community is misguided and “smacks of what was done in Nazi Germany.”
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A number of Jewish suspects have been arrested over the murder of Palestinian teenager Mohammad Abu Khdair, whose death sparked days of violent protests.
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Initial autopsy findings from the body of an East Jerusalem youth who Palestinians believe was kidnapped and killed by far-right Jews showed that he was burned alive, the Palestinian attorney-general has been reported as saying.
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Security concerns are complicating the release of a controversial report on “enhanced interrogations techniques,” with officials fearing the document could inflame the Arab Street and put Americans in danger.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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It’s the latest development in the tick-tock of two stories: the reactions of the world’s governments to the Snowden revelations that the NSA has their entire populations (and leaders) under deep surveillance; and Russia’s steady march to a totalitarian Internet that’s like Iran’s halal Internet, with Putin-authoritarian characteristics.
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Posted in Bill Gates at 6:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Bill Gates’ private (for-profit) coup against public education is being impeded by people whom it negatively affects
SOME time ago it was reported in local media that Indiana had been getting out of the Bill Gates-imposed Common Core regime. Bill Gates apparently bribed not enough lawmakers, politicians, newspapers and non-profit origanisations over there. Passing taxpayers’ money to private pockets didn’t work as smoothly as expected.
According to new backlash against Gates, led by more public figures like Professor Diane Ravitch who wants Bill Gates investigated, it is “Good Riddance to Common Core Testing”, at least in some states:
Bill Gates’ money helped foist Common Core on Indiana
Indiana is no longer alone in abandoning the Common Core academic standards.
Oklahoma and South Carolina are pulling out, and North Carolina is headed for the door as well. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is taking his state out of the national standards, provoking a conflict with the state’s education superintendent and causing uncertainty about state testing in the fall.
Bill Gates is hardly any different from the Kochs. He has better marketing and he buys more media outlets than the Kochs, at the cost of around one million dollars per day. He does all this abusive lobbying while he keeps pretending to do charity (he hoards billions of additional dollars at times of recession), using heavy PR and bribed press. For people among world’s top 10 for wealth, the cost of bribing lots of papers and officials is by far outweighed by the profit this generates and Gates has been an incredibly useful example of this.
Here is a new and rather long article that covers some of the angles we have talked about before (although we may not agree with everything it says):
COMMON CORE WILL MAKE BILL GATES RICHER
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Common Core will be used for “data mining.” In May 2012 Charles Scaliger wrote in The New American that “in the sagebrush desert of Bluffdale, Utah, in the shadow of the Wasatch mountains, a vast new federal surveillance and intelligence processing center is being erected. The so-called Utah Data Center, operated by the National Security Agency, will occupy more than a million square feet when it becomes operational sometimes next year.
Coincidentally this Data Center was completed in 2013 about the same time Common Core was being promoted by such organizations as the National Governors Association (which helps state governments get federal grants) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (which claims to provide leadership, advocacy and technical assistance on major educational issues) – started work on a common set of curriculum standards in English language arts and mathematics while using such deceitful words as “state led” and “voluntary.”
Thankfully, a lot of people now realise that not only in the education sector is Gates doing great harm. Former managers from Microsoft link to our articles about Gates, perhaps realising what was inconvenient to believe when Microsoft paid their salary. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 5:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Lack of demand
Summary: The software bully which manipulates its financial reports is said to be unable to sell the latest Windows and a new Microsoft product running this version of Windows is axed before arrival
Microsoft’s criminal behaviour does not work quite so well in hardware, where bribes are harder to get budget for (unlike with software, which can be copied infinitely). Microsoft was already forced to kill many products and divisions and it has many famous failures in hardware, including Kin, Windows Mobile, and Xbox (which lost money). Now we learn that Microsoft has ditched yet another product. This article uses promotional language which fails to explain what a colossal failure Surface has been (the big table as well as the tablets with the same brand name).
Based on other reports like this one from ZDNet (citing the Microsoft-funded Net Applications), right after China banned Vista 8 and various countries/businesses rejected it for technical reasons:
Net Applications has found that Windows 8.x actually lost user share in June 2014, while Windows 7 has really been the operating system to gain from XP’s end of support.
This is not good for Microsoft’s financial bottom line. It’s also embarrassing because it shows systematic pushback.
Another ZDNet report says that Microsoft enables XP to still receive patches (a month ago IDG reported inaction from XP users). The NSA is going to benefit from this as more PCs have lots of back doors piling up. The NSA flags GNU/Linux users (or people who read GNU/Linux sites) for extra surveillance, based on leaked source code. Those who want security (e.g. Russia, China, Korea) will surely move to GNU/Linux very soon. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 5:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The Internet of Things Alliance has just let the mole, Microsoft, dip its finger in the competition, as it so often does in order to derail the competition
The poorly-named “AllSeen Alliance” (or Internet of Things Alliance) is about to find out that it doesn’t pay off to welcome Microsoft. Resistance and antagonism are defence mechanisms here.
