So whenever I’m told the key to Linux’s success is tied to big manufacturers offering distros on their hardware, my response is always, “You mean like Dell?”
Dell’s Precision M3800 mobile workstation launched recently, and rejoice Linux lovers! The powerful, flexible MacBook Pro competitor is also available with Ubuntu Linux thanks to Dell’s Project Sputnik endeavor.
If you’d prefer a sleeker Linux laptop, you can still pick up an XPS 13 Ultrabook with Linux, and yes, the latest, super-sleek version of the XPS 13—which PCWorld hardware editor Gordon Mah Ung called a MacBook Air killer—will get a “developer edition” with Ubuntu preinstalled soon, according to Project Sputnik lead Barton George.
Librem 15 is a new Linux-powered laptop that will ship with completely free applications, drivers, and kernel. The crowdfunding campaign for this laptop is almost over and it has been a resounding success.
European lab CERN is working to standardise 64bit Linux as the operating system for all if its control systems, according to test firm National Instruments (NI).
In a bid to break the world land speed record of 1000 miles an hour, the UK’s largest distributed general supercomputing network is challenging schools in Wales with the ultimate science project.
GitHub is a treasure trove of some of the world's best projects, built by the contributions of developers all across the globe. This simple, yet extremely powerful platform helps every individual interested in building or developing something big to contribute and get recognized in the open source community.
CoreOS has gained notoriety over the past few years as the creator of a new Linux distribution designed for massive, Google-scale server deployments. The company's star has risen along with the popularity of Linux containers -- a key component of CoreOS -- and their open source components are being widely incorporated by companies on the bleeding edge of distributed computing.
Plex Media Server is a media center application that allows users to stream video and audio content to local and remote clients, such as mobile devices or smart TVs. We now take a closer look at this powerful server and client and see what's the fuss all about.
According to the Linux Foundation, over the last year 300,000 students signed up for the free Introduction to Linux Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) created by The Linux Foundation and offered through the edX platform.
The Allseen Alliance, which is an Internet of Things (IoT) Linux Foundation Collaboration project, was launched in December of 2013. But it was missing one key element -- a definitive patent policy. Now at long last in January 2015, the AllSeen Alliance has defined a patent policy for Intellectual Property (IP), which will come into effect in April.
The libinput 0.9.0 release adds support for hovering fingers on touchpads, click methods are now configurable, and there's support for the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Broadwell model with regard to the physical buttons above the touchpad area.
For those wondering what else Kristian Høgsberg is working on in his post-Wayland days, after tackling initial Skylake enablement in Mesa his latest achievement is a new Mesa performance patch.
GCC 4.9.2 and LLVM Clang 3.5.0 were benchmarked using the packages provided on Fedora 21 x86_64. The same Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon was used for all of the benchmarks, the first Broadwell laptop/ultrabook at Phoronix and it features the Core i7 5600U that's dual-core with Hyper Threading and tops out at 3.20GHz. Fedora 21 was running with the Linux 3.17.8 kernel while testing each of the provided compilers.
The latest distribution I tried on the X1 Carbon (and the OS I'll ultimately use for running the X1 Carbon in a production capacity as my main system) is Fedora 21. Fedora 21 booted up on the X1 Carbon wonderfully without any issues aside from the trackpoint button clicks being wonky (though the button clicks in the corner of the trackpad works fine). Fedora 21 with Wayland also ran fine on this system with Intel HD Graphics 5500. Overall, it was a pleasant experience without any major problems.
Version 0.91 of Inkscape was released this week and the new version of this open-source vector-based graphics program has some exciting changes.
While working with the command line, there are times when you might want to manually send an email to communicate one-liner information
Every house needs a good speaker system, and a good speaker system is even better if it can be accessed by multiple devices over the wireless network. AirPlay uses Apple technology that was reverse-engineered in 2011, which means that third-party devices can now participate in the fun. AirPlay allows any Apple device to broadcast whatever is coming out of its speakers to an AirPlay receiver (which will be our Pi in this case). There is a way to send audio from PulseAudio to AirPlay receivers, as well as an application for Android called AirAudio. Sadly, the Android application requires root to access the audio of other applications running on the device. To keep things simple, we’re going to use an iPad as the test client.
Valve got an enormous amount of press coverage when it announced its Steam Machines. But disappointment has set in for some, while others have become disillusioned enough to write off Steam Machines altogether. TechRadar thinks that Valve's Steam Machines are alive and well.
Techland has begun their patching of Dying Light for Linux & Windows in their effort to clean up the rather botched release, and we took a look.
Dying Light is the latest FPS from Techland and it's all about zombies. The game is powered by a beautiful engine and it takes quite a toll on the system. It's still pretty buggy, but the first patch has arrived.
If you have updated to the recently released GNOME development version, you may have noticed that some window decorations look slightly different. Of course it is quite normal for the theme to evolve with the rest of GNOME, but in this case the visual changes are actually the result of some bigger changes under the hood which deserve some more explanation.
It is well-known that GTK+ gained support for client-side decorations a while ago – after all, most GNOME applications were quick in adopting custom titlebars, which have become one of the most distinguished patterns of GNOME 3 applications. However it is less well-known that client-side decorations may also be used for windows with no custom decorations, namely when using GDK’s wayland backend.
Red Hat is among the only technology vendors to offer a full family of open PaaS solutions: OpenShift Origin, the open source PaaS project; OpenShift Online, a commercial public PaaS offering; and OpenShift Enterprise, an on-premise private PaaS product. OpenShift delivers to developers a cloud application platform with a choice of programming languages, frameworks and application lifecycle tools to build and run their applications. The platform provides built-in support for Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java and the capability for developers to add their own languages. OpenShift also supports many popular frameworks, including Java EE, Spring, Play and Rails.
Version 0.9 of Corebird is now in the updates-testing repo for Fedora 21 and Rawhide.
