World Beyond Windows is your guide to the anything-but-Windows PC universe, dishing out key news, analysis, tips, open-source software recommendations, and much, much more. Manning the helm is Chris Hoffman, a veteran technology reporter who has extensively covered Linux and Chrome OS for several publications, including PCWorld (natch), MakeUseOf, HowToGeek, and others.
If you are doing it yourself or if you hire someone, you might still need to know how to install GNU/Linux. There are literally hundreds of sources of GNU/Linux. I’ve been using GNU/Linux for many years and only dealt with a few of them. You can hunt for a distribution of GNU/Linux at Distrowatch. You can get the software by downloading an image file of a CD and burning a CD, buying a CD or receiving a copy from a friend, or getting files to put on a USB drive… or… That’s why geeks are useful.
Sometimes people make decisions that are so baffling – and so far out of left field – that you are left simply... dumb struck.
Case in point: ChromeOS is dropping support for ext2, ext3 and ext4 file systems – the file systems used by the vast majority of Linux systems.
Cumulus Linux 2.5, designed for white-box data center hardware, helps Hadoop, VMware, and OpenStack users ramp up their networking
On top of some separate patches to make the mainline 64-bit ARM Linux kernel closer to building under Clang, a separate pull request was sent in for the Linux 3.18 kernel that works to make other areas of the kernel's massive code-base more compatible with the LLVM/Clang compiler.
With the x86/cpu changes there is a change by Lan Tianyu of Intel to speed up the suspend/resume process by avoiding a 10mms sleep for CPU offlining during the S3 state. This is a fix to a timing related issue and in the tested Intel hardware led to a sleep time from 100ms to less than 5ms. For large servers the suspend time can be reduced by much greater times (in one reported case by 2.3 seconds).
Linux Foundation launches collaborative rpoject to bring open source drone platforms under one roof
The Linux Foundation, the same organization that fosters the collaboration for the Linux kernel, is looking to unite the companies that make open source-powered drones under one roof.
Can you please pull the current XFS updates from the tree below? The changes outlined in the tag description include everything that is not in your tree, but I has a question about that because there are commits in the branch that are already in your tree.
UK-based colocation and managed hosting provider Datacentred has joined the Linux Foundation to advance its core competency in open source technologies. The company has been offering cloud services based on the OpenStack project since 2012.
Among various bug-fixes, this version also features support for GPU acceleration on Linux platform (CUDA-capable devices only) and reworked documentation.
PhysX has been around for many years on the Windows platform and it's been a coveted feature. There was no practical interest from the NVIDIA devs to make it compatible with Linux as long as there were no applications or games to take advantage of it.
The Radeon R9 285 "Tonga" graphics card is the first GCN 1.2 GPU and was launched last month. Right now I happen to be working on a Linux review of the R9 285 with Catalyst. It turns out though that there isn't open-source driver support for the R9 285 in the current open-source Radeon driver. Rather, AMD is using this GCN 1.2 GPU as the starting point for the new AMDGPU Linux driver stack.
Well, this is an exciting way to start off Monday morning... Intel developers published an open-source DRM driver for Imagination Technologies PowerVR decoder hardware.
The Cf4ocl project is a GPLv3/LGPLv3 initiative to provide an object-oriented interface to the OpenCL API that's OpenCL version independent.
I’m all about full-screen, intuitive, colorful interfaces to programs. I don’t really care if something has been done before (everything has been done before), unless you’re reinventing the reinventing of the reinventing of the wheel. Just give me a good interface and a decent perspective on the task at hand, and I don’t care if your program was written in 2012 or 1992 — it’ll work for me.
Dolibarr is an Open Source, web based free ERP & CRM software that can be used to manage your business operations such as products, stocks, emails, orders, invoices, and more. You can install and use it either in a standalone server or VPS, or in Cloud. Dolibarr is designed especially for small/medium sized organizations, freelancers/foundations etc. It supports almost all modern operating systems such as Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Additionally, Dolibarr is available as a single auto-installer package for all platforms, so that even a newbie can install and configure it in minutes.
Google has just released a desktop client of its Hangouts application and it also works on the Linux platform. The problem with it is that it's both a good and a bad application, a feat that could have been pulled off only by a big company like Google.
In this post am going to show how I installed trashindicator in in Elementary OS Luna.
You may remember me praising Ziggurat for being an awesome Early Access title. Well, here's another one that I've been pretty interested in for a while that is quite a mix: Hand of Fate!
Planetary Annihilation has just received an update adding the (much requested) possibility of playing offline and LAN games (see announcement).
This is the first-pass on it, and more features will come.
Scrolls is the next game from Minecraft studio Mojang that promised Linux support back in 2012. Two years later they have just pushed out an experimental Linux build.
