Sometimes people can be downright rude and nasty, for little or no reason. In the world of open source this kind of behavior can have the unfortunate effect of driving away new Linux users who are attacked in online forums for asking basic questions. Foss Force has some examples of open source bullies.
On a monthly basis — on the last Saturday each month — members of the Felton Linux Users Group drag their collective butts out of bed at the crack of 9:30, or possibly earlier, and make their way from various points in the sleepy little town just northeast of Santa Cruz to the solar-powered Felton Fire Station for their meeting.
It’s a good group with core regulars hosting meetings since the Lindependence Project held three open houses to introduce the town to Linux in the summer of 2008. In those open houses, various distros like Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and Mandriva, along with hardware maker ZaReason, and even an open-source stuffed penguin maker called Open Animals based in Phoenix, appeared to show their wares to the curious in the San Lorenzo Valley area. Around 600 people appeared over the three days and more than 300 live CDs went out the door.
For years I have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of 'Ubuntu Edge' or some similarly convergent distribution of Linux capable of running my Android applications as well as a full Linux desktop.
The idea of docking my smartphone (now phablet) to get a full Linux desktop including all the applications I am accustomed to using with all the responsiveness and flexibility that we have come to expect from mature distributions such as we get currently from the open source community, is from a business perspective, the return on investment that is necessary when investing into ever more expensive technology.
In the world of embedded systems, systems-on-chip and single-purpose hardware solutions, it's easier to list the products that don't have Linux as their operating system! This month, we focus on putting Linux into tiny places, and that means everything from the tiniest "Android Wear" watch to the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. As Linux users, we've been sneaking open source into server rooms for decades. Now we get to sneak it in everywhere!
"This laptop is going blue screen again.”
Linode has added new features to its managed cloud hosting offering, including free cPanel administration software and site migrations, as well as discounts on server-administration services.
Last month following the launch of Intel's Core i7 5960X Haswell-E platform I ran into a rather odd situation with the first system assembled using the X99 chipset and eight-core, $1000+ processor: the motherboard failed. Coincidentally it happened at the same time as another motherboard failure at a fellow review site. Fortunately, since then, there's been no other major reports of failures with Intel's new platform. MSI has been helpful in this matter and I've since received a new MSI X99S SLI PLUS to confirm there's no fundamental issues with their board.
The project is launching with thirty-eight founding companies, including many of the largest IT companies in the world. Importantly, they include not only cloud and service infrastructure vendors, but telecom service providers, developers and end users as well. (Disclosure: my firm and I represent the Linux Foundation and OPNFV).
The Linux Foundation - with support from many big names in the industry - has launched a project to build an open platform for network functions virtualisation (NFV).
In 2014, companies and open source programmers alike are working as hard as they can to virtualize hardware into software. The latest example of this is Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).
Open source network functions virtualization (NFV) took a major step forward today with the announcement of a new Linux Foundation initiative, the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV), that aims to advance software-based networking, storage and communications.
The Linux Foundation today is announcing a new Collaborative Project, Open Platform for NFV, or OPNFV. It involves nearly 40 companies and has largely been driven by end users like AT&T, China Mobile, NTT DOCOMO, Telecom Italia and Vodafone, among others. Together this community aims to build a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform to accelerate Network Function Virtualization.
The response has been fantastic with thousands of people signing up to take the exam from all corners of the globe. We have also engaged with large companies who are buying certifications in mass as a requirement for their teams. It’s been very satisfying to see so many of you engaging with the program.
The AMD developers have announced that a new Catalyst 14.9 Linux driver is now out and that it brings support for a couple of new operating systems and a few bug fixes.
Pekka Paalanen of Collabora has landed the new presentation extension for Wayland that currently is living within the Weston compositor code-base until it's fully vetted.
The latest open-source component of Intel's Linux graphics driver stack receiving hardware enablement for Skylake is libdrm.
Earlier this month NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 as their highest-end offerings based on their Maxwell architecture. Since the GTX 750 series debut I have been anxious to see Maxwell succeed Kepler in the high-end space and finally last week I got hands on time with the GTX 980. As long as you are not committed to using pure open-source graphics drivers, the GeForce GTX 980 is the best you can get as a Linux gamer/enthusiast for high performance graphics for ending out 2014.
Intel's Haihao Xiang has announced the version 1.4.0 release of the VA-API library along with the company's updated VA-API driver.
There's a lot of work going on right now to the AMD Catalyst Linux graphics driver. We've written about new features coming to an upcoming Catalyst Linux driver but silently being pushed into the latest round of release is a GLSL shader disk cache.
NVIDIA on Tuesday released an updated Linux x86/x86_64/ARM graphics driver in their 340.xx long-lived branch.
For those using the Gallium3D HUD, RadeonTOP, or other utilities, more data is being exposed with new patches for the Radeon DRM driver.
The 4K Video Downloader is a software solution that allows users to download video and audio files from YouTube, with the help of a simple and efficient interface. It's not freeware, but it's a good tool and it deserves a closer look.
Musique is a minimalistic music player for the Linux platform that features a simple and clean interface. It's not like there is a lack of open source music players, so we've decided to see if this one is any good.
DraftSight is developed by Dassault Systèmes, a French company specialized in CAD design. On the website you can find both the free and a paid, Pro version.
