It's impossible to deny the amazing rise of Chrome OS. The Chromebook has taken the consumer world by storm and is repeatedly the top selling laptop around. This Linux-based platform was the ideal solution at the ideal time. The cloud proved itself not only a viable option but, in many cases, the most optimal option. The puzzle was simple to solve...
The chip maker's offering includes its Opteron A100 "Seattle" SoC, its first chip based on the ARM architecture.
It is no secret that AMD plans to release SoCs (system on a chip) featuring ARM processor cores and that AMD and ARM have been collaborating on various projects for quite some time. A few months ago, AMD even released its low-power Beema and Mullins processors, which included on-die ARM-based Platform Security Processors which leverage the industry standard ARM TrustZone system security framework. Just yesterday though, AMD announced that it had made available development kits featuring AMD’s first 64-bit ARM-based processor, formerly codenamed “Seattle.”
If you have used Elastic Beanstalk from AWS or OpenShift from Red Hat you might be familiar with PaaS terminology, but if you haven’t then PaaS is a category of cloud computing services that provides a computing platform and a solution stack as a service.
If you are a java developer, then you might need Apache tomcat application server with a PostgreSQL database as a backend and some sort of storage to develop and publish your application.
Stable kernels 3.15.8, 3.14.15, 3.10.51, and 3.4.101 have been released. All contain important fixes.
Today, the Linux Foundation "Introduction to Linux" course, which previously cost $2,400, is becoming available for free on the web. You can get the details and register here. The Linux Foundation has provided a very complete summary of what is found in the course, and it looks like an excellent offering that anyone can dive into online, without pressure. As we've noted many times, edX, which is hosting the class, has also emerged as one of the top destinations for online learning.
In today's open source roundup: The free Introduction to Linux class starts today and you can still register. Plus: Can LibreOffice 4.3 beat Microsoft Office, and Debian 8 will ship with Linux 3.16
Several economic changes conspired to put OLS into the financial bind it is today. You can read Andrew’s take about it on the Indiegogo site. I think the problems started before the temporary move to Montreal. In OLS’s growth years, the Kernel Summit was co-located, and preceded OLS. After several years with this arrangement, the Kernel Summit members decided that OLS was getting too big, that the week got really really long (2 days of KS plus 4 days of OLS), and that everyone had been to Ottawa enough times that it was time to move the meetings around. Cambridge, UK would be the next KS venue (and a fine venue it was). But in moving KS away, some of the gravitational attraction of so many kernel developers left OLS as well.
The XBMC project has shared with us that they're renaming the project entirely to something very different in order to no longer reflect its past Xbox Media Center name.
XBMC (Xbox Media Center) is undoubtedly one of the most popular media center products around. This open source project is now being rechristened as Kodi.
[...]
Personally, since I never owned or liked Xbox I really feel like installing an Xbox application of my system. Why would I install an application meant for Xbox on my Linux machine which has remotely nothing to go with Microsoft’s ‘me too’ game console? So I will be more inclined towards installing Kodi than some Xbox Media Center.
The Calibre eBook reader, editor, and library management software has been updated to version 1.47 and comes with a set of new features.
ClamTk is a GUI frontend for ClamAV using Perl and Gtk libraries, and it was developed to provide on-demand virus scanning and detection. It might feel a little redundant, but you can never be too sure.
Most note-taking applications I have used forced me to enter plain text and leave a reference to related files. With MyNotex, I can format as I enter the information and be done with it. For example, I can place graphics and photos within the note. Each note may have any number of attachments. I can manage paragraph alignment as well as bullets, numbered or alphabetic lists with automatic indentation.
Linux has recently gotten a lot more attention as a platform for games, and this has caused a lot of joy among Linux gamers. But are we celebrating something that already happened a long time ago?
UNIGINE, a real-time 3D engine built to run on all major platforms, including Linux, has been updated again and its developers have implemented numerous features, including a comprehensive City Traffic System.
Valve has pushed another update out to SteamOS, with this time around there being benefits to fans of the XBMC multimedia software.
As you can see in both the screencast and these two screenshots, the edit dialog for placemarks has a couple of fields which are unavailable at the moment (label scale, ion color/scale). This is because Marble is designed in a way so that the data (such as coordinates, name, description, label/icon scale, etc) is kept apart from the objects which deal with the rendering and these objects don’t have an implementation for the unavailable options I mentioned above. However, they will be implemented soon. Also, I’m planning to implement another way of managing icons in the near future.
It’s been a while since my last update, but the DVB implementation for Plasma Media Center (PMC) is fully functional, so from now on I am polishing the user interfaces.
Today KDE released the Release Candidate of the new versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing.
Almost all Kubuntu software is ported already. Some of the applications even managed to go qt-only because of all the awesome bits that moved from kdelibs into Qt5. It is all really very awesome I have to say.
The second Alpha images of the upcoming Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) Linux distribution are now available for download and testing.
The release candidate for KDE’s Applications and Platform version 4.14 has been made available for testing.
openSUSE is known for offering one of the most integrated experiences with the desktop environment it comes with. Their Plasma and Gnome desktops are par-excellence when it comes to polish and now those who still like the good old Gnome 2 UI can use the latest version of Mate in openSUSE.
WebKitGTK+ 2.5.1 is the first version of this release cycle. It comes very late mainly due to the regressions introduced by the switch to CMake and the problems we found after removing WebKit1 from the tree. It also includes some new features that I’ll talk about in other posts, probably when 2.6.0 is released. In this post I’ll only focus on the breaks introduced in this release, in order to help everybody to adapt their applications to the API changes if needed...
Zorin OS 9 is based on Ubuntu Linux 14.04 which is the long term support release and this means you will get software updates until 2019.
The unique selling point for Zorin OS is that it is has multiple themes which make it look like the operating system that you are used to using. For instance if you are used to Windows XP then you are able to switch to an XP style interface and if you use Windows 7 you can switch to a Windows 7 interface.
Wow, I had no idea that people would care about the start of this project. There seems to be a few questions out there that I’d like to address here to clarify what we are doing and why.
