The original code of Linux was written for fun, or in Eric Raymond’s phrase, to ‘scratch the itch’ of Linus Torvalds, and later to satisfy the enthusiasm and programming itch of an assortment of hackers and hobbyists who, for the most part, had grown up in the age of the ZX80 and the BBC Micro, Acorns and Apricots, for which the code was often available – and hackable.
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Owen le Blanc compiled the fi rst ‘MCC interim release’ of Linux in February 1992, named after the Manchester Computing Centre in Manchester, England. Later that year Peter McDonald released SLS (Softlanding Linux System), which was the first attempt to pull together all the available software to make a popular Linux distribution as we might recognise it today.
Since last year, as Linux containers have come to the forefront of the technology hype cycle, there has been much rumbling about the security of containers. Most of these discussions, articles, and blog posts that have been published inevitably compare containers to VMs as if this were a comparison that mattered. It is not.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) has been talking about its Moonshot effort since 2011 as an approach to better enable high-density scale-out data center server workloads.
It's very easy launching a Power8 cloud instance in either the S or 2XL instance type. It would be nice to see a wider range of instance types available and of course to offer other Linux platform support too.
For months we have been talking about Intel XenGT as mediated graphics pass-through support so virtual machines can access Intel Haswell HD Graphics GPUs from the host under Linux and the GPU shared directly with the VMs running on the system. This work is finally closer to being realized to end-users with the code working towards being mainlined.
The performance of the upcoming Mesa 10.4 might be better out-of-the-box for R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D driver users if a new patch is accepted to re-enable HyperZ by default.
NetJapan, Inc., publisher of backup, recovery, and virtualization solutions, announces the release of ActiveImage Protector 4.5 Linux Edition. New features support local and off-site replication for increased security of backup images and full support for the latest versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.x and CentOS 7.
Kali Linux is a security-focused operating system you can run off a CD or USB drive, anywhere. With its security toolkit you can crack Wi-Fi passwords, create fake networks, and test other vulnerabilities. Here’s how to use it to give your own a network a security checkup.
This time, GOL World Tour goes back to the Americas - this time to Canada to see what the country has to offer Linux gamers and who the companies are making those games.
IndieBox which is a game distributor that specializes in the distribution of Indie titles has apparently done a deal with Double Fine to do a Limited Edition release of Brutal Legend for PC, Mac, and Linux. The release is celebrate the fifth anniversary of game and it is the first time that the game has gotten a physical release on the PC.
"Players anxious to take a turn at the Mac and Linux versions may pre-order Beyond Earth right now through Aspyr's online store at GameAgent.com," reads 2K Games' official announcement. "All pre-orders through GameAgent.com will include the Exoplanets Map Pack as a free bonus. Additionally, any customers who are established GameAgent members will find a note on the Beyond Earth product page that will grant them a special 15% pre-order discount. This offer expires once the Mac and Linux versions of Beyond Earth have launched."
An extraordinary twist of the tower defence genre that puts you in control of the armoured convoy making its way through the heavily defended streets of a city captured by the alien invaders.
Lastly, LXLE will be sticking with torrent only downloads which is a decentralized open source choice that was heavily influenced by Crunchbang. There is nothing wrong or inherently bad about using torrents vs direct downloads, plenty of questionable software is hosted on a server. Torrents receive a bad rap because many choose to use it for piracy, that's not the fault of the protocol that's the fault of users in general. Considering the size of the LXLE ISO it also makes technical sense since downloads speeds are far greater than with traditional direct downloads.
For Linux, Krita Studio users have access to a package for CentOS 6.5, and Krita Lime has been updated for Ubuntu users.
Calculate Linux has a rather interesting strategy for desktop environments. It is characterized by two flavors with the same look and feel. That does not mean that the inherent functionality of the KDE and Xfce desktops are compromised. Rather, the Calculate Linux developers did what you seldom see within a Linux distribution with more than one desktop option: They unified the design.
