Unlike most other desktop and server operating systems, Linux comes in a wide variety of flavors, each based on a common core of the Linux kernel and various GNU user space utilities. If you're running Linux servers -- or Linux desktops, for that matter -- you should understand the important differences and be discerning about which flavor of Linux is best suited to any given situation. This article will help you do just that.
Business and free software have been intertwined for years, but the two often misunderstand one another. That's not surprising -- what is just a business to one is way of life for the other. But the misunderstanding can be painful, which is why debunking it is a worth the effort.
An increasingly common case in point: the growing attempts at open hardware, whether from Canonical, Jolla, MakePlayLive, or any of half a dozen others. Whether pundit or end-user, the average free software user reacts with exaggerated enthusiasm when a new piece of hardware is announced, then retreats into disillusionment as delay follows delay, often ending in the cancellation of the entire product.
It's a cycle that does no one any good, and often breeds distrust – and all because the average Linux user has no idea what's happening behind the news.
My own experience with bringing products to market is long behind me. However, nothing I have heard suggests that anything has changed. Bringing open hardware or any other product to market remains not just a brutal business, but one heavily stacked against newcomers.
OEMs should be switching to GNU/Linux to pump up margins. If “the market isn’t there”, they need to do some advertising and hire salesmen and programmers. Samsung did that with smart thingies. Why not with legacy PCs and GNU/Linux? No. This market has been ruined by M$. The world is finally rejecting M$’s offerings and OEMs lack the courage to go their own way. Abandoning the market is not a sound business-plan. There is still a need for desktop IT. There’s no need to accept M$’s taxation.
Matthew was pessimistic about the prospects of ACPI for ARM. Matthew explained that now Linux (Android) is the dominant platform on ARM rather than Microsoft Windows, we could run into problems, "Software development is hard, and firmware development is software development with worse compilers. Firmware is inevitably going to rely on undefined behaviour. It's going to make assumptions about ordering. It's going to mishandle some cases. And it's the operating system's job to handle that. On x86 we know that systems are tested against Windows, and so we simply implement that behaviour. On ARM, we don't have that convenient reference. We are the reference. And that means that systems will end up accidentally depending on Linux-specific behaviour. Which means that if we ever change that behaviour, those systems will break. So far we've resisted calls for Linux to provide a contract to the firmware in the way that Windows does, simply because there's been no need to - we can just implement the same contract as Windows. How are we going to manage this on ARM? The worst case scenario is that a system is tested against, say, Linux 3.19 and works fine. We make a change in 3.21 that breaks this system, but nobody notices at the time. Another system is tested against 3.21 and works fine. A few months later somebody finally notices that 3.21 broke their system and the change gets reverted, but oh no! Reverting it breaks the other system. What do we do now? The systems aren't telling us which behaviour they expect, so we're left with the prospect of adding machine-specific quirks. This isn't scalable."
While Kris does dance around one of everybody’s favorite topics (systemd) he specifically avoids turning the post into yet another rant about systemd. His main point: identifying that there is a gap in communication between OS developers and users. It may be lack of empathy, lack of feedback loop, etc. And Kris specifically points out that this is a starting point for discussing how to fix that gap.
With Weston 1.6 release the libinput library is now used by default for handling input. Linux input expert Peter Hutterer at Red Hat has written a lengthy blog post to explain the need for libinput and how it's improving device input on Linux.
Last November, Jonas Ãâ¦dahl sent an RFC to the wayland-devel list about a common library to handle input devices in Wayland compositors called libinput. Fast-forward and we are now at libinput 0.6, with a broad support of devices and features. In this post I'll give an overview on libinput and why it is necessary in the first place. Unsuprisingly I'll be focusing on Linux, for other systems please mentally add the required asterisks, footnotes and handwaving.
Mesa 10.3 is in the process of making its way to Ubuntu 14.10.
Maarten Lankhorst of Canonical has pushed Mesa 10.3.0 into the utopic-proposed archive after merging the updated Mesa packages from debian-experimental. Confirmation of Mesa 10.3 coming for Ubuntu 14.10 can be found via this change message.
The X.Org Foundation has released a new version of its X.Org server, bringing many news fixes and changes to the table. According to the official release note published on Sep 21 02:21:08 PDT 2014, a single fix has been implemented in xorg-server 1.16.1 in order to to address an issue when building Xwayland from the tarball.
Yesterday I shared my initial Counter-Strike: Global Offensive benchmarks on Linux while following that have been others using the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org to deliver their own results for this latest Valve game to reach Linux.
With the Linux 3.17 kernel due out soon, here's our routine file-system benchmarks we do each kernel cycle to see how the popular Linux file-systems have evolved between kernel releases.
FFmpeg, a complete solution to record, convert, and stream audio and video, has advanced to version 2.4.1 and is ready for download.
If you watch foreign movies regularly, chances are you prefer having subtitles rather than the dub. Grown up in France, I know that most Disney movies during my childhood sounded weird because of the French dub. If now I have the chance to be able to watch them in their original version, I know that for a lot of people subtitles are still required. And I surprise myself sometimes making subtitles for my family. Hopefully for me, Linux is not devoid of fancy and open source subtitle editors. In short, this is the non-exhaustive list of open source subtitle editors for Linux. Share your opinion on what you think of the best subtitle editor.
Several computer algebra systems are available to Linux users. I even have looked at a few of them in this column, but for this issue, I discuss OpenAxiom. OpenAxiom actually is a fork of Axiom. Axiom originally was developed at IBM under the name ScratchPad. Development started in 1971, so Axiom is as old as I am, and almost as smart.
Good news for the Counter Strike: Global Offensive fans, as the popular game makes its way to Linux operating system. The game’s Linux port was confirmed through SteamDB which added the growing operating system on the list of supported systems.
Valve has just updated the SteamOS Beta branch of their operating system and they made a number of modifications that should be very interesting.
Some of you may be wondering what happened to the Linux release of the new Gauntlet game, well we have the answer for you.
Following the launch of the launch of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on Linux and approaching the one year anniversary of the Steam Machines announcement (so much happens during Oktoberfest season...) is Valve rolling out a new Steam storefront.
DG2: Defense Grid 2, the sequel to one of the best tower defense games ever made, has been released on Linux, but with a small caveat.
The latest and greatest in tower defence is now available on Linux with DG2: Defense Grid 2. The Linux version isn't finished, but you can still play it.
Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active 2.8.6 have just been released. This is last recommended update brings over 60 improvements to the 2.8 series of the applications and underlying development frameworks.
The Freeze is only one month away!
So, we generally want to analyze effects of icon design on the overall performance of an icon set. Statistics on this issue can obviously only be done after all icon sets have been tested. But with every test, we win some specific insights in strengths and weaknesses of each icon set tested.
