With Linux continuing its steady rise to world domination, we thought we'd ask you what you think has been the greatest moment for Linux since the start of the millennium.
The cover of the December 1st–7th 2012 issue of The Economist shows four giant squid battling each other (http://www.economist.com/printedition/2012-12-01). The headline reads, "Survival of the biggest: The internet's warring giants". The squid are Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. Inside, the story is filed under "Briefing: Technology giants at war". The headline below the title graphic reads, "Another game of thrones" (http://www.economist.com/news/21567361-google-apple-facebook-and-amazon-are-each-others-throats-all-sorts-ways-another-game). The opening slug line reads "Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are at each other's throats in all sorts of ways." (Raising the metaphor count to three.)
LinuxQuestions' annual members choice survey is in and the top Linux distributions and open-source programs are sometimes quite surprising
The “freedom” issue surrounding Chromebooks is well documented, same with Windows 8 certified systems. So, which one is better? Or which one gives you less or more freedom?
There are more signs emerging that some of the biggest global technology players in the hardware space are warming up to open source operating systems, even as they appear to cool toward Microsoft Windows. Recently, we've reported on Chromebooks running the Chrome OS platform, and how they have improved dramatically, and are now available at $200 price points that challenge the laptop status quo. (The hot selling $199 Acer C7 is shown here.)
Here are four good reasons why Microsoft needs to worry about the rise of the Linux-powered, Chrome OS-enabled Chromebooks: Acer, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung.
Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has officially launched the HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook, joining Acer, Samsung and Lenovo as core PC makers that now back Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) ChromeOS-based cloud notebooks. Is the Chromebook revolution quietly accelerating within the shadow of Microsoft‘s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows 8 push? Hmmm…
Rumors were true, HP has joined the Chromebook bandwagon and announced its first Chromebook. As the Microsoft dominated PC market is declining smartphones, tablets and Chromebooks are picking up. It's inevitable that hard-core Microsoft partners like HP would start offering GNU/Linux powered Chromebook.
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is to launch a new server range specifically targeting SMBs and emerging markets.
At a presentation at FOSDEM 2013, three of the developers behind udev fork eudev, stated that their primary aim in launching the project back in November was to learn something. Dislike for the udev/systemd developers was, as they repeatedly stressed, not the reason for launching the project – it was not a "hate based fork". The developers also noted that their "pet project" was anything but mature and that users foolish enough to use it in its present state could really mess up their systems.
There are several ways to end up with a satisfactory experience on the desktop with Ubuntu despite their recent confusion of the user interface. We will discuss some of those another day (KDE vs. Gnome vs. Cinammon vs. Unity). Today we are going to talk about setting up your desktop environment for multiple monitors. This article assumes you are running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or 12.10, however, the process should work equally well back to version 10.04 LTS unless otherwise noted.
Assuming you have installed Ubuntu and are successfully sitting at the desktop (the window manager at this point is irrelevant), a couple of questions will now come to mind. What am I going to be using my linux desktop environment for? If you are going to be running office applications, email, basic web browsing and the occassional movie, you might be done. The default (read: Open Source) binary video drivers for both AMD (radeon) and Nvidia (nouveaux) are perfectly acceptable for all of those things. In fact, recently, they both have picked up some compositing support (so you can run the nifty 3D window effects in Compiz or KWin) as well as support for gaming. However, that support is spotty and performance still leaves a lot to be desired.
Another major release for the popular open source planetarium was made available today, bringing huge improvements that will excite the fans of this useful application.
Improvements, bug fixes and lots of new features additions contribute to the Stellarium’s next major step in the mission to help people discover and understand the night skies.
Most podcast fanatics on Windows and Mac OS X use iTunes as their main podcast client. What about Linux users? What are the podcast client that you can use?
Here are five alternative podcast clients for Linux that I would recommend based on my own searching and experimenting.
The development team behind the powerful Evolution email client announced earlier today, February 3, that the fifth unstable version of the upcoming Evolution 3.8 application is now available for download and testing.
Most of this post is based on the information found in the blog of Nicolargo, the author of this tool.
Glances is a free software (licensed under LGPL) to monitor your GNU/Linux or BSD operating system from a text interface. Glances uses the library libstatgrab to retrieve information from your system and it is developed in Python.
John Carmack, the co-founder of id Software and lead developer of the id Tech engine for the Doom and Quake franchises, is now promoting Wine for Linux gaming rather than native Linux ports.
While it was speculated it would come to Linux as a key developer stated internally they were running the game on Linux, Wargame: European Escalation has now been officially announced for Linux. The game is currently undergoing closed beta testing on Linux before its official Steam debut.
Wargame: European Escalation is a real-time strategy game that was released last year for Windows and Mac OS X operating systems and its story is set in Europe during the Cold War. This game is powered by RUSE's IRISZOOM game engine. Wargame: European Escalation was developed by Eugen Systems and is distributed digitally via Steam.