OpenStack learned that Microsoft involvement is trouble, as it had ushered in a proprietary culture (secrecy, neglect, technical incompatibilities, and distrust-inducing NSA back doors). The same goes for OpenDaylight, which is another way Microsoft got its foot inside the Linux Foundation (directly, not through Nokia or Novell).
While there is propaganda from Microsoft-bribed circles (e.g. Om Malik, who received Microsoft money and apparently still receives money from Microsoft to publicly openwash them as well as whitewash Nadella) it is clear that Microsoft is not an Open Source friend but a foe. Microsoft is doing so much to harm FOSS, as we shall continue to show perhaps for years to come (if Microsoft is still around).
IDG said that “Microsoft backs open source for the Internet of Things” (widely cited article), but it’s not clear what the word “backs” should be taken as. Microsoft competes with FOSS and Linux in this area, so Microsoft probably “backs” the Internet of Things in the same way that Microsoft “backs” ODF or the NSA “backs” Germany (see related news which fall outside the scope of this one particular post).
Having proprietary software inside a supposedly open initiative, just like in OpenDaylight, is a very dumb idea. In past years we covered examples where Microsoft was revealed to have pressured groups (rival groups) to let them in. Some successfully resisted and some admittedly perished after they had caved in for Microsoft’s manipulative mind game (e.g. complaining about exclusion and intolerance).
“Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” is what one of our readers immediately called the above news. One pro-GNU/Linux pundit stated: “Microsoft, like most companies, does what it is in its own interests, and I think joining the AllSeen Alliance is truly a marriage of convenience. So you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t interpret this move by Microsoft as marking some new attitude toward open source. It seems to be something that is clearly rooted in Microsoft’s self-interest rather than any shared open source vision.”
The Linux Foundation has once again let a malicious mole in. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before there are complaints from within. It always happens sooner or later.
The more moles the Linux Foundation brings in (Microsoft or its allies), the harder it will become for it to prevent entryism. Just look what happened to Nokia. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Lennart Poettering gave a talk recently in Beijing about the state of systemd and its future ahead.
Lennart keynoted at the joint FUDCon Beijing 2014 with GNOME.Asia 2014 event and he talked about the current position of systemd and its future going forward, while acknowledging it’s evolved more than just being a basic init system to being “a set of basic building blocks to build an OS from.”
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA has today released ther 331.89 Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD graphics drivers within their long-lived 331.xx graphics driver branch.
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While two X.Org GSoC projects already failed this summer, student developer Samuel Pitoiset continues making great progress on his work for implementing performance counter support within the open-source Nouveau NVIDIA graphics driver.
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Applications
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So I finally managed to put out a new Transmageddon release today. It is primarily a bugfix release, but considering how many critical bugs I ended up fixing for this release I am actually a bit embarassed about my earlier 1.x releases. There was for instances some stupidity in my code that triggered thread safety issues, which I know hit some of my users quite badly. But there were other things not working properly either, like dropping the video stream from a file. Anyway, I know some people think that filing bugs doesn’t help, but I think I fixed every reported Transmageddon bug with this release (although not every feature request bugzilla item). So if you have issues with Transmageddon 1.2 please let me know and I will try my best to fix them. I do try to keep a policy that it is better to have limited functionality, but what is there is solid as opposed to have a lot of features that are unreliable or outright broken.
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If you’re like me, you may not have heard much about Corebird, a native GTK+3 Twitter client. Which is a bit surprising really, as Corebird is a very nice and stable application that holds it’s own with any of the other clients out there and deserves more love.
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PCManFM or PCMan File Manager has reached version 1.2.1 earlier today. While there’s no official announcement on the project’s blog or homepage, we’ve dug up the changelog in order to notify our users of what’s new in this release.
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Proprietary
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It is pretty much acknowledged by now that Skype is evil. Maybe not as evil as a DRM on a brand new game, but very close. To summarize the events, Skype has been bought by Microsoft, has been spied on by the NSA, is now quitting its peer-to-peer protocol for a centralized system, and on top of that, is proprietary software. The worst of it is that just like a DRM on a game, we put up with all of this for the product. It is true that Skype at first did help users go into the VoIP realm. Its interface is intuitive, and its setup is simple. However, it is time to move on. For this, here is a list of six software to replace Skype with on Linux.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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The Wine development release 1.7.21 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
- Support for critical sections in the C runtime.
- Unicode data updated to Unicode 7.0.
- Support for interlaced PNG encoding.
- Initial stub for the Packager library.
- Various bug fixes.
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Games
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At the end of April LGP was migrating servers and expected to “keep downtime to an absolute minimum” while more than two months later the once leading Linux game publishing company remains offline.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Enlightenment is flying high these days with the great contributions being done by Samsung’s investment into the project.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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One week-end of Calligra sprint is currently going on in the old and cozy center of Deventer in the Netherlands.
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The Cutelyst 0.2 release that happened today is more real-world-ready. This release features framework documentation at Cutelyst.org, a WordPress-like blog has been written using Cutelyst as an example app, API updates, and a variety of other changes.