The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.0.6 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
This is a bugfix release of the v3.0 musl based branch. This release is based on the 3.14.22 kernel which has some critical security fixes.
openSUSE 13.2 comes with the latest and greatest that the GNOME desktop has to offer — GNOME 3.14. At the time of the release 13.2 offers GNOME 3.14.1, which improves upon the user-experience of GNOME 3.10, that came with openSUSE 13.1, several notches, featuring notably a much improved gnome-shell with pretty-but-subtle animations and multi-touch gestures for the first time. The core applications have all seen remarkable activity during the development of 3.14 (and earlier, 3.12), focused on exciting features but also to make the desktop experience more unified and consistent.
openSUSE's Factory and Tumbleweed rolling-release projects will be merged into one next month around the time of the openSUSE 13.2 release.
“With the release of openSUSE 13.2 due in November, we realised this was a perfect opportunity to merge our two openSUSE rolling-releases together so users of Tumbleweed can benefit from the developments to our Factory development process over the last few years,” said Richard Brown, Chairman of openSUSE board. “The combined feedback and contributions from our combined Tumbleweed and Factory users should help keep openSUSE rolling forward even faster, while offering our users the latest and greatest applications on a stable rolling release.”
OpenStack Summit Paris is a five-day conference for OpenStack software users, developers and administrators, with a main conference encompassing keynotes from leading figures in the OpenStack community and a design summit focused around collaborative working sessions.
Red Hat has become a role model for other companies by writing a success story based on open source software and Linux, without a single proprietary component in the soup.
The company continues to evolve and transform itself with the changing times to remain a leader, and not simply relevant, unlike many other software giants that are struggling in the market.
Our glorious Fedora uses Mediawiki to manage both test cases and test results for manual release validation. This is clearly ludicrous, but works much better than it has any right to.
While the Fedora 21 Alpha release was challenged by multiple delays that put it back one month, the delays aren't over yet. At yesterday's first Go/No-Go meeting for the Fedora 21 Beta, it was determined that the beta release isn't quite ready yet.
Today at Go/No-Go meeting it was decided to slip Fedora 21 Beta release as we did not have release candidate (RC) available in time. However we will try one day slip.
The Debian Multimedia Maintainers have been quite active since the Wheezy release, and have some interesting news to share for the Jessie release. Here we give you a brief update on what work has been done and work that is still ongoing.
While init system discussions have dominated the discussions about Debian 8.0 Jessie, on a brighter note, there's many multimedia improvements found in this next release.
Rescatux works like a regular Live CD distro, but it has a very specific purpose. Despite the name, this is not really a recovery tool, or at least not for data. It's designed to help in the recovery of entire operating systems by repairing the boot process, the Grub, the MBR for Windows OS, and so on. It also comes with some nice features related to the users of a particular system, but we'll get to that in a minute.
ubuntuThe release of Ubuntu 14.10, codenamed Utopic Unicorn, was the big news today. But in other news, Kostas Koudaras has a sneak peek of GNOME in upcoming openSUSE 13.2 and Alessio Treglia shared some bits on Debian 8.0 multimedia. Miguel de Icaza announces Mono for the Unreal Engine and, finally, Erich Schubert says avoiding systemd isn't hard at all.
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Alessio Treglia posted today of "some interesting news to share for the Jessie release" from the Debian Multimedia Maintainers. He said improvements to multimedia support include new and improved frameworks and libraries for codec support, newest plugins, and toolkits. His report even introduced new multimedia applications like Advene video annotation, dvd-slideshow, Groove Basin music server, and HandBrake transcoder. See Treglia's full post for lots more on that.
Ubuntu 14.10 moves to Linux 3.16, and offers performance and stability improvements, Netflix on Chrome support, and an easier loading process for the Android SDK.