The popular Unvanquished open-source first person shooter game that promises to deliver on good quality in-game graphics and compelling game-play, is now out with its monthly alpha release.
Valve is updating its Steam client for Linux regualarly, fixing the issues which are reported by lots of interested Linux gamers. I was a bit behind with updating my Slackware remix of the client binaries but I have overcome the flue and pushed an update, bringing the steamclient package for Slackware to the latest version, 1.0.0.22.
id Software has habit of releasing their engines as open source, but a statement made by John Carmack, on Twitter, revealed an interesting information.
People will remember that id Software was one of the few big game developers that thought about the Linux platform way before there were any hints that the open source platform was a valid business avenue.
Linux as a games platform is being held back by chronic shortcomings with IDEs and debuggers, says Braid developer Jonathan Blow.
I've blogged about some of the more prominent changes in this new Nepomuk release. I thought it would be a good idea to document all the changes, most of which I haven't publicly blogged about.
On November 3, 2008 libplasma moved from kde-workspace to kdelibs sporting a spiffy API that used the new QGraphicsProxyWidget heavily.
In Randa this past summer we agreed on the last few big decisions for libplasma2. We would remove QGraphicsView and move entirely to QML. In the process, libplasma would have no drawing system dependent code in it. It would be data and business logic only.
I am still migrating away from my old KDE tools. Most of them will run under LXDE, or any other desktop, but I'm finding that since KDE 4 came out, the accessories are all fatter, slower, and worst of all, buggy. I reported last month on replacing Korganizer. Next up: Knotes.
Krita 2.6 adds many performance improvements, but also new support for OpenColorIO, a color management system used by movie studios and applications like Blender, which means that Krita now fits into a movie/vfx studio workflow.
Great news for KDE users. Aason Seigo, the KDE project lead, is starting a weekly Google+ Hangout. Seigo 'tested' the first hangout and it went well, except for some initial glitches caused by Pulse Audio.
Floating out in newsfeeds today was an interesting tidbit by John Palmieri who said, "So GNOME finally chose an official language and it is JavaScript." Now I'm not a developer, but everytime I encounter JavaScript it's causing problems. Is this a good idea for GNOME?
At the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest in Brussels, the GNOME developer community has tackled the problem of specifying a canonical development language for writing applications for the GNOME desktop. According to a blog post by Collabora engineer and GNOME developer Travis Reitter, members of the GNOME team are often asked what tools should be used when writing an application for the desktop environment and, up until now, there has been no definitive answer. The team has now apparently decided to standardise on JavaScript for user-facing applications while still recommending C as the language to write system libraries in.
The GNOME project, developers of the GNOME desktop for Linux, has decided JavaScript will be the only “first class” language it will recommend for developers cooking up new apps for the platform.
It's finally time for me to leave the Gnome Desktop, thanks to Gnome 3. Fortunately for me, the MATE desktop is a continuation of the Gnome 2 Desktop, and as of Fedora 18, is integrated into the Fedora repository; it's also fairly easy to install.
Desktop Distribution of the Year - Slackware (20.59%)
UberStudent is a Linux distribution which declares itself as being "Linux for learners". The project is based on Ubuntu with UberStudent 2.0 using the latest Ubuntu long-term support release as a base. Looking over the project's documentation we find UberStudent is designed with an eye toward education. The project is targeting people wishing to teach or learn academic computing. The project's website refers to the distribution as a learning platform, designed to help people become fluent in computer technology. There are several editions of the latest UberStudent release. The main edition comes with the Xfce desktop environment and other editions feature the LXDE and MATE desktops. Each edition is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds. I opted to try the Xfce edition which can be downloaded as a 3.5 GB DVD images.
From performance point of view, these days, Openbox is my favorite desktop environment. I found it actually to be more efficient and less resource consuming than either LXDE or XFCE and works very efficiently on low powered P4 machines. Perhaps the most famous distros with Openbox DE are Archbang and Crunchbang. Recently, SparkyLinux came up with their version of Openbox spin. In this article, I review SparkyLinux 2.1 "Ultra" Openbox as well as do a brief comparison with Archbang and Crunchbang.
There are more than a billion people around the globe living with some sort of disability today, yet software in general and operating systems in particular are just beginning to address their computing needs.
Linux Lite is a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu. It is uses the Xfce desktop environment, a desktop environment known to be suitable for low-end computers. The latest update, Linux Lite 1.0.4, was released just today.
It ships with Steam client for Linux, the popular game distribution platform, installed. Because of the memory requirements of Steam, don’t expect to run this edition of Linux Lite on a resource-starved computer, if you intend to play that game.
PCLinuxOS is an "old standard" Linux distribution. Although it doesn't seem to have been getting as much attention recently it still seems to have a significant number of very loyal followers.
The strength of PCLinuxOS today is in stability, and a very active and dedicated user community.
It includes an excellent array of applications and utilities in the base distribution, so for many purposes it is ready to use right out of the box. If you try it and have problems of any kind, you can generally get very capable help from the PCLinuxOS User Forums very quickly.
