The training which started Monday would avail the participants the opportunity to acquire basic knowledge on Linux operating system.
Next-gen GNU/Linux, what does that even mean? The FOSS world is so unlike the proprietary world. In that closed universe, new releases are considered so important that secrecy becomes paramount. So the next-gen release of Windows becomes so crucial. With FOSS and Linux development everything is laid bare. Sensible folk stick with the stable release but the brave-hearted can jump into an unstable, development branch and compile where angels fear to tread.
Long story short, Windows 10 feels like a beta for an early version of Android, a consumer operating system that is designed to be on-line all the time. It does not feel like an operating system I would use to get work done. In fact, other than watching movies, browsing the web or listening to music, I don’t think I would find Windows 10 particularly useful. At least not without the on-line account stuff being removed and the package manager(s) fixed. Forcing users to sign up for an on-line account is a sure way to tell us privacy is not a concern and the alternative, downloading applications from the web, is a sure way to introduce malware.
However, Jesse Smith, of Distrowatch.com fame, said Microsoft isn't making it easy to find the download, but it is possible and he did it. The installer was simple enough except for the partitioner, which was quite limited and almost scary. After finally getting into Windows 10, Smith said the layout was "sparce" without a lot of the distractions folks hated about 7. The menu is back and the start screen is gone. A new package manager looks a lot like Ubuntu's and Android's according to Smith, but requires an online Microsoft account to use. Smith concludes in part, "Windows 10 feels like a beta for an early version of Android, a consumer operating system that is designed to be on-line all the time. It does not feel like an operating system I would use to get work done."
Now that everyone has had time to examine Windows 10, it seems like a good time to finally do a proper Windows vs. Linux showdown. After all, I waited until Windows caught up in turns of features and user interface. For the sake of common sense, I've decided to use Ubuntu as our default Linux release.
In this article, I'll hammer out the features for both platforms and compare them accordingly. Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses, and this article will help to shed some light on each of them.
The icon theme of an operating system has more importance than people might imagine. Microsoft has updated the icons for the latest Windows 10 preview and they actually look terrible and they lack consistency. We listed a few Linux ones for a better comparison.
This morning, Dell has announced that their Developer Edition line of Linux-powered laptops is getting a pretty significant revamp. In addition to an upgraded XPS-13 Developer Edition based on Dell’s 2015 XPS-13 refresh, the line is adding a piece of workstation-class hardware: the Dell Precision M3800 mobile workstation, Developer Edition.
They said in working up hardware, they carefully designed the laptop "chip by chip" to work with open source software. The 4.4-pound laptop runs Linux. This is a GNU-based distribution, more specifically, the Trisquel GNU/Linux, "the strictest of distributions and strips all binary blobs from the Linux kernel." At the same time, they said laptop owners, if they want, can easily install anything less strict, such as Debian and Ubuntu. The machine has a 15.6" display in either 1920x1080 or 3840x2160 with a 60Hz refresh rate, 720p camera and HD Audio. It has a CD/DVD ROM drive. They used Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200. It has a 48 Wh lithium polymer battery with about eight hours of usage.
Chromebooks, the lightweight, web-focused laptops from Google (GOOG) that ship with the mostly open source ChromeOS, have ironically not tended to play overly nicely with other Linux distributions. But now that's changed, thanks to updates from Google that make it easier to boot and install any open source Linux operating system on the devices.
A Finnish group of phone developers, hoping to get the world interested in modular smartphones, has proposed a nifty idea for re-using their phone motherboards: turn them into clusters.
Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux kernel version 3.18 in time for the holidays. In his mail, Linus noted that the previous RC, release candidate 7, had been “tiny” (in terms of changes and bugfixes), so it was time to get the final release out. The latest kernel includes support for storing AMD Radeon GPU buffers in regular application memory (building upon similar work done by Intel for kernel 3.16), and overlayfs (which we have covered previously), amongst a number of other less interesting new features. A full summary is provided at Kernel Newbies.
In the past few days when begining to deliver a number of initial Linux tests from Intel's new Broadwell processors, a number of Phoronix readers have inquired about the OpenCL and VA-API support for the new hardware.
