A few years ago, your author took possession of what was then the latest version of SuSE Linux. For the first time, this version allowed you to easily encrypt a whole filesystem right from the start (it was always possible to do before then, but required a lot of obscure command line magic).
Interested in trying this out, I encrypted my /home filesystem – meaning that at boot time I had to enter a lengthy passphrase to decrypt it and then, whilst running, the filesystem would act normally.
Unfortunately, I stopped using that particular computer for a few weeks and when I came back I couldn’t for the life of me remember the passphrase. I spent hours trying everything I could think of. I hunted through notebooks to see if I’d written it down. All to no avail.
At first glance, one might see that I use two monitors, one 1280 pixels wide and the other 1920. One is used for apps that never move and the other for windows I do move around or close. I've never adapted to appreciate more than one virtual desktop. In fact, I don't like have windows spread out too far - one might get away from me.
Acer Inc. is expected to announce quarterly results sometime today, according to Yahoo Finance. If the PC maker’s latest quarterly earnings do surface, they could provide new clues about Windows 8 tablet and ultrabook sales as well as Google Chromebook sales. Acer President Jim Wong in January suggested that Chromebook sales were heating up but Windows 8 wasn’t doing much to give Acer a lift. Has that trend continued? Hmmm…
Chances are you know about the digital divide, but not about the Kramden Institute's work to help hardworking students in grades 3 - 12 who don't have a computer in their home cross it. You also might be shocked to learn that while information technology seems to be ubiquitous, a full 23% of U.S. households still don't have a computer.
For most of the students we serve, working with computers is an exercise in persistence: rationed minutes in a school computer lab, fighting for time in a crowded library, or working on obsolete machines in after-school programs. Owning a working computer that these students and their families can use in the comfort and safety of their homes is a luxury that most have never contemplated.
There was quite a lot of Hollywoodish (sans MPAA) drama around a 'secret' Google project called Chromebook Pixel. Some videos were leaked and the company in question said that their servers were hijaked. No one confirmed or rejected the story. Some called it a hoax. I think the device is in the making and I have some reasons to believe so.
The next Google I/O summit is scheduled to be held in Moscone Center West in San Francisco on May 15-17, 2013. Registrations will be open soon. This is the event when Google also introduces their next 'game changing' device. We already have Nexus 10, 7 and 4 where Android has seen massive improvement, mainly in the hardware. That leaves the Chromebook behind where we have not seen any Google devices after cr-48. I believe that Google would be announcing Chromebook Pixel during this I/O summit. Chromebooks have picked up really well; they were the #1 best sellers on Amazon so it's time for Google to up the ante with better hardware.
One of the most common areas in Linux that gets overlooked during a production deployment is overall security. Specifically, the hardening of the operating system against common exploits (and hardening can encompass both policy and configuration for both internal and external use). We are going to talk about some common ways to protect our server from both the inexperienced as well as the malicious users it will be exposed to.
Intel currently offers flash cache acceleration software for Windows, but the company is assuring Linux shops that the company hasn't forgotten about them.
The Linux kernel developers have long been aware of the need for better testing of the kernel. That testing can take many forms, including testing for performance regressions and testing for build and boot regressions. As the term suggests, regression testing is concerned with detecting cases where a new kernel version causes problems in code or features that already existed in previous versions of the kernel. Of course, each new kernel release also adds new features. The Trinity fuzz tester is a tool that aims to improve testing of one class of new (and existing) features: the system call interfaces that the kernel presents to user space.
TeamViewer is a popular application for remote control, desktop sharing, file transfer, online meetings and more, that's available for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, Android and iPhone. The application is free (freeware) for personal use only!
Depending on who you talk to, Microsoft may or may not port their Office productivity suite to Linux. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNet seems to be the biggest naysayer at the moment. You can count me in his camp. He’s right; at present we don’t represent a big enough potential market for the Redmond folks to entertain any thoughts of putting high dollar coders to work doing the porting work. I’m sure the Microsoft bean counters would estimate it would take decades for them to earn their investment back. For that reason alone, it ain’t going to happen.