Today marks 10 years of Ubuntu and the release of the 21st version. That is an incredible milestone and one which is worthy of reflection and celebration. I am fortunate enough to be spending the day at our devices sprint with 200+ of the folks that have helped make this possible. There are of course hundreds of others in Canonical and thousands in the community who have helped as well. The atmosphere here includes a lot of reminiscing about the early days and re-telling of the funny stories, and there is a palpable excitement in the air about the future. That same excitement was present at a Canonical Cloud Summit in Brussels last week.
Canonical has just released Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), a Linux distribution based on Debian that uses the Unity desktop environment. The ISO images are now ready for download and the upgrade path from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is open.
The latest release of Ubuntu focuses on application updates, maintenance and stability enhancements.
The IT world is crazy about containers these days, and Ubuntu 14.10 is happy to follow the crowd with support for Docker v1.2, as well as LXC containers, embedded inside. With previous editions of Ubuntu Server, containers could only be created by sysadmins with root access. But now LXC containers are getting a new user-level controller, which means users can do so too. This means that developers will be able to launch as many containers as they wish to test different tiers of code in their apps.
MozillaI want to congratulate the Ubuntu Teams on releasing another solid release of Ubuntu. I would like to take a moment to encourage those installing and upgrading to Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn to enable Telemetry and Firefox Health Report on Firefox.
This time around Ubuntu focuses on application updates, as well as maintenance and stability improvements. Unicorn’s biggest addition is a developer tool center focused on writing Android apps and 64-bit ARM chips.
Kubuntu 14.10 is available for upgrade or install. It comes in two flavours, the stable Plasma 4 running the desktop we know from previous releases, and a tech preview of the next generation Plasma 5 for early adopters.
All the Ubuntu flavors reached version 14.10 today. Let's take a quick look at what's new in Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME and Kubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn).
In today's Android roundup: Android Wear now offers offline music listening and GPS functionality. Plus: Five great features you may not know about in Android 5.0 Lollipop, and the best retro games for Android
Android 5.0, codenamed Lollipop, has introduced a key change to the WebView component, used by app developers to display HTML 5 content within their apps, making new features more readily available.
Whether you are a developer, project manager, or a stakeholder of any level—you’d like to have a clear view of where the project is headed. Are the deadlines being continuously achieved? How is the load on developers? How much of the project is complete? What is next for you in the project? And so on.
A project management tool generally answers all these questions. Ideally, you can just login to the system and check the project status. But as with other things in life—it’s very difficult to achieve an ideal scenario here. People may be too busy (or even just outright lazy) to update their status in a project management tool. So, it’s almost always the case that the project management tool doesn’t reflect the actual project scenario. One solution to this is using a tool that is intuitive and fits alongside the developer's normal workflow. Additionally, a tool that is quick to update and attracts users to use it.
For years, the open source world has taken comfort in a bit of Gandhi wisdom: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Red Hat went so far as to emblazon the phrase on the walls of its lobby, a reminder to open sourcers everywhere to take courage against the proprietary software machine.
Brocade wants to have the same relationship with OpenDaylight as Red Hat has with Linux.
It appears that Google engineers are getting ready Intel Broadwell support for future Chromebooks/Chromeboxes. Broadwell support is now present within Coreboot.
Like arch-rival Amazon.com, the soon-to-split eBay Inc. is something of an oddity in that it hasn’t historically been a big contributor to the open-source community. But the e-commerce pioneer hopes to change that with the release of the source-code for a homegrown online analytics processing (OLAP) engine that promises to speed up Hadoop while also making it more accessible to everyday enterprise users.
OpenStack has presented a huge opportunity for technologists at many levels. Niki Acosta is one of those technologists who strives to pull together all aspects of the OpenStack community for the betterment of everyone.
Niki is the Director of Cloud Evangelism at Metacloud, now a part of Cisco. Metacloud delivers private infrastructure as a service based on the popular and open source cloud platform, OpenStack. As an active OpenStack participant, tweeter, and blogger, she has become a recognized name in the cloud industry.