Vivaldi is a new web browser based on Chromium / Blink, especially created for users who "have problems fitting all their open tabs on one screen". The browser is developed by Vivaldi Technologies, whose chief executive and founder is John von Tetzchner, former Opera CEO and co-founder.
Pump.io is a "social server with an ActivityStreams API". It’s from the same people that originally created StatusNet, which has now become GNU social. Pump.io servers are nodes in a federated social network: when you have an account on one, you can interact with others on that server, but also others with accounts on other pump.io servers. It’s free software, so you can host your own instance and connect to others, wherever their servers may be.
The Opera team has just released the first stable edition of the Opera browser in 2015 and the application is now at version 27 and change. A couple of new major features have been implemented and a ton of smaller fixes have been added.
Not everyone uses the Raspberry Pi while it’s hooked up to a monitor like a normal PC. Due to its size and portability, it can be located almost anywhere that it can be powered and it’s widely used as a file server, media centre and for other nontraditional applications. Some of these uses won’t easily allow access to a monitor for easy updates and maintenance. While you can always SSH in, it’s a bit slower than a full web interface that allows for custom commands and a view of the Pi’s performance. We’re using software called RaspCTL, which is still in development, but works just fine for now.
Wine-Staging is the initiative to serve as a staging area for new Wine code not yet ready for proper mainline acceptance, inspired in part by the Linux kernel's staging area. Wine-Staging has already landed the Direct3D CSMT patches for improving performance along with NVIDIA CUDA and GPU PhysX support, among other experimental functionality.
Grim Fandango Remastered, a remake of the original Grim Fandango game developed by LucasArts, has been released for the Linux platform.
It was brought up today in the forums that it's been three years of having a new LGP CEO while Linux Game Publishing's website remains down for the better part of the year, their web presence is disappearing, and it simply doesn't look like there's a bright 2015 ahead for this one leading provider of games to Linux.
There wasn't anything like Grim Fandango when it first came out in 1998. Nearly two decades later, there's still nothing that comes close.
Homeworld Remastered is a collection of games that contains Homeworld Remastered Edition and Homeworld 2 Remastered Edition that have been released by Gearbox. Linux users are now trying to make enough waves so that the studio hears their plea for a port.
It's quite hard to contain my excitement about this game, but as always we will give it a fair look and tell you what we think about Dying Light. This is not a full review, but a look at what you can expect with the game right now on Linux.
The KDE Community announced that Plasma, the desktop for the KDE project, is now at version 5.2 and the developers have made a number of important changes and improvements.
The ever-amazing Plasma team from KDE just put out a new release of Plasma. I won’t spend much describing how big of an improvement it is – the release announcement at KDE has all the details needed to whet your appetite.
And of course, now it’s the turn of distributions to get out packages for the users at large.
Version 0.21 of the widely-used, GUI-based GNOME Partition Editor is now available.
GParted 0.21 key changes according to its developers include a fix for a off by one sector error with GParted's internal block copy, support for EXT4 file-systems on RHEL/CentOS 5.x, and removing unnecessary duplicate actions when resizing a partition.
The latest snapshot of this rolling release distribution includes initial support for UEFI, the KDE 4.14 desktop, systemd version 218 and the Qupzilla web browser. I mention Qupzilla because I feel it is a rare gem in the open source world, a quick capable browser that perhaps does not get the attention it deserves. KaOS is available in just one edition, a 64-bit x86 build. The ISO we download for KaOS is 1.6GB in size. x
4MLinux is not your average Linux distribution, in fact it's not really even a 'single' distribution in the usual sense either. There is an allinone edition and until this past week there were media, game, rescue, server and multiboot editions.
4MLinux Allinone Edition, a Linux distro that encompasses multiple tools for Maintenance (system rescue Live CD), Multimedia (e.g. playing video DVDs), Miniserver (using the inetd daemon), and Mystery (Linux games), is finally out of the Beta stages and has reached version 11.0.
Hold on to your (red) hats. Fedora 22, the next iteration of the "move fast and break things" version of Linux sponsored by Red Hat, is set to arrive on May 19. After the multiple editions introduced in the previous Fedora, what's in store this time?
The answer lies with the proposals received by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo), whose deadline for proposed changes passed last week. Here are some of the more notable and head-turning proposals for Fedora 22 that seem most likely to make it to the final product.
