Most of the characteristics of GNU/Linux he describes as suitable for use in India are applicable everywhere for some of us. I spent years in Canada’s North in schools that certainly benefited by using GNU/Linux. We didn’t have the time, money or resources to prop up Wintel. Even buying a new PC sometimes cost $200 just for the freight. All the more need to keep PCs working until they died, something we could not do with Wintel because of malware.
Open-source software, or more precisely the FLOSS (Free and Libre Open Source Software) is arguably one of the best gifts the 20th century had presented us with. With the turn of the century, we continued to nurture this gift, and polish it more and more. A vast array of open-source software arose from our collective efforts, and indeed they’re helping make the world a better place for everyone.
You're not a power user unless you're running one of these distros
Kanotix, a rock-solid Linux distro based on Debian, which contains the newest packages and recognizes more modern hardware than any other operating system in use today, has just received a special edition called LinuxTag 2013.
This news just blew my mind. Quantum computing is here and you can buy yourself a quantum computer today. Actually you could buy one for quite a while now but there is a new model which is 512 QuBits up from 128 QuBits of the previous model.
The Linux Foundation today is releasing its annual Enterprise End User Report. Because this is the third year we've surveyed the world's largest enterprises and The Linux Foundation's End User Council about Linux adoption, we're able to share some interesting trending data.
But perhaps most interesting is the opportunity to understand how Linux is outpacing Windows in server revenue in the enterprise. IDC's latest quarterly tracker shows Linux growing at 12.7 percent year-over-year while Windows is stagnating at 3.2 percent year-over-year growth. In fact, the quarter prior (Q312), Windows was actually in decline while Linux was growing.
Riku Voipio of Linaro, Andrew Wafaa of ARM, Olof Johannson of Google, Sonny Rao of Google and Marcin Juszkiewicz of Linaro talk about hacking and using the full performance of the ARM Powered Samsung Chromebook to run Ubuntu, Debian, Open Suse on this ARM Powered laptop, talking about how much the Mali-T604 is being used in this ARM Powered Chrome OS, which feature improvements the ARM Powered Chromebook may get to possibly improve battery life, and a bit about the possibility of running Chromium OS or Chrome OS on older/cheaper ARM Powered laptops such as ARM Cortex-A9 and previous.
The most recent Linaro Connect (Linaro Connect Asia 2013 – LCA), held in Hong Kong the first week of March, really put a spotlight on the incredible momentum around ARM based technology and products moving into the Data Center. Yes – you read that correctly – the DATA CENTER!
With these releases, a large amount of upstream bug/security fixes have been applied (1,368 with 3.0,79-LTSI; 944 with 3.4.46-LTSI). This should result in a dramatic reduction of in-house maintenance costs for the companies who use LTSI Kernel.
In addition to the back port of bug/security fixes, LTSI has many patch collections now that are not merged and can be very useful and easy to apply to products.
Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.10-rc3 kernel on Sunday afternoon, but to his dissatisfaction, this third release candidate is bigger than its predecessor.
After years of work near single-handedly by James Simmons, the independently-created DRM kernel mode-setting driver for many VIA Chrome IGPs is finally looking for inclusion into the mainline kernel.
Somewhere in my music writing, I remember an anecdote about Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the songwriting team behind many hits by Elvis, The Coasters, and many others. Apparently when Leiber & Stoller hits were topping the charts, a music producer walked into a drum store and asked for the Leiber & Stoller drum kit. The store owner did a slack take, then responded that if he really wanted the Leiber & Stoller sound, he'd have to buy every drum in the store.
Making a list of the best Linux software is a tough task. Hell, you could fill an entire book just by listing the various distros and desktop environments, let alone making a list of the best software for each one. So while this is by no means a comprehensive list, we did our best to include a wide variety of programs that the average user will find helpful. Below, you’ll find a hodgepodge of different software – mostly stuff for KDE and GNOME, but also a good number of programs that work in any desktop environment. So no matter what flavor of Linux you prefer, there’s something here for everyone.