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Five months ago I announced the very first release of Cutelyst, a web framework powered by Qt 5. Time passes and I started shaping my real world applications written with it, I should probably release a newer version earlier but it’s not very nice to keep releasing API that changes a lot, however next version (0.3.0) will still contains API changes.
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We just finished migrating one of our stacks to a new and powerful piece of hardware. It was a major activity and took about 9 hours with around 2-3 hours of downtime per CMS. The activity is now complete, however there are a few rough edges that we’ll be ironing out over the weekend.
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Technically, the functions to reach those goals all bring their own interactions and workflows. For users it is necessary to perceive clearly what happens and how to achieve the desired result. Unfortunately, some uncontrolled growth in KDE applications has lead to non-standardized implementation and application-specific short-cuts.
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A few weeks ago I contacted Thomas Pfeiffer with the idea to design a new user interface for Klipper in Plasma 5.1. Surprisingly he informed me that a discussion was already started in the KDE Forums. Which is awesome as that means there was already some ideas on how the user interface could look like. Last week the number of new bug reports for KWin get lower so I started to look into Klipper for 5.1.
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The KDE Community introduced the concept of convergence way back in 2008 with the arrival of KDE 4.x (back then it was still KDE Desktop). If you ever tried KDE on your netbook you would have noticed that the desktop that got installed was different from that you would get when you install the same iso on your desktop.
That was convergence. KDE knew what kind of form factor you have and would offer an interface optimized for that device.
KDE community was also developing something called Plasma Active, which was aimed at devices using touch-based interface as found on today’s smartphones and tablets.
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A new Linux distribution under development is among the latest dreaming of commercial success in hopes of finally conquering the Linux desktop and having their OS pre-installed on systems being sold in brick and mortar stores.
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Red Hat Family
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Scientific Linux, the distribution developed by produced by the Fermi Laboratory and CERN as a derivative of the open Red Hat Enterprise Linux code-base, is preparing for their RHEL7 re-spin.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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After having put in place the infrastructure to allow companies to contribute financially to Debian LTS, I spent quite some time to draft the announce of the launch of Debian LTS (on a suggestion of Moritz Mühlenhoff who pointed out to me that there was no such announce yet).
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With the help of the Debian System Administrators, it’s now setup on tracker.debian.org!
This service is also managed by the Debian QA team, it’s deployed in /srv/tracker.debian.org/ (on ticharich.debian.org, a VM) if you want to verify something on the live installation. It runs under the “qa” user (so members of the “qa-core” group can administer it).
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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We are pleased to announce today, July 4, that the Ubuntu MATE Remix 14.04 has reached Alpha stage and is available for download as Live DVD/USB images that can be installed.
Ubuntu MATE Remix 14.04 Alpha comes as a July 4 surprise to many who believed the controversial project would become reality sooner or later. It beautifully integrates the MATE desktop environment into the latest upstream Ubuntu release.
The distribution was developed by a few members of the Ubuntu community and provides users with an old-school graphical desktop environment, which reminds us of the good ol’ times of Ubuntu 10.04.
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For some brief benchmarking during Independence Day in the US, I ran some tests comparing Ubuntu 14.04 LTS stable against a fresh development snapshot of Ubuntu 14.10.
Over Ubuntu 14.04, the Ubuntu 14.10 “Utopic Unicorn” in its current development state has the Linux 3.15 kernel (but will end up using Linux 3.16), Unity 7.3.0, Mesa 10.2 (10.3 should make it in time for Ubuntu 14.10), and GCC 4.8.3 (while GCC 4.9 should make it for 14.10).
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As I have already written a few times already, Canonical’s Alan Pope and Martin Wimpress, one of the leading MATE developers have been working a lot at Ubuntu MATE Remix, a Ubuntu spin which uses Mate as the default desktop environment.
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Flavours and Variants
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Cinnamon has come a long way in terms of both usability and responsiveness, and Mint 17 ‘Qiana’ stands proof of this. As mentioned in my review of Mint 17 KDE edition, this release will be supported for five years, and it will also be the base for development of future Mint releases.
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Will your next car run Linux? Cars go open-source with Automotive Grade Linux It’s early days, but Automotive Grade Linux already looks better than most proprietary systems
In-car tech has just gone open source with news of a new automotive-grade build of the Linux operating system. But what does this mean for your next car?
Linux in various forms is already widely used in cars. But to date, it’s largely been used in embedded systems, the operations of which are mostly obscured from owners and drivers.
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Phones
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Android
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Reaching out to the next billion connected users is a phrase that has been tossed around liberally.
Mozilla used it when they announced their $25 smartphone initiative. Nokia’s (now Microsoft’s) Stephen Elop used it when Nokia launched the revamped Nokia Asha line last year, and again when he announced the Nokia X. Last year Google used the same phrase as it launched Android 4.4 KitKat.