2014's slate of cloud deals reflect a few important trends in the market for the open source cloud software. One is that traditional enterprise vendors continue to see potential in OpenStack and they're willing to shell out the cash to buy the expertise and technology they need to pursue the market.
Tux Machines has run using Drupal for nearly a decade (the site is older than a decade) and we recently had the pleasure of speaking with Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire, Open Source Evangelist at Acquia, the key company behind Drupal (which the founder of Drupal is a part of). The questions and answers below are relevant to many whose Web sites depend on Drupal.
FreeBSD 10.1 RC3 was a few days late but it's out there this Thursday afternoon. FreeBSD 10.3 takes care of an API incompatibility between 10.0-RELEASE and the earlier 10.1-RC2 state (due to the libopie library) and aside from that this third release candidate has a lot of other fixes.
This is a guest post from Shauna Gordon-McKeon, who spoke at LibrePlanet 2014 on behalf of OpenHatch.
A report commissioned by the Homeland Security Department's Science and Technology Directorate say barriers to using and developing open source software must be addressed as IT budgets across government continue to tighten.
The “Open Source Software in Government: Challenges and Opportunities” report was a project of DHS’ science and technology office and based on interviews with OSS experts, suppliers and potential agency users.
When we last spoke with Half Moon Bay resident Brent Turner, he was presiding over the demonstration of an open-source voting system at San Francisco’s LinuxWorld software conference.
The CC BY and CC BY-SA 4.0 licenses are conformant with the Open Definition, as are all previous versions of these licenses (1.0 – 3.0, including jurisdiction ports). The CC0 Public Domain Dedication is also aligned with the Open Definition.
Some of our readers might remember the Controllino PLC Arduino open source Internet of Things controller we featured here on Geeky Gadgets back in March of this year.
Patches have been flung out to cover vulnerabilities in PHP that led to remote code execution and buffer overflows.
The flaws were detailed this week by Swiss researchers High-Tech Bridge in versions 5.4.33, 5.5.17 and 5.6.1 on a machine running Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS and the Radamsa fuzzer.
This release adds coverage for the following Supplemental Multilingual Plane scripts: Old Permic, Ornamental Dingbats, Geometric Shapes Extended, and Supplemental Arrows-C. The SMP now contains over 5700 glyphs.
For many organizations, the typical approach to implementing security is as a bolt-on feature after development. At the SecTor security conference in Toronto, Securosis CEO and analyst Rich Mogull explained why the emerging world of DevOps can radically remake how security is built into the software development and deployment process.
"The problem is that by nature, security is often reactive," Mogull said. "We don't control our destiny and we have to secure new stuff all the time."
Credit card theft continues to be among the most common and widespread forms of digital crime. Speaking at the SecTor security conference here Oct. 22, Grayson Lenik, principal security consultant at Nuix, outlined how these credit card thieves—known as "carders"—operate and how they eventually get caught.
And how could a TV show talk about war without talking to ex-military officials?
...rampant use has led to rampant civilian deaths, which in turn has led to more resentment toward the U.S.
Climate change does not respect borders and we must work together to fight its threats. These are not the words of a tree-hugger, but the US Department of Defense.
A report published on Monday says that extreme weather, rising temperatures, unpredictable rainfall and rising oceans could fuel armed insurgency and heighten the impact of a pandemic, through their effects on political instability, poverty, migration and resource disputes.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board's crusade against the enforcement of Wisconsin's campaign finance laws has gone off the rails.
An historic vote in the U.S. Senate earlier this year to amend the constitution to reverse Citizens United and stem the flood of money into our elections – expected to top $1 billion this election cycle – has the Koch brothers spooked.
If passed by Congress and approved by two-thirds of the states, the amendment could put a brake on outside spending from groups like the Koch brothers' political network, which spent over $400 million on the 2012 elections and is reportedly planning to drop another $300 million on the 2014 midterms.