Earlier this week, the Inkscape upstream made the final tarballs available for the long-awaited new 0.91 version of Inkscape. This version has not been announced by upstream yet, but thanks to the awesome Fedora Inkscape package maintainer Limb, this version is now available for testing on Fedora 21. Please try it out, and give karma to the package in Bodhi.
A survey by Canonical of cloud and server trends among Ubuntu Linux users shows that public clouds are declining in popularity as a result of security and privacy concerns, while private cloud adoption is on the rise.
Canonical, the company behind the open source cross-platform operating system Ubuntu, released its annual cloud and server survey this week that seeks to cast more light on the makeup of cloud infrastructure, how it is managed, and what is driving cloud adoption.
Canonical is out with findings from its sixth annual Ubuntu Server and Cloud Survey, which went out to respondents at the end of 2014. The survey aims to provide an overview of the enterprise cloud market, including emerging and changing trends, current challenges and technology preferences. It also tracks the adoption of OpenStack and Ubuntu as well as public cloud usage.
In Canonical's sixth annual Ubuntu Server and Cloud Survey, the company found -- no surprise -- that the enterprise is rapidly adopting the cloud. Further, the cloud is moving from "mostly development and testing to more production-grade workloads".
What kind of cloud? It's still heavily weighted to private clouds, which has 35 percent of users. The most popular platform for private cloud is OpenStack, which is used by 53 percent of users. At the same time, hybrid clouds are on the rise, at 20 percent, up from 15 percent last year. Indeed, the survey found that hybrid clouds are now almost as popular as public cloud, which is at 23 percent.
Bill Gates is much more involved in philanthropy than Microsoft these days and he's done some great work regarding the eradications of certain diseases and to improve the quality of life in a number of third world countries. He's also inadvertently promoted Ubuntu, which is a Linux system.
Ubuntu Touch is almost ready, but some of the core apps are still updated. The camera app recently received an upgrade and numerous features have been added.
The system can be controlled using an Android app.
Another beautiful board is coming to kickstarter: it’s tiny and powerful. Black Swift runs on OpenWRT Linux, and it can be programmed in a bunch of languages, ranging from C/C++ to PHP, Python, Perl, and Bash scripting (there’s also a Node.js port).
Finnish startup Jolla is looking to crowdsource a new 64GB version of its tablet on Indiegogo, following the original campaign a few months ago.
For those unfamiliar with this project, Jolla aims to bring a new platform to the market with its tablet, which runs a Linux-based operating system called Sailfish OS.
Finnish mobile startup Jolla has announced a fresh crowdfunding campaign, returning to Indiegogo to offer a new 64GB version of its Sailfish OS tablet.
Jolla initially took to Indiegogo earlier this year, seeking funds to allow it to build its first tablet. The company went on to raise $300,000 over its original $1.5m target, enabling it to start manufacturing the 32GB slate and hitting its stretch goal of offering the device with microSD card support up to 128GB.
OnePlus introduced its own version of Android for its One smartphone earlier this month in response to its standoff with Cyanogen, and now the company has revealed that it will unveil its own ROM which can be installed on third-party Android devices on February 12.
Correction: OnePlus tells us that, in fact, it won’t launch the ROM on the 12th. This is a tease-of-a-tease, and instead we can expect to see “more information about the ROM” not an actual download for third-party Android devices.
Cyanogen is one of these forks. It has just raised $70 million from a number of investors including Microsoft to continue producing its own version of Android that it can position as a direct competitor to Google's.
You might want to think twice before sending that sensitive text message over your supposedly secure Blackphone. A security flaw discovered by an Australian communication security expert could have allowed attackers to decrypt a Blackphone user’s messages, gather location information, and run additional code of the attacker’s choosing.
A smartphone marketed as the most anti-surveillance, NSA-proof personal device – the BlackPhone – has been found vulnerable to a simple SMS attack that allows the hacker to steal contacts, decrypt messages, and even take full control of the device.
In Oct. 2013 when Google's Motorola subsidiary announced Project Ara, for building an open source, modular smartphone, the consensus was that it would fail on both the technical and business levels. Today, however, the odds have tilted in the project's favor.
Google sold Motorola to Lenovo, but retained the Advanced Research and Projects (ATAP) R&D group that runs the project. ATAP recently showed off a second generation prototype of the Ara phone, and earlier this month, Google announced plans to launch a 2015 pilot program in Puerto Rico. Project Ara has also recently attracted some interesting technology partners, including battery maker SolidEnergy, audio experts Sennheiser, and health accessory designer Lapka.
I have been working in the computer business for over 40 years, but the best years have been the last 17 or so working with Linux and open source software. I got into the computer business unintentionally and kind of sideways, but that is a whole other story. I'll tell you about how I got into open source and Linux semi-intentionally and also kind of sideways.
Sphinx is a free, open source project written in Python and, not surprisingly, is really well suited for documenting Python projects. Now, before you harrumph “Meh, I code in which isn’t at all like Python!” be aware that Sphinx supports several other languages (C and C++ support is in development).
The Tor anonymity network has increased with 12 more middle relay nodes that can distribute user traffic, courtesy of Mozilla as part of the Polaris Privacy Initiative started in November 2014.
One of the most interesting trends in the computer world during the past few years has been the rapid growth of NoSQL databases. The term may be accurate, in that NoSQL databases don't use SQL in order to store and retrieve data, but that's about where the commonalities end. NoSQL databases range from key-value stores to columnar databases to document databases to graph databases.
The Document Foundation today announced the latest and "most beautiful" LibreOffice ever. LibreOffice 4.4 is the ninth major release for the project and brings with it lots of design and functionality improvements. Redesigned toolbars, menus, status bars, rulers and new theme selector are among the goodies for users. Michael Meeks said today that this release not only improves the visible features but also the foundations underneath.