For those experienced with Linux kernel development and looking for new employment, Red Hat is soliciting offers for a job working on maintaining Fedora's kernel.
Fedimg’s EC2 service has matured quite nicely, and I’m confident that it will be quite helpful as we get closer to the Fedora 22 release date. Still, there’s more to do. After speaking with gholms in #fedora-cloud, I’ve realized that there will need to be at least six different AMI types created for each image. These six types can be seen in this section in the docs. This was a big reason for all the refactoring I did to the EC2 service for this new release — I needed to pave the way for registering each image as many different kinds of AMIs. The added multithreading will help with that, too. Because of the important role of EC2, adding support for these AMI types is probably higher priority than finally adding OpenStack support (a task I’ve been holding off on for some time now).
As you might have seen Paul blog about, Red Hat has an immediate opening for a Fedora kernel maintainer position on my team. This is actually a fairly rare thing, as we don't have a lot of churn in our department and most of the engineering positions we hire for are primarily RHEL roles. If you have kernel experience and love working on fast-paced and frequently updated kernels, then this might be a good role for you.
It is hard to see the direction Devuan will take, given that the project is still in its early days. The new community could create a shallow derivative, or it could fork the entire Debian archive. Another option is to try replacing Debian entirely and become a new gateway between upstream projects and users of all packages, which would require a lot more manpower and infrastructure.
Unity 8 for Ubuntu is coming along and Mir is also making good progress. One of the byproduct of all these improvements is that some of the apps that are designed for the Ubuntu Touch are also working on the Ubuntu desktop, with very little help.
About a year and a half after I started writing the openstack-debian-images package, I’m very happy to announce to everyone that, thanks to Steve McIntyre’s help, the official OpenStack Debian image is now generated at the same time as the official Debian CD ISO images. If you are a cloud user, if you use OpenStack on a private cloud, or if you are a public cloud operator, then you may want to download the weekly build of the OpenStack image from here:
In the meantime, even if Meizu was the first company to confirm the release of an Ubuntu phone, it looks like Bq beat them to the punch, although they are aiming at different users. The specs detailed by Canonical show that Aquarius E4.5 is an affordable device with medium hardware specs. It doesn't seem like much, but it's addressed at people who don't want to spend too much on a high-end phone, but still want to own a smartphone.
Mobie is a new kind of 2-in-1 tablet developed in Finland that is capable to dual-boot Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Windows 8.1. It's being launched in a couple of months and it already looks very good, at least on paper.
Eurotech’s “CPU-351-13ââ¬Â³ SBC runs Linux on Freescale’s i.MX6 SoC, and offers ZigBee, GPS, extended temperature operation, remote IoT management, and more.
Axiomtek announced a rugged, Linux-friendly box PC based on a quad-core 2GHz Celeron SoC, and featuring multiple display outputs, serial ports, and PCI slots.
Smart Electronics is prepping a tiny $26 open-source “Black Swift” SBC that runs OpenWRT on an Atheros AR9331 and offers WiFi, dual micro-USB, and header I/O.
Variscite unveiled a Linux-friendly, SODIMM-style COM based on TI’s Sitara AM437x, supporting the updated SoC’s quad-core Programmable Real-time Unit (PRU).
The VAR-SOM-AM43 is the first computer-on-module we’ve seen to use the Texas Instruments Sitara AM437x, a single-core Cortex-A9 system-on-chip that clocks to 1GHz. Last month, Adeneo announced an Android 4.4 BSP for TI’s Sitara AM437x development platform. Variscite is supporting its VAR-SOM-AM43 with a Yocto Linux, and soon, Android-ready hardware/software development kit of its own, which includes a VAR-AM43 CustomBoard development board, touchscreens, cables, and more
Android continued, in the Q3 2014, to dominate the market according to IDC, having gained 84.4% of the market by the end of the quarter, compared to 81.2% for the same period in 2013.
The Australian video on demand market kicked things up a notch over the Australia Day long weekend, with both the official launch of StreamCo's Stan service and Foxtel turning on Android tablet support for Presto.
Cyanogen Chief Executive Kirt McMaster is taking the first shot in a revolt against Google.
The startup wants to make Android a completely open platform, according to Android Authority.
