Look…let’s face this together. Dating can suck.
When you’re young, it’s an adventure. One has relatively little baggage, the emotional scars are few and you haven’t even begun to think about dating’s therapeutic value yet. In other words, the dating world is your oyster.
Then you find yourself at midlife, when you’ve accumulated a large pool of of crises. You know, stuff like that divorce or two under your belt, some strong political or religious beliefs that are deeply ingrained and…oh yeah…that messy conviction for hacking that’s still on your record. These are things that tend to narrow down the potential list of candidates for life-long bliss.
Most price speculation put the device at around $399, and considered the device expensive. Now that the official price is known, the unique device seems even less appealing than before. With HP’s Chromebooks ranging from $279 to $349, and LTE models available, the Slatebook looks woefully overpriced.
Ubuntu has been spotted aboard the International Space Station and it seems that it was used to control a rover back on Earth.
Astronaut Alexander Gerst has published a photo that he took on board the ISS (International Space Station), bragging with the fact that he controlled a rover back on Earth and with his brand new “Rover driving licence.”
Alexander Gerst is an ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut and he is currently onboard the ISS. He's also a geophysicist and volcanologist, and now he seems to be a certified Rover driver. The image that he published on Twitter and Google+ got a lot of people interested, including Linux users...
Cumulus Networks, a startup with a Linux-based operating system for commodity data center network switches, has added support for a new hardware architectures and expanded the feature set in the latest Cumulus Linux 2.2 release.
The generally interesting ACPI and power management pull request was sent in for the Linux 3.17 merge window.
The changes corralled by Intel's Rafael Wysocki for the ACPI+PM area of Linux 3.17 include an ACPICA update to bring ACPI 5.1 support, potentially faster hibernation, and basic work towards ACPI on ARM support. The faster hibernation is via using radix trees for storing memory bitmaps.
The Intel DRM graphics driver will feature its usual large amount of changes with the in-development Linux 3.17 kernel.
The Linux Foundation is once again this year sponsoring scholarships for students and young professionals interested in open source software development through the Linux Training Scholarship Program, which is now accepting applications.
As always there is no shortage of driver related updates in the new kernel and there are also a few interesting features too. Perhaps the most interesting is the unified control group hierarchy which is a feature that Jon Corbert of LWN has done a masterful job of explaining what it does. With Linux 3.16 and beyond there is even more fine grain feature for control and the how users are grouped for that control.
The PowerPC pull request for the Linux 3.17 merge window reveals that support for pre-POWER4 hardware is being eliminated. Among the affected hardware is POWER3 and IBM RS64 processors, which are from the late 90's. POWER3 was used in IBM RS/6000 servers at the time and clocked at only a few hundred megahertz. Support for the old POWER hardware is being dropped since its Linux usage is minimal these days and the support was already regressed for some kernel releases.
Facebook is hiring another Linux kernel engineer to join its growing kernel team. The goal for the new employee will be to make "the Linux kernel network stack to rival or exceed that of FreeBSD" and carry out other improvements to the Linux network stack.
Facebook wants better comms performance from the Linux kernel, and is recruiting developers to get it.
Its job ad, here, says the House of Zuck wants a Linux kernel software engineer who will focus on the networking subsystem.
FACEBOOT IS LOOKING to hire a high-level Linux kernel developer, as it seeks to upgrade the Linux network stack to rival FreeBSD.
It's been quite a long time since the announcement of the Barbershop Load Distribution (BLD) Algorithm. Quite a few changes have been made, since then. Now it more reflects what it really should be Wink. It's a simplistic approach towards load balancing, typical x86 SMP boxes should run okay (tested personally) , but, yes it can break your boxes too. I'm looking forward to get some feedback, to keep further development up and going.
The new DRM/KMS driver for the Linux 3.17 release is the STI KMS driver for STMicroelectronics with their STIH416 and STIH407 chipsets. Nouveau is missing out on changes for this pull request due to Ben Skeggs still tracking down a longstanding Nouveau issue but he's expected to send in a separate Nouveau pull request in the days ahead that will have the new improvements for the open-source NVIDIA driver.
NVIDIA today has announced their first beta Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD driver release in the 343.xx driver series. As expected, this release drops pre-Fermi hardware support from the Linux mainline driver code-base.
As we have known for months, those with GPUs older than the GeForce 400 "Fermi" series, you'll need to use NVIDIA's 340.xx legacy driver from here on out until you're able to switch over to the open-source Nouveau driver. The NVIDIA 340 legacy driver will still maintain support for newer Linux kernel and X.Org Server releases along with prominent bug-fixes, but won't otherwise receive new driver features, etc. NVIDIA's now maintaining multiple legacy drivers and they've been doing a good job at still supporting these drivers for vintage hardware for several extra years.
NVIDIA has just announced that a new version of its Beta driver for the Linux platform, 343.13, has been released and is ready for download and testing.
The new driver from NVIDIA doesn't feature anything out of the ordinary, but the developers have made a series of changes and improvements, which should translate in better support and performance.
The Broadcom VC4 Gallium3D driver, which provides the open-source user-space component to an OpenGL driver for the Raspberry Pi, will soon likely be added to mainline Mesa.
In continuing of yesterday's tests of comparing the OpenGL performance of the latest Radeon Gallium3D and Catalyst drivers with an array of AMD Radeon HD/Rx graphics cards, here's some complementary data including the performance-per-Watt and overall system power consumption for a few of the different AMD GPUs of recent generations.
The software tracks a user’s pressed keys, mouse clicks and used bandwidth and the uptime of the system. Periodically, or by hand, the user can upload to the server the number of keystrokes made; this is called “pulsing”.
Data Crow 4.0.2, a media cataloger and organizer that can be used to manage all your collections in one product, has been released and is available for download.
Wireshark, the best network protocol analyzer that offers users the means to capture and interactively browse the traffic running on a computer network, has advanced to version 1.12.0 and is now available for download.
The Opera developers have released a new version of their Internet browser and they brought the version up to 25.x, at the same time implementing a number of new features.
Now that the Opera developers are working on the Linux version, users expect only the best from them, but most of all, to have the same quality as the other supported platforms, Windows and Mac OS X.
Take-Two Interactive Software is one of the biggest game publishers, with games like GTA V under its belt, and it looks like it's showing an interest for the Linux platform.
Borderlands: The Pre-sequel will be the first Borderlands IP to release on Linux, according to 2K.
The HandBrake repository has seen some updates; it now contains the current development version for Fedora 20 and later, based on feedback in the previous weeks. It contains less and less bundled libraries and now uses the GTK3 interface.
Digia has officially announced today they will be spinning off their Qt division into its own company (still wholly-owned by Digia) that will focus exclusively upon Qt development.
Over the last years, many changes have been happening in the Qt ecosystem. One of the biggest was the creation of Qt Project where Qt is now being developed as an open source project. The Qt Project was created to provide a space open for all to further develop and foster innovation for the Qt technology.
As the adoption of Qt is increasing in commercial as well as Open Source projects the company behind the project, Digia, has decided to spin Qt unit as a new company.
Digia has been facing a resource challenge with Qt as 75% of the contribution comes from Digia employees. Qt has dual presence one at qt.digia.com and one at qt.project.com and these two sites or two entities have drifted apart instead of coming closer. Now what is the difference between the two? Same as with any open source project and commercial product. qt.digia.com is all about commercial offering whereas qr-project is all about the community.
After 5 months we are releasing a new version of plasma-nm for KDE 4.x containing a lot of bugfixes, minor design improvements and internal changes (see my previous blog post). This is probably last major release since we are now focused to KF5/Plasma 5 version, but we will be still backporting all fixes and you can expect at least one more bugfix release in future.
KDE has today made the first update to KDE Frameworks 5. Frameworks are our addon libraries for Qt applications which provide numberous useful features using peer reviewed APIs and regular monthly updates. This release has 60 different frameworks adding features from Zip file support to Audio file previews, for a full list see KDE's Qt library archive website Inqlude. In this release KAuth gets a backend so you can again add features which require root access, KWallet gets a migration system from its KDELibs 4 version and support has been added for AppStream files.
When we were building towards 5.0, we made the choice to focus all the effort on the core, and not release plasma-addons. It would have been simply too much work and quality of the core would have suffered.
The intention was to start bringing them back from 5.1, which will be in approximately 2 months from now.
The amount of stuff in plasma addons is huge.
The KDE Community has released Frameworks 5.1. KDE Frameworks is the evolution of KDE Libraries which is now extremely modular and optimized for Qt applications. This modular nature of KDE Frameworks makes is easy to use for Qt developer as now they can choose only those libraries that they need instead of having to install the entire set which would as one may say ‘bloat’ the system.
The WebKit2 GTK+ API has always been GTK+ 3 only, but WebKitGTK+ still had a hard dependency on GTK+ 2 because of the plugin process. Some popular browser plugins like flash or Java use GTK+ 2 unconditionally (and it seems they are not going to be ported to GTK+ 3, at least not in the short term). These plugins stopped working in Epiphany when it switched to GTK+ 3 and started to work again when Epiphany moved to WebKit2.
This year’s GUADEC was in Strasbourg, a very beautiful city with its old streets and architecture.
CherryTree 0.34.3, a hierarchical note-taking application that features rich text and syntax highlighting, storing data in a single XML or SQLite file, has been released and is now available for download.