The Document Foundation is pleased to announce LibreOffice 4.4, the ninth major release of the free office suite, with a significant number of design and user experience improvements.
You can find out what's new, from the technical viewpoint, about this suite here . Let's see...it comes with a nice sidebar...it has better OOXML support (I don't care about that as I use ODF), and it even added textboxes. Well, texboxes are something I never needed and I actually find them annoying, but others may think they're handy... Still, I am more interested in knowing if this new release could meet my needs.
Today we release LibreOffice 4.4.0, packed with a load of new features for people to enjoy - you can read and enjoy all the great news about the user visible features from so many great hackers, but there are, as always, many contributors whose work is primarily behind the scenes in places that are not so easy to see. That work is, of course, still vitally important to the project. It can be hard to extract those from the over eleven thousand commits since LibreOffice 4.3 was branched, so let me expand:
LibreOffice and open source office suit released LibreOffice 4.4 that is said to have the most beautiful changes ever. LibreOffice is a must app that has lots of features that makes office work in Linux easier. Let's see the new features and how we can Install/Upgrade to LibreOffice 4.4 in Ubuntu Vivid Vervet, Trusty Tahr etc. and Linux Mint Rebecca, Qiana etc.
LibreOffice (aka LO) is among the best and the most used free (of cost) and open source office suites. The just-announced, brand new version 4.4 boasts some new features and a much needed design overhaul.
A new version of open-source office suite LibreOffice is now available for download and the hands behind it are calling it ‘the most beautiful’ release ever.
The Document foundation announced availability of the latest version of LibreOffice on Thursday, which it says is the most beautiful version of the open source productivity suite yet. LibreOffice 4.4 also fixes some compatibility issues with files that are saved in Microsoft's OOXML formats.
LibreOffice 4.4 is now available as the newest version of this leading open-source, cross-platform office suite.
It's been a long time since last hearing of any major innovations or improvements to VirtualBox, the VM software managed by Oracle since their acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Is there any hope left for a revitalized VirtualBox?
Back when DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 file-system development began being publicized, it was believed it wasn't going to be ready until at least 2013. Fast forward two years, HAMMER2 isn't yet used by default on this BSD operating system and it's still being actively developed.
PfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD that has been built to be used as a firewall and router. A new iteration has been released and the distro now sports the 2.2 version number.
Back in 2013 the Free Software Foundation endorsed its first laptop as respecting the user's freedoms. Being announced today is another laptop now being endorsed by the FSF.
A new minor release of littler is available now.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has implemented a private cloud infrastructure to offer IT services to its user communities. The datacentre in Frascati, Italy, is already operational, while a second datacentre in Darmstadt, Germany, has just been completed.
You might have noticed that a new Apple product launched recently. I’m not going to name it here, because the presstitutes have already flooded the Web with coverage of it to the point where people are suffering from the-Apple-device-that-must-not-be-named fatigue.
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I decided recently to see what the modern Web was like without Flash, so I uninstalled it from one of my systems.
The first thing I noticed was that the Flash ads were gone. I still saw ads on Web pages I visited, but without most of the irritating animation. (Some pages used animated GIFs, but there were a lot fewer of those.) This meant that I also missed out on some parts of Web sites that used Flash—things like interactive slide shows and games weren’t viewable in my browser.
The death toll from the crash of a Greek F-16 at a Spanish military base rose to 11 after one of the French airmen who suffered serious burns died at a Madrid hospital.
The death came as Spanish investigators were trying to determine what caused the jet to lose thrust as it took off and crash into five parked planes at the Los Llanos air base in south eastern Spain.
The crash triggered a series of explosions and a fire that took about an hour to put out.
Two pilots aboard the Greek F-16 were killed along with eight French air force members on the ground and the French airman who died on Tuesday.
Eleven Italians and nine French were injured. Three French jets and two Italian jets were damaged.
Millions of genetically modified mosquitoes could be released in the Florida Keys if British researchers win approval to use the bugs against two extremely painful viral diseases.
Details about a GLIBC vulnerability were published a couple of days ago by a company called Qualys, and the distributions using it have already received patches. Now, it seems that Google knew about this problem, patched it in ChromeOS a year ago, and forgot to say anything to anyone.
A new security hole has been found (and patched) on Linux systems. Jack Wallen uses this example as yet more proof the open-source community exemplifies how patching should be done.
That’s an important distinction because, as American Sniper continues t obreak box office records, many of its fans are having trouble separating the flesh-and-blood human being from his celluloid counterpart. This was perhaps best embodied by Kid Rock’s response to the public criticisms of the film made by Seth Rogen and Michael Moore on Twitter. “F*** you Michael Moore, you’re a piece of s*** and your uncle would be ashamed of you,” he wrote. “Seth Rogen, your uncle probably molested you. I hope both of you catch a fist to the face soon. God bless you, Chris Kyle. Thank you for your service.”
The United States has spent about $65 billion to build Afghanistan’s army and police forces, and until this month the American-led coalition regularly shared details on how the money was being put to use and on the Afghan forces’ progress.
But as of this month, ask a question as seemingly straightforward as the number of Afghan soldiers and police officers in uniform, and the military coalition offers a singularly unrevealing answer: The information is now considered classified.
The top U.S. general in Afghanistan is increasingly classifying information about the Afghan military and police that had previously been released, an “unprecedented” decision that keeps it from the American public, according to a new watchdog report.
Jordan has threatened to fast-track the execution of a would-be suicide bomber the Islamic State...
Two IDF soldiers were killed and seven others were wounded in the Wednesday attack, when Hezbollah launched an anti-tank missile at an IDF convoy traveling near the Israe-Lebanon border. The IDF responded to the attack with heavy artillery fire, which killed a Spanish UNIFIL peacekeeper.