Amazon Web Services this morning announced it has launched a new region, this time in Germany, and the company worked hard to assure European businesses that its services are totally secure, even from U.S. government snooping.
The research focuses on the use of ‘directed surveillance’ contained in the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) by police forces; a form of covert surveillance conducted in places other than residential premises or private vehicles which is deemed to be non-intrusive, but is still likely to result in personal information about the individual being obtained.
Sir Iain Lobban, the outgoing head of GCHQ, says that the idea the internet doesn't need policing is a flawed 'Utopian dream' as he argues the security services need 'strong capabilities' to stop those who want to harm Britain
With the UN declaring mass surveillance a violation of human rights, the proper thing for the world's biggest intelligence agencies -- who regularly engage in mass surveillance -- to do, might be to cut back on the practice and go back to targeted surveillance projects that most people find acceptable. Or, you know, they can do what the outgoing head of the GCHQ (the UK's equivalent of the NSA), Sir Iain Lobban, did and just redefine the English language. That's easier.
San Jose — Kristin Nyunt was charged by information today with two counts of illegal wiretapping and the possession of illegal interception devices, announced United States Attorney Melinda Haag and FBI Special Agent in Charge David J. Johnson.
A woman deploys spyware on her soon-to-be ex-husband's phone, an act that is probably more common than anyone wants to admit, but one that rarely results in criminal charges. In this case, however, her husband happened to be employed by the Pacific Grove (CA) Police Department. If not for that simple fact, would there have been an investigation, much less charges brought? This story deals with multiple layers of official privilege -- the extra attention those labeled "law enforcement" receive as victims of criminal activity, as well as the extra access law enforcement officers have, and how easily it can be abused.
One of the many problems with the debate on mass surveillance is that it is largely driven by emotions, on both sides. Facts are few and far between -- much is secret, for obvious reasons -- which makes objective discussion hard. What is needed is some rigorous research into this area. Surprisingly, it turns out the European Union has been funding just such a project, called "Surveille," a name derived from "Surveillance: Ethical Issues, Legal Limitations, and Efficiency."
James Comey's pleas that something must be done for the [potentially-molested] children of the United States seem to be falling on mostly deaf ears. Mostly. After realizing that there's nothing in current laws that compels Google and Apple to punch law enforcement-sized holes in their default encryption, Comey has decided to be the change he wishes to force in others.
What do a philosopher, a law school dean, a technologist and a private investigator named Emery Goad all have in common?
This:
They say we humans are creating huge databases about our personal information, our tastes, our flirtations, our finances.
We’re doing this with nearly every phone call, text, keystroke, Facebook posting and store purchase. We’re unwittingly sketching out glimpses of our virtues, vices, sins and souls.
Last year, a propaganda campaign for attacking Syria was evidently stopped in its tracks by an overwhelmingly war-weary U.S. citizenry. But in recent months, the “drums of war” have been beating fiercely yet again. Retired generals, allegedly experts on war “policy,” predictably advocated another military intervention in the Middle East (this time to stop the menacing advance of ISIS, an “enemy” virtually unheard of as recently as several months ago). It is, of course, a well-known but rarely mentioned fact that such retired military generals and admirals generally hold considerable stock in these “defense” behemoths. With new military “engagements,” product-demand is ramped up (the profit-margin already exorbitant on contracts), as Congress invariably approves increases for such costly weapons as Apache attack helicopters, Tomahawk cruise missiles (Raytheon), and Hellfire air-to-ground missiles (Boeing/Martin)—the latter “delivered” by Predator/Reaper drones (General Atomics).
Drone footage can be breathtaking, capturing aerial views that you just can’t get any other way.
It's an epidemic—killing hundreds of thousands of people and leaving many others hospitalized. It's present in over 148 countries and has expanded out of control. I'm talking not about Ebola, but the U.S. government. The very entity that many turn to for protection has been responsible for wars, police shootings, withholding of drugs that could save lives, and many other acts of violence and negligence that have resulted in far more deaths than Ebola.
