What can you say? In a few short years, that other OS has gone from mainstream to niche and Android/Linux and GNU/Linux are stepping up to displace it as the goto OS of the world. It’s all good. This is the right way to do IT with the world making its own software throughout the whole stack: OS on client and server and a ton of applications too. There is no need for a monopoly in IT. The world wants a revolution not lock-in.
We’ve been banging on about the horrific and broken Windows software ecosystem for a long time now. Rather than installing applications from Download.com and every other freeware site, you should just switch to Linux if you want to download freeware safely.
In yesterday's roundup I included two stories about Windows 10 and the fate of the Linux desktop. Today there's a story at Datamation that compares Windows 10 with Ubuntu to see which one might be a better fit for readers.
In the last two years, the Linux desktop has settled into a period of quiet diversity. The user revolts of 2008-2012 are safely in the past, and users are scattered among at least seven major desktops -- Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE,LXDE, MATE, Unity, and Xfce -- and likely to stay that way.
So what comes next? What will the next innovations on the desktop be? Where will they come from? Prediction is as safe as investing in penny mining stocks, but some major trends for the next couple of years seem obvious without the bother of a tarot reading.
In 2007, Dell became the first major computer OEM to sell pre-installed Linux on their computers. Today, Dell continues to support desktop Linux. In its latest move, Dell will be bringing Ubuntu 14.04 to its top-of-the-line Precision M3800 workstation laptop and the latest model of the Dell XPS 13 .
If you're a developer and like Ubuntu Linux, your coffee may taste sweeter this morning. Dell has unveiled a new Precision M3800 laptop preloaded with the open source operating system and tailored for programmers and high-end applications.
With a quadrupling of contributors over the past year, the open-source Docker container project has unveiled a new structure aimed at dealing with that accelerating growth.
Without a doubt, container technology was one of the hottest stories of last year, and if you mention the container arena to most people, Docker is what comes to mind. As impressive as Docker is, as recently as June of last year, OStatic highlighted some of its instabilities. And, we've also chronicled new competition in the container space. Google has set its sights squarely on Docker by transforming its Kubernetes platform into a full-fledged part of Google Cloud Platform with Google Container Engine. Meanwhile Canonical is leaping into the into the virtualization arena with a new hypervisor called LXD that uses the same Linux container tools that have allowed Docker to isolate instances from one another.
The popular open-source application container virtualization effort gets an overhaul in a bid to improve project organization. The open-source Docker application container virtualization project is evolving today, in a bid to improve the project's organization, scalability and openness.
Scientists take computational approach to evidence of plant climate adaptation using iPlant, Stampede and Lonestar supercomputers
When it comes to storing this viewing data, Netflix currently uses Cassandra as the primary data store for all persistent data, with memcached layered on top of Cassandra as a guaranteed low-latency path for reading, possible stale, data.
Latest kernel 3.18.4 includes many changes, you can check the Changelog for the complete list of changes.
The OpenDaylight community is comprised of leading technologists from around the globe who are working together to transform networking with open source. This blog series highlights the developers, users and researchers collaborating within OpenDaylight to build an open, common platform for SDN and NFV.
The latest work landing in the DRM-Next code-base for the Linux 3.20 kernel merge window is the Tegra DRM driver updates.
Prep Course Comes Bundled With a Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator Exam, Which Can Be Taken Anywhere, Any Time
A fresh version of the Linux kernel, 3.18.4, has been released by Greg Kroah-Hartman and is now available for download. This is now the most advanced version you can find and it will remain like this at least for the next couple of weeks.
Going along with many DRM graphics driver improvements for Linux 3.20 is the seemingly never-ending work on atomic mode-setting.
Atomic mode-setting/display support has been talked about for years but is finally nearing a reality within the mainline Linux kernel with drivers like the Tegra DRM driver adding initial support.
With Linux 3.20 there's the actual Linux DRM Atomic IOCTL and along with other changes means that Linux user-space can start accessing the atomic support, albeit it's hidden for now behind the experimental drm-atomic=1 flag.
Last week NVIDIA released the GeForce GTX 960, a great $200 GPU for Linux gamers that is based on their new power-efficient Maxwell architecture. On launch-day I delivered some initial performance figures of the full GeForce GTX 900 series line-up along with other graphics cards and following that I did many new NVIDIA Linux GPU tests going back to the GeForce GTX 400 (Fermi) series. Not part of those tests were any AMD Radeon graphics cards while in this article are such numbers in making a new 18-way graphics card comparison with the latest Linux graphics drivers.
NVIDIA has released a new branch of Legacy drivers for the Linux platform and they are the most advanced versions you can get right now for old video cards.
For conservative NVIDIA Linux users not quick to jump to new release streams, the 340.76 stable update is now available, which is also the driver that's continuing to provide long-term support for pre-Fermi graphics card users relying on NVIDIA's binary blob.
As some extra Broadwell Linux performance numbers this morning, here's some brief test results for the Intel Core i7 5600U when testing the Intel P-State vs. ACPI CPUFreq frequency scaling drivers and the different scaling governors.
mpv, an open source media player that has been forked from mplayer2 and MPlayer and that works only from the command line, has been upgraded to version 0.7.3 and is ready for download.
unhtml is one of probably two or three (or four or five …) html-strippers that I’ve seen since the start of this silly little site, and while it’s not the most elegant or flexible, it might be the oldest.
Achieving good performance from a computer or network is an important part of system administration.The monitoring and maintenance of the system is the most important task listed in the checklists for daily tasks of a system and network administrator. There are many commands line utilities created for this purpose.
For the first thing, it's an optional feature of bash. It can be included in bash if the --enable-restricted option is used with the configure command when bash is built. To make it usable, you (assuming you're the admin now) create a symbolic link to bash and call is rbash. It's as simple as that. And if you're not sure if a system that you use or administer provides the rbash functionality, try this:
Now replaced more and more by forums, social networks, or mailing lists, IRC was once the method of communication of the web. And if it stands today as the last bastion of hackers and bearded Linux users, it remains one of the fastest and most specific channel of communication. If you have a technical difficulty, or just want some company, there is an appropriate IRC channel for you. And if you are tired of the YouTube comment section and its torrent of hate, IRC people are in general much more behaved (and moderated). So in short, here is a non-exhaustive list of IRC console clients. Why console? Because if you go down there, you might as well do it in style.