The Phoronix coverage so far from the Wine development track at FOSDEM 2013 includes Gaming On Wine: The Good and Bad Graphics Drivers, Support For Running Windows Apps On ARM With Wine, Wine-Mono Isn't Too Fit For .NET, and Wine On Android Is Coming For Running Windows Apps. Another worthwhile Wine session was Alexandre Julliard's keynote.
Ubuntu users who've been thirsty for the first stable release of Valve's Steam Client can officially consider themselves quenched. After months of rigorous beta testing,
While the open-source world has had serious alternatives to most serious computer jobs, the world of gaming has been a different matter. Steam for Linux is a welcome step in the right direction as it shows the intent by Valve to support Linux in the future. This is the Steam client and it does not mean the entire Steam catalog is suddenly available for Linux. The choice of games on offer is much more restricted compared to Windows. Hopefully the selection will widen as time goes on.
Valve updated the Steam client today to provide full compatibility with the Linux open-source OS. To celebrate the release, all 54 Linux-compatible games are on sale. That includes Half-Life for $2.49, World of Goo for $2.49, and Bastion for $3.74. This sale applies to Windows and Mac (when available) as well.
The Steam client is available to download from the Ubuntu Software Center, launching with 60 games that are compatible with the operating system.
Love this one, it's really great to see them bring out new releases with excellent new content, one not to miss for city building fans.
Love it, great to see some new idea's coming up, there are only so many platformer/puzzle games I can take before I get bored solid!
The Kool Desktop Environment, later known as K Desktop Environment or KDE, was launched after Matthias Ettrich issued a call for programmers on de.comp.os.linix.misc in October 1996, and soon had 40 programmers contributing.
In July 2013, Akademy — the KDE community summit — will host the Qt Contributor Summit (QtCS) in Bilbao, Spain. QtCS is THE gathering of the Qt Project contributor community. It will take place July 15th and 16th in the middle of the KDE Akademy conference week (13-19 July). By co-hosting, KDE and the Qt Project will increase their existing collaboration even further. Holding their annual conferences at the same time and the same place will foster interaction, knowledge transfer and technical progress.
Lars Knoll has revealed a few more details today about Digia's plans for Qt 5.1. He also shared that they are hoping to ship this next tool-kit update in late April.
The latest edition (released Sunday, February 10), is Chakra 2013.02, code-named Benz.
Are you a systems administrator? Quick, which system in your infrastructure is most vulnerable to hacker attacks? No, it’s not the web server -- though it’s a good guess. No, it’s not the firewall. The answer may surprise you -- it’s your workstation.
Think about it -- unless you’re working for an agency with extremely rigid security policies, you are probably able to connect to servers you administer right from your workstation. Perhaps not all the time -- perhaps you have to establish a VPN connection first in order to be on the “inside.” Once that is done, however, your workstation becomes an extremely interesting target for malicious hackers, since at that time your workstation happens to be the least protected system that sits both on the outside and on the inside of your trusted network.
Fedora 16 reached its official end of life at the beginning of the week. This means that the release was maintained for 16 months as opposed to the usual 13 months. In most cases, Fedora discontinues support for a release when the next version over has been released for a month. The three-month delay in the release of Fedora 18 explains the longer support cycle in this case.
Debian developers are still working on making the operating system compiler agnostic so that its packages can be built with LLVM/Clang and other compilers rather than continuing in a monogamist relationship with GCC.
Canonical made quite a splash at the start of this year when it announced Ubuntu for phones, but—apart from what it demonstrated at the time—we're still waiting both for the downloadable image it promised to provide for the Galaxy Nexus and for specifics on actual devices.
First step is to switch your desktop to LXDE...
As of yet, there's no word on what smartphones running the Ubuntu OS will look like, hardware-wise. But Canonical -- the tech startup which drives much of Ubuntu's development and looks for ways to exploit it commercially -- just recently posted its guidelines for the look and feel of Ubuntu on smartphones.
Xubuntu team has decided to drop the CD version due to space constraints and move to 1GB ISO. CD are either way becoming obsolete especially on netbooks and new devices.
The open source Raspbmc media centre distribution has been released in its first stable version. Version 1.0 of the XBMC 12 based distribution transforms the $35 Raspberry Pi mini computer into an HD capable entertainment centre. According to the development team, Raspbmc can be easily installed to a USB stick or an SD card, even without prior Linux experience.