GNOME has, for some reason or another, always been the default desktop environment in Debian since the installer is able to install a full desktop environment by default. Release after release, Debian has been shipping different versions of GNOME, first based on the venerable 1.2/1.4 series, then moving to the time-based GNOME 2.x series, and finally to the newly designed 3.4 series for the last stable release, Debian 7 ‘wheezy’
Qubes, an open source operating system designed to provide strong security for desktop computing, which is based on Xen, X Window System, and Linux and can run most Linux applications and utilize most of the Linux drivers, is now at version 2 RC2 and it's ready for testing.
It runs Linux. It's opensource It supports a wide range of hardware. It's stable. It keeps the browser upto date, supporting the latest standards like the Web Video Text Tracks Format.
Furthermore Webconverger Neon is polished, if it fails in often hostile outdoor environments, such as a hardware issue of loss of connectivity, it defaults to a black screen. No silly network can't be found messages. No blue screens. No modal dialog boxes. And then network/hardware is restored, it lights back up as best it can as it's retrying in the background.
Clonezilla Live 2.2.3-30, a Linux distribution based on DRBL, Partclone, and udpcast that allows users to do bare metal backup and recovery, is available for download and testing.
PCLinuxOS comes with many flavors, but the default is actually KDE. The developers also make a few other versions, like KDE MiniMe, LXDE, or FullMonty, but this is the main one downloaded by most users.
The distribution actually follows a rolling release model, which means that new major features and other changes are introduced regularly through the update channel. Every month, the download ISOs are regenerated with the new update, but if you already have the operating system installed you only have to update it regularly.
A new preview version of Manjaro 0.8.11, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, has been released for the Xfce, Openbox, KDE, and NET flavors.
In the 2013 edition, he looked forward to 2014 as "a defining year for the technology industry. In Whitehurst's eyes, cloud computing was ripe for production-scale deployment, and Big Data analysis would start to yield real-world results. Web-based businesses took this step a couple of years ago, but this is where more traditional industries join the cloud-based revolution.
On July 29th, the Fedora local team gave an introductory presentation for the students of Computer Systems Engineering at Universidad Interamericana de Panamá as our contribution for the Engineering Week that this university organizes.
Josh Boyer — member of the Fedora Kernel Team and FESCo — talked at Flock about the State of the Fedora Kernel, including some of the changes and updates for Fedora 21. The plan with for the Kernel in Fedora 21 is to release kernel 3.16 (or 3.17 at release, depending on scheduling.) During the Fedora 21 process, the kernel maintenance has actually been fairly calm, despite a set of new packaging changes.
At the Flock 2014 conference in Prague, Aditya Patawari delivered a talk on the Fedora Project’s use of Ansible for orchestrating its services. System administrators face many challenges today, as new servers, applications, and updates to these systems are constantly needing to roll out. Deciding whether to deploy virtually or on bare metal; configuring and managing systems and their access credentials is also a continuous and repetitive challenge which Patawari calls the “sysadmin loop.”
During Josh's talk about the Linux kernel in Fedora, he shared that Fedora 21 will likely ship with the feature-rich Linux 3.16 kernel. However, depending upon the timing of things, it could end up being Linux 3.17. This isn't a huge surprise given Fedora 21's early November release and going into beta in September.
Once upon a time in Fedora Core 1 through Fedora Core 3, updates were handled via a manual process involving emails to release engineering. Starting with Fedora Core 4, a private internal updating system that was available only to Red Hat employees.
Matthias goes on to point out that Wayland is actually not that hard to find in Fedora either — while it won’t be the default display server in Fedora 21, it is already including in the upcoming release for users to try out and test. To try out Wayland for yourself, just install the gnome-session-wayland-session package from the repositories, then select the GNOME on Wayland option from the session chooser when logging into your profile.
Christoph asserts that “distros are boring”. He means that most people choose a distro they are comfortable with, not “which one is best”. The traditional delivery model has made assumptions that are no longer valid. Each distro release tried to meet everyone’s needs. Fedora.next represents a recognition that, with a common core, each of the Products can address the needs of a different audience well.
The Nvidia driver has been updated to beta version 343.13 for Fedora 21 and 22.
Starting from this version, nvidia-settings is now compiled with GTK3 in place of GTK2.
FSF executive director (and Debian Developer) John Sullivan will give a presentation about the current state of things as the FSF sees it, and will leave plenty of time for discussion as well.
Version 7.4.0 of KNOPPIX is based on the usual picks from Debian stable (wheezy) and newer Desktop packages from Debian/testing and Debian/unstable (jessie). It uses kernel 3.15.6 and xorg 7.7 (core 1.16.0) for supporting current computer hardware.
I ran across this on Monday night. Anyone else watch Major Crimes?
debbugs is the Debian bug tracking system. See https://www.debian.org/Bugs/ for an entry point. It's mostly mail based, with a read-only web interface. You report a bug by sending an email to submission address, and (preferably) include a few magic "pseudo-headers" at the top of your message body ot identify the package and version. There's tools to make this easier, but mostly it's just about sending an e-mail. All replies are via e-mails as well. Effectively, each bug becomes is own little dedicated mailing list.
Canonical's Ubuntu operating system has found a very large market to expand to, India, and it looks like this might be the country that's the most receptive to this Linux operating system.
Colombia’s Caribbean tourism hotspot Cartagena is set to host a regional convention on computer operating system Ubuntu from August 14 and 16, offering workshops and presentations from Latin America’s Ubuntu experts.
The UK authorities have declared that the Ubuntu Shopping Lens are legal and that no laws have been broken, either in Great Britain or in the European Union.
Today in Linux news, Softpedia is reporting that Ubuntu is the fasting growing operating system in India. Tarus Balog says it seems like "the ideal of open source software" is dead. Linux.com has the top 10 Open Source software titles that rock the Web and Dmitry Kaglik says Zorin OS has stopped him from "distro hopping."
The Amazon "shopping suggestions" feature built into Ubuntu desktops does not violate consumer protections under European and UK privacy law.
Stéphane Graber of Canonical announced the Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS release today as the first update since the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS debut back in April. Ubuntu 12.04.5 features its updated kernel and X.Org/Mesa stack for improved hardware support should you still be bound to Ubuntu 12.04. As with other Ubuntu LTS point releases, Ubuntu 12.04.5 also incorporates various security and bug fixes for its package set to make it an easier install than having a large upgrade basket upon installation.
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.
I, a Microsoft user since DOS 5.x was introduced to Linux in the late 90's when a friend gave me a copy of Novell Linux. I was in awe that you could get a "free" operating system without having to pay for it. The system didn't hold my attention long because there were not a lot of applications for it that were similar to the Windows programs I was accustomed to.
Sydney, Australia-based Ninja Blocks was one of the earlier entries in the Linux home automation game. The startup’s open source Ninja Block hub launched on Kickstarter in 2012, and began shipping in a more advanced version last October. The $199 Ninja Block Kit integrated a BeagleBone Black SBC and an Arduino-compatible microcontroller, and offered remote access via smartphone apps and a cloud service. Using a 433MHz RF radio, it controlled vendor-supplied sensor inputs including motion detectors, contact closures, temperature and humidity sensors, and pushbuttons.
Stolen or lost phones have been a big headache for some Android users. There's almost nothing worse for some folks than realizing that their phone is no longer in their possession and that they have no idea where it went. Now Google has released an update to its Android Device Manager that may help recover lost or stolen Android phones.
CyanogenMod have today launched a central device information point on the CM website. The ‘Device Status Roster’ is an extremely easy to navigate point of reference for anyone looking to install CM or find the latest download available.
Sony has announced that it will no longer support the Android side of PlayStation Mobile, its initiative to support cross-platform indie game publishing for the PS Vita and Google's OS. The service will continue to operate on PlayStation Certified devices running Android 4.4.2 and below, but from Android 4.4.3 and up, Sony can't guarantee that games will play correctly or that users will be able to access the store. Phones and tablets on Android L, the upcoming major refresh, won't have store access at all, and Sony says it has no plans to give any more devices PlayStation Certified status.
Android dominates the world’s smartphone market. A new report from analyst firm Strategy Analytics pegs the Google-owned operating system’s global market share at 85 percent. That means that nearly nine in ten phones shipped are built on Android.
Navdy’s Android 4.4 based automotive head-up display (HUD) combines a projected display with voice and gesture controls to interact with smartphone apps.
Transparent head-up displays (HUDs) are becoming increasingly available as pricey options for luxury cars, promising to improve driver safety by keeping eyes on the road. Now, San Francisco-based startup Navdy is introducing a one-size-fits-all aftermarket solution for the 99 percent. The Navdy HUD is available at a steep discount of $299 throughout August before moving to $499, and will ship in early 2015.
There are a lot of different Android tablets, but sometimes it can be a time-consuming headache to find the best ones. ZDNet has a helpful roundup of the best Android tablets for this month, and there's even one from Nvidia that will appeal to Android gamers.
Given the broad choice, and combine that with rock-bottom prices, there's never been a better time to pick up a new Android tablet.
Recent numbers from ABI Research on the market share of mobile smartphone platforms splits out the two major variants of Android. Both Google’s flavor of Android (namely the Android variant used by members of the Open Handset Alliance, with the Google Play support and services), and the Android Open Source Project, which is free for any manufacturer to base their handset on, are listed.
Android's march to the top of the smartphone field has been nothing short of meteoric. Back in 2008, there were still questions about the viability of the platform. But in July, Strategy Analytics researchers delivered their latest smartphone market share numbers, which showed Android reaching new highs at a record 84.6 percent share of global smartphone shipments. That is commanding share.