Scribbleton is a very infant -- as in alpha -- release of an innovative note-taking app for Linux that provides cross-platform access with Windows and Apple computers.
It creates a personal wiki for storing everything from quick notes to detailed checklists to outlines. It creates links between pages in Scribbleton. Think of this as an easy-to-use database to create links between words, phrases and pages. You can just as easily use Scribbleton to store snippets or volumes of text and quickly locate cross-referenced information.
Calibre is the premiere application on the Linux platform to convert, edit, view, and download eBooks. It has so many features it would be difficult just to count them all, but it's time to take a closer look at this app and see what changed in the years that passed since our last review.
The latest Lightworks 12 includes a new Content Manager structure, rewritten Lightworks Play engine for improved playback performance along with new Blur, Color Correction and Selective Color Correction effects and more.
In partnership with Google, Adobe is now offering Photoshop, its flagship photo-editing software, on Chromebooks.
The Opera browser is now based on Chromium and this simple fact has delayed the release of a stable Linux version for more than a year. Now, the Linux platform will finally get a release and some final touches have been made to the client.
Pithos 1.0.1 was released recently and it includes some minor improvements and bug fixes - for instance, the bug that was causing the Ubuntu Sound Menu to stop working when using Pithos was fixed in this release.
Borderlands 2, the popular action RPG video game developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K Games, is now available on Linux / Steam OS.
Borderlands 2 is available today as the newest action RPG / first person shooter on Linux. Borderlands 2 -- a game powered by a modified Unreal Engine 3 -- is now available natively via a port done by Aspyr Media.
Courtesy of our friends at Aspyr Media the new port may have a few rough edges (what new port doesn't?), but it's a really great game to have on our platform. The game is also on sale, so there's never been a better time to pickup a copy, or if you already owned it be sure to grab some DLC to show your support.
Outland is a 2D platformer with action game elements developed by Housemarque and published by Ubisoft. Gameplay mainly revolves around using Light (blue) and Dark (red) energies, which allows the player to pass through their respective barriers, and attack monsters born of the opposite alignment (e.g. use Light to attack Dark monsters). The game uses an open world structure.
Divinity: Original Sin, a masterfully executed true RPG game developed by Larian Studios, might be getting a Linux version before the end of the year.
A new SteamOS update has been made available by Valve to correct a bug that caused some problems during the booting process.
I now have over 300 games for Linux. In most ways this makes me very happy. But there is one thing that is getting me very unhappy. Currently games seem to be saving wherever the hell they like, it's making one hell of a mess. Heaven forbid I might want to ever backup all my savegames.
Valve pushed down a big update yesterday following their successful Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Linux launch last week.
This being done, we will be able to focus on things planned in Randa: transfer to KDE infrastructure, code cleaning, port to KF5… Big changes hidden behind small words!
September 30, 2014. Today KDE releases the beta for the second release of Plasma 5. Plasma 5 was released three months ago with many feature refinements and streamlining the existing codebase of KDE's popular desktop for developers to work on for the years to come.
This release is for testers to find bugs before our second release of Plasma 5.
Plasma 5.1 is the first update to Plasma 5 that was released three months ago. The Plasma 5.1 update features new switchers for panels, the restoration of the icon-only task manager, a new System Settings module for switching desktop themes, a new Breeze widget theme, and various other changes.
Qt 5.3.2 has entered testing a few hours ago. This will be the version of Qt we will release with Debian Jessie, and it happens to be a nice coincidence, because upstream focused in stability for the 5.3 branch.
One of the best things about open source software is the ability to use software without having to pay for it. But is this really a sustainable model? Or has the time come for open source developers to start requiring users to pay for software? A redditor thinks that GNOME developers should start making him pay for software.
I’m pleased to announce the release of California 0.2, Yorba’s GNOME 3 calendar application. A lot has happened since we announced California (way back in March) and I’m happy to say that we got more features into this first release than I thought we’d make.
Following on from last month’s update to Geary and Shotwell the non-profit software outfit Yorba is back, this time with a new release of their California calendaring application.
After launching last month on Kickstarter, the project has turned into a failure and all development has ceased. Operating System U by Andrew Bernstein only raised $1,948 of its $50,000 goal over the month-long period for the OS that claimed numerous advantages over Ubuntu and Windows 8. Andrew then posted, "Unfortunately OS U was unsuccessful. I truly, truly appreciate everyone who backed us, but unfortunately since we where unsuccessful, combined with other circumstances, OS U will not have any more continued development."
The Chakra team is happy to announce the first release of the Chakra Euler series, which will follow the 4.14 KDE releases.
A noticeable change in this release is the major face-lift of Kapudan, which now gives the option to users to enable the [extra] repository during first boot so they can easily install the most popular GTK-based applications. Kudos to george2 for the development and Malcer for the artwork.
Today in Linux news Jessie Smith has a nice article on Gentoo-derivative Calculate Linux 14 in this week's Distrowatch Weekly. Linuxbsdos.com has a review of OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1, released last week. Mageia 5 Beta 1 is delayed and openSUSE 11.4 is "truly, finally dead." We have all this and more in tonight's Linux news recap.
Red Hat seeks to become a significant corporate cloud player, boosting the OpenShift open hybrid cloud application platform - or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) - and, principally, the open cloud software platform OpenStack.