MontaVista€® Software, LLC, a leader in Embedded Linux€® commercialization services, today announced MontaVista Carrier Grade Edition 7 (CGE 7), the next generation platform for multi-architecture virtualization and abstraction for the Network Infrastructure Market. The seventh generation platform provides several new and updated technologies to enable dynamic cloud based networks. The standards based solution also brings new enhancements to security and up-time availability. MontaVista’s CGE 7 is designed to meet the demands of the virtualized network, providing application portability, dynamic configuration, and real-time performance in a single platform. These new features enable providers of Next-Generation Networks to handle the explosive growth and increase in traffic, specifically with the rapid adoption of cloud technology and the growth in multimedia and video rich content.
Sam Nazarko, a 19 year old student from London, has announced what he calls the final version of Raspmbc. Raspbmc is a minimal Linux distribution based on Debian that brings XBMC to Raspberry Pi. If you are as confused as I am, Sam clarifies that 'final' version doesn't mean there won't be any work done on it in future.
This is my annual statistical market review of the smartphone global contest. It also is the Q4 quarterly review. Welcome to a cavalcade of numbers and stats
You could start with one of Vertu's handsets which cost in the region of €£6,994 in the case of the firm's latest Vertu Ti which has been built with the Android mobile operating system on board.
Made in Hampshire, the Vertu range features models with titanium casing, sapphire screens and Ferrari styling.
Last year, the small California company, ZaReason, promised, and then came out with a tablet called the ZaTab which it described as a device for hackers. Now it looks as though our great hope was premature.
PengPod is now shipping its first tablets to customers. These are 7 and 10 inch tablets that can run both Google Android and Linux.
In late 2007 Palantir launched Gotham, a new geospatial and comprehensive analytics platform designed to meet the challenges of their vast array of customers. This article provides more information on Gotham that enables data integration, search and discovery, knowledge management, secure collaboration, and algorithmic analysis across a wide variety of data sources.
ROS, the open source Robot Operating System created by Willow Garage, is now in the process of moving under the governance and ownership of the Open Source Robotics Foundation. The move comes after Willow Garage, which also manufactures the PR2 robot, announced it was pivoting into a "self-sustaining company" and looking for commercial opportunities.
While not one of the most well known multi-server micro-kernel operating systems compared to GNU Hurd and others, HelenOS continues to move forward as a general purpose BSD-licensed operating system that dances to its own beat.
Tech documentation writer Bob Reselman will give a talk entitled "How to Make Technical Documentation Work in Your Organization" at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 24, in the LaJolla Room. The SCALE Team caught up with Bob for a brief interview.
Badly chosen warning messages caused some consternation with Google recently as its Chrome browser began declaring supported Linux systems such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 obsolete. The problem was brought to public attention by Red Hat evangelist Jan Wildeboer in a Google+ posting when his browser announced "Google Chrome is no longer updating because your operating system is obsolete".
The international Firefox OS App days event finished just over a week ago, giving people a chance to make their own apps for Firefox OS
Rackspace says it is turning conversations about its OpenStack-based cloud services into pilots.
NoSQL, the catchall phrase for non-relational databases, is all the rage among Web developers. However, it's somewhat unfair and unhelpful to use the term NoSQL to describe them, given the variety of technologies involved. Even so, there are some fundamental differences between traditional relational databases and their NoSQL counterparts. For one, as the name implies, NoSQL databases don't use the standard SQL query language, and use either their own SQL-like language (for example, MongoDB) or an object-oriented API. Another difference is the lack of two-dimensional tables; whereas SQL databases operate solely with such tables, NoSQL databases eschew them in favor of name-value pairs or hash-like objects. And finally, NoSQL databases typically lack the features that led to the development of relational databases, namely transactions and data integrity.
LibreOffice 4.0 was launched last week, and the news reports and activity on social media were massive, more than any release of LibreOffice or OpenOffice before, with better coverage than many of Microsoft’s well-funded introductions. There were numerous links sent around to the usual sites like LinuxToday.com, but also TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Time Magazine, etc. A fair amount of the chatter was people wondering what the difference is between the two versions. Some have basic questions like whether LibreOffice can import their OpenOffice documents.