Red Hat provides open-source software. It is particularly famous for its Linux operating system. In the third quarter, Red Hat's revenues increased by 18% y-o-y to hit the $344 million mark, which was in-line with expectations. Subscription revenues experienced a 19% increase that enabled them to hit the $294 million mark. Billing also grew by 18%. More importantly, in the third quarter, the company announced the acquisition of ManageIQ. ManageIQ specializes in cloud management and automation. The acquisition is expected to be a long term gain for Red Hat. It is also an attempt to take on VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW) , a company that has managed to make inroads into enterprise through its vCloud platform but failed to enter the public cloud.
Bring us your cool, useful, and productivity-heightening apps and devices and we'll look at them and work to support your efforts.
That's the unique view that Linux vendor Red Hat takes when it comes to the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon that's prevalent in the world of enterprise IT.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced that Cloud9 IDE has built its online development environment with Red Hat’s OpenShift Online hosted Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution. By integrating OpenShift Online into its original online development environment, Cloud9 IDE is able to deliver more flexibility, security and ease of use to developers.
So normally I do my updates from one version of Fedora to the next using yum, in particular the Upgrading Fedora using yum guide. Usually it works pretty good. I didn’t really have much good experience with PreUpgrade the few times I tried it, so I wanted to give FedUp a try.
The latest edition of Fedora Linux was released on January 15th, after 2 months of delay. This community project is sponsored by Red Hat Linux and is one of the primary showcases for the GNOME desktop and its applications. Among the features making their debut is a much improved Samba setup (which is supposed to let you connect easily with Windows’ Active Directory). Also, the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments which got their start in Linux Mint are available, although not installed by default.
This is my review of the KDE edition of Fedora 18, 64-bit version. After 3 reviews of their main release, I decided it was time to check out the KDE Spin edition. Fedora has several different “Spins”, produced to showcase desktops or emphasize scientific, design, gaming, or other focused interests.
Dan Horák announced that the Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) operating system for IBM System z (s390x) 64-bit systems is now available for download.
The Fedora 18 for ARM release includes pre-built images for Versatile Express (QEMU), Trimslice (Tegra), Pandaboard (OMAP4), GuruPlug (Kirkwood), and Beagleboard (OMAP3) hardware platforms. Fedora 18 for ARM also includes an installation tree in the yum repository which may be used to PXE-boot a kickstart-based installation on systems that support this option, such as the Calxeda EnergyCore (HighBank).
Ubuntu's rate of evolution over the past few years is astounding. It has grown from a standard Gnome desktop distribution into a full operating system with its own desktop environment, development tools and community.
To celebrate Ubuntu's success, I wanted to take a moment to highlight the things Ubuntu is doing well and also mention some issues that could use improvement.
Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced a few days ago that the codename for the upcoming Linux Mint 15 operating system will be Olivia.
Linux Mint 15 (Olivia) will be available for download at the end of May 2013, and it will be distributed as separate Cinnamon, MATE, KDE and Xfce editions.
It's been a big 2013 for the Raspberry Pi so far. As we've reported, the diminutive $25/$35 Linux-based computing device (shown) is emerging as one of the biggest open source stories of this year. While fully stocked Raspberry Pi devices have been selling briskly at the $35 price point, a new blog post confirms that the latest Model A devices, initially available only in Europe, will move back to the $25 price point--in reach of lots of schools and individuals.
Raspberry Pi’s base model release finally fulfills the promise of a $25 computer, available in Europe now
Samsung announced the Samsung GALAXY Young and Samsung GALAXY Fame. The GALAXY Young, available in white, deep blue, wine red and metallic silver, is a smart and affordable Android playmate for the younger, stylish generation of mobile users. The GALAXY Fame, available in pearl white and metallic blue, combines powerful performance with an essential suite of features and services, all packed within a stylish design.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could run Windows applications on your Android smartphone or tablet? Well, that may one day be a reality, and the person who is working on the new project is the best man for the job. That’s right: Wine for Android is coming.
Alexandre Julliard, the project lead for Wine, gave a mini demo of Wine for Android at FOSDEM, which will allow Android users to run Windows apps.
Who needs Windows apps on Android when Windows mobile platform has a very tiny app ecosystem when compared with Android. On the contrary there are thousands of high-profiled Android apps which are not available for Windows 8 mobile devices.
The Android-based console will be available for $99.99. An extra controller will go for $49.99.
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is revamping its payout schedule for Android application developer partners, stating the change is designed to accommodate new Play storefront payment options.
Together with version 4.0 of LibreOffice, due out in the next few days, the developers plan to release the "Impress Android Remote" app that allows the office suite's presentation features to be controlled from Android smartphones. The developers plan to release the app at the same time as, or shortly after, LibreOffice 4.0; communication with the presentation rendering system will be handled via Bluetooth. This is some of the information that LibreOffice developer Michael Meeks offered in his presentation at this year's "Free and Open source Software Developers European Meeting" (FOSDEM 2013), which ended on Sunday.
