In other words, “the year of Linux on the desktop” is a diversion. Don’t sit around waiting for Linux to become mainstream—it already is. The year of Linux on everything but the desktop is here!
The perfect desktop is undoubtedly the one you would design yourself. However, lacking the necessary time and expertise, many users hop instead from desktop to desktop desktop with the same enthusiasm as others hop between distros, hoping to find the ideal distribution.
In many cases, they never find their ideal, and for good reason -- even the simplest Linux desktop is a mixture of advantages and disadvantages.
Crouton is a script that lets you run Ubuntu or Debian on a Chromebook without uninstalling Chrome OS. Developed by David Schneider, the tool has been around for a few years, offering an easy way to run native desktop Linux apps such as GIMP, LibreOffice, and even Firefox on Chrome OS laptops and desktops.
GOOGLE HAS ANNOUNCED that Chromebook users can now choose an alternative operating system for their prized devices.
It's only for the brave, and will involve potential permo-borkage of your machine if you get it wrong, but brand evangelist Francis Beaufort has been telling Google+ users about a new and easier process for poking around under the bonnet of Chromebooks, if that is your bag.
Google's Chromium team is making it easier to modify the software stack of your Chromebook, boot a Linux distribution from a USB drive, and carry out other tasks.
On Tuesday, IBM launched the z13, which it bills as the first mainframe specifically designed to accommodate the booming mobile app economy. Mainframes—the refrigerator-sized, pre-PC computers beloved of government, corporations, and Tron—were long synonymous with IBM, which introduced its first mainframe in 1952. The company has long since reinvented itself as a provider of business services rather than hardware. But it turns out the old standby is still around.
IBM today officially announced the z13 mainframe platform, loaded with silicon and other hardware innovations to accelerate mobile, analytics and security-driven workloads.
CloudPassage provides tools to monitor application security and enforce security policies. Now, the company's platform will include security-vulnerability assessment, file-integrity monitoring, log-based intrusion detection, access control and firewall micro-segmentation for Docker as well.
These either alone or accumulated can draw a solid, thick line between trying the Linux kernel development and letting it go. This is especially true for the less experienced individuals who therefore may fear to try however the truth is that the devil is not as black as painted.
In December 2014, a critical vulnerability was found in Git that affected Mac OS X and Windows users. Even if the vulnerability didn’t affect Linux users, it could harm users who work on Windows or Mac systems.
A patch was released immediately, but that wasn't soon enough to keep Linus from yelling out loud about how horrible Apple’s HFS+ file system is. As an Apple user, and as much as I love their hardware, I am not a fan of their software.
So what’s the basic problem with HFS+? Both NTFS and HFS+ are case insensitive, which means if you have a folder named 'Linux' or 'linux' they will treat them as the same folder, which understandably causes a lot of problems. Thomas Pfeiffer, a usability consultant to KDE, refers to an article by Brian Tiemann and says case-insensitive but case-preserving file systems are actually a good idea from a desktop user’s point of view.
For basic use things just work, you don’t need to learn anything new to use systemd.
It provides significant benefits for boot speed and potentially security.
IoTivity is hosted by The Linux Foundation and will release a reference implementation of the IoT standards defined by the Open Internet Consortium (OIC), which has more than 50 members including Intel and Samsung.
The systemd project is off to a quick start in 2015 with already seeing over 200 commits (granted, in 2015 systemd development skyrocketed with nearly 5,000 commits). With the newest work that's landed, the networkd component to systemd has been improved with new features.
Rob Clark's work on the open-source Freedreno driver stack the past few years is turning out quite nicely and suitable for end-users wanting an open-source graphics stack for Qualcomm Adreno hardware.
After last week delivering initial open-source Radeon DRM driver tests on Linux 3.19, here's similar treatment in testing out the new Linux 3.19 kernel with the Nouveau DRM driver for open-source NVIDIA graphics.
The latest quarterly update to XenGT for Intel Graphics Virtualization Technology is now available that allows providing a complete vGPU solution with mediated GPU pass-through.
NVIDIA announced the release today of the CUDA 7.0 Release Candidate that brings new features to their popular but proprietary parallel programming toolkit.
Kristian Høgsberg has been out of the Wayland spotlight for the better part of one year with stepping away from its development for unknown reasons although he remains employed by Intel and working on their Linux graphics stack. Following Kristian's departure, Pekka Paalanen of Collabora took over release manager roles for Wayland and Weston.