Oracle says it plans to open source the Android and iOS implementations of its JavaFX UI platform "over the next couple months," which it says will allow Java developers to use the technology to write cross-platform smartphone apps for the first time.
"Even though the educational market is slow to adopt new things, I think it is inevitable that open source is going to work its way into education. There is no reason for the education field to stop it. There is really nothing wrong with it. People no longer see open source as a problem. I think as more people continue to use open source, it will work its way into the education field."
Continuing to advance its health information exchange offerings, ONC posted Connect 4.0 on Monday and the latest iteration brings the HIE platform closer to a day when ONC might turn it over to the open source community.
Connect is essentially gateway and adapter software designed, in conjunction with Direct and Exchange, to enable secure health information exchange.
Last year, Red Hat announced that it plans to offer OpenStack on a subscription basis as a commercial, enterprise-grade product. OpenStack is an open source software project for building private and public clouds.
Red Hat's engineers contribute to the OpenStack project, and the company is an old-hand at productizing open source projects and offering them on a subscription basis. It is probably best known for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), a productized version of the open source Fedora Linux operating system, as well its JBoss Enterprise Middleware, based on JBoss community projects.
Opscode's Chef, the open source, cloud-focused, configuration management framework, has received a major update in the recently announced Chef 11 and now sports a core API server written in Erlang. Erchef, as the new core API server is known, was created using the experiences Opscode had running its hosted Chef offerings. The company set out to make a server that was API-compatible with the Ruby version of the Chef server, but faster and more scalable. To that end, the developers have been working on API endpoints where they could get the most benefit from scaling and performance and have been deploying it with their private Chef customers. The Chef 11 release marks the point where the Erchef server is incorporated into Chef's open source code base.
The Ruby on Rails Developers have released updates to Rails 3.2, 3.1 and 2.3 and made users aware of an update to the JSON gem to close an important security flaw. Most notable of the problems is CVE-2013-0277, another problem with serialised attributes in YAML. The flaw, which only affects Rails 2.3 and 3.0, can be exploited so that a crafted request would deserialize arbitrary YAML inside the server with the risk of denial of service or remote code execution. The Rails developers have released a fix for Rails 2.3, 2.3.17, but there will be no fix for Rails 3.0 in line with maintenance policy. The advisory contains patches for various versions of Rails for use where users cannot upgrade easily.
Pidgin 2.10.7 has been released a few hours ago, February 13, and it brings numerous fixes, improvements, and a few new features, especially to MSN, Gadu-Gadu, MXit, Sametime, IRC and Yahoo! protocols.
The City of Munich stands by its November 2012 cost estimates, which concluded that using free and open source software for desktops and office productivity for its 15,500 PCs is over 11 million euro cheaper, compared to the ubiquitous proprietary alternative. "There is no reason to correct this information", the city's IT department comments on 11 February to claims to the contrary.
Federal Parliament has issued documents formally compelling major technology vendors Apple, Microsoft and Adobe to compulsorily appear before its committee investigating price hikes on technology products sold in Australia, in a move that finally ends months of stalling by the vendors, who have proven unwilling to voluntary discuss their pricing strategies in public.
Code Across America is scheduled for February 22-24. It will be a weekend of community building and moving the needle for more openness in local governments across the United States.
Code Across America is a multi-day event that any municipality or community can join. Individuals and groups can participate through virtual and in-person activities around the country. The initiative is organized by Code for America and coincides with International Open Data Day on February 23.
Erin Robinson, the Information and Virtual Community Director for the Foundation for Earth Science, the management arm of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (@ESIPFed), says that earth science matters to all of us. For example, when Hurrican Sandy devastated areas of the country, responders needed information on flood zones and what hospitals were available.
It was alarming to read in the recent article The Rise and Fall of Languages in 2012 by Dr. Dobb's editor, Andrew Binstock, that Perl was "continuing its long decline" and was in"an irretrievable tailspin," based on statistics from Google searches. Nothing in the article discussed what was lacking feature-wise in the language that might be behind this decline. While I am not an authority on programming languages, I thought it was only appropriate to reflect on the strengths of Perl that I've relied on during my 14-year affair with the language.