Some people forget, though, that Google steers a preferred version of Android (the version used by members of the Open Handset Alliance, with Google Play support and services), while the Android Open Source Project walks its own path. The fact is, though, both channels benefit Google in big ways.
One last app came rolling in at the tail end of update Wednesday. This time, we've got a relatively small update to Android Device Manager, Google's answer for lost or stolen phones. The changelog hasn't been posted on the Play Store, but a quick teardown told us everything we needed to know. There's a new callback feature that makes contacting the owner a one-touch operation.
Qualcomm were quick to add that the success of such power capacity during playback was largely due to their Snapdragon processor. The Qualcomm 801 processor contains a ‘Qualcomm Hexagon DSP’ “a technology block found inside certain Snapdragon processors” which works harmoniously with the One’s 3100mAH battery. Qualcomm suggest while other processors rely on CPU to playback media the Snapdragon is able to “funnel” the media through the DSP thus limiting battery consumption.
Shortly after Google’s I/O event we announced the release of a developer preview of the upcoming and hotly anticipated L preview. This was specifically for Nexus 5 and 7 devices and allowed users to get a taste of what L might eventually look like when it is released in the fall.
An open source project’s website is the main gateway for potential users and contributors to learn about your project, and it assists existing community members to contribute to the project. But it has to do it right. Does your website clearly present your project, its goals and status, and assist your community members to efficiently communicate with each other? Is it attracting new contributors?
Since the very beginning, I knew that we wanted to build a community around the philosophy of the open source way at Opensource.com. That would be easy because once people understood the benefits of open source, they’d be onboard, right? But, what would be the best way to reach new people? Who would participate? How and why would they want to? All of these questions were swimming around in my head. When I set out to find the answers, I could tell it wouldn't be easy. Understanding group dynamics is a complex beast, but one that comes with satisfying rewards.
Before he lost his arm serving as a Marine in Iraq in 2005, Jonathan Kuniholm was pursuing a PhD in biomedical engineering. Now as a founder and president of the Open Prosthetics Project Kuniholm is working to make advanced, inexpensive prosthetics available to amputees around the globe through the creation and sharing of open source hardware designs.
Riak CS 1.5, the latest release of the open source distributed NoSQL database for cloud storage from Basho, is out this week, with new features aimed at enhancing performance, scalability, Amazon S3 compatibility and more.
When most people think “open source” they think of software Github projects and hackers determined to code for the Greater Good. But it’s also a wholesale philosophy that can be applied to many aspects of society—like running a city.
Twitter has shifted its way of thinking about how to launch a new service thanks to the Apache Mesos project, an open source technology that brings together multiple servers into a shared pool of resources. It's an operating system for the data center.
Within our industry, there is a growing divide between two schools of thought; between those companies that believe that the future of the network lies in openness, and those that think a proprietary approach is the compelling way to go.
Midas List VC Salil Deshpande talked to TechRepublic about why he's betting on open source software and what he thinks about the future of IT.
Zenoss Inc., the leading provider of unified monitoring and analytics solutions for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT, today announced Zenoss Control Center, an open source project.
Move to commodity hardware: All elements of the system run on low-cost standard Linux servers, signifying a transition away from traditionally proprietary, closed hardware systems to a software-based, IP network future.
Open-source software is also called as OSS, which is a computer software program designed and deployed with its source code made available and licensed with a free license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to an anonymous entity for any purpose. People using OSS can distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose because Open-source software is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open-source software is the most prominent example of open-source development and often compared to (technically defined) user-generated content or (legally defined) open-content movements.
Chrome is not just a browser. It has managed to reinvent itself by first turning into a full-fledged operating system, and then an ecosystem. Thanks to the relative openness of the platform and the plethora of efforts developers have put in, extensions and apps on Chrome offer pretty much the same functionality as a big ol' desktop.
The Development branch of Google Chrome, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, has advanced to version 38.0.2114.2 for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
Last week marked the release of ownCloud 7 Community Edition, the new version of the ever popular open source file-sharing and storage platform for building private clouds. As The Var Guy noted: "The biggest update that makes the software stand out from other cloud services is a server-to-server sharing feature, which allows users of one ownCloud cloud to share files with those on a completely separate instance, without having to use file-share links."
In the early days of OpenStack, established vendors and startups focused mainly on providing services to design and build private cloud environments for devops approaches that blended development and IT operations for speed and efficiency. As OpenStack has matured, there's been an increase in enterprise adoption and a corollary rise in vendors deploying supported products and managed services.
MongoDB has appointed venture capitalist and former entrepreneur Dev Ittycheria as its new chief executive, adding fuel to speculation that the NoSQL database firm may be planning to go public soon.
A database is an information organized in such a fashion that a computer program can access the stored data or a part of it. This electronic file system is stored, updated, selected and deleted using a special program called Database Management System (DBMS). There is a huge list of DBMS, a few of which makes to the list here are – MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, LibreOffice Base, Microsoft Access, etc.
Facebook engineers Avinash Lakshman and Prashant Malik originally built Cassandra to power the engine that let you search your inbox on the social network. Like other so-called “NoSQL” databases, it did away with the traditional relational model—where data is organized in neat rows and columns on a single machine—in order to more easily scale across thousands of machines. That’s vitally important for a growing web service the size of Facebook. Lakshman had worked on Amazon’s distributed data storage system called Dynamo, but the two also drew inspiration from a paper Google published in 2006 describing its internal database BigTable.
Larry Ellison’s Oracle bowled out Solaris 11.2 last week – and what does this Unix-like give us? Cloud computing, yes, but also a stab at a datacenter-in-a-(large)-box.
Oracle Solaris, one of the most widely deployed UNIX operating systems, which delivers critical cloud infrastructure with built-in virtualization, simplified software lifecycle management, cloud scale data management, and advanced protection for public, private, and hybrid cloud environments, has finally reached version 11.2.
Plone is a powerful content management system (CMS) that provides users with full control of the process of publishing content. Along with this fine-grain control comes a level of collaboration you might not find with other CMS tools. Plone supports sharing out the publication process to users and groups, as well as sharing folders and documents to individual users. It is, of course, important that you tailor the users and groups to meet the specific needs of your publication and collaboration process.
"Code is the next resume." These words by Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation tell profoundly about how our technology industry, and the many businesses that depend on it, are transforming. The unprecedented success of open source development methodology in the recent past raises some fundamental questions about the way the businesses are designed, the structure of the teams, and the nature of work in itself.
Last month in Cambridge was the 2014 GNU Tools Cauldron where GCC as a JIT compiler and other interesting topics were discussed by developers. One of the topics discussed was surrounding better collaboration between GCC and LLVM developers.
Everyone has wasted an afternoon on YouTube clicking through videos of talking cats, screaming goats and bad-lip-reading renditions of popular movies. Heck, there are plenty of YouTube videos of me doing odd and silly things as well. (Does anyone remember 'Buntu Family Theater?) For important family videos, however, I much prefer to control my own data. I've tried over the years to keep an archive of home movies and such in a folder on a server somewhere, but they never get seen because getting to them in inconvenient. That's where MediaGoblin comes in.
The laptop that the Free Software Foundation awarded last year as the first laptop they endorsed that "respected your freedom" was the Gluglug X60, old refurbished models of the IBM ThinkPad X60. These old laptops that were recommended by the FSF came loaded with Core Duo/Solo processors and GMA950 graphics along with other outdated specs, but were free of needing any firmware blobs or binary drivers. The Gluglug X60 ships with Coreboot as its boot-loader and since the initial announcement the Gluglug company has evolved into offering a "Libreboot" project.
Percona Server, an enhanced drop-in replacement for MySQL that will allow queries to run faster and more consistently and to consolidate servers on powerful hardware, is now at version 5.1.73-14.12.
OpenDNS has released OpenGraphiti, an interactive open source data visualization engine that enables security analysts, researchers and data scientists to pair visualization and Big Data to create 3D representations of threats.
The parking space bidding app MonkeyParking is no longer available to San Francisco drivers, but another developer called Sweetch is using an open-source approach to fill the void.
The Department of Immigration has showed what a cash-strapped government agency can do with just $1 million, some open source software, and a bit of free thinking.
Speaking at the Technology in Government forum in Canberra yesterday, the Department's chief risk officer Gavin McCairns explained how his team rolled an application based on the 'R' language into production to filter through millions of incoming visitors to Australia every year.
The General Services Administration last week announced a new policy requiring open source software be given priority consideration for all new IT projects developed by the agency. And while some may question whether open source software will be as effective as its conventional, proprietary counterpart, Sonny Hashmi, GSA’s chief information officer, is confident this new IT model will put the agency in the best position to procure and develop software in the most cost-effective manner.
The General Services Administration will require all new IT projects be open source, according to a policy announced by the agency Aug. 1.
The Russian government is considering the replacement of Microsoft and Oracle products with Linux and open source counterparts, at least for the Ministry of Health.
Back in the good ol’ days, a customer could reasonably add a representation to a software or development agreement that promised “no open-source materials will be provided in the work product/software.” Those days are long gone because nearly every product incorporates open source. It seems that every vendor has a list of open-source software that is incorporated into its products and is more than eager to share the list with customers.