Now that tracker.debian.org is live, people reported bugs (on the new tracker.debian.org pseudo-package that I requested) faster than I could fix them. Still I spent many, many hours on this project, reviewing submitted patches (thanks to Christophe Siraut, Joseph Herlant, Dimitri John Ledkov, Vincent Bernat, James McCoy, Andrew Starr-Bochicchio who all submitted some patches!), fixing bugs, making sure the code works with Django 1.7, and started the same with Python 3.
The folks at VolksPC started showing off a software solution that lets you run Android and Debian Linux simultaneously on an ARM-based computer. This lets you use the same machine to run full desktop Linux apps like LibreOffice or Firefox as well as Android apps including Netflix, Hulu Plus, and any number of video games.
Whether it’s the NSA exploiting weaknesses in encryption software, the holes in Tor making it less anonymous, or the major problems with Tails—vulnerabilities are constantly testing the security and anonymity of computer users.
But little known Montreal-based developers at Subgraph want to change all that, and have started working on a zero-day resistant Operating System (OS), protecting against infiltration.
Subgraph takes the approach that overall computer security is critical to anonymity, targeting protection against zero-day vulnerabilities, the types of weakness unknown to the developers while they’re writing software.
“Ubuntu MATE is a stable, easy-to-use operating system with a configurable desktop environment. Ideal for those who want the most out of their desktops, laptops and netbooks and prefer a traditional desktop metaphor. With modest hardware requirements it is suitable for modern workstations and older hardware alike,” reads the official website.
Ubuntu 14.10 Alpha 2 implements new some under-development applications, so that the users can report bugs for the developers to fix in the daily images. For example, a RC version of Kernel 3.16 now runs on the Alpha 2 images, while Kernel 3.16 stable will be implemented on the final versions of Ubuntu 14.10.
Canonical published some very interesting details about a South Korean company called Bukwang Pharmaceuticals, which ditched most of its Windows OSes for Ubuntu and saved a lot of money. On top of the obvious savings, it also got a lot of good press, and other businesses found out that it can be done...
Bukwang Pharmaceuticals has been developing and manufacturing drugs and personal hygiene products in South Korea since 1960. Today, it has over 600 employees based at various sites across the country.
I’ve said it many times but it bears repeating that the price/performance of GNU/Linux that is widely accepted on servers can be had on desktops too. The licence says so. You can run, examine, modify and distribute the code, all those things that cost extra with that other OS and are a constant drain on resources.
Ami Banerji's Linux desktop is clean, simple, and pretty open. What it gives up in widgets it gets back in simplicity, and what's a good thing. Here's how to get the same look for your computer.
Canonical has published details in a security notice about a Unity exploit that has been corrected in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating systems.
Canonical has published details in a security notice about a KDE-Libs vulnerability in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems that has been found and fixed.
The Ubuntu developers have closed a small vulnerability with KDE-Libs that would cause kauth to be tricked into bypassing polkit authorizations.
Kubuntu 14.10 Alpha 2 (Utopic Unicorn) is now ready for download and its developers provide both the KDE 4.14 branch and the new Plasma 5 for testing.
The Ubuntu developers have released the second alpha of the Utopic Unicorn (to become 14.10). Since Ubuntu Unity doesn’t participate in alpha releases, the alpha includes ISO images for Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, UbuntuKylin and the Ubuntu Cloud. Xubuntu is once again missing from the alpha release.
Marvell has posted detailed datasheets on its previously opaque Armada 370 and XP SoCs, used in Linux-based NAS systems from Buffalo, Netgear, and Synology.
The Revolv Smart Home Automation Solution is now available with an Android control app, greatly expanding its appeal beyond its core iOS user base. Until now, Android users have required an Insteon Remote in order to perform functions like assigning manual-triggered “Actions.” You can now use your Android phone to unify devices and customize automations based on four triggers, three of which are automatic: GeoSense, time of day, and device-to-device/motion sensor. The fourth is an On Demand manual trigger.
For some time now, there has been much talk about the Raspberry Pi revolutionising the teaching of computing in schools. Linux User & Developer has devoted much space and attention to the growing number of Jamborees and the increasing attention teachers are giving to the small, €£25 bare-bones machine. It is, say advocates, the perfect way to introduce children to the world of computing, allowing them to see and actually interact with the innards of the machines they are using. It is, they add, a great platform for programming and for creating all manner of electronic wonders.
The problem has been execution. The Samsung UI that was once known as TouchWiz has earned derision for being bloated, bloopy, and unintuitive, while the subscription-based Samsung Music Hub was recently shuttered due to lack of user interest. Ironically, Samsung’s now struggling with the same sort of software issues that gave it the opportunity to become a leading phone manufacturer in the first place.
Microsoft's purchase of Nokia's mobile division gave most of us the impression that Nokia was done with mobile phones. But suspicious job listings posted on LinkedIn recently may indicate that Nokia is planning a mobile comeback, and it might be based on new Android phones.
Hong Kong based reseller W2Comp, which previously introduced a dual-core Rockchip RK3066 based Probox2 Ultimate media player that runs Android 4.0, has now launched a faster model, called the Probox2 EX (Extreme), that runs Android 4.4 (“KitKat”). The new mini-PC is open for pre-orders at $150, with shipments beginning Aug. 8. There’s no mention of any support for Google’s upcoming remix of Google TV called Android TV, but the Probox2 EX would seem to have the advanced hardware to run it.
So you have rooted your device and are now thinking what do I do? What was all the flashing, installing and wiping for? My phone still looks the same! Well, yes, rooting does not actually do much in itself but instead offers you the opportunity to customize and alter the device. The best way to do this is with root-only available apps and this list should help you to get to grips with the basics of root apps.
OnePlus has generated a hell of a lot of hype over the last few months and seem to be using hype as an interesting marketing tool. The company’s flagship device, the ‘One’ generated enormous hype among techies and as a result has generated demand which clearly outweighed the company’s expectations and capabilities. Especially due to their notorious invite system. Last week there were suggestions OnePlus are already working on the OnePlus Two and now it seems hype is building around what very well could be a OnePlus Smartwatch…the OneWatch.