Football Manager is a football management simulation video game developed by Sports Interactive and published by Sega. The game series dates back to the early 90s. From the original Facebook post, there is no information available right now for new features to Football Manager 2014 over Football Manager 2013 nor is a release date set.
The news was confirmed by studio director Miles Jacobson on Twitter, alongside the announcement that next year's game will be available on Windows, Mac and Linux.
As a way of giving back to the groups behind software which has made World of Tanks possible, developer Wargaming.net has announced plans to fund foundations which support open-source development.
Rise of the Ravager offers classic arcade action reminiscent of a fast action Missile Command while players blast descending waves of coloured enemies that can only be annihilated by a matching colour bullet (in a similar fashion to Guitar Hero or Ikaruga). Seek the favour of the Old Ones to prevent an ancient god’s avatar from rising, signalling the End of Times.
Half-Life 2 is a first-person shooter developed by Valve that was released back in 2004 and it has recently been ported on the Linux platform. The first patches have started to arrive.
Porting a complex title such as Half-Life 2 is a very difficult task and the developers have to release a lot of updates until the game exist the Beta stages.
Element4l is an immersive and experimental indie platform game, with a strong focus on flow and smooth gameplay, wrapped in an exceptional soundtrack by Mind Tree.
I have spent the last two weeks working to make print-manager experience in 4.11 the best I could. And this post should be about it. Sadly it’s not.
As a worldwide effort to provide every child with equal opportunity for a quality education, SugarLabs has created a Sugar Learning Platform that encourages critical thinking and collaborative learning for children. It first existed as a desktop environment for the various Linux distro, but has now become its own distro that can be run directly from the USB stick.
Conky-lua is a great and stylish conky that I got from Deviantart. I like its simplicity and appeal. However, conkies doesn't tend to work with modern Gnome 3, Unity and KDE desktops, as it is. Some subtle changes are required to make them work work with these modern desktops.
For those that still hold some nostalgia for Mandriva/Mandrake, there's good news. The OpenMandriva project was able to obtain a lot of the files before their server was scrapped. An archive has been set up by the OpenMandriva gang for all to share.
Raspberry Pi users have another operation system option, after the folks behind Fedora Linux changed their recipe and issued a “remix” of the OS for the tiny computer.
These settings will give your Fedora 18 a much more familiar look and feel. This will move you to fallback mode and enable your desktop.
Overall, the Unity-based flavor of Raring Ringtail, I repeat the Unity-based flavor, not Kubuntu or Xubuntu, which are quite alright really, deserves 0/10.
The application youtube-dl no longer works on Ubuntu 12.04 due to a change in the format of urls for videos. This is terrible as who doesn’t like to download videos! Looking at the bug report we can see that the test case is quite simple, on an Ubuntu 12.04 system (for this bug you could even use a virtual machine or a chroot) with youtube-dl installed try downloading something and it will fail. It is important that we also verify that we are impacted by the bug, because something may be different about our configuration, setup, or hardware.
Canonical's long-term Ubuntu strategy remains focused on convergence -- a single operating system designed for smartphones, tablets and PCs. But here's the thing: Can Ubuntu really achieve mass-market consumer success without a proper multi-million-dollar consumer marketing push? Hmmm...
Ubuntu 13.10 (Suacy Salamander) coming to us with a Touch Animation User Interface may be a reality, as a video detailing a new theme for Ubuntu has surfaced, which showcases the Touch interface being used on a Ubuntu based mobile phone. Reportedly made by Ubuntu designers, the video showcases various visual animations put to use in scenarios including unlocking the Ubuntu mobile-phone display.
Expectations were high for the release of Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail, but let's see if the hype was well deserved. 13.04 delivers improved performance, and some refinements for the Unity desktop. The critics and the community have spoken, but as always I demand the final word.
I often say, Lubuntu and LXLE are like a Ford Mustang and a Ford Shelby Mustang. Both are fords, both are mustangs, but the Shelby version is much more feature rich, with very different goals/purpose. Same is true for LXLE.
