It wasn't that long ago that Linux and open-source were thought of as toy software. Today, they dominate both business and technology.
If you are planning to purchase SSDs for Linux, keep an eye on the drives that are blacklisted by the Linux Kernel. Also pay heed to what Sukar suggests, “...be careful, even when you don’t enable the TRIM explicitly, at least since Ubuntu 14.04 the explicit FSTRIM runs in a cron once per week on all partitions – the freeze of your storage for a couple of seconds will be your smallest problem."
If you pay attention to these points, your data may just stay in the solid state.
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Right now, my refrigerator uses Linux, as does the thermostat that controls the climate of my home. The washer and dryer components and firmware with the touch control screens are built on Linux (Amana if you want to look it up). The navigation system on my old Ford Explorer is based on Linux. Our home entertainment center has a touch screen control based on Ubuntu.
For those using perf for Linux profiling with performance counters, the Linux 4.2 kernel will bring many improvements to benefit Intel customers.
The latest version of the stable Linux kernel, 4.1.1, has been released by Greg Kroah-Hartman, making this the latest and the most advanced version available. It's not a large update , but that usually happens with the early versions.
Specifically, CII’s funds will support a new open source automated testing project, the Reproducible Builds initiative from Debian, and IT security researcher Hanno Böck’s Fuzzing Project.
Any Linux operating system is incomplete without a download manager. From many years, Linux based distros are using wget as default download manager. Its pretty little application which works fine from command line, if you need to install anything, download any stuff, you need to run shell scripts etc, everything uses wget on some level to complete tasks. Over the past many years, it has been identified that wget is lacking some advance features and its alternative, Aria2, has received the attention of many users due to fulfilling the thirst of advance linux users. We will be reviewing the installation process of Aria2 and the difference between Wget and Aria 2 in this article, so you may decide which download manager best suits your needs.
Data is growing both in volume and value. It is becoming increasingly important to be able to back up and restore this information quickly and reliably. As society has adapted to technology and learned how to depend on computers and mobile devices, there are few that can deal with the reality of losing important data. Of firms that suffer the loss of data, 30% fold within a year, 70% cease trading within five years. This highlights the value of data.
A much more powerful took is "Atop", a powerful monitor program that allows you to see system-level counters concerning utilization of CPU and memory/swap, as well as see disk I/O and network utilization counters at the system level -- in real time or historically. It also allows you to store raw counters in a file for long-term analysis on system levels and process levels, as well as seeing resource consumption for each thread within a process of a multi-processor program.
A few months ago I reported about my advancement in my use of Emacs. This post will be a report of my further progress. Quick reminder: I started using emacs for project management and working on web sites. I still do that today, even though I spent much less time editing websites and these are very much side projects I do for and with friends.
Google Drive is an instrument that is used by many. Of course, there are many alternatives to it like Dropbox or Yandex.Drive, but nevertheless many prefer a Google-backed solution. One of the reasons for me was an ability to have several services under one "roof", one account.
Building on Friday's Wine 1.7.46 release, Wine-Staging 1.7.46 was released today.
At present Wine – the open-source compatibility layer software that runs Windows applications on other operating systems – supports DirectX9, allowing many older Windows games to run on Linux, but software has moved on and developers are no longer using that older version of DirectX.
Garry Newman, the developer behind the famous Garry's Mod and the survival MMO Rust, has made some very interesting comments about the lack of Linux players and why his studio doesn't really care about the open source platform.
FPS adventure game Gone Home is now available on Steam for Linux with huge 88% price cut that will last for another day.
Gone Home is a story driven game that is like nothing you've ever played until now. You don't get to meet anyone, and you don't get to interact with any other character. You're just trying to solve a mystery. Despite the fact that there are no enemies, and you don't get hurt in any way, the game manages to keep the suspense going with ease, and that's mostly due to the script and the gameplay itself.
Unity is a game engine that managed to get a lot of developers and fans in the past couple of years. Even if it supports the Linux platform, there are no Linux tools just yet, and the developers have explained why that happened.
Guild Software announced this past weekend the availability of a new update for their Vendetta Online science-fiction MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) for Windows, Android, Linux, Mac OS X, and iOS operating systems.
Solar 2 is described by its developers as a sandbox universe, but that doesn't quite cover it. And when you're having a problem describing the gameplay, you know that you have some something special.
Valve is pleased to announce the preview of the next SteamOS release, codenamed "brewmaster" and based on the latest Debian 8.1 stable release.
One of the most often voiced complaints about Open Source Software is that it tends to be "ugly" or otherwise aesthetically uninspired. A few years ago a few people in the KDE camp came together and created, what they hoped, would be a solution to that problem: The KDE Visual Design Group.
When I wrote my Kubuntu Vivid review, I mentioned a tool called KDE Connect, which I wasn’t quite sure what it was supposed to be doing. A bunch of you emailed me, telling me it’s a nice little applet that can keep your smartphone notifications in sync with the desktop, as well as allow you to remotely control certain parts of your KDE-flavored desktop from the smartphone.
At beginning of June 2011 I made my first blog post about KWin support Wayland clients featuring a screenshot of Desktop Grid effect with a Wayland window shown on each desktop.