Android smartphones are becoming a seemingly unstoppable force, accounting for 85% of the worldwide market in the second quarter of 2014 according to new research.
The team at Mitro Labs, the developer of a password manager, is joining Twitter, and its software is being released under a free and open source license, Mitro said Thursday.
Today, Twitter acquired a password manager startup called Mitro. As part of the deal, Mitro will be releasing the source to its client and server code under the GPL.
Open source and open data solutions now should receive top consideration at the General Services Administration.
Sonny Hashmi, the GSA chief information officer, said Thursday during an online chat with Federal News Radio that he recently signed out a memo requiring agency software developers to look at open source before they consider traditional commercial solutions.
This week, SDN bloggers took a look at how open source SDN continues to take shape among vendors, how SDN adoption rates are higher than initially predicted, and all you need to know about OpenFlow.
One of the major driving forces behind the plethora of technological innovations in the cloud computing arena is the concept of open source software. With nearly one million open source projects related to the cloud believed to be in progress, new technologies such software as a service are on the rise.
Companies are contributing more in terms of time, money and support for user-led open source initiatives, with big business benefits such as operational cost reductions, application flexibility and boosts to competitive advantage being on offer.
Vendor-led development initiatives are gaining ground too, buoyed by massive collaboration projects on a global scale. The increasing ‘democratisation' of the open source world is a major contributor to its burgeoning success.
A PRESENTATION by the European nuclear research organisation CERN at the recent open source convention (OSCON) has provided a glimpse at where IT organisations are going to have to go in order to remain competitive. They will need to leave old legacy proprietary approaches behind and adopt open source.
CERN collects huge volumes of data every day from thousands of detectors at its nuclear collider ring located under the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva. It organises and archives all of this data and distributes much of it to research scientists located throughout the world over high-speed internet links. It presently maintains 100 Petabytes of legacy data under management, and collects another 35 Petabytes every year that it remains in operation. One Petabyte comprises one million Gigabytes.
Brescia said that Bitnami's goal is to make it as easy to deploy an application on a server as it is to install an application on an endpoint computer. Bitnami has more than 90 different open-source applications and development environments in its software library that can be deployed with one-click installer packages on desktop, virtual machine and cloud deployments.
Belkin revived the Linksys WRT54G in a new 802.11ac model earlier this year and one of its selling points has been the OpenWRT support as what made the WRT54G legendary. However, OpenWRT developers and fans are yet to be satisfied by this new router.
If the release of Firefox's Australis interface got you down, there are Firefox-based alternatives out there with a more traditional Mozilla UI. One such alternative is Pale Moon and here's how you get it.
Paying talented developers to write high quality code isn't cheap; why on Earth would you then turn around and give that code to your competitors? Turns out, there's probably a competitive advantage in doing so.
ownCloud Inc, the popular open source enterprise file sync and share project, has launched the latest ownCloud 7.
June and July brought lots of big news surrounding enterprise analytic data management powered by the open source Hadoop platform. Cloudera, focused on supporting enterprise Hadoop, announced in June that it raised a staggering $900 million round of financing with participation by top tier institutional and strategic investors. It also firmed up a partnership with Dell and Intel to launch a dedicated Dell In-Memory Appliance for Cloudera Enterprise that facilitates Hadoop-driven analytics.
Open Source Storage (OSS), the recently relaunched company that bills itself as "the only true end-to-end open source storage solution," added two new executives this week who bring experience from Oracle (ORCL), Sun and elsewhere.
In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the new features in LibreOffice 4.3.
Back in early 2012, when the TechCrunch developer team (Nicolas Vincent, Alex Khadiwala, Eric Mann, and John Bloch) started working on the TechCrunch redesign, one of the main goals was to improve site performance. During the development process, we implemented several tools to help achieve that goal.
The FSF is happy to building bridges to new communities, and exploring the role of free software in social justice and economic change.
A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance: please see https://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at https://www.gnu.org/help/help.html. To submit new packages to the GNU operating system, see https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.
Join the FSF and friends every Friday to help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones.
As I write this, NASA has just passed another milestone in releasing its work to the Open Source community. A press release came out announcing the release on April 10, 2014, of a new catalog of NASA software that is available as open source. This new catalog includes both older software that was previously available, along with new software being released for the first time. The kinds of items available include project management systems, design tools, data handling and image processing. In this article, I take a quick look at some of the cool code available.
The main Web site is at http://technology.nasa.gov. This main page is a central portal for accessing all of the technology available to be transferred to the public. This includes patents, as well as software.
The commission's consideration of open source options for content management was based on Cabinet Office requirements for public sector organisations to look at potential alternatives to proprietary systems dating back to 2010.
It's that time again. In this week's edition of our open source games news roundup, we take a look at a WWI shooter for Linux where trench foot is conspicuously, blessedly missing from the feature list, as well as a remake of one of my favorite Dreamcast joints, ChuChu Rocket!
In this podcast, we talk to Chris Albon, director of the global crisis data arm of Ushahidi, an open-source data mapping organisation that originated in Nairobi, Kenya.
Perhaps the most rewarding experience of education is self-direction. Here, the individual fully enjoys his or her own labor. Whatever one’s interests are, self-direction is achieved on one’s own terms.
Self-directed education promotes initiative, creativity, co-operative/mutual labor and healthy academic competition in one’s field to cultivate a learning network.
This is the very basis of the scientific method. We are encouraged to doubt and question the existing order, to follow self-direction and formulate our own hypotheses to work toward possible conclusions.
MakerBot has launched MakerBot Europe in order to pave the way for desktop 3D printing beyond the United States.
A group of Facebook developers has decided to break with 20 years of tradition and release a formal specification for the PHP programming language.
If you’ve been using Linux long, you know that whether you want to edit an app’s configuration file, hack together a shell script, or write/review bits of code, the likes of LibreOffice just won’t cut it. Although the words mean almost the same thing, you don’t need a word processor for these tasks; you need a text editor.