In other words, I want everyone to realize and understand that LXLE is the “Shelby” version of Lubuntu. This makes finding help, support and or overall camaraderie easier within the community.
As for LXLE being lightweight, I have a general rule, I keep it as light as I can, with great apps and a overall goal of being a drop in and go operating system for aging computers. Not light just to be light.
It's been almost a year since Zorin OS 6 made its debut, and since then several minor updates to the user-friendly Linux distribution have been released as well.
On Thursday, however, the Zorin project team rolled out a release candidate for Zorin OS 7, the next major version of the software.
Coreboot support for the popular BeagleBone ARM development board is being pushed mainline.
Hitting the Coreboot Git repository on Sunday morning by Google developers was the initial BeagleBone support.
Wardriving is the act of searching for Wifi networks by a someone on a vehicle, using a laptop, smartphone or personal digital assistant. A 22 year old IT security consultant and motorcycle enthusiast from New Zealand, Denis Andzakovic, has taken wardriving to a new level of coolness, with the help of the mighty tiny Raspberry Pi.
Generally speaking most recent cars have an on-board computer (called an engine control unit) that uses a 32bit, nominally 40Mhz, ARM based SOC and runs some version of Linux.
ARM's Development Studio 5 (DS-5) Community Edition (CE) to feature industry standard, and free-to-use software development environment for ARM Embedded Linux applications. DS-5 CE to offer Eclipse IDE, GNU cross-compiler, DS-5 Debugger, Streamline performance analyzer, online help and software examples. This product to help microcontroller users moving into the world of Linux.
Tizen is a Linux-based operating system that’s backed by Samsung and which is expected to ship on Samsung smartphones this year. But the OS isn’t just for mobile devices like phones and tablets.
A month after being released to mostly positive reviews, Samsung's flagship phone is getting some validation from Consumer Reports. The publication has run all its tests, kicked the phone's tires, and named the Android-powered Galaxy S4 its top rated smartphone.
Calling all Android developers — if you have a great idea for an app, then you could win cold hard cash from Samsung.
Update to Chrome for Android and desktop computers offers faster speed and better query understanding.
The Wandboard is a tiny computer or developer board which looks a bit like a Raspberry Pi, but which has a starting price about three times as high and which packs significantly more power.
Samsung phones running a secure version of Android have been approved for use by the US Department of Defense.
The approval is the start of a process that will see many different types of mobile devices used by US soldiers.
While covering the launch of Appcelerator Enterprise Platform at Mountain View last week, we enjoyed a short chat with Jeff Haynie, co-founder and CEO of Appcelerator.
Haynie explained that his company’s new enterprise platform is important because it leverages mobility, cloud, and Big Data. These three game-changing advancements have really transformed the way the enterprise does business. We are moving away from package software deployed inside of middleware and enterprise app software that has been the trend for the last 15 years, and now towards on-demand subscription-oriented software, Haynie says.
Joeffice is an alpha version of a open source Java-based office suite, which was created by its author, Anthony Goubard, in thirty days. Goubard documented the development process in a series of videos now available on YouTube.
The application's framework, and the tool used to develop the application, is the NetBeans platform. It is well known that NetBeans is an IDE, but the IDE also supports being effectively hollowed out and being used as the basis for applications. This is called the NetBeans platform and gives applications all the support for customisable editors for documents and having a fully tab-supporting, dock-enabled, single window or multi window environment with toolbars, menus and other interface elements.
Are you ready for Google to take over the desktop? You’d better be if you use Chrome. With it, Google is making a play to rule the computing world as a back door to a new app economy.
Local OpenStack Innovators and Tech Leaders Will Demonstrate Cloud Capabilities at Premier Technology Event
SYDNEY May 27, 2013 – The OpenStack€® community will take part in CeBIT Australia for the first time when the show opens in Sydney tomorrow, bringing the promise of cost savings, speed of deployment and freedom from vendor lock in to Australian enterprises. CeBIT will run from May 28 through 30 and will be held at the Sydney Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour; OpenStack will be on stand 001 in the Cloud Ecosystem section in Hall 4.