Malaysian terrorist Zulkifli bin Hir alias "Marwan" may be dead, but the government still has a huge task ahead: To locate the whereabouts of some 300 bomb makers he trained in Central Mindanao over the past two years.
The deadly clash in southern province of Maguindanao between government forces and Muslim rebels could derail the passage of Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL).
A series of clashes occurred in the early hours yesterday in Mamasapano town between the Special Action Force of the Philippines National Police (PNP) and the alleged members of the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
A confirmed US drone strike that hit Yemen in the midst of one of the country’s worst ever crises this week means at least 424 people, including eight children, have now been killed in such missions since the start of operations in 2002, Bureau research shows.
Monday’s attack south of Yemen’s capital Sanaa was ordered by the CIA and killed three people, one of whom was reported to be a child aged between 12 and 15.
The United States is facing increasing difficulty acquiring intelligence needed to run its stealth drone program in Yemen, undermining a campaign against the most lethal branch of al Qaeda after Houthi rebels seized control of parts of the country’s security apparatus, U.S. officials say.
Gaps in on-the-ground intelligence could slow America's fight against a resurgent al Qaeda in Yemen and heighten the risk of errant strikes that kill the wrong people and stoke anti-U.S. sentiment, potentially making the militants even stronger in areas where al Qaeda is already growing.
As the new year unfolds, the Western and Muslim worlds are now subject to the renewed hysteria over Salafist Islamists who have assassinated the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in their offices, and others have been killed, arrested and accused of impending operations in Belgium and Cueta (a Spanish colony on the Mediterranean coast, in Morocco). The wars in Syria and Iraq are said to have spread to new front lines in Europe (according to Jim Sciutto, of CNN), xenophobes rally in Dresden and Leipzig, and counter-terrorism ideologues claim new urgency and relevance. The public is being warned of the increasing need for vigilance, border control, and law and order across the West, as the freedom of speech and public safety is declared to be yet again under threat by heavily armed and professionally trained “religious fanatics”and “extremists”of radical Islam. As the Arab Rebellions continue to unravel a century of Western designs on the region, dangerous women, hidden by their notorious veils (hijab, niqab, chador, burqa, et al) are thought to mysteriously slip through dragnets and across borders to plot and finance further attacks! Gaza has been wrecked and Iraq remains a smoldering ruin, but the adolescent proclivity to insult the religious and engineer hyper-security for shopping must be our abiding preoccupations!
That’s the name given to the operational plan to arrest or “neutralize” (meaning, kill) Malaysian Zulkifli bir Hir, alias Marwan – for whose capture, dead or alive, the US government had offered a $6-million reward, he being in its list of “most wanted terrorists.”
The covert operation, carried out at dawn last Sunday in Mamasapano, Maguindanao by the US-trained PNP Special Action Force, reportedly succeeded in killing Marwan. But it tragically ended up with 44 SAF officers and men dead in firefights with forces of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters.
Something went terribly wrong in the execution of the operation, although there was plenty of time to prepare, if the latest reported details prove to be true. Who botched it?
The device was triggered remotely from Tel Aviv by agents with Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, who were in communication with the operatives on the ground in Damascus. “The way it was set up, the U.S. could object and call it off, but it could not execute,” said a former U.S. intelligence official.
For many in the Middle East collaboration with America is a betrayal. And their presence spawns more terrorists than the drones can kill.
Czech president compares current crisis with Islamic State to lack of resistance to the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936
One of the hostages held during a siege at an Australian cafe last month was killed by a ricochet of at least one police bullet that also injured three other hostages, an inquest into the deaths was told on Thursday.
Jeremy Gormly, counsel assisting the New South Wales state coroner, said lawyer Katrina Dawson, 38, was hit by six fragments of a police bullet, or bullets, with one striking a major blood vessel.
We resist the power of fear partly by acknowledging our own vulnerability and reaching out to victims. Instead of building more walls along the Rio Grande, we can use our resources to combat the poverty, injustice and violence that send desperate people away from their homes and across our borders. The money we spend to operate drones would be more likely to diminish fear if we used it instead to help care for the millions of people displaced and impoverished by hatred and violence in Syria and Iraq.
Mr. Bryant worked on U.S. military bases in Nevada and New Mexico. From those bases, he remotely controlled drones that flew over the skies of Iraq and Afghanistan approximately 10,000 kilometers away. He worked over 10 hours every day and accumulated a total flight time of over 6,000 hours. Mr. Bryant also participated in about 4,300 missions ranging from surveying objective points or specified personnel, escorting U.S. convoys from above, and additionally assisting forces on the ground and conducting actual strikes. He mentions the number of targets he hit with a direct missile attack is 13 and that the total number of people killed in the missions that he participated in is 1,626.
Schoolboy Mohammed Taeiman died this week on a remote Yemeni road, a casualty of a U.S. drone campaign against the local branch of al Qaeda that seems to be sliding into disarray.
The sixth-grader's death as he returned home with a family friend aroused the kind of anger that has long helped Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to recruit fighters.
A US drone strike targeting al-Qaeda fighters in Yemen on Monday killed a 12-year-old boy, whose father and 14-year-old brother were killed in a previous American aerial attack.
As this Reuters graphic shows, according to data compiled by the New America Foundation, drone and cruise missiles have been a part of the global anti-militant campaign since 2002, with 396 total strikes taking place in Pakistan and 118 occurring in Yemen. The frequency of strikes increased in late 2008, and then rose substantially once President Obama took office, peaking in 2010, when they killed at least 609 in Pakistan. Since then the frequency has somewhat abated, and the majority of monthly strikes have shifted to targets in Yemen. Drones killed 411 Yemenis in 2012, the worst year for deaths in that country.
A U.S drone strike this week that killed two suspected Al Qaeda militants also led to the death of a sixth-grade boy whose brother and father were killed by drone strikes in 2011, according to Yemeni officials and a human rights group.