The statistics collection feature of KActivities is slowly becoming a core part of Plasma.
The first new feature of the GSoC project on animation in Krita is has landed in git. Until now, I have been mostly concentrating on refactoring the core structures toward their final form, which has taken much more time than I anticipated. Fortunately, it is now mostly done, and I am getting to the point where progress is more visible.
We reported earlier this week that the GNOME Project has announced the availability of the third snapshot of the anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, GNOME 3.17.3, a release that brought in new features and plugged numerous annoying bugs.
Béla Markus has announced the immediate availability of piCore 6.1, a special edition of the Tiny Core Linux operating system specifically designed for the Raspberry Pi single-board computer (SBC).
It was recently brought to our attention that there's a Linux kernel-based operating system out there developed in Havana, Cuba by students at the University of Computer Sciences and sponsored by the Cuban government.
The Solus operating system has just received its first daily ISO, and it looks like the team is well on its way to promote the first RC. The developers are moving closer to a stable version, and things seem to be on the right track.
The main features at a glance:
Using Sencha ExtJS 5.1.1 framework for the WebGUI Add a new dashboard and widgets Many internal improvements and bugfixes Improved the internal network interface backend Add Wi-Fi support. Only WPA & WPA2 is supported Add VLAN support The network interface configuration page has been modified. Now only the configuration values are displayed. Use the dashboard widget to show the state of all network interfaces. The public key of the user must now be specified in the RFC 4716 SSH public key file format. It is possible to add multiple keys. Option to turn off the collection of system performance statistics. Use the browser local storage to store the WebGUI state (e.g. displayed grid columns, column width, …) instead of cookies.
Here is our tribute to our founder and the community he and others created.
The second update pack for Manjaro 0.8.13 has been made available, and it packs a lot of new packages, including Budgie 8.2 and a new Linux kernel.
Red Hat's new Ceph Storage and Gluster Storage open-source, software-defined storage products continue to push storage's limits.
When Jim Whitehurst set out to write his book The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance, he wasn't looking to define the open-source movement in the same way that Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar defined open-source. Rather than define open-source as a development methodology, Whitehurst's focus is on open-source principles as applied to the domain of company management.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst spent last week’s annual Summit praising the progress made in open source, but during his opening keynote he also warned attendees about companies that claim to be open source without actually encouraging open participation and innovation from a broad group of users.
Releases of the Fedora operating system, being the mostly regular six-monthly events that they are, do not usually find themselves worthy of note -- your average run-of-the-mill Fedora release can usually be summed up as: "Everything you had six months ago, only slightly better."
With Fedora 22, though, changes arrived thick and fast. The release's desktop environment got a new, flatter look; the package manager of choice changed; GCC was updated to the 5 series; and the next generation of display server inched towards general availability. While none of these changes alone should send the quality of the release into reverse, somewhere along the line, it hasn't all come together.
Now that Ubuntu for phones has also landed on the Meizu MX4 a lot of people might want it, but it's difficult to get. Some people might get the idea of buying a regular Meizu MX4 with Flyme OS, but they wouldn't be able to get Ubuntu on that device or at least not in a safe way.
If you have any questions regarding new features and apps that are present, absent, or in the works for the Ubuntu Touch platform, you need to know that there is already a comprehensive wish list out there that takes care of everything.
The Linux Mint 17.2 "Rafaela" ISO images for both the Cinnamon and MATE flavors have been released, although the official announcement hasn't been made available just yet.
Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela has been released in its two traditional flavors, Cinnamon and MATE, but the developers did not publish any release notes yet.
Like Linux Mint 17 and Linux Mint 17.1, Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela is based on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr and uses latest generation desktop environments: Cinnamon 2.6 and MATE 1.10, but most likely, many Linux Mint-specific improvements have been implemented.
As usual, the Linux 4.2 kernel is bringing more improvements for ARM, including support for new SoCs and boards.
Highlights for the ARM Linux 4.2 merge window include:
- SMP support for the Allwinner A23 SoC with the SunXI code and SMP support for the Broadcom BCM63138. - Big endian support in Socpga. - Initial support for the Freescale I.MX7D. The dual-core i.MX7 has two Cortex-A7 cores up to 1.0GHz, Cortex-M4 up to 256MHz, LPDDR2/LPDDR3 support, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and one PCI Express lane. The i.MX7 series is primarily aimed at "Internet of Things" devices. - Initial support for the ZTE ZX296702 SoC with dual-core Cortex-A9 processor and ARM Mali 400 graphics. - NVIDIA Tegra HDA support.
The Dronecode open-source UAV platform initiative has announced that it has welcomed on board a raft of new members, who'll help drive the project towards becoming a de facto standard for consumer and commercial drones.
The non-profit organisation – governed by the Linux Foundation – was formed in late 2014. Founding members 3D Robotics (3DR) and Yuneec International have since been joined by 27 other organisations and sponsored members, keen to participate in the "neutral, transparent initiative for advancing UAV technology", as the Linux Foundation's marketing big cheese Amanda McPherson described it.