When I was at school, computers were only really just beginning to show their promise and few people had Internet access. I remember begging my Mum for a ZX Spectrum and using it to write basic code to draw things on the screen. From then on I was hooked, but didn’t really know if there were careers programming computers, and it wasn’t at all clear whether this was of any use if I wanted to do scientific research. As I moved to a much faster Amiga 500 Plus, I continued to enjoy programming as a hobby and loved writing simulations to understand mathematics and physical phenomena.
Mancini and her colleagues at Democracia en Red, though, might just have the answer to that. It’s called DemocracyOS, and it’s an open source platform that enables citizens to debate proposals that their representatives are voting on. It's also a place for voters to present projects and ideas to their representatives for debate.
LowRISC is a new venture that's "open to the core" with a goal of producing fully open hardware systems.
A Phoronix reader wrote in this week to share lowRISC, a hardware platform aiming to be open-source from its System-on-a-Chip (SoC) to the development boards. As implied by the name, lowRISC is based upon the 64-bit RISC-V instruction set.
Parse released the Parse PHP SDK, aimed at enabling Parse integration "for a new class of apps and different use cases." The company also said that this is its "first SDK for a server-side language, and the first to be truly open-source."
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the huge win for open standards - and thus, by implication open source - in the realm of document formats in the UK. There's an interesting Cabinet Office document from 25 March that is the record of the meeting where the final decision to go with PDF, HTML5 and ODF was taken.
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The issue of patents rather hinges on the new Unitary Patent and the Unified Patent Court, both of which I expect to be bad news for free software. There's not much we can do about it until we know exactly what the problems are, and even then it's not clear how much we can change things.
The point about fonts is a good one, and something that several people have mentioned to me after I published my article on the ODF decision. The issue is that it is all very well setting ODF as the standard for exchanging documents, but if everyone is using different sets of fonts, there could be interoperability problems. So we need to draw up some basic list of such fonts, and make them part of the new government standard.
Companies too often focus on fixing the wrong software vulnerabilities, leaving themselves open to attack, a security expert says. Core Security is releasing at Black Hat a model to help companies properly patch flaws.
A researcher finds possible security risks with Nest thermostats, though Nest Labs itself is downplaying the risk.
Hidden within hundreds of millions of mobile phones around the world is control software used by carriers to help set up devices and features. According to new research set to be presented at the Black Hat USA security conference this week in Las Vegas by researchers working at Accuvant, the carrier control software itself has security vulnerabilities in it that could be exposing the world's mobile phone users to risk.
Companies increasingly understand that the key to developing innovative software faster and better than the competition is through the use of open source software (OSS). It’s nearly impossible to use only commercially sourced code and get your software to market with the speed and cost constraints required by today’s product life cycles. Without the ability to choose and integrate best-of-breed OSS, some of the greatest product ideas might never see the light of day.
The hackers collected data on a massive scale, 'so it affects absolutely everybody,' security firm says
Can your computer be hacked? Yep. Can your phone be hacked? Yep. Have your passwords been harvested? Very possibly. (The NYT just reported that one Russian group has more than a billion, though it’s unclear how many are salted and hashed.) So how worried should you be, exactly?
Carroll of Westforth Street, Anstruther, pled guilty to being in possession of an offensive weapon in Great Junction Street on June 21 last year. His defence solicitor, David Patterson, said Carroll had served with Royal Engineers for six years. After leaving the British Army, Carroll, he said, “had been head-hunted by the CIA to work as a Close Protection Officer in Iraq”.
The summit in Washington was supposed to be about trade, but it's not. US imperialism does not sustain itself by competitive trade, but by force of arms. The real objective was to ensure that mutually beneficial African trade with China and Brazil results in no shift in African nations' political orientation away from the US
Whatever lingering moral authority remaining in the administration of President Barack Obama fell to dust last Friday in a news dump that no one, apparently, was expected to pay any attention to.
That's what Friday news dumps are for; you drop the smelliest stories in the late afternoon, when the citizenry is staring out the window at work and waiting for the weekend to begin. Very few people pay attention to the news on the weekends, and by Monday morning, the damning or damaging stories that were dropped on Friday have flowed far down the river to pollute the bay, out of sight and out of mind.
The Obama administration will push for the stalled mega deals for M-777 ultra-light howitzers and Javelin anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) when US defence secretary Chuck Hagel comes visiting from Thursday.
Why is it that most politicians of both parties have no problem subsidizing the Iron Dome to protect Israel from enemy air attacks with billions of dollars in taxpayer money but claim they haven’t the funds to build a fence to protect our Southern border?
A recent move by the Pakistani government to curtail U.S. drone attacks highlights their problematic nature.
Pakistan on Thursday condemned the U.S. drone strike in North Waziristan tribal region that had killed at least five people on Wednesday.
Pro-Palestine demonstrators determined to stay on top of UAV Engines in Shenstone, Staffordshire
A man has been arrested as pro-Palestinian activists entered the second day of a protest today after scaling the roof of a factory in Staffordshire which they claim is supplying weapons to Israel.
Africa is the new frontier for the U.S. Defense Department. The Pentagon has applied counterterrorism tactics throughout the Middle East and, to a lesser extent, Central and South Asia. Now it is monitoring the African continent for counterterrorism initiatives. It staged more than 546 military exercises on the continent last year, a 217 percent increase since 2008, and is now involved in nearly 50 African countries.
U.S. military and police aid to all Africa this year totaled nearly $1.8 billion, with additional arms sales surpassing $800 million. In terms of ensuring Africa's safety and security, however, the return on this investment is questionable.
What if, for example, that money was instead spent eradicating pervasive viruses that are undermining Africa's future? Yellow fever vaccination doses cost less than $1.00 and Hepatitis B vaccination doses cost 25 cents or less. These viruses, and their deadly bedfellows like Ebola, are the real threats terrorizing African communities - and more deserving of U.S. defense dollars.
In recent weeks, media outlets, including this publication and The New York Times have noted the shift in U.S. counterterrorism strategy from direct action, such as drone strikes and capture-and-kill raids, to indirect action—namely training, equipping and advising partner or indigenous troops, with a limited American combat role.
Al-Qaeda started to get stronger after 2009, when its various international branches decided to make Yemen their main base," the NDC representative Nadia Abdullah said, Itar-Tass reported.
"We are also convinced that other countries contributed to that, thinking they would free themselves of the (Al-Qaeda) presence by redirecting the militants to Yemen. There are Iraqis, Saudis, Syrians, Afghans, and Pakistanis. They did a disservice to Yemen," she added.
White supremacist David "Joey Pedersen offered no apology for a multi-state crime spree that left four dead, using his statement at Monday's sentencing to blast police, prosecutors and American foreign policy in a harangue briefly interrupted by a sister who yelled at him to "shut up."
Pedersen said he couldn't sit idle while "Western identity is being destroyed by other cultures," and he regretted that police intervened before he did more damage.
"I offer no excuses because none are needed," he said.
Two missiles slammed into a house in a village in the Datta Khel area in the border region of North Waziristan, security officials said, injuring two militants, besides the five dead.
The bodies of the five people killed were charred beyond recognition, one of the villagers told Reuters.
Drone strikes in Pakistan resumed in June after a gap of six months, during which the Pakistani government pursued peace talks with the Taliban. Pakistan announced an anti-Taliban offensive in North Waziristan within days of the resumption.
Nick Clegg has indicated the Government is to announce a suspension of Britain's €£42m of arms export licences to Israel if it resumes its attacks on Gaza.
This is quite a new development in the history of West Asia which is fraught with blood-spilling tussle between the Arabs and Israelis. Egypt, which has played the role of a balancer traditionally in the volatile politics of West Asia, is leading a coalition of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against the Hamas. But what is the reason behind this fresh development in West Asian politics?
With reports indicating that forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad are gaining ground in that country’s brutal civil war, moderate Syrian rebels have told a visiting journalist that the United States is arranging their training in Qatar.
The White House proposed a plan two months ago for the Pentagon to train and equip vetted Syrian rebel forces in that nation’s civil war. But, since then, there’s been lots of talk and not much action.
Administration officials have agreed on the broad outline of a proposal, which would see several hundred U.S. troops train 2,300 to 2,500 vetted rebels outside of Syria over 18 months. The Syrians could then train more forces at home.
But with Iraq in shambles, intervention has become a tougher sell—and that’s a good thing.
After supporting radical jihadists in Syria, the administration of Barack Obama is now going to bomb them in Iraq – two-and-a-half years after the last American troops left the Middle Eastern country.
The full extent of the troubles that have befallen the Yazidi people of northern Iraq has not yet come to light, but the fighting for their land continues. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki refused to consider stepping aside for Iraq’s sake. At least 938 people were killed and 107 more were wounded.
T.E. Lawrence – Britain’s legendary “Lawrence of Arabia” – warned outsiders that, for them, Arabia is not a hospitable place. “However friendly and informal the treatment of yourself may be, remember always that your foundations are very sandy ones.”
West also insisted that, "President Obama has little moral authority at this point," criticizing the government's $USD 2 million pursuit of former Black Panther Assata Shakur and the persecution of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden.
We’re continuing to explore the US-led Global War on terror and try to understand why it has actually resulted in an increased terrorist threat around the globe.
As a 72-hour truce in Gaza expired at 8 a.m. Friday, Palestinian militants fired barrages of rockets into Israel and the Israeli military responded with airstrikes, one of which killed a 10-year-old boy, according to relatives.