It's going on two years since the release of PCC 1.0, but there hasn't been any follow-on Portable C Compiler release nor is there much public-facing development activity happening.
In writing recently about new GCC features, a new PathScale EKOPath compiler, and other compiler-related advancements, I was curious to see what was going on within the Portable C Compiler camp. I was also reminded of the compiler yesterday when seeing its being used within the HelenOS micro-kernel OS project.
Zend Enterprise, a company that has been among the main developers of PHP for many years, has released new versions of Zend Server and Zend Studio. New features in version 6 of Zend Server focus on handling the challenges that can arise in ensuring cooperation between developer teams and system operators.
These new features position the company as a member of the DevOps movement, which aims to provide techniques and processes to improve communication, cooperation and integration between developers and system operators. These techniques are now more important than ever, as there is a trend towards companies having to release increasingly smaller changes more often and having to test their applications on an ongoing basis. To remain competitive, companies no longer focus on major annual releases, instead issuing updates and patches at short intervals.
After cursing at a professor during a Spanish final, former Columbia-Juilliard student Oren Ungerleider was involuntarily committed to St. Luke’s Hospital and kept there against his will for 30 days, according to a lawsuit he filed against the University this month.
We humans constantly are telling ourselves stories about moral and immoral behavior. Many of the most memorable -- if only because of repetition -- are from the Bible. From them we learn about moral courage and cowardice, about wisdom and folly, about when to obey and when to rebel. And, of course, most Bible stories tell us to believe in God. But God -- He/She/It -- is so many things at once: God is Love, God is Nature, God is Truth. How can I believe in all these things at the same time? I’m more comfortable with each of those declarations about what God IS when the formula is reversed. For example, I prefer Nature is God. If that identifies me as a pagan, so be it. But the Bible stories still move me profoundly, especially when I try to apply them to the world around me.
In my years reporting on the intentional narrowing of political vernacular to guarantee specific outcomes, I have encountered no better example of Orwellian newspeak than that which now dominates the conversation about America’s drone war. Given that, it’s worth reviewing the situation because it is so illustrative of how militarist propaganda operates in the 21st century.
As we write, Christopher Dorner is most likely dying or dead, as the cabin in which he was trapped burns around him. A huge manhunt involving local, state and federal officials has culminated in what can only be described as an extrajudicial execution. We condemn Dorner’s murder at the hands of the state.
People cheer Dorner because, whatever his motivations, he exposed the workings of a vicious white supremacist system that goes quietly unacknowledged most of the time. He declared war on a system that has waged an undeclared war on us, every day, for years; a system that holds millions of poor people and people of color in prisons, and guns them down in the street. He did what every young person of color in Los Angeles dreams of, when he or she comes home after getting fucked with by the cops, and starts a shootout on GTA V. He was celebrated for doing what many of us could not.
At approximately 7 PM ET, I listened through a police scanner as San Bernardino Sheriffs gave the order to burn down the cabin where suspected murderer Christopher Dorner was allegedly hiding. Deputies were maneuvering a remote controlled demolition vehicle to the base of the cabin, using it to tear down the walls of the cabin where Dorner was hiding, and peering inside.
According to a statement on Wednesday from the Israel's Justice Ministry, Ben Zygier's Melbourne family was notified after he was detained. Zygier was reportedly known as ''prisoner X'' in the high-security jail.
Conspicuously absent from Obama’s State of the Union was any mention of Guantanamo Bay or the 166 detainees still stuck there.
...C.I.A., and the Joint Special Operations Command have so far killed large numbers of people.
The Senate and House armed services committees also receive briefings on drone strikes conducted by the U.S. military. However, the Senate foreign relations and House foreign affairs committees—who are supposed to provide oversight of all U.S. foreign policy—have repeatedly been refused general briefings about targeted killings by the White House, even though all relevant staffers have security clearances. As these committee members point out, it is impossible to exercise oversight over a country or region without insight into how the CIA or military conducts targeted killings. If President Obama wants to “continue to engage” with Congress, agreeing to hold closed-door briefings with these committees would be a good start.