Since officials can’t tell the different between a 12-year-old student and “al-Qaeda,” that’s an understatement, and they are trying to blame this on the recent Houthi takeover in Sanaa.
A young Chris is told by his father, “You got a gift. You gonna make a fine hunter some day.” Indeed. In 1999, Kyle joined the US Navy and became a Navy Seal, hunting Arabs, Muslim men, women, and children. He loved his work. And so many Americans love that he loved it. You know the story. A gun culture. Testosterone. Nationalism.
If you've followed the trials of James Risen and Jeffrey Sterling, or read Risen's book State of War, you are aware that the CIA gave Iran blueprints and a diagram and a parts list for the key component of a nuclear bomb.
The CIA then proposed to do exactly the same for Iraq, using the same former Russian scientist to make the delivery. How do I know this? Well, Marcy Wheeler has kindly put all the evidence from the Sterling trial online, including this cable.
The spokesperson for Eastern District of Virginia has confirmed that the United States Justice Department’s investigation into WikiLeaks continues. The confirmation came when asked to comment on search warrants that were served against Google for data associated with three of the media organization’s staff members. And, in an interview for The Washington Post, a lawyer for Google explained that the company had fought the gag orders, which prohibited them from informing WikiLeaks staff about the search warrants.
Sarah Harrison, investigations editor, Kristin Hrafnsson, spokesperson and Joseph Farrell, section editor, each had search warrants served against them in March 2012.
WikiLeaks is demanding answers after it was notified by Google that it handed over staff emails to the FBI almost three years after it was served with search and seizure warrants. But Google says it fought the gag orders throughout this time.
The scope of the state secrets privilege is again a matter of contention, as government attorneys in an ongoing lawsuit told a judge last week that he had construed the privilege too narrowly.
Is the state secrets privilege applicable only to discrete items of evidence whose disclosure can be shown to harm the Nation? Or can the privilege be invoked more broadly based on the “context” in which litigation occurs? The proper parameters of the state secrets privilege have never been defined in statute, and so these questions recur.
In a pending lawsuit concerning the constitutionality of the “no fly” list (Gulet Mohamed v. Eric Holder), the presiding judge has taken a distinctly skeptical view of the government’s use of the state secrets privilege.
The writer of the BBC's new comedy inspired by Julian Assange once called for the police to publicly shoot the Wikileaks founder in the head.
Supporters of Assange say tweets Thom Phipps posted about him were 'shocking' and 'dangerous' – and make him unfit to write about the issue.
Coral reefs cover just 0.1 percent of the ocean floor, but provide habitat to 25 percent of sea-dwelling fish species. That's why coral scientist C. Mark Eakin, who coordinates the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch program, is surprised that the warning he has been sounding since last year (PDF)—that the globe's reefs appear to be on the verge of a mass-scale bleaching event—hasn't drawn more media attention.
Pelosi insisted that Obama drop the plan, scuttling what had been quickly labeled a disastrous policy that would hurt the middle class.
It’s unanimous! The European Central Bank confirms that the only possible solution to falling wages and depressed spending is to throw more money at the banks and inflate another stock-market bubble.
The ECB thus joins the world’s other most important central banks in the hope that “quantitative easing” — a form of “trickle-down” economics — will somehow work despite having never achieved anything other than the inflation of asset bubbles, a benefit primarily to the one percent. Then again, perhaps that might explain it.
In October of 2014, former Democratic Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle and his wife sold their seven-bedroom, seven-bathroom house on Foxhall Road for $3.25 million.
It was not an unusually large haul for a member of Washington’s political elite, but it was a big step up from his financial circumstances in 2003. Daschle’s financial disclosure form—filed a year before he lost a race to John Thune, marking the first time in more than half a century that a Senate party leader failed to win reelection—showed his net worth to be between $400,000 and $1.2 million. It was a pitiful amount by congressional standards and led CNN to disparage him as a senator of “modest means.”
After leaving office, however, Daschle immediately began making millions by advising corporations. During the two years prior to his failed nomination to head Health and Human Services he netted $5.2 million, mostly from healthcare, energy, private equity and telecommunications companies. That included big compensation for speaking appearances (he is, according to his speakers’ bureau profile, “a tireless fighter for the common man”) and for authoring such works as, Getting It Done: How Obama and Congress Finally Broke the Stalemate to Make Way for Health Care Reform, which was subsequently found to induce narcolepsy in laboratory rats.
In a photograph of the Jan. 18, 1983 meeting, Cohn is shown standing and leaning toward Reagan who is seated next to Murdoch. Following that meeting, Murdoch became involved in a privately funded propaganda project to help sell Reagan’s hard-line Central American policies, according to other documents. That PR operation was overseen by senior CIA propaganda specialist Walter Raymond Jr. and CIA Director William Casey, but the details of Murdoch’s role remain sketchy partly because some of the records are still classified more than three decades later.
FRENCH PRESIDENT François Hollande rather fancies the idea of making companies like Google and Facebook culpable, at least in part, for the offensive hate chat that some of their users post.
Last week 21WIRE reported on Facebook’s new communitarian policy whereby readers can ‘flag’ content as “fake news” if they believe it’s not real, or if they do not like it. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo False Flag event, the social media giant appears to be now allowing governments to determine what is ‘good free speech’ and what is not. Is it censorship? You decide…
CIA took steps to prevent anti-American tirades from Chinese Communist officials from being heard in America.
In our age of careerism, it’s rare for high-ranking officials to sacrifice their powerful posts for principle, but that was what NSA’s William Binney and the late U.S. Ambassador Robert White did. Their sacrifices and integrity were honored by likeminded former government officials, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern describes.