A few days back I wrote about being able to finally get the Metro Redux game benchmarks running in an automated manner under Linux to the point that we're now able to test it with the Phoronix Test Suite. With Metro 2033 Redux and Metro Last Light Redux now running well for our testing purposes, I've carried out performance tests of these two games with twenty-two AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on Linux. Besides looking at the normal FPS result there's also frame latency metrics, power consumption data for each of these graphics cards, performance-per-Watt metrics, and GPU thermal results. If you're wondering what graphics card works best for your needs for OpenGL 4.x Linux gaming, here's an interesting look with the Metro Redux titles that premiered on Steam for Linux back in December.
While the configuration, tools and output has dramatically changed... really firewalld makes things easier and more manageable. Really. One of the problems with Linux across distros is that there really hasn't been a standardized way to handle the host-based firewall. Each distro seems to have their own way of doing it... and popular packages like Shorewall have been around for years. I think firewalld tries for a happy medium somewhere between simple and complex and a standard that distros can choose to adopt.
Samba, an app that integrates Linux/Unix servers and desktops into Active Directory environments using the winbind daemon, has been upgraded to version 4.1.15 and is now available for download.
RAR, a powerful archive manager that can be used to reduce the size of files and to decompress RAR, ZIP, and other formats, has reached version 5.21 Beta 1.
Lets set up 3 Fedora servers for the purposes of testing flannel on Fedora. These can be bare metal, VMs (on KVM, VMware, RHEV, etc...). Why do we want to test this? This is to demonstrate setting up the flannel overlay network and confirming connectivity. Specifically, I want to test container connectivity across hosts. I'd like to make sure that container A on host A can talk to container B on host B. I received quite a bit of guidance from Jeremy Eder of breakage.org - Thanks for the tips!
Hi everyone, we'd like to get your help in testing Chivalry for Linux and Mac OS X.
Everyone who owns Chivalry should now have access to the Linux and OS X versions. Currently you will need to switch to a Beta branch to access this, the "linuxtesting" branch (for both OS X and Linux).
Heroes of Steel is a tactical RPG set in a grim post-apocalyptic fantasy world. Coordinate your party of four heroes in turn-based combat and navigate a engaging world and story.
Egosoft have been detailing their porting X Rebirth to Linux with a series of forum posts. It's good to see them be open about it, and we look forward to testing it out.
A new bundle called "Abstract Bundle" featuring 10 great games that are available on multiple platforms, including Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, has been released and it's available with a ridiculously small price.
I found this pretty awesome arcade racing game while i was browsing through Kickstarter and i wanted to share it. I am glad to see another racing game coming to Linux, since our supply of racing games is a bit short.
Are you an avid video gamer? Are you on the hunt for a simple yet effective technique for playing play station games on a PC? While this was virtually impossible decades ago, the advent of technology in recent years has simplified the process; enabling gamers to enjoy their favorite play station titles on Windows, Linux, and Mac computers with minimal effort. This article highlights these steps in detail, to help increase your probability of success.
Version 4.2 of the cross-platform C4 Game Engine was released today. The big change of C4 Engine 4.2 is that it gets rid of Linux support after its lead developer has had a very unhappy and difficult experience with Linux.
In the past few days there's been some progress in benchmarking newer Steam Linux games thanks to support from Valve developers and separate from that was now support for automated benchmarking of Metro Redux (Metro Last Light Redux and Metro 2033 Redux). The Metro Redux test ability led to yesterday's 22-way AMD/NVIDIA GPU comparison for this OpenGL 4 Linux game. The latest excitement? Getting automated tests up and running for Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4!
The Enlightenment crew were hard at work during the holidays and today in getting the new year going they've released the first alpha of the Elementary 1.13 library.
So its has been a long time since I published anything Oxygen-KDE related. Well been taking some time off from the extreme amount of responsibility/work Oxygen/KDE was. It was for the best and its great fun seeing Breeze develop its own little magic. They are just great.
I noticed a while ago that the CMake installation variable names used by KDE projects (defined either in kdelibs or KDEInstallDirs in extra-cmake-modules) are inconsistent with what GNUInstallDirs, for example, uses.
Today KDE releases a beta for Plasma 5.2. This release adds a number of new components and improves the existing desktop. We welcome all testers to find and help fix the bugs before our stable release in two weeks' time.