The latest entry in the Borderlands series 'Borderlands: The Pre-sequel' has been released in the Americas today. Unfortunately the rest of the world will have to wait a few days before getting their hands on the game.
Steam has always been the go-to place for digital downloads in the PC gaming world on Windows. However, support for Linux has always been sorely lacking, but that is all changing. Valve’s digital download platform has just surpassed 700 Linux games available for sale and download. There are exactly 712 games available for the operating system, with Borderlands 2 being one of the new major releases for the OS, according to PC World.
I know you guys laugh at me for loving my Mac, but I can’t help it. I’m even looking to get a new one at the end of the year – sure I could go PC, but then I’d lose my hipster credibility. But fear not my fellow Mac or Linux users, we can also take over the future world in Civilization: Beyond Earth.
Version 0.8 of LXQt -- the Qt version of the open-source, lightweight LXDE desktop -- was released on Monday. Important to LXQt 0.8 is full Qt5 compatibility while Qt4 support is being maintained too until the next release.
During the KDE 4 series, KRunner was an important part of the KDE Workspace, and it was tied very closely to Plasma. The KRunner library was in fact a part of the Plasma library.
It’s been over 3 years since the last feature release is out on the street. During that time, many new features were added and many bugs were fixed. The team has decided it’s time to get on the path to another stable release.
KMyMoney 4.7.0 is now available for download. It is KMyMoney 4.8 Beta 1, only suitable for advanced users willing to help us stabilize and iron out the upcoming stable version.
Today's tiptoe through the headlines revealed a rolling release round-up in this week's Distrowatch Weekly. Sean M. Kerner touches on the highlights of CAINE Linux and Bruce Byfield asks if GNOME can make a comeback. ChromeOS has been said to have dissed Linux users and several other Linux tidbits are featured in tonight's Linux news watch.
For GTK+ 3.16 there is now native support for OpenGL along with a new widget type. The GTK+ OpenGL support works on both X11 with GLX and under Wayland with EGL.
Five years ago, GNOME was the main contender for the Linux desktop. It battled KDE, and, more often than not, came out on top. Today, it is down -- if far from out -- to the extent that any observer has to ask: Can GNOME ever regain its former predominance?
True, GNOME technology still dominates the desktop, with Cinnamon, GNOME, MATE, and Unity all using GNOME-based applications and utilities. However, the last few years have not been kind to the former giant.
First, the early releases of GNOME 3 were different enough that many users deserted it after a quick glance, turning to Xfce and Linux MInt's Cinnamon and MATE -- neither of which would probably exist otherwise. In the Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Awards of 2013, GNOME was the choice of only 14%. It did even worse in the 2013 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards, with only 10%. By themselves, these are hardly definitive numbers, but their consistency is enough to make them ominous.
Well it's a good thing we here in the Linux community had that refreshing and refocusing break recently, courtesy of Linux.com and Carla Schroder, because last week it was back onto the hot coals once again.
[...]
Similarly, "there is no answer better than, 'any distro that works for you, has more than two users and has good information and forums online,'" suggested Google+ blogger Gonzalo Velasco C.
For fans of free and open source software, "the present year has been one of philosophical questioning about the future of GNU/Linux, freedom of choice and 'market' share," he pointed out. "So, the answers will reflect this."
At the time of writing each operating system in my trial has been up and running for a few days. About once a week I will update each system and take note of what does or does not work. At the moment I plan to focus on whether each system is still able to boot after an update, whether I will be able to login to a graphical desktop and browse the web using Firefox and edit documents using LibreOffice. I am open to suggestions as to other tests readers may want me to perform. During this trial I will be posting observations on events as they happen on my Twitter feed as regular updates seem appropriate for a trial involving rolling-release distributions. I will also post updates on the experience here on weeks when something of significance happens.
There is no shortage of Linux distributions to serve specific markets and use cases. In the security market, a number of Linux distributions are widely used, including Kali Linux, which is popular with security penetration testers. There's also CAINE Linux, which is focused on another area of security. CAINE, an acronym for Computer Aided INvestigative Environment, is a Linux distribution for forensic investigators. Instead of penetration testing tools, CAINE is loaded with applications and tools to help investigators find the clues and data points that are required for computer security forensics. Among the tools included in CAINE are memory, database and network analysis applications. CAINE is built on top of the Ubuntu Linux 14.04 distribution that was released in April. Rather than use the Ubuntu Unity desktop environment, CAINE uses the MATE desktop. The CAINE 6.0 "Dark Matter" operating system was first released on Oct. 7 and includes new and updated applications to help forensics investigators. CAINE can be run as a live image from a CD or USB memory stick and can also be installed onto a user's hard drive. In this slide show, eWEEK examines some of the key features of CAINE 6.