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As a CIA analyst, MacMichael encountered similar attempts to conceal human rights crimes by U.S.-backed forces in Central America, an early example of the “politicized” intelligence pushed by Reagan’s CIA Director William Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates. MacMichael quit his senior CIA position and testified at The Hague to the truth about the Reagan administration’s secret war to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
More open-source initatives are working towards an encrypted future than ever before. This is a good thing! This shows a stronger level of interest and activity anyone would have expected prior to June 2013.
Last year, the Chinese government started laying out new rules for technology products used by government agencies and banks, in part as a response to revelations about the National Security Agency’s exploitation of Chinese networks. Now, new rules for selling products to China’s financial sector have drawn a protest from North American and European technology vendors because of how intrusive they are—including demands for back-doors into hardware and complete source code.
The financial reports also tell us how much each person on Facebook is worth to the company, which varies by country.
A user in the US or Canada was worth $9 in the final quarter of 2014, but Europeans were only worth $3.45 and users in Asia-Pacific $1.27. Users in the rest of the world including Africa and Latin America – which is the big potential growth area – were only worth 94 cents.
Of course, as advertising revenue grows, each person outside the US might be worth more, though users themselves are unlikely to benefit: the time has not yet come when they can cash out their work to Facebook.
Another day, another shameless exploitation of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. We've just reported on an EU call for Internet companies to hand over their crypto keys; now the European Commission is trying to push through a requirement for wide-ranging information about everyone flying in and out of Europe to be collected and stored for years.
The FBI, along with seemingly every law enforcement agency in the country, wants a backdoor into every new, encrypted-by-default cellphone, arguing that without this, the "bad guys" will win the "tech arms race." The DOJ cited this same "arms race" in its (losing) argument against a warrant requirement for cellphone searches. To hear law enforcement tell it, today's criminals are racing far ahead of today's under-equipped cops, who are stymied by their billions of federal drug-chasing dollars, automatic license plate readers, warrantless GPS tracking, building interior-scanning radar devices and cell tower spoofers.
Although there is a clear protectionist element to many of these, as well as a desire to take a look at Western source code, the boldest demands -- those for backdoors and encryption keys -- are identical to what the US and EU are implicitly calling for. And so, once again, there is no way for the West to claim the moral high ground here, which inevitably undermines any protestations it might make about China's decision to follow its example.
The presidential advisory board on privacy that recommended a slew of domestic surveillance reforms in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations reported today that many of its suggestions have been agreed to “in principle” by the Obama administration, but in practice, very little has changed.
Most notably, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board called attention to the obvious fact that one full year after it concluded that the government’s bulk collection of metadata on domestic telephone calls is illegal and unproductive, the program continues apace.
“The Administration accepted our recommendation in principle. However, it has not ended the bulk telephone records program on its own, opting instead to seek legislation to create an alternative to the existing program,” the report notes.
One of the more controversial issues during the Obama administration has been the National Security Agency (NSA) and its handling of domestic spying. While many Republicans have been in an agreement with the president, other members of Congress from both parties aren't too happy.
The recent terrorist attack on the office of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo generated a now-familiar meme: Another terrorist attack means we need more surveillance.
INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain 'information superiority.'
By utilizing numerous servers NSA maintains worldwide, the agency keeps track of botnets comprising innumerable contaminated PCs. When required, it resorts to those botnets' features for injecting more malware created at NSA into the already-hijacked PCs via certain methodology codenamed Quantumbot, published Der Spiegel a news magazine in Germany.
A confidential document, which Edward Snowden an erstwhile contractor of NSA exposed as also which Der Spiegel published, has a thorough description of stealthy software from NSA known as DEFIANTWARRIOR which's utilized for compromising botnet PCs that are then utilized as "throw-away computer network attack (CAN) source points of non-attributable nature" and "all-encompassing vantage points for network analysis."
A government-appointed group of privacy watchdogs is again calling on President Barack Obama to end the National Security Agency’s domestic phone data collection, in a reminder that it views the spying program as illegal and ineffective at stopping terrorism.
Review group says Obama can stop NSA phone surveillance 'at any time'ââ¬â¹A review group assembled by the White House to recommend changes concerning the United States’ intelligence gathering operations is calling out the Obama administration for not yet halting the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records.
White House could take action ‘at any time’, says Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board chair as key Patriot Act measure is poised to expire
Kaspersky Lab researchers analyzed source code released via Snowden documents and found 'solid proof' that links the QWERTY keylogger plugin to the Regin cyber-attack platform used by the NSA for espionage.
The case was filed back in 2011, demanding disclosure of information on secret interpretations, using the Freedom of Information Act as its basis in the argument.
With Congress unable to curtail the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance programs, privacy-minded lawmakers in eight states are pushing bills they hope will either boot NSA facilities or ban the agency from setting up shop.
With federal reform elusive, state lawmakers and activists resume back-up plan to shut down mass surveillance.
Deutsche Telekom is stepping up data protection on its networks to soothe Germans spooked by international surveillance.
Germany’s leading telecommunications group said this week it keeps domestic Internet traffic within the country and sources key equipment from at least two suppliers.
Attentive viewers will also notice that at the beginning of the speech he treats the NSA's dragnet surveillance on millions of innocent Americans as a response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks—whereas near the end of the speech, he characterizes such practices as a pragmatic, pre-9/11 response to technological trends. To me, the distinction hardly matters. As I see it, the Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, and mass surveillance always qualifies. I'd argue that this makes my Constitution more resilient to terrorism than his.
You may have heard that the Patriot Act is set to expire soon. That’s not quite the case. The Patriot Act was a large bill, as were the reauthorizations that followed in 2005 and 2006. Not all of it sunsets. But three provisions do expire on June 1st: Section 215, the "Lone Wolf provision," and the "roving wiretap" provision.
The Justice Department has dropped its bid to keep secret a legal analysis of how the Patriot Act justifies law enforcement and intelligence access to census records, watchdog group EFF said Thursday.