“Change is inevitable in a progressive society. Change is constant” Benjamin Disraeli 1867. Quite a fitting quote if I say so myself. When I started in systems administration back in the mid 90’s everything was done either remoted in from your desktop, a server, or you plugged a terminal into the back of the server. Laptops were still bulky back then and I loathed carrying around my brick of a laptop to connect into things. Thin laptops were too much for a lot of IT budgets, Palm was just getting started, and tablets were luxury items (yes we had tablets). We made do with what we had.
The ApacheCon NA 2013 conference is coming up. The event takes place 24 February - 2 March 2013, at the Hilton Portland and Executive Towers, in Portland Oregon. Registration for the event is now open, and you can find more about the conference, and registration here.
In conjuction with ApacheCon NA 2013, OStatic is running a series of guest posts from influencers in the Apache community. The first in the series ran here. In this second post in the series, Patrick McGarry (shown), a community manager for Inktank, the consulting services company that helps users to learn and deploy Ceph, discusses open source and disruption.
If you are on the Internet, chance is that you are being tracked. Advertising companies, Internet services and even Internet Service Provider track users for a variety of purposes, but most often to profile users to increase advertising revenue or sell the data to companies that do.
While cookies are most often used for that purpose, and I’m using the term lightly so that it includes all different kinds of cookies, it is not the only option that companies have. Fingerprinting may be an option as well which tries to identify users based on factors such as their IP address, operating system, web browser and other data that is submitted automatically when connections are established.
When the community GNU/Linux distributions Fedora and openSUSE recently announced that they would be switching their default database management system from MySQL to MariaDB, one man in Finland would have had a very hearty laugh.
While there's many in the open-source community that remain unhappy with Oracle, including the direction of the MySQL database server to the point that Fedora will now ship MariaDB instead, MySQL 5.6 was released this morning by the software giant.
Oracle says their general availability release of MySQL 5.6 has increased performance, scalability, reliability, and manageability over earlier releases of this open-source MySQL database software.
"LibreOffice does everything I need, and in fact I keep learning about new things I can do in LibreOffice," said Google+ blogger Kevin O'Brien. "I even carry it with me on USB Thumb drive in the Portable Apps version. So please explain to me why I should care about overpriced bloatware? And don't get me started on the $%^**#%$ Ribbon."
It was in September of 2010 that a group of key members of the OpenOffice.org developer team announced that they were no longer willing to wait out the uncertain future of OpenOffice, especially in the face of the lack of interest shown by Oracle, the new owner of the project following its acquisition of Sun Microsystems nine months before.
Join the M revolution and the next big thing in healthcare IT: the integration of the node.js programming language with the NoSQL hierarchical database, M.
M was developed to organize and access with high efficiency the type of data that is typically managed in healthcare, thus making it uniquely well-suited for the job.
One of the biggest reasons for the success of M is that it integrates the database into the language in a natural and seamless way. The growth and involvement of th community of M developers however, has been below the radar for educators and the larger IT community. As a consequece it has been facing challenges for recruiting young new developers, despite the critical importance of this technology for supporting the Health IT infrastructure of the US.
I vividly remember the time when my early opinions about open source software were built around questions that made natural (and perfect) sense to me at that point in my life, like: "Why would someone sell a software product for free?" and "Why should anyone participate in a project that does not reap financial rewards?" These formed the basis of my rationale.
That was before I embarked on my professional journey and as a consequence had not experienced organizational life. My myopic view towards the open source methodology of developing projects, and the profound impact this methodology has on the business world in general and the organizational structure in particular, began to broaden after my first intense exposure to the Linux operating system at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. My understanding about the magnificence of this operating system and the process by which it is constantly iterated caused a 180-degree transformation. This consequently cultivated appreciation for the entire process of peer production and the impact it has on today's businesses, both big and small.
We've been asked to help promote what looks like an incredible initiative. The Sonar Project hopes to fund the development of a Linux distribution focused on accessibility, and the campaign is looking to raise $20,000 through Indiegogo, a crowd funding site. But the project could also benefit from people with graphic design skills as well as those who can simply help spread the word.
About 5 minutes before starting the Hangout last week, I impulsively named it "The Luminosity of Free Software" as that was resonating with the thoughts in my head at the time .. and I think I'll stick with that name for the time being. You may notice that there is no "KDE" in the title (or my name, either :) and that's intentional. I want to be able to discuss larger issues in Free software, and this gives me more freedom to do so. The show will be a reflection of my interests and those who watch and participate, so there will be a good amount of discussion that relates to or is relevant for KDE, it just won't be exclusively about it.
At one time, Wikipedia was a universal source for the useful programming tools and resources. If some language, framework or tool was used in general, it has been covered there. However recently Wikipedia seems raising the requirements to the level that would exclude many useful Free software projects. For instance, recently JAMWiki has been removed - reasonably popular, thousands of downloads (and that is for server side app), mentioned in near every review on Java-based wiki engines over multiple sources on the web - where it has been a problem?