Manjaro Unity Community Edition is a new respin of the Manjaro Linux distro, an operating system based on Arch Linux. This is one of the few distros outside of the Ubuntu ecosystem to adopt Unity, so it should be a very interesting experiment.
The Scientific Linux community is finally out with the official release of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 re-spin.
Fermilab's intention is to continue the development and support of Scientific Linux and refine its focus as an operating system for scientific computing. Today we are announcing the release of Scientific Linux 7.
The company is today extending that list with the addition of Red Hat. Red Hat RHT -1.1% is using AppDirect to power the marketplace for its OpenShift Platform as a Service (PaaS) product. The idea is pretty simple – OpenShift developers can buy add-on services to extend their applications from within OpenShift. From Red Hat’s perspective it’s a tried and true model – other PaaS vendors like Heroku and CloudFoundry have a similar model. Users sign in using their existing credentials and billing is integrated directly into the platform.
From the kernel to the network stack, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 has been tuned to optimize performance. With support for higher processor counts and memory limits as well as kernel optimizations that allow for more efficient CPU utilization on large NUMA systems, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 better accommodates dense single-server workloads. Other system performance enhancements include support for additional 40 GbE network adapters, reductions in network latency and jitter, and support for high performance, low latency applications.
Red Hat is out today with the latest version of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL) platform, as well as now providing support for users of the newer Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to run RHEL 6 apps in a container.
You may noticed there's been a new release of mock in rawhide (only). It incorporates all the new features I've been working on during my Google Summer of Code project, so I'd like to summarize them here for the people who haven't been reading my blog. Note that there were some other new features that weren't implemented by me, so I don't mention them here.
Every release of Fedora introduces a wide range of updates to the graphics stack from a wide range of upstream projects. Fedora 21 includes a range of updates and feature enablement to many elements of the graphics stack, including: new 2D & 3D driver support, updates to the X Server, and updates to the kernel. All these updates make even more devices perform better under Fedora than ever before.
Amrita University is conducting a two-day conference starting October 17 on open source computer operating system, Debian.
The conference to be held on Amritapuri campus is named ‘Debutsav’14.’ The event starts with a keynote address by Krishnakant Mane of IIT Bombay and the Director of Digital Freedom Foundation on the importance of open source software and how students can gain from it.
The ability to bookmark drives or other locations in the file manager should be something standard. Surprisingly, it's not a feature that's present everywhere and it lacks flexibility. Let's take the example of Ubuntu, which is used as the base of Linux Mint. Users can make bookmarks, even if it's a Samba directory, but they can't move them. This can be annoying, if you really want the power to change everything you want.
Wind River announced a new version of Wind River Linux based on Yocto Project 1.7 code, and featuring new binary deployment and security assessment options.
Vision Components has launched two Linux-based, smart machine vision cameras and a COM built around a Xilinx Zynq SoC, each supporting up to 4.2MP video.
I own three Raspberry Pi's (two B's and one B+) and many people I know also own one or more Pis. All those Pi add up and now the Raspberry Pi Foundation says that it has sold 3.8 million units.
That's a whole lot of Pi.
The Raspberry Pi was never supposed to be a massive volume seller. It was supposed to be a teaching and educational tool to help get kids (and adults) interested in development and maker culture.
There is no confirmation that this new UX is headed to Android and some even say that it is destined for the Tizen OS. Either way, as a strategy going forward it would make sense having the same UX on both platforms, making it easier for your Google Android customers to come across to the Tizen platform, and become your customers, paying you a share of the apps, music and videos that they purchase, sounds very nice indeed.
OpenDaylight is an open source SDN controller. In its short lifetime, OpenDaylight has gained support from a diverse set of companies and individuals who are eager to see an open source controller serve the networking needs of traditional IT, cloud infrastructure platforms, traditional virtualization management, and fleets of containers. Cisco released the initial code in 2013 and the project now includes 41 paying members.
The Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV), the collaborative partnership for advancing open source software-defined networking and data centers that the Linux Foundation announced last month, is now officially live. Here's what it's up to so far, and what it hopes to becomes over the coming months and years.
The famous tenet “all bugs are shallow” is a cornerstone of open source development. Known as Linus’s Law, the idea that open code leads to more effective bug detection in one’s projects is often the first thing IT pros think of when it comes to the security upside of the open source model.
Throughout history, social and technological progress has been the result of people working together for change. Today community is just as important and instrumental as ever – enabled by the internet and social media, said Jono Bacon, senior director of community at XPRIZE and former Ubuntu community manager, in his keynote Tuesday at LinuxCon and CloudOpen Europe in Dusseldorf.
Amazon is not resting on their laurels though. They have rapidly adopted Docker into several AWS offerings, and are constantly improving the platform.