The U.K. telecommunications regulator Ofcom has called for international industry standards on privacy in the internet of things.
On Tuesday the regulator published an outline of its approach to the developing internet of things, largely based on responses to a call for input that it made last year. It noted that “stakeholders” had identified data privacy and consumer literacy as their primary areas of concern.
With increasing concerns about government access to user data, tech companies try to appease us with reports on how frequently they’re asked to turn over information on users. Dropbox today released its own semiannual transparency report.
Whistleblowers from the US and the EU recounted the problems they faced in trying to expose what they believed to be wrongdoing in the organisations they worked for, testifying this week at a hearing of PACE’s Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee.
Jesselyn Radack, an attorney and former ethics adviser to the US Department of Justice who revealed ethics violations in the FBI’s interrogation of John Walker Lindh, known as the “American Taliban”, told parliamentarians via video-link of her experience of being prosecuted for revealing state secrets. “A law meant for spies is being used against whistleblowers. No distinction is made between selling secrets to our enemies and revealing public interest information.”
She also communicated a statement to the hearing from former CIA agent John Kiriakou, who is currently in prison in the US after a conviction for revealing state secrets.
Maria Bamieh, a British former prosecutor at EULEX, the EU’s Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo, went public after she felt that her evidence of possible corruption in the mission was not being properly investigated internally. “I have no problem with abiding by secrecy laws for genuine national security reasons, but I have a problem when they are used to cover up crimes,” she told the hearing.
Millions of pictures, videos, and other files downloaded online globally are being watched by Canada's electronic spy agency CSE, says the latest mass surveillance report based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE), an equivalent to the US National Security Agency (NSA), focuses on electronic surveillance. It can access data from over 100 global free upload sites, monitoring downloaded content in countries across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and North America, suggests a covert operation revealed by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept journalist Glen Greenwald.
Fans of The Simpsons might recall an episode entitled Mr Spritz Goes to Washington. Krusty the Clown gets elected to Congress and the family receives an education in the activities required to get things done in the political capital. Against the ever-decent Lisa’s better judgement, they surreptitiously attach a change to air traffic control law to a bill giving US flags to orphans. The provisions get passed, thereby curing the Simpsons’ recent air traffic noise pollution problem created by Mayor Quimby.
“Waterboarding is torture. . . . And thus, illegal,” Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch said during her confirmation hearing Wednesday.
Lynch is not the first AG nominee to definitively label waterboarding as such; Eric Holder made the same declaration during his 2009 appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
[...]
In the days after the Senate torture report was released, John Yoo, the architect of the original Department of Justice memos, said that the report indicated some of the CIA officers involved went beyond the strict guidance they were given and engaged in acts that “were not approved by the Justice Department at the time.” However, as the dust has settled from the report’s release, a closer, detailed reading of the report makes clear that the program’s legality was undermined because of how the agency misled the Justice Department lawyers looking over their shoulders.
The public defender, Jami Tillotson, was charged with the one-size-fits-all-who-give-us-any-lip crime of "resisting arrest." This charge doesn't work the way people expect it would, much to their anger, dismay and surprise. One would think that the police would need to be arresting you for a different crime and, after encountering some resistance, add "resisting arrest" to the charges. But no, apparently "resisting arrest" simply means not doing what cops say to do, no matter the legality of the request.
Police officials in the southern French city of Nice questioned an 8-year-old boy who is believed to have made comments in school defending the gunmen who killed 17 people in terrorist attacks in and near Paris this month, a senior regional police official confirmed on Thursday.
The questioning of the boy, which occurred Wednesday, grabbed headlines across the country and spurred a debate on social media and elsewhere about whether France’s desire to combat terrorism was tipping over into hysteria. Since the attacks, France has moved to enforce tough new laws against the incitement of terrorism, fueling tensions between free speech and public order.
A Georgia state senator has announced a bill to limit the use of no-knock warrants. These warrants have gone from the exception to the rule over the past several years, as our nation's drug warriors apparently labor under the assumption that drug dealers keep banker's hours.
Of course, no-knock raids have resulted in plenty of collateral damage -- both to cops and civilians -- as the element of surprise tends to be bullet-and-flashbang heavy. It's the use of flashbang grenades that has prompted this new legislation, which unfortunately puts it into the category of "Laws Named After Victims," most of which are written badly and hastily.
But the government failed to produce any proof that Sterling talked with Risen about the Iran operation, Lang and other close observers of his trial have noted. Prosecutors could show only that Risen and Sterling, an African-American, talked and traded emails after an appeals court rejected a race discrimination suit by Sterling against the CIA in 2005.
I would champion human rights at home and abroad. The prohibition of torture and inhuman treatment, the right to free speech and peaceful protest, equality before the law, the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial – these are not alien to British values and constitutional traditions. They go to the heart of what it means to call Britain a free society.
So I would strengthen, not scrap, the Human Rights Act and support, not withdraw from, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The Act has brought very real benefits to people living in Britain: preventing the separation of elderly couples, securing accommodation for survivors of domestic violence, and tackling discrimination against the homeless.
The ECHR - which British lawyers helped create - has greatly advanced human rights across Europe: helping to end torture in custody, promoting equal treatment for women and for gays and lesbians, ending corporal punishment in schools and protecting press freedom. The suggestion that Britain should ignore rulings from the Court that it doesn’t like would gravely damage the institution and set a dreadful precedent for abusive governments elsewhere in Europe, for example in Russia and Turkey.
VICE News FOIA'd the first disclosure by the US government that force-feeding war-on-terror detainees who are capable of making informed decisions about their own health is a violation of medical ethics and international law.
A two-page document recently obtained by VICE News contains the first disclosure by the US military that force-feeding people who are capable of making informed decisions about their own health is a violation of medical ethics and international law.