Since nobody else has done the honors yet, I'm happy to announce that - as decided at the Qt Contributors Summit this year - support for running applications under a Wayland compositor will be seeing its initial release with Qt 5.4. That is, the QtWayland repository is finally going to stop sitting in the corner, sulking. :)
Qt is a popular open source framework that can run on multiple operating systems. However, till date there was no update on the future of Qt on Wayland. Users of popular Qt applications like qBittorrent should be overwhelmed to know that developer Robin Burchell announced the support for running applications under a Wayland compositor will be seeing its initial release with Qt 5.4. The decision has been taken at the Qt Contributors Summit, 2014. With this, the QtWayland repository is finally about to see the daylight.
As talked about with this morning's GTK+ 3.14 release is now multi-touch support and a gesture framework for this week's GNOME 3.14 debut. While there's still improvements to be made, it looks like the gestures support for the GNOME Shell is turning out well for the 3.14 version.
We have been working hard over the past 6 months to make GNOME Software even better compared to the previous 3.12 release. Here’s a quick status update what the new 3.14 release brings.
GNOME 3.14, the latest version of GNOME 3, has been released. Announcing the new version, Matthias Clasen said: “This is another exciting release for GNOME, and brings many new features and improvements.”
The new release is the result of six months’ work by the GNOME project, and includes 28,859 changes by 871 contributors.
GNOME 3.14 has been officially released today as the latest major advancement to the GNOME Shell driven desktop environment.
Cinnamon 2.4, which is still under works and will be most likely used by default on Linux Mint 17.1, has been updated yet again, receiving a “Background slideshows” feature, a feature that is not present on many desktop environments so far.
Manjaro Linux 0.8.10 Ascella Openbox Edition is the latest version of manjaro linux distribution with OpenBox desktop environment. Manjaro Linux is a fast, user-friendly, desktop-oriented operating system based on Arch Linux.
The Live version of Salix, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast, easy to use, and based on the Xfce desktop environment, has finally reached version 14.1 Beta 1.
India has made history today by being the first and only country in the world to send a space craft to Mars in first attempt. The country also made history as it achieved it in a budget lesser than the un-scientific Hollywood block buster Gravity; India spent only $71 million on the mission.
This past week, Red Hat released RHEL 5.11 which is the final minor milestone release for RHEL 5.X. RHEL now enters what Red Hat calls it production 3 support which will last for another three years. During the production three phase no new functionality is added to the platform and Red Hat will only provide critical impact security fixes and urgent priority bug fixes.
Red Hat has a lot to be proud of as one of the few publicly traded companies that made open source software a way of life from the outset.
Now a blog post by Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst flaunts the company's ambitions to rule the enterprise cloud world, as the company finds itself "in the midst of a major shift from client-server to cloud-mobile."
The alpha version of what will become Fedora 21 Workstation, which is scheduled for release before the end of this year (tentatively December 2 2014), was made available for download and testing yesterday.
The DNF next-generation package manager is installed by default on Fedora 21 but it doesn't yet replace Yum. Yum is still present on the system and used as the default package manager. However, with the upcoming Fedora 22 release is where DNF is set to replace Yum. The version found right now on Fedora 21 is DNF 0.6.1 with RPM 4.12.
It’s just a fancy term; I learned it from reading Jakob Nielsen‘s writings. It’s a simple process of walking through a user interface (or product, or whatever,) and comparing how it works to a set of general principles of good design, AKA ‘heuristics.’
Long story short, in the case mentioned above, the SiS driver works much better than the generic xf86-video-vesa and xf86-video-fbdev generic drivers and now this user running their aging system on the latest Fedora Linux development code is left without the dedicated DDX. In that case, the user discovered that Mageia's SiS DDX driver that's packaged happens to be ABI compatible with the Fedora X Server (at least temporarily), so he's back to using his preferred driver without burdening the Fedora developers in supporting an out-of-date, open-source GPU driver.
As usual, it is not recommended to install Alpha-level software on a production machine; you may want to try it in a virtual machine to experience the new features. Personally, I am fairly confident in the release, so I will commit to running it on a dedicated SSD. Why? Well, we Fedora 20 users have been stuck on GNOME 3.10 for a year now and I am extremely eager to use a more recent version of the desktop environment.
Today in Linux news, Debian has reportedly changed their default desktop again, this time back to GNOME. Fedora 21 Alpha made to release and Phoronix posted their first impressions. Jessie Smith reviews SymphonyOS 14.1 and Scott Nesbitt discusses scanning tools. And finally today, Softpedia covers new Plasma 5 update and Qt 5.4 will be the first to feature Wayland support.
Fedora 21 Workstation is expected to have GNOME 3.14, which is due to be released in late September and which includes many new features like integration of Picasaweb and DNLA media server support in GNOME Photos and more. For developers, Fedora 21 also includes the new DevAssistant tool by default. DevAssistant helps developers set up environments for their projects, so they can concentrate on writing code.
I know there are a ton of posts about Fedora 21 Alpha hitting the Fedora Planet, and hopefully elsewhere on the web. But I couldn’t resist saying congratulations to the Fedora community on getting this release out.
Dennis Gilmore announced the release of Fedora 21 Alpha, the first step of Fedora.Next that's been troubled by multiple development delays and now won't be officially launching until December -- one year after the Fedora 20 debut. Fortunately, at least, there's a lot to make up for the delays. Fedora 21 features countless updated packages, improvements to the different Fedora roles, and much more. Over the night I wrote more at length about the Fedora 21 features.
While Fedora 21 is being dragged out agonizingly long for day-to-day Fedora users, the alpha release is out today and it's great and comes with many new features. Having not run Fedora Rawhide in several weeks now as the latest development code, Fedora 21 is turning out fairly nicely and with my early morning tests thus far the Fedora 21 Alpha release is stable and running quite nicely.
Developers from the Debian project have been trying to decide for quite a while whether to implement Xfce, GNOME, or a few other DEs by default, and it looks like GNOME has won, at least for the time being.
Debian 8 or the testing is the next Debian release. The devs and maintainers have agreed to pull in the latest chages from GNOME 3.14 upstream branch. The process might be time cosuming but it will be completed duly. As a matter of fact, some packages have already been updated to version 3.14 as the status page of GNOME 3.14 in Debian shows.
Debian switched to Xfce as the default desktop environment back in November 2013. But that didn't last long because a few days ago, Debian restored GNOME as the default desktop, based on preliminary results from the Debian Desktop Requalification for Jessie.
Canonical has joined hands with Oracle to offer support to customers using Ubuntu and Oracle Linux as fully supported guests on one another’s respective OpenStack offerings.
As you may know, the final version of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn is scheduled for release on the 23rd of October, 2014, and will be using Kernel 3.16 as default, the same kernel as Debian 8 Jessie and Fedora 21.
While Red Hat is trumpeting that it wants to be the "undisputed" OpenStack market leader, its rivals Canonical and Oracle have teamed up to ensure that each's Linux distro plays well with the other's OpenStack implementation, even though they also compete.