However, these companies’ efforts are still to leave a mark in the countries where the supposed next billion connected customers reside. Firefox’ $25 smartphones are yet to enter the market, neither Nokia’s Asha nor X line have turned out to be “hot items”, while affordable smartphones running KitKat are still few and far between.
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The security model on the Google Nexus devices is pretty straightforward. The OS is (nominally) secure and prevents anything from accessing the raw MTD devices. The bootloader will only allow the user to write to partitions if it’s unlocked. The recovery image will only permit you to install images that are signed with a trusted key. In combination, these facts mean that it’s impossible for an attacker to modify the OS image without unlocking the bootloader[1], and unlocking the bootloader wipes all your data. You’ll probably notice that.
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HTC One M8 Prime release date may happen between October and December and is set to come preinstalled with the new Android L OS.
An XDA member leaked the roadmap of HTC in rolling out the Android L OS for its handsets. It seemed that HTC will offer the upcoming version of Android OS to its two-year-old gadgets. In a leaked document by HTC tipster @LlabTooFeR, smartphones from the past two years have all been marked with the “evaluation” stamp. Their tentative timeline is between October and December.
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A new release is out for BlueZ, the Linux Bluetooth stack, with the developers continuing to work on the same theme of the past few months of adding Android features for BlueZ.
This week’s BlueZ 5.21 release adds support for the following features from Android: Scan Parameters, Device Information, and Health Device. BlueZ 5.21 also adds a kernel background auto-connection feature, support for storing/loading connection parameters, and also boasts a couple fixes over BlueZ 5.20.
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CMS
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“We’re heavily involved in Drupal. I’m a member of the Drupal security team and the former lead of the team for over two years,” Knaddison said. “So it’s an area where we have a fair amount of expertise and depth, and we feel that our situation is best served by fixing vulnerabilities directly in the software itself.”
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Public Services/Government
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Using open source software solutions is helping a Welsh pilot project to manage flood risks and provide a stepping stone for future research. The Citizen Observatory Web (Cobweb) project involves citizens using their smartphone or tablets, to submit data observations within the Dyfi area in Wales, to help collect environmental data for use in evidence based policy.
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South Korea said that it will move away from Windows in the future to avoid dependency on the Microsoft operating system, citing the fact that Windows XP is no longer supported.
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Usage of idiosyncratic software could push the Korean government away from Microsoft’s offerings and into open-source OSes like Linux
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Openness/Sharing
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In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we celebrate our digital independence and take a cruise with Automotive Grade Linux. Plus more!
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Programming
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Damian Conway is one of the Guardians of Perl (our term) and one of Perl 6′s chief architects. But he’s chiefly a computer scientist, a brilliant communicator and an educator. His presentations are often worth crossing continents for. He was the Adjunct Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology at Melbourne’s Monash University between 2001 and 2010, and has run courses on everything from Regular Expressions for Bioinformatics to Presentation Aikido (and of course, lots of Perl). Which is why, when we discovered he was making a keynote at this year’s QCon conference in London in March, we braved train delays and the sardine travelling classes of the London Underground to meet him opposite Westminster Abbey.
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Search company extends bans on pornography ads across its network, while conservative US pressure groups claim credit
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Health/Nutrition
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“We know in the field of aging that some people tend to senesce, or grow older, more rapidly than others, and some more slowly,” Olshansky told the Washington Post. “And we also know that the children of people who senesce more slowly tend to live longer than other people.”
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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We could have built 120,000 new homes, desperately needed. Instead we spent the money on a bloody big ship. To what purpose? An aircraft carrier is of no use to defend the British Isles – land based planes can do that much better. It is to enable our armed forces to operate elsewhere, far from here. In other words, it is not for defence, it is for attack. It was ordered in the Blairite era of enthusiastic invasion of other countries.
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The Queen will formally name the Royal Navy’s biggest ever ship on Friday, with whisky replacing the more traditional champagne at the ceremony.
She will smash a bottle of Islay malt whisky against the HMS Queen Elizabeth at the event at Rosyth dockyard in Fife, where the 65,000-tonne aircraft carrier has been assembled and fitted out.
The Queen will be accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh at the naming ceremony, a naval tradition dating back thousands of years that combines a celebration and a solemn blessing.
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Murphy was at Volk Field that day protesting drones, unmanned aerial vehicles. It was his first arrest at Volk Field, but his eighth or ninth overall — he lost count.
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As our military contemplates Iraq again, we’re beset by unchallenged magical thinking — and a dangerous narcissism
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Ideology or religion, nationalism, self-determination, and independence appear lofty notions and goals, but in reality, it is “always … about the oil, stupid!” to paraphrase Professor Schwartz paraphrasing Bill Clinton.
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This mind-set is especially odious since the United States supported the terrible dictator Fulgencio Batista, and supported businesses and American mobsters who controlled the economy, impoverishing Cuba and its people.
We tried to bring Castro and his government down repeatedly, attempted to kill him, and placed CIA agents and others there to stir up revolt. These actions are not in the spirit of democracy and in line with our country’s best ideals. They are in line with those who think of power, control, and empire, but who hide behind the empty invocations of manifest destiny, national security, and democracy promotion.
