Our render farm is all open source and is quite substantial. We have roughly 1000 Linux nodes between the two facilities and the majority of our artists run on Linux as well, though we have a few Mac boxes for Photoshop and other packages that can’t run on Linux.
I'm happy to say that things have calmed down a bit, and things look to be on track.
Which didn't actually seem to be the case at all earlier this week - we had what appeared to be really nasty core bugs, and together with rc6 being bigger than previous rc's, I was really not feeling all that good about this release there for a while.
But the worst "nasty bugs" ended up clearing up and not being kernel bugs at all. One turned out to be a compiler issue (which is always very scary and hard to debug and very annoying), and it even had a fairly simple workaround so that we didn't end up having to blacklist compilers. Another turned out to be lockdep just being too aggressive, and a false positive.
We obviously *do* have various real fixes in here, but none of them look all that special or worrisome. And rc7 is finally noticeable smaller than previous rc's, so we clearly are calming down. So unlike my early worries, this might well be the last rc, we'll see how next week looks/feels.
In numbers, rc7 is about one third arch (xtensa, powerpc, x86, s390, blackfin), one third drivers (gpu, media, networking), and one third "random" (networking, mm). But it's all fairly small. Shortlog appended.
Linus
In just a few days, anyone will be able to take the Linux Foundation's "Introduction to Linux" course—which previously cost $2,400—for free over the Internet. The MOOC version of the class on the open source operating system, hosted on edX, opens Aug. 1.
AMD Hawaii support works with GLAMOR (both with the external library and the internal support found in X.Org Server 1.16), is running a variety of Steam games, etc. As a word of caution, MSAA might be one of the currently broken Hawaii features unless additionally applying a libdrm patch. Among the titles people are reportedly trying with the Hawaii GPU on RadeonSI Gallium3D include Civilization 5, Half-Life 2, Metro: Last Light, Portal 2, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The performance on the open driver is said to be satisfactory in most situations but with XCOM for instance the frame-rate on a R9 290 class GPU is under ten frames per second and there's also issues with GPU stalls. A big problem reported by a user comes down to very poor performance in playback of video streams, such as from Twitch.
Starting out the last week of July's Linux benchmarking on Phoronix is a fresh comparison of several NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards when comparing the performance of the latest open-source Nouveau driver against the latest NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics driver. While the Kepler cards now support GPU re-clocking, the results aren't quite ideal yet.
Intel doesn't make a big fuss about their drivers, at least not like AMD and NVIDIA. The developers usually make the release and let people and other devs find out on their own. This is just the case with the latest 2014Q2 Intel Graphics Stack Release, which totally went under the radar.
MKVToolNix, a set of tools to create, alter, and inspect Matroska files under Linux and other platforms, has reached version 7.1.0.
Trine 2: Complete Story, a 2D platformer developed and published by Frozenbyte studio, is now available on Steam for Linux with an 80% discount.
The Age of Wonders III turn-based strategy game that was released back in March is still in the process of being ported to Linux and OS X. Developers are hopeful this well-received game will be released for the non-Windows platforms later this year.
Also, the latest update of the Plasma 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 adds experimental Wayland support to the already existing X11/X.org Server support. The KDE Frameworks 5 does not have hardcoded support for X.org anymore, while many of the KDE 5 apps are developed in Qt 5.3, which is Wayland compatible.
From the fourth to the sixth of July, the Calligra team got together in sunny Deventer (Netherlands) for the yearly developer sprint at the same location as the last Krita sprint. Apart from seeing the sights and having our group photo in front of one of the main attractions of this quaint old Dutch town in the province of Overijssel, namely the cheese shop (and much cheese was taken home by the Calligra hackers, as well as stroopwafels from the Saturday market) we spent our time planning the future of Calligra and doing some healthy hacking and bug fixing!
I’ve become overly lazy when writing blog posts is concerned. Maybe it is because I’m again working on the user-visible features, and it is much easier to just post a screen-shot or a screen-cast, than to actually write anything meaningful.
Last May a group of three Okular developers met for four days at the Blue Systems Barcelona office to hack on the KDE universal document viewer.
Unlike it’s Neon 5 counterpart , this ISO contains packages made from the stock Plasma 5.0 release . The ISO is meant to be a technical preview of what is to come when Kubuntu switches to Plasma 5 by default in a future release of Kubuntu...