"The illegal carpet-bombing of neutral Cambodia, designed to deprive North Vietnam of troops and supplies ... sowed the seeds for the murderous Pol Pot regime," wrote the BBC's Bob Chaundy.
And according to documents released by the CIA in the early 2000s, "Kissinger was actively involved in the establishment of Operation Condor, a covert plan involving six Latin American countries including Chile, to assassinate thousands of political opponents," wrote Chaundy.
Obama has authorized targeted air strikes on Islamic State to protect US personnel. He also authorized air drops of humanitarian aid to members of the Yazidi minority who fled to the mountains and Christians as well.
Yemen is a U.S. ally that says it approves every drone strike, but it is also so strapped for cash that the government has implemented numerous austerity measures. Either it handed out the money and guns to cover for its partner, or the U.S. privately paid money to the families of men it publicly describes as al-Qaeda while simultaneously promoting the man responsible for the strike. In truth, only three things are known for certain: Twelve men are dead, $800,000 in cash was delivered, and the dead can’t be both guilty and innocent.
When it comes to often misleading euphemisms, no organization does a better job of it than the US military. For example, when combatants shoot their own, they term it “friendly fire.” Makes one wonder what would “unfriendly fire” be? Or it’s when our drones in the Middle East kill innocent women and children, we term it “collateral damage.” Back in the days of the US invasion of Vietnam, a misadventure that ended up costing an estimated 2.5 million lives, there was the village “pacification program,” one case being the My Lai episode, where Lt. William Calley and his troops “pacified” two villages by exterminating somewhere between 350 and 500 children, women (some pregnant) and senior men and women.
The hydraulic fracturing process, or "fracking," involves pumping a mixture of fluid chemicals into the earth at a high pressure, creating horizontal fractures that release more oil or natural gas from the rock formations than from vertical drilling alone. The oil and gas industry commonly uses "deep injection wells," also known as "class II" wells, to dump untreated waste fluids after they are used. As the level of fracking production escalates, the wastewater injection process has also increased; it more than tripled from the first half to the second half of 2011, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. With the uptick in fracking comes emerging risks. Scientists have linked the process to seismic activity, specifically to a recent surge of more than 200 earthquakes in Oklahoma so far this year, some of which have been disastrous.
Librexcoin LogoLibrexcoin is today’s Random Coin of the Day for its implementation of Zerocoin, a library used in anonymization of the coin’s transactions. Librexcoin claims that some other coins do not truly implement any form of anonymity, but instead making it easier to track the transactions. “Vaporware” is where a company (or coin in this case) publicly discusses releasing hardware or software to generate interest, but the product is never formally released or canceled publicly. Librexcoin seeks to change this with their coin.
The Prime Minister backed the announcement, tweeting: “Great news that Boris plans to stand at next year’s general election – I’ve always said I want my star players on the pitch.”
This week the White House has gathered dozens of heads of state from across Africa for a summit in Washington, DC. It has the potential to raise some interesting issues about economic development, major corporations and debates over human rights and the US-led war on terrorism.
But the Sunday chat shows had a strange way of doing this. CBS's Face the Nation (8/3/14) tapped CEO and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as its Africa expert, sitting alongside White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.
The self-proclaimed super PAC to end all super PACs, MAYDAY has relied financially on tech moguls since it started its push to take money out of politics. The organization recently released a list of donors that gave more than $10,000, including some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest players who gave the committee millions.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s recent decisions upholding Governor Scott Walker’s signature voter ID legislation depended on the votes of the four justices often described as “conservative.”
But the decisions were anything but conservative -- instead, they ran counter to conservative principles like federalism and judicial restraint.
Last month O'Reilly and others on Fox News defended racist remarks about black communities when they supported local New Jersey reporter Sean Bergin, who was suspended after editorializing that "broken families" were the cause of the "sick, perverse" anger toward police that has "contaminated America's inner cities."
The controversial “right to be forgotten” ruling introduced by the European Union Court of Justice (ECJ) earlier this year has attracted fresh wave of criticism from the Wikimedia Foundation. The criticism comes hot on the heels of the release of the first-ever transparency report by the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia. The report gives an insight into the volume of government requests the Foundation receives for content alterations or take-downs from its various websites (including Wikipedia).
A recent European Court of Justice (ECJ) decision is undermining the world’s ability to freely access accurate and verifiable records about individuals and events. The impact on Wikipedia is direct and critical.
Former Indian External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh has alleged that the United States exerted pressure on former prime minister Manmohan Singh in the choice of his ministers and that CIA agents had "penetrated deep into every sphere of decision and policy making" of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, according to local media reports Monday.
A new classified document about the US intelligence community has been released causing some officials to suspect that a new leaker is feeding information to journalists.
The federal government has concluded there's a new leaker exposing national security documents in the aftermath of surveillance disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, U.S. officials tell CNN.
Just over a year after Edward Snowden revealed NSA surveillance techniques to the world, US officials confirm speculation that a second leaker is now spilling secrets
A website has disclosed the number of people considered suspicious by the NSA’s terrorism investigators. But who leaked the lists? It's unlikely that it was Edward Snowden, the usual suspect.
Today in bad news about the government watching you, we learnt that the US government’s terrorist watch list has doubled in recent years. What’s worse, however, is that the government admits that over 40 per cent of the people on that list have “no recognized terrorist group affiliation”. None.
The document reveals that “On 28 June 2013, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) passed a milestone of one million persons in TIDE,” including some 730,000 “biometric files” such as fingerprints, retina scans, DNA, and the like.
A U.S. government database of known or suspected terrorists doubled in size in recent years, according to newly released government figures. The growth is the result of intelligence agencies submitting names more often after a near-miss attack in 2009.
What could possibly be more invasive, more offensive, than the secret indiscriminate bulk collection of data by the National Security Agency?
Quite a number of things, actually.
Let's put aside, for now, the CIA's complicity in torture, which, to my mind, is the worst scandal of the Bush years. Then, as you read about the following two stories, compare them to the NSA's surveillance, and weigh the potential and actual harm to real people that the practices exposed herein would cause.
1. The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill, relying on classified documents, has exposed for all to see the ungainly expansion of terrorist watch lists after September 11, 2001, and particularly, the intrusive, invasive, and privacy-threatening means the government knowingly uses to secretly enrich its files on what must be thousands of innocents Americans, assuming that the actual bad people among them are very few. As of August 2013, Scahill reports, there were 5,000 Americans on watch lists.
The bill also leans on the executive branch to be more transparent about surveillance activities. It would require the director of national intelligence to make public either a redacted version or a summary of any significant opinion by the FISA Court. It also would require far more detailed statistical reporting on the use of surveillance authorities. For the first time, the government would publicly report the number of individuals affected by various surveillance programs—including, for most programs, a separate estimate of the number of affected Americans. And the bill would establish a panel of paid privacy advocates who could appear in FISA court proceedings, which currently take place with only government officials present.
To increase the security of the internet and computers, the government should corner the market on zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits, offering top-dollar to force out all other buyers. At least, that’s what Dan Geer thinks, and his opinion matters. Geer is chief information security officer at the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, which invests in technologies that help the intelligence community.
In a eclectic keynote delivered to the Black Hat conference audience, Dan Geer, CISO at In-Q-Tel, made known his thoughts on and ideas about a number of things: from Internet voting to vulnerability finding, from net neutrality to the right to be forgotten.
In-Q-Tel is a not-for-profit corporation that invests in tech companies with the goal of keeping US intelligence agencies equipped with the latest information technologies, but in this instance, Geer put forward his own views.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released a video by acclaimed documentarian Brian Knappenberger (The Internet's Own Boy) that explores how and why an unlikely coalition of advocacy organizations launched an airship over the National Security Agency's Utah data center. The short documentary explains the urgent need to rein in unconstitutional mass surveillance, just as the U.S. Senate has introduced a new version of the USA FREEDOM Act.
Public concerns about the US government's secretive surveillance programmes exposed by Edward Snowden have spawned a slew of encryption products and privacy services that aim to make electronic spying more difficult.
The Attorney-General had a difficult task when he squeezed into the tiny Sky News studio yesterday afternoon to discuss the government’s data retention proposal. The Prime Minister had already caused confusion by saying an internet user’s browsing history would be included under the proposalââ¬â°—ââ¬â°a dramatic widening of data retention from the model proposed by Labor,
The Intercept, an independent media organization in the U.S., announced on August 4 that the National Security Agency (NSA) of the US included South Korea in the biggest threats secretly working against the U.S.
U.S. House of Representatives Liberty Caucus Chairman Justin Amash survived a strong primary challenge from establishment forces, but those same groups picked off Rep. Kerry Bentivolio and prevailed in an open primary to replace retiring House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers. The libertarian-leaning Michigan Republican Amash won 57-43 percent over challenger and businessman Michael Ellis.
Rep. Justin Amash has been one of the most involved and active voices in Congress on pushing back against the intelligence community's overreach and attack on our civil liberties. Many folks know him for the Amash Amendment, which would have defunded the NSA's bulk collection of phone records under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. While it was narrowly defeated, it certainly woke up many in Congress to the fact that the surveillance scandal was a real deal. Over the last year, though, we'd been hearing more and more stories about how the "mainstream Republicans" were looking to unseat Amash in the primaries. Amash is often identified as being in the "Tea Party" wing of the party, and sometimes described as more "libertarian."
After easily defeating his primary challenger on Tuesday, Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) delivered a scathing victory speech slamming his opponent for running a “smear campaign” against him.