April welcomes the recognition by the culture, education and communication committee at the French Senate, of the importance of open formats and of free software to the education public service because only them guarantee equal access for all to this future public service.
Devops represents a dramatic change from the old siloed developers and script-heavy system administrators of yesterday. Any tools that can provide some common ground for developers and IT operations professionals can help, and it seems Chef and Puppet often do.
The libjpeg-turbo library, which is the increasingly-used fork of the JPEG library that provides faster performance through SIMD optimizations, has out a new release.
The Department of Science and Technology revealed plans to adopt InaSAFE, a disaster mitigation technology from Indonesia, to its Nationwide Operational Assessment of Hazard (NOAH) project in a bid to improve disaster planning and preparedness in the country.
The website Futuregov Asia reported that the Philippines are planning to improve their disaster mitigation efforts by adopting an Indonesian mapping and planning tool: "The Department of Science and Technology revealed plans to adopt InaSAFE, a disaster mitigation technology from Indonesia, to its Nationwide Operational Assessment of Hazard (NOAH) project in a bid to improve disaster planning and preparedness in the country. InaSAFE, or Indonesia Scenario Assessment for Emergency, is an open source software that produces realistic natural hazard impact scenarios to help decision makers in their disaster planning, preparedness and response activities.
With next month's release of LLVM 3.3 quickly approaching, here's an overview of some of the best and most exciting features coming to this next major update of the LLVM compiler infrastructure and Clang C/C++ compiler front-end.
Some of our favorite features coming to LLVM 3.3 include:
People with higher IQs are slow to detect large background movements because their brains filter out non-essential information, say US researchers.
Instead, they are good at detecting small moving objects.
The findings come in a study of 53 people given a simple, visual test in Current Biology.
The results could help scientists understand what makes a brain more efficient and more intelligent.
In what has been roundly declared a victory for food rights and private food transactions by supporters, a jury returned a verdict of not guilty on three of four charges against Wisconsin raw milk farmer Vernon Hershberger in the early morning hours of March 25. "It's a beautiful day. . . . They tried their best to set me free," Hershberger told The Complete Patient after a few hours of sleep.
There has been a lot of outrage expressed recently over the contents of an affidavit filed in support of a search warrant to search the e-mail accounts of reporter James Rosen. The government’s affidavit offered the view that Rosen violated the law by aiding and abetting the alleged violations of laws prohibiting the disclosure of classified national security information. Specifically, the affidavit stated, “there is probable cause to believe that the Reporter . . . has committed a violation of 18 U.S.C. 793(d) either as Mr. Kim’s co-conspirator and/or aider and abetter.” To some, the fact that the government would make this argument shows that the Obama Administration is engaging in a War on Journalism.
Scripps News reporters discovered 170,000 Lifeline phone customer records online that contained everything needed for identity theft. After requesting an interview with the COO of TerraCom and YourTel, the reaction was kill-the-messenger style; the reporters were called "Scripps Hackers" and threatened with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The ability to copy electronic code makes one-time pads vulnerable to hackers. Now engineers have found a way round this to create a system of cryptography that is invulnerable to electronic attack.
On Monday, I profiled asylumbooter.com, one of several increasingly public DDoS-for-hire services posing as Web site “stress testing” services. Today, we’ll look at ragebooter.net, yet another attack service except for one secret feature which sets it apart from the competition: According the site’s proprietor, ragebooter.net includes a hidden backdoor that lets the FBI monitor customer activity.
Twitter introduced multi-factor login verification on Wednesday. Good news? Well… that depends.
Twitter's initial implementation of two-factor authentication (2FA) relies on SMS.
But… Twitter also uses SMS as a way to send and receive Tweets (making use of SMS for double-duty: social and security). It's possible to "STOP" incoming Tweets via SMS, and that makes sense, because people sometimes end up roaming unexpectedly — and there needs to be a way to stop the SMS feature. Otherwise it could generate a costly bill.