"We're attempting to take Android away from Google," said McMaster, during The Information's "Next Phase of Android" event in San Francisco on Thursday evening.
The iPhone has always been, the consensus goes, the rich man's phone. iOS customers earn more than Android users. They spend more on apps and on in-app purchases. And advertising rates are higher.
Google and Core Security are at odds over the severity of a vulnerability affecting a number of Android mobile devices, details of which were released by the security vendor today.
The first modular smartphone kit to arrive under the Project Ara banner should be launched later this year. While we wait on the big occasion, we thought you’d like to know that developers are working on the modules that will actually let you achieve device customization.
Android and iOS will forever be a battle in the mobile industry. As long as Apple keeps making devices and Google maintains Android, there will be battle to have. But there are some key features that Android 5.0 Lollipop has that iOS wishes it had. Welcome to our 7 Reasons why Android 5.0 Lollipop is better than iOS 8!
A bundled microSD card arrives preinserted into the rear of the CuBox-i, and it’s loaded with a version of Google’s Android operating system. Interestingly, SolidRun has gone to the effort of seeking the certifications required to load the Google Apps suite onto the card, meaning users receive Google Mail, YouTube, Google Maps and full access to Google Play straight out of the box. An even newer build, based on the latest Android 4.4 KitKat branch, can be downloaded from SolidRun’s website and provides an entirely useable desktop Android experience.
APUS Group, a seven-month-old Chinese company that develops Android utility apps for the global market, has confirmed that it has raised $100 million in new funding. The company’s Series B round, word of which got out in China earlier this month, will be used to develop new services and grow its reach in global markets like the U.S., Brazil, India and Russia.
We spend a lot of time talking about Lollipop and OS-level issues with Android -- but you know what's just as important as the operating system on your phone or tablet? The apps that surround it.
The right apps can make your device easier and more enjoyable to use. They can give it powers you didn't know were possible. They can make it feel like your own custom-tailored gadget -- whether you've been using it for two minutes or for two years.
As concerns for privacy and data security accompany the use of free cloud services, users and small businesses might be better served by installing the open source package ownCloud.
IT professionals are expected to move away from proprietary to open source software in 2015, according to new research.
A survey by Ponemon Institute and Zimbra shows 67 per cent of EMEA IT professionals agree that commercial open source software offers better business continuity.
74 per cent in the US also agree open source is better for business continuity, compared to propriety software.
NIST has partnered with the private sector to develop the next-generation open source control software for quantum information systems.
Online torrent repository IsoHunt has launched a $100,000 (€£66,000) competition to encourage open-source development of The Old Pirate Bay, the popular torrent site set up in the wake of The Pirate Bay's shutdown.
The unprecedented move to offer prize money will mean that an open-source community will be responsible for developing the site rather than a closed team, therefore making the site more difficult to take down.
One of the Achilles heels of administrators of Big Data and cloud computing deployments is that disk/server failure rates occur on up to 10 percent of systems annually. That failure rate calls for data replication strategies and use of services for replication.
Inkscape similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X is an Open Source, free and uses the W3C SVG file-format as its native file format. The latest stable version is 0.48.5 that was released last year. The app is very nice and easy to use.
When I look back at my years working in open source, I realize how much conferences have helped my career. Back when I was an editor at Linux Pro Magazine, I met dozens of writers in person at conferences, which almost always improved our working relationships, and I recruited countless new and first-time authors. Watching other speakers and then meeting them after their sessions helped inspire me to get past my stage fright (with a dash of imposter syndrome) and start speaking at events. I've also forged friendships at conferences that are now almost as old as my career. And I've met more than one person who ended up being a future employer.
Guix will be present at FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium, with a talk entitled "The Emacs of Distros" this Saturday, at 3PM, in room H.1302.
Networking is an important part of any modern datacenter. As open source continues to grow in virtualization solutions, virtualized networking is an important part of the picture. MidoNet, an open source network virtualization platform for Infrastructure-as-a-serivice (IaaS) clouds like OpenStack cloud software, is gaining traction as a way to implement networking solutions.
Two companies have started working on a full-featured version of the free office suite LibreOffice for Android. They hope to have a beta version available in March.