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His CIA career included assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the most perilous posting for Jeffrey Scudder turned out to be a two-year stint in a sleepy office that looks after the agency’s historical files.
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A 19-year veteran of the CIA claims he was fired for trying to make hundreds of once-secret documents public. Jeffrey Scudder shares his story about how his career unraveled.
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The root of the CIA’s intervention in Congo was an overhyped analysis of the communist threat.
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One key to solving the ISIS crisis is hunkered down in the presidential palace in Damascus, and his name is Bashar al-Assad. Demonized by the United States and by neoconservatives long before he waged a ruthless, take-no-prisoners blitzkrieg against the American- and Saudi-supported rebellion that began in 2011, Assad has proved to everyone (with the possible exception of Secretary of State John Kerry) that he’s staying put, at least for the foreseeable future. For all intents and purposes, Assad has won the civil war in Syria, and short of an Iraq-style invasion—which isn’t in the cards— there’s no way for the United States to oust Assad. Which is a good thing, because his ouster would immeasurably strengthen the extremists who’ve led the fight against him, including the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, now “the Islamic State,” the Caliphate-mongering radicals who are an Al Qaeda offshoot. On the other hand, by ending its support for the Syrian rebels, who don’t have a prayer anyway, the United States would strengthen Assad and allow him to crush ISIS.
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The revelation that General David Richards, the former head of Britain’s Armed Forces, drew up plans to train a 100,000-strong Syrian rebel army shows just how desperate the British government was to become embroiled in Syria’s brutal civil war.
During his three-year tenure as Chief of the Defence Staff, Lord Richards of Herstmonceux, as he has now become, was deeply sceptical of the Coalition’s willingness to embark on ill-considered – and potentially catastrophic – military adventures in the Arab world.
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Britain was considering the option of training a massive, 100,000-strong army in Turkey and Jordan to defeat President Bashar Assad, according to a plan drawn up by a leading British general. The invasion was later scrapped as too risky.
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James Risen of The New York Times, using recently disclosed State Department documents, has written a bombshell-of-a-story chronicling how Blackwater’s top manager threatened to kill the U.S. government’s chief investigator in 2007, thus thwarting an investigation into Blackwater’s operations just weeks before the company’s guards massacred 17 Iraqi civilians.
The story is characteristic Risen: unflinchingly and thoroughly reported. However, Risen may not be able to write such stories in a matter of months. Instead, he may be sitting in a jail cell as a result of a case being prosecuted against him by the Obama administration.
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Russia sent several disassembled Su-25 fighter jets to Iraq this week, and Iran has also supplied Su-25s.
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There’s a reason the CIA wanted to prevent the publication of Douglas Valentine’s 1986 book, The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam. This masterwork is more than an exposé of the US pacification program in Vietnam the book is titled after. It is an indictment of a cynical and bloody plan to kill Vietnamese.
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The Cold War against the Soviet Union became an industry in the United States.
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With an ethnic Chechen Omar Shishani coming to the spotlight in ISIS’s activities in Iraq, analysts say Chechen war was an attempt by the Western countries to destabilize Russia through the Caucasus.
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What we are seeing going on in the Ukraine can be understood from the perspective of American political intrigue. The true elite power in America is rapidly losing power and they are in a state of panic. These people are for the most part the former “cold warriors” in America’s military and intelligence establishments and their political underlings who are handled by them. The former are mainly remnants left over from the first Bush’s reign at the C.I.A. They are “American Firsters” who cloak themselves under the banner of patriotism however their true motivation is simply power for their own self-interests.
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U.S. “unnamed officials” confirmed to Reuters on Thursday that over a hundred military troops have been operating covertly in Somalia since 2007.
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Transparency Reporting
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16 July hearing is first legal battle in the case since WikiLeaks founder sought asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in London
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Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt refuses to address questions from Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman about the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is wanted for questioning in Sweden on allegations of sexual offenses. Assange’s attorneys recently asked the Swedish government to withdraw a warrant that has kept him confined in Ecuador’s London Embassy for two years. Assange has voiced fears he would ultimately be sent for prosecution in the United States if he were to return to Sweden. Assange’s attorneys say the warrant should be lifted because it cannot be enforced while Assange is in the embassy and Swedish prosecutors refuse to question him in London. Although Assange faces a warrant for questioning, he has not been formally charged. Fifty-nine international organizations have submitted reports to the United Nations challenging Sweden’s treatment of Assange. Speaking at the Almedalen political festival in Visby, Bildt refuses to address the case directly, calling it an issue for the Swedish judicial system, not its political one. We get reaction to Bildt’s comments from Assange legal adviser Jen Robinson, who also discusses the parallels between Assange and National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. “We are now seeing a trend of whistleblowers, publishers, journalists having to seek asylum and refuge in countries around the world because of their concern about prosecution in the United States,” Robinson says.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Saving our skins might be surprisingly cheap. To avoid dangerous climate change, the world needs to boost spending on green energy by $1 trillion a year. That sounds scarily large, but we could cover a lot of it using the subsidies currently handed to fossil fuels.