In this group test we’ll be looking at five humble text editors that are more than capable of heavy-lifting texting duties. They can highlight syntax and auto-indent code just as effortlessly as they can spellcheck documents. You can use them to record macros and manage code snippets just as easily as you can copy/paste plain text.
Programming always has been that "thing" people did that I never understood. You've heard me lament about my lack of programming skills through the years, and honestly, I never thought I'd need to learn. Then along came the DevOps mentality, and I started introducing programmatic ways of managing my system administration world. And you know what? Programming is pretty awesome.
Today in Linux news, Jack Germain has a look at the perfect note taker. The Linux Voice has a comparison of text editors for programmers and the Linux Journal introduces their current issue on program languages. In other news, XBMC becomes Kodi and Linux.com has 10 reasons to take the Linux Foundation's Introduction to Linux edX course.
During his visit to Estonia on June 21, the President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso emphasized that it is vital to reach an agreement on the Rail Baltica project, reports Eesti Paevaleht.
Just a week into the sampling program and SWERUS-C3 scientists have discovered vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor of the Laptev continental slope. These early glimpses of what may be in store for a warming Arctic Ocean could help scientists project the future releases of the strong greenhouse gas methane from the Arctic Ocean.
Take the case of cocoa farmers in the Ivory Coast, the world's leading exporter of cocoa beans. (The country produces more than 30% of all the beans grown worldwide.) As this CNN infographic explains, only 3% of the money you pay for a chocolate bar makes it back to the farmers who grow the beans. The rest goes to the people further up the supply chain, the ones who transform the beans into chocolate and sell it it stores across the globe. Ivory Coast farmers make roughly $10 a day, putting a $2 chocolate bar out of reach.
When creators of the state-sponsored Stuxnet worm used a USB stick to infect air-gapped computers inside Iran's heavily fortified Natanz nuclear facility, trust in the ubiquitous storage medium suffered a devastating blow. Now, white-hat hackers have devised a feat even more seminal—an exploit that transforms keyboards, Web cams, and other types of USB-connected devices into highly programmable attack platforms that can't be detected by today's defenses.
We've been following the case of Adel Daoud for a little while now. He's one of the many people arrested for "terrorism" in one of the FBI's dozens of "home grown plots" in which they create their very own terrorist plot, dupe someone into "joining" and then arrest (and then relish in the headlines about stopping a terrorist "plot" that was never a real plot in the first place). In Daoud's case, the made up "plot" involved blowing up a Chicago bar. But the Daoud case got a lot more attention, because in the big "debate" over the renewal of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) in late 2012, Senator Dianne Feinstein directly described the Daoud "plot" as an example of why the FAA and Section 702 were necessary.
Four Mail on Sunday journalists were told by the police in 2006 that their mobile phones had been hacked
Iran does not have a "nuclear weapons program." It has a uranium enrichment program; some politicians claim it also has a weapons program it is concealing. This has never been substantiated by international inspections. Unfortunately it is often treated as a fact by journalists. The original Times piece had it right, referring to Iran's "suspected efforts to design a weapon."
The debate about drone strikes can now be settled. Even the US no longer has the temerity to repeat the canard that the attacks do not cause civilian casualties. A years-long investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been able to track down the names of more than 700 people killed in drone strikes and found that nearly half of them were civilians. This comes as no surprise. The idea that intelligence is so good and the targeting so perfect that missiles will only kill militants was always a scarcely believable fiction. Even the figure that half the dead were civilians is most probably understating the count. So far, through its painstaking work, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been able to put names to less than one-third of the total victims. It stands to reason that militants would be easier to identify since the US, and the Pakistan authorities, are interested only in trumpeting the militants the US has killed and hiding any known details about civilian casualties. The typical press release issued after a drone strike only notes the number of militants killed and never mentions civilians. Journalists have little access to the areas where drone strikes are conducted, making identification a difficult task. The only logical deduction, then, is that a vast majority of unidentified drone victims may be civilians.
An investigative project shows that 323 out of a little over 700 identified victims of US drones in Pakistan are reported to be civilians, including 99 children.
The United Kingdom-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been able to record the names of more than 700 people reportedly killed by the CIA-operated drones in Pakistan and nearly half of them are stated to be civilians.
Some 32 people died in three CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, making this the bloodiest month since July 2012. This was stated by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, United Kingdom, in its report on the drone strikes for July 2014. It said the strikes all reportedly occurred in and around Dattakhel in North Waziristan.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s anti-Semitism is getting the better of him. Once again, the Turkish prime minister has trotted out the Hitler analogy in relation to Israel and what it has done in Gaza. “They curse Hitler morning and night,” he said of the Israelis. “However, now their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”
At least 1,600 Palestinians - most of them civilians - have been killed and 8,000 injured during the assault, while Israel has lost 63 soldiers and three civilians.
Photos obtained by Breitbart News showcase the struggle far-left activists are facing in persuading the public to support their anti-Israel rallies. A rally hosted by Code Pink on Wednesday in front of the Israeli embassy appeared to be more populated by journalists covering the protest than protesters themselves.
The children are coming from three Central American countries—Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Is it just a coincidence that these are all countries in which the American hand has weighed particularly heavily? Guatemala we just wrecked starting in 1954, with the CIA-directed coup against land reformer Jacobo Arbenz that led to a military dictatorship and, eventually, 36 years of civil war that ended in 1996. El Salvador was, with Nicaragua (more on it later), the focus of Ronald Reagan’s “keep the commies out of Harlingen, Texas” doctrine; a few billion Yanqui dollars poured into the country to arm death squads and perpetuate another wrenching civil war, which took 75,000 lives and ended in 1992.
I wish to express my extreme displeasure at the ongoing incremental genocide of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis, the knee-jerk military support of the US government, and their apparent encouragement of the Zionist quest to solve the "Palestinian problem" in the same the way the Turks did the Armenians.
This doesn’t square with a review of Serwer’s record. Since arriving at MSNBC from Mother Jones in 2013, Serwer has written on issues pertaining to the Afghanistan war, the aborted US military intervention in Syria, Barack Obama’s drone strike program, the international fallout from Edward Snowden’s NSA disclosures, the ongoing turmoil in Iraq, and more — all subjects with clear “foreign affairs” dimensions.