Those users who are still using Novell Client for Windows should look around for alternatives. In recent weeks, at least two 0-day exploits for the kernel driver have surfaced on the internet. The security firm eEye has documented the issues with the ids 20130510 and 20130522.
Those 86 prisoners have not been, and will not be, charged with any crime whatsoever; they are not "terror suspects."
The dust in Iraq rolls down the long roads that are the desert's fingers. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school playgrounds, consuming children kicking a ball; and it carries, according to Dr Jawad Al-Ali, "the seeds of our death". An internationally respected cancer specialist at the Sadr teaching hospital in Basra, Dr Ali told me that in 1999, and today his warning is irrefutable. "Before the Gulf war," he said, "we had two or three cancer patients a month. Now we have 30 to 35 dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48% of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with, then long after. That's almost half the population. Most of my own family have it, and we have no history of the disease. It is like Chernobyl here; the genetic effects are new to us; the mushrooms grow huge; even the grapes in my garden have mutated and can't be eaten."
The rally, now in its third year, is tolerated by the authorities, but just like a year ago when 10,000 participated, it was not given official permission to take place.
Like last year’s parade, hardliners managed to spray graffiti on parliament, leading authorities to take extra precautions. Bern's Old Town was locked down on the eve of the event, with extensive riot police deployments and barricades erected around Parliament Square.
Investigators believe they have found "conclusive" new proof that CIA-linked planes landed regularly in Scottish airports as part of the "extraordinary rendition" programme.
SNP MSPs have urged the UK government to come clean on what knowledge it has on rendition flights using Inverness, Wick and Aberdeen airports.
Rob Gibson, who has campaigned against these flights, said new findings that claim to have “conclusive” proof rendition planes landed regularly in Scottish airports, was “shocking”.
The study by Kingston and Kent universities found that 13 flights to these airports may have been involved in the US security service's rendition programme.
The UK's support for the CIA's global rendition programme after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US was far more substantial than has previously been recognised, according to a new research project that draws on a vast number of publicly available data and documentation.
Storm was offered $250,000 (€£165,000) to help track down the radical Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike in 2011. But the relationship soured when the CIA refused to pay him, saying that despite his assistance, the information that led to the kill came from other sources.
When the New York Times reported recently that the CIA routinely provides cash payments to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, totaling in the tens of millions of dollars, many were surprised. I wasn't among them. The Karzai scandal cycle has developed a certain amount of redundancy: his odd outbursts, his family's endless corruption, the vacillating positions on peace negotiations and about faces on the Taliban one day and the United States the next -- it has lost the power to shock. CIA payments are not even at the front of this parade of infamies.
Currently ex-CIA agent John Kiriakou is serving a 30-month prison term essentially for embarrassing the U.S. government. What was so embarrassing? He exposed the CIA's torture program during the Bush administration.
Russian agents warned them that both Zubeidat Tsarnaeva and 26-year-old Tamerlan were militant Islamists
Forget it; the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is not becoming more “democratic” – or even transparent.
US President Barack Obama now pledges to transfer the responsibility of the shadow 'Drone Wars' from the CIA to the Pentagon – so the US Congress is able to monitor it.
On the other hand, we now also know (again thanks to the Washington Post) that James Rosen, the Fox News reporter almost certainly communicated some of the time with his alleged source Stephen Jin-Woo Kim through a Gmail account. Those communications are at the heart of a leak investigation in which DOJ is, as Jack has noted, pushing very hard. So, apparently what I consider an obvious lapse in tradecraft is, to at least one sophisticated news reporter, …. a surprise. And if Fox News doesn’t know that Gmail is insecure, maybe it is too much to expect that the CIA would know.
In the first part, geopolitical analyst William Engdahl discussed the role of CIA’s Graham Fuller in creating the policy of using angry Jihadist Muslims as trained terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere against the Soviet Union. Herein—largely drawing on the revelations made by FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edwards—Engdahl throws the spotlight on the entire CIA-sponsored Islamic Jihadist operations run through Fetullah Gülen across Turkey into Central Asia and Russia and China.