Yesterday I released version 0.8 of AppStream, the cross-distribution standard for software metadata, that is currently used by GNOME-Software, Muon and Apper in to display rich metadata about applications and other software components.
GEGL has for a long time supported meta-operations: operations which are built as a sub-graph of other operations. However, they had to be built programatically using the C API which limited tooling support and the platform-specific nature made them hard to distribute.
[...]
This makes Flowhub+imgflo a useful tool also outside the web-based processing workflow it is primarily built for. Feature is available in GEGL and GIMP master as of last week, and will be released in GIMP 2.10 / GEGL 0.3.
Vivaldi is a web browser based on Chromium, developed by an Opera founder and his team. They want to provide a browser that is aimed at power users and that makes no compromises regarding its functionality.
Sadly sometimes people go on autopilot, and the developer of Two Worlds II and Raven's Cry has confirmed to me they didn't read my previous emails correctly, so Two Worlds II is not coming to Linux, but it might be, confused? I am.
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel the latest in the Borderlands series that is available on Linux has gained another DLC titled ‘Lady Hammerlock the Baroness Pack’, and this new DLC is available for Linux thanks to Aspyr Media.
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is still being improved on for the Linux platform and a new major patch has been released for the games, although it's still in the Beta stage.
We know how some of you feel about wrappers, but that's an old argument now. The game is here, and the developers are still working on improving it. The Witcher 2 had a new beta a few days ago, and we took a look and just how much of an improvement it is.
A new beta of the Linux port of The Witcher 2 was released this weekend and it aims to deliver improved performance.
The Witcher 2 for Linux was released last May but many Linux gamers remain frustrated with the initial quality of the game port. The Linux port was done using Virtual Programming's eON layer to ease the developer's process in porting from Windows to Linux, but it's caused major performance issues.
Darksiders is another big game we are excited about, and sadly the current people in charge of the port haven't replied to our messages, but thanks to SteamDB we can see it's still happening.
I love the idea of game creation tools that require no programming knowledge, as they enable hobbyists to have fun, quick prototyping and much more. Construct 2 is one of the finest around, and the developers have laid out plans for Construct 3.
Cradle (their site is a terrible all-Flash website, urgh!) is a really quite good-looking adventure game coming out, and the developers have teased their Linux testing recently.
Curse Client is an addon management tool for games such as World of Warcraft and others, which unfortunately doesn't work on Linux.
Humble Weekly Bundle: Je Suis Charlie is a collection of games from French developers and the proceeds from the sales are going to Freedom of the Press Foundation. Also, most of the games have Linux support.
Good news folks, thanks to a comment on a recent article we were poked about taking a look at the progress of porting Outlast to Linux, and it seems to have a new private Linux build in testing.
Out There: Omega Edition has landed on Linux in the form of a beta, and it's a game we have been eagerly waiting for. Thankfully I've had some time to test before the official release, and here are some thoughts.
KDE will be at Europe's largest gathering of free software developering this weekend, taking over the city of Brussels for FOSDEM.
The Star-Hopper is an amazing feature present in KStars which allows you to find a path between two points in the sky. It is very commonly used in astronomy. If you have a bright star as a reference and you want to find an object in it’s vicinity, you start from your reference star and trace a route to the destination traversing a sequence of stars/pattern of stars.
Well, that's not exactly true. Professional-level video editing on Linux has been solid and mature for many years now, with the likes of Lightworks, Cinelerra and Blender. But the "hobbyist" video editor market just wasn't very well-served. There were video editors out there… but they were often buggy and lacking in critical features.
First of all, what is Marble? Marble is a virtual globe application which allows the user to choose among the Earth, the Moon, Venus, Mars and other planets to display as a 3-D model. It is free software under the terms of the GNU LGPL, developed by KDE for use on personal computers and smart phones.
Today I had the pleasure of launching the new Planet KDE website theme done by Ranveer Aggarwal. It looks very lovely and importantly makes the site a pleasure to browse on your phone. Everyone hug him and do report any bugs to bugzilla.
Manjaro Xfce 0.9.0 Pre2, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, has been released. The devs have made quite a few improvements to it and users have been asked to test it.
The KDE community released the source code to Plasma 5.2.0 today, and some of you are dying to see what it looks like.
And yes – let me get this clear right from the start: this Plasma 5.2.0 desktop environment will replace the KDE 4 packages you have installed.
I am extremely pleased to announce that the FUDCon APAC 2015 will be hosted in Pune, India. There was a bid from Pune, India and PhnomPenh, Cambodia. After a lot of discussion, Pune, India has been given an opportunity to be the host for FUDCon APAC 2015.
The developers of the Ubuntu Linux operating system for desktop, notebook, and server computers are working on a touch-friendly version for smartphones and tablets, with the first Ubuntu phones expected to go on sale this year.
Ubuntu Touch is an operating system that uses Unity 8 as the desktop environment and it's designed to run on mobile devices like phones and tablets, at least for now. With some small trickery, you can make it run its apps in separate and floating windows, just like on a desktop. Let me repeat that, like on a desktop.
Details about an Unbound vulnerability in Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which has been found and corrected, have been published in a security notice by Canonical.
Canonical has revealed that the previous update for Firefox has introduced a regression for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 14.10. A new version of the browser has been released and now the users can also upgrade their Firefox browser.
This new vulnerability is called GHOST and it has been intensely publicised, but the truth of the matter is that it's not all that dangerous and it's pretty well contained. In fact, in order to exploit it a user needs to make some serious efforts and the rewards are not all that great.
Unless you manually upgrade your kernel and other system packages from your Ubuntu 14.10 installation, Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet is an important release for users of new Intel Broadwell systems for ensuring your hardware reaches its maximum performance potential.
Linux newbies have probably heard a lot about Ubuntu, but it isn’t the only Linux distribution. In fact, Ubuntu’s standard Unity desktop is still controversial among long-time Linux users today.
Many Linux users prefer a more traditional desktop interface, and Linux Mint offers that. As Ubuntu focuses more on Ubuntu for phones, Linux Mint may be an even clearer choice in the future.
No, Ubuntu isn’t terrible. Some people prefer Ubuntu’s Unity desktop and love it. But you’ll probably have an easier time getting to grips with Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu.
The ARM CPU used in the BeagleBone Black and other single board computers is designed to interface with half to a few gigabytes of RAM and allow a full operating system such as Linux to be run on the computer. (See my long series of reviews on Linux.com of ARM-based computers that run Linux). By contrast the ARM Cortex-M is a microcontroller level chip which might run at 16-100Mhz, contain 2-100kb of RAM, and some flash memory to contain only the program that you want to execute.