Before the outbreak of green on blue killings that eventually led to a significant interruption in the training of Afghan security forces last September, it was impossible to read a statement from the US military or NATO regarding future plans without encountering a reference to a required 352,000 force size for combined Afghan National Security Forces. It was our training of the ANSF that was touted as our primary reason for remaining in Afghanistan because we need those trained troops available to take over security responsibility as we withdraw. I have been insisting since the interruption that it will be impossible to continue to claim that a functional ANSF force size of 352,000 can be achieved, as the known high rate of attrition continued during the training interruption. No new troop size prediction has emerged, but it was significant to me that references to the 352,000 force size claim had seemed to disappear.
President Barack Obama delivered his “State of the Union” address on Tuesday night. And though he suggested there may be minimal reductions to wartime spending, he jingoistically declared, “We will maintain the best military the world has ever known.”
The speech renewed the US government’s commitment to a permanent war on terrorism. While it signaled the country would no longer be engaging in full-scale occupations or nation-building efforts while Obama was president, there was no indication that America’s dominance in the world would be reduced. America’s global military footprint of around 1,000 bases would be preserved.
Despite Osama of bin Laden's death, al-Qaeda has exploited the Arab Awakening to create is largest safe havens and operational bases in more than a decade across the Arab world. This may prove to be the most deadly al-Qaeda yet. And at the center of the new al-Qaeda remains the old al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri still hiding in Pakistan and still providing strategic direction to the global jihad.
The undertow of anti-Iranian fearmongering becomes stronger.
Western sources tell Kuwait's Al-Jarida newspaper 'Prisoner X' took part in 2010 mission to kill top Hamas terrorist in Dubai. Attorney who met Zygier: There were no signs he was going to commit suicide
During last week’s confirmation hearing for CIA director nominee John Brennan, senators discussed the establishment of a federal court with jurisdiction over the president’s death-by-drone program.
As proposed by lawmakers, the so-called “drone court” would be tasked with approving the targeting (and, by extension, the assassination) of people on President Obama’s or the CIA’s respective kill lists.
Siraj is currently rallying for a young man named Ziyad Yaghi who was taken away by U.S. authorities under the dreaded anti-American legislation known as the NDAA, or 'National Defense Authorization Act' which allows the United States to arbitrarily arrest and detain Americans without granting them due process, the NDAA is a torch hovering near our Constitution which guarantees protection from such diabolic actions.
Bethlehem first came to the attention of the general public as the man who advised the Israeli government that it was legal to build their “security” wall slicing through the West Bank and disrupting Palestinian communications and access to fields and water resources. Bethlehem was then the counsel to the Israeli government at the resulting case before the International Court of Justice.
The International Court of Justice – along with the vast majority of reputable international lawyers – disagreed with Daniel Bethlehem, and Bethlehem and the Israeli government lost the case. The Israeli government however disregarded the court’s judgement and continued its illegal activity.
If Pfc. Bradley Manning is convicted of ‘aiding the enemy,’ it could be the end of whistleblowing as we know it in the United States Armed Forces.
We made this YouTube advertisement entitled “Aiding the Enemy” to raise awareness of the dangers posed to the American public by leveling this charge at Bradley Manning, and recruit people to our campaign urging Major General Michael Linnington to drop the charge immediately.
Watch our new ad, “Aiding the Enemy,” and donate $20 to help us run it in front of as many YouTube users as possible.
Second, both Bush and Obama officials continuously attempted to apply coercive pressure on Italian magistrates to obstruct this investigation, and when that failed, applied the same pressure to the Berlusconi and Prodi governments. Indeed, numerous diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks detail those efforts, and the Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi of L'Espresso described that campaign of obstruction in her book "Dossier WikiLeaks. Segreti Italiani."
The author has both interviewed several stakeholders in US an Mexico, and used documents from the State Department released by WikiLeaks to tell the story of several years of cooperation between US and Mexico in order to fight the drug cartels.
The story begins in November 2006 with a meeting between President Felipe Calderon and George Bush, where Calderon states that he wants to struggle corruption and organized crime.
The DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) is authorized to use illegal ways to fight the organized crime (people killing, weapon trafficking, and providing themselves drugs)
The operation is known as “Iniciativa Mérida” (Merida Operation). Merida is the city in Yucantan where the first negotiations between the two presidents took place.