“I ran for office to stop people like you,” Amash said, referring to his primary challenger, Brian Ellis.
“You owe my family and this community an apology for your disgusting, despicable smear campaign. You had the audacity to try and call me today after running a campaign that was called the nastiest in the country,” he continued.
Digital mass surveillance is having a chilling effect on US democracy, affecting journalists and lawyers, a report from human rights organisations has warned.
The report, by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, concludes that some of the most fundamental freedoms are under threat. The organisations argue that the government’s policies on secrecy and preventing leaks, as well as its stance on officials talking to the media, undermine traditional US values.
Two Carnegie Mellon University researchers from the school’s Software Engineering Institute, or SEI, were set to present an abstract on Tor at Black Hat today. Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord’s talk was to center on how adversaries could “de-anonymize hundreds of thousands Tor clients and thousands of hidden services within a couple of months,” and do so cheaply.
Tor has been a thorn in the side of law enforcement for years now, but new work from Wired's Kevin Poulsen shows the FBI has found a new way to track users across the network. Poulsen looks at the 2012 case of Aaron McGrath, who agents found hosting child pornography on a network of servers in Nebraska. Looking to expand on the bust, agents got a warrant to track anyone who visited the website at its Tor address, and infected servers with tracking malware to identify the root IP of anyone who visited the site. As a result, agents were able to track at least 25 users back to home addresses and subscriber names.
University of Oxford students now have the option to pursue a Master’s degree in software and system security accredited by GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) – the British counterpart of the US NSA (National Security Agency).
On June 27, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Greenpeace and the Tenth Amendment Center joined forces to fly a 135-foot-long airship bearing a downturned arrow and the words “Illegal Spying Below” over the National Security Agency’s $1.2-billion data center in Bluffdale, Utah.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) lacks independence and uncritically adhered to the wishes of US electronic eavesdroppers in releasing a weakened random-number generator in 2006. So says a group of mathematicians and computer scientists in a new report commissioned by the lab following the leaking of documents last year by the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. According to those documents, the NSA designed an encryption algorithm to include a "back door" so that it could copy encryption keys from internet users without their knowledge. The algorithm was approved by NIST, which itself develops cryptography technology and advises US companies and government agencies on electronic security issues.
Richard Betts, a national security expert at Columbia University, said Snowden released “lots of information about the sorts of metadata the National Security Agency - or NSA - collects for U.S. intelligence, involving the destination of communications and the identities of people around the world who are talking to each other.
A KEYLESS SECURITY SYSTEM that doesn't use databases and never stores passwords has hit the Kickstarter crowdfunding website, promising to encrypt data and make it inaccessible to hackers and spies.
A startup named Venux has created an "NSA proof" security system called Venux Files, a universal file management system that provides access to many cloud-based services such as Dropbox and iCloud, making it easier for users to store, access, and manage files securely from any location.
Over the years, there have been many instances of Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) being down for maintenance or crashing leaving millions of users stranded. Although individuals can get their social media fix from Twitter, Instagram or Google+, users insist that Facebook is their primary choice. This means that even when it’s down, they’ll resort to any tactic to ensure it goes back up, even calling the police.
The announcement this week that Federal Cabinet has given in principle support to the retention of customer data by telecommunications companies for up to two years - so that government agencies can access it without a warrant - suggests that government representatives just don't understand the consequences of retaining everyone's metadata and giving spy agencies access to it. The Australian population generally, and lawyers and journalists in particular, should be deeply concerned.
Metadata is not just "the envelope" rather than its content. It is not some sort of harmless or innocuous activity log, which is exactly why the spy agencies are so keen to have it stored and accessible. It is the index to a person's electronic communications, detailing the when, who, where and how often of each contact. As journalist Glenn Greenwald asks in his book 'No place to hide Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State': 'Would the senator, each month, publish a full list of people he/she emailed and called, including the length of time they spoke and their physical locations when the call was made?"
ThoughtWorks, a global technology company employing 200 people Australia, is concerned that Australian Attorney-General appears confused about data retention and metadata.
We stand ready to provide Senator Brandis with a briefing and clear explanation of the technical and practical aspects of metadata and data retention, in addition to outlining the considerable cost it poses to business.
A judge that served on the secretive U.S. court that authorizes U.S. government surveillance issued a letter raising concerns with a new Senate bill to reform NSA surveillance. In the letter, Judge John Bates – who formerly served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) – argues that the FISC reforms proposed in Sen. Leahy’s recent USA FREEDOM Act (S.2685) would degrade the court’s relationship with the government and increase the court’s workload.
Currently, the FISC considers sweeping government surveillance requests in secret, with only the government advocating before it. Several current laws – such as Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act – give the FISC limited discretion to evaluate surveillance requests, which ultimately led to the government obtaining overbroad surveillance authority. Sen. Leahy’s USA FREEDOM Act would pave the way for independent lawyers to advocate for civil liberties before the FISC – subject to several restrictions.
Malware used by government agencies for illegal surveillance, known as FinFisher has likely been exposed. The alleged hack of Gamma Group International yielded a 40GB trove that has been made public. Gamma is a provider of "surveillance technology" that your anti-virus probably knows as malware, but only further concealments are developed, as indicated in the screenshot above from release notes which are linked below.
With global citizens and governments dealing with cyber-surveillance and its impact on personal freedom, classified document leaks will continue and that's not a bad thing, say security and law experts.
The context for this discussion is the Australian government’s new anti-terror proposals included in the National Security Amendment Bill that Parliament will vote on soon. One of the provisions of that bill is that telecommunications companies will be forced to keep your ‘metadata’ for up to two years. This is called ‘data retention’.
The NSA pulls no punches when it comes to the surveillance of innocent people in every corner of the world in its attempt to “collect it all.” Those in the U.S. prepared to vigorously oppose mass government spying need to fight back and hold our representatives to account for the routine human rights violations perpetrated by the National Security Agency. And this activism needs to occur on all levels, from lobbying local and state officials to setting up meetings with Congress members.
The National Security Agency can legally monitor every American, inside and outside the U.S., “by collecting their network traffic abroad,” according to a working paper by researchers at Harvard University and Boston University.
This can happen without any checks and balances from Congress or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees surveillance requests from the NSA, said researchers Axel Arnbak of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Sharon Goldberg, a BU assistant professor of computer science.
At dawn on June 27th Greenpeace and the Tenth Amendment Center launched an airship to fly above the NSA data center in Utah. The message on the sides was not subtle -- "Illegal spying below", with an arrow pointing down. It was meant as an alert to action for citizens, and the stunt did have an effect.
The U.S. National Security Agency is turning to Silicon Valley for topflight talent, but first it has to rebuild trust.
Anne Neuberger, special assistant to NSA Director Michael Rogers, said this week she feared the agency would no longer be able to recruit top technologists, since former contractor Edward Snowden blew the lid off the extent of its spying activities.
Something is bugging us Indians now a days. Is the alleged bugging of BJP minister Nitin Gadkari's home a case of infighting within the party or is a foreign government or agency involved? Or is there any truth in such report at all? These are questions that 'bugs' for an answer. The Congress has, meanwhile, used it as an inflammable object to start a political bushfire to corner the BJP.
Revelations about the U.S. National Security Agency's electronic eavesdropping capabilities have sparked anger in Germany and a boom in encryption services that make it hard for the most sophisticated spies to read emails, listen to calls or look through texts.
Jon Callas, co-founder of Silent Circle, which sells an encryption app allowing users to talk and text in private, said a series of disclosures from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden last year have been good for business.
IT security firm Kaspersky Cyber security Windows XP firm Kaspersky claimed it has detected an old, widely known vulnerability that was used in a cyber attack to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program in some versions of Windows platform across 19 million computers, including in India.
Google will boost the search rankings of websites that always use secure encrypted connections to transmit pages and exchange data.
What Google announced, specifically, is that it will begin favoring sites that encrypt their traffic in its search results. As offers go, this seems eminently reasonable and optional. Adopting Web encryption—technically, the HTTPS standard, also known as HTTP over TLS—is pretty straightforward; lots of sites (banks, many email services, Facebook, etc.) use it already. (ReadWrite, alas, does not.)
A few days ago Dan Greer, the chief information security officer at In-Q-Tel, gave a keynote address at Black Hat USA[1]. According to the company’s web site In-Q-Tel is a non-profit, but it’s a special sort of non-profit. It offers venture capital funding on behalf of the “intelligence community” (read government spies). During his presentation Greer proposed, among other things, that the U.S. government bolster internet security by dominating the market for zero-day vulnerabilities.
Zero-days are basically flaws, unpatched bugs, in software and hardware which attackers can leverage to compromise a computer and covertly gain access. Think of a zero-day vulnerability like an unlocked door recessed back in an obscured alleyway of an otherwise secure home.
Greer’s recommendation goes like this: using its buying power the United State government could act like a hi-tech billionaire who’s snatching up real estate in Silicon Valley and wade out into the digital black market to outbid all of the other buyers. By driving up prices American security services would corner the market on zero-day vulnerabilities.
South Asia's diverse topography, chaotic overpopulation and vast, unplanned cities make drones especially useful
India has started using drones to monitor public gatherings and events that are difficult for law enforcement bodies to control from the ground, Time magazine reported.