The Acnodes “FES8670ââ¬Â³ is a rugged industrial box-PC that runs Linux on a 4th Gen Core CPU, and offers four GbE ports and numerous storage and display ports.
So far, we’ve still only seen one company (Congatec) announce products based on Intel’s new 5th Generation Core (“Broadwell”) processors, although we expect many more to break cover at Embedded World next month. Yet, there’s still plenty of juice left in the 4th Gen Haswell Core chips, which drive Acnodes’s powerhouse FES8670. Earlier Acnodes industrial PCs have included the Atom D2550-based FES2215.
Apple just reported a record number of iPhone sales in its Q1 earnings.
But while iPhones might be selling like hot-cakes, there are still a bunch of reasons why Android phones are better.
The table is made of aircraft-grade aluminum and the table top is only 2.4-inches / 60mm in thickness. On the Windows side, the panel can detect up to 60 distinct touch points, while on the Android one there are only 12.
With word that Apple's long-awaited Apple Watch is set to hit store shelves in April, the World Wide EchoTubes are filling up with all the headlines you'd expect -- anything and everything related to the Apple vs. Android "smartwatch war" and which company's wearables will "win the battle."
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but listen closely: Smartwatches are not the same as smartphones. Aside from silly fanboy arguments and meaningless analyst ramblings, there is no direct Apple Watch vs. Android Wear rivalry. Not in any way that's actually relevant in the real world.
Smartphone preference is always a hot topic among enthusiasts, with the iPhone vs. Android rivalry being the most obvious one since the smartphone revolution started by the original iPhone eight years ago. While Google’s Android is the most popular smartphone OS by market share, Apple is still a significant adversary, one that has never been beaten when it comes to smartphone profits. In fact, Apple on Tuesday announced record and estimates-smashing revenue, and most importantly, iPhone sales.
A nice array of great mobile games hit the Android Google Play store at the start of the new year. Along with these new games to pass the time with, several other released games have maintained their stronghold over the top games chart. We’re here to make sure you download some of the finer outings available to mobile games who game primarily on Android devices. These are simply the top five best Android games of January 2015. There’s action, puzzle, strategy and racing games that you’ll need to play. Here’s just a few of the best,
Here are some notes about my experience adapting android-galaxyzoo to Material design for Android 5.0 (Lollipop) though I only used the most superficial parts of Material design.
Dozens of Chinese technology companies have created iPhone 6 look-alikes that run Android and cost a lot less than Apple's smartphone. Most of these knockoffs, however, look and feel a bit cheaper and come with low-end hardware compared to the iPhone.
Gobs of new open source projects are released every year, but only a few really capture the imaginations of businesses and developers.
Open source software management company Black Duck tries to spot these, measuring which projects attract the most contributors, produce the most code, and garner the most attention from the developer world at large.
These are just two examples of serious flagship projects, but even on a day-to-day level there are plenty of opportunities for systems librarians to interact with open source software. A large amount of vendor software runs on Linux, so there’s plenty of systems administration to do. I work in a relatively small library, and even here we run five Drupal websites: one as a portal for library services, one as the primary repository for our archive, another provides the public interface for an aboriginal research center, and one to manage safety information for our bio sciences lab.
Traditionally, open source software has relied primarily on asynchronous communication. While there are probably quite a few synchronous conversations on irc, most project discussions and decisions will happen on asynchronous channels like mailing lists, bug tracking tools and blogs.
Given intense competition for the world's best engineering talent, can your company really afford to lock up its code behind proprietary licenses? Sure, if you're in the business of selling software, giving it all away may not make sense. But the vast majority of companies don't sell software, and should be contributing a heck of a lot more as open source.
What is open source? Simply put, it is source code (used to develop software programs) that is freely available and modifiable on the Internet. Open source developers from all over the world contribute to various projects, which are hosted on various websites—GitHub, a popular code hosting site, has over 8 million users and over 19 million code “repositories.”
Not so long ago, the open source model was the rebellious kid on the block, viewed with suspicion by established industry players. Today, open initiatives and foundations are flourishing with long lists of vendor committers who see the model as a key to innovation.
The Embedded Linux Conference + Android Builders Summit on Mar. 23-25 in San Jose is about “Drones, Things, and Automobiles,” but drones get the most love.
Maybe it’s just our imagination, but the Linux Foundation’s Embedded Linux Conference seems to be getting more interesting than ever. The program increasingly reflects new opportunities for Linux in areas such as drones, robots, automotive computers, IoT gizmos, 3D sensing, modular phones, and much more. For those of you worried that ELC North America is skimping on the basics as it explores the more colorful sides of Linux, rest your mind at ease. There are still plenty of sessions on booting, trace analysis, NAND support, PHY frameworks, power management, defragmenting, systemd, device tree, and toolchain. Geeks still rule!
Today is International Data Privacy Day. It is a day designed to raise awareness and promote best practices for privacy and data protection. It is a day that looks to the future and recognizes that we can and should do better as an industry. It reminds us that we need to focus on the importance of having the trust of our users. At Mozilla, we start from the baseline that privacy and security on the Web are fundamental and not optional. We are transparent with our users about our data practices and provide them options for choice and control. We seek to build trust so we can collectively create the Web our users want – the Web we all want. Still, we are working to do better.
On November 11, 2014 Mozilla announced the Polaris Privacy Initiative. One key part of the initiative is us supporting the tor network by deploying tor middle relay nodes. On January 15, 2015 our first proof of concept (POC) went live.
RequestPolicy is an extension for Mozilla browsers that requestpolicyincreases your browsing privacy, security, and speed by giving you control over cross-site requests.
What can OpenStack do for you? How about helping you along your career? OpenStack is a growing space and there are more than enough jobs still to go around for qualified seekers. So how do you go about getting one of those jobs?
In this video from the Kilo OpenStack Summit in Paris, Niki Acosta, Ryan Yard, Shamail Tahir, Kenneth Hui, Eric Wright, and Aaron Delp offer their perspectives on a variety of topics around creating and building a career in cloud software through the OpenStack community.