In 2006, Amazon was an e-commerce site building out its own IT infrastructure in order to sell more books. Now, AWS and EC2 are well-known acronyms to system administrators and developers across the globe looking to the public cloud to build and deploy web-scale applications. But how exactly did a book seller become a large cloud vendor?
Mozilla seems to be staying very focused on the low end of the smartphone market with its Firefox OS platform, despite the high-end evolution of iOS and Android. Recently, Firefox OS phones have been arriving in India, priced well under $50, and promising to put phones in the hands of users who have never had them before.
Now, Zen Mobile has announced it will arrive in the Firefox OS market in India with a low cost mobile phone available later this month.
Just few weeks into the unveiling of the first Firefox OS device in the the Indian market, Mozilla announced further partnerships with popular mobile device brands and app partners in India to launch new smartphones and content services.
Most notable about the Firefox 33 web browser update is that it integrates OpenH264 sandboxed support via Cisco's H.264 open-source support.
Slowly but surely, database-as-a-service functionality has been emerging as an important component of the evolution of the OpenStack cloud computing platform. When the OpenStack Icehouse version arrived in April, the Trove database-as-a-service project was one of the under-the-hood offerings. And now, the OpenStack Juno version is slated to arrive on Oct. 16, featuring a significatnly improved version of Trove.
The second RC build of the 10.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.
Since last year there's been an initiative for an embeddable GCC JIT compiler and ambitions to mainline the JIT support with LLVM long having been promoted for its Just-In-Time compilation abilities. Now with new patches, GCC JIT is a step closer to being mainlined.
Many policy makers at senior levels—particularly those without experience in ICT—are not expected to have a firm grasp of issues surrounding open source and open standards. Nonetheless, Ansip displayed facility on these issues during his hearing, calling for software produced by the EC to be made open source. When he was initially asked about "free software," he responded by talking about "open source." Although a minor point, it provides indication that he is not new to these issues.
The vast majority (85 percent) of Romania’s 105 universities are now using Moodle, an open source e-learning platform, reports the country’s Moodle community manager, Herman Cosmin. “They appreciate its world-wide community and the involvement of the national community.”
Lulu.com helped define modern publish-on-demand services. In my mind, they did define them; I remember printing my first photobook and sending it to Lulu to be sent back, spiral-bound. I was amazed. I had essentially put together a small markup language (DSL, or Domain Specific Language, even), processed it through a Scheme script, and spit out LaTeX that produced reasonably pretty pages that could be converted to PDF and submitted for publication. I think I bought two copies.
German optics manufacturer Carl Zeiss is the latest company to jump on the virtual reality headset bandwagon, although the company is focusing on providing a headset that is more open than the competition.
How many times you have been hit by unit tests failing because of environment differences between you and other team members? How easy is it to build your project and have it ready for development? Vagrant provides a method for creating repeatable development environments across a range of operating systems for solving these problems. It is a thin layer that sits on top of existing technologies that allows people working on a project to reproduce development environments with a single command: vagrant up.
Undertaker is a project centered around static code analysis for code with C preprocessor directives. Undertaker is based on the VAMOS and CADOS research projects and is able to analyze the preprocessor directives of the Linux kernel.
The inadequacy or lack of documentation of software is a recurring issue. This applies just as often to proprietary software as it does to free software. Documentation of code has two main purposes: to make the code readable for other programmers, and to make the code useable. Good documentation of free software is vital for users, and contributing to the documentation (or translation to a minority language) of a free software project is a good way to get involved for those who don’t know where to start, or how to program, and want to know how it’s done. The problem is a shortage of recruits.
For the past 10 years, Congress has tried to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill. And for 10 years, Congress has failed.
One of the biggest obstacles to passing a law has been the insistence that the U.S.-Mexico border must be secure before any bill can be considered.
While this demand has remained constant, the border has become more and more secure over the years, undermining the argument. Data released by the Department of Homeland Security confirm the Southern border is more secure than it has been in decades.
As world health officials struggle to respond to the Ebola epidemic, Pakistan has passed a grim milestone in its efforts to combat another major global health crisis: the fight against polio.
In 2012, the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups banned polio vaccinations in the North Waziristan region; vaccinations are believed by some radicals to be cover for the sterilization of Muslim children, while paranoia may also have been provoked by the phony hepatitis vaccination campaign the CIA used to gain access to Osama bin Laden's compound before he was killed. (The doctor who helped the CIA organize the campaign is serving 23 years in prison on separate charges believed to be pretexts to punish him for aiding the U.S.)
Nobody claimed responsibility for the bombing, but militants have been aggressively targeting immunisation workers across Pakistan. The militants allege polio vaccination is a cover for espionage or Western-conspiracy to sterilise Muslims. Those conspiracy theories gained further traction after the CIA recruited a local doctor to start a vaccination programme during the hunt for Osama Bin Laden which dismayed many aid and health workers.