BeagleCore is a new Internet of Things development board that has been created to be 100 percent open source and provide an easy way for makers, developers and hobbyists to have access to all all the core features of BeagleBone Black in a miniaturised computer module.
Industry-leading organizations and start-ups like Parrot, Walkera, and Team Black Sheep have joined 3DR, Intel, Qualcomm and others to create an industry-standard, shared open source platform for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Even groups that compete against one another are working together as part of Dronecode. Change is not just coming in the future, it’s taking place now. Think advances in vision processing, obstacle avoidance, and environmental and situational awareness: Dronecode members are delivering on all of these today.
A German startup called BeagleCore is spinning a computer-on-module version of BeagleBoard.org’s BeagleBone Black single board computer on Kickstarter. Packages start at 39 Euros ($44) for the first 500 units shipping in Feb. 2016, or 49 Euros ($55) for the second shipment in April. With a baseboard, it costs 99 Euros ($111), also with April 2016 shipment. The BeagleCore and Starter-Kit support Linux flavors including Debian, Ubuntu, Android, and Cloud9 IDE on Node.js with BoneScript library.
Samsung now plans on delivering a Gold variant of the Z1 next month and has also confirmed more models are on the way. The Z1 launched at 5,700-Rs whist the second Tizen handset is expected to go on-sale for between the 8,000-Rs 15,000-Rs range. We have previously reported on a rumoured Samsung Z3, so this could signal it’s launch? The handsets will also be manufactured in India at Samsung’s factory in Noida.
The SDK includes an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), a light-weight TV Simulator for testing web apps, and a TV Emulator.
Google has decided Android Studio is all you need to make apps, and by the end of the year will no longer support the venerable but popular Eclipse IDE.
Android product manager Jamal Eason has blogged that in recent years “our team has focused on improving the development experience for building Android apps with Android Studio”, and it's now time to move on.
In this video, Android Engineer Kris Pena picks out the most important pieces of information that came out of this year's Google I/O conference.
Along with a tweak in the application design guidelines, Google has updated its own applications for Android with a subtle graphical tweak to remind users just who the driving force behind the ecosystem actually is. Not only are splash screens now an acceptable part of Android design, Google is making immediate use of them in a defensive move against other cloud providers such as Microsoft.
Android software service for Galaxy S3 has long been disbanded and for those who are still hanging on to their 2012 Samsung smartphone, crDroid has some good news to share.
The mobile boom brought forth a world of opportunities to creative individuals – especially musicians. Gone are the days when these artists were bound to full studio equipment (which costs fortunes) in order to get anything done. Professional music makers still need those, but our smartphones and tablets are more than capable of taking a quantifiable load of work.
Android is beloved by millions because it’s endlessly customizable. Want to use a different launcher? There are a ton of options in the Google Play store. Same goes for icon packs, of which we’ve covered extensively in the past. If you don’t like TouchWiz, Sense or even the way vanilla Android looks, it’s easy to change up the look and feel of your phone to make it look exactly the way you want it to. That’s the beauty Android has to offer.
Recently, Google made a selection of Android games under 25 MB, and highlighted them in Play Store.
Yes, Google hates lag on smartphones as much as you do -- enough so that the search giant has a robot dedicated to spotting that delay between your finger input and what happens on screen. Meet the Chrome TouchBot, an OptoFidelity-made machine that gauges the touchscreen latency on Android and Chrome OS devices. As you can see in the clip below, the bot's artificial digit pokes, prods and swipes the display in a series of web-based tests (which you can try yourself) that help pinpoint problems in both code and hardware. This isn't the only gadget monitoring device lag at Google, but it could be the most important given how much the company's software revolves around touch. Don't be surprised if this automaton boosts the responsiveness of Mountain View's future platforms.
Back in February the LG G3 Android 5.0 Lollipop update finally started rolling out in the United States on multiple carriers, following a release in other regions around the globe. Since then we’ve seen the G4 arrive with Android 5.1 on board, and many G3 owners are hoping for the same treat.
Once again, consumers in the market for a new Android phone have tough decisions to make. While hardcore Android purists will understandably opt for the Nexus 6 to get fast updates and greater tinker capabilities, the Galaxy S6 is the better choice for all others. It is a more well-rounded experience.
Samsung has crafted a phone that is not only a piece of art, but is a comfortable size and has superior security with biometrics. The fingerprint reader is more important than having the ability to run custom ROMS. In 2015, there is no excuse for any flagship smartphone to ship without a fingerprint scanner.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 is Android at its finest. Highly recommended.
Some of its biggest selling points include 4K and NVIDIA Grid support. If you love gaming, have a powerful rig with a robust NVIDIA GPU, and want to enjoy one of the best in class Android TV experiences, then the NVIDIA Shield Android TV is a sure bet. If you’re more of a casual gamer, then there are less expensive options, but if you want to have something that packs a wallop, streams your games, and is quite future proof, then we highly recommend it. Further, we’ve given it our highly coveted Editor’s Choice Award for being a rock solid Android TV device!
The Huawei P8 represents the classiest and most capable Android from a Chinese manufacturer yet, and a strong advance from last year’s P7. The hardware design is superb and it has a terrific camera. The biggest differentiator is actually quite useful: the microSD slot doubles up as a SIM slot, too.