When the topic turns to job market opportunities these days, hardly any technology trend is drawing more attention than Big Data. And, when talking Big Data, the subject of Hadoop inevitably comes up, as it remains the star open source framework for drawing insights from large data sets. Big tech companies like Yahoo and eBay use Hadoop extensively, but it's also used by smaller companies these days, and we've reported before that the job market is very healthy for people with Hadoop skills.
Despite all these challenges, exceptions, and subtleties, we’ve made good strides in separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to identifying important data, in no small part thanks to open source. In particular, gains made in search engine technology like Apache Lucene and Solr have revolutionized our ability to deal with multi-structured content at scale, rank it and return it in a timely manner. Search engines have evolved significantly in recent years to seamlessly collect, collate, and curate data across a wide variety of data types (text, numeric, time-series, spatial, and more) and are no longer about just doing fast keyword lookups. Combined with large scale data processing frameworks (Hadoop, Spark, et. al), R for statistical analysis, machine learning capabilities like Apache Mahout, Vowpal Wabbit, MLlib and NLP libraries like Stanford’s NLP libraries, Apache OpenNLP, NLTK and more, it is now possible to build sophisticated solutions that take in your data, model it, serve it up to your users and then learn from their behavior.
VMware announced its own OpenStack distribution in August of 2014. Gelinsger said that the market will be hearing more this quarter about the VMware OpenStack product and he's very excited about what's coming.
We are very close to release LibreOffice 4.4 and I thought I’d share my thoughts on the work that has been put into this new branch and what the general idea is about it. LibreOffice 4.4 is unusual; as a major release you may expect some important underlying change in its architecture, or the inclusion of a set of major features. The 4.4 does include several important features and improvements, most notably for Impress and the much forgotten HTML editor (the comprehensive release notes may be found here). But the most important details are not to be found in this area. If you want to understand where the 4.4 branch is headed, I think it is useful to keep two fundamental trends in mind.
The next major LibreOffice desktop release is just around the corner and now the developers behind the open source productivity suite are preparing to extend it to Android.
The Document Foundation on Tuesday announced it had assigned the work necessary to build the Android apps to two companies. The Document Foundation is hoping the result will be a "compelling, elegant and full-featured experience of LibreOffice on Android", Ital Vignoli, one of its founders, said.
While FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, and other BSD distributions have made much headway in the past year or two in porting the Linux DRM/KMS drivers to their kernels, the work still measurably lags behind the latest upstream Linux kernel code.
GNUzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla suite, and GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license restricts distribution in several ways incompatible with freedom 0.
Four citizens of the German city of Dortmund have started a citizens’ initiative, asking the city council to seriously consider the use of free and open source software. “The city needs to recognise free software as a topic in the public interest”, the DO-FOSS initiators write.
Ahead of the parliamentary elections in Greece last week, the Greek Free/Open Source Software Society (GFOSS) contacted all political parties to ask about their positions [in Greek] with regard to open software, open data, open hardware and open government. The four parties to respond all came out generally in favour of openness. Some of them were even able to present very detailed planning on how to improve the current institutional and legislative framework and outlined how openness could help reconstruct Greek productivity.
Recently, the German Ministry of the Interior presented 'The Federal Government's National Action Plan to implement the G8 Open Data Charter'.
The latest motherboard being supported by Coreboot for replacing the board's proprietary BIOS is the ASUS KFSN4-DRE.
Everyone hates Flash, right? You have to install a plug-in, it's resource intensive, it doesn't work on mobile, and it causes all sorts of security problems. YouTube has been working on ridding itself of Adobe's ancient Web plug-in for several years now, and while the whole site has been slowly transitioning away from Flash, today YouTube announced that it finally serves HTML5 video by default. Users of Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8, and "beta versions of Firefox" will all have a Flash-less experience.
YouTube's transition seems to have been pretty straightforward. Four years ago, YouTube laid out a laundry list of problems it had with HTML5, and today it has a blog post explaining how it has worked with the Web community to solve each issue.
It's been a long time coming, but YouTube has finally made the switch from Flash to HTML 5 and no one seems to really care about that.
[...]
Basically, you can mark this day in the calendar as the official date for the death of Flash, or at least as the culmination of its decline.
The Philippines government came under fire on Friday after admitting that hundreds of homeless people were taken off Manila’s streets and put into luxury accommodation during Pope Francis’s recent visit, when he preached compassion for the poor.
US regulator the FTC says now is not the time for new laws on the "Internet of Things" – but security needs to be improved as we enter the era of always-on, always-connected gadgets, sensors and machines embedded in homes, streets and pockets.
In a report [PDF] published today, the commission's staff make a number of policy recommendations for the wave of new devices that collect and transmit data on our everyday lives.
From the camera that posts pictures online with a click, to automated home lighting and heating, to FitBits and Apple Watches, the Internet of Things (IoT) was the focus of this year's Consumer Electronic Show, as well as a speech by FTC chairwoman Edith Ramirez.
I work on SE Linux to improve security for all computer users. I think that my work has gone reasonably well in that regard in terms of directly improving security of computers and helping developers find and fix certain types of security flaws in apps. But a large part of the security problems we have at the moment are related to subversion of Internet infrastructure. The Tor project is a significant step towards addressing such problems. So to achieve my goals in improving computer security I have to support the Tor project. So I decided to put my latest SE Linux Play Machine online as a Tor hidden service. There is no real need for it to be hidden (for the record it’s in my bedroom), but it’s a learning experience for me and for everyone who logs in.
It was 42 degrees and raining lightly around 3 a.m. on Monday when an inebriated off-duty employee for a government intelligence agency decided it was a good time to fly his friend’s drone, a 2-foot-by-2-foot “quadcopter” that sells for hundreds of dollars and is popular among hobbyists.
But officials say the plan was foiled, perhaps by wind or a tree, when the employee — who has not been named by the Secret Service or charged with a crime — lost control of the drone as he operated it from an apartment just blocks from the White House.
The official said the White House is taking urgent steps to protect itself from its association with the murderous state terror of the drone campaign. “We’re going to be stepping up the number of happy, peppy events we have at the White House,” he said, “and making sure they all have a very prominent ‘White House’ label. In the next few weeks, we’ll be having the ‘White House Sweet Ole Granny Quilting Bee’ featuring photogenic grannies from all over the country, and the ‘White House ‘Smores and More Weekend,’ where the President and Mrs. President will gather with kindergarten kids from across this great land of ours to make some simple, tasty picnic treats.