Amnesty International has stated in its annual report that it is concerned about the pace of Poland's investigation into alleged CIA prisons for terrorists on Polish soil.
Following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States rounded up suspected terrorists wherever they were and then moved them to secret prisons around the globe, where they were detained and questioned. The program, largely carried out by the CIA, was known as extraordinary rendition.
Prosecutors are applying to the Attorney General to extend the investigation into an alleged CIA prison in Poland, where renditioned prisoners have complained they were imprisoned and tortured.
WikiLeaks has lashed out at a forthcoming US-made documentary on founder Julian Assange. The whistleblowing group decried the film for its alleged inaccuracies, chiefly implications that Assange conspired with Bradley Manning to commit espionage.
The anti-secrecy organization released an annotated copy of the film’s transcript that took no prisoners. Even the documentary’s name – ‘We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks’ – was condemned by the group as misleading.
As I noted in intro to my interview with Alex Gibney, director of the new We Steal Secrets film re WikilLeaks, he has been slammed by Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks Twitter feed for months, for various reasons, no doubt. It seems that Assange early on got some kind of leaked script or transcript for the film in process. Gibney hit back for basing a critique on some words on the page, when a film is a quite different experience.
The disclosures known as the “Kissinger cables” make the US Administration ethically and morally, if not legally, responsible for the Bhopal Gas Disaster that took thousands of lives, sickened and maimed many more. If one looks at the larger picture of the Bhopal tragedy one would find officials of the US Administration including those in its Indian embassy and some Indian collaborators working against all ethical or moral and legal norms from the beginning to end for the benefit of a big corporation. The entire script, however, was prepared and choreographed by the US.
In Nigeria, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the drafting of legislation to assist the progress of GE crop approval there. Other forms of coercion were more gentle, even glamorous; they included a "magical evening" with famed Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli on Venice's San Giorio Maggiore island and State-sponsored biotech conferences, receptions and delegations of agriculture officials and reporters to U.S.-based biotech centers.
At Freedom of the Press Foundation, we believe it’s vital to defend WikiLeaks’ right to gather and publish classified information in the public interest, just as it’s vital to protect the rights of Associated Press and Fox News to do the same. Under the law, the AP, Fox News, and WikiLeaks are no different (a fact that even the government argues). If one falls, the others will not be far behind.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd fulfilled his campaign pledge to withdraw Australian “combat” forces from Southern Iraq on June 2008. Rudd used the occasion to condemn former Prime Minister John Howard for joining the war, but US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks show the Rudd government wanted to keep more Australian forces in Iraq than it had withdrawn.
After the withdrawal of soldiers, about 1000 Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel remained in Iraq, including sailors on board warships in the Persian Gulf ââ¬â¢ Australia’s contribution to the multinational Task Force 158 (TF158) guarding Iraqi oil platforms.
The Aafia Siddiqu case that Archibald was involved with became controversial in Pakistan. The facts surrounding Siddiqui’s activities and arrest remain disputed and though she was eventually tried and convicted in New York City her case remains controversial due to questions surrounding her possible kidnapping, detainment, and torture by U.S. forces as well as disputes regarding forensic evidence and due process rights.
London: An interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would cost an interviewer as high as a million dollars.
On Tuesday evening I gave an envelope full of hundred-dollar bills to a friendly long-haired young man I’d never met in an undistinguished coffee-shop in an undistinguished neighborhood. By the time I got home, the BitCoins I’d bought were worth noticeably less than I paid.
Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, has continued to defend the company's tax affairs, insisting it would comply with British law if it was changed and claiming to be perplexed by the debate.
In a phrase less snappy than the more celebrated "don't be evil", Schmidt said Google had "a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders" that prevented the internet company from paying more tax abroad. However, he said: "It's not a debate. You pay the taxes."
nearly half the world's population lives on less than $2.50 a day.
[...]