Kubuntu Plasma 5 ISOs have started being built. These are early development builds of what should be a Tech Preview with our 14.10 release in October. Plasma 5 should be the default desktop in a future release.
The curtains are up on GUADEC 2014, and the first keynote was delivered by Jim Hall. Jim is the Director of Information Technology at Morris, University of Minnesota, and he presented his work on usability in GNOME. We took some time to talk to Jim about his keynote and about his research on GNOME.
The second day of GUADEC was also full of interesting talks. Jeff Fortin spoke about the video editor Pitivi. Nathan Willis devoted his keynote to software for automotive and the opportunities for open source software in this area.
Javier Jardón from the GNOME development team has announced that GNOME 3.13.4 has been released, taking the desktop environment a little closer to the final version.
Few Linux desktops have brought about such controversy as GNOME 3. It’s been ridiculed, scorned, and hated since it was first released. Thing is, it’s actually a very good desktop. It’s solid, reliable, stable, elegant, simple... and with a few minor tweaks and additions, it can be made into one of the most efficient and user-friendly desktops on the market.
Of course, what makes for an efficient and/or user-friendly desktop? That is subject to opinion -- something everyone has. Ultimately, my goal is to help you gain faster access to the apps and the files you use. Simple. Believe it or not, stepping GNOME 3 up into the world of higher efficiency and user-friendliness is quite an easy task -- you just have to know where to look and what to do. I am here to point you in the right directions.
I decided to go about this process by first installing a clean Ubuntu GNOME distribution that included GNOME 3.12. With the GNOME-centric desktop ready to go, it’s time to start tweaking.
GTK+, a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces that provide a complete set of widgets, suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites, has been promoted to version 3.13.5.
4MLinux Multiboot Edition, a mini Linux distribution that is focused on the 4Ms of computing, Maintenance (system rescue Live CD), Multimedia (e.g., playing video DVDs), Miniserver (using the inetd daemon), and Mystery (Linux games), is now at version 9.1.
Salix Openbox 14.1 brings the Openbox window manager, teamed with fbpanel and SpaceFM to create a fast and flexible desktop environment. This is the most lightweight edition we have so far among our 14.1 releases and everything has been tweaked to provide a desktop experience comparable to other Salix editions. The development of this edition involved a long and rigorous period of testing and the final release has evolved a lot since the first beta.
Things moved recently about kf5 in mageia. We had, since a long time, the framework part.
Now that the first stable release is out we packaged the desktop/workspace part.
As part of GNOME 3.14, GNOME 3.13.4 has been recently released, with updates, worth mentioning being that Gnome Shell has received HiDPI support for font scaling on Wayland and Mutter getting support for touch gestures and fixed the move/resize operations for Wayland clients.
One of the key improvements is better support for proxy servers, including configuration options and accessibility from the API.
Is the default image viewer in your desktop environment just not working the way you want? need more features (or maybe something simpler) from an image viewer? Well, you are in luck, as there is no shortage of choices when looking at alternative image viewers in Fedora. This article covers 15 image viewers in Fedora.
Typically, an image viewer does one thing — shows you the images in a directory (sometimes in a thumbnail view), and lets you quickly flip through them. Some image viewers also allow you do simple edits of an image, and will also show you some added details of your pictures (like metadata, and color histograms).
Recently the Debian developers and other stakeholders have been trying to decide between basing Debian 8.0 Jessie's Linux kernel on the 3.14 release, which is Greg KH's latest long-term stable kernel, or to use Linux 3.16. The benefit of Linux 3.16 is that it's intended to be used by Ubuntu 14.10 and thus will receive support from the Canonical/Ubuntu kernel team for the better part of two years after its October debut. Linux 3.16, of course, has many improvements, new drivers, and other hardware support improvements over Linux 3.14.
Just days after marking the end of life of Ubuntu 13.10, Canonical has released Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, the newest version of its open source Linux operating system for desktops, servers, the cloud and (coming soon, maybe) mobile devices.
Designed by a team led by University of Manchester honorary research fellow Dr Andrew Robinson, the PiFace Control & Display does exactly what the name implies: it provides users a means of controlling the Raspberry Pi away from a keyboard and mouse, while also providing a means of displaying its output.
It's the Android-rival mobile operating system that never was. At least for now, anyway.
With the Android L set to roll out in a couple of months times, only two companies are definitely supporting the latest Google OS update.