The stuttery performance and annoying popups that marred last year’s P7 have been banished. There’s a lot to like with thrown-in features like call blocking and security.
Some new tidbits about Nokia's Android future have surfaced and word is that Foxconn will be making the Android smartphones for Nokia. That is no big surprise considering that Foxconn makes many of the popular smartphones on the market today for the companies who sell them including the Nokia N1 and the iPhone.
Word has also surfaced that the first markets to get the new Nokia Android smartphones will be India, China, and a few European nations. Nokia appears to be targeting markets where smartphones are booming in popularity but aren’t as saturated as they are in other countries. These also appear to be nations where consumers show or budget devices rather than high-end devices.
The CDE7060T is said to offer a Linux OS, but the datasheet more specifically notes that it runs the Linux-based Android 4.2.1 on an unnamed, dual-core Cortex-A9 system-on-chip. Also onboard are 1.5GB of RAM and 8GB of flash.
It’s not really a surprise, but after just over six months since the “forking” of both Node.js and Docker, the two different projects have ended up back in some sort of alignment. For Node.js, it was the reunification with io.js under the Node.js Foundation, which was officially launched under the Linux Foundation’s umbrella. The Node.js and io.js technical development is now driven by a technical committee and hopefully this will all work out well for all.
The Libreboot "fork" of Coreboot now has support for its first AMD motherboard -- or more broadly, its first desktop motherboard.
So it’s interesting when a senior IBM exec turns up in a keynote slot. Big Blue’s heritage, at least at the high end, had for years been dominated by proprietary architecture. No longer, said Doug Balog, general manager of IBM Power Systems. The founding of OpenPOWER roughly two years ago, sale of IBM’s x86 business, and the sprint away from the formidable but proprietary Blue Gene (and re-embrace of the battle-tested mainframe) are all part of IBM’s about-face.
The Open Source Initiative€® (OSI) today announced that The Open Information Security Foundation (OISF) has been accepted as an Affiliate Member. “The OSI is excited to welcome OISF,” said Patrick Masson, General Manager and Director at the OSI. "Just as we're seeing with open source software projects, more and more organizations are looking for support from mature, robust and relevant security communities. The OISF and the open source technologies they support are ready to help and we're happy to promote their good work."
I caught up with Eva to get a bit of a background on her, Netflix, and how open source is being used to improve services at Netflix. Not only has Netflix used and contributed to existing open source projects, but they have released their own projects like Genie as open source. To learn more about Netflix's open source projects you can pursue their GitHub.
The All Things Open conference today pushed out a notification to recipients on its mailing list announcing that registration for the event, slated for October 19th and 20th. has begun. For the first time ever, event organizers are offering something of a super early bird special: Buy a ticket before July 7th and get admission for both days for only $99 — which is a deal since that’s what a single day will cost once the Early Bird Special kicks-in next Tuesday.
New Zealand-based global open source company Catalyst has announced that Kiwi software development companies can build on the Catalyst Cloud for free.
Michael Meeks, a leading LibreOffice developer, says the open source suite is currently being used by about 20 million Linux users. (LibreOffice is included in many Linux distributions.) He adds that update requests are also regularly received from 120 million different IP addresses – with one million new ones appearing every week -- and suggests that in total there may be 80 million LibreOffice users around the globe.
The Document Foundation has released the second RC for the upcoming LibreOffice 5.0 version, and it looks like the developers are making a final push for the new version of the office suite that is scheduled to land in July.
And yet there is a lot of really good documentation out there. For example, the documentation for LibreOffice is excellent. It includes several documents in multiple formats including HTML and PDF that range from "Getting Started" to a very complete user's guide for each of the LibreOffice applications.
A couple days ago, the Roundcube Next crowdfunding campaign reached our initial funding goal. We even got a piece on Venture Beat, among other places. This was a fantastic result and a nice reward for quite a bit of effort on the entire team's part.
DragonFly BSD is a distribution that belongs to the same class of operating systems as other BSD-derived systems and UNIX. The developers have released a new version of the distro, and they have integrated quite a few changes and improvements.
For the first time I installed a BSD box on a machine I control. The experience has been eye-opening, especially since I consider myself an "old-school" Linux admin, and I've felt out of place with the latest changes on the system administration.
Linux is now easier to use than ever, but administration has become more difficult. There are many components, most of which are interconnected in modern ways. I'm not against progress, but I needed a bit of recycling. So instead of adapting myself to the new tools, I thought, why not look for modern tools which behave like old ones?
DragonFlyBSD 4.2 was released this morning as the next major release to this popular BSD operating system. For end-users there are a lot of notable changes with this update.
The editors are certainly salivating over the possibility of valgrinding our way to victory.
On June 28, the GnuCash development team had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and update of the seventh maintenance release of the stable 2.6 branch of one of the best free financial accounting software, GnuCash.
The government of Galicia (Spain) has made available three open source solutions over the past year, one for PC classrooms, one for land-management, and a third for computer network enhancement. The tools are available at Galicia’s software repository, and information about the solutions is now also available at Spain’s Centre for Technology Transfer (CTT).