Think about it. When it comes to Israel, the United States is the ball game. It provides Israel with the money, the weapons, and the United Nations' vetoes that enable both the occupation and its multiple wars (like this one) to preserve it. And that shows no sign of changing.
Watch the television coverage. For three weeks the killing of children and other innocents in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military has dominated the news. We see the bombs dropping. We see the destroyed schools, hospitals and mosques. We see the parents wailing over the deaths of their children and children wailing at the deaths of their parents and siblings.
But it makes no difference to the United States government which can stop the slaughter with a few words. (Five of those words are "your $3.5 billion aid package.)
Fifty years ago in August, the US contrived an incident that led to the escalation of the US war on Vietnam. That incident, known historically as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, was said to involve an unprovoked attack by northern Vietnamese forces on two US Navy boats. As it turned out, the Vietnamese were repeatedly provoked before the incident and the US had fired first. Nonetheless, Lyndon Johnson and the US Congress used the events as a reason to intensify the war on the Vietnamese. Like so many times since, the rush to war swept all dissent aside.
U.S. military chiefs came under great pressure to clarify the fracas of the 4th. The NSA, Hanyok reports, produced what it claimed was the text of a North Vietnamese assessmdnt of the “battle,” although this material was at least unreliable and perhaps fraudulent. On the Turner Joy, as reported by writer Eugene Windchy, only those sailors who believed the “battle” was real were allowed to talk to Pentagon investigators. On the Maddox, great uncertainty hardened into qualified belief. It was enough for President Johnson.
Like most of her supporters in the courtroom, I was enraged when I heard N.Y. Judge David Gideon sentenced Mary Anne Grady-Flores to one year in jail on July 10. But a deep hope prevailed, which characterizes the local anti-drone movement in New York and is no small part of the impact we’ve had.
The state's drilling boom is bringing more spills -- many of which go unreported to residents
Now that summer is here, a trip to the shore should bring familiar smells: seawater, sunscreen and, depending on your beach of choice, sewage.
One in 10 recreational beaches in the United States isn't fit for swimming, according to a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
While the Court appreciates the Longmont citizens’ sincerely-held beliefs about risks to their health and safety, the Court does not find this is sufficient to completely devalue the State’s interest, thereby making the matter one of purely local interest.
Instead, the Court finds this matter of mixed local and state interest
[...]
Longmont’s ban on hydraulic fracturing does not prevent waste; instead, it causes waste. Because of the ban, mineral deposits were left in the ground that otherwise could have been extracted in the Synergy well."
It's been the refrain of behavioral economists and, in my case at least, my wise husband for years: Spend your money on experiences, not things. A vacation or a meal with friends will enrich your life; new shoes will quickly lose their charm.
That's true, but it's not the whole story, argue psychologists Darwin A. Guevarra and Ryan T. Howell in a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Not all goods, they say, should be lumped together.
Maybe she should question the fact that large corporations and the extremely wealthy do not pay their fair share of the taxes. Oil companies actually receive subsidies after showing record profits.
After forty years of pushing corporate-friendly policy in state legislatures, this week the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is launching its new project aimed at doing the same at the local level.
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), a big business-funded group that claims to be the "nation's leading small business association," has joined the corporate board of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or "ALEC." It marks perhaps the final step towards the NFIB abandoning any pretense of being a nonpartisan representative of small business owners.
New online speech restrictions are taking effect Friday in Russia, making it more difficult for bloggers to remain anonymous and requiring social-networking sites like Facebook to retain user data for at least six months.
Over the past decade, governments around the world have tightened their control over the free flow of information to address what they see as potential security concerns. The US has its Patriot Act and PRISM programme developed by the National Security Agency or NSA, and the UK has its Data Retention and Investigatory Powers (DRIP) surveillance law.
[...]
The Russian government has also felt compelled to tighten the editorial line of its foreign language broadcaster, Russia Today (RT), which until recently used to offer a fresh alternative perspective to mainstream media. Following the biased reports on the shooting down of the Malaysia Airlines plane over Ukraine, Sara Firth, a London correspondent for the network for five years, tendered her resignation letter; she said that the coverage of the MH17 tragedy was "the most shockingly obvious misinformation". Two of her colleagues, Liz Wahl and Abby Martin, also either resigned earlier this year in protest of RT's coverage of the conflict in Ukraine.
A prominent Russian politician Sergei Stepashin has condemned UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent anti-Russian statements saying they mark a new phase of the escalating Ukrainian crisis aimed at drawing the European Union into war against Russia.
Google has released the first figures to show which countries have been busy wanting us to ‘forget’, with France being the source of more than 17,500 ‘right to be forgotten’ requests.
The internet search giant is continuing its push towards transparency since the revelations of the US electronic surveillance PRISM programme became apparent and that the US National Security Agency had been using companies such as Google to find information about its users.
“When it comes to Citizen Lab, what you have is methodical, careful, but passionate people,” says Gus Hosein, the director of the UK-based Privacy International and a longtime acquaintance of Deibert's. “That is what I wish every academic research institution was, but clearly they've been allowed a degree of freedom that others in academia aren't given.”
The social network is requiring that mobile users install Messenger for chatting. Don't like it? Too bad!
For about $12, Sprint will soon let subscribers buy a wireless plan that only connects to Facebook .
For that same price, they could choose instead to connect only with Twitter , Instagram or Pinterest—or for $10 more, enjoy unlimited use of all four. Another $5 gets them unlimited streaming of a music app of their choice.
The plan, offered under the company’s Virgin Mobile brand of prepaid service, comes as wireless carriers are experimenting with ways to make wireless Internet access more affordable for the poorest consumers by offering special deals on slices of the Web.
An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program.
The report by the agency’s inspector general also found that C.I.A. officers read the emails of the Senate investigators and sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information, according to a summary of findings made public on Thursday. One official with knowledge of the report’s conclusions said the investigation also discovered that the officers created a false online identity to gain access on more than one occasion to computers used by the committee staff.