We now can reveal VERY early reports are suggesting the Nexus line is not dead and in fact Motorola are already working on the new Nexus device. This at the moment is still only at the rumor stage with Android Police this morning reporting they have received unconfirmed reports the device is being manufactured by Motorola and is set for release sometime in the fall. Possibly November. The device at the moment is codenamed Shamu although again this has not been in any way confirmed. In fact at present the only evidence provided to support the rumor is a screenshot taken from Google’s issue tracker referencing ‘Shamu’.
Google launched Android 4.4 KitKat last September so we've investigated when the new Android version will be released, whether it's 4.5 or 5.0. Google has detailed Android L at it's I/O 2014 developer conference so there's lots to talk about including release date, version number, material design and new features.
According to Android Headlines, the Android team of Google presented its new design language at the company's I/O Developers' Conference last month. The said design language is called Material Design, which boasts a flat interface.
FrozenBitFully securing our cryptocurrencies in a trustless manner has consistently been an ever-present problem. FrozenBit aims to solve this as the first open source multisignature / multicoin wallet via a trustless approach; with support to include Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Quarkcoin and Blackcoin. Moreover, they are attaining to do so by way of end-user simplicity.
A nippy microkernel mathematically proven to be bug free*, and used to protect drones from hacking, will be released as open source tomorrow.
The power to learn, the freedom to change, and the push for innovation. What is there not to love about open source software? The world of open source consists of a passionate community of individuals hacking away in their dens, all with the same vision for the future of programming: openness and collaboration.
As a technology that predates even the Web by nearly two decades, email may not seem like something with a lot of room left for improvement. But the recently announced Dovecot Rest API (DAPI), which presents new ways for apps to interact with email data on the Dovecot open source IMAP email platform, could have a significant impact on enterprise computing and the way we use email.
If you've got some time to add another open source application to your arsenal, getting to know VLC Media Player, available for Windows, the Mac and Linux, is one of the best choices you can make. The application is famous for handling nearly any kind of video file format for playback; you can use it as a video transcoder for converting video file formats; and you can listen to and manage podcasts with it.
SaaS model becoming a criterion for companies to choose testing tool for to gain the benefits of Cloud
This past week marked my second year helping out as a co-organizer of the Community Leadership Summit. This Community Leadership Summit was especially important because not only did we introduce a new Community Leadership Forum but we also introduced CLSx events and continued to introduce some new changes to our overall event format.
ColorZilla has created a couple of plugins, both for Chrome as for Firefox, that allows you to have an integrated eyedropper on your browser, so you can collect easily color samples of anything. Is like having a kcolorchooser just a click away.
Fine-tuning the software settings of smartphones and desktop computers to unlock the hidden potential of the devices will deliver faster performance.
Like each previous year, OSCON 2014 didn’t disappoint and it was great to have Mozilla back at the convention after not having a presence for some years. This year our presence was focused on promoting Firefox OS, Firefox Developer Tools and Firefox for Android.
On Monday, the Mozilla Corporation announced that its last-minute April hire for interim CEO, Chris Beard, has been permanently appointed to the position. Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker confirmed the news in a blog post, stating that "the board has reviewed many internal and external candidates—and no one we met was a better fit."
Mozilla has selected Chris Beard, who started with the company with the release of Firefox 1.0, to be its chief executive.
OpenStack has already earned support across the IT industry from users, developers, cloud providers, and vendors, but many deployments are still new, and we have yet to see how people will innovate around the platform. Everybody from AT&T to Rackspace and the Linux Foundation to IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, and Yahoo keeps touting innovation surrounding OpenStack, but where might there be surprises for the platform over the next several years.
Announced amid the cloud company's Solve leadership summit in San Francisco on Monday morning, Rackspace will now provide support for MariaDB and Percona Server through Rackspace Cloud Databases.
GNU tar version 1.28 is available for download.
Aside from the experimental "Coconut" as a Python JIT compiler using GCC's new Just-In Time capabilities, the libgccjit.so shared library isn't yet depended upon in the real-world but the JIT compilation abilities are being built upon for hopeful incorporation into the GNU Compiler Collection.
Going back to October of 2013 has been work on this GCC-based embeddable JIT compiler that initially generated a lot of interest but has yet to be incorporated into a stable GNU Compiler Collection release.
Throughout most of my education, I was taught that collaboration was cheating. With the exception of teacher-sanctioned group projects, I had learned that working with others to solve problems was not acceptable. So when I got to college and the first assignment in my computer science class was to read an article about the benefits of pairwise programming and open source, I was very confused.