The government of Aragon (Spain) has published updates of the open source software it uses for 25 eGovernment services. The updates have been available at the repository of Spain’s Centre for Technology Transfer since late last month.
The House of Representatives has officially jumped on the open source bandwagon. A June 25 announcement declared that U.S. representatives, committees and staff would be able to procure open source software, participate in open source software communities and contribute code developed with taxpayer dollars to open source repositories.
As the executive branch of the United States government quietly works on creating an official open source policy, the legislative branch is also moving into the 21st century: Open source software is now officially permitted in the U.S. House of Representatives. That means software developed in the People's House with taxpayer funds will eventually be available to the people. According to the nonpartisan OpenGov Foundation, there will soon be an Open Source Caucus in Congress.
The Simplon course was developed in France to teach skills in Linux, Ruby on Rails, CSS, Javascript, Meteor.js and other web development langauges. Co-founder Andrei Vladescu-Olt attended the opening of the SAP-funded laboratory, and explained that there’s more to the course than coding.
It is a sad day in tech. This is such a young industry in mobile that most who built it are still alive. One of the biggest pioneers, however, died this past Friday. Matti Makkonen, the inventor of the SMS text message, was a former Telecoms Finland (later known as Sonera) exec and then Nokia VP and later Finnet Group boss and ended his career as Managing Director of Anviva before he retired from active business management work. He still continued on some part-time jobs in telecoms in Finland. In 2008 Matti received the Economist Innovation Award for inventing the SMS and we celebrated that occasion here on this blog at the time.
It took about 2.5 hours to test, deploy and upgrade Ikea's entire IT infrastructure to defend against Shellshock. Here's how Ikea did it so quickly.
Serbia unveiled a statue on Sunday of the man whose killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand 101 years ago lit the fuse for the First World War, feting an assassin who still divides his native Balkans.
Many Serbs regard Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, as a pan-Slavic hero, the shot he fired in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 marking the death knell for centuries of foreign occupation over the various nations and faiths that would make up the Yugoslavia that emerged.
To others he is a terrorist, a nationalist fanatic whose act triggered a war in which 10 million soldiers died and the world order was rewritten.
It’s too early to say whether yesterday’s ‘day of terror’ was coordinated, or whether it was a random convergence of events whose perpetrators share the same commitment to ‘leaderless resistance’ jihad which makes it equally possible to murder ‘apostate’ Shia worshippers in a mosque or ‘kufar’ tourists in Tunisia.
Whoever they are, their broader intentions are not difficult to fathom. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Kuwait and Tunisia attacks. Both are acts of ‘strategic’ terrorism.
The attack in Kuwait is clearly intended to foment the sectarian war that IS believes it can exploit for its own purposes.
Technologies are making humans who remote-control drones more and more like children playing video-games. That is the main problem. When deaths or killings seem to be happening so far away, the "combat mentality" can combine with the comfort zone to highly murderous effect. When it's so easy to kill without risking your own life, will you be merciful or shoot them up?
When Israel is criticized about its rights-abusive policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the refrain most often heard among local politicians is that the government’s hasbara—the Israeli propaganda machine—is inadequate. The problem, in other words, is not what Israel actually does to the Palestinians, but rather the inability to get its positive message across to the international community. This is usually referred to as “rebranding Israel”. The underlying assumption here is that the merchandise is fine, and only the packaging needs to be replaced.
Here’s how Israel deals with hostages. The results aren’t pretty.
[...]
The war in Gaza, which had raged for three weeks by then and claimed the lives of dozens of Israelis and some 1,500 Palestinians, seemed to be tapering off. The ambush near Rafah would have gone down as one more skirmish. But as the surviving Palestinians retreated, they did something that would turn that Friday into the bloodiest day of the summer and embroil Israel in a possible war-crimes ordeal that reverberates even now: They dragged the third Israeli, Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, with them underground.
Conservatives immediately turned on the news agency, which released a statement saying the five photos it issued “were not intended to portray Senator Cruz in a negative light”.
After “consideration”, said the statement, “we have decided to remove those photos from further licensing through AP Images”.
Civil rights activist Kevin Alexander Gray and Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, discuss whether the shooting in Charleston was an act of domestic terrorism. "Dylann Roof was a human drone, and every Tuesday morning the Obama administration uses drones to kill people whose names we don't even know and can't pronounce," Kevin Alexander Gray says. "So I don't know if I feel comfortable with the idea of expanding this word 'terror.'" But Richard Cohen calls the shooting "a classic case of terrorism." "It's politically motivated violence by a non-state actor and carried out with the intention of intimidating more persons than those who were the immediate victims," Cohen says. "I think in some ways it's important to talk about terrorism in that way, not so we can send out drones, not so we can deny people their due process rights, but so we can understand the true dimensions of what we're facing."
White Americans are the biggest terror threat in the United States, according to a study by the New America Foundation. The Washington-based research organization did a review of “terror” attacks on US soil since Sept. 11, 2001 and found that most of them were carried out by radical anti-government groups or white supremacists.