An internal CIA investigation confirmed allegations that agency personnel improperly intruded into a protected database used by Senate Intelligence Committee staff to compile a scathing report on the agency’s detention and interrogation program, prompting bipartisan outrage and at least two calls for spy chief John Brennan to resign.
President Obama said U.S. intelligence officials “crossed a line” after the 9/11 attacks and “tortured some folks” during the George W. Bush administration, conclusions he said on Friday will be described in a long-awaited report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, portions of which he and his counsels have agreed to declassify.
Democratic Sens. Mark Udall and Martin Heinrich both called for CIA Director John Brennan's resignation late Thursday after the spy agency admitted it had improperly hacked into Senate staffers' computers used during a review of the agency's Bush-era interrogation practices.
When John Brennan assured the country that the CIA hadn't improperly monitored the Senate team that compiled a report on Bush-era torture, he fed us false information. That much is clear from Thursday's news that "the C.I.A. secretly monitored a congressional committee charged with supervising its activities." Either the CIA director was lying or he was unaware of grave missteps at the agency he leads. There are already calls for his resignation or firing from Senator Mark Udall, Trevor Timm, Dan Froomkin, and Andrew Sullivan, plus a New York Times editorial airing his ouster as a possibility.
The latest scandal at the Central Intelligence Agency reads as if torn from the pages of one of the late Tom Clancy’s spies-know-best novels: Noble CIA agents, unhappy that weak-kneed U.S. Senate oversight staffers were pussyfooting around its detention and torture records, hack the Senate’s computers to find out what its minders have discovered. The Constitution? Never mind.
In March, at the Council on Foreign Relations, CIA Director John Brennan was asked by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell whether the CIA had illegally accessed Senate Intelligence Committee staff computers “to thwart an investigation by the committee into” the agency’s past interrogation techniques. The accusation had been made earlier that day by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who said the CIA had “violated the separation-of-powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution.” Brennan answered:
I don’t want to understate how seriously wrong it is that the CIA searched Senate computers. Our constitutional order is seriously out of whack when the executive branch acts with that kind of impunity — to its overseers, no less.
Private apologies are not enough for a defender of torture, the architect of America’s drone program and the most talented liar in Washington. The nation’s top spy needs to go
Here's a surprise. An internal investigation by the CIA has determined -- just as Senator Dianne Feinstein charged -- that the CIA illegally hacked into the network of Senate Intelligence Committee staffers in order to spy on what they were doing with regards to a report on the CIA's torture program. They did this despite an earlier instance of a similar problem after which the CIA promised it would not touch the Senate Intelligence Committee network any more.
Thanks to Snowden's leaks and a host of other information proceeding those, it's become clear that intelligence agencies -- despite their constant and loud "worrying" about cyberattacks -- are more than happy to make computers and the Internet itself less safe by purchasing, discovering and hoarding vulnerabilities. These are exploited to their fullest before being reported to the entities that can patch the holes. In the meantime, the NSA and others make use of security holes and vulnerabilities, leaving millions of members of the public exposed.
One morning last July, the German intelligence service knocked on Daniel Bangert's door. They had been informed by the US military police that Bangert was planning to stage a protest outside the Dagger Complex, an American intelligence base outside Griesheim in the Hesse region. Why hadn't he registered the protest, and what were his political affiliations? they asked.
An influential cross-party group of British MPs have come out in support of whistleblowers, such as ex-CIA contractor Edward Snowden and others who have exposed wrongdoing in major institutions. They report some incidents of treatment of whistleblowers as being "shocking" and subject to "victimisation"
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Thursday conveyed to US Secretary of State John Kerry the ‘anguish’ of people of India over media reports on authorisation of his country’s National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on the Bharatiya Janata Party.
“I raised this issue with Secretary Kerry. I told him that when this news appeared in newspapers, people of India were agitated and expressed their anguish. I told him that I want to make him aware of that anguish,” Swaraj said, addressing a joint news conference with Kerry after they co-chaired the fifth annual strategic dialogue between the two nations.
The German chancellor claims to have learned a lot of interesting facts through Edward Snowden. The fact that Germany is now refusing to take Snowden in shows a lack of political courage, writes DW's Jens Thurau.
Details about the National Security Agency’s “Prism” surveillance program have entered the news in dribs and drabs since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked revealing documents about the program to the Guardian and the Washington Post in June of last year. The unsettling insights revealed by Snowden generated quite a stir in the press, and large tech and telecom companies faced a wave of consumer backlash in the wake of the ongoing story.
Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan is facing calls to resign after admitting CIA officials spied on a Senate panel probing the agency’s torture and rendition program. The allegation surfaced in March when members of the Senate Intelligence Committee openly accused CIA officials of illegally monitoring their staffers’ computers. The Senate report has yet to be released but reportedly documents extensive abuses and a cover-up by CIA officials to Congress. At the time, Brennan denied the spying allegations and said those who make them will be proved wrong. But he reversed his stance this week after an internal CIA inquiry found the spying indeed took place with the involvement of 10 agency employees. Brennan apologized to lawmakers in a briefing earlier this week. The White House is standing by Brennan, citing President Obama’s "great confidence" in his leadership. But at least two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Democrats Mark Udall of Colorado and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, are calling for his resignation. We speak with the reporter who first broke the news of the CIA’s admission to spying on Senate computers: Jonathan Landay, senior national security and intelligence correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers.
The recent accusation against Xiaomi for having allegedly planted spying software in the smartphone's firmware that secretly transfers data to the company's Beijing servers brings to light the new dimension of international spying in the tech savvy times of today. What is even more intriguing is that turning off the MiCloud service on the smartphone that is believed to be the culprit does not help things either.
The NSA is looking for a Director of Strategic Communications on LinkedIn. Why is it even advertised?
Rather than seek out traditional Silicon Valley funding, the Switzerland incorporated startup chose to crowdfund the development costs because, “unfortunately, too many VCs nowadays are just looking for a quick profit,” says cofounder Andy Yen, who’s based at MIT with half the team.