As you all know already, CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources provided by Red Hat. This is the eleventh update for the distribution and probably the last one. It features all the packages from all variants, including Server and Client, and the upstream repositories have been merged into a single one.
Red Hat Inc. ( RHT ) plans to offer $700 million of convertible senior notes that mature in 2019 to raise funds to repay the cost of hedge transactions and other purposes, with $400 million of the proceeds targeted to repurchase the software company' stock.
Red Hat will raise $700 million in debt offerings to finance a $400 million share-buyback program; remaining proceeds will go toward other liquidity requirements of the company
It's no secret that Fedora has had a challenging time sticking to their release schedules for a long time. With taking care of blocker bugs, Fedora Linux releases tend to frequently slip -- with Fedora 21 it's about two months behind schedule and we're just past the alpha stage. By the time Fedora 21 actually ships, Fedora 20 will have been at least twelve months old. However, a new release scheduling strategy might be tried starting with Fedora 22.
2014 has been a strange year for Fedora and one in which the Red Hat community distribution has yet to release a single milestone update. No that's not a typo.
In tonight's Linux news, GamingOnLinux.com poster says "game saves are messing up our drives" - stop it! Phoronix.com is reporting on discussions of changing Fedora release schedule. Jack Germain says Scribbleton creates a personal local wiki to store anything from notes to books and Opera 25 draws near.
2014 has been a strange year for Fedora and one in which the Red Hat community distribution has yet to release a single milestone update. No that's not a typo.
Assuming no further schedule slips, Fedora 21 is set to be released on 2 December. The release is looking really good, let’s keep the momentum going and get Fedora 21 out the door!
Adam D. Barrat published some release team news. The window for new transitions closed on September 5, and ongoing transitions should be completed as quickly as possible. The final architecture check was completed in mid-September, and the current agreed list of architectures for Jessie is amd64, armel and armhf, i386, kfreebsd-amd64 and kfreebsd-i386, mips, mipsel, powerpc and s390x. The final decision for kFreeBSD ports, for which human resources is a concern, and arm64 and ppc64el ports, which made good progress and have strong support, is expected in the very beginning of November. The freeze for Jessie is scheduled for November 5. In order to get their packages into Jessie before the freeze, maintainers of packages should take into account the fact that starting from October 5, the migration delay for all packages uploaded to unstable to enter Jessie will be 10 days.
For years there's been the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port that ships the same Debian GNU user-land as Debian GNU/Linux but replaces the Linux kernel with that of the FreeBSD kernel.
Steve showed me one of the Debian ARM buildd boxes which are Marvell development machines. These systems are powerful quad core machines housed in compact steel enclosures.
While Ubuntu 14.10 on the desktop isn't using Mir by default, Mir 0.8.0 is being prepared for release by Canonical and it has a number of interesting changes.
We are pleased to announce that the beta images for Simplicity Linux are available. These releases use LXDE as for the window manager and ship with the 3.15.4 kernel and come in Netbook (cloud based apps), Desktop (local apps) and Subdivision (Windows XP style desktop) editions. We have tested these images on hardware as low as a 900mhz Intel Atom with 1gb RAM.
NI unveiled a fanless, rugged vision computer that runs NI Linux on a quad-core Atom E3845, and offers an FPGA and support for 350MB/s USB3 Vision cameras.
The list of major corporations getting involved with open source communities is persistently growing, a trend evidenced by the rapidly expanding financial backing of open source foundations like the Linux Foundation. Samsung is one of these companies through its Open Source Group which was established in February of 2013. It's part of an effort to bridge the gap between the company and the open source communities it relies on and to promote the use and development of open source technology within many sectors of the company.
A “Com 1ââ¬Â³ Indiegogo project is the first Android Wear smartwatch to use a Ingenics MIPS SoC. The watch offers IP67 waterproofing, WiFi, and a $125 price.
Late in August, Samsung unveiled its new Gear S smartwatch, a Tizen-powered timepiece capable of making calls and going online without a smartphone. Other features, as noted at the time, included turn-by-turn navigation provided by the Nokia-owned HERE mapping platform, which brings genuine usefulness to the wrist-worn contraption.
TiVo has finally updated its Android app to allow streaming of recorded shows and movies. You can also access additional content via Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon's Instant Video service. The TiVo blog recently announced the updated app.
Calling all Android users – the wait is finally over! The Android streaming app is now available. With this update, users can stream most recorded and live shows directly to their Android mobile device to enjoy in or out of the home.*
ITTIA has added bidirectional sync to ITTIA DB SQL for Android, enabling a back-end RDBMS to store device data and download sync’d updates for each device.
Open source networking is becoming a reality now that standards bodies, vendors and development communities are working together. Yet these players face a slew of challenges.
Facebook. It's one of the world’s most well-known tech companies and on the forefront of open source technology. Just take a look their portfolio of over 200 open source projects on GitHub.
Women are an underrepresented group in the open source world. According to data from the FLOSS 2013 survey, a little more than 10% of open source developers are women. Recently, there have been several attempts to make open source more welcoming to women contributors and supportive of their accomplishments. Two good examples of these efforts are GNOME's Outreach Program for Women, an internship program designed to welcome women into the open source community and provide them with mentoring, and Red Hat's Women in Open Source Award.