I don’t rate any of our wars since to have been justified morally. I am morally shaken by our U.S. war these days involving drone use. Innocent civilians are being killed. We call it "collateral damage," which I believe actually means "unintended murder." How have we come to justify that? We claim to be doing it for the right reason. We have identified terrorists in these locations. When our drones strike, there are too often innocent civilians caught in the hell fire. It was not our intention to kill innocent people, but there are too many unanticipated consequences.
To deem behavior or opinion as extremist depends on a particular point of view.
A pair of US drone strikes over the past 48 hours have killed at least nine people, none of them identified by name but all of them labeled “al-Qaeda suspects” by local officials on the ground in Yemen.
Ex-chief of navy Lord West says Britain must protect covert relationships but must also clear up grey areas over involvement in non-war zone killings
The New York Times on Wednesday reported details about American counterterrorism officials’ use of drone strikes in countries such as Yemen, as well as the working relationship between intelligence agencies in the U.S. and the U.K.
The documents are said to show the extremely close cooperation between the NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters better known as GCHQ, in regards to the controversial drone program.
Britain’s murky operations against the United Nations were first made public in 2004 when government minister Clare Short stated she “had read transcripts of some of Mr Annan’s conversations. She said she recalled thinking, as she talked to Mr Annan: “Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I are saying”.” She admitted in a BBC interview that British intelligence agencies had recorded conversations of the UN Secretary General in his office in New York. This astonishing revelation attracted an intriguing reaction from her own government, with prime minister Blair declaring her statement to be “deeply irresponsible” rather than taking any action about this manifestly irresponsible and illegal operation. It was obvious that the British government was up to its neck in a program of espionage against the leader of the organization that is intended to “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person,” and there was no possibility that the prime approver of such funtime capers was going to admit his culpability.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times continued their fight in court Tuesday as they try to secure nine Department of Justice memos they believe outline the federal government’s legal justification for tactical drone strikes that have killed hundreds — including U.S. citizens — across the world.
Attorneys on both sides presented their arguments to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York on Tuesday — the latest round of courtroom discussions that date back four years.
In 2011, the ACLU submitted a Freedom of Information Act request regarding the targeted killings of U.S. citizens Anwar Al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, and Sameer Khan earlier that year in September.
The appealing parties want the public to know who and why the U.S. is killing in drone strike operations.
Five militants have been killed following a NATO airstrike in eastern Afghanistan's Nuristan province, a source said on Sunday.
Wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan have killed at least 149,000 people between 2001 and 2014, says a recent report by a US think-tank.
Recent escalation in tension between nuclear-armed Pakistan and India figured high among US international concerns last week, with Secretary John Kerry cautioning against implications of South Asian hostilities, amidst tenuous search for Afghan stability.
Protesters from 25 UK-based campaign groups are expected to take part in the latest rally on July 6 outside the Lynn Lane factory which they claim supplies arms to Israel.
The U.S. actually trains more unmanned pilots than traditional fighter pilots today.
Fighting surged again this week in eastern Ukraine, where government troops are battling separatist militias and their Russian allies.
NATO is responding by sending troops and equipment to eastern Europe, and it's also giving defensive training to Ukraine's beleaguered army.
Nato defence ministers are meeting in Brussels to agree their next steps in dealing with the renewed threat from Russia.
It is harder for eyes from the sky or those pushing the drone buttons from the other end of the world to see precisely what lies wasted under the rubble of mud houses in the tribal regions of Pakistan. The loud claims of ‘successfully’ targeting wanted al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists have drowned the cries of the local populations for about a decade over their children, women and men having been killed. Over 2,000 civilian casualties must not disappear from the human radar after being termed collateral damage. True, we cannot escape human tragedies for larger ends of the war on terror, but we also need to take responsibility for errors of judgment.
Sunday reports indicate an Israeli warplane bombed a remote Lebanese Bekaa region to destroy one of its drones apparently downed.
An IDF spokeswoman declined to comment. A Lebanese security source said it's not entirely clear what happened "but most probably it was an Israeli airstrike to destroy its downed drone" - whether because of mechanical failure or by Hezbollah isn't known.
America, its rogue NATO partners and Israel unilaterally or together bomb other nations in blatant violation of international law.
The Obama administration is contemplating setting up bases in Iraq and sending hundreds of additional American troops there. And a few months ago, President Barack Obama announced that nearly 10,000 American troops will remain in Afghanistan through the end of the year. This is in spite of US interventions in the two countries that have left hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced and continuing instability all over the region.
The FBI must disclose its interviews with so-called "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the New York Times and reporter Scott Shane have told a federal judge.
From the Arabian Peninsula to northern India to California’s Central Valley, nearly a third of the world’s 37 largest aquifers are being drained faster than they are being replenished, according to a recent study led by scientists at the University of California, Irvine. The aquifers are concentrated in food-producing regions that support up to two billion people.
An application to start fracking at a site on the Fylde coast in Lancashire has been rejected by councillors.
Energy firm Cuadrilla wanted to extract shale gas at the Little Plumpton site between Preston and Blackpool.
Lancashire County Council rejected the bid on the grounds of "unacceptable noise impact" and the "adverse urbanising effect on the landscape".
Plans to frack for shale gas in Lancashire have been rejected by county councillors.