After much research I’ve finally found the right company to make our KDE T-shirts for FOSDEM 2015.
As Lydia described, KDE has many things to offer and many goals to achieve. We are looking for a talented professional who will push the organization, alongside the rest of the Community, and help create the useful technologies of today and tomorrow.
Even though I caught a bad cold (luckily, it was not the flu as I feared at first) I managed to do a lot of prepping for new KDE 5 packages (Frameworks, Plasma, Applications) since last week.
I made 4 snippets for RPM Spec files to get spec skeleton: minimal, library, python-arch, python-noarch. You can start typing one of this, press ENTER and see how this magic works. It’s very useful when you packaging something to avoid calling rpmdev-newspec with parameters, opening editor, manual walking by lines and etc.
Yes. Chrome OS, and its open source variant, Chromium OS, are distributions of the Linux kernel that come packaged with various GNU, open source, and proprietary software. The Linux Foundation lists Chrome OS as a Linux Distribution as does Wikipedia. Even Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman, while he does not approve of Chrome OS's restrictions, recognises it as "a variant of GNU/Linux."
There are many different Linux distributions available, but not all distros are created equal. ITworld has a list of nine Linux distributions that are worth watching in 2015.
I usually don't dig into new distros, unless they have something new to offer. The reason is because there are so many distros that are released everyday that it's challenging, and to some extent, pointless to track them all.
I was not very excited when I decided to download Deepin as I assumed it to be yet another distro. I was wrong. It turned out to be an extremely polished, robust and easy-to-use distribution targeted at traditional Windows or Mac users. So what makes this OS so special? Almost everything.
The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.5.2
The software vendor Red Hat has launched an upgrade to Satellite 5, its lifecycle management tool, continuing support for the software despite the release of version 6 in September.
In this interview, Red Hat CIO Lee Congdon discusses the role he sees for openness and collaboration in the innovation process. Congdon also highlights the benefits offered by the open hybrid cloud model, and shares advice for IT leaders who want to guide their business partners on their journey to the cloud.
With Snappy Ubuntu being out there for atomic upgrades in the cloud and on servers, Fedora 22 is looking to have RPM-OSTree for providing atomic upgrades and server-side composes.
One of the latest features being proposed for implementing in Fedora 22 is rpm-ostree, which allows composing RPMs on a server in an OSTree repository to provide image-like upgrades with package-like flexibility. The rpm-ostree software was started by Project Atomic, an initiative around deploying and managing Docker containers.
After it didn't pan out for Fedora 21, Fedora developers are now looking at having a default local DNS resolver used by Fedora 22 as one of its new features.
One of the Fedora 22 changes being mentioned today is the Direct3D 9 state tracker "Gallium Nine" that landed in Mesa 10.4 that can interface with a patched version of Wine to offer better D3D9 performance on the open-source drivers. This state tracker is an alternative to using Wine's Direct3D to OpenGL translation layer. Users relying upon this state tracker have generally reported very positive results.
While Debian 7.8 was released this weekend, for those living on the bleeding edge the release candidate of the installer for the upcoming Debian 8.0 "Jessie" release is now available.
Recently, Kernel 3.18.2 has been implemented on Ubuntu 15.04, but the final version of the system will most likely ship with Kernel 3.19.
Canonical now has X.Org/X11 applications running on the Ubuntu Phone/Touch via XMir.
The Linux AIO Linux Mint DVD is a project that aims to provide users will a single DVD ISO image that has all the interesting flavors.
A Pi competitor using a MIPS chip with potentially a lot more power and much more uses for makers and hackers
LG showed off an unannounced smartwatch at CES and a hands-on video revealed the device was running webOS. A new report claims LG is planning to release the device in early 2016.
Most companies making smartwatches are looking for ways to differentiate themselves from competitors. Pebble uses an e-paper monochrome LCD display, which allows the device to get up to 7 days of battery life, and it's also one of the few smartwatches that supports both iOS and Android.
Sony updated its decades-old Walkman media player line with an aluminum model running Android 4.2, featuring high-res audio, and priced around $1,120.
The NW-ZX2 is the first Walkman to integrate Sony’s new LDAC codec technology. LDAC provides an enhanced wireless audio experience by transmitting digital audio data “three times more efficiently than previous Bluetooth connections,” says the company.
LG Electronics turned up at last week's CES with a smartwatch that apparently runs webOS.
LG used the watch to unlock an Audi at the show.