The incomes of 100 people out of the seven billion on the planet could fix that, and then fix it again, and then fix it again, and then fix it again. The exact total of the wealth of these individuals is actually something of a mystery, thanks to the tax havens they use to hide their fortunes. There are trillions of dollars squirrelled away in those havens - no one knows quite how much - and the subtraction of that money from the global economy has a direct and debilitating effect on the people not fortunate enough to be part of that elite 100.
A prominent Vietnamese blogger has been arrested for posting articles critical of the communist government, reports said on Monday, in the latest crackdown on dissent in the authoritarian country.
Responding to calls to revive the communications data bill...
Depending on your point of view, U.S. General Keith Alexander is either an Army four-star trying to stave off a cyber Pearl Harbor attack, or an overreaching spy chief who wants to eavesdrop on the private emails of every American.
The 1 million square-foot Camp Williams facility in Bluffdale, Utah will house a 100,000 square foot data center, while the remaining 900,000 SF will be used for technical support and administrative space. Wired has estimated the Utah Data Center would consume $40 million of electricity a year, which translates into about $2.4 million annually in additional taxes under HB325.
It was the first time the NSA made public the number of people who work for the agency, whose post-9/11 workforce is now estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000.
....every telephone conversation... with or without a search warrant — "is being captured as we speak."
Journalists, First Amendment watchdogs and government transparency advocates reacted with outrage Monday to the revelation that the Justice Department had investigated the newsgathering activities of a Fox News reporter as a potential crime in a probe of classified leaks.
Critics said the government’s suggestion that James Rosen, Fox News’s chief Washington correspondent, was a “co-conspirator” for soliciting classified information threatened to criminalize press freedoms protected by the First Amendment. Others also suggested that the Justice Department’s claim in pursuing an alleged leak from the State Department was little more than pretext to seize his e-mails to build their case against the suspected leaker.
The Senate immigration bill's H-1B restrictions have clearly upset Indian firms. But sometimes being in a tough spot can prompt new ways of approaching problems. One firm is implementing software robots.
In late April, the 16-year-old central Florida honor student was accused of igniting a chemical explosion on school grounds, leading to her arrest and suspension from school, but authorities dropped criminal charges last week.
A federal judge has ruled that the office of America’s self-proclaimed toughest sheriff systematically singled out Latinos in its trademark immigration patrols, marking the first finding by a court that the agency racially profiles people.
A dramatic battery of measures to prevent radicalisation of British Muslims was outlined on Sunday by the home secretary, Theresa May, including tougher pre-emptive censorship of internet sites, a lower threshold for banning extremist groups and renewed pressure on universities and mosques to reject so-called hate preachers.
Today, the California Assembly Appropriations Committee gave a “Do-Pass” approval to a bill that could render toothless the federal “indefinite detention” powers under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The bill, by ASM Tim Donnelly was previously passed unanimously by the Public Safety Committee and is expected to get a vote in the full state assembly in the coming week.
In the past few years we have witnessed the worst of government. President Barack Obama now represents a lawless government incapable of any accountability. It's my belief that "Articles of Impeachment" must be brought forward in order to check the executive branch. Congress must make itself relevant again; otherwise no president will fear anything and the executive branch of will become more and more tyrannical.
When President Obama delivered a major speech on America's drone program and the ongoing existence of the Guantanamo prison, the majority of those most affected by the latter - the prisoners themselves - were, ironically, unable to hear his speech.
Late on Friday evening, RT published an article I had been commissioned to write for them, entitled, “In Guantánamo, fine words are no substitute for freedom.” In it, I examined in detail the parts of President Obama’s national security speech on Thursday that dealt with the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where a prison-wide hunger strike has been raging for nearly four months.
The 166 men still held are expressing their despair at having been abandoned by all three branches of the US government — by President Obama and his administration, by Congress and by the judiciary, and for good reason — 86 of these men were cleared for release three years ago by an inter-agency task force that President Obama established when he took office in 2009, and most of the 80 others would be entirely justified in concluding that, in their cases, justice has gone AWOL.