I believe that Aaron’s death was not caused by depression.
I say this with the understanding that many other people would not have made the same choice that Aaron made, even under the same pressures he faced.
I say this not in any way to understate the pain he was in — nor, for that matter, the pain that clinically depressed people are in.
[...]
I say this because over the last 20 months of his life, Aaron spent more time with me than with anyone else in the world. For much of the last 8 months of his life, we lived together, commuted together, and worked in the same office — and I was never worried he was depressed until the last 24 hours of his life.
I say this because, since his suicide, as I’ve tried to grapple with what happened, I’ve been learning. I’ve researched clinical depression and associated disorders. I’ve read their symptoms, and at least until the last 24 hours of his life, Aaron didn’t fit them.
And that makes it hard to read, in so many articles, that “Aaron struggled with depression” — as though the prosecution was just one factor among many, as though, perhaps, he might have committed suicide on January 11 without it.
This morning, Karen Gould, the president of Brooklyn College, issued an extraordinarily powerful statement in defense of academic freedom and the right of the political science department to co-sponsor the BDS event.
[...]
So that’s good. But the fight is not over. The New York City Council, as you know, has laid down a gauntlet: if this event goes forward, with my department’s co-sponsorship, the Council will withdraw funds from CUNY and Brooklyn College. As Glenn Greenwald points out this morning, this is about as raw an exercise of coercive political power —and simple a violation of academic freedom—as it gets; it is almost exactly comparable to what Rudy Guiliani did when he was mayor and pulled the funding from the Brooklyn Museum merely because some people did not like what it was exhibiting.
So now the battle lines are clear: it’s the City Council (and perhaps the State Legislature and Congress too) against academic freedom, freedom of speech, and CUNY.
Throughout this controversy, there has been one voice that has been conspicuously silent: Mayor Bloomberg. To everyone who is a journalist out there, I ask you to call the Mayor’s office and ask the question: Will he stand with the City Council (and follow the model of his predecessor), threatening the withholding of funds merely because government officials do not like words that are being spoken at Brooklyn College? Or will he stand up to the forces of orthodoxy and insist: an educational institution, particularly one as precious to this city as CUNY, needs to remain a haven for the full exploration of views and opinions, even about—especially about—topics as fraught as the conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
I have been a PhD student for less than two years.
In this series I’m looking at my experiences using social media as a business professional. In this entry I examine the rules and policies I personally use regarding Twitter.
In the introduction to this series of blog entries, I asked several questions regarding my use of particular social media services, and how I manage the intersection of my personal and professional lives in them. Here I’m going to look specifically at Twitter. This is the way I use the service and may or may not be how you do or should use it yourself.
Whispers has learned that a member of Congress is about to introduce legislation today to decriminalize marijuana.
The Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2013 will be introduced by Democratic Rep. Jared Polis, from Colo., whose office did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Monarchy is bollocks, and something we should have outgrown a long time ago. Nice to see that today’s Prince Harry retains the tradition of remorseless homicide though.
For over a year now journalists, civil liberties advocates, and members of Congress have been asking the Obama administration to release internal memoranda from the Office of Legal Counsel justifying Obama's targeted killing program.
Eleven senators sent a letter to President Obama on Monday demanding access to secret legal memos outlining the administration’s case for the targeted killing of U.S. citizens in counterterrorism operations overseas.
Daniel Klaidman has what must be intended as a defense of John Brennan. Given that it (once again) fails to mention Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, accepts Brennan’s claims to have opposed torture on its face, and makes no mention of Brennan’s assault on Americans’ privacy, it fails to make the case it tries to, that Brennan would rein in the war on terror at CIA.
Unnamed officials involved in the review inform that the administration is moving in the coming weeks to “approve the nation’s first rules for how the military can defend, or retaliate, against a major cyber attack.” These rules, according to David Sanger and Thom Shanker, will “govern how the intelligence agencies can carry out searches of faraway computer networks for signs of potential attacks on the United States.” If the president approves a strike, the government will be able to “attack adversaries by injecting them with destructive code — even if there is no declared war.”
He strongly suggests we’ve been targeting all manner of alleged terrorists, including cooks and drivers. And we’ve changed that practice not because of the dubious legality of targeting non-combatants, but because cooks are easily replaced.
Leon Panetta lies about the drone strike that killed Baitullah Mehsud and his wife
Civil rights lawyers urged a judge Monday to stop the New York Police Department from routinely observing Muslims in restaurants, bookstores and mosques, saying the practice violates a landmark 1985 court settlement that restricted the kind of surveillance used against war protesters in the 1960s and '70s.
Morris Davis says the used of "enhanced interrogation techniques" has failed to make America safer.