Open source has promised to unseat proprietary competitors for decades, but the cloud may make the threat real.
Three months ago I quit my job to work on Sidekiq and build a brand new OSS project and commercial product. Tomorrow I want to introduce it to you.
What do you do when you have terabytes and more of data and you want to work it with in real time? Well, one solution is to turn to Apache Storm.
Inbox, the email startup founded by Dropbox and MIT alums offering modern APIs that allow developers to build new applications on top of email’s aging underpinnings, is today taking steps to make it even easier for developers to get started with the launch of open source email apps. The company is also announcing the pricing for its hosted version of the Inbox API for the first time publicly.
Both Mozilla and Google updated their Web browsers on Sept. 24 for a vulnerability that had been present in all prior releases. The updates fix a single issue in the core Network Security Services (NSS) library that is present in both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The new Mozilla update is Firefox 32.0.3, and the Google Chrome update is version 37.0.2062.124.
The streaming stick market is apparently heating up. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all have entrants in this space, and if a new Kickstarter appeal succeeds, there will soon be a Firefox OS stick getting in on the action.
Streaming media dongles are a dime a dozen these days. Google’s Chromecast was the first on the block but since then, we’ve seen a number of different devices from major players like Microsoft and Roku. None, however, have been able to compete with Google on price… until now.
But what it fails to recognise is that one of the key ways of making the Web medium "less free and open" is the use of legally-protected DRM. DRM is the very antithesis of openness and of sharing. And yet, sadly, as I reported back in May, Mozilla has decided to back adding DRM to the Web, starting first with video (but it won't end there...) This means Mozilla's Firefox is itself is a vector of attack against openness and sharing, and undermines its own lofty goals in the Open Web Fellows programme.
That’s why we are joining together today to launch the Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows program, a landmark initiative to create a worldwide community of leaders who will advance and protect the free and open Web.
In partnership with Ford, Mozilla has just launched its Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows Program, which is "a Global Initiative to Recruit the Heroes of the Open Internet." In short, Mozilla is convinced that the bulk of the available tech talent in the job market goes to companies like Google and Facebook (which would also be companies that pay up for tech talent), while government organizations and nonprofits can't attract talent.
The platelets are definitely shifting in the OpenStack cloud computing race. Last week, I reported on Oracle's release of its OpenStack for Oracle Linux distribution. Based on the OpenStack Icehouse release, it allows users to control Oracle Linux and Oracle VM through OpenStack in production environments. It can support any guest operating system (OS) that is supported with Oracle VM, including Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, Microsoft Windows,and other Linux distributions.
I just found out that McKenty is leaving Piston, the company he helped to create after leaving NASA and is now moving to a new role at Pivotal.
This week I noted in a post that the platelets are shifting in the fast-growing OpenStack cloud computing arena, and there is more and more evidence that this is translating into opportunity for many companies and individuals. Pivotal has just hired some monster OpenStack talent in the form of Joshua McKenty, a cloud computing guru and one of the original architects of OpenStack. He joins Pivotal as field CTO for Cloud Foundry, the open source Platform-as-a-Service.
Nantes-based open source software startup Akeneo has raised $2.4 Million from Alven Capital, the VC fund reported this week. After initially raising a seed round from Kima Ventures and Nestadio Capital, cofounders Frédéric Gombert &
This is a defense of the most prolific and dedicated public servant that has graced the world in my lifetime. One man has added hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of value to the global economy. This man has worked tirelessly for the benefit of everyone around him. It is impossible to name a publicly traded company that has not somehow benefitted from his contributions, and many have benefitted to the tune of billions. In return for the countless billions of wealth that people made from the fruits of his labor, he was rewarded with poverty and ridicule. Now that the world is done taking from him, they are heading to the next step of villifying him as incompetent.
Without the fuss and delays that have plagued so many large government IT projects, a key part of the NHS digital infrastructure was recently migrated and updated in a single weekend.
The collection of applications and directory services known as the Spine connects clinicians, patients and local services to core NHS services such as the GP2GP patient record transfer, the Electronic Prescription Service, patients' Summary Care Records, and the Choose and Book service. More than 250,000 health service staff connect to it every day, sending more than 400m messages each month.
England's Healthwatch organisations are now using CiviCRM, an open source solution for customer relationship management. "Open source affords access to a wide community of developers, which means that the software continues to develop and security updates and bug fixes are regularly rolled out", explains Tim Schofield, the organisation's interim systems manager.
The Italian city of Udine is 'gradually and painfully' removing all the ties that bind the city's ICT systems to the usual proprietary operating systems and office productivity solutions, reports head of the IT department, Antonio Scaramuzzi. The city aims to slowly introduce more free and open source software alternatives.
Unhurried, the municipality is implementing open source technologies where feasible, avoiding big migration projects, Scaramuzzi writes to the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR).
Earlier this month, IT trade news site Zdnet that the town is making Apache OpenOffice the default office suite. The software is already installed on all of the city's 900 PCs. ZDNet writes that this switch will save the city about 400 euro per PC in proprietary software licences.
Looking at open source softwares particularly, this is a fact that is probably useful to you if you are thinking about business models, many people don't care about it anymore. We talk about FOSS, Free and Open Source Software, but if we really are strict there's a difference between free software and open source software. On the left, I have free software which most typically is GPL software. Software where the license insures freedom. It gives freedoms to you as a user, but it also requires that the freedoms are maintained.