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The GOP delayed raising auto efficiency standards for 25 years, shouting it would “destroy Detroit.” Ironically, when the CAFE standards were finally raised, in Obama’s 1st year, guess what happened? (1) The GOP tried – openly and vociferously – to destroy the U.S. auto industry by refusing loans to GM and Chrysler (loans that are now 90% repaid). (2) The mileage standards are working! Mileage is rising rapidly, American drivers are saving billions at the pump, the automakers are highly profitable, the air is cleaner… a positive sum game with no negative aspects at all…
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Finance
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On Monday the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Affordable Care Act, ruling that privately-owned corporations don’t have to offer their employees contraceptive coverage that conflicts with the corporate owners’ religious beliefs.
The owners of Hobby Lobby, the plaintiffs in the case, were always free to practice their religion. The Court bestowed religious freedom on their corporation as well—a leap of logic as absurd as giving corporations freedom of speech. Corporations aren’t people.
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In a recent New York Times op-ed article, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz theorized that capitalism does not inevitably produce inequalities in wealth. Instead, he argued, today’s inequalities result from policy decisions made by politicians on all sorts of matters that affect people’s income: the tax structure that favors the rich, the bailout of the banks during the Great Recession, subsidies for rich farmers, cutting of food stamps, etc. In fact, he concluded, today there are no “truly fundamental laws of capitalism.” Thanks to democracy, people can steer the economy in a variety of directions and no single outcome is inevitable.
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Journalist Phillip Dorling traced the impulse behind the Occupy movement back to the release of the U.S. Army helicopter gunship Collateral Murder video and noted how it was strongly based on the work of the whistleblower website Wikileaks. Amnesty International pointed to the role of leaked documents in triggering revolutionary global uprisings. The BBC documentary WikiLeaks: Secret Life of a Superpower also attributed their revelations as the spark for Arab revolutions, showing how U.S. cable leaks shared through social networking sites in 2010 became a powerful force that finally toppled the corrupt Tunisian dictator Ben Ali.
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Grant by US agency to open markets to ‘competition’ draws protests from Salvadoran farmers and concern from NGOs
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Censorship
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Browse the web in the UK, and sooner or later there’s a good chance you’ll stumble across a website that’s been blocked. Sites like The Pirate Bay, Fenopy and H33t are no longer viewable due to court orders preventing access, and other sites — many perfectly legitimate — are being blocked by censorship filters.
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Censorship, in most cases, is what happens in the newsroom.
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Google — which opposed the court decision — responded by introducing an online form giving visitors to its European sites a formal route to make removal requests. In the first four days after uploading the form, Google received more than 41,000 requests.
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Kendall Jones is a 19-year-old from Texas, a university student and a former cheerleader – but those characteristics of her life are not what she posts about on Facebook.
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The European Court of Justice ruling requiring Google to ‘hide’ stories shows the need to defend digital freedom of speech
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Freedom of religion was intended to guarantee freedom from governmental persecution because of private beliefs. Today, that freedom has been twisted and perverted into instead creating persecution against individuals, backed up by governmental force. It is time to abolish it as archaic and obsolete, and let the modern freedoms of opinion and speech take its place.
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When the actor and comedian Steve Coogan (pictured) was made a patron of the Index on Censorship earlier this month, the British media’s guffawing could be heard round the world. Coogan, you see, is a leading light in Hacked Off, the celeb-packed censorious outfit that has spent the past three years agitating for state-backed regulation of Britain’s raucous tabloid press. For a venerable free-speech group like Index on Censorship to make the celebrity censor Coogan a patron is like the British Humanist Association giving a job to the Pope of Rome.
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Sept. 17 last year was a pretty bad day for the Constitution on our campuses. Robert Van Tuinen of Modesto Junior College in California was prevented from passing out copies of the Constitution outside of his college’s tiny “free speech zone.” Near Los Angeles, Citrus College student Vinny Sinapi-Riddle was threatened with removal from campus for the “offense” of collecting signatures for a petition against NSA domestic surveillance outside his college’s tiny free speech area. I mention September 17 because that was Constitution Day. – See more at: http://westhawaiitoday.com/opinion/columns/colleges-are-slowly-taking-away-your-first-amendment-rights#sthash.VbYv0a4f.dpuf
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Privacy
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Freshly released but heavily censored FBI documents include tantalizing new information about events connected to the Sarasota Saudis who moved suddenly out of their home about two weeks before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, leaving behind clothing, jewelry and cars.
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The law which bans online businesses from storing personal data of Russian citizens on servers located abroad today passed its third and final reading in the State Duma – the Russian parliament.
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Only a fraction of our connections on social media are people we love. The rest are people we already probably dislike
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The bare essentials of what happened over a week in 2012 are now clear. A study was conducted, unknown to the millions of Facebook users and to the many directly affected, by researchers from Facebook and from two American universities — Cornell University and the University of California. To carry out this hidden manipulation, Facebook altered the content that appeared on certain users’ news feeds to control the number of posts that contained words with positively or negatively charged emotions.