So when a man said he was flying a drone for fun just after 3 a.m. in downtown Washington, D.C., and had an accidental crash-landing into a tree on the wrong side of one of the world's most highly protected fences, he didn't merely touch the famous property at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Brandon Bryant’s recent exposé of drone operations killing hundreds of innocent civilians during his service, which led to his post-traumatic stress and retirement, explains the dark side of the CIA led US drone operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Adding to Bryant’s shock and surprise, his peers believed that they had killed a dog and not a kid that day, and thus it was nothing to worry about.
Bryant worked as a drone sensor operator for the USAF from 2006 to 2011, mainly operating from a dark container at a facility in New Mexico. But his oversight of these operations, where he became directly and indirectly responsible for the death of more than 1,000 people, nagged at his conscience forcing him to call it quits.
A Notre Dame University law professor says the legal and moral issues related to the U.S. government's use of unmanned drones to kill individuals in war zones could be more difficult than similar issues on torture.
A message to President Obama: saying something does not make it so. How does killing people, so many of them innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever, with missiles launched from drones by "pilots" thousands of miles away, demonstrate respect for human dignity and the application of "proper" constraints?
Let's consider all the ways in which Obama's drone assassination program undermines "human dignity" and lacks proper constraints. To do so, one need only consider the many reports that have been entered into the public record by United Nations Special Rapporteurs, human rights organizations, and academic institutions.
In May 2010, Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, submitted a report to the UN Human Rights Council. In his report, Alston noted that some states, including the U.S., had adopted targeted killing policies, which they have justified as necessary for fighting terrorism. According to Alston, "In the legitimate struggle against terrorism, too many criminal acts have been re-characterized so as to justify addressing them within the framework of the law of armed conflict."
Over the past decade, the United States has manufactured more than 6000 drones of various kinds. 160 of these are Predators, which are used not only in Afghanistan but also in countries officially at peace with the US, such as Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. In Pakistan, CIA drones carry out on average of one strike every four days. Although exact figures of fatalities are difficult to establish, the estimated number of deaths between 2004 and 2012 vary from 2562 to 3325.
The Bureau of Prisons contacted me Friday, assigning me a prison number and a new address: for the next 90 days, beginning Saturday I’ll live at FMC Lexington, in the satellite prison camp for women, adjacent to Lexington’s Federal Medical Center for Men. Very early Saturday morning, Buddy Bell, Cassandra Dixon, and Paco and Silver, two house guests whom we first met in protests on South Korea’s Jeju Island, traveled with me to Kentucky and deliver me to the prison gates.
In December, 2014, Judge Matt Whitworth sentenced me to three months in federal prison after Georgia Walker and I had attempted to deliver a loaf of bread and a letter to the commander of Whiteman Air Force Base, asking him to stop his troops from piloting lethal drone flights over Afghanistan from within the base. Judge Whitworth allowed me over a month to surrender myself to prison; but whether you are a soldier or a civilian, a target or an unlucky bystander, you can’t surrender to a drone.
The Jordanian government has agreed to release a female prisoner in exchange for the freeing of an air force pilot captured by militants in Syria a month ago. The Islamic State had threatened to kill the pilot and a kidnapped Japanese journalist if the prisoner, Sajida al-Rishawi, was not released. She had been facing a death sentence for her role in a 2005 attack on three hotels in Amman that killed more than 57 people.
The U.S. reportedly killed three al Qaeda members in a drone strike Monday, the first strike on militants since Yemen’s U.S.-backed president resigned last week, according to Reuters. The strike is a sign that the U.S. air campaign in Yemen will continue without the blessing of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who was a leading U.S. partner against the militant group.
The MQ9 Reaper - now deployed 24/7 over Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere - makes killing too easy. It makes war easier to initiate and perpetuate. US drone wars are started with little or no public awareness or support - and with little apparent stake in the game. The weaponized drone cheapens honor. It cheapens life.
A young Israeli soldier, fresh from the front, bluntly recounts the orders from above. “They never said, ‘Leave no one alive,’ but they said, ‘Show no mercy,’ ” he explains. “The brigade commander said to kill as many as possible.”
Another recalls encountering Arabs on rooftops. “They’re civilians — should I kill them or not?” he asks himself. “I didn’t even think about it. Just kill! Kill everyone you see.” And a third makes it personal: “All of us — Avinoam, Zvika, Yitzhaki — we’re not murderers. In the war, we all became murderers.”
More details come in the 12th paragraph: The January 18 airstrike "killed five fighters from Hezbollah, including the son of the group’s slain military commander, Imad Mughniyeh, and an Iranian general." So that's a more serious flare-up, right? Assuming that we're not defining the seriousness of an attack based on the nationality of those killed, that is.
But the New York Times is seemingly able to forget about the Israeli attack moments after it mentions it: "The flare-up shattered a fragile calm that has mostly held along the frontier since the month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006." Mostly–aside from that Israeli airstrike that killed six people ten days ago.
People often tell reporters things their employers, or their government, want to keep suppressed. But leaking can serve the public interest, fueling revelatory and important journalism.
Back in the solidarity movements of the 1980s, activists were encouraged to apply for our FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act.
Nobody expected the FBI to tell the truth about what it had. It was intended as a protest of the FBI's spying on activists.
I applied. Eventually, I got back a letter from the FBI, saying: "We have no records responsive to your request." Everybody said, that doesn't mean anything, the FBI lies.
“The US attorney’s office thought the notice and the resulting publicity was a disaster for them,” Gidari said. The Perkins Coie partner added that federal prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office in Alexandria, Va. “went through the roof” after the name of assistant US Attorney Tracy Doherty-McCormick was published.
A spokesperson for the federal prosecutor’s office did not respond to The Post’s request for comment because the investigation of Wikileaks is ongoing, the spokesperson said. Gidari said that Google is still fighting gag orders on subpoenas “to the present.”
"US, India Move Forward on Nuclear Energy Deal" read the headline at the top of USA Today's front page (1/26/15). Moving forward–that sounds good, doesn't it? The subhead was "Obama makes progress on the 1st day of his 3-day visit"–making progress also generally being seen as a good thing.
Broadcast Networks Provided The Most Climate Coverage In Five Years. During 2014, the major broadcast networks' evening and Sunday news programs aired a total of 154 minutes of coverage of climate change. This was an increase from the previous year's 129 minutes and was significantly above the six-year average of about 108 minutes, but remained below the 205 minutes of coverage in 2009.