On the right-hand side, you have open source software which is open for all, but it also allows you to close it. So here we come back to the famous clause of the GPL license, the reciprocity requirement which says, "If I am open, you need to be open." So software that comes under the GPL license carries with it something that other people call a virus. I call it a blessing because I think it's great if all software becomes open.
What does the above have to do with open source? Do you use tools like c:geo? Then, you are using open source to go geocaching! Geocaching is an offline scavenger hunt, out in the real world, with the help of GPS coordinates. The person who hides the "cache" is the owner and prepares it by finding a nice hiding spot and putting sheet of paper, the log book into a cache container. Cache containers come in different kinds sizes and forms. The most popular kind is a 35mm film container. There are others that look like old rusty screws, parts of a tree, bird houses, or look-a-like rocks. The owner then hides the container, records its GPS coordinates, and makes it available to other geocachers so that they can go find the cache and sign the log book to record the finding.
France is the first country to appoint a Chief Data Officer (Administrateur Général des Données, AGD), to ensure open data reaches its full potential in improving government services. On 17 September, France appointed Henri Verdier, director of Etalab, which runs the Inter-ministerial open portal, data.gouv.fr. Verdier is to coordinate government actions aimed at inventorying, governing, producing, circulating and using government data. With the CDO, France aims to enhance evaluation of government policies, increase government openness and boost research and innovation.
For almost three years a community of independent filmmakers called the apertus project have been developing an open source digital cinema camera with Axiom, which would allow filmmakers the ability to modify, repair and create their own custom cameras. After creating a proof-of-concept prototype, the Axiom Alpha, the group launched a crowd-funding campaign on indiegogo.com in September 2014 to raise further development funding for the Axiom Beta, a second model which will allow the team to test and advance the product further.
A new toolkit could help veteran and beginner roboticists design, create and assemble a variety of soft-bodied bots. The online resource, which includes a trove of blueprints, tutorials and how-to videos, could spur the development of new robots to operate in the medical industry, disaster relief efforts or an array of other applications.
David writes, "A year ago I pledged to make a fully interactive version of my augmented jack-O-lantern, Gourdy; I've finally gotten around to doing it, and I'm releasing him free for anyone to use.
Open source hardware maker unveils Materia 101, a "precision 3D printer."
While GCC 4.9 features OpenMP 4.0 support, it doesn't feature the OpenMP offloading support, but that should be coming soon to mainline GCC.
The first thing to notice here is that these bugs were found – and were findable – because of open-source scrutiny.
So that's a current government official, a retired general, and retired Pentagon and CIA officials. Now that's a diverse line-up.
If only its intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance activities, conducted from as high as 11 miles off the ground and on flights of up to 32 hours, weren't classified. Pentagon officials are tight-lipped about the drone's role in recent U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.
Holder supported the Obama administration's use of drones to kill suspected terrorists — even U.S. citizens — on foreign soil without trial or evidence they were in the process of launching a terrorist attack.
Ironically, while Holder scored on the civil rights front, he failed on the civil liberties front. His Justice Department authorized the use of drones to kill American citizens on foreign soil, without a fair trial. His department defended the National Security Agency’s wholesale collection of phone data on millions of Americans accused of no crime. And Holder has invoked the Espionage Act against government leakers and journalists more times than all prior administrations combined. Charges against reporter James Risen are still pending.
John Oliver’s been looking for information about the unmanned death robots, such as what exactly an “imminent threat means or how many people are killed during any given drone strike. So far, “hard facts” have been hard to come by, and in the “Last Week Tonight” host’s words, it’s “completely fucking terrifying.”
There is a collective amnesia that continues to block government and society's memory that we have been there and done that many times before. Therefore, the war machine keeps rolling on with the encouragement of hawkish politicians, pundits and the military industrial complex.
The motivating question behind John Oliver’s look at the American military’s use of drones is this: Given the secrecy around their deployment, the uncertainty about whom they actually kill, and the psychological toll that drones inflict on civilians in countries where they are routinely deployed, why do so many Americans favor their use overseas?
It’s a good question.
Since 1990, the people of Iraq have sustained some level of US military aggression by four successive US presidential administrations. Yet they failed to find WMDs much like they failed to preclude the rise of the Islamic State.
The Obama administration, while channeling weapons to anti-government Syrian rebels, many with connections to terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, was at the same time ignoring the rapid rise of the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant (now Islamic State, or IS) in Iraq, which aspires to the creation of a caliphate throughout the Middle East. This tragedy has its roots at least as far back as the first Bush administration, when the decision to attack Iraq in 1990 was first made.
Pakistan drone launched by the United States killed at least four people who are suspected to be militants, according to the statement the Pakistani officials made on Sunday. The drone attack was made on Sunday afternoon in Karikot, which is located in the South Waziristan tribal region.
U.S.-led air strikes hit grain silos and other targets in Islamic State-controlled territory in northern and eastern Syria overnight, killing civilians and wounding militants, a group monitoring the war said on Monday.
We're bombing Iraq again. Isn't it nostalgic?
[...]