"LG has never officially confirmed that we were planning a webOS smartwatch," company spokesperson Ken Hong told TechNewsWorld.
"I think that is speculation based on the watch that Audi announced here at CES, which we developed but have not finalized the OS for," Hong continued.
With the announcement of the Compute Stick, Intel has signaled its intent to battle for market share at the low end of the mobile computing space.
Like existing compute-on-a-stick devices, Intel’s Compute Stick will transform any display with an HDMI port into a fully-functional computer.
The Raspberry Pi credit card-sized personal computer has just been turned into the central driving component of 3D printers, solving one of the biggest issues with home-brewed additive manufacturing machines for the first time ever.
Well it was a fairly quiet week here in the Linux blogosphere, as much of the mainstream tech world staggered directly out of their New Year's revelries and into the halls of CES.
Not that Linux didn't have a presence at the gargantuan show, mind you. It was there, all right -- not just in phones but in TVs, smartwatches and cars, to name just a few examples.
Still, there was no denying that the mega-event left things a little more peaceful than usual for those of us who chose to stay put in the Linux blogosphere, where we could ponder the news at leisure and -- most importantly -- from afar.
CompuLab’s latest tiny, fanless desktop computer is powered by a low-power AMD processor, supports up to 8GB of RAM, and is designed to run Linux Mint or Windows 7 or later.
The Tizen Experts Team and Linux enthusiasts EVERYWHERE (almost everywhere) are delighted to see this moment finally happen.
Samsung has finally announced its first ever Tizen-powered smartphone, though the Samsung Z1 is targeted specifically at the Indian market.
We've been reporting on Samsung's plans to launch a smartphone running on its own OS for several years now, but all we've seen on the Tizen front are smartwatches, cameras, and just recently TVs.
So its now out, actually being sold, finally. Tizen. The latest OS to join the Bloodbath, two years behind schedule and with a totally revised strategy from what it originally promised. But we have one device out now, from Samsung, in one market. Yes, India is the third largest smartphone market globally, thats not a bad thing but now Samsung does need to expand the reach of Tizen, more phones more countries. And the platform does need validation from other hardware makers, so hopefully by next year there will be more than just Samsung making Tizen smartphones. Can the Z1 give Tizen 1% market share by the end of this year. No. That needs more but this is a start and hopefully Sammy is serious about Tizen and gives us more phones in more markets and gives Tizen its full chance.
Having scotched plans to launch a premium flagship handset in Russia last year, Samsung has refocused its Tizen smartphone strategy on accessibility and affordability, choosing to target India first.
Blackberry stock is up over 29% after Reuters reported hit that Samsung was talking about buying the company for $7.5 billion.
Samsung is reportedly interested in Blackberry's patent portfolio.
But the situation isn’t as black and white as Beardsley and Fox-Brewster are suggesting. Ask yourself this question, when was the last time that Samsung, or HTC, or LG posted an update for devices running Android 4.1, 4.2 or 4.3? Obviously, I am unable to keep track of every update pushed out by every company in the world, so I am sure there will be some exceptions to this, but the answer is – rarely.
HTC makes good on its promise to deliver the latest version of Android in a timely manner.
The Replicant project released version 4.2 0003 recently. I have been using Replicant on a Samsung SIII (I9300) for around 14 months now. Since I have blogged about issues with NFC and Wifi earlier, I wanted to give a status update after upgrading to 0003. I’m happy to report that my NFC issue has been resolved in 0003 (the way I suggested; reverting the patch). My issues with Wifi has been improved in 0003, with my merge request being accepted. What follows below is a standalone explanation of what works and what doesn’t, as a superset of similar things discussed in my earlier blog posts.
CES is the proving ground for many new innovations in technology. Here are the Google and Android trends you need to know from CES 2015.
Whether you’re a CSS rookie or frontend virtuoso, frameworks can be used effectively during the early stages of development. Crafting a website from scratch is sometimes useful and oftentimes necessary. But it’s not the only solution in this wacky open source wonderland.
ABC’s Shark Tank is a US television show and a favorite among American entrepreneurs. Each week, business owners offer up a piece of their equity in exchange for cash from savvy and respected investors. It’s exciting to see entrepreneurs get their dreams funded — but what do these contestants have in common? And although a majority are using WordPress, what other platforms and CMSs are these businesses running on?
Lumicall, the free, open source and secure alternative to Viber and Skype.