A reminder to Apple and smug iPhone owners: Just because iOS has never been the victim of a widespread malware outbreak doesn’t mean mass iPhone hacking isn’t still possible. Now one group of security researchers plans to show how to enslave an entire botnet of Apple gadgets through a perennial weak point—their connection to vulnerable Windows PCs.
This week, that changed. Whisper Systems, makers of the widely-lauded Android encryption app RedPhone, released a voice encryption application designed specifically for iPhone. It’s called Signal, and if you’re in the market for a voice encryption app (and you should be) then look no further.
Privacy advocates aren’t happy with an NSA reform bill that only gets part of the job done.
The federal government has been brazenly violating citizens' privacy rights in the name of national security. The nation's spy apparatus has gone so far as to spy on members of Congress, with the CIA admitting on Thursday the agency had gone into Senate computers.
Twitter Inc. (TWTR), the San Francisco-based social media company, has been receiving a plethora of requests from governments to access its user data. The company has reported in its biannual transparency report that it received 2058 requests from governments in the first half of 2014, which marks a 46% increase from 2013.
There appears to be a clear bipartisan consensus that the NSA has gone too far with its bulk collection of Americans' phone records. The question is how far Congress will go to restore a balance between individual liberty and national security.
Nice intranet you’ve got there. Shame if something should happen to it.
Investigative reporter Jason Leopold is suing the National Security Agency for refusing to release the financial disclosure statements of recently retired director Gen. Keith Alexander.
Former NSA director Keith Alexander will charge companies up to $1 million a month to keep them safe from online hackers, Foreign Policy reports. Apparently Alexander and business partners from IronNet Cybersecurity have founded a new firm after leaving the government and military in March. The company supposedly offers a new technology that has a “unique” approach when it comes to detecting hackers online.
The centerpiece of the NSA debate after Edward Snowden has been the bulk collection of the call logs of U.S. citizens. The Senate bill would end the government’s practice of collecting and saving vast storehouses of U.S. calling data. In its place, the proposal would require government agents to identify a particular target — and to get a judicial order. Any information collected under this program that is superfluous to a legitimate intelligence investigation would have to be discarded, and the inspector general would do more to monitor the application of these rules.
New Zealand lawmakers demanded Friday that the government reveal whether the United States National Security Agency (NSA) had set up an interception site on New Zealand's only international fiber optic communications cable.
The statement said they don't use the term SSO and what is being referred to is a "cable access programme". However, there is no explanation of what that is, or why someone was in New Zealand from the NSA to discuss it.
The New Zealand Herald yesterday reported an engineer from the US National Security Agency's Special Source Operations (SSO) unit visited New Zealand last year to talk to the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) about electronic spying.
On July 22, 2014, police officers arrested over 100 members of law enforcement as part of an ongoing investigation regarding widespread illegal wiretapping and invasion of privacy without just cause. The probe dated back to a massive eavesdropping scandal that the authorities uncovered back in February 2014 relating to the surveillance of thousands of journalists, academics, politicians and senior government officials. Although scores of police officers and members of the judiciary have since been reassigned or suspended, the July 22 operation marked the first concrete response from the Turkish judiciary. An Istanbul court has subsequently ordered the formal arrest of key police officers on charges of espionage, document fraud and illegal wiretapping. As such, the Gülenist shadow state has come under an unprecedented level of public and legal scrutiny.
The reports that Edward Snowden has been living in Russia with precarious “temporary leave to remain” rather than under any formal asylum protection is further evidence he must be allowed to travel to and seek asylum in the country of his choice, said Amnesty International today.
Fugitive US intelligence agent Edward Snowden marked on Thursday one year of political asylum in Russia, where he continues to live a life shrouded in mystery amid a dearth of public appearances.
Past decades offer an endless trail of evidence: Operation Gladio, Operation Mockingbird, Project MKUltra, Operation Wheeler/Wallowa, Watergate, Operation CHAOS, COINTELPRO, Operation Northwoods, P2OG (the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group), Iran-Contra, etc.
Austrian law student Max Schrems appealed to a billion Facebook users around the world on Friday to join a class-action lawsuit against Facebook's alleged violations of its users' privacy, stepping up a years-long data-protection campaign.
Facebook is facing a class-action lawsuit from Max Schrems, an Austrian law student and data privacy activist who announced Friday that he will sue social networking site. Mr. Schrems claims Facebook violated Europe's privacy laws and its own terms of agreement during its participation in NSA spying programs.
As major crisis surround the US and world, the real issues that matter involve the inability to like, comment or post on Facebook
But recently it was leaked that the NSA pried its way into the servers in Huawei’s sealed headquarters in Shenzhen, China’s industrial heartland. According to documents provided to the NSA by former contractor Edward Snowden, the NSA obtained information about the workings of giant routers and monitored communication of the company’s top executives.
Governments in the United States, Russia and Britain have worked for years to unmask users of Tor, which, according to the British Broadcasting Corp., has been linked to illegal activity including drug deals and the sale of child-abuse images.
What do I hold Obama accountable for? The NSA spying on just about everyone. His war on whistleblowers, which is really a war against an informed citizenry. His very troubling use of drones.
Before his first election, Obama supported a public option for health care, but the first thing he did when negotiations began was yank it off the table. He made statements supporting net neutrality, but then installed cable lobbyist Tom Wheeler as head of the FCC.
We've been joking the last few weeks about how everyone was waiting for the White House to dump buckets of black ink on the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report. As we'd noted, for reasons that still don't make any sense, the CIA was given first crack at redacting the 480 page declassified executive summary of the 6,300 page, $40 million Senate Intelligence report into the CIA's torture program. Once the CIA was done with it, it was handed over to the White House to exhaust reserve stores of black ink.
President Barack Obama admitted on Friday that the U.S. "tortured" some al-Qaida detainees captured after the 9/11 attacks — but retired Gen. Michael Hayden was disconcerted at Obama describing the controversial CIA practice that way at a news conference.