Whether you went to college or you didn't. Whether you interned at the company where you work now or started out in a completely different field. For many an important and valuable step before that first professional job is one in which they get their feet wet.
One of the most powerful proofs of the strength of the ideas underlying open source is the way they are being successfully applied in fields very different from computing. Many of these are familiar enough - open content, open data, open science etc. But what I find inspiring is how new examples are appearing all the time.
Interested in keeping track of what's happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what's happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.
Git 2.0.3, a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency, has been officially released.
Meson is a new, open-source build system under development showing good results over the likes of SCons.
You possibly have heard of WebODF already, the Open Source JavaScript library for displaying and editing files in the OpenDocument format (ODF) inside HTML pages. For ideas what is possible with WebODF and currently going on, see e.g. Aditya’s great blog posts about the usage of WebODF in OwnCloud Documents and Highlights in the WebODF 0.5 release.
The WebODF library webodf.js comes with a rich API and lots of abstraction layers to allow adaption to different backends and enviroments. There is an increasing number of software using WebODF, some of that listed here.
By running an experiment among Germans collecting their passports or ID cards in the citizen centers of Berlin, we find that individuals with an East German family background cheat significantly more on an abstract task than those with a West German family background. The longer individuals were exposed to socialism, the more likely they were to cheat on our task. While it was recently argued that markets decay morals (Falk and Szech, 2013), we provide evidence that other political and economic regimes such as socialism might have an even more detrimental effect on individuals’ behavior.
Dramatic shift in divorce patterns shows younger husbands are the first generation of men not to find more highly educated women ‘threatening’
[...]
...in previous generations marriages where the husband was better qualified
My favourite figure of last week came from the London Fire Brigade, writes Anthony Reuben.
Walk through your local grocery store these days and you'll see the words "all natural" emblazoned on a variety of food packages. The label is lucrative, for sure, but in discussing the natural label few have remarked on what's really at stake — the natural ingredients and the companies themselves.
2014 has been a big year for dictaphones so far.
First, it was France and the secret recordings made by Patrick Buisson during the reign of President Sarkozy.
The Pentagon is working to ensure that U.S. military equipment left in Afghanistan and sent to Afghan forces does not wind up in the wrong hands.
Israel and Hamas went back and forth on Sunday over proposals for a new cease-fire in the fighting in the Gaza Strip, and Israel sought to bolster its claim that its forces were not responsible for the deaths of 16 Palestinians reportedly killed in an attack on a United Nations school.
A total of 120 schools, more than 70 run by the United Nations refugee agency, have been bombed or suffered collateral damage during the recent emergency in Gaza. But it was last Thursday’s devastation, with the deaths of 15 women, children and UN staff and the injury of more than 200 in the bombing of the UN school in Beit Hanoun that brought the issue to a head. It has challenged us to end, once and for all, the use of schools and their pupils as pawns in the pursuit of war.
The UN Security Council has called for an "immediate and unconditional humanitarian ceasefire" in Gaza.
NBC host David Gregory was forced to issue a correction at the end of his weekly Meet the Press program on Sunday after a United Nations official confronted him for using a unconfirmed Israeli video that allegedly showed Hamas shooting rockets from a UN school.
Drone blowback is real. Over the past five years, terrorists have attempted serious attacks on American soil that were motivated in part by U.S. drone strikes abroad. We know this because the apprehended terrorists have been loud and clear about their motives.
At last there may be justice for Alexander Litvinenko, but it has taken a downed passenger jet to make us see that Russia does not own Britain
The US on Sunday released satellite images it said backed up its claims that rockets have been fired from Russia into eastern Ukraine and heavy artillery for separatists has also crossed the border.
Data from black box of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 has been recovered. The information from the flight data recorder suggests the Malaysia Airlines flight was hit by a missile before crashing. Also, the loss of MH17 and MH370 has led Malaysia Airlines to consider "renaming and rebranding."
Intelligence rarely meets the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard required to convict in a U.S. court, said Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency.
In a reckless maneuver posing the risk of direct clashes between the United States and Russia, Washington is moving to escalate the civil war in east Ukraine by directly involving US forces in the targeting of Russian-backed separatist groups.