Those conspiracy theories gained further traction after the CIA recruited a local doctor to start a vaccination programme during the hunt for Osama Bin Laden which dismayed many aid and health workers.
Pakistan is losing ground in the battle against polio, with the country suffering its worst outbreaks in more than a decade.
Efforts to erase polio are hampered by suspicions that health workers are spies, following the CIA's use of a vaccination team to track Osama bin Laden. That legacy led to two polio workers being killed Wednesday.
Since December of 2012, militants have killed several dozen health workers involved with the Pakistan vaccination program and the police officers escorting them.
As Ebola rages on in West Africa, Pakistan is dealing with a terrible outbreak of polio. More than 200 people have contracted the disease this year, the worst infection rate in more than a decade, The Washington Post reported this week (October 7).
“We want to limit the virus outside of our boundaries and want to work to control it in our boundaries, but it’s certainly a very challenging situation ahead,” Ayesha Raza Farooq, the polio eradication coordinator for Pakistan’s government, told the Post.
At least $20 million went missing from money seizures by law enforcers, critical evidence was destroyed by a federal agency, a key informant was outed by a US prosecutor — contributing to her being kidnapped and nearly killed — and at the end of the day not a single narco-trafficker was prosecuted in this four-year-long DEA undercover operation gone awry.
If you're reluctant to continue using TrueCrypt now that the open source encryption project has been abandoned, and you don't want to wait for the CipherShed fork to mature, one alternative that's well worth investigating is VeraCrypt.
VeraCrypt is also a fork of the original TrueCrypt code, and it was launched in June 2013. IT security consultant Mounir Idrassi, who is based in France, runs the project and is its main contributor.
It's clear from the fact that the list spans many different manufacturers that the problem is not unique to any one company. It affects nearly all router makers, and a huge percentage of Internet users. And if these brand names are not familiar, that doesn't mean you're safe: the Actiontec Q1000, for example, is provided by Verizon Communications to its customers.
The Secret Service these days is performing about as well as the Iraqi security forces have been against the Islamic State. On both fronts, the White House is saying that this time it will work better. But nothing has really changed.
Washington uses ISIS/ISIL/Islamic state (IS), Nusra Front, Al Qaeda and likeminded groups strategically as enemies and allies. At times, simultaneously.
In the 1980s, CIA-recruited mujahideen fighters battled Afghanistan's Soviet occupiers.
Ronald Reagan called them "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers." They're today's Taliban despite distinct differences between them. Longstanding US support enhanced radical Islamic strength. Extremist groups were natural Cold War allies.
October 6th, is the 38th anniversary of the first act of terrorism against civilian aviation in the western hemisphere – the unparalleled Cubana air disaster on the coastline of Barbados on October 6, 1976 – the Barbados crime. Cubana flight 455 was hit by two C-4 explosives bombs just after the aircraft took off from the then Seawell Airport (now the Grantley Adams International Airport) in Barbados at an altitude of 18,000 feet.
Fred Branfman, the first person to draw public attention to a previously unknown U.S. bombing campaign inside Laos during the Vietnam War and who later became a leading anti-war activist in Washington, has died at a medical facility in Budapest, where he had lived for several years. He was 72.
At first he did not want me to write the book. He did not want anyone to write the book. Many people who knew him during the war are famous journalists like Stanley Karnow and others. They offered An $500,000 to write his memoirs. And An kept saying "No, because if I tell the secrets, too many people would be hurt".
In transmitting President Richard Nixon's orders for a "massive" bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, "Anything that flies on everything that moves". As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger's murderous honesty.
The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They levelled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors “froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told … That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.”
When Greg James QC recently launched Frank Walker’s book Maralinga on British nuclear tests in Australia, the former NSW Supreme Court judge said the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation was involved in an associated program to collect the bones of dead children without the parents’ permission.
Jones later explained that he obtained this previously unpublished information, although not precise details, while representing military veterans exposed to radiation from the tests in 50s and 60s. However, the book provides a powerful reminder of the harm that can be done by using national security to conceal indefensible behaviour.
Walker sets out how 22,000 bones, mostly of babies and young children, were removed from corpses as part of a secret program to examine the effects of the radiation, which the tests spread across large parts of Australia. The program, that began in 1957 and lasted 21 years, was kept secret until 2001.
The U.S. government discussed a plan with the Lee Myung-bak administration to use nuclear weapons if North Korea invaded the South, a former U.S. defense secretary and CIA director has disclosed.
On October 4, Pittsburgh anti-war forces braved bitter cold rain and hail to stand against a new round of wars in the Middle East. Over 50 demonstrators gathered at Schenley Plaza on University of Pittsburgh’s campus for a rally organized by ANSWER Coalition, the Anti-War Committee of the Thomas Merton Center, and many other local peace groups. Protesters connected the wars abroad to the cuts in social services at home by chanting “Money for jobs and education, not for wars and occupation!”