Syriza, a hard left party, that outrightly rejects EU-imposed austerity, has given Greek politics its greatest electoral shake-up in at least 40 years.
You might expect the man who now occupies the role of finance minister to be a radical zealot, who could throw Greece into the fire.
He is not.
Yanis Varoufakis, the man at the core of the coalition Syriza has forged, is obviously a man of the left.
Defense contractor Northrop Grumman has ended its relationship with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), thanks to shareholder engagement from the Fond du Lac, Wisconsin-based Congregation of Sisters of St. Agnes.
That's how much Charles and David Koch's political network hopes to spend on the presidential race, House and Senate contests, and other elections and policy fights in 2016. That figure is not far off from how much President Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's presidential efforts each spent in 2012. It is well over what John Kerry and George W. Bush together spent during the 2004 campaign. This fundraising target was announced Monday morning at the Koch brothers' winter retreat for members of their elite donor network.
Watchdog organizations Common Cause and the Center for Media and Democracy jointly filed a public records request today seeking details of Governor Scott Walker's trip to a secret fundraising retreat hosted by billionaire industrialist mega-donors Charles and David Koch in Palm Springs, California.
The final point, is of course, the conflation of anti-zionism with anti-Semitism. That seems to me the fundamental design of the media campaign exaggerating the scale of anti-Semitism at the moment. Yes, we must always remember the terrible warnings from history and it is right to remember those who died in the concentration camps, Jewish, Polish, Romany, Gay, Communist or any other category. But we should be aware of those who wish to manipulate the powerful emotions of horror thus evoked, for present objectives of the powerful.
Why media fall for sports industry's bogus economic claims
Last week justice ministers from across the European Union called on ISPs to conduct voluntary censorship of online content—but documents in preparation for a meeting of telecoms ministers suggest such a move could be illegal.
The documents, prepared by the Latvian presidency of the Council of the EU, note that calls to allow Internet service providers to block or filter content in the “public interest” as part of a proposed net neutrality law could violate privacy laws that protect the confidentiality of communication.
Only two weeks after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a strongly worded #JeSuisCharlie statement on the importance of free speech, Facebook has agreed to censor images of the prophet Muhammad in Turkey — including the very type of image that precipitated the Charlie Hebdo attack.
Blogs, and online political activism generally, changed all of that. Though they tried – hard – these journalists simply could not ignore the endless stream of criticisms directed at them. Everywhere they turned – their email inboxes, the comment sections to their columns, Q-and-A sessions at their public appearances, Google searches of their names, email campaigns to their editors – they were confronted for the first time with aggressive critiques, with evidence that not everyone adored them and some even held them in contempt (Chait’s bizarre belief that “PC” culture thrived in the early 1990s and then disappeared until recently is, like his whole grievance, explained by his personal experience: he heard these critiques while a student at the University of Michigan, then was shielded from all of it during most of the years he wrote at The New Republic, and now hears it again due to blogs and social media).
Although calls to ban or backdoor encryption have been made in the past, David Cameron's rather vague threats against crypto clearly mark the start of a new, concerted campaign to weaken online privacy. Thanks to a leaked paper, written by the EU Counter-Terrorism Co-ordinator and obtained by Statewatch, we now have a clear statement of what the European authorities really want here (pdf)...
A Facebook spokesperson said, “Earlier this evening many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram. This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems. We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for everyone.”
Contrary to suggestions hacker group Lizard Squad took out Facebook, there was almost certainly no attack on the social network and its photo sharing property Instagram, which both went down late last night. According to a source with knowledge of the matter, the downtime was the result of a technical foul up. Facebook is now confirming this in statements to media.
British and Canadian spy agencies accumulated sensitive data on smartphone users, including location, app preferences, and unique device identifiers, by piggybacking on ubiquitous software from advertising and analytics companies, according to a document obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The document, included in a trove of Snowden material released by Der Spiegel on January 17, outlines a secret program run by the intelligence agencies called BADASS. The German newsweekly did not write about the BADASS document, attaching it to a broader article on cyberwarfare. According to The Intercept‘s analysis of the document, intelligence agents applied BADASS software filters to streams of intercepted internet traffic, plucking from that traffic unencrypted uploads from smartphones to servers run by advertising and analytics companies.
Harper government plans to introduce new legislation increasing the powers of Canada's security agencies.
Canada’s leading surveillance agency is monitoring millions of Internet users’ file downloads in a dragnet search to identify extremists, according to top-secret documents.
The covert operation, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, taps into Internet cables and analyzes records of up to 15 million downloads daily from popular websites commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files.
It's never been clear exactly how Communications Security Establishment Canada, or CSEC does its work. What kind of information does it gather? Who does it target? CBC's Dave Seglins joins us to give us a rare glimpse into the operations of a part of the Canadian Government we know little about.
In North America, the Canadians have long had to play country mouse to the flashier city mouse of the U.S. It’s the latter that gets all the attention, while the former sits quietly in a corner.
But recent stories have shown just how big a player the Canadians are becoming—at least in the surveillance realm.
A new European commission counter-terror plan will require the blanket collection and storage for up to five years of personal data records of all passengers flying in and out of Europe, the Guardian can reveal.
Civil liberty campaigners say the revised European passenger name record plan – in the aftermath of the Paris attacks – breaches a recent European court of justice ruling that blanket collection of personal data without detailed safeguards is a severe incursion on personal privacy.
Privacy is a hot topic at the moment - it continues to dominate the headlines as news of new NSA incursions, celebrity phone hacks, and corporate breaches are being reported on an increasingly regular basis. In response to this, a number of products have been brought to market that attempt to provide consumers with a greater level of privacy than typical devices allow for. In the phone market, one of the premier products to be released in recent years is undoubtedly the BlackPhone (http://www.blackphone.ch), which has been cited numerous times in tech publications as being one of the best available defenses against mass surveillance, as it provides full end-to-end encryption facilities for voice calls and text/MMS messaging.
Several documents released by Der Spiegel and The Intercept in the last year demonstrate that the exploitation and infiltration of computers often complements the "passive" collection by providing entrance into systems and networks that would otherwise be invisible to the mass surveillance infrastructure. The separation between mass and targeted surveillance is becoming blurry as we learn of attacks against Internet Service Providers, of targeting of system administrators and systematic compromise of Internet routers.s
Earlier this month, SPIEGEL International published an article based on the trove of documents made available by whistleblower Edward Snowden describing the increasingly complex digital weapons being developed by intelligence services in the US and elsewhere. Concurrently, several documents were published as well as the source code of a sample malware program called QWERTY found in the Snowden archive.