“The misconception that drones are meant more for destructive purposes seems to still linger around,” Shinil Shekar, head of sales and marketing at Airpix, a Mumbai-based drone company, was quoted by Time as saying, “And it is important that people be more educated about their potential civilian applications.”
While you’d expect the members of the military who were being paid daily to hunt down virtual threats would come out way in front, it turns out the guys who have been sitting on the sidelines waiting for their chance to shine got just that, and blew the serving squads right out of the water.
A class-action civil suit by a lawyer against Facebook's data collection practices has attracted over 20,000 co-complainants just five days after its launch.
Facebook is confronting another class action lawsuit, which is gaining massive support from users. Austrian law student and data privacy activist, Max Schrems filed the case against the social network giant’s subsidiary in Ireland for allegedly violating European privacy laws.
Former NSA and U.S. Cyber Command head Keith Alexander is defending his new million-dollar cyber-security consultancy, which critics say allows the recently retired general to profit off of his taxpayer-funded career in public service.
FOIA enthusiast Jason Leopold isn't going to sit back and let former NSA head Keith Alexander recede noisily into the background. Alexander's transition from spy-in-chief to $1 million-a-month rockstar security consultant to our nation's most easily-impressed banks is currently on everyone's minds. First off, how many state secrets is he selling? And just how many hacker-beating patents will he be filing for?
It hardly seemed possible that Keith Alexander the civilian could stir more outrage than Keith Alexander the cyber surveillance chief.
In the space of just one week last month, according to Crif, the umbrella group for France's Jewish organisations, eight synagogues were attacked. One, in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, was firebombed by a 400-strong mob. A kosher supermarket and pharmacy were smashed and looted; the crowd's chants and banners included "Death to Jews" and "Slit Jews' throats". That same weekend, in the Barbes neighbourhood of the capital, stone-throwing protesters burned Israeli flags: "Israhell", read one banner.
Fox News host Steve Doocy and guest Bo Dietl exploited the death of a Staten Island man at the hands of the New York Police Department (NYPD) to attack Mayor Bill de Blasio and push for increased use of aggressive police tactics like stop-and-frisk and chokeholds. Dietl went as far as to suggest the autopsy of the man's death was fraudulent, calling for an "independent" medical examiner to inspect the event.
This is why, 40 years after Richard Nixon's resignation from office, I carry a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution in my brief case. It is my way of remembering how far we have come since Watergate ... and how much always is at stake for America.
On anniversary of Nixon's fall, John Dean talks Tea Party, taking out Gordon Liddy & Watergate conspiracy theories
Neither Congress nor the courts have taken the exam€ple to heart and stood firmly against presidential crimes or serious misconduct.
The burglary he demanded was not the one that would occur exactly one year later at the Democratic National Committee’s office in the Watergate complex. Richard Nixon was ordering a break-in at the Brookings Institution, a think tank, to seize material concerning U.S. diplomacy regarding North Vietnam during the closing weeks of the 1968 presidential campaign.
The reaction to the events was furious. "It was a terrifying night," Drew says. "It felt like we were in a banana republic." "The television networks offered hour-long specials," Woodward and Bernstein write in their book The Final Days. "The newspapers carried banner headlines. Within two days, 150,000 telegrams had arrived in the capital, the largest concentrated volume in the history of Western Union. Deans of the most prestigious law schools int he country demanded that Congress commence an impeachment inquiry. By the following Tuesday, forty-four separate Watergate-related bills had been introduced in the House. Twenty-two called for an impeachment investigation."
The reaction forced Nixon to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who would eventually succeed in his quest for the tapes.
The Senate is all aglow over the CIA's hacking their computers. But 42 years ago, Hollywood warned about an overarching national security state, and nobody listened. In 1972 a movie issued alerts with striking prescience but minimal public response, and remains little known. What makes the Groundstar Conspiracy notable is its depiction and discussion of what evolved after 9/11/2001; although created decades earlier, it predicted the post al Qaeda environment, asking how far we should go to preserve our security, how much freedom we have to give up to remain secure.
Release details of CIA program
Even though a bipartisan majority of the committee voted to declassify the report, there is a concerted effort to discredit it by depicting it as partisan and unfair. The report’s detractors include the CIA itself: The agency’s rebuttal will be released alongside the report’s key sections. While the CIA is under no obligation to stay silent in the face of criticism, it seems that between its apparently excessive redactions and its spying on the committee’s computers, the agency is determined to resist oversight.
The release of a long-delayed investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency’s post-9/11 interrogation methods was held up yet again on Tuesday after the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee objected to the amount of information that had been censored by the Obama administration.
CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who has been serving a prison sentence in a federal correctional facility in Loretto, Pennsylvania for over a year, has written a letter describing how he was given a special designation marking him dangerous. This led to him not being sent to a minimum security camp, and he reveals he was put in a low-security facility because the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) inappropriately categorized his offense as one related to “espionage.”
Was there not something annoyingly breezy in the president’s phrasing last week as he acknowledged the abuse of suspected terrorists in the wake of Sept. 11? Was there not something off-putting in the folksy familiarity of it?
“We tortured some folks.”
What’s next? “He raped a chick?” “They stabbed a dude?”
In an Aug. 1 news conference, President Obama acknowledged that in the post-9/11 era “we tortured some folks.” His casual description of detainees did nothing to soften the brutal truth that by resorting to torture the United States failed to uphold the legal and moral framework that should truly define “American exceptionalism.” Instead, America resorted to tactics that are wrong and ineffective, and that put Americans at risk of enduring similar treatment.
"I have a question for all the well-meaning people who praise President Obama for 'banning' torture," asks Barry Eisler. "Would you also find it helpful for the president to ban kidnapping? Child abuse? Mail fraud? Maybe you would. After all, no one likes kidnapping, child abuse, or mail fraud. Maybe it would be good if the president banned them."
Khadija and her family survived though her father was brutally tortured and two of her uncles were executed. Her family recently won a settlement with the British government, though part of the deal was that Britain did not publicly admit to any wrongdoing and inquiries were halted.
Several Democratic senators have criticized the Obama administration’s heavy censoring of a Senate report that details the Central Intelligence Agency’s program last decade in which terrorism suspects were tortured.
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, complained that the administration redacted or removed “key facts” from the report, which has not been released.
In fact, the editing by Obama officials makes it unlikely the committee’s findings will become public anytime soon, as Feinstein wants as much of the full story of the CIA’s shadowy program told as possible. She said she intends to press the White House for omissions from the report to be restored.
Republicans in the Senate Intelligence Committee are claiming that the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation techniques were vital in finding Osama Bin Ladin, as part of a larger critique of a report by Democrats that details what President Obama called “torture” of prisoners in CIA custody (via The Daily Beast).
More than a year and a half ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee approved a voluminous report on the CIA's detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists after 9/11. Those who have read the report say it concludes that the agency used brutal and sometimes unauthorized interrogation techniques, misled policymakers and the public, and sought to undermine congressional oversight. It also reportedly rejects the idea that waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” (a euphemism for torture) produced information vital to preventing terrorist attacks.
A group of retired Military Generals has asked US President Barack Obama to declassify a Senate report on CIA interrogations expected to be released this week. “The CIA’s programme prompted a public discussion about whether these enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) produced reliable information,” a group of 15 interrogators, interviewers and intelligence officials said in a letter to Obama.
The Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman is withholding release of its long-awaited report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program in protest of administration redactions that "eliminate or obscure key facts'' in the panel's review.
In some respects, the recent admission by CIA Director John Brennan that his agents and his lawyers have been spying on the senators whose job it is to monitor the agency should come as no surprise. The agency's job is to steal and keep secrets, and implicit in those tasks, Brennan would no doubt argue, is lying.
We're taught as kids that lying is bad, that liars should be held accountable. But in Washington, lying is so endemic and so flagrant that the perpetrators are rarely even rebuked.
Forty years ago, Senator Frank Church suggested that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was “a rogue elephant rampaging out of control, over which no effective direction was being given.” Church’s “rogue elephant” was a myth, although a plausible one at that, in that neither Dwight D. Eisenhower, nor John F. Kennedy left a paper trail conclusively linking them to plots to murder Fidel Castro. The absence of any paper trail was designed to allow presidents to “plausibly deny” any operation, should it be exposed. This was seen as a prudent step to protect the United States government, particularly its chief executive, from repercussions stemming from violations of international law.
First came the stirring denial, followed by the heartfelt apology.
The CIA and the Senate can’t agree on how to mask the identities of those who helped the U.S. in its secret detention. Whose identities will Obama protect?
A definitive Senate report about one of America’s darkest periods continues to be withheld – precisely because the agency behind it refuses to come clean
The US administration is expected to release a declassified Senate report in the coming days that will detail abuses by intelligence agents targeting extremist groups in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The CIA's months-long battle with the Senate has reached a new impasse, this time over the release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA's torture of terrorism suspects during the Bush years. In about the most blatant conflict of interest imaginable, the CIA was allowed to redact the report about its own war crimes — and to precisely no one's surprise, the spy agency blacked it out into gibberish.
The CIA now admits that it spied on a Senate investigation into the agency’s shameful program of secret detention and torture. Do we need any more proof that the spooks are out of control?
An internal “accountability board” will look into the incident, an agency statement said, and might recommend “potential disciplinary measures” or even “steps to address systemic issues.”
The Bush administration's interrogation policy cannot be written off as a panicked aberration that ended in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
And I actually don't want to pick on them. They've done a lot of bad stuff, and they've done a lot of good stuff, and the people who work there, by and large, are as good as you might think you are.