The Google Nexus 6, aka Nexus X, is heading for an official launch soon and one of its highlights that it will release running Android L, the new version of the mobile operating system. Being able to use a smartphone running pure vanilla Android is really appealing to many people, but some may prefer the Nexus 6 on Ubuntu rather than Android L.
There has been plenty of speculation over the last few months about the Nexus 6. So far even the name hasn’t been confirmed, and there have been recent rumors that it may be titled the Nexus X. One thing that’s a given though is that it will run the Android L update, which is currently with developers and also hasn’t had its final name confirmed.
The Cinnamon development work is done by the same people who also make Linux Mint, so all the changes and improvements that are made for the desktop environment quickly land in the latest edition of that distribution.
For those with a Raspberry Pi, the emerging open-source 3D-supported Linux graphics driver stack continues to evolve.
Finland’s Jolla Takes Its Sailfish-Powered Smartphone To India, Via Snapdeal.
Jolla, the Finnish smartphone startup that used the MeeGo open source OS as a jumping off point for its own Android-app compatible Sailfish OS — and which last November released its first Sailfish-powered handset in its home market — has now expanded availability of the phone to India.
Jolla’s handset is priced at Rs. 16,499 in India (around $270), and is selling exclusively via local ecommerce giant Snapdeal.
Pienimaki said Jolla wants to work with app developers as well in India and was exploring more business models for device vendor tie-ups. "We want device manufactures and Internet companies to hop on board to bring differential products and services to the market," he said. The company plans to offer its opensource Sailfish OS for free to device manufacturers, hoping to monetise the OS through deeper integration of services.
Samsung's Gear S smartwatch will hit US shores sometime this fall. According to a succinct press release, the device will be available through AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless. Android Central reports receiving an email from T-Mobile that states the Gear S will be available through the company's Equipment Installment Plan, with more details to follow in October.
If you think the upcoming Android "L" release will do everything to secure your mobile device, think again. Jack Wallen reminds users that, ultimately, mobile security is in their hands.
SILENT CIRCLE has announced a bug bounty programme for its Blackphone venture designed to find security flaws in the "surveillance-proof" smartphone.
Blackphone is a joint venture of Silent Circle and Geeksphone, known as SGP Technologies. Running a secure PrivatOS operating system, it is what the companies call "a truly surveillance-proof smartphone" in the wake of the past year's NSA revelations.
A hacker working independently appears to have topped Google's own efforts to extend compatibility between its Chrome OS and Android. Google last week unveiled four Android apps for Chromebooks based on its ARC API. Vlad Filippov, aka "Vladikoff," went Google several giant steps better, publishing a runtime dubbed "ARChon" that allows users to run any number of Android APKs in the Chrome OS.
For Apple, the launch of iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus is a big deal. Literally. The iPhones were starting to look tiny in front of flagship Android phones. But with the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus, which have bigger screens, Apple is back in the game.
On the software side, with the iOS 8, which is the latest version of the software that powers iPhones and iPads, Apple has tried to close the feature gap with Android.
While the default dialer and contacts apps are good, they miss out on many important features like social media integration, T9 search, and gesture-based dialing. Thanks to the freedom that Android offers, you won't have to put up with the default apps for long.
Google is finally making a move that has long been discussed among Chrome OS users: It's bringing Android apps to Chrome OS, opening the Chrome OS desktop up to a huge library of apps written for Android. Some observers are even predicting that Google could merge Android and Chrome OS in the future, although that move is unlikely for various reasons.
Inforce Computing unveiled an Android-ready Pico-ITX “IFC6540ââ¬Â³ SBC that extends Qualcomm’s quad-core 2.5GHz Snapdragon 805 SoC with wireless, GPS, and more.
Like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 (S4 Pro) based, Android-ready IFC6410 SBC that Inforce Computing announced last year, the new IPC6540 uses the 100 x 70mm Pico-ITX form factor. (This week Inforce added a Linaro/Ubuntu Linux build pre-loaded on the IFC6410, sold at a discounted rate of $75, down from $149.)
Bringing Android apps to Chrome OS pushes the two platforms closer together. This sets the stage for Google to merge them completely down the road to have one OS for both mobile and desktop. This is similar to what Microsoft has done with Windows 8, but Google has the advantage of doing it with two existing solid bases that already run well on mobile devices.
Huawei and their smartphone business have not exactly garnered good press in the past – especially when there were allegations of Huawei churning out spyphones for the China government, which the company vehemently denied. Subsequently, it is said that Huawei themselves decided to pull out from the U.S. market, where we then learned that the tables were turned afterwards with the NSA being accused of spying on Huawei instead. Having said that, it seems as though officials over in China will have a spanking new smartphone soon – and it will not hail from the likes of Samsung, LG, HTC or other big name players, but from Huawei themselves.
Authorities in Shanghai have banned the use of all foreign smartphones, including Apple's popular iPhone, by government officials, according to a report from the People's Republic of China (PRC).
As of today there's now mainline Coreboot support for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) thanks to work originally done by Google.
The UK economy is growing at its fastest rate since 2007, according to the Office of National Statistics, and the financial services sector is playing a major role in supporting this recovery. Renewed confidence in the City is driving up demand for effective IT. However, mirroring austerity measures put in place to help get national economies back on track, most (if not all) banks these days have cost reduction programmes in place.
The United Nations International Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has launched RapidPro, an open-source platform of apps that can help governments to quickly deliver important information in real time. It can also be used to connect communities to lifesaving services.
The open source software community is nothing if not prolific, and exciting new projects arrive on the scene practically every day. Keeping up with it all can be a formidable challenge; on the other hand, failing to do so could mean you miss out on something great.
Nowhere is that more true than in enterprises, where upstart new contenders can change the way business is done almost overnight. Take Docker, for example. Though it only just launched last year, the container technology tool has taken the enterprise world by storm, becoming a fundamental part of the way many businesses work.
The schedule for the upcoming Tizen Developer Summit Shanghai 2014 has been released. Reminder: If you want to attend than the early bird registration ends on 30th September, so get registering now (links at the bottom of the page).
We plan to add a security warning to the Web Console to remind developers that they should not be using a SHA-1 based certificate. We will display an additional, more prominent warning if the certificate will be valid after January 1, 2017, since we will reject that certificate after that date. We plan to implement these warnings in the next few weeks, so they should be appearing in released versions of Firefox in early 2015. We may implement additional UI indicators later. For instance, after January 1, 2016, we plan to show the “Untrusted Connection” error whenever a newly issued SHA-1 certificate is encountered in Firefox. After January 1, 2017, we plan to show the “Untrusted Connection” error whenever a SHA-1 certificate is encountered in Firefox.
Yet another certification program for Big Data and the cloud has entered the fray. But this one, offered by Databricks and O'Reilly Media, is the first for developers working with Apache Spark, the open source Big Data processing engine.
OpenStack is on a six-month release cycle, with each release given a code name starting with consecutive letters of the alphabet. On October 16th, OpenStack Juno will be released, with several new projects, and lots of new features. Here's a few of the things you can expect in the next release of OpenStack. This isn't intended to be comprehensive—just a taste of some of the things that are coming.