Why, for instance, did we never send troops in when central Africa was being torn apart by various countries and militias? Were it happening now, would we, the UK, be calling in airstrikes? Millions died, and yet I think not. If barbarity and a disregard for human rights is the key criterion (or, indeed, a propensity to start wars), we could all think of a number of countries just crying out for a bombing.
Nafeez Ahmed examines how the rise of ISIS was both predicted and evitable, and argues the West's current military campaign is already being used to neuter mass surveillance reforms at home and will likely produce further political destabilisation in the region.
Tariq did come back alive – but only because his beating was caught on tape and because he was a U.S. citizen.
The website shows satellites and drones hovering as well as men and women hacking into computers and carrying out surveillance operations.
While drone operators are not physically in harm's way — they do their work at computer terminals in darkened rooms far from the actual battlefield — growing research is finding they too can suffer some of the emotional strains of war that ground forces face.
Host John Oliver of HBO's Last Week Tonight criticized the U.S. government's drone program for inflicting fear in children.
"When children from other countries are telling us that we made them fear the sky," he says, "it may be time to ask some hard questions."
What does the U.S. government want us to know about drones? Approximately nothing.
Sana’a: A US drone strike killed three Al Qaida militants and injured three civilians on Friday evening in the northern province of Jawf, local official and a witness told Gulf News.
A U.S. drone strike killed three Al Qaeda militants and injured three civilians on Friday evening in the northern province of Jawf, local official and a witness told Gulf News.
The strike occurred in a remote village called Al Khasaf near the province’s capital, the local government official.
Despite the Sept. 5 ceasefire, fighting has flared frequently around Donetsk international airport, in eastern Ukraine. seven Ukrainian soldiers were killed when a separatist shell hit their armoured personnel carrier
None of the Slain Identified, But All 'Suspects'
US airstrikes hit Syria oil refinery near Turkey
As the Obama Administration prepared to bomb Syria without congressional or U.N. authorization, it faced two problems. The first was the difficulty of sustaining public support for a new years-long war against ISIS, a group that clearly posed no imminent threat to the “homeland.” A second was the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or U.N. approval.
The White House has acknowledged for the first time that the strict standards President Obama imposed last year to prevent civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes will not apply to U.S. military operations in Syria and Iraq.
Two years ago, Andy Bacevich published an important piece, “How We Became Israel.” His argument concerned strategic doctrine more than ideology. He noted similarities between Washington’s seemingly continuous low-grade military campaigns, which commenced once the Cold War was over, and Israel’s regular attacks on its neighbors. Both countries sought through military strength a kind of absolute security; both had no problem with starting preemptive wars; both employed “targeted assassinations” against opponents as a matter of course. Both relied on air power. Both were perfectly willing to endure perpetual war in their quest for dominion over their region.
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It is, to be blunt, a blatant misrepresentation of reality: one need hardly be a defender of Hamas to note the critical differences. The comparison was, as 972ââ¬Â²s Larry Derfner put it, “a crude attempt to brainwash people, to put the most horrifying image in their mind and associate it with Gaza, thereby cleansing Israel of those images of Gaza’s agony.” A twofer in other words. Israel is exonerated of killing 500 innocent children, and America is associated with Israel, for we are doing the same thing. The ISIS/Hamas comparison is valid only so far as both organizations are Muslim and militant.
This begs the question: If drone strikes are so precise, why do Pakistanis condone them? There are three main causes:
1. Signature strike
2. Double tap strike
3. Lack of supported media
There are basically two different kinds of strikes conducted by US drones in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas: Signature strike/kill list and personality strike.
Those people which are killed on the basis of behavior or pattern, as it resembles to that of terrorists rather than knowing their precise identity, falls in the category of signature strike. Drone strikes shows that hardly any civilians may be targeted in personality strikes and interestingly people have no reservation over the nature of such strikes, because Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders have been killed in personality strikes.
Islamabad High Court (IHC) has been moved for registration of murder case against Pervez Musharraf in respect of the innocent citizens who have been killed in drone strikes in tribal areas of the country.
IHC moved for registration of murder case against Pervez Musharraf over killings in US drone strikes
After sharply criticizing Israel for civilian casualties in its air campaign in Gaza, which the IDF consistently attempted to avoid, the White House has now issued a statement abandoning the strict policies Obama implemented last year to prevent civilian casualties.
This statement came in response to questions about reports that as many as a dozen civilians were killed when a Tomahawk missile struck the village of Kafr Daryan in Syria's Idlib province on the morning of September 23.
Yesterday, Yahoo News reported a pretty ominous new development in the American air war against ISIS. In the Afghanistan and Pakistan drone campaign, the US puts relatively strict restrictions on targeting to avoid civilians. In Syria, Yahoo reported, these standards won't be used — putting Syrian civilians, like the roughly 12 already killed by one US strike, in greater danger.
Last week also saw the first reported civilian casualties from American strikes in Iraq, according to Iraq watcher Joel Wing.
Expect to see more stories like this. While the American war against ISIS has so far been unusually, impressively clean, the nature of that war virtually guarantees that more civilians will be killed.
The Obama administration has acknowledged that its strict policy of preventing civilian deaths does not apply to American airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.
The statement confirming the loosening of high standards pertaining to minimizing collateral damage comes amid reports that as many as a dozen civilians, including women and children, were killed by a U.S. strike of a Syrian village.