The U.S. and U.K. collaborated to snatch Khadija al-Saadi's family in Hong Kong and deliver them into the custody of a murderous dictator.
I felt that no one was really paying attention to the travesty of politicized intelligence that I documented in 1991. And now I must ask again, “Is anyone paying attention to any of this?” In addition to the limited attention that the issue received from the mainstream media, President Obama answered a question at a news conference last week about the Senate report by stating that “We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks.” Well, if we “tortured some folks,” then perhaps we need to know the folks that did the torturing. Of course, the CIA’s redaction of the report included the pseudonyms of the operations officers who conducted the “enhanced interrogation techniques.” It is “beyond the scope of reason” that anyone, including the commander in chief, could read or even be briefed on the sadistic activity that dominates the torture report and blithely answer any question on the topic.
When the Central Intelligence Agency was accused of spying on U.S. senators investigating its detention program, Director John Brennan quickly rejected the charges.
CIA Director John Brennan has apologized to lawmakers over the determination that his agency improperly spied on Congress by searching computers used by Senate investigators. An apology isn’t enough: He needs to go.
The Senate Intelligence Committee since 2009 has been investigating the CIA’s use last decade of interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects that President Obama now describes as “torture.” An Inspector General’s report confirmed last week that five CIA employees searched computers that were assigned to congressional investigators and, in the process, reviewed committee files and staff members’ emails.
Recently The Jerusalem Post reported that Col. (res.) Jana Modgavrishvili is the first Justice Ministry investigator of complaints of torture against the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) who is not an internal appointee.
THE Senate Intelligence Committee will soon release key sections of its report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects after 9/11. In remarks on Friday anticipating the report’s release, which he has publicly supported, President Obama acknowledged that “we tortured some folks.”
President Barack Obama said Friday the United States “tortured some folks” during President George W. Bush’s tenure, a declaration that could conceivably bring consequences for alleged American torturers or those who authorized their conduct.
Cheney left behind the legacy of torture as national policy.
The latest example erupted last week, when the CIA's inspector general confirmed that the agency had hacked into Senate Intelligence Committee computers and read emails sent by staffers. The investigation came after Sen. Dianne Feinstein revealed the surreptitious search, charging that the CIA had violated federal law and the Constitution.
CIA spying on the Senate is the constitutional equivalent of the Watergate break-in. In both cases, the executive branch attacked the very foundations of our system of checks and balances.
President Obama is not President Nixon. He hasn’t been implicated personally in organizing this constitutional assault. But he is wrong to support the limited response of his CIA director, John Brennan, who is trying to defer serious action by simply creating an “accountability panel” to consider “potential disciplinary measures” or “systemic issues.”
There's nothing like a former ally who's changed sides. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, once a spy agency loyalist on intelligence matters, has become a demanding critic who wants more disclosure of CIA torture practices.
Feinstein, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, was a quiet supporter of Washington's spy agencies for years. But that changed - at long last and for the public's good - when she learned the CIA was hacking into her committee's computers while Senate staffers drew up a long-awaited appraisal of the agency's treatment of suspected terrorists in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
So what diversion does Obama dangle as bait before his media in his last press conference before they vacation together? With his CIA caught snooping on Senators, he changes the topic to his favorite “Blame Bush” theme by leaking a CIA document on torture.
The US State Department is increasing security at some American embassies in anticipation of the public release of a long-awaited Senate report detailing the CIA's use of harsh interrogation techniques, US officials said on Wednesday.
“The bottom line is that the United States must never again make the mistakes documented in this report,” Feinstein said in a statement released Tuesday. “I believe the best way to accomplish that is to make public our thorough documentary history of the CIA’s program.”
[...]
In his own statement, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) echoed the committee and Feinstein, saying the CIA’s proposed redactionswere “totally unacceptable.”
The most transparent administration ever has managed to infuriate the left's top national security state defender, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), even further. The CIA already drew her ire in a way even libertarians can appreciate (and yet still laugh at) when they snooped on staffers from the Senate Intelligence Committee as they put together a massive report analyzing the CIA's use of torture under President George W. Bush. The CIA ended up apologizing to her, and now there are calls to dump CIA Director John Brennan after he initially scoffed at Feinstein's complaints.
Wow. Twelve years. The time has flown by. Seems like just yesterday that the Justice Department sent over its torture memos to then-CIA General Counsel John Rizzo, ramping up a CIA torture program that horribly abused more than a hundred men, killing a few of them. No one at the CIA was ever even charged with a crime. Some agents, in fact, got job promotions.
A retired major general in the US army, Antonio Taguba, says CIA officials are trying to undermine a report about the agency's interrogation programme. In a New York Times op-ed, he also says CIA officials have used extraordinary means to resist oversight of their activities.
On July 24, European Court for Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Poland has to pay 230,000 euros ($307,366) compensation to two individuals whose human rights had been violated. Guantanamo detainees Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn (also known as Abu Zubaydah), and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri won a case against Poland, which, according to the court, failed to prevent their detention and torture at the CIA-operated Stare Kiejkuty prison, and to prosecute those responsible for it.
Among members of the intelligence community, Brennan has “the closest relationship with the president,” said former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who spent eight years on the House Intelligence Committee and is now the director of the Wilson Center.
She used to just make baskets. Now she also makes history. Former Colorado State star Becky Hammon — soon to retire after 16 seasons in the WNBA — is hired by the San Antonio Spurs to be an assistant coach. Who would have guessed that this glass ceiling was about to shatter? Via the Coloradoan.
A new book, to be released September 2nd, discloses a previously unknown connection between Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, John F. Kennedy and the CIA. In fact, author Roger Stone, a former Nixon aide, asserts that Nixon “knew the CIA was involved in JFK’s assassination” and was so pesky in his attempts to get them to disclose all their records that the CIA contemplated the assassination of Nixon as well. The book, Nixon’s Secrets: The Rise, Fall, and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate, and the Pardon, demonstrates a definitely unfriendly relationship between himself and then CIA Director Richard Helms.
A U.S. program in Cuba that secretly used an HIV-prevention workshop for political activism was assailed Monday by international public health officials and members of Congress who declared that such clandestine efforts put health programs at risk around the world.
It was during this time, the early phases of the Obama administration, that the relationship between Washington and Havana appeared to be moving in an innovative direction, away from ideological tactics and Cold-War rhetoric towards progressive talks and cooperation. Sadly, however, this was not to be the case. Despite the odd and insignificant lessening of the embargo’s merciless restrictions on travel and remittances, the Obama administration has maintained a moribund status quo of Washington’s policy towards Cuba. This tragic fact was emphasized as recently as August 4, when yet another woeful tale of sandbox antics when the Associated Press revealed an additional United States Agency for International Development (USAID) program that was tasked with subverting Cuban sovereignty.
Another cockamamie USAID plot revealed
US legislators and health activists criticized the US plans to use an HIV-Aids campaign in Cuba to carry out political activism by saying that such covert operations put US health programs at risk in all parts of the world.
The program, which was financed and supervised by the US Agency (USAID) for International Development including the sending of a dozen Latin American youngsters to Cuba to recruit leaders and encourage a rebellion on the island.
The Associated Press gratuitously blew a CIA democracy-sowing operation in Cuba, supposedly to make us so outraged that the CIA would encourage regime change in a socialist paradise. Just whom was AP serving?
No, it wasn't one of the agency's famous Keystone Kop capers to unseat the ruling Castro brothers. There were no exploding cigars, no revved up Cuban exiles, no weapon shipments, no cloaks, no daggers.
Did Obama, Clinton, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which oversaw the operation, learn nothing from the 1960s, when the Kennedy and Johnson administrations tried repeatedly to overthrow Cuban ruler Fidel Castro and even to assassinate him?
In the 1980s the Sandinistas accused the CIA of trying to assassinate him with a bottle of poisoned Benedictine liqueur. Fr D’Escoto once referred to former US president Ronald Reagan as “the butcher of my people” and only last year told US president Barack Obama in a letter that the US was “hooked on wars of aggression” and “possessed by the demons of greed and domination”.
In the past year, over 50,000 refugee children have fled from Central American countries and crossed the U.S. border. While many have been released to their families and other caregivers, thousands remain locked up in mass detention centers. Much of the media coverage carries the familiar anti-immigrant slant, blaming the parents and even the children for imagining the U.S. to have pro-immigration policies. This tendency to blame immigrants parallels the longstanding trend of blaming formerly colonized countries for internal violence, and it omits the role of U.S. and European colonialism and imperialism in originating it. It erases the history of Central America and it distorts the nature of mass migration.
As in Venezuela in 2002, when Hugo Chávez was briefly detained during a failed coup, tens of thousands took to the streets to support the president. A section of the “democratic” opposition offered its conditional support. Another, led by Cléver Jiménez, head of Pachakutik Plurinational Unity Movement — the political wing of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie) — called (unsuccessfully) on indigenous and social movements to form a “national front” to demand Correa’s resignation.
There is an interesting copyright case going on at Wikipedia. A photographer named David Slater who went to Indonesia to shoot jungle there. Unfortunately one of his cameras was temporarily stolen by a female Macaque and ended up taking a lot of selfies.
With help from Hollywood, City of London Police have arrested the alleged operator of Immunicity and a range of torrent site proxies. The 20-year-old man was questioned at a local police station, and pending further investigation was released on bail.