Consolidation is a natural part of any industry’s maturation, especially a segment as fiercely competitive as the database space, which has witnessed a massive influx of new players in recent years each vying for their own slice of the market. The resulting overlap in products and capabilities is starting to claim its first victims.
The public administrations of the Italian cities Todi and Terni are switching to LibreOffice, announces LibreUmbria. The regional project is assisting the Umbria region's public administrations to use this free software suite of office productivity tools.
If you need to be anonymous online, or evade digital censorship and surveillance, the Tor network has your back. And it's more than a little bit stronger now than it was this spring, thanks to the Tor Challenge.
Tor is a publicly accessible, free software-based system for anonymizing Internet traffic. It relies on thousands of computers around the world called relays, which route traffic in tricky ways to dodge spying. The more relays, the stronger and faster the network.
We'd like to warmly thank our allies at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for organizing the Tor Challenge and inviting us to join them in promoting it. And most of all, thanks to the 1,635 of you who started a relay! (The FSF would have started one too, but we've already been running ours for a while.)
MediaGoblin 0.7.1 has been released! This is a bugfix release building on MediaGoblin 0.7.0.
On the project page for RCS on savannah, the intro blurb now has a proper link to CVS, as well as a link to the tip jar page.
The Grantlee community is pleased to announce the release of Grantlee version 5.0 (Mirror). Grantlee contains an implementation of the Django template system in Qt.
The UK public sector today faces its greatest challenges for a generation. A unique combination of severe budget constraint, growing demand, innovation in technology and the mainstream adoption of online channels is speeding up an urgent drive for channel shift.
But rather than pushing for a bill at the state Legislature, this year the Minnesota Student Association is focusing its open-source efforts on winning over faculty members one by one.
Almost a month after releasing RC4, the Darkcoin team is back again with its much-awaited client upgrade, Release Candidate 5.
As assured by the project’s core developer Evan Duffield, this new client easily fixes the concerns raised in security review, published earlier by renowned security expert Kristov Atlas. This includes the improvisation of Darksend’s anonymity effectiveness. Other fixes that has been implemented in RC5 is: Enforcement of masternode payments; improved Darksend speed; and Added Darksend overview screen so users can see what’s happening.
Open data can play a crucial role in helping us navigate such mazes. In the world of business, the key store of open information is OpenCorporates, which I've written about several times. But OpenCorporates is just the start; what's really exciting is the way that people are starting to use its growing resources to investigate companies and their industries. A particularly good example of this is a project called OpenOil
Once you fall down the genealogical rabbit hole, it's hard to find your way back out. My journey began with my grandfather, a polio survivor confined to a wheelchair who took to computers in his later years. One of his passions was researching his ancestors, and the tool he used to collect his findings was Brøderbund's Family Tree Maker. I was fascinated by the charts and tables that he'd print out on his bubble jet printer, but I didn't have the patience for all the data entry.
The European Commission in July unveiled the Cohesion Policy Data platform - offering information and open data on the performance of EU Cohesion Policy. The policy determines one-third of the total EU budget: each year the EU invests about 50 billion euro in economic development at the national and regional level. The new open data platform shows how the funding is distributed between countries, by categories of regions, and with details on the different funds and policy objectives.
Wanna be a programmer? That shouldn’t be too hard. You can sign-up for an iterative online tutorial at a site like Codecademy or Treehouse. You can check yourself into a “coding bootcamp” for a face-to-face crash course in the ways of programming. Or you could do the old fashioned thing: buy a book or take a class at your local community college.
One of the latest programming languages out there is now CLike, a language inspired by the C programming language but with an extensible syntax and typed macros support.
Newcomers to python-ideas occasionally make reference to the idea of "Python 4000" when proposing backwards incompatible changes that don't offer a clear migration path from currently legal Python 3 code. After all, we allowed that kind of change for Python 3.0, so why wouldn't we allow it for Python 4.0?
I've heard that question enough times now (including the more concerned phrasing "You made a big backwards compatibility break once, how do I know you won't do it again?"), that I figured I'd record my answer here, so I'd be able to refer people back to it in the future.
When you cut the knees out from under a complex society, as Edward Snowden and the NSA have done to the internet over the past year or so, the effects ripple outward unpredictably. Right away, there was a rush on cryptography software, which immediately threatened the online status quo; privacy software might just as accurately be called “anti-analytics” or “anti-big-data” software, and your details and behavioral data (tracking cookies) are the lifeblood of the online economy. That looming problem can only get so big while encryption solutions remain clunky and intimidating to newbies — but pressure is mounting for more aggressive, far-reaching protection of online traffic. In particular, large email providers are looking forward to a future in which they must try to protect a user’s inbox while encryption prevents them from knowing virtually anything about it. By using encryption to protect ourselves from Google, hackers, and the NSA, we could be making ourselves vulnerable to spam.
The four freedoms are only meaningful if they result in real-world benefits to the entire population, not a privileged minority. If your approach to releasing free software is merely to ensure that it has an approved license and throw it over the wall, you're doing it wrong. We need to design software from the ground up in such a way that those freedoms provide immediate and real benefits to our users. Anything else is a failure.
Bash or the Bourne again shell, is a UNIX like shell, which is perhaps one of the most installed utilities on any Linux system. From its creation in 1980, bash has evolved from a simple terminal based command interpreter to many other fancy uses.
If bombing a country really made it better, we would have made a paradise of Iraq by now. Instead it is a total disaster, with access to electricity, drinking water, education and health services all far worse than they were before we started bombing it. That is even without the growth of the Caliphate, or ISIS, a direct result first of our deposing Saddam and conniving in the intolerant Shia rule of Maliki, and then of our connivance in arming and funding anyone willing to fight Assad.
The U.S. today began bombing targets inside Syria, in concert with its lovely and inspiring group of five allied regimes: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Jordan.
That means that Syria becomes the 7th predominantly Muslim country bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama—after Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Iraq.
“A decade of war is now ending,” Barack Obama proclaimed from the steps of the Capitol in the first minutes of his presidency. “We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.”
It does make one wonder: What would an enthusiastic warrior look like to the corporate media? Would bombing eight countries in six years be enough?
The Syrian foreign ministry said Tuesday that Washington informed Damascus’ envoy to the United Nations before launching airstrikes against the Islamic State group in Syria, attacks that activists said inflicted casualties among jihadi fighters and civilians on the ground.
America and its Arab allies launched a devastating blitz on Islamic State strongholds in Syria yesterday as Britain was poised to join in.
American jets hit targets in Syria on Tuesday in the US-led fight against Islamic State. Although the US has not declared war since 1942, this is the seventh country that Barack Obama, the holder of the Nobel Peace Prize, has bombed in as many years.