Normally it’s retired military rallying support for the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station drone program but on Thursday veterans joined anti-drone protestors at the base’s entrance to publicize their opposition.
The air base is the site of the home of the 107th Airlift Wing which is converting from flying C-130 cargo planes to the remotely operated MQ-9 Reaper. No drones will launch from Niagara Falls but pilots who operate them will be stationed at the base.
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“When people lose family members to drones,” Ross said, “the blowback is incredible. We are recruiting people for terrorist organization from our use of drones.”
Pakistan has called for a pre-emptive ban on the development of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS), also known as the 'killer robots' that are capable of making their own combat decisions without human intervention, saying such devices would undermine world peace.
On Wednesday, a jury of eight women and four men in a federal district court in Washington, DC convicted four Blackwater mercenaries for their role in the 2007 Nisour Square massacre. The jurors found one of the contractors guilty of murder and another three guilty of manslaughter for firing hundreds of rounds of ammunition and grenades at Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in a brutal operation that left 17 dead and another 20 wounded.
For more than a year, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on International Justice and Peace studied the use of drones and targeted killings. In May 2013, Bishop Richard Pates, chair of the International Justice and Peace Committee, wrote to National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, raising moral questions about the use of drones for targeted killings. He asked that the U.S. be more transparent in its policies and exercise leadership in advancing international agreements on their use.
I do not think there is a single person in public life or social media nowadays who would not accept that the FCO were simply lying. Jack Straw was blatantly to lie about it to parliament. But ten years ago the public and media knew much less than they know now. Nobody outside secret circles had ever heard the words extraordinary rendition. It was a year later – May 2005 – before the New York Times revealed the CIA was sending people to Uzbekistan to be tortured, precisely as I had stated.
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After going on the Today programme I went on the run, in fear for my life. I am not paranoid, remember David Kelly. I first stayed with my old friend Andy Myles in Edinburgh, then I think Chief Executive of the Scottish Liberal Democrats. He was phoned the next morning by the FCO. When he denied knowledge of my whereabouts, they not only said they knew I was staying with him, they said which bedroom I was sleeping in. Ten years ago today I was hiding in Aviemore in the house of my old friend Dominic.
That was the start of a decade as a dissident where I have devoted my life to exposing, and trying to counter, the evil of the neo-conservative policy pursued by our political class at the behest of the corporations who fund them. I have suffered a huge loss in money, status and most of the other normal aspirations. But what I have gained is invaluable. I have respect and love, while Blair and Straw will forever be despised.
When is a pizza box a pillow? Or an umbrella a ‘structure’? In Parliament Square Occupy Democracy protesters have spent their seventh night sleeping on the ground on top of piles of newspapers. According to the 2011 Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act, the local authority for the City of Westminster has the power to confiscate items that count as sleeping equipment or a structure, so mattresses and tents are forbidden.
But protesters say the police are getting creative with their interpretation of the bylaw, confiscating backpacks and pizza boxes, claiming that they count as sleeping equipment. Umbrellas have similarly been confiscated because they count as a structure. Some have been told that sleeping bags are allowed to keep them warm while they’re awake, but not when they’re asleep.
For over a decade and a half, Project Censored researchers at Sonoma State University have been monitoring law enforcement–related deaths in the United States. In the most recent phase of this research, we interviewed members of fourteen families who had lost a loved one in a law enforcement incident. In this study, we let the families tell their stories in their own voices, and we report the commonalities in their trauma and mistreatment by law enforcement and the corpo- rate media after the death of their loved ones.