Allegations of liberal media bias are almost constant in the conservative press, but their intensity has increased since President Obama and Hillary Clinton appeared together on 60 Minutes, where interviewer Steve Kroft posed "softball" questions that were almost comically obsequious. "Mr. Kroft, as embarrassing as his interview was, is merely symptomatic of a larger phenomenon: the unprecedented swooning and cheerleading by the press for Barack Obama," Peter Wehner wrote in Commentary, echoing an argument voiced by many on the right. He posits that the rise of conservative media outlets like Fox News may have triggered a liberal backlash.
More generally, the white paper fleshes out the Obama administration's argument that U.S. citizens killed by drones are getting all the process that is appropriate in the circumstances; hence the Fifth Amendment, though implicated, is not violated. And since these targeted killings are lawful acts of self-defense, the Justice Department says, they do not violate the law against killing U.S. nationals in foreign countries or the executive order banning assassination. After all, "A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination." Duh.
The US trade publication Defense News last week posted a video on its blog from a US Naval Institute conference featuring an extraordinarily blunt assessment of China's maritime strategy and ambitions from US Navy Captain James Fanell, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence and Information Operations for US Pacific Fleet. The moderator describes Fanell as the 'top intelligence officer' in the Pacific Fleet, which means he is advising some of the US military's senior decision-makers on China's military strategy and capability.
As important as it is to see the white paper DOJ gave Congress to explain its purported legal rationale, it is just as important to make clear what this white paper is not.
First, is it not the actual legal memos used to authorize the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki and who knows who else. As Michael Isikoff notes in his story, the Senators whose job it is to oversee the Executive Branch — even the ones on the Senate Intelligence Committee that are supposed to be read into covert operations — are still demanding the memos, for at least the 12th time. The release of this white paper must not serve to take pressure off of the White House to release the actual memos.
Tom Hanks has a knack for playing the roles that define American generations. In “Saving Private Ryan,” he embodied the courage of the men who landed on the Normandy beaches under heavy fire. In “Apollo 13,” he conveyed calm and ingenuity under intense pressure: “Houston, we have a problem.” And Forrest Gump revealed much about America before, during and after the Vietnam War.
A bipartisan group of 11 senators is appealing directly to President Barack Obama to give lawmakers his administration's legal justification for using armed drones or other counterterrorism operations to kill American citizens.
The report authored by Amrit Singh, daughter of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, says over 50 countries assisted the US in its war against al Qaeda including by hosting CIA prisons on their territories and detaining, interrogating and "torturing" terror suspects.
Accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning will have spent 1,000 days in prison come Feb. 23. Manning faces a possible lifetime sentence for allegedly leaking military information to the news outlet WikiLeaks in 2010.
The first trend is increasing inequality and hierarchy. Roughly speaking, early human societies evolved from relatively simple, egalitarian bands of hunters and gatherers, to more complex, hierarchical, unequal societies. Over time, as a general tendency, leaders, chiefs and kings emerged with ever stronger authority and powers.
The second trend is increasing injustice in dispute resolution — what Betzig called “asymmetry in the resolution of conflicts”. Roughly speaking, when there are disputes, they are resolved less and less on the merits of the case, and more and more on the power and wealth of the parties. The powerful tend increasingly to win disputes even if they are in the wrong. Asymmetric rules may develop: for instance, insulting a peasant has rarely had serious consequences, but not so with insulting the king.
First, I regret to inform that we have received a phone call from Jeremy the other day, telling us that he has been moved into solitary confinement, 'the hole' for an undetermined amount of time. We are not sure why, because our phone call was cut short when the battery died on my phone. This injustice was further confirmed when we conferred with his legal team, who have been visiting him on a daily basis since he was put in solitary confinement. At this point, he will not be able to receive visits (other than his lawyers) and will have heavy restrictions on phone calls. He is still able to receive mail, although less regularly. With hope, he will not be in the hole for too long and be 'lucky' to return to regular prison society sooner rather than later.
The quest for cheap energy and cheap labor is a conquering human urge, one that has played out with notable ferocity starting with the Industrial Revolution. The introduction of coal into British manufacturing and the more recent outsourcing of Western manufacturing to Asia have marked key thresholds in this ongoing progression.
Visa Inc., (V) the world’s biggest payments network, contravened Australia’s consumer protection laws by preventing buyers from using a currency of their choice when shopping, the country’s competition regulator said. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said in an e-mailed statement that it sued Visa in federal court, claiming the company prevented the expansion of so-called dynamic currency conversion services. A copy of the claim wasn’t immediately available from the court.
A foundation dedicated to promoting and funding transparency journalism, which launched on December 16, has concluded its first round of funding for organizations. It has enjoyed incredible success and found there are a lot of people who want to support this kind of an organization.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) raised nearly $200,000 for four different organizations, including WikiLeaks, which it collected donations to support because the media organization faces a banking blockade that makes it difficult for it to directly accept funds from supporters.
AT 9:30 A.M. ON AUGUST 1 a software executive in a spread-collar shirt and a flashy watch pressed a button at the New York Stock Exchange, triggering a bell that signaled the start of the trading day. Milliseconds after the opening trade, buy and sell orders began zapping across the market's servers with alarming speed. The trades were obviously unusual. They came in small batches of 100 shares that involved nearly 150 different financial products, including many stocks that normally don't see anywhere near as much activity. Within three minutes, the trade volume had more than doubled from the previous week's average.