Okay, now the anti-war president is at war. This makes sense. Sure it does. Remember in 1964 when LBJ’s campaign included this nugget: “We are not about to send American boys nine- or 10-thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves?” Then Nixon got elected in ’68 with a secret plan to end the Vietnam War and escalated it to horrifically criminal heights by bombing peaceful, sovereign nations “back to the stone age.” Oh, and remember when George W. Bush spoke in the late-summer of 2000 of a “humble foreign policy?” They can’t help it. I
The US began airstrikes in Syria today, fulfilling president Barack Obama’s vow to “degrade and destroy” the extremist group that calls itself the Islamic State. The Pentagon said it deployed bombers, fighters, armed drones, and cruise missiles against IS forces in the group’s de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria and along the Iraq border. Military aircraft from Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates took part in the strikes, US officials told the New York Times.
The US and five Arab allies have launched the first strikes against Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria.
The Pentagon said warplanes, drones and Tomahawk missiles were used to targeted several areas including IS stronghold Raqqa. At least 70 IS militants were killed, Syrian activists say.
These drones kill more civilians than the United States wants to make out.
At least 10 militants were killed today in a US drone attack in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region, officials said.
[...]
The identity of those killed was not known immediately.
U.S. drones Wednesday fired missiles at a compound and vehicle and killed at least eight militants in a restive Pakistani tribal area bordering Afghanistan, officials said.
Sri Lanka has condemned the use of drones by certain countries for combating terrorism and said it violates the international humanitarian law.
The Sri Lankan delegation at the UN Human Rights Council has said the use of remotely piloted aircraft or armed drones result in killing of civilians and the matter should be "promptly investigated".
Drones can perform a critical intelligence role by staying the air a long time and providing a good overview but without a pilot on board they have a limited ability to distinguish between combatants and civilians and quickly make sense out of confusing situations on the ground.
A drone similar those used by the United States to track down and attack suspected al Qaeda militants in Yemen crashed in the southern part of the country on Tuesday, witnesses and a local official said.
An aircraft believed to be a U.S. unmanned aerial drone crashed Tuesday in Yemen’s southern Shabwah province, eyewitnesses have said.
To illustrate this disturbing fact, Israel just wrapped up its annual drone conference during which it showcased drones that had just successfully been deployed during the devastating Operation Protective Edge in Gaza where 2,100 Palestinians were killed.
US President Barack Obama says air strikes unleashed against the Islamic State group in Syria send a clear message the world is united in confronting them.
ISIS may think they have a monopoly over the truth, but all they’ve shown is their own arrogance as they bask in their fantasy caliphate. Their stupidity and arrogance means they will destroy themselves. But recent history suggests that the current bombing campaign in civilian areas risks radicalising a new generation of already marginalised young men.
It was no surprise when the Obama Administration began attacking ISIS targets in Syria last night. What was surprising was that the US also attacked a group known as Khorasan, then hyped what a huge, “imminent” threat they supposedly are.
As you've probably heard, the US-led Coalition of the Willing to Be Seen Putting the Hurt on the Islamic State just made an overnight delivery of live ordinance to Islamic State targets throughout Syria, and they really blew the heck out of some stuff. Meanwhile, the White House and Pentagon have taken the field in the battle for public opinion armed with briefings, statements, videos, pictures, calls, and other weapons of mass communication.
The British government has been warned it may face legal action if it fails to consult Parliament and the public on the redeployment of drones outside declared war zones.
The United States has launched airstrikes in Syria targeting the Islamic State, as well as members of a separate militant organization known as the Khorasan group. The Pentagon says U.S. forces launched 47 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles from warships in the Red Sea and North Arabian Gulf. In addition, U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps fighters, bombers and drones took part in the airstrikes. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 20 Islamic State fighters were killed in strikes that hit at least 50 targets in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces in Syria’s east. The United States says Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had either participated or supported the strikes against the Islamic State, which has seized swaths of Syria and Iraq. The United States acted alone against the Khorasan group, saying it "took action to disrupt the imminent attack plotting against the United States and Western interests." The Syrian government claims the United States had informed it of the pending attacks hours before the strikes began. Meanwhile, the United States has expanded its bombing of Iraq, launching new strikes around Kirkuk. To discuss this development, we are joined by two guests: Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Trinity College who has written extensively about the Islamic State, and Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the peace group CodePink and author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.
The United States and several of its Gulf Arab allies launched at least 50 air and missile strikes on Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) strongholds in Syria on Tuesday, opening a new, far more complicated front in the battle against the militants, as well as marking the start of a new chapter in the ongoing US-proclaimed global “war on terror.”
Eight civilians, three of them children, have been killed in the US-led air strikes on Al-Qaeda Nusra front positions, Reuters reported, citing Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
I’m all in favor of doing something about ISIS, but as the bombs fall over Syria, may I ask: How many unilateral bombing campaigns does a left-wing President get to launch before the Nobel committee has to consider taking his Peace Prize away?
The Syrian government acknowledged that the US gave fair warning it would bomb Raqqah to the Syrian ambassador to the UN. That is, the US may not militarily be coordinating with Syria, but it does inform the regime of enough information to avoid a shoot-down.
Not only ISIL positions but also some targets of the Jabhat al-Nusra or Succor Front (the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria) were struck by the US and its allies. Once you enter a war, it doesn’t stay limited.
The US deployed not only fighter jets but also drone strikes and Tomahawk missiles, presumably fired from a destroyer from the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. It targeted suspected arms depots, the mayor’s mansion (used by ISIL as its HQ in Raqqah), and checkpoints, among other things. Dozens of ISIL fighters were said to be killed and more wounded.
I remember the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and how, for a moment, I was seduced by the notion that we needed to re-run World War 2, ousting Saddam, the new Hitler.
I remember the generals and their briefings that told us that the precision weapons used in airstrikes protected civilians, and reading news reports that said otherwise.
I remember that Britain and America armed Saddam Hussein in the first place.
In the past year the United States has expanded its drone warfare campaign into Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Somalia, beyond the traditional Afghan-Pakistani battleground. The story of a young eastern Afghani man, Miya Jan, was widely reported throughout the western media last year. A United States drone strike changed his life forever: it killed his brother, his sister-in-law and their child.
A Brooklyn jury’s verdict holding a Jordanian bank liable for Hamas terrorist attacks, combined with a federal appeals court’s reinstatement of a similar lawsuit against National Westminster Bank, is ratting international banking as well as policymakers at the U.S. State Dept. In both cases U.S. courts rejected traditional deference to foreign laws and sovereign immunity and showed a willingness to apply American tort law to overseas terrorist attacks.
Qatar, a proven financier of Hamas, played a supporting role in the airstrikes.
Article One, Section Eight of the U.S. Constitution vests the power "to declare war" in the hands of Congress. But as the world now knows, President Barack Obama took it upon himself last night to launch an undeclared war against ISIS in Syria. Just like President George W. Bush before him, Obama believes his vast war powers as commander in chief trump whatever old-fashioned limitations the text of the Constitution happens to impose on the presidency.