For most readers, that source code was little more than 11 pages of impenetrable columns of seemingly random characters. But experts with the Russian IT security company Kaspersky compared the code with malware programs they have on file. What they found were clear similarities with an elaborate cyber-weapon that has been making international headlines since November of last year.
Google has fought all gag orders preventing it from telling customers that their e-mails and other data were sought by the U.S. government in a long-running investigation of the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, which published leaked diplomatic cables and military documents, an attorney representing the tech firm said this week.
A spokesman for the Justice Department claimed that the DEA’s data collection program was suspended in September 2013, has been terminated, and the data deleted. If true, that is rare good news in the field of civil liberties preservation; however, citizens should still be alert for other unconstitutional or illegal government behavior originating from bureaucratic incentives to exploit people’s excessive fear of being killed by the rare terrorist attack.
We begin at The New York Times, widely considered America’s most powerful newspaper. Its office near Manhattan’s Times Square is a symbol of the power of the influential media outlet, which often sets the political agenda and tells us what’s important.
In the context of an interview about a case in which a paid FBI informant is alleged to have offered destitute men a quarter of a million dollars to execute an attack, a former assistant director of the FBI admits it's in the bureau's best interest to inflate the supposed terror threat. That's remarkably candid, and profoundly disturbing.
Keylogging malware that may have been used by the NSA shares signficant portions of code with a component of Regin, a sophisticated platform that has been used to spy on businesses, government institutions and private individuals for years.
The keylogger program, likely part of an attack framework used by the U.S. National Security Agency and its intelligence partners, is dubbed QWERTY and was among the files that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked to journalists. It was released by German news magazine Der Spiegel on Jan. 17 along with a larger collection of secret documents about the malware capabilities of the NSA and the other Five Eyes partners—the intelligence agencies of the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Computer malware used in cyber attacks on European Commission and International Atomic Agency developed by the US National Security Agency, Germany's Spiegel magazine claims
The US National Sheriffs' Association wants Google to block its crowd-sourced traffic app Waze from being able to report the position of police officers, saying the information is putting officer's lives at risk.
"The police community needs to coordinate an effort to have the owner, Google, act like the responsible corporate citizen they have always been and remove this feature from the application even before any litigation or statutory action," AP reports Sheriff Mike Brown, the chairman of the NSA's technology committee, told the association's winter conference in Washington.
At a public event last week, Edward Snowden argued that the NSA has developed a “culture of impunity,” that its people “are not villains, but they think they can do anything because it is for a just cause.” John DeLong, an NSA Director, responded that “the idea that NSA activities were unauthorized is wrong, it’s wrong in a magnificent way.”
The Chinese government has adopted new regulations requiring companies that sell computer equipment to Chinese banks to turn over secret source code, submit to invasive audits and build so-called back doors into hardware and software, according to a copy of the rules obtained by foreign technology companies that do billions of dollars’ worth of business in China.
A federal judge ruled in 2007 that the U.S.A. Patriot Act empowered the National Security Agency to collect foreigners’ emails and phone calls from domestic networks without prior judicial approval, newly declassified documents show.
The documents — two rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — fill in a chapter in the history of the N.S.A.’s warrantless surveillance program. They show the agency’s secret moves in the months before Congress authorized the spying by enacting the Protect America Act in August 2007.
The disclosure also brought into public view a previously unknown example of how the surveillance court, which hears arguments only from the government before issuing secret rulings, sometimes accepts novel interpretations of the law to bless government requests for spying powers.
“Tor obviously was created with good intentions, but it’s a huge problem for law enforcement,” Caldwell said in comments reported by Motherboard and confirmed to me by others who attended the conference. “We understand 80 percent of traffic on the Tor network involves child pornography.”
That statistic is horrifying. It’s also baloney.
In a series of tweets that followed Caldwell’s statement, a Department of Justice flack said Caldwell was citing a University of Portsmouth study WIRED covered in December. He included a link to our story. But I made clear at the time that the study claimed 80 percent of traffic to Tor hidden services related to child pornography, not 80 percent of all Tor traffic.
That is a huge, and important, distinction. The vast majority of Tor’s users run the free anonymity software while visiting conventional websites, using it to route their traffic through encrypted hops around the globe to avoid censorship and surveillance. But Tor also allows websites to run Tor, something known as a Tor hidden service. This collection of hidden sites, which comprise what’s often referred to as the “dark web,” use Tor to obscure the physical location of the servers that run them. Visits to those dark web sites account for only 1.5 percent of all Tor traffic, according to the software’s creators at the non-profit Tor Project.
Republican Rep. Justin Amash, in reference to this story, tweeted "disqualified." His office would not clarify what the Michigan libertarian meant by the tweet.
Colorado Congressman: if Marco Rubio wants to declare permanent surveillance of Americans forever, he should be the first volunteer
Last week in Ber€lin the 2015 Sam Adams Award for Integ€rity in Intel€li€gence was presen€ted to the former Tech€nical Dir€ector of the NSA, whis€tleblower and tire€less pri€vacy advoc€ate, Wil€liam Bin€ney.
A 36-year intel€li€gence agency vet€eran, Bill Bin€ney resigned from the NSA in 2001 and became a whis€tleblower after dis€cov€er€ing that ele€ments of a data-monitoring pro€gramme he had helped develop were being used to spy on Amer€ic€ans. He explained that he “could not stay after the NSA began pur€pose€fully viol€at€ing the Constitution”.
Today—Jan. 27—marks five years since the death of the great historian and activist Howard Zinn. Not a day goes by that I don’t wonder what Howard would say about something—the growth of the climate justice movement, #BlackLivesMatter, the new Selma film, the killings at the Charlie Hebdo offices. No doubt, he would be encouraged by how many educators are engaging students in thinking critically about these and other issues.
Zinn is best known, of course, for his beloved A People’s History of the United States, arguably the most influential U.S. history textbook in print. “That book will knock you on your ass,” as Matt Damon’s character says in the film Good Will Hunting. But Zinn did not merely record history, he made it: as a professor at Spelman College in the 1950s and early 1960s, where he was ultimately fired for his outspoken support of students in the Civil Rights Movement, and specifically the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); as a critic of the U.S. war in Vietnam, and author of the first book calling for an immediate U.S. withdrawal; and as author of numerous books on war, peace, and popular struggle. Zinn was speaking and educating new generations of students and activists right up until the day he died.