Abington resident and former Pennsylvania Congressman Joseph Hoeffel was uncertain, but despite his reservations he voted in support of the war in Iraq in October 2002. However, he later regretted that decision.
“I was convinced we had to disarm Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction,” Hoeffel in an interview July 14. “I was uncertain about the vote. I was 60 percent in favor of it and 40 percent opposed to it. I was uncertain if [President George W.] Bush [and his] administration were telling the truth about the weapons of mass destruction. But, I concluded, if you can’t trust the president and his top national security team to tell the truth to Congress and the American people about a matter of war and peace, then who can you trust?”
The “democratic tomorrow” promised by NATO in 2011 has been realized – that is – in the form of predictably fraudulent elections accepted by no one, leaving a power vacuum apparently to be settled through increasingly violent armed conflict. Perhaps most ironic of all is that these conflicts are being waged between NATO’s various armed proxies it used to carry out the ground war while it bombarded Libya from the air over the majority of 2011.
Libya could collapse because of the violent clashes between rival militias, according to the Libyan Government. Militias loyal to renegade general Khalifa Hifter and Islamic fighters continue to battle for control of the Tripoli airport, despite calls to end the 13-day conflict.
Investigations into the WikiLeaks saga, that saw government ministers and senior Zanu-PF officials quoted by United States diplomats speaking ill of President Robert Mugabe, are still on, Prosecutor General Johannes Tomana confirmed on Sunday.
Israel desperately covets Gaza's gas as a 'cheap stop-gap' yielding revenues of $6-7 billion a year, writes Nafeez Ahmed. The UK's BG and the US's Noble Energy are lined up to do the dirty work - but first Hamas must be 'uprooted' from Gaza, and Fatah bullied into cutting off its talks with Russia's Gazprom.
Never mind the 'war on terror' rhetoric, writes Nafeez Ahmed. The purpose of Israel's escalating assault on Gaza is to control the Territory's 1.4 trillion cubic feet of gas - and so keep Palestine poor and weak, gain massive export revenues, and avert its own domestic energy crisis.
Taking into consideration Argentina’s historic precedents, it’s not a venture to say that soon this crisis will hit rock bottom, with a strong devaluation, a significant economic set-back, and a rise of unemployment and poverty levels. Then, as always, the economy will start to recover, and after some years of prosperity, the cycle will start again.
Paul Ryan's budgets can be summed up in a single sentence: Cut the deficit by cutting programs for the poor. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that fully two-thirds of Ryan's cuts came from programs to the poor. Meanwhile, Ryan refused to raise even a dollar in taxes. Politics is about priorities, and Ryan's priorities — lower deficits, no new taxes, steady defense spending, no near-term entitlement changes — meant programs for the poor got hammered.
An IP address from a staff member in the U.S. House of Representatives has been temporarily blocked from making edits to Wikipedia articles after some of its changes were deemed disruptive.
The small South American nation of Uruguay might be forced to pay a heavy price for trying to curb smoking and avert a public health disaster. The country is currently embroiled in a high stakes legal battle with Phillips Morris, the world’s largest cigarette manufacturer. The industry giant, whose annual profits outsize Uruguay’s entire yearly GDP, is suing the government of Uruguay over a 2008 law that requires cigarette packs to be 80 percent covered by health warnings.
Largely relegated to the fringe for years, the prospect of impeachment has been invigorated thanks to conservative media figures like Fox News contributors Sarah Palin and Allen West, who have spent recent weeks loudly demanding Obama's removal from office. But not everyone in conservative media is on board, with several prominent figures arguing that impeachment is ill-fated, politically toxic, and could severely damage Republicans' chances in the upcoming 2014 midterm elections.
A free and plural media is the foundation of a free society, and a safeguard of democratic tradition. The new "advertising tax" in Hungary shows it is still very much under threat.
In a move without precedence, one of world’s most influential dailies, the New York Times, has editorially declared that “press censorship” is back in India “with a vengeance.” But there is a caveat, it suggest. During the Emergency, imposed on June 25, 1975, Prime Minister India Gandhi imposed “strict” censorship, but this time it is “not direct government fiat but by powerful owners and politicians.” Titled “India’s Press in Siege”, the top daily, however, compares it with the censorship imposed Indira Gandhi, recalling how, “with defiant exceptions, much of the press caved in quickly to the new rules.”
The Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv is on a war footing. In the 10 days since Israel started its ground operation in the Gaza Strip, the hospital has received more than 50 soldiers with wide-ranging combat injuries.