The Iran Project is a non-governmental organization seeking to dissolve American-Iranian differences.
The First US Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday upheld a District Court finding that the CIA was permitted to keep the material secret, under exemptions in the FOIA law.
Andrew Bacevich has done a tally of the number of countries in the Islamic world that, since 1980, the United States has invaded, bombed or occupied, and in which members of the American military have either killed or been killed. Syria has become the 14th such country. Several of the countries have been the scene of U.S. military operations more than once.
For nearly 30 years, the renovated Little Havana duplex off Calle Ocho has been home to artifacts and images from the failed CIA-backed attempt in 1961 by Cuban exiles to overthrow the communist regime of Fidel Castro. It has hosted international politicians, movie stars and grade school students and held memorials for the dozens who died during the Bay of Pigs invasion.
“I think we should—we should advocate for the end of the embargo” on Cuba, Hillary Clinton said in an interview this summer at the Council on Foreign Relations. “My husband tried,” she declared, “and remember, there were [behind-the-scenes] talks going on.” The way the pre-candidate for president recounts this history, Fidel Castro sabotaged that process because “the embargo is Castro’s best friend,” providing him “with an excuse for everything.” Her husband’s efforts, she said, were answered with the February 1996 shoot-down of two US civilian planes by the Cuban air force, “ensuring there would be a reaction in the Congress that would make it very difficult for any president to lift the embargo alone.”
The history of this dramatic episode is far more complicated than Hillary Clinton portrays it. But she is correct about one thing: Should she become president, it will be far harder for her to lift the 50-year-old trade embargo against Cuba than it would have been when her husband first assumed the office. The person most responsible for that, however, is Bill Clinton.
Vice President Joe Biden apologized to the United Arab Emirates Sunday for charging that the oil-rich ally had been supporting al Qaida and other jihadi groups in Syria's internal war, his second apology in as many days to a key participant in the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State extremists.
US Vice President Joe Biden has once again got himself in hot water, this time with key Sunni allies, after blaming them for indirectly facilitating the growth of the Islamic State militants in Syria.
Mr. Biden’s remark also reveals the arrogance of American foreign policy. By always looking for the next Jefferson or Madison we refuse to recognize that other countries may have other models or paths to follow, and that the American experience is not universal — a belief that may spring from good intentions and a generosity of spirit, but also reflects an unwillingness to accept real differences between people and countries. It is the political equivalent of believing that everybody everywhere can speak English if you just speak it loudly and slowly enough.
A growing number of high officials in American foreign policy engage in two all-consuming pastimes. One is the relentless pursuit of power, status and acclaim. The other is striving mightily, upon leaving office, to doctor the historical record so as to airbrush their misdeeds while striking a pose of statesmanlike wisdom and skill. The unforeseen rise of IS is provoking an outbreak of the latter.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a television interview that a recent White House rebuke of Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is "against American values," but he praised President Obama's decision to attack ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
WE: It’s brought them to the point of war between Shia and Sunni. That certainly was not the case before 2003. There was an uneasy truce – but it was a truce. In Syria, you had Shia and Sunni living side by side, Alawites and so forth. Same in Turkey and in Iraq. And now? Look at what General Petraeus did in Iraq to create this holy war between Shia and Sunni there – with his strategic Hamlet-kind of insurgency, trainings, secret police, and what not. And now we are reaping the result. ISIS has been trained by US Special Forces in Georgia. They’ve recruited Chechens as soldiers, they trained them in secret NATO bases inside Turkey and Jordan. For the last year and a half, they have been developing what we now call ISIS (IS, ISIL or DASH) or whatever moniker you want to give it. It’s all made in Langley, Virginia (the CIA’s seat) and [by] the affiliates of Langley inside the Pentagon.
The squabbling factions that make up the Syrian “moderate opposition” should get their act together. But so should the foreign nations — such as the United States, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan — that have been funding the chaotic melange of fighters inside Syria. These foreign machinations helped open the door for the terrorist Islamic State to threaten the region...
With the RAF now flying combat missions over Iraq, President Obama's national security team is breathing a little easier. After all, even as UK participation in the coalition became likely, Parliament's August 2013 rejection of air strikes against Assad has lingered in Washington memory. The prevailing fear was that Britain could no longer be relied upon.
Harper has maintained that ground soldiers will not be deployed to the battle in an effort to limit Canadian casualties. However, the mission could be expanded to fight ISIL militants in Syria, although federal opposition parties have demanded for a new vote over any expansion of the combat mission into the neighbouring country.