A counter-rally, under the name of Newcastle Unites, was also held in the city, with people chanting: "NazI scum, off our streets".
Website of Liberty Reserve, a digital currency, has been shut with the founder arrested by police in Spain this week over his alleged involvement in money laundering.
In an unusual move before a trial, a federal judge expressed a tentative view that the U.S. Justice Department will be able to show evidence that Apple Inc engaged in a conspiracy with publishers to increase e-book prices.
Today EFF joins organizations from the around the world representing a diversity of interests in launching a new coalition to ask for A Fair Deal on intellectual property (IP) in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The coalition has launched a website at www.OurFairDeal.org calling for TPP negotiators to “reject copyright proposals that restrict the open Internet, access to knowledge, economic opportunity and our fundamental rights.” The TPP meetings are taking place in Lima, Peru this week until May 25th, and EFF has been on the ground working with groups to fight those provisions and demand a seat at the table at these secretive negotiations.
One of the longer-running and higher stakes high-tech patent disputes has been laid to rest. Brocade and A10 Networks settled their patent and copyright dispute over their competing application delivery controllers today. The deal was struck just one hour before a San Jose jury was going to hear opening statements in a damages trial, according to Mike Swift, a reporter for the MLex legal and regulatory news service.
There have been many small-to-medium developments in the Prenda Law saga. I'm preparing for trial, so I won't be covering them any time soon. But I will leave you with one: a consequence for a Prenda Law lawyer in the Ninth Circuit.
The four lawyers linked to the Prenda Law copyright-trolling organization were slapped with an $81,000 sanctions order, which as of today, they have missed the deadline to pay. They did make time to file a last-minute motion to delay the sanctions, which only got referred back to the judge who's angry at them in the first place: US District Judge Otis Wright.
Yesterday we had a story about how a judge in Minnesota, Judge Ann Alton, angrily accused Paul Hansmeier of fraud in the lawsuit filed by Alan Cooper against Prenda. There was some confusion by the judge about whether Cooper and Godfread were in on the fraud too, which seems to have made the judge less open to possible damages against Prenda. Either way, without a court reporter, Matthew Sparby, who was in attendance, wrote up the following first-hand account of what happened in the court room. It's definitely disappointing to see that the judge made a few bad assumptions about Cooper/Godfread, but good to see that she knew that Prenda has been up to no good.
The RIAA has submitted its latest Form 990 tax filing to the IRS, which details the organization's precipitous shelving off in budget and employees (though the execs gave themselves fat raises)...
ABC, NBC, and Fox file a new copyright suit against a far less formidable opponent
In recent weeks a new Demonoid-inspired standalone tracker entered the BitTorrent ecosystem with a bang. Blessed by The Pirate Bay, Demonii has quickly become one of the most used BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. TorrentFreak decided to catch up with the admin to find out how it all came to be.
In recent weeks a new Demonoid-inspired standalone tracker entered the BitTorrent ecosystem with a bang. Blessed by The Pirate Bay, Demonii has quickly become one of the most used BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. TorrentFreak decided to catch up with the admin to find out how it all came to be.
With a reputation of taking harsh measures against unauthorized file-sharing, the RIAA has made quite a few enemies over the years. How ironic is it then that the RIAA website now appears to be seeding more than a dozen pirated porn videos? Or could it be that someone is trying to nail the RIAA in a clever way?
While we realize that the intricacies of IP law (and its often-attendant ridiculousness) can be rather difficult for the average, uninterested person to parse, it's really not asking too much to expect large international news agencies to make an effort to get the terminology right.
As you recall, Kim Dotcom recently announced he holds a patent for two-factor authentication, which he then waved in the direction of other internet titans like Twitter and Google, promising not to sue in exchange for contributions to his legal defense fund.
Here's how AFP (Agence France-Presse), the third-largest news agency in the world (and one of the oldest) titled its coverage of the Dotcom/patent story: Kim Dotcom might sue Twitter, Google and Facebook over copyright infringement.