A joint meeting between two committees in Iceland began today, the committees are the Constitutional and Supervisory Committee and the Judicial Affairs and Education Committee. At the meeting the actions of the FBI, during the summer of 2011, will be discussed.
The secret truth: There never was a “task force” dedicated to ferreting out mortgage fraud
It takes a lot of chutzpah for Obama to recycle a watered-down version of a 2008 campaign commitment and present it as his brightest, shiniest promise in the State of the Union address laying out his second term priorities. The Vichy Left was predictably over the moon at Obama’s pledge to raise the Federal minimum wage in increments to $9.00 by 2015.
U.S. regulators told lawmakers they are making significant progress to prevent a repeat of the 2008 credit crisis, pushing back against complaints of slow progress and efforts to undo parts of the Dodd-Frank Act.
Republican leader John Boehner must have some expertise when it comes to labor economics. Either that, or the New York Times is allowing him to make misleading claims without being challenged.
It would grant us more control over how our personal information is collected, stored and exploited, and make sure that those who hold our data play by the rules. This proposed Data Protection Regulation, made in the context of a booming trade in personal information, is a major and rare opportunity to give people back more control over their data.
The General Data Protection Regulation was put forward by the European Commission on 25 January 2012. It is a proposed update to the Data Protection Directive from 1995.
The current proposals are a stronger and more enforceable assertion of existing principles. The Regulation outlines a number of measures that would give people more control over their data and make sure businesses that handle data play by the rules, ensuring they are held to account for their data practices.
With the reintroduction of the much-maligned Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act scheduled for the day after the State of the Union, the House of Representatives may have hoped the President’s own cybersecurity initiative would divert some of the attention away from the controversial legislation known as CISPA.
Do you think you'll ever take a laptop, iPad, or smart phone with you on an international trip? Did you know that, when you get back to the United States, the Department of Homeland Security can search through your personal electronic devices, even if they have no reasonable cause for suspicion? Did you know that they can send you home and keep your computer or phone for days or even weeks, looking through your photos, archived emails and other private data at their leisure?
"...they are keeping records of our movements for months or years for no good reason.”
One of the key pieces of the order, according to the Department of Homeland Security, is an effort to increase the sharing of information between the government and private companies. Judge Andrew Napolitano said today on Fox Business Network “that is the beginning of the end” for individuals’ Internet privacy, arguing that it’s yet another government initiative presented “with a smiling face … to help you.”
...nearly 300 pages about the surveillance technique directed toward users of mobile phones.
In President Barack Obama’s first days as president, he pledged to have his administration create an “unprecedented level of openness in government.” His chief of staff, Jack Lew, has contended the administration is the “most transparent administration ever.” At a rally in 2010, he told the public, “We have put in place the toughest ethics laws and toughest transparency rules of any administration in history.”
Despite the stated commitments and professions on transparency, the Sunlight Foundation found talk of “government integrity, transparency, and influence” was mostly absent in his “State of the Union” speech last night.
American liberalism has always been pro-intervention
In 2004, the ACLU produced a satiric video called “Ordering Pizza in 2015” that has become the single most-downloaded piece of content we’ve ever produced (at least we believe in the absence of complete stats). I won’t describe it—you can watch it here if you haven’t seen it—but like many successful viral products, it combined humor with a biting commentary on an all-too-real set of trends. We got the idea from a humorous email someone sent us, and the voiceovers were performed by an entry-level ACLU staffer and a friend of our then-communications director.
Earlier this week, we wrote about the latest defense by Homeland Security of their laptop search policies that (they claim) give them broad coverage to search laptops within 100 miles of the border. The latest bit of news was that an internal review found that there was minimal benefits to one's civil liberties in not searching their laptops, so it was okay (think about that sentence for a bit).
President Barack Obama signed the latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law on January 2, renewing the power to apprehend and detain Americans indefinitely granted in the previous year’s version.
In order to protect their citizens from being grabbed and imprisoned under the provisions of the NDAA, many state lawmakers are standing up to the federal government, proposing resolutions nullifying this unconstitutional power at the state borders.
In the not-too-distant future, Congress passes a draconian, UK-style ban on all weapons. Or, maybe the Senate does it through an international treaty. Or, instead of Congress, maybe the president follows in the footsteps of FDR, who whipped up an executive order requiring people to turn in their gold.