In Killing Hope, William Blum aims to provide a comprehensive account of America’s covert and overt military actions in the world, all the way from China in the 1940s to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and – in this updated edition – beyond. Julia Muravska is disappointed by some shallow characterizations and concludes that academic readers may not be satisfied by Blum’s analysis.
CIA terror suspects were interrogated on the British overseas territory of Diego Garcia, an official in the Bush administration claimed yesterday.
Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was US secretary of state , said that the island was used for “nefarious activities” after 9/11 when other sites were too full or insecure.
The CIA used a remote British island to interrogate terror suspects for weeks at a time, it has been claimed.
A former aide to the Bush administration claims Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean was used as a transit site and as a site for interrogations.
The island - which is nearly 1,800km to the south of India, was used by the CIA to carry out "nefarious activities", Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's ex-chief of staff, claimed.
Terror suspects held by the CIA were interrogated on the Britishââ¬âowned island of Diego Garcia despite the repeated denials of London and Washington that any such incidents took place, a senior American official said today.
The UK government is facing renewed pressure to make a full disclosure of its involvement in the CIA’s post-9/11 kidnap and torture programme after another leading Bush-era US official said suspects were held and interrogated on the British territory of Diego Garcia.
Interrogations of US prisoners took place at a CIA black site on the British overseas territory of Diego Garcia, a senior Bush administration official has told VICE News.
The island was used as a "transit location" for the US government's "nefarious activities" post-9/11 when other places were too full, dangerous, insecure, or unavailable, according to Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff.
Apparently, even ‘tourism’ related purposes are not permitted. Obviously, none of this makes a part of their official press release; they wouldn’t want bad press attention for this racist policy, now would they? This brings me to the purpose of my blog today.
Now we finally come to the real agenda of the vaccine industry. After vaccines have been repeatedly documented by the Natural News Lab to contain neurotoxic chemicals such as mercury, formaldehyde and MSG; after vaccine shots have been repeatedly shown to kill people who take them; and after flu shots have been exhaustively shown to be based on no science whatsoever -- with vaccine manufacturers openly admitting there are no clinical trials to show they even work -- the rabid vaccine pushers are unveiling their end game: throw vaccine resistors in prison.
A secret UK-Libyan rendition programme in which two Libyan opposition leaders were kidnapped and flown to Tripoli along with their families had the effect of strengthening al-Qaida, according to an assessment by the UK security service, MI5.
Prior to their kidnap, Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi had ensured that their organisation, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), focused on the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi, the classified assessment says. Once handed over to the Gaddafi regime, their places at the head of the LIFG were taken by others who wanted to bring the group closer to al-Qaida.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered stays of three Oklahoma executions as it considers a case challenging the state’s current lethal injection regimen.
David Cameron’s government only a week ago raised its voice to slightly above its customary whisper to condemn Saudi Arabia’s public flogging of a liberal writer, Raif Badawi.
The Bureau has constructed a timeline showing all the people in charge of US national defence and intelligence agencies during the years from 2002 to 2007, the period when the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme was operating.
The interactive timeline also includes the changes in leadership and the people at the top of the CIA (formerly Central Intelligence), Defense Intelligence Agency, Secretary of State, National Counterterrorism Center, and the Senate intelligence committee.
Kamil Shah is demanding compensation for the mistreatment he says he suffered at the Hands of the CIA whilst imprisoned in the military detention facility in Bagram, Afghanistan
The woman who will probably be the nation’s top lawyer opened the door to prosecuting the men and women responsible for the CIA’s torture program on Wednesday. And whether the President who nominated her likes it or not, she should act on it as soon as she’s in office.
Mr Pornpetch said that he was not surprised Mr Russel had met in Thailand with groups of people in a way that violated appropriate diplomatic practice because the US State Department often acted this way.
The officer, a former Marine who is under cover and whose first name is Greg, was recently the head of the Special Activities Division, the CIA's elite paramilitary force. He has twice been station chief in Afghanistan, where in December 2001 he jumped to shield Karzai when the U.S. military accidentally bombed the position of the man who would become Afghanistan's president. He earned Karzai's trust, and the Obama administration asked him to troubleshoot the fraught relationship with the Afghan leader in 2012, when he again served as station chief in Kabul.
The Central Intelligence Agency has selected a new top spy, tapping an undercover veteran who played a central role in developing personal relationships with Afghan leaders after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.
While the immediacy of publishing information on the Internet dramatically speeds the dissemination of scholarly knowledge, the transition from a paper-based to a web-based scholarly communication system has introduced challenges that Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists are seeking to address.
"For more than 70 percent of papers that link to web pages, revisiting the originally referenced web content proved impossible," said Herbert Van de Sompel, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library. "These results are alarming because vanishing references undermine the long-term integrity of the scholarly record."
This, of course, was only the latest in an ongoing effort by the Internet Archive, led by Jason Scott (who has been involved in all sorts of archival efforts of internet content and video games and made a documentary about text adventure games called Get Lamp). Andy Baio has a great post up discussing this work and how important it is that it's being done by the Internet Archive, rather than a giant corporation. As he notes, while Google used to really focus on similar archival projects, in the recent past, it seems to have let that focus fade, which is quite disappointing.
Of course, in discussing the possible reasons why Google's archival efforts have stagnated, Baio tosses out a few suggested reasons, including the lack of profitability, but also, the potential legal liability. After all, Google is still fighting in court about the Google book scanning project, and the focus of that project seems much more about pushing people to buy books, rather than being able to do useful searches through that huge corpus of knowledge.
You may have heard the news recently about how a drunk employee of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (can't make this crap up) accidentally flew a DJI Phantom II drone onto White House property, leading to a general collective freakout over the security implications of these personal helicopters. In response to this, President Obama has called for more drone regulations -- which may or may not make sense -- but it needs to be remembered that the FAA has been refusing to actually release any rules for quite some time.