This is not Obama's first undeclared war, of course. That would be his 2011 war in Libya, which he also launched after refusing to obtain congressional authorization as required by the Constitution. Nor is it Obama's only unilateral exercise of unprecedented executive power. That list of misdeeds is growing too long to summarize in a short blog post. As Obama himself bragged in January 2014, "I've got a pen and I've got a phone.... And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward."
US film director Oliver Stone said in an interview published Tuesday he admired Russian President Vladimir Putin and understood his actions in Crimea and Ukraine.
Not talking about the largest climate march in history (Action Alert, 9/22/14) left Chuck Todd with some time to fill up on NBC's Meet the Press. Some of it he spent explaining his theory that the 2014 midterms are really a battle between Chick-fil-A and Starbucks. (Republicans like the chicken franchise, apparently, whereas Democrats prefer the coffee chain.)
The Wall Street Journal sandwiched their coverage of the largest climate change march in history between commentaries that cast doubt on global warming and the need for action, fulfilling the newspaper's trend of pushing harmful rhetoric against international climate negotiations.
I suppose if you're in the economic class that sells a house for $4.5 million that you bought two years ago for $4 million, then, yes, there are a lot of interesting restaurants you can eat at in New York City. If you're not in that class, it might be easier to recognize that New York is also one of the most unequal and most segregated cities in the US.
The troubled supermarket giant, which yesterday (Monday), announced it had overstated its half-year profit guidance by €£250m, has been battling falling sales as discount chains such as Aldi and Lidl gain popularity.
To shoppers reading about Tesco’s €£250m black hole with their jaws to the floor, the most extraordinary thing about it could be this: none of Tesco’s suppliers are surprised.
For years we have been bullied and browbeaten by Tesco’s buyers, who demand a lowball price for our goods then keep screwing us for more as the contract goes on.
You see, with Tesco, after you’ve agreed a price for your product, often through a tender process if it’s own label, you never know how much extra they’re going to demand back from you further down the line. They say every little helps, but when it comes to its demands of suppliers, with Tesco it’s never little.
So, for example, did you know that Tesco will try to charge us for the shortfall in their profits if they drop the price of our products halfway through our contract period? Did you know that they will try to bill us for wastage if our goods are unsold and go off?
As Aldi and Lidl eat into Tesco’s market share, this has been a growing problem. But many suppliers are starting to say: “No. If you drop your prices halfway through our contract, that’s your problem, not ours. If you can’t get enough shoppers into your stores to buy our product, that’s out of our control too. Don’t try to bill us retrospectively because you can’t run your business properly.”
This weekend, while commentators yawped on about local democracy, and Ed Miliband vowed he’d close the chasm between the rich and the rest of us by a whole couple of centimetres, a bunch of young women in east London just got on and did it.
Just one day after Google announced it was cutting ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), fellow tech giant Facebook announced that they are "not likely" to renew their ALEC membership next year.
“We re-evaluate our memberships on an annual basis and are in that process now,” a Facebook representative wrote in a September 23 e-mail to the San Francisco Chronicle. “While we have tried to work within ALEC to bring that organization closer to our view on some key issues, it seems unlikely that we will make sufficient progress so we are not likely to renew our membership in 2015.”
Two Wisconsin Republicans who have copied-and-pasted model legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and passed the bills off as their own ideas are claiming that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke is not suited for office because her jobs plan contained language borrowed from other candidates.
Senators Alberta Darling and Leah Vukmir issued a statement on September 20 knocking Burke for lifting portions of her jobs plan from proposals by gubernatorial hopefuls in other states. Burke blamed the copy and paste job on a consultant, who had worked for those same candidates.
Beijing’s Internet censorship ‘overrides’ Web’s use in ‘commerce or scientific research.’
By now most of us have been made aware of the profound need for a Google self-appraisal. Whether you’re looking for a new job, a scholarship, or a big promotion—whether you’re seeking public office or just trying to get a date—what the Internet says about you matters, and Google is the most prominent and influential gatekeeper. An entire industry, christened “online reputation management,” sprang up a few years back to help people and businesses manage what Google says about them; as of right now, that industry seems to be dwindling, but interest in matters of online privacy does not.
Where are the "limits of surveillance"?
For internet activists debating that very subject it was when someone in the audience started live-streaming their discussion.
The panel did not look entirely comfortable with the young man's attempt to beam the "Stop Spying On Us" debate at Manchester's Anthony Burgess Museum to a worldwide audience.
The heated debate about America's massive electronic spying dragnet is mostly "muted" as foreign jihadists rush in to fight alongside Islamic State (ISIS) militants, Foreign Policy reports.
The extent of the National Security Agency's electronic snooping – first revealed in documents snatched from the NSA by ex-contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 – shocked the West.
That was then.
Today, legislation that would restrict the spy agency's reach – a version of which passed the House – is stuck in the Senate.
On September 19, 2014, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers followed up on comments he and Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss made last week concerning the prospects for cybersecurity information sharing legislation. Chambliss and Rogers have been sounding the alarm that cyber legislation is not likely to get done this year.
Last year, Edward Snowden made headlines around the world with news of the extent of the National Security Agency's surveillance programs. You might have thought that Congress would react by passing legislation to address the issue. But with Congress now on break until after the November elections, that's looking increasingly unlikely.
Politico's Tony Romm has an in-depth story examining what happened to the leading reform proposal, the USA Freedom Act. It passed the House in May, and a version sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was introduced in July. And then... nothing happened. The calendar ran out without Leahy's proposal getting a vote by the full Senate.
What the law would do is restrict the government's ability to spy on Americans, particularly by requiring the government to justify programs that collect details of the call or Internet use of all citizens under Section 215 of the Patriot Act and other parts of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Some say we need these programs to fight terror. Yet an assessment by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent government oversight body, found that there were no instances where the nationwide call-metadata program conducted under Section 215 prevented an act of terrorism.
Put another way: Our country has spent billions on programs under Section 215 that trample the rights of Americans, hamper journalists, and take resources away from more effective counterterrorism efforts – and we have nothing to show for it.
They say it started with a call from the NSA. In May 2013 Al Lankford, a schools security official, took a call from someone he said identified themselves as with the National Security Agency. They warned of a student who had posted tweets threatening violence against an assistant principal as well as two teachers.
A secret program to monitor students' online activities began quietly in Huntsville schools, following a phone call from the NSA, school officials say.
A Huntsville, Alabama, public school superintendent says that after taking a friendly call from the NSA, he decided to start secretly monitoring students' social media activities.
The school board had no idea what he was doing, and the NSA has denied that it would make a phone call concerning a domestic matter. But Superintendent Casey Wardynski says no, it was definitely the NSA who called.
Former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden has been awarded Sweden's Right Livelihood Honorary Award, often referred to as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize', for his work on press freedom, the award's foundation said on Wednesday.
Sweden's foreign ministry has banned a civil rights group from its premises after news leaked that this year's winner of the Swedish Right Livelihood Award would be whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Fugitive US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden and Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian newspaper, were named honorary co-winners on Wednesday of the 2014 Right Livelihood Award.