Internet search engines such as Google should not be left in charge of "censoring history", the Wikipedia founder has said, after the US firm revealed it had approved half of more than 90,000 "right to be forgotten" requests.
The Chinese Central Propaganda Department has banned the downloading of all foreign social-networking products. Previously downloadable social-networking products have also been blocked on a large scale.
After a week of the Harper government again drawing criticism for hiding information or clamping down on dissent, the public’s eyes may have glazed over at the latest in a litany of cases. But are we getting inured to something serious going on at the federal level and throughout society?
The High Court of Justice should force Israel Radio to run an advertisement with the names of 150 Gaza children killed during the last 16 days of Operation Protective Edge, the Israeli NGO B’Tselem said on Thursday.
B’Tselem plans to petition the High Court on Sunday to overturn the Broadcasting Authority’s (IBA’s) decision and that of its appeals board, which also rejected its ad, titled “The children of Gaza have a name.”
In an interview with The Guardian he is quoted as saying that his party will “abolish mass surveillance and rejuvenate politics by giving the internet generation a voice.”
It reported: "Initial investigations have revealed that the bugs were 'planted in the house by a foreign agency since the sophisticated listening devices found are used only by western intelligence operatives, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA)'".
The paper said "it may be recalled that Edward Snowden's revelations carried by Washington Post on 30 June stated that top BJP leaders were under surveillance by a premier US spy agency. " - See more at: http://indiablooms.com/ibns_new/news-details/N/3036/bugging-devices-at-gadkari-residence-minister-calls-reports-speculative.html#sthash.kIHnEH5V.dpuf
But the denial emanating from Gadkari has been far from categorical. Also, another BJP leader, Subramaniam Swamy, has conceded that Gadkari, a former BJP president and known for his proximity to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, could well have been on the radar of intelligence agencies.
BJP leader Subramanian Swamy has asked the government to make an official statement on the issue and said, “My own investigations and my sources reveal that this may happen not later than October last year. The planting of the device and that means at that time, when the UPA was in power, the NSA has specifically targeted the BJP and Gadkari was a very important person. He had the confidence of the RSS.”
Was Nitin Gadkari's house bugged? The reported recovery of listening devices from Union Minister Gadkari's house has set tongues wagging in political circles, with Congress suggesting that this shows there is lack of trust among the NDA leaders. Even former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has demanded a probe into this matter.
Very recently, her patience with persistent American spying even after Snowden’s revelations snapped quite dramatically, when she ordered the US Central Intelligence Agency’s “chief of station” at the American embassy in Berlin to leave the country. The US has never formally apologized for tapping Merkel’s phone. It refused to give her access to the NSA file on her before she visited Washington. And it went on paying a spy who worked for the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND-Federal Intelligence Service) right down to this month.
The Senate is about to begin debate on a bill that could, at long last, put an end to the indiscriminate bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records and bring needed transparency to the abusive spying programs that have tarnished the nation’s reputation.
These assaults on personal privacy included reading random people’s emails, text messages, and Facebook conversations en masse, recording Skype calls between users, and even passing around nude photos picked up from webcams that were spied on through services like Yahoo.
The Obama administration has quietly rewritten the rules on how it goes about designating Americans as terrorists, according to a new report by Glenn Greenwald’s Intercept online investigations project.
Tech companies and civil liberties groups are becoming more optimistic that the Senate will take major steps to rein in the National Security Agency this year.
Right now, only phone companies, broadband providers and some Internet phone services are required by law to build in intercept capabilities, but the government wants to extend that requirement to online communication providers.
Concrete evidence of being a suspected terrorist is not necessary before nominating people to watchlists; leaked "guidance" states that uncorroborated posts on social networking sites are sufficient grounds for the government to add people to watchlist databases.
The Obama administration is increasingly less inclined to make a deal to allow Edward Snowden to come back to the United States, according to a top National Security Agency official.
A top National Security Agency offficial says there's less need now for the U.S. Government to cut a deal with leaker Edward Snowden than there was after his wave of surveillance disclosures began more than a year ago.
Why did we do this? With Google continuously expanding its social media reach and the long line of controversies surrounding facebook’s practices of tracking users and reportedly providing the NSA with unfettered access to user data–not to mention the incessant location tracking features that come with mobile phones, tablets and cameras–it’s becoming dangerously simple for anyone to gather intelligence on us whether it’s a corporation, some government agency or a rag-tag group of racist rice farmers with mad computer skillz. That intelligence can in turn be used to hurt or undermine our movements, organizations, campaigns, networks, families, communities and Nations.