The method wouldn’t really matter. The end result would easily be one of the greatest attacks on liberty in American history.
A resolution introduced Tuesday at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors stands in opposition to a federal defense law that many fear undermines constitutional rights by allowing the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without charge or trial. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), passed by Congress in 2007 and renewed each year, contains provisions authorizing the U.S. military to indefinitely jail terrorist suspects and those aiding them.
A resolution was introduced at today's meeting of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors opposing provisions of a federal law that allows the indefinite detention of American citizens on U.S. soil without due process.
The National Defense Authorization Act for 2013, signed by President Barack Obama in January after its approval by Congress, includes provisions that would permit indefinite military detentions without trial.
Board of Supervisors president David Chiu, who authored the resolution against the NDAA, joined a few dozen people who gathered for a rally about the legislation outside City Hall prior to this afternoon's board meeting.
President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address contained very few surprises in the realm of national security and merely marked the continuation of the Bush-era war on terror policies despite their extraordinary fiscal toll, even as the American economy faces incredible duress under the deficit and the threat of congressionally-imposed sequestration.
Despite the fact that the U.S. spends almost as much on its military as every other country in the world combined, Obama stated that the cuts would “jeopardize our military readiness.” In fact, U.S. military spending has never been higher than in the post-9/11 era, which saw rises in spending greater than Vietnam and the entirety of the Cold War. Furthermore, the 31% in defense cuts would be less than the 43%, 36%, and 33% cuts that came with the end of the Korean, Cold, and Vietnam wars respectively. In this light, the defense sequestration cuts are perfectly reasonable, and indeed necessary to alleviate our country’s economic crisis.
They voted for him, yet a growing number of American liberals are angry over President Barack Obama’s reliance on the use of drones and his support for the National Defense Authorization Act. They argue that the president’s embrace of these policies is even more extreme and conservative than that pursued by his predecessor, George W. Bush.
“If Bush had done the same things as Obama, then more people would have been upset about it,” Daniel Ellsberg observed. “He is a Democrat, though, and to an extent can get away with it.”
Ellsberg, who is famous (or notorious, depending on one’s political preferences) for having leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, is among the plaintiffs in a court case challenging the NDAA. He and others have accused the Obama administration of using the law to grant itself unconstitutional new powers.
The rationale behind the administration’s “assassination by drone” program sounds eerily reminiscent to former V.P. Dick Cheney’s “one-percent doctrine.”
Sommers labels as "understandable but misguided" the attitude, "Isn't it time for women and girls to enjoy the advantages?" A more pertinent question to ask Sommers, though, is what advantages are women enjoying that suggest boys deserve an extra boost?
After all, women who work full-time still make only 81 percent of what men do. And women own only 36 percent as much wealth as men do.
Only 4 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women, as are 17 percent of directors on Fortune 500 boards. Women are 18 percent of U.S. representatives and 20 percent of U.S. senators.
This post deals with a strange copyright troll, which bullies people into properly attributing a quoted poem. The troll runs across multiple social media platforms but does a bulk of its "work" at Twitter, where it can receive instantaneous feedback. Along the way, we'll deal with the poet himself, a company called On Press Inc. and some other connections which seem to indicate the poet himself is behind the trolling, along with a threatened lawsuit against me for copyright infringement, defamation and false claims.
We have previously discussed how President Obama has repeatedly yielded to the “copyright hawks” who have steadily increased the penalties for copyright and trademark violations, including criminal penalties. Despite the abuse of average citizens by thuggish law firms and prosecutors, the Obama Administration continues to support draconian measures against citizens. Even after the abuse and death of Aaron Swartz by the Justice Department, the Obama Administration has decided to double down in a case of a young mother in Northern Minnesota who was hit with grotesque penalties for simply sharing 24 songs. She was told to pay $222,000 — over 100 times the actual damages for the songs. The Obama Administration has intervened before the Supreme Court to ask for it to allow the penalty to stand as lawful and correct.
When the Copyright Office announced its updated DMCA exemptions list, we were saddened to find that the office had abdicated its duty on multiple fronts. While that sad result was announced back in October, the downgraded exemptions list has just now come into effect. We need your voice in this fight.