Award for whistleblower and Guardian editor recognises their work in exposing mass surveillance by the NSA and others
The Stockholm-based Right Livelihood Award Foundation on Wednesday praised Snowden, a former US intelligence agent, for "revealing the unprecedented extent of state surveillance."
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden will be awarded the Right Livelihood Award, a Swedish honor often called “the alternative Nobel Prize”, along with the editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, which published his revelations.
Following revelations that the American National Security Agency (NSA) spies on the German Government and had tapped Chancellor Merkel’s private phone, an Austrian journalist has alleged the NSA has a significant listening station in central Vienna, overlooking the United Nations complex there, reports The Local.
A series of photos of what is believed to be an NSA-operated listening post on top of a skyscraper in the Austrian capital of Vienna have been circulated by Austrian media Tuesday.
The IZD Tower building is situated next to the Vienna International Centre that hosts the United Nations Office at Vienna (UNOV), with media reports speculating the suspected listening hut atop the building, which at first glance appears to be a maintenance hut, is used to receive signals from bugs installed at the UN premises.
If this is what passes for national security or foreign policy, we're all in trouble.
[...]
Knowing all this does not give me confidence in my government, but it does tend to vindicate Snowden's actions. Maybe he did betray the government's trust, but the government has been betraying the people's trust to a far greater degree.
A massive, $7.2 billion Army intelligence contract signed just 10 days ago underscores the central role to be played by the National Security Agency and its army of private contractors in the unfolding air war being carried out by the United States and its Gulf States allies against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Governments around the world are increasingly demanding their citizens’ data, or rather the user data stored by companies such as Yahoo and Google. These demands have been justified under the veil of national security, tied to the NSA surveillance program brought to light in 2013 by Edward Snowden.
Yet, this poll tells only half the story. While Americans seem to have re-found fear of international Islamic terrorism — thus the willingness to allow the nation's security enterprise to protect them — there remains a disconnect about this feeling regarding domestic efforts to protect.
The recent events in Ferguson, Mo. have led to a nationwide dialogue about the "militarization" of police. Polls taken in the wake of police conflicts with protestors in the St. Louis suburb suggest that Americans do fear domestic law enforcement at levels not previously seen. A poll taken by YouGov/Huffington Post, for example, showed that only 28 percent of Americans believe that police use of military weapons is necessary, while 51 percent of respondents believe that police go "too far" in their use of those weapons.
The NSA peeks and pries into our lives in countless ways, violating our privacy and ignoring the Fourth Amendment. But a former NSA chief says one agency activity endangers Americans more than the rest: the routine sharing of warrantless data with state and local law enforcement.
In an interview earlier this month, William Binney called NSA information sharing “the most threatening situation to our constitutional republic since the Civil War.”
A Government Accountability Office comprehensive study released by the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee confirms that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is collecting financial data on up to 600 million consumer credit card accounts, without sufficient security and privacy protections to ensure there is no risk of improper collection, use, or release of consumer financial data.
Last week longtime local publisher Howard Owens, founder of the online news site the Batavian, launched a new publication covering Wyoming County in upstate New York. Buried in a parenthetical within his welcome message to readers was a fascinating promise: “We’ll also respect your privacy by not gathering personal data to distribute to multinational media conglomerates for so-called ‘targeted advertising.’”
This kind of explicit promise regarding reader privacy is increasingly important and all too rare.
Edward Snowden's leaks about the NSA haven't caused Islamic terrorists to hide communications behind encryption software, according to a report by Flashpoint Partners.
The report states that their groups are now using more secure means of communication, but attributed this not to the leaks about the NSA, but to the development of encrypted communications packages made by the terrorists themselves; going against the GCHQ claim that terrorists have increased security measures because of Snowden's information about the NSA.
Add New Zealand to the list of governments snooping on you. State surveillance has become a central issue in New Zealand’s national elections, following today’s revelation by the A-Team of whistleblowers who gave details surrounding the creation of a Kiwi mass surveillance operation code-named “Speargun.” Revelation of the secret program could lance prime minister John Key’s reelection bid next week.
This weekend, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key secured his third term in power after his center-right party won an increased majority in parliament. Key, a popular premier credited with steering the country through the global financial crisis, withstood the challenges of a slew of parties, including an eye-catching intervention by controversial Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, who beamed in via video link Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden at an Auckland event last week.
Last Friday, 43 veteran and reserve members of Israel's secretive spy organization, Unit 8200, claimed they'd been directed to spy on Palestinians for coercion purposes.
The group signed an open letter of protest to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to the head of the Israeli army, accusing the spy agency of targeting innocent Palestinians and collecting data for political purposes, not national security.
Historians of the Constitutional Era of the United States (1789-2001, RIP) will recall the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the one that used to protect Americans against unreasonable and unwarranted searches.
The Supreme Court had generally held that searches required a warrant. That warrant could be issued only after law enforcement showed they had "probable cause." That in turn had been defined by the Court to require a high standard of proof, "a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place."
The basic idea for more or less over 200 years: unless the government has a good, legal reason to look into your business, it couldn't. As communications changed, the Fourth evolved to assert extend those same rights of privacy to phone calls, emails and texts, the same rules applying there as to physical searches.
Since the police shooting of Michael Brown and the response in the streets, militarization of the police, especially with surplus military hardware like armored vehicles, has been a hot topic, both in the news and in Congress. And that's a good thing.
But the equipment we can see on the news isn’t the only thing flowing from our military to local cops. Alongside armored vehicles and guns, local police are getting surveillance technology with help from the federal government. And while we don’t know the full contours of that aid, what we do know is worrisome and should spur further scrutiny, both locally and nationally.
The surveillance state doesn’t operate in a vacuum.
In fact, the NSA and other federal spy agencies depend on support from a wide array of both public and private entities in order to engage in world-wide snooping.
American colleges and universities count among the institutions supporting dragnet spying. Through more the 170 schools, the NSA recruits and trains future spies and gains valuable research.
The Principles, endorsed by more than 400 civil society groups worldwide, provide a framework to assess whether government surveillance complies with international human rights obligations. Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Principles, which were publicly released on September 22, 2013. Today’s announcement follows on from the Principles Coalition’s Week of Action last week, which highlighted the Principles and promoted their adoption.
But despite these nods to privacy-conscious consumers, Apple still strongly encourages all its users to sign up for and use iCloud, the internet syncing and storage service where Apple has the capability to unlock key data like backups, documents, contacts, and calendar information in response to a government demand. iCloud is also used to sync photos, as a slew of celebrities learned in recent weeks when hackers reaped nude photos from the Apple service. (Celebrity iCloud accounts were compromised when hackers answered security questions correctly or tricked victims into giving up their credentials via “phishing” links, Cook has said.)
While Apple’s harder line on privacy is a welcome change, it’s important to put it in context. Yes, a leading maker of smartphones, tablets, and laptops is now giving users better tools to lock down some of their most sensitive data. But those users have to know what they’re doing to reap the benefits of the new software and hardware — and in particular it helps if they ignore Apple’s own entreaties to share their data more widely.