Feldstein: I found FOIA to be occasionally, but not frequently useful, when I was an investigative reporter. It was not terribly useful for the vast majority of stories for obvious reasons: There are many exemptions in the law that allow agencies to avoid turning over information, and it can be a slow process under tight news deadlines, especially if you have to file an appeal. That said, I got lucky, either based on a tip that helped me narrow the focus of my request or just by happening to fish in the right waters. The FOIA law is great on paper, but in reality, it has many loopholes. Here’s the bottom line: FOIA is a crude tool. Don’t expect too much. It’s worth doing, but don’t expect too much and hold your breath waiting, because it can be a while.
Colby College’s Lovejoy winner, a New York Times reporter, faces the possibility of being imprisoned for refusing to reveal his sources.
Voters have turned decidedly hostile toward President Obama and his policies. That’s not just my partisan view; it is empirical data. A poll released over the weekend shows that 32 percent of voters are using their midterm election votes to send a message of opposition to the president. That is “the highest ‘no vote’ percentage in the last 16 years” as measured by Gallup. I have never seen a White House or a political party as hollowed out as the Democrats appear to be now. The Obama presidency isn’t officially over yet, but it is receding further into our rearview mirror. And it is becoming clear that many in the Democratic Party think the Obama presidency is effectively over, and they are acting accordingly.
Kim himself will be participating in a panel focused on ways to boost renewable energy and in particular the role of the aid community in limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
But how much influence do top development donors actually have in the fight against global warming? Very little, according to Jairam Ramesh, India’s chief negotiator at the 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen.
There was confusion on Tuesday at the Los Angeles City Council meeting. Supporters of the minimum wage raise expected council members to vote on the motion to raise the minimum wage.
Actions of the West in Eastern Europe and ongoing pressure on Russia may eventually intensify the movement to combat the petrodollar. The biggest danger to the oil currency is likely to be related to China and its plans to increase the role of the yuan in the world.
Russia and China currently discuss the creation of a system of inter-bank transactions, which would be an analogue to the international system of bank transfers - SWIFT. This was announced by First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov after talks in Beijing.
"Yes, this idea was discussed and supported," he said, when asked about the possible creation of an analogue to SWIFT in bank transactions between China and Russia.
SWIFT is an international interbank information transfer and payment system. The system is also known as SWIFT-BIC (Bank Identifier Codes), BIC code, SWIFT ID or SWIFT code. The system was founded in 1973; 239 banks from 15 countries acted as co-founders.
The TV debates for the Westminster election will offer you a dazzling range of neo-con policies from right wing to very right wing. Conservative, Labour, Liberal or UKIP, any flavour of corporate neo-con control that you like. It is a kind of weird speed dating circle between Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and Farage.
These types of strict voter ID laws are popular among Republican lawmakers, despite the fact that they are redundant and there is no evidence of widespread, in-person voter fraud -- the type of fraud voter ID laws are designed to prevent. Nevertheless, on the October 10 edition of CBS Evening News, correspondent Chip Reid's segment on the recent legal decisions affecting Texas and Wisconsin's voter ID laws failed to report this simple truth about voter suppression:
Voter ID is “a mere fig leaf for efforts to disenfranchise voters likely to vote for the political party that does not control the state government,” federal appellate Judge Richard Posner wrote in a scorching dissent published October 10.
Just as they did with Robert Gates, White House officials are trying to avoid too much of a public spat with Leon Panetta, the latest former high-level administration insider to criticize the president, in the not unreasonable hope that the less they say, the quicker the story will go away.
But as they seethe quietly over what they consider the Pentagon chief’s disloyalty, administration officials are also bashing him in private, distributing a long raft of statements that he made as Obama’s CIA director and later as defense secretary that sometimes appear to contradict or undermine Panetta’s claims that he argued strenuously to keep U.S. troops in Iraq after 2011 and urged a military intervention in Syria.
As editor at large, he brought his experience and knowledge to the paper’s editorial board. He is also co-author of “Worthy Fights,” the new book by Leon Panetta, former defense secretary and CIA chief.
Some non-denial denials come incredibly close to flat-out lies, and that one sure did. It relied on a legalistic definition of “sexual relations” that Clinton later explained did not cover repeatedly receiving oral sex from Lewinsky, because, for his part, he had no “intent to arouse or gratify” her.
Now that he has abandoned not just the anti-Islamic but the anti-Russian elements of traditional German culture, he no longer is welcomed among the conservative Germans who had helped him to build, and then, for decades, to advance, his successful long career as a 'journalist,' but which he now calls "propagandist."
A tweet sent out by the Unity engine folks earlier about their stats page mentions that all Unity games automatically send your data to them on the first launch. This is interesting and worrying.
A proposed national ID system pending approval in the House of Representatives will threaten the privacy of ordinary citizens, a party-list lawmaker warned on Wednesday.