Tor is apparently no longer a safe place to run a marketplace for illegal goods and services. With the alleged operator of the original Silk Road marketplace, Ross Ulbricht, now going to trial, the arrest of his alleged successor and a number of others in a joint US-European law enforcement operation, and the seizure of dozens of servers that hosted "hidden services" on the anonymizing network, the operators of the latest iteration of Silk Road have packed their tents and moved to a new territory: the previously low-profile I2P anonymizing network.
The Google developers have been keeping themselves busy and they've released a new stable version of the Google Chrome browser that comes with an updated Flash (not for Linux) and a few other changes and fixes.
Today in Linux news Jim Mendenhall discusses whether Chrome OS is a Linux distribution. In other news, Konrad Zapaà âowicz said contributing to the Linux kernel is easier that one might imagine and another Linus quote is making headlines. Elsewhere, Danny Stieben compares Linux to BSD and OpenSource.com is wondering which distro you use.
Mozilla has announced that a new version of the Firefox browser, 35.0, has been released and is now available for download. As usual, the new release is full of interesting changes and improvements, although it's not all that exciting.
who has been a contributor for many years. Vineel is raising money for Collab House, a Collaborative Community Space in India which has been used for many Mozilla India events and other open source projects.
The Adobe Flash Player plugin that's bundled with Google Chrome is in the form of a PPAPI (or Pepper Plugin API) plugin and Mozilla isn't interested in adding support for it. Because of this, Rinat Ibragimov has developed Fresh Player Plugin, a wrapper that allows Linux users to use Pepper Flash from Google Chrome in Firefox and other NPAPI-compatible browsers.
The new update to Firefox 35 is available on PCLinuxOS and OpenMandriva.
I have been expecting this update because it includes Hello, the new video-call feature from Mozilla.
When open source projects grow, their governance models must evolve to support them. We’ve written on the governance of the OpenStack project before, but an important event taking place this week is to make some modifications that might make a big difference.
Basho was once a rising star in the NoSQL space, but over time other vendors began to move in, and it lost a step or two — then came a big turnover of key personnel last year. With the company ready to start anew, CEO Adam Wray says a new $25M cash infusion should help get Basho moving.
At MakeUseOf, we cover Linux quite a bit as the “alternative” to Windows and Mac OS X. However, those aren’t the only three operating systems out there — there’s also the BSD family of Unix-like operating systems, which are technically speaking different from Linux.
In the name of fair competition, it’s time that we gave BSD operating systems some recognition as well. And there’s no better way to do that than to compare them against Linux. What’s different about BSD operating systems, and should you be running it instead of Linux? How does Linux and the best BSD desktop OS, PC-BSD, compare on the desktop?
Users of DragonFlyBSD on the desktop (or otherwise using sound on this popular BSD platform) will benefit from the next major update of the operating system.
DragonFlyBSD has pulled in the sound system from the FreeBSD 11 development code and it offers a huge improvement over the previous code, which was from FreeBSD 6.x.
With this new sound system update there's smarter volume controls, improved HDMI/DisplayPort audio, an easy way to switch the default sound device, and HTML5/YouTube videos should now play with sound out-of-the-box. There's also new hardware support with this new sound update.
These beautiful badges come in four different styles, each with three color schemes to pick from. They're perfect for sharing on social media or embedding on your Web site or blog, and we've provided embed code that links back to pages that will help new people get acquainted with free software.
A few days ago, the Free Software Foundation announced a new video explaining Free software in simple terms. The video named User Liberation is 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a way to explain what Free Software is all about. Unfortunately several of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did not make sense to show it to them.
A new version of RcppGSL is now on CRAN today. This package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL using our Rcpp.
Lua 5.3 was released today with a variety of new features for this lightweight scripting language.
The big ticket items for Lua 5.3 is support for integers, official support for 32-bit numbers, bitwise operators, basic UTF-8 support, and functions to pack/unpack values.
Fabless processor company Allwinner Technology Co. Ltd. (Zhuhai, China) has been accused of violating the GNU General Public License (GPL) under which Linux is distributed.
The alleged violations are within the software development kits that support the writing of software for some of Allwinner's 32-bit system-chips, according to Linux-Sunxi, a community of open-source developers that has formed around the Allwinner SoCs. The Linux kernel is at the heart of the Android operating system, and therefore a significant factor in the tablet computer market which has been a key part of Allwinner's business to date.