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Why pledge allegiance to the united tech giants of America – and the surveillance for which they stand? I am one man, relatively invisible, with liberty and justice online
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An article published on July 3 by German public broadcaster Das Erste reveals that the National Security Agency (NSA) is using its surveillance program XKeyScore to target users of the traffic anonymizing software Tor and the Tails operating system, for deep packet inspection, data retention, and heightened surveillance.
The article is based on “exclusive access to top secret NSA source code, interviews with former NSA employees, and the review of secret documents of the German government.” This is the first leak regarding NSA surveillance, which includes a portion of the programming source code being used by the spy agency.
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Russia’s parliament passed a law on Friday to force Internet sites that store the personal data of Russian citizens to do so inside the country, a move the Kremlin says is for data protection but which critics see an attack on social networks.
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That’s the message from Cheltenham’s Liberal Democrat MP Martin Horwood who believes it has become “fashionable” for people to have a go at GCHQ.
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This week, Michael Hayden, who headed the CIA and the NSA during the Bush Administration, said that if he’d been on the Supreme Court for the 9 to 0 decision requiring a warrant before cell phone searches, the vote would’ve been 10 to zero. Former Congresswoman Jane Harman also spoke in favor of the ruling.
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Germany summoned the US ambassador in Berlin on Friday following the arrest of a man reported to have spied for the United States, heightening friction between the two countries over alleged US eavesdropping in Germany.
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A German student who ran a server that hid people’s IP addresses to help them stay anonymous was targeted by the United States National Security Agency (NSA). What are Germany’s means for holding the NSA accountable?
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Linux Journal is reporting that apparently the NSA considers it an “extremist forum” and the NSA may also be targeting Linux users for increased surveillance. Linux Journal’s information is based on reports issues by German media that disclosed details on who the NSA has been targeting.
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Testifying, Binney accused the NSA of having a “totalitarian mentality” and wanting “total information control” over citizens in breach of the US constitution. It was an approach that until now the public had only seen among dictators, he added.
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When it comes to spying on its own citizens the former East Germany certainly had a lock on things.
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Social networking site Facebook made headlines for a recently published study where it modified the emotional content of what appeared in people’s news feeds and studied the after-effect of that change on users. The experiment has been rightly condemned as an intrusion and a manipulation of unsuspecting users of the site. By not seeking informed consent of over 700,000 users in an experiment, Facebook breached broadly accepted ethical guidelines.
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The Onion Router project has fired back at the National Security Agency, after it emerged that those who use the network – and read Linux magazines – are considered worthy of surveillance.
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Aiming for a fresh start in troubled U.S.-India relations, U.S. Sen. John McCain met with newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi today in New Delhi. But McCain’s two-day visit was overshadowed by reports that the U.S. National Security Agency was granted permission in 2010 to spy on Modi’s political party.
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Federal prosecutors say a 31-year-old German man was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of spying for foreign intelligence services. They did not identify the suspect or the intelligence services.
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In the latest turn in the yearlong tensions with Germany over U.S. spying, a German man was arrested this week on suspicion of passing secret documents to a foreign power, believed to be the United States. The U.S. ambassador, John B. Emerson, was summoned to the Foreign Office here and urged to help with what German officials called a swift clarification of the case.
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As if there weren’t enough reasons to attend HOPE X in NYC this month, now there’s a killer whistleblower panel.
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A man believed to be a German intelligence operative has been arrested on suspicion of being a double agent for the US.
A spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel said she had been informed of the arrest but refused to give any further details.
“The Chancellor was… informed of this case,” Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters in Berlin.
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Most of the public and congressional concern about the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance programs has focused on the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone “metadata” under a strained interpretation of the Patriot Act. That’s understandable, given the indiscriminate nature of the program. Fortunately, President Obama has now directed that the government obtain court approval before “querying” or searching the database of Americans’ phone records, and legislation moving forward in Congress would end government storage of the records.
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As Wheeler notes, this wording may also indicate the agency’s anticipation of bulk records being maintained and held by service providers, thus further limiting its splashing around in the collected metadata. But it does indicate that the recently-imposed “hop” limitation is nearly useless. Rather than simply searching one hop out from the RAS selector, the agency is having its analysts build contract chains starting from that hop and moving outward. This puts the agency right back where it was prior to the minimal restrictions placed on it by the administration’s reform measures.
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Germans still have an “overwhelmingly positive” image of the US, according to RTL’s Editor-in-Chief Peter Kloeppel, speaking at a round table discussion centered on transatlantic relations in light of the NSA scandal.
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Civil Rights
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INDEPENDENCE WASN’T invented in America on this day in 1776. Freedom and self-rule are concepts that predate George Washington and our other Founding Fathers by centuries.