Jose Castaneda, center, speaks about his cousin who was killed in an incident with Denver Police as activists Rev. Patrick Demmer, left, and Anthony Grimes lsten before heading into a meeting on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2015, with officials from the office of the Denver District Attorney. The activists are calling for a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate the fatal shooting of the 17-year-old girl who allegedly hit and injured a Denver Police Department officer while driving a stolen vehicle early Monday in a northeast Denver alleyway. Photo: David Zalubowski, AP
A now-former California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer who was charged with criminal felony charges after seizing and distributing racy photos copied from arrestees’ phones has pleaded no contest and will serve no jail time.
Sean Harrington’s plea deal, which was finalized on Tuesday, means that he receives a 180-day suspended sentence, three years of felony probation, and according to local media accounts “must also speak at a community violence solutions class to tell everyone what he did.” Harrington resigned from the CHP last year after the charges were filed.
Last month, dashcam video of a 23-year-old (Victoria) Texas cop throwing a 76-year-old man to the ground and tasing him emerged, leading to plenty of outrage across the web. The imagined "crime" was the lack of an inspection sticker on the vehicle the elderly man was driving. Of course, had the officer known the law, he would have known that inspection stickers aren't needed on vehicles with dealer plates -- something that could have been confirmed by anyone inside the car dealership where the incident occurred.
The Ecuadorian government recommended Sweden in the second cycle of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Human Rights to advance in the defense and protection of human rights, particularly in the case of Australian computer expert Julian Assange, asylee over two years in his diplomatic mission in London.
Investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler says Sterling faces decades in prison for leaking details of a botched CIA operation against Iran's nuclear program
The former chair of the Senate Intelligence committee excoriated a report on the CIA’s searches of computers used by her staff as riddled with “mistakes and omissions.”
In a statement Tuesday, Senator Dianne Feinstein rejected the CIA accountability board’s conclusions that five agency personnel shouldn’t be penalized for searching computers used by her staff to compile a scathing report on the torture of detainees.
“The bottom line is that the CIA accessed a Senate Intelligence Committee computer network without authorization, in clear violation of a signed agreement…,” said Feinstein, reiterating an assertion that the searches violated “the constitutional separation of powers between Congress and the executive branch.”
Monday’s guilty verdict in the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling on espionage charges — for talking to a newspaper reporter — is the latest milepost on the dark and dismal path Barack Obama has traveled since his inaugural promises to usher in a “new era of openness.”
Far from rejecting the authoritarian bent of his presidential predecessor, Obama has simply adjusted it, adding his own personal touches, most notably an enthusiasm for criminally prosecuting the kinds of leaks that are essential to a free press.
The Sterling case – especially in light of Obama’s complicity in the cover-up of torture during the Bush administration – sends a clear message to people in government service: You won’t get in trouble as long as you do what you’re told (even torture people). But if you talk to a reporter and tell him something we want kept secret, we will spare no effort to destroy you.
There’s really no sign any more of the former community organizer who joyously declared on his first full day in office that “there’s been too much secrecy in this city… Starting today, every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information but those who seek to make it known.”
Head of civil service questioned about delays to Chilcot inquiry and accused of letting prime minister pressurise him
Noam Chomsky discussed the film “American Sniper” at an event held by the Baffler, last week in Cambridge, Mass. The noted linguist, philosopher and political commentator discussed the film, and drew comparisons with the mentality of Chris Kyle (the American sniper whose memoirs are the basis of the film), that of drone operators, and the American public for ignoring the drone war.
“In the memoirs he describes what the experience was like, so I’ll quote him,” Chomsky said. “His first kill was a woman, who walked into the street with a grenade in her hand as the Marines attacked her village. Chris Kyle killed her with a single shot, and he explains how he felt about it.”
The swamp of moral depravity in which America is sinking is illustrated by a movie glorifying the exploits of a racist killer, American Sniper, receiving six Oscar nominations, while a movie depicting the historic struggle against racism led by Martin Luther King, Selma, has been largely overlooked.
Directed by Clint Eastwood, American Sniper tells the story of Chris Kyle, a US Navy Seal who served four tours of duty in Iraq and was credited with 160 confirmed 'kills', earning him the honour of being lauded the most lethal sniper in US military history
Say what you like about the film American Sniper, and people have, you have to admire its clarity. It’s about killing. There is no moral arc; no anguish about whether the killing is necessary or whether those who are killed are guilty of anything. “I’m prepared to meet my maker and answer for every shot I took,” says Bradley Cooper, who plays the late Chris Kyle, a navy Seal who was reputedly the deadliest sniper in American history. There is certainly no discursive quandary about whether the Iraq war, in which the killing takes place, is either legal or justified. “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis,” wrote Kyle in his memoir, where he refers to the local people as “savages”.
Ventura also dismissed the movie as propaganda because it conveys the false idea that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. "It's as authentic as 'Dirty Harry,'" he said, referring to fictional movie series starring Clint Eastwood, the director of "American Sniper."
A pro-Islam group says that Clint Eastwood’s new film “American Sniper” is partially responsible for a recent rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric online since the film premiered.
Members of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee penned a letter to director Clint Eastwood and the film’s star Bradley Cooper to express their concern that the war film has lead to an increase in threats against Muslim people.
In the letter, members of the ADC claim that the “majority of the violent threats we have seen over the past few days are result of how Arab and Muslims are depicted in American Sniper.” The organization also says they’ve collected “hundreds of violent messages targeting Arab and Muslim Americans from movie-goers” on social media since the film’s release.
It is easy to understand how these movies were denied any support from the Pentagon. Besides showing the determination of the enemy, they also showed American soldiers committing suicide, fratricide and mass killings of civilians. Aeschylus said, “In war, truth is the first casualty.”
No more drones sent to slaughter whoever happens to be the target, and then some.
For years now we’ve heard about randy grandparents getting nasty in the old folks home. Yet studies of septuagenarian sex continue to make the news as if it’s weird, shocking or gross.
It’s blatant ageism against the canasta class.
Yet another study, reported on by the Huffington Post, confirms what we already know: The elderly continue to have sex. This particular study claims significance because it’s the “first piece of research of its kind to include people over the age of 80.”
New leaks show how transatlantic regulatory bodies will undermine EU and national sovereignty