No tool in existence protects your anonymity on the Web better than the software Tor, which encrypts Internet traffic and bounces it through random computers around the world. But for guarding anything other than Web browsing, Tor has required a mixture of finicky technical setup and software tweaks. Now routing all your traffic through Tor may be as simple as putting a portable hardware condom on your ethernet cable.
As a progressive, Chinese-fluent journalist who has spent years working in China and especially Hong Kong, and who has spent decades exposing the secret workings of US agencies and their network of fake NGOs in support of US empire, as well as their anti-democratic activities here in the US, I can understand why people might be suspicious, but I want to explain that Hong Kong is not Ukraine or even Venezuela or Brazil.
[...]
I give this history to make it clear that there is a multigenerational history of struggling for and defending individual rights and of fighting for democratic rights in Hong Kong. Hong Kong people are not new to this stuff, and as an educated population with access to a world of information in their open media and wide open internet, they are not a population that is readily susceptible to the kind of manipulation and subversion practiced typically by the likes of the NED.
Taiwan's student-led protest against a trade-in-services agreement with China earlier this year was held to preserve values cherished in Taiwan, not out of fear of China, a Taiwanese official stated in a response to an op-ed in the United States said Tuesday.
Despite the heightened state of tension between Russia and the West on the international stage, the Prime Minister of Ukraine – Arseny Yatsenyuk – recently called for Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). If Ukraine was to join the alliance in the near future it would signify a further escalation in a situation that is already beginning to spiral out of control, as it would directly threaten Russia’s strategic security.
CIA agents waterboarded al Nashiri and subjected him to a mock execution before his arrival at Guantanamo in 2006. He subsequently got a military medical diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder. A consultant who examined al Nashiri said the scan was necessary in order to determine how to provide him with proper health treatment at the prison.
A federal judge on Wednesday ordered a hearing on whether to suppress statements by a Libyan terror suspect who claims he was shell-shocked from being tasered and kidnapped by Delta Force operatives and subjected to a harsh shipboard CIA interrogation.
The Uzbek authorities are threatening Negmatjon Siddikov’s imprisoned son Sadyr should the activist refuse to disassociate himself with Elena Urlaeva, the head of the Human Rights Alliance of Uzbekistan (PAU).
Former CIA Director Leon Panetta says that he was cursed at by President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff after he agreed to cooperate with the Senate’s investigation into his agency’s torture tactics in the wake of 9/11.
In passages taken from his new book and published online by the Intercept, Panetta explains the event that triggered the outburst, which flowed from the former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a man notorious for his profanity-laced tirades.
“I am well aware that we face many long days and difficult obstacles have to be overcome before we can really see victory,” Ethel Rosenberg wrote while behind bars in 1952, “but I’m still confident that we’ll win our freedom.” Of course, she and husband Julius , convicted in 1951 of conspiracy to commit espionage, did not win their freedom, and a year later they were executed in the electric chair.
The US State Department's Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) is conducting public diplomacy, not information warfare against the Islamic State (IS) and other terrorist organizations by contesting the space of digital communication and challenging extremist propaganda, the CSCC coordinator told RIA Novosti on Tuesday.
"It is 100 percent overt public diplomacy as the US government has been doing over decades. Everything we do is overt," Alberto Fernandez told RIA Novosti when asked if he considered the CSCC mission to be information warfare. Speaking of the CSCC efforts to counter terrorist and extremist messaging on the internet, he continued, "That's why we're seeking to contest the space, to unnerve the adversary, to change the conversation."
The world of espionage and undercover operations is the realm where the state – the maker of laws – deliberately breaks its own laws in the interest of self-preservation. In this sense, it forms part of the realm that Carl Schmitt, and more recently Giorgio Agamben, have termed “the state of exception”, and that Susan Buck-Morss calls the “wild zone of power” — the zone where power is above the law. This realm has become a greater and more important part of almost all political systems over the past half century. In an age of information, the possession and guarding of secrets is more than ever crucial to political power; and in a globalized age, the complexity of multilayered cross-border interactions impels the state to develop ever-more extensive information gathering systems, to guard against multiple challenges to its authority emerging from wide range of directions.
Police agencies have used hundreds of millions of dollars taken from Americans under federal civil forfeiture law in recent years to buy guns, armored cars and electronic surveillance gear. They have also spent money on luxury vehicles, travel and a clown named Sparkles.
A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old's chest -- and just got off scot-free. But here's why it gets even worse
When you buy a device, you expect to own it. You expect to be able to open it up, mess with it, and improve it. At the very least, you expect it to continue to work for its intended purpose.
The U.S. Government is trying to get their hands on the assets of Kim Dotcom and his fellow defendants through a civil lawsuit, claiming that they are the proceeds of crime. Megaupload's legal team is striking back against these allegations and informs the court that the Government's case is built on nonexistent crimes.