Max Keiser deliveres some unpleasant truthes on the state of the UK economy.
Though it should surprise no one, the FBI has been thoroughly tracking the ideas, movements, and members of Occupy Wall Street since August of 2011, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. “These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity," Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, PCJF's executive director said in a release.
The central point that I want to stress as a white-collar criminologist and effective financial regulator is that Goldman Sachs is not a singular “rotten apple” in a healthy bushel of banks. Goldman Sachs is the norm for systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) (the so-called “too big to fail” banks). Impunity from the laws, crony capitalism that degrades democracy, and massive national subsidies produce exceptionally criminogenic environments. Those environments are so perverse that they produce epidemics of “control fraud.” Control fraud occurs when the persons who control a seemingly legitimate entity use it as a “weapon” to defraud. In finance, accounting is the “weapon of choice.” It is important to remember, however, that other forms of control fraud maim and kill thousands.
The United States is plagued by large corporations with outsized political power. They are “too big to fail.” So if they are about to fail, they get rescued. Many are so big that they can block the laws needed to stop them from destroying the economy or the environment.
We need to replace them with smaller companies, but U.S. antitrust law is inadequate. It exists, but has been weakened over the past decades. Consider the proposed “Volcker Rule,” which would make many banks split into two companies, one for risky investments and one for loans based on savings, as the old Glass-Steagall law required. This would address some problems, but would not make banks small enough. Eliminating “too big to fail” banks means making sure that each is small enough that regulators, prosecutors and elected officials won’t hesitate to let it suffer the consequences of its own decisions.
It isn't often that I feel the need to amplify Stallman's words; he's usually a little extreme-left for my tastes. But this is one of those times when he reminds me why I still count him as a visionary - perhaps even still ahead of his time.
In this Reuters interview, he addresses the problem of corporations that are "too big to fail" and proposes that monopoly laws be strengthened, a return to Glass-Steagall-type regulation, and a progressive tax on corporations, where the bigger the company, the more of a percentage they pay.
Wonderful, wonderful sense, it would fix just about every economic problem we have in this country. And you can hang your hopes on seeing unicorns fly before it actually happens.
If the world can learn anything from Britain's phone-hacking scandal, it's a lesson about the brute force of a media empire.
Rupert Murdoch's conglomerate was so powerful, it was allegedly able to invade people's privacy and pay police officials to grease its dodgy news gathering machine; all while playing kingmaker in British Parliamentary elections and gaining access to the highest reaches of state power.
Meanwhile, CNET has been fired by folks at CES. They won’t be choosing the “Best of Show” anymore and they lose credibility as an objective tech news source–at least temporarily.
This is bogus on so many levels. First off, and most importantly, the video itself is a "work" of the US government, and as such is simply not protected by copyright law. Rather it is definitively in the public domain as per Section 105 of the Copyright Act. And, of course, even if it was subject to copyright, it would still be a ridiculous claim. There would be obvious fair use in merely showing a single still image from a longer video, especially given the context of the use and the speech. And, yes, this is in the UK, rather than the US, but even under UK "fair dealing" concepts, this would almost certainly be considered fair dealing.
At the valuable Nuclear Secrecy blog today a report, not widely-known, about one of first outside experts into Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombings. Local reaction amazing. My own book and video on U.S. film-makers who arrived a few weeks later, and their footage suppressed for decades.
On January 25, 2012, the European Commission (EC) issued a privacy proposal to require “data controllers” (online merchants, advertisers, etc.) to provide more transparent and accessible information to data subjects (individual Internet users). The proposal asserts a right of EU citizens “to be forgotten,” thereby obliging data controllers to delete personal data on request. Data controllers would be prohibited from collecting data unless the subject gives express consent. In the meantime, the United States has proposed precisely what the EU has already vehemently rejected: voluntary industry self-regulation, subject to limited federal enforcement.
The Polish government says it is 'disturbed' by the European Court of Human Rights' decision to declassify documents on the alleged existence of a CIA prison in Poland.
When John Brennan heads to Capitol Hill on Thursday, senators are expected to grill the prospective head of the CIA about his central role in the Obama administration’s expansive “targeted killing” program. They might also want to ask him a few things about his finances.
Here is the memo. With a few tweaks and a more creative title — like “Murder With Your Hands Clean” — this memo could sell a lot of copies.
The documents show that agency analysts, down to the last minute before the outbreak of fighting, were assuring President Nixon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other policymakers that Egypt and Syria were unlikely to attack Israel.
Those assessments, in the words of a CIA postmortem report from December 1973, "were — quite simply, obviously, and starkly — wrong." Nearly 40 years later, the CIA analysts responsible for those judgments say they are still troubled by their mistakes.