We continue to wait and wait for the White House to finish pouring black ink all over the Senate's torture report, before releasing the (heavily redacted) 480-page executive summary that the Senate agreed to declassify months ago. However, every few weeks it seems that more details from the report leak out to the press anyway. The latest is that officials at the State Department were well aware of the ongoing CIA torture efforts, but were instructed not to tell their superiors, such that it's likely that the top officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, may have been kept in the dark, while others at the State Department knew of the (highly questionable) CIA actions.
The charge against Khadr is that he was an “unprivileged belligerent” — meaning he was not a soldier — and so had violated the “US common law of war” by fighting the invading American forces in Afghanistan. Now a US Department of Justice memo to the US Department of Defence implies that the case against Khadr is bogus. The memo was sent in July 2010 and dealt with the status of CIA agents who are not soldiers but who operate drones and kill people. Are they guilty of war crimes?, the Department of Defence asked. The Justice Department responded that war criminality depends on a person’s actions, not on whether he or she is a part of an army. The memo was only disclosed now on the order of a court in a case initiated by the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times.
Gary McKinnon, the computer hacker who won a 10-year battle to avoid extradition to the US, has been warned not to visit his ill father in Scotland, for fear America will mount fresh bids for his arrest.
George Tenet, who presided over the CIA when terrorist suspects were waterboarded and subjected to other forms of brutal “enhanced interrogation,” has set himself a near-impossible task. He is leading an effort to discredit an impending Senate committee report expected to lay out a case that the intelligence agency tortured suspects and then misled Congress, the White House and the public about its detention and interrogation program.
US President Barack Obama hasacknowledged that the CIA had tortured suspects detained in the immediate aftermath of September, 11 terror attacks.
The Obama administration censored significant portions of the findings of an investigation into the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation methods on suspected terrorists, forcing the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee to delay their release “until further notice.”
The postponement added to serious frictions over the investigation between the administration and lawmakers, who have been pressing for the swiftest, most extensive publication of the findings on one of darkest chapters in the CIA’s 65-year history.
Two Democratic senators, Mark Udall (D-CO) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM), have called on CIA Director John Brennan to resign after he admitted that the CIA had spied on Senate computers used by Senate staffers to research a report on the agency’s interrogation and detention practices during the Bush administration. Brennan apparently called Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to apologize. Despite this admission, however, neither President Obama nor Feinstein has called for Brennan’s resignation and the likelihood is the president won’t.
Why? Because Brennan wasn’t asked to resign for a major intelligence breach that was far worse than anything that happened with the Senate’s computers. As we explain in our new book, Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department, despite White House denials, John Brennan was apparently responsible for the outing of a Saudi Arabian intelligence agent inside the Yemen branch of Al Qaeda.
It was the release of the so-called "smoking gun tape" on Aug. 5, 1974, that prompted even Nixon's most ardent defenders to agree that he must go. On the tape, you hear Nixon, just six days after the Watergate break-in, order aides to get the CIA to tell the FBI to back off its investigation by claiming a bogus national security connection.
Military guards may continue to touch the groins of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, when they search for contraband before the prisoners are moved to speak with their lawyers, a federal appeals court ruled Friday. Because of the procedure, which was put in place in May 2013, some inmates have stopped meeting with or calling their lawyers.
So it was with deep regret that I watched Nixon’s televised address on Aug. 8, 1974, and heard him utter words never spoken before in the Oval Office — “Therefore, I shall resign the presidency … ” At that historic moment, I felt heartily sorry.
Not sorry for Nixon, especially not when he swaggered across the White House lawn the next day and mounted the helicopter, smirking triumphantly and brandishing the double-V victory sign as if he had just won another election. Nor was I sorry for his minions, although they would do jail time for their lockstep loyalty to the commander-in-chief while he would emerge with a full, free and absolute pardon.
Also on my list of bad-Jew sins is my complete disinterest in religion, and apparently religion plays a small role in Jewish life – it’s not just eating gefilte fish and controlling Hollywood. Not so long ago, a dear old Jewish friend passed away, and at her funeral service all the men had to go in a separate room and read from a Hebrew prayer book – but I can’t read Hebrew so I hid up the back of the group, cowering behind a guy with a 50-centimetre full-bush Jew-fro. Then the rabbi came in and said, ‘‘When we pray, we must face Jerusalem ... so let us all turn to the east!’’ and every man in the room spun 180 degrees, so I went from being at the back, to being at the front, with everyone staring at me like I was about to give a Zumba class. I had to pretend-pray for the next half-hour, the focus of the entire ceremony, making up my own Hebrew language – part Yiddish words I heard Fran Drescher use on The Nanny, part Honey-Boo-Boo hillbilly drawl.
In a letter sent to Verizon CEO Dan Mead on Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said he is "deeply troubled" by the cell phone carrier's announcement. He demanded more details about the plan and questioned whether it's legal.
U.S. cellphone users frequent victims of 'cramming': Senate study. Reuters reports: "U.S. mobile phone users have likely paid hundreds of millions of dollars in unauthorized charges "crammed" onto their bills, according to a report released by the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday to coincide with a hearing on the topic."
Soon, the government won't be able to throw you in jail for "unlocking" your iPhone to use it with a new wireless phone company.
Late last week Congress passed a bill that rolled back draconian penalties for unlocking a mobile phone or tablet purchased on a wireless carrier contract. It is now waiting for the President to sign it into law.
Visiting US Secretary of State John Kerry has urged the Indian leadership not to oppose global trade reforms in the coming days. The senior US official, currently on an official visit to the South Asian country, told the local media in New Delhi that India should show its commitment to carry on economic liberalisation process by backing the protocol.
As part of our Open Wireless Movement, we set out to create router software that would make it easier for people to safely and smartly share part of their wireless network. Protecting hosts, so their security is not compromised because they offer open networks, is one of the goals of the router software we released. However, as research published by Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) and others has shown, almost every popular home router has serious security flaws.
Just as discussion moves away from the punitive measures that did little to curtail piracy in the last decade, an Australian minister has urged a return. Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull says that in order to send a clear message, rightsholders need to "roll up their sleeves" and strategically sue some "moms, dads and students."