A startup called Comingle is trying to raise $50,000 to launch The Mod, a "multivibrating open-source dildo." OK, you've got my attention.
You are invited to participate in a mapping event with OpenStreetMap (OSM) that will kick off on January 16, 2015 called #MapLesotho Mapathon! Last year, we had 5 out of 50,000 American OSM users participate. By contrast Germany had over 200 and Poland over 40. Let’s show the world that America can map with OSM!
"A real coder doesn't use an IDE, a real coder uses [insert a text editor name here] with such and such plugins." We all heard that somewhere. Yet, as much as one can agree with that statement, an IDE remains quite useful. An IDE is easy to set up and use out of the box. Hence there is no better way to start coding a project from scratch. So for this post, let me present you with my list of good IDEs for C/C++ on Linux. Why is C/C++ specifically? Because C is my favorite language, and we need to start somewhere. Also note that there are in general a lot of ways to code in C, so in order to trim down the list, I only selected "real out-of-the-box IDE", not text editors like Gedit or Vim pumped with plugins. Not that this alternative is bad in any way, just that the list will go on forever if I include text editors.
Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion among authors protesting at dropping definitions of words like ‘acorn’ and ‘buttercup’ in favour of ‘broadband’ and ‘cut and paste’
Academic achievement hasn't improved much, so why are college-goers getting higher GPAs than ever before?
The average shopper likely thinks Amazon has the lowest prices anywhere on the web.
That's not always true. In fact, Amazon will tweak its prices many times per hour (equaling millions of individual price changes per day), taking advantage of the psychology of price perception.
I am COO of a London-based startup, Eris Industries, that specialises in distributed computing. Hence, cryptography is involved. If the UK bans proper E2E encryption we are going to pack our bags for more liberal climes such as Germany, the U.S., the People’s Republic of China, Zimbabwe, or Iraq.
While the SCAP technologies are interesting, they have limited value without security content – the actual set of security tests run by SCAP. Fortunately there is a good set of content available that can be used as a starting point.
A report [pdf link] recently released by Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) details only the second known cyberattack that has resulted in physical damage. According to the report, hackers accessed a steel mill's production network via the corporate network, following a spear-phishing attack. This then allowed them access to a variety of production controls, culminating in the attackers' control of a blast furnace, which prevented it from being shut down in a "regulated manner." The end result? "Massive damage to the system."
Please do not be distracted by the array of reputational attacks – including that he is everything from a rapist, megalomaniac and a traitor - that have been made on Mr Assange. The claims are entirely irrelevant and have no bearing on his fundamental human rights or the right to the presumption of innocence. Indeed Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks, has been trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for two and a half years. He has not been charged with any crime. Wikileaks has extensively exposed the US military’s crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, including its killing of journalists - and the USA’s ongoing efforts to oust democratic governments. The Swedes have used sexual assault allegations against Assange which are based on ridiculously flimsy evidence as a pretext to do the USA’s dirty work. Highlighting Sweden’s gross hypocrisy and its true motives in the Assange case, in 2001, US agents sexually assaulted two “rendition” victims in Stokholm in the presence of Swedish officials. Nobody has been prosecuted for it. One positive outcome of Assange having challenged Sweden’s efforts to extradite him for questioning is that it forced the UK High Court to describe the allegations against him. I strongly encourage people to read the court’s account (paragraphs 74-76 and 93 in particular). Under normal circumstances (i.e. when US “security interests” are not involved) allegations based on such weak evidence would get tossed by a legal system with any respect for the accused’s presumption of innocence. The only credible reason Swedish prosecutors have not dismissed them (as they initially did) is to punish Assange for his work with Wikileaks. There is even less excuse for Sweden’s refusal to question Assange via Skype or by travelling to the UK. Swedish authorities recently questioned a professional hockey player via Skype regarding assault allegations so that he wouldn’t miss a game. I learned about that from the Wikileaks Twitter account many UK liberals would like everyone to ignore.
Taken at face value, his words imply much, much more. As well as those chat apps, encrypted email would be affected. The UK government might be able to use warrants to twist the arm of big companies like Google and Microsoft to hand over encryption keys for specific users, but it won't be able to do anything about users of smaller services that have been set up specifically to avoid that eventuality. And what about PGP, Tor and OpenVPN? Even HTTPS could be a problem, since soon many sites will be using certificates provided by the Let's Encrypt project, and unlike companies providing such services, it will doubtless be unwilling to hand over anything to British government.