Two recent examples in Germany are particularly telling. First, the German government ended its contract with Verizon in late June, saying the U.S.-based telco was a liability due to its relationship with intelligence agencies like the NSA. Then, in early July, Deutsche Telekom unveiled a new highly secure German data center, which it touted as “Fort Knox” for data protection. Germany is well known for its strict data privacy standards, and clearly, new privacy concerns are reshaping how service providers do business within German borders.
The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) is just CISPA in new clothing — and this bill is even worse!
CISA would give the NSA even more authority to access our data and force companies to hand it over without a warrant than CISPA did, strengthening and legitimizing the toxic programs we're working our hardest to eliminate.
The National Security Agency has increasingly been working hand-in-glove with the repressive Saudi Arabian government since 2013, sharing intelligence and assisting with surveillance, according to the latest Snowden leak.
Edward Snowden claims he wants to keep up the fight against the NSA and other high-level spy agencies. The question is whether or not we can trust him, or if he’ll just go back to spying on us like a secret cell of the NSA.
“Common Core is not a political issue. It’s an issue of their children,” Robbins told The Daily Caller. “You can mess with a lot of things. You can have the IRS going after people. You can have the NSA spying on people, but when you start to mess with people’s children, they start to pay attention.”
More ambitiously, the NSA is hoping to build a quantum computer that “could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business, and government records around the world,” according to the Washington Post (NSA source documents stored on Electronic Frontier Foundation server here and here). A quantum computer could conceivably break “all current forms of public key encryption,” the article says, “including those used on many secure Web sites as well as the type used to protect state secrets.”
A Manchester activist has claimed the government are using George Orwell’s 1984 as a ‘handbook’ as it tries to push through new laws that threatens to further encroach on people’s privacy.
A driver for the Prime Minister's Office was arrested in Jerusalem three weeks ago on suspicion of serially raping young girls between the ages of 8 and 12, it emerged Thursday.
You can’t get more serious about protecting the people from their government than the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, specifically in its most critical clause: “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” In 2011, the White House ordered the drone-killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki without trial. It claimed this was a legal act it is prepared to repeat as necessary. Given the Fifth Amendment, how exactly was this justified? Thanks to a much contested, recently released but significantly redacted — about one-third of the text is missing — Justice Department white paper providing the basis for that extrajudicial killing, we finally know: the president in Post-Constitutional America is now officially judge, jury, and executioner.
In close collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency, President Obama has granted the masterminds of the Bush administration’s torture programs access to the agency’s “Internal Panetta Review” in advance of the review’s expected August publication.
About a dozen former CIA officials named in a classified Senate report on decade-old agency interrogation practices were notified in recent days that they would be able to review parts of the document in a secure room in suburban Washington after signing a secrecy agreement.
The cover-up continues with the Obama administration, Paul claims, citing last week’s European Court of Human Rights verdict that two suspects were illegally detained and tortured in so-called “black sites” in Poland. The Polish government was ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation to those men in that verdict.
Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, “we don’t torture people”? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, “this government does not torture people”? We knew then it was not true because we had already seen the photos of Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib prison four years earlier.
Ruling thwarts journalist's attempt to shed light on whether West German authorities knew in the 1950s where Eichmann fled after the Holocaust.
So the war of words over interconnection has continued. Last week, we wrote about the back and forth between Verizon and Level 3 on their corporate blogs concerning who was really to blame for congestion slowing down your Netflix video watching. As we noted, Level 3 used Verizon's own information to show that Verizon was, in fact, the problem. Basically, in spite of it being easy and cheap, Verizon was refusing to do a trivial operation of connecting up a few more ports, which Level3 had been asking them to do so for a long time. In other words, Verizon was refusing to do some very, very basic maintenance to deliver to its users exactly what Verizon had sold them.
The net neutrality debate has been going on the United States for a number of years now, put simply, net neutrality means keeping a non-tiered internet, all content can reach users at the same speed.
Popular Linux distro marketplace the Pirate Bay is now available on mobile, complete with separate sites to download TV, music and films. The new website has been designed specifically for mobiles with large buttons and clearer layout after its developers said the old site looked "crap" on mobile devices.