The road to Agadez is long and treacherous. The city lies in the middle of the Sahara, about 900 kilometers away from the capital city of Niger, Niamey. Yet Agadez is strategically important to the United States. The American government plans to build a drone base in the former caravan city from which it can strike against Islamist groups in the Sahel region.
The noted peace activist Fred Branfman passed away this past week after suffering the effects of ALS (Lou Gherig’s disease). In 2002, while researching the history of the Vietnam War, I came across Fred’s slim volume, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life Under an Air War in the Brandeis library and the book had an immediate effect on me. It was one of the few books written from the vantage point of the victims of the US air war in Indochina, or of US bombing and covert intervention carried out anywhere in the world. As a means of evading the Vietnam-era draft, Fred had signed on to work as a volunteer in Laos with the International Voluntary Service (IVS) and developed a deep attachment for the country’s people. Unlike many of his peers, he did not subscribe to the dominant US cold war ideology or to a paternalistic attitude towards the Lao, but loved and respected them. He struck a particularly close friendship with a village elder where he stayed, Paw Thou Douang, a devout Buddhist, farmer and medic whom he later found out was a local leader of the pro-communist Pathet Lao (the organization which had led Laos’ liberation struggle against the French and had sunk deep popular roots as a result of their commitment to nationalist principles and land reform).
The risk of civilian deaths from bombs dropped in Syria and Iraq could be much higher than drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, according to US officials. This is due to a lack of intelligence on the ground and a change in bombing policy.
This may kill more of them, but it will not conquer them. It will only deepen their hatred and defiance. Beyond ISIS, U.S. drone policy doesn't even require identifying who will be killed, and it accepts all collateral damage as simply part of the operation.
The Guardian asked Matthew’s superior, Captain Brad (who also withheld his last name), why the group is dressed in the single-piece uniforms that symbolise the combat-readiness of the traditional air force pilot when today they spend all day indoors in front of computer screens. Isn’t all that Top Gun stuff unnecessary in the age of the drone?
I like to call it The War of the Heads. ISIS beheads people one-on-one, up-close-and-personal on You Tube while the United States of America and its coalition of cautious or secret partners prefers “decapitation,” as in using powerful F16 bombs and drone rockets to whack off metaphoric heads.
Osama bin Laden is the reason we're fighting ISIS today and the reason we've wage two wars in the Middle East. His vision for chaos in the region was clearly stated even before he murdered 3,000 Americans and long before we entered Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. Our national amnesia fueled by the righteous indignation of watching Americans murdered on ISIS video plays right into the trap bin Laden set on 9/11 and mires us further into the sectarian and religious quagmire in Iraq and Syria. Actually, to be completely accurate, bin Laden's terror and maniacal visions were only half of the problem. The other half rests with America's penchant for being lured into never-ending counterinsurgency wars against an enemy who wears tennis shoes, hides in apartment buildings, drives pickup trucks with gun turrets, and makes horrifying videos to frighten the average American household into blindly accepting a forever war. After 4,486 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq and 2,347 U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan, close to 1 million U.S. soldiers wounded in both wars, and a cost that will easily exceed $6 trillion, the last thing American soldiers and their families need is an electorate who willingly accepts perpetual war. Mind you, this blind acceptance is coupled with the fact that according to Forbes, over 900,000 Americans have had their lives altered fighting terror in the Middle East:
Why do Americans hate beheadings but love drone killings? What accounts for our irrational response to these two very different forms of illegal execution, one very profitable and high-tech, usually resulting in many collateral deaths and injuries, and the other very low-tech, but provoking fear and righteous condemnation from the citizens whose country prefers the high-tech?
Whew. Back on planet Earth, burning more fossil fuels is going to have at least one consequence: It will continue contributing to the heating of the planet. But Samuelson never mentions climate change, which is too often treated as a non-event in coverage of energy (FAIR Blog, 5/15/12; 9/9/14).
In a way, this is merely a different type of climate change denial, one that wishes away the consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels. Interestingly, the Samuelson column has a "Read more about this topic" link at the bottom, which takes readers to a Post editorial on the same subject, headlined "Commerce Dept. Should Allow Exports of US Crude." This is notable because the Post editorial page has drawn attention for a series they're calling "A Climate for Change," which is supposed to represent the paper's decision to take the climate crisis seriously. Except, apparently, when the same editorial page is making the case for drilling for more oil.
The number of African Americans living under the poverty line ( $11,139 for an individual in 2010) rose to 10.7 million i.e. 27.4 percent of African Americans were living in poverty in 2011 [1] .
MPs being investigated for alleged abuses of their expenses will have their names kept secret, the Commons watchdog has announced.
The high streets of our poorest towns are strewn with betting shops, bargain booze outlets, pawnbrokers and payday lenders.
The headline alone–"PBS Self-Destructs: And What It Means for Viewers Like You"–was surely going to rankle people at PBS. And it did; as reported in Current (9/18/14), PBS distributed talking points for station managers who might be asked about the article. They aren't intended to rebut anything in Williamson's piece; it is mostly a compilation of awards and ratings data to show that PBS is actually doing a wonderful job.
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) has endorsed Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker for reelection.
Privacy-centered digital currency Darkcoin (DRK) is now a fully open-source cryptocurrency as it unveils its source code and moves out of the beta stages of development.