“If Senator Pinior believes he saw a document with my signature on it, then he is a liar and a scoundrel,” Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) leader Leszek Miller said on Tuesday morning after the European Court of Human Rights announced it was to declassify evidence which is part of an investigation into claims that Poland hosted a CIA prison, where suspected international terrorists were held and tortured as part of the United States ‘war of terror’.
Jozef Pinior,a senator for the ruling Civic Platform party and a member of the European Parliament committee in Poland investigating the secret CIA ‘black site’, said Tuesday morning that there is “enough accumulated evidence to show that there was a CIA prison in Poland, organized with the consent of the government under Leszek Miller”.
The report, authored by Amrit Singh, daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, says over 50 countries assisted the U.S. in its war against al-Qaeda including by hosting CIA prisons on their territories and detaining, interrogating and “torturing” terror suspects.
[...]
Ms. Singh said she had found evidence that prisoners were held in countries like Thailand, Romania, Poland and Lithuania while Denmark facilitated CIA air operations.
Fifty-four foreign governments assisted the CIA in a global campaign that included harsh interrogations of suspects, a rights advocacy group said Tuesday, as it pressed for greater accountability.
The report by Open Society Foundations marks the most comprehensive list of countries that helped the United States in what critics saw as excesses by then president George W. Bush's administration after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in extraordinary renditions via Dubrovnik, a newspaper has claimed.
[...]
But citing a report called ‘Globalizing Torture’ by the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), the suspects were taken via Croatia at least twice.
If you noticed a drone strike in the news, chances are the only name that accompanies it will be the name of the target and if they're now believed to be alive or dead. More than two thousand people -- civilian and militant -- have been killed in Pakistan by US drone strikes since 2004, but their identities remain often unreported and unclear. It's hard to give emotive value to drone deaths if you can't name the victims.
CIA drone strikes in Pakistan are “a clear violation of our sovereignty and a violation of international law” that threaten stable relations between the two governments, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States said Tuesday.
Persistent reports that Pakistan has tacitly approved the strikes while publicly denouncing them are untrue, Ambassador Sherry Rehman said.z
A man says Vernal police disrupted an intimate moment of mourning with his deceased wife of 58 years when they searched his house for her prescription medication without a warrant within minutes of her death.
The Bill of Rights Defense Committee recently coordinated the filing of three amicus (friend of the court) briefs in Hedges v. Obama, a lawsuit in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals challenging domestic military detention under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012.
Born on Feb. 4, 1913, today would have been Rosa Parks’ 100th birthday. On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her act of resistance led to a 13-month boycott of the Montgomery bus system that would help spark the civil rights movement. Today we spend the hour looking at Rosa Parks’ life with historian Jeanne Theoharis, author of the new book, "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks." Often described as a tired seamstress, no troublemaker, Parks was in fact a dedicated civil rights activist involved with the movement long before and after her historic action on the Montgomery bus. "Here we have, in many ways, one of the most famous Americans of the 20th century, and yet treated just like a sort of children’s book hero," Theoharis says.
The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argued in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, February 15 in a hearing in a legal battle over the government’s demands for Twitter user records. The ACLU and EFF represent Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian and one of the Twitter users whose records were sought by the government.
On February 8, 2011, a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia unsealed motions filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, EFF, and others concerning government attempts to obtain Twitter account records about three individuals in connection with its WikiLeaks investigation. The documents were originally filed under seal late last month.
Washington state lawmakers will consider bipartisan legislation that would block any cooperation with attempts to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens or lawful resident aliens in Washington without due process under sections written into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.
If passed, the law would also make it a class C felony for any state or federal agent to act under sections 1021 or 1022 of the NDAA.
INTERNET ACTIVIST GROUP the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants the US to reconsider the severity of its computer crime laws and tear them up and start over. The Inquirer (http://s.tt/1zoHD)
Today starts “Licences for Europe”, an initiative by the European Commission to discuss the issues of today's copyright regime. Instead of planning for a broad reform that would break away with full-on repression of cultural practices based on sharing and remixing, the Commission is setting up a parody of a debate. 75% of the participants to the working-group concerning “users” are affiliated with the industry1 and the themes and objectives are defined so as to ensure that the industry has its way and that nothing will change. Through this initiative, the EU Commission shows its contempt of the many citizens who participated in defeating ACTA and are still mobilized against repressive policies.
The Digital Economy Act's Sharing of Costs Order has been withdrawn - another procedural complication that will delay implementation even further.
Last year saw a major upgrade in Japan’s anti-piracy legislation in an attempt to shift Internet users away from file-sharing sites and networks and towards the country’s legitimate outlets. But while the change in the law was significant, getting the legal-downloading message to users proved problematic. In response the government and rightsholders are now seeding fake files with anti-piracy messages hidden inside.
The University of Glasgow will be home to a research centre that will examine how copyright is changing and the need for new business models for distributing creative content.
Just under 1,000 broadband subscribers in the UK received letters in December from O2 or Be Broadband, saying that the company is passing on their name and address details to a company called Golden Eye.