Energy firm Cuadrilla wanted to undertake exploratory drilling and fracking at a site between Preston and Blackpool.
Planning officials recommended approval of the operation subject to a number of conditions - but councillors rejected the advice and voted against.
Justices invalidate new rules in move that could make Environmental Protection Agency more vulnerable to challenges to new regulations on carbon emissions
A man who ran a Bitcoin-based online poker site and then fled to Antigua after being raided earlier this year has pleaded guilty to a lesser gambling violation in Nevada as a way to stay a near-free man.
According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, Bryan Micon accepted probation on Thursday and will also pay a $25,000 fine, surrender the computers, 3.0996 bitcoins ($750) and the $900 that were seized from him during the raid. Once complete, his charge will be reduced to a gross misdemeanor of operating an unlicensed interactive gaming system.
The Dutch city of Utrecht will start an experiment which hopes to determine whether society works effectively with universal, unconditional income introduced.
The city has paired up with the local university to establish whether the concept of 'basic income' can work in real life, and plans to begin the experiment at the end of the summer holidays.
Basic income is a universal, unconditional form of payment to individuals, which covers their living costs. The concept is to allow people to choose to work more flexible hours in a less regimented society, allowing more time for care, volunteering and study.
Tsipras asks voters to reject austerity proposals offered by creditors as thousands of his supporters rally in Athens.
Evidence pointing to international espionage, a plot to murder former Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and a 2012 plan for Greece’s exit from the euro code-named the “Silver Drachma” are just some of the sensational findings unveiled in a report by Greek Anti-Corruption Investigator Dimitris Foukas, released on Friday and sent to the Justices’ Council for consideration.
The report outlines the findings of three converging judicial investigations spanning several years, initiated after the notorious phone-tapping scandal in 2005 and revelations that the mobile phones of then Prime Minister Karamanlis and dozens of other prominent Greeks were under surveillance.
Martina Roemmelt-Fella, who owns a small, family-run turbine manufacturer in Bavaria, should be a cheerleader for a trade deal between Europe and the United States that promises to ease the flow of goods and services across the Atlantic.
But instead she fears the Trans Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being hammered out between Brussels and Washington will give too much power to big multinationals at the expense of small companies like hers.
At some point, Will either noticed, or someone pointed out to him, that Roberts’ decision did the opposite of what Will’s column says it did: It did not defer to the executive branch’s interpretation of the ACA, but instead produced its own definitive interpretation of the law. This makes most of Will’s criticism–starting with the first paragraph, which denounces “decades of populist praise of judicial deference to the political branches”–irrelevant to the opinion Roberts actually wrote.
Anyone who has been freaked out by the robots in Channel 4’s new hit drama Humans knows what life in the Uncanny Valley feels like. The same goes for those who have met or seen footage of Aiko Chihira, a realistic humanoid who has just started welcoming visitors to a department store in Japan. She’s creepy, in the extreme.
Cisco revealed a security vulnerability in a number of the company's network security virtual appliances that could give someone virtually unlimited access to them—default, pre-authorized keys for Secure Shell (SSH) sessions originally intended for "customer support" purposes. As Threatpost's Dennis Fisher reported, Cisco has released software patches that correct the problem, but there's no temporary workaround for systems that can't immediately be patched.
Cisco released an advisory on the vulnerability on June 25. There are two separate SSH key vulnerabilities for the Cisco Web Security Virtual Appliance (WSAv), Cisco Email Security Virtual Appliance (ESAv), and Cisco Security Management Virtual Appliance (SMAv).
Many Cisco security appliances contain default, authorized SSH keys that can allow an attacker to connect to an appliance and take almost any action he chooses. The company said that all of its Web Security Virtual Appliances, Email Security Virtual Appliances, and Content Security Management Virtual Appliances are affected by the vulnerability.
This bug is about as serious as they come for enterprises. An attacker who is able to discover the default SSH key would have virtually free reign on vulnerable boxes, which, given Cisco’s market share and presence in the enterprise worldwide, is likely a high number. The default key apparently was inserted into the software for support reasons.
That respect could lapse, however, if the company is ever sold or goes bankrupt. At that point, according to a clause several screens deep in the policy, the host of details that Hulu can gather about subscribers — names, birth dates, email addresses, videos watched, device locations and more — could be transferred to “one or more third parties as part of the transaction.” The policy does not promise to contact users if their data changes hands.
While this project is separate from the ongoing developments in Nissan’s connected vehicle technology, Deacon said that there were “huge developments” ongoing in bringing customer service to the car dashboard and more automated systems.
Last year Renault also revealed a major overhaul of its internal and customer-facing interactions through a Europe-wide Salesforce rollout that would link its systems to its dealerships, allowing it to claw back valuable customer data.
Clauses in privacy policies that enable online services to transfer or sell personal data about consumers as part of a merger, bankruptcy or other transaction are becoming common practice, an examination by The New York Times of the top 100 websites in the United States has found. The prevalence of these data-transfer clauses illustrates how little control people typically have over the dissemination of information about them. Details from privacy policies of five companies offer a sampling of the information that may be collected and how companies may handle the data in the event of a sale or bankruptcy. -- Natasha Singer
In 2013, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to a once-clandestine warrantless surveillance program that gobbles up Americans' electronic communications—a project secretly adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks on the United States. Congress legalized the surveillance in 2008 and again in 2012 after it was exposed by The New York Times.