If you don’t already know, Darkcoin was released in the first quarter of 2014, and it’s unique selling proposition as a digital currency was it’s enhanced privacy and security structure relative to the almighty Bitcoin. A minor-league detective can figure out the transaction origins made on Bitcoin’s Blockchain, and mine your privacy, in effect. Darkcoin aims to take your financial dealings into total darkness, with a security-centric design language.
Darkcoin is a revolutionary new cryptocurrency which offers privacy and fast transaction speed. Four years ago, the mysterious and brilliant Satoshi Nakamoto developed a revolutionary piece of software called Bitcoin. In doing so, Satoshi created both a digital currency (so-called "cryptocurrencies" are decentralized and secured by cryptography, rather than by a government) and an inexpensive payment network. Bitcoin uses a decentralized financial ledger called a "blockchain" to keep track of everybody's balances and to transfer money from one bitcoin address to another.
As scheduled during the release of RC5 last week, the Darkcoin Foundation today open-sourced Darksend. The code of this anonymity-offering platform was kept closed-source since the time of its launch. The reasons given for hiding Darksend’s source code were the unsureness of its functionality in mainstream market, due to which the platform had to go through some really rigorous testing and audit procedures.
Now this argument has been solidly debunked in various articles, breaking down to these main reasons:
You don't know what you have to hide
You should have something to hide
Privacy is a basic human need
On the first two, security researcher Moxie Marlinspike wrote for Wired Magazine.
Open Rights Group has responded to the Home Secretary, Theresa May's call for a revival of the snoopers' charter to give the police greater powers to access communications data.
Open Rights Group's Executive Director, Jim Killock said:
"We already have GCHQ engaging in illegal mass surveillance justified by the investigation of terrorism. Why exactly does Theresa May need to revive the snoopers' charter which would give the police the same powers to infringe our liberties? We need targeted surveillance not data trawling and population profiling."
The Conservatives have made a clear offer to the public: they are saying that they will, if elected, revive plans for the Snooper’s Charter. Massive data gathering and analysis of your online habits would become available to the police and a range of public bodies. Powers that are currently being challenged in the courts, but are in practice available to GCHQ under programmes like TEMPORA, would become an everyday policing tool.
Wading into a fight that’s about to get more interesting, Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday urged tech firms to cooperate with law enforcement.
“We would hope that technology companies would be willing to work with us to ensure that law enforcement retains the ability, with court-authorization, to lawfully obtain information in the course of an investigation, such as catching kidnappers and sexual predators,” Holder said.
That was all too typical in Holder's call to tech companies to leave device back doors open to police.
The European Union's “Digital Agenda” should not only be about digits and economy. It is also about rights and freedom. After several hours of hearing of Günther Oettinger, the designated EU Commissioner for the “Digital Economy and Society”, one question remains unanswered: what about the protection of fundamental rights in the digital environment?
Last Tuesday, in a courtroom in New York City, a long-running chapter in the “war on terror” came to an end, when Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, 48, a Kuwaiti-born cleric who appeared in media broadcasts as a spokesman for Al-Qaeda the day after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, received a life sentence based on the three counts for which he was convicted after his trial in March: conspiracy to kill Americans, providing material support to terrorists and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.
A fair society is one where laws are clear and crimes are punished in a way that is deemed fair. It is not one where thinking about crime is criminal, or one where talking about things that are unpalatable is criminal, or one where everybody is notionally protected from the arbitrary and the capricious. Over the past 20 years life has become safer, not more risky, for people living in an Internet-connected West. That’s no thanks to the listeners; it’s thanks to living in a period when the youth (the source of most trouble in the world) feel they have access to opportunity and ideas on a world-wide basis. We are pretty much certain to have hard challenges ahead in that regard. So for all the scaremongering about Chinese cyber-espionage and Russian cyber-warfare and criminal activity in darknets, we are better off keeping the Internet as a free-flowing and confidential medium than we are entrusting an agency with the job of monitoring us for inappropriate and dangerous ideas. And that’s something we’ll have to work for.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other activist groups denounced a speech that Holder gave at the Northwestern University School of Law in 2012 in which he argued that Barack Obama’s administration had the authority to engage in targeted killings anywhere in the world without judicial review, a critical check on executive power. In May the District of Columbia Court of Appeals upheld deference to the administration in a case brought by the family of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a drone attack in Yemen in 2011 after he had been placed on a kill list. Journalist Jason Leopold recently obtained a copy of a DOJ memo about the justification for extrajudicial assassination that was heavily redacted, and the human toll of both intended targets and civilian casualties remains shrouded in secrecy.
In my last update, I mentioned plans to organise a European Citizens' Initiative, a formal petition against both TTIP and CETA. I think everyone assumed that the European Commission would just ignore this when it was presented, but in fact it has done something rather more spectactular - and stupid: it has refused to allow the ECI to go ahead at all.
After nine years of campaigning, Open Rights Group is delighted that copyright exceptions for parody and format shifting have passed into law.
Executive Director Jim Killock said:
"It has been a long, drawn-out campaign but we're delighted that people who contribute to the rich creativity of the internet by creating parodies will now have protection under the law. It’s also right that copying our own legally bought music or books for personal use will no longer be illegal.