Kashmir Hill at Forbes has a great profile of (not-very-anonymous-after-all) blogger Peter Young, who has received the dreaded SSSS designation from the TSA. Ringing up 4 S's means every TSA agent thinks you're a terrorist and every visit to the airport means extra patdowns and questioning. Young has been detailing the humdrum existence of your everyday terrorist over at his blog, "Jetsetting Terrorist," where he notes that his decidedly non-terroristic appearance causes the consternation and confusion at smaller airports where 4-S designations are few and far between. Not that being a jetsetting terrorist doesn't have its upsides…
There was another large riot recently, one that resulted in a large police presence. Maybe you heard something about it. Maybe you didn't. Maybe the media portrayed this riot as "rowdiness" fueled by alcohol that just "got out of hand." Maybe it didn't. The annual Pumpkin Festival in Keene, New Hampshire, somehow devolved into overturned cars, smashed windows and lit fires, but there's been no extensive handwringing about the police response to that situation -- one composed mostly of white, college-age males. [h/t to Techdirt reader WulfTheSaxon for the NBC News link]
Last week, the investigative journalistic world got a severe shock: the United States strongly consider that the United Nations Convention Against Torture which universally ban "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" does not apply to C.I.A. and the U.S. military operations abroad - which includes US-run prisons - and that the Obama administration is considering reaffirming the previous Bush administration's position that the (UN) treaty imposes no legal obligation on the United States to bar cruelty outside its borders.
“We are seeing a battle in Kobani. We’re seeing Baghdad being surrounded. We’re seeing threats on the Green Zone in Baghdad by ISIS. What do you think that we as a government should be doing, and are we doing enough?” asked MSNBC host Jose Diaz-Balart Thursday.
And stretching those principles, Rogers said, increases the risk that other nations will do likewise. “Other countries can justify the use of force using the same arguments,” he said. “When the United States weakens these principles, other states will use them and it weakens the international order.”
The City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has received substantial new funding which secures its future until at least 2017. The €£3 million cash boost, announced this morning by Minister for Intellectual Property Baroness Neville-Rolfe, will come from public funds. It's being billed as good news for the economy and bad news for pirates.
We've written plenty about the City of London Police and its Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), which despite an official jurisdiction covering a square mile of London, has made it clear that it considers itself Hollywood's private police force worldwide when it comes to stopping copyright infringement online. PIPCU has basically been a bumbling, censoring mess from the beginning. A year ago, it started ordering domain registrars to kill off websites with no court order and no legal basis -- demands that actually violated ICANN's policies. For registrars that ignored those baseless, bogus censorship demands, PIPCU started sending ridiculous threats claiming that they were engaged in criminal behavior. Of course, PIPCU's understanding of both the internet and "criminal" laws is suspect. The head of the unit, Adrian Leppard, claims that "the Tor" is "90% of the internet" and "is a risk to society." Another top officer, Andy Fyfe, somehow believes that if PIPCU isn't running around censoring sites there would be anarchy online.
Remember earlier this year when German newspaper publishers, led by rights management firm VG Media, demanded Google pay them a massive amount of money (11% of all ad revenue on any page linking to their works) for having the gall to send those publishers traffic via Google News? VG Media insisted that Google's use of "snippets" was illegal. German regulators rejected this demand, but VG Media was still pursuing legal efforts to force Google to pay. Given that, Google did what made the most sense and removed the snippets for VG Media associated publishers. You'd think that this would make VG Media happy. Instead, it claimed that Google was engaged in "blackmail."
Google’s 4-month-long fight with German news publishers over license fees for search result snippets came to a close today when the publishers threw in the towel.
This isn't a huge surprise, given Judge Alison Nathan's recent comments during the Aereo hearing, but Judge Nathan has now basically granted the networks what they want -- a pretty broad injunction (pdf) against Aereo.
As the saying goes, death and taxes are both certainties -- as is the fact that politicians lie. But another near universal certainty is that Marvel will totally freak out whenever it gets the slightest inkling that its intellectual property is threatened. The latest head-scratching example of this was yesterday's leak of a trailer for The Avengers 2, which Marvel promptly DMCA'd.