Human-rights activists and journalists brought the Supreme Court challenge amid claims that the FISA Amendments Act was chilling their speech. But the Supreme Court tossed the case, telling the challengers' lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union to bring proof by real targets of the warrantless e-mail and phone surveillance. In a 5-4 ruling (PDF) by Justice Samuel Alito at the time, the court said the case was based on "assumptions" and that the plaintiffs "merely speculate" that they were being spied upon.
Fast forward to the present day: a US resident of Brooklyn, New York, accused of sending $1,000 to a Pakistani terror group has won the right to become the nation's second defendant to challenge the surveillance at the appellate level. This could mean a Supreme Court bid is likely several months or more away.
But the true nature and scope of the information required by the government and subsequently collected by the government on an employee is massive. Take a look at Standard Form 86. This is a 127-page form that usually takes a week or more to complete and requires the entry of the applicant's Social Security number on each page. The data included on this form is not just enough for identity theft, but enough to allow a person to literally become another person. Each Standard Form 86 fully documents the life of the subject. The only thing missing is the name of your first crush, though that might be in there somewhere too.
Facebook is to open a new office in Africa, a region with more than one billion people but only 120 million Facebook users.
One thing I was obsessed with was campaign finance reform. I almost cut my throat when Citizens United was allowed to participate in financing political campaigns because corporations have the same rights as people. I believe that decision absolutely destroyed our so-called democracy. I also observed the Democrats that stood by and let that happen. What that showed me was how corrupt and devious our elected officials are. I stand with Bernie on this issue on overturning Citizens United.
China's State Council Information Office on Friday issued a list of human rights violations committed by the United States government. The annual report is intended to counter US allegations of human rights abuses in China.
Amnesty International finds all 50 states and Washington, DC, fail to comply with international law and standards on the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers
The transition from Bush to Obama was much less dramatic than one imagined and the transition from Obama to someone else is likely to be more nuanced
More than 100,000 migrants have entered Europe so far this year, with some 2,000 dead or missing during the perilous quest to reach the continent. Dozens of boats set off from lawless Libya each week, with Italy and Greece bearing the brunt of the surge.
Australians who engaged in terrorism will be stripped of their citizenship, under new laws aimed at preventing militants fighting overseas from returning home.
The prime minister announces an expansion of powers ‘to reflect modern conditions’ and says laws could be applied retrospectively; Julie Bishop can’t confirm deaths of two Australians reportedly killed in drone strikes; and the ABC is under attack for allowing a former terrorism suspect to appear on Q&A. As it happened
The laws would also strip citizenship from dual nationals who engage in terrorism inside Australia.
When are we going to have an honest conversation about guns in America? While I vigorously disagree with the Supreme Court's most recent interpretation of the Second Amendment, I'll concede that the right of individuals to bear arms is, for now, the law of the land.
Operation Rescue has confirmed that the Routh Street Women’s Clinic in Dallas, Texas, halted abortions earlier this month, beginning what is expected to be a series of clinic closures in the wake of a ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling upheld a 2013 law, HB2, that requires abortion clinics to meet minimum safety standards.
In addition, Planned Parenthood has apparently abandoned its efforts to open a larger clinic to replace its outdated facility located at 104 Babcock Road in San Antonio. Pro-life supporters with the Stop Planned Parenthood SA Coalition sued and successfully blocked a planned opening in January 2015, citing deception and zoning violations.
David Cameron, echoed by the corporate media, calls upon the millions of law-abiding Muslims in the UK to denounce and distance themselves from a few terrorist nutters with whom 99.99% of British Muslims have no connection anyway. That apparently is acceptable. But to ask that the Zionist and Jewish organisations denounce the long term criminal activities of the man who actually led those organisations, is portrayed as unacceptable racism.
Charter yesterday promised that it won't impose any data caps or overage charges on customers for at least three years if the Federal Communications Commission allows it to buy Time Warner Cable.
The Council of the European Union is looking to remove all reference to Net Neutrality in the regulation of telecommunications. While the Council has always refused to take a step towards a compromise, it has been looking for several weeks to put the responsibility for the failure of the negotiations on the European Parliament. Thus, it is with bad faith that the Council is taking on this 4th trialogue today ; with their aim to make the Parliament to give in.
Supreme Court's decision is bad news for developers targeting the U.S. market, who will now have to avoid any API not explicitly licensed as open
A week after making the US LGBTQI community happy last week by ruling gay marriage legal across all the states, the US Supreme Court made the decision to not review the Google v. Oracle API Copyright decision made by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals last year. The Federal Circuit have been accused for misunderstanding both computer science and copyright law.
Last week Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm lost his appeal against his hacking conviction in Denmark. With an August release potentially on the horizon but an unexpected situation still to be resolved in Sweden, Gottfrid is longing to get in front of a computer and back into the world of IT. But before then he wants to set the record straight.