But in an era when communication takes many forms, and with the added problem that much of this communication is encrypted, how easy is it to turn this sound bite into reality?
[...]
"Encryption is mathematics, not technology. It can't be suppressed by law," Mr Bloch told the BBC.
Whatever route the government elected in the UK in May decides to go, Prof Woodward hopes that it will listen carefully to the technology industry.
"The government will need to take a lot of wide-ranging advice as this has the potential to go spectacularly wrong."
It is also worth noting, he added, that the men involved in the Paris shootings were known to the authorities and had been under surveillance until it was deemed that the threat from them had lessened.
"The security forces need better resources not more powers."
Of course, that is impossible. You cannot 'always' be able to open, read, or find a record of a communication. Nor should it be compulsory for you and I to record every time time we talk to someone, online or offline. But we should take a moment to consider what Cameron might actually be proposing.
On Monday David Cameron managed a rare political treble: he proposed a policy that is draconian, stupid and economically destructive.
The prime minister made comments widely interpreted as proposing a ban on end-to-end encryption in messages – the technology that protects online communications, shopping, banking, personal data and more.
“[I]n our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?”, the prime minister asked rhetorically.
Sorry, but that's not a system, it's a bit of red tape. A pathetic formality lies between the government and access to the most sensitive personal communications data ever amassed. The content -- not just the metadata -- of your phone and email conversations, your instant messaging and literally anything else you can think of. It's all fair game in Cameron's eyes. Strong encryption may well face some sort of ban or prohibition. The intimate details of your internet activity could be watched over at will.
It’s the new NSA director saying that the alleged damage from the leaks was way overblown.
Politicians and Beltway commentators are today consumed in a debate over whether President Obama, in failing to attend the march in Paris, failed to show solidarity with the victims of the terror attack and the cause of free speech in general.
It was almost inevitable that the Communications Data Bill, aka the Snoopers’ Charter, would be called for once again in the aftermath of the attacks in Paris. Having regenerated a number of times since the powers were first mooted in 2007 under a Labour Government, the powers have proved to continuously be controversial due to their un-targeted nature.
I watch with alarm as, in the wake of the barbaric murders in France, politicians seek increased surveillance powers for the security services.
It is not just libertarians who are dismayed by the growing calls for the return of the Snooper’s Charter in response to events in Paris, but anyone who has studied the reality of recent terrorist atrocities and the role of intelligence and surveillance.
The Charlie Hebdo shooters — just like the murderers of Lee Rigby and the Boston bombing suspects — were known to the authorities, and had been for years, linked with known groups.
James Risen, a New York Times reporter, will not be called to testify at a leak trial scheduled to begin this week, lawyers said Monday, ending a seven-year legal fight over whether he could be forced to identify his confidential sources.
The Justice Department wanted Mr. Risen to testify at the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer charged with providing him details about a botched operation in Iran that was intended to disrupt that country’s nuclear program. Mr. Sterling had raised concerns inside the government about the program, and prosecutors suspect he took those concerns to Mr. Risen, who described the program in his 2006 book, “State of War.”
Twelve jurors and two alternates, an even mix of men and women, will hear the case in a trial that is expected to last three weeks. Prosecutors released a witness list that includes Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser, as well as several C.I.A. operatives who will testify behind screens and reveal only their first names and last initials.
The James Risen saga is basically over, but ended in a bizarre way. As you hopefully recall, this case goes back many years, and involves the DOJ trying to convict Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA official, of leaking info to Risen. However, Risen has made the compelling case that the DOJ's desire to involve him was an attempt to punish him for earlier work he'd done exposing questionable practices by the intelligence community -- and specifically to force Risen to give up a source, so that future whistleblowers can't trust him. This backfired massively, as Risen fought this entirely, promising never to give up his source, even as the issue went up the Supreme Court (which refused to hear the case), but technically ended with a court saying Risen had to give up his source. Risen still insisted that he would not, and he'd go to jail if he had to. This put Attorney General Eric Holder in a bit of a bind, as he'd promised not to put reporters in jail. Thus, last month, Holder blinked, saying the DOJ would not force Risen to give up his source. However, he was still supposed to testify, just not on that.