The U.S. Department of Justice successfully halted Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s pending National Security Agency lawsuit on Monday, which will stay on hold while a similar case questioning the constitutionality of certain surveillance moves forward.
Sen. Rand Paul's lawsuit over National Security Agency surveillance was put on hold Monday, pending an appeals court ruling on a parallel case brought before the senator's.
Canadian specialty channels and online mediacasters will provide coverage of a talk about online privacy and data security by controversial American author Glenn Greenwald.
Greenwald’s upcoming presentation will be live streamed and recorded as part of media podcasting and on-demand access plans for the event.
William Binney was the former technical director of the World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group and a senior NSA cryptomathematician at the NSA. He worked there for over three decades, and retired after 9/11 as the agency began to implement domestic spying programs that he says are unconstitutional. He is also a whistleblower, having disclosed information to the Defense Department in 2002 about corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse in the agency related to the use of data collection and analysis program called Trailblazer.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to expand the ability of an independent agency to investigate government surveillance activities. The Strengthening Privacy, Oversight and Transparency (SPOT) Act would expand the role of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) — an executive branch watchdog group formed as a result of suggestion from the 9/11 Commission to investigate the privacy implications of counterterrorism policies.
In an effort to significantly improve the oversight and accountability of the nation's intelligence community, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, (D-Ore.) and U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) spearheaded a bipartisan, bicameral effort to strengthen the government's privacy protection board. The legislation gives the oversight board greater ability to carry out its function of balancing the government's national security and counterterrorism activities with the need to protect the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans. The bill is cosponsored by U.S. Senator Tom Udall, D-N.M., and U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.
A year and a half after the Edward Snowden revelations, with promised reform measures stalled in congress, security expert Bruce Scheier says we should break up the National Security Agency to help build trust and transparency, while preserving its necessary functions.
Recently, BoingBoing ran an article about how some librarians in Massachusetts were installing Tor software in all their public PCs to anonymize the browsing habits of their patrons. The librarians are doing this as a stand against passive government surveillance as well as companies that track users online and build dossiers to serve highly-targeted advertising.
Which means, of course: There's now an app for that. The Niko Niko platform is an emerging service that can measure and track mood data via iOS app, email or a Google Chrome extension. The idea is that managers can pose an emotional question on the platform — e.g., "How do you feel about progress you made on your priorities for the week?" — and team members can indicate how they are feeling on a quick smiley-face scale.
Google's Eric Schmidt is infuriated with Julian Assange allegations that Google is tied to the US government when it comes to the openness of the internet, which the WikiLeaks founder expressed in his new book 'When Google met WikiLeaks.'
Julian Assange reminisced to RT’s Afshin Rattansi about a meeting he had with Google in 2011 and how the company is in bed with the State Department. He also mentioned that a state within a state is being developed within the USA.
It was revealed earlier this year that GCHQ had operated a secret surveillance project called Optic Nerve which captured images from millions of Yahoo! webcam chats made between people suspected of no crime.
Leaked documents dated from 2008 to 2010 reveal that Yahoo! was chosen because it was known to be used by “GCHQ targets”. The NSA was also involved, providing software to identify video traffic online and make screenshots searchable once intercepted.
SIX pro-Palestinian activists have been arrested following a demonstration at the Glasgow premises of defence systems firm Thales UK.
Over at VICE News, reporter Jason Leopold has this very interesting story about the FBI investigation of Samir Khan, the AQAP propagandist and editor of Inspire magazine, who was killed in the strike against Anwar Al-Aulaqi. Khan, like Al-Aulaqi, was a U.S. citizen, though the government maintains that he was not the target of the strike that killed him. The article is based largely on documents released by the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act. While Leopold notes that they are heavily redacted, he actually gleans a lot of worthwhile detail from them.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide, is writing to express its concern about the effects of intelligence and law enforcement activities undertaken by agencies, over which your administration has oversight, on the free flow of news and other information in the public interest.
Global Voices is joining more than 60 other media and press freedom organizations in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists’ campaign for the Right to Report in the Digital Age, targeting the Obama administration. Revelations about surveillance, intimidation, and exploitation of the press have raised unsettling questions about the rights and safety of journalists’ ability to report in the digital age. The revelations also give ammunition to governments seeking to tighten restrictions on media and the Internet.
Conservative documentary filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza -- the man behind such anti-Obama films as "2016: Obama's America" and "America" -- was sentenced Tuesday (Sept. 23) to serve eight months in a "community confinement center," five years of probation and to pay a $30,000 fine for a campaign-finance violation to which he pled guilty earlier this year. But in the process, he avoids the hard jail time to which he could have been sentenced (via The New York Times). That story tops this morning's Popcorn Breakfast, my regular three-minute(ish) movie-headlines roundup.
Global human rights body Amnesty International today called for a fair trial for detained TV journalist Jaikhlong Brahma.
“The Government of Assam must release Jaikhlong Brahma from administrative detention or charge him with recognizably criminal offences, and guarantee him a fair trial which meets international standards,” Amnesty International India said in a release.
A presidential administration expected to be more open and transparent than preceding ones has become focused on keeping secrets and preventing legitimate public inquiry.
In totalitarian America, nonstandard freedom of speech is frowned on, and the police snuff it out. The authorities require any demonstrators to get a permit, thereby allowing them to eliminate the Constitutional right to redress of grievances based on a pretext. The Constitutional right to protest is all or nothing; so soon as you allow the Fascists to demand a permit, the right vanishes. They come up with a pretext to ban what they find distasteful. As usual, the Constitution that is so precious states absolutely nothing about a permit. He who would understand class society must study the pretext.
As members of Congress left town for the mid-term election campaigns last week, they managed to leave unresolved almost every important pending national security question before them. Issues of war, torture accountability, NSA surveillance, and even expatriation of terrorists remain to be taken up, by the lame-duck Congress after the elections, or by the next Congress altogether. Given how dysfunctional and divided this Congress has been, maybe doing little or nothing is the best we can hope for. But the questions are not going to go away, and require democratic reckoning. The emerging war with the Islamic State in Syria, otherwise known as ISIS or ISIL, will almost certainly color resolution of all the pending questions. President Obama insisted, in his May 2013 speech at the National Defense University, that our democracy demands an end to perpetual war. But he has now, it seems, bequeathed to us a new perpetual war. And as with the war with Al Qaeda, there is a real risk that we will inappropriately discount rule of law, civil liberties, and human rights concerns.
There are a number of ongoing initiatives trying to bridge the gap between developed and developing countries in terms of internet access. We wrote about Cosmos Browser in one of our earlier articles. We found another such initiative to extend the bliss of the information available in the internet to the 4 billion people who don’t enjoy a reliable internet connection – Project Seed. The goal of the project is to let the light of knowledge reach everyone on the planet.