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From tongue-in-cheek London to NSA-wary Berlin and skeptical Dubai, expats are coming to grips with just how unsettling ‘blind patriotism’ can be
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But as much as I’d like to wave a flag and have a grand ol’ time. I know that the land of the free has taken many steps in the wrong direction. In 2012 President Barack Obama signed into law the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act). This act gave the U.S. government the right to indefinitely detain any U.S. citizen without trial, forever.
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The shocking scale of female genital mutilation (FGM) in a Swedish school, where every single girl in one class had been subjected to the procedure, has been revealed.
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A controversial report into EU Freedom of Movement, written as part of the government’s review of the balance of competencies within the European Union must be disclosed, the Information Commissioner has decided.
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Document Casts Doubt over Accuracy of US Reports from Tehran — and Adds to Debate over Responsibility for the Coup
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The long history of British abuse and torture in Kenya, Malaya, Aden, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and Afghanistan cannot be explained as the work of a few ‘bad apples’.
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Women claiming damages from the Metropolitan police after being tricked into forming sexual relationships with undercover officers have won a legal victory in the high court in their ongoing battle for compensation.
Mr Justice Bean said on Wednesday that the Met could no longer rely on issuing a “neither confirm nor deny” (NCND) response to the claims for damages from the women.
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Now, in the new post-constitutional America, we, too, torture. For legal purposes we do “a little sidestep” in the tradition of Charles Durning in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” We torture outside the United States and thus our Justice Department contends we are not violating the Constitution.
It isn’t too late. There are about 50 men and women in this country who run the television industry. They are far more powerful than members of the Federal Reserve or elected officials, such as members of Congress. They and their television companies have the power to open up a debate on all of this. If not, we are in the process of losing the great American experiment without even a chance to say goodbye. It’s the end of America as we know it.
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Ministers yesterday said enhanced security would be in place for some time to come, while offering assurances that it will not cause “significant disruption”. It is also noteworthy that the official UK threat status remained unchanged at “substantial” – two rungs below the highest level. None the less, as school holidays begin and families head for the airports, the requirement to arrive at least two hours before take-off is likely to become closer to three hours. So accustomed have we become to removing jackets, belts and shoes that the queues tend to move faster than they once did. But there has been no relaxation in the ultra-strict measures brought in a few years ago which, for instance, prevented significant amounts of liquids being taken through security in hand luggage. Once introduced, they tend to be permanent.
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Did you know that fireworks are actually a “propaganda campaign that inures us—especially the children among us—to the real wars half a world away”?
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The pine-cone POO-lice are doing their jobs with all do vigilance. My cousin was cleaning the pine-cones from the ground, around his motor-home. A call was placed to 911 that a motor-home was emptying its waste in the street. The city police blockaded the street and sent in five squad cars. With palms resting on their semi-automatic pistols, the police were ready for action. A pine-cone mistaken for a human poo. Police ready to shoot an American over poo or pine-cones.
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As a poll of American voters ranks Barack Obama as the worst president of all time, Matt Lewis says his presidency has been a disastrous flop – talented and much-hyped but ultimately unsatisfying
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The Fifth Amendment is supposed to ensure that you are innocent until proven guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you of your life, your liberty or your property without following strict legal guidelines. Unfortunately, those protections have been largely extinguished in recent years, especially in the wake of Congress’ passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the president and the military to arrest and detain Americans indefinitely without due process.
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If you judge political success by delivering on a three-word slogan at any cost, then Tony Abbott’s asylum policy has succeeded. He has for now, as he promised, “stopped the boats”.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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This was followed by another question, irrespective of the respondents said yes or no. It asked them what they believed to be the biggest threat that the Internet will face by 2015. The experts canvassed by Pew believe that the government and big online corporations are the biggest threat to the Internet, and not hacking or some other form of cyber war.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Qualcomm has forced GitHub to take down over 100 Git repositories over alleged copyright infringement.
Using the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), Qualcomm has forced GitHub to take down over 100 Git repositories on the basis of “Cyveillance has recently discovered the unauthorized publication, disclosure, and copying of highly sensitive, confidential, trade secret, and copyright-protected documents on the below web site. Specifically, we have confirmed that the documents whose locations and filenames identified below are confidential and proprietary to Qualcomm and were posted without Qualcomm’s permission.”
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A company claiming to represent Qualcomm has shut down a number of repositories on source-code sharing site GitHub under provisions of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) – including at least one repository belonging to Qualcomm itself.
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Twitter has removed the profile pictures of several of its users after the company received a takedown notice from World Cup organizer FIFA. The football organization forbids the use of any of its official logos and emblems on social media, including pictures of the World Cup trophy.
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The website of Argentina’s equivalent of the Recording Industry Association of America was hacked Tuesday and transformed into a Pirate Bay proxy, serving up torrents instead of industry lobbying affairs.
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In a bid to tackle alleged infringement, popular music sharing platform SoundCloud is offering unlimited removal powers to certain copyright holders. Responding to a complaint from a UK DJ the company admitted that Universal Music can delete any and all SoundCloud tracks without oversight.
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