The Espionage Act is a bad law -- but here's why the former CIA director needs to be prosecuted for violating it
While the hacks on Monday appeared relatively superficial and limited to CENTCOM’s presence on third-party social media sites, the proposals from Obama targeted incidents where digital intruders access the inner workings of a company’s computer systems and steal personal data. When companies get hacked like this, executives, employees, law enforcement, and contractors can often find out about the incident long before the customers whose data has been breached.
Obama today called for a single federal standard on notifying customers that their data has been breached, within 30 days of the hack.
To be fair, he wasn’t wholly responsible. If it wasn’t for all the lunacy that preceded him, I probably would have dismissed his cartoon as just another Herald Sun atrocity, more a piece of Murdoch-madness to be mocked rather than trigger for outrage.
But context is everything. And after days of sanctimonious blather about freedom of speech and the Enlightenment values of Western civilisation, his was one pencil-warfare cartoon too many.
The cartoon in question depicts two men – masked and armed Arab terrorists (is there any other kind of Arab?) – with a hail of bomb-like objects raining down on their heads. Only the bombs aren’t bombs. They are pens, pencils and quills.
Get it? In the face of a medieval ideology that only understands the language of the gun, the West – the heroic, Enlightenment-inspired West – responds by reaffirming its commitment to resist barbarism with the weapons of ideas and freedom of expression.
It is a stirring narrative repeated ad nauseam in newspapers across the globe. They have been filled with depictions of broken pencils re-sharpened to fight another day, or editorials declaring that we will defeat terrorism by our refusal to stop mocking Islam.
“Never again.” This was the vow of many lawmakers and government officials when the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its long-awaited so-called “torture report” examining the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the CIA under the Bush administration.
Top U.S. Department of Justice officials violated policy in suspending two prosecutors involved in the botched case against the late Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a federal board ruled this month in declaring the discipline invalid.
Make no mistake: whatever the news may say about the changing cast of characters the US is fighting and the changing motivations behind the changing names of our military "operations" around the world, you and I will have fought in the same war. It's hard to believe that you will be taking us into the 14th year of the Global War on Terror (whatever they may be calling it now). I wonder which one of the 668 US military bases worldwide you'll be sent to.
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The number of non-combatants killed since 9/11 across the Greater Middle East in our ongoing war has been breathtaking and horrifying. Be prepared, when you fight, to take out more civilians than actual gun-toting or bomb-wielding "militants." At the least, an estimated 174,000 civilians died violent deaths as a result of US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan between 2001 and April 2014. In Iraq, over 70% of those who died are estimated to have been civilians. So get ready to contend with needless deaths and think about all those who have lost friends and family members in these wars, and themselves are now scarred for life. A lot of people who once would never have thought about fighting any type of war or attacking Americans now entertain the idea. In other words, you will be perpetuating war, handing it off to the future.
President Obama today called for an end to state laws that restrict the rights of cities and towns to build their own broadband networks.
In a report titled, "Community-based broadband solutions: The benefits of competition and choice for community development and highspeed Internet access," the White House said it wants to "end laws that harm broadband service competition."
The Linux community has pressured the GOG developers to remove the password-protected archives that were present in a number of their games, making the contents of those titles accessible to all the platforms.
Senators are now working around the clock to re-introduce a bill that would put trade agreements on the fast track to passage in the US after those deals are finalized. Deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) have been negotiated in almost complete secrecy, except for private industry advocates serving on trade advisory committees who can read and comment on these texts. That has enabled these agreements to include extreme copyright and other digital policy provisions that would bind all signatory nations to draconian rules that would hinder free speech, privacy, and access to knowledge. Under fast track, also referred to as Trade Promotion Authority, lawmakers would only have a small window of time to conduct hearings over binding trade provisions and give an up-or-down vote on ratification of the agreement without any ability to amend it before they bind the United States to its terms.
One of the many big problems with TTIP is the lack of democracy: it is being negotiated behind closed doors, with virtually no input from the public. The texts will be made available once the negotiations are complete, at which point it will not be possible to make changes. Even the national parliaments will be limited to a simple yes or no vote.
A long running legal battle between the world's largest record labels and an Irish-based ISP has resumed today. Sony, Universal and Warner want UPC to warn and disconnect subscribers found sharing infringing content online but the ISP doesn't want to foot the bill.
The mandatory piracy notifications that were implemented to deter copyright infringement in Canada have boosted the interest in anonymous file-sharing tools. Data from Google reveals a massive increase in searches for VPNs over the past two weeks, while VPN providers see a surge in traffic and sales.