Subsonic is a nice free, multi-platform web based media streamer, make large collection of music handling easy. You can share music with your frineds or stream your favorite music anywhere. You can stream to multiple players simultaneously.
While Smith’s characterization of Washington as “incredibly entrepreneurial” may be a tad optimistic, she did appear sincere in her support for promoting the use of open source development, and introducing a culture of “APIs, not RFPs.”
Echoing a mantra of executives at Google X, Smith also expressed a desire to find ways for the government to exhibit the sort of technological prowess that normally occurs only in wartime. She also emphasized that she and her deputy, former Twitter lawyer Alex Macgillivray, want to reduce the sort of regulatory morass that can inhibit innovation.
LaChappelle, from Colorado, taught himself robotics after meeting a 7-year-old girl at the state science fair who had a prosthetic arm that she told him cost $80,000. He's refined his technique since he built his first prosthetic arm (with LEGOs, no less), combining 3D printing and open-source software to allow others to download and work with his designs.
Makers, developers and hobbyists that have considered adding advanced machine vision to their project may be interested in a new small affordable and expandable development board called the OpenMV Cam.
Boom Boom personal home speaker adds 3D recording capabilities, ups its long-term value
We’ve all heard about big data; over the past few years, many companies have invested in Hadoop, NoSQL, and data warehouses, to collect and store massive volumes of new data. Even when based on open source platforms like Hadoop, these investments can easily measure in the millions of dollars for large companies with new hardware, new staff, and untold person-hours spent implementing new systems and procedures.
As a result, Finland’s government has invested heavily in the country’s startup scene, resulting in some major post-Nokia success stories such as billion dollar startups Rovio and Supercell.
The Lizard Squad hackers’ group has claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s outage on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook officials, however, denied it was a hack attack, saying it occurred after they introduced a change affecting configuration systems.
Today we released Plasma 5.2 and this new release comes with two fixes for security vulnerabilities in our screen locker implementation. As I found, exploited, reported and fixed these vulnerabilities I decided to put them a little bit into context.
The first vulnerability concerns our QtQuick user interface for the lock screen. Through the Look and Feel package it was possible to send the login information to a remote location. That’s pretty bad but luckily also only a theoretical problem: we have not yet implemented a way to install new Look and Feel packages from the Internet. So we found the issue before any harm was done.
Incident happened almost three years ago but gag order on Google kept the search giant silent
Google handed over data belonging to WikiLeaks to the US Government, but was not allowed to tell the group for almost three years.
A "profiteering" care agency took hundreds of pounds from low-paid carers who were desperate for work, a BBC London investigation has found.
HCA Professionals, based in Barking, east London, promised carers jobs if they paid for unnecessary and "highly unprofessional" training.
Criminal record checks were charged for but not submitted and work did not materialise, but cash was not returned.
The company, run by Chris Rigland, denies all wrongdoing.
Witte ends his article with Greek economist George Pagoulatos warning that Syriza's voters "are not ready to accept the kind of compromise that the situation requires." Witte describes Pagoulatos as "a former government adviser," but doesn't note that the governments he advised presided over some of the worst economic performance in Greece's history, from November 2011 to June 2012. Perhaps voters might be forgiven for being skeptical of the benefits of the kind of compromises that Pagoulatos thinks are required (Beat the Press, 1/25/15).
The race for Rupert Murdoch's endorsement is on as potential presidential candidates line up to seek political support from the owner of Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.
Murdoch has long been a major political player whose media companies play a substantial role shaping the debate. Last year he declared that Fox News had "absolutely saved" the Republican Party by giving "voice and hope to people who didn't like all that liberal championing thrown at them on CNN." Prominent politicians on the national and international stage regularly seek out Murdoch's opinion and approval.
The political network organized by Charles and David Koch plans to spend an incredible $889 million to capture the White House in 2016 and deepen the Koch party's bench in Congress. But that's not what they'll tell federal regulators.
The BBC has learned that Facebook has complied with a Turkish court order demanding the blocking of a page it said offended the Prophet Muhammad.
If the social media platform had refused, the court had threatened to block access to the entire site.
The site is believed to have around 40 million members in Turkey.
TalkTalk says customers who have not yet chosen whether to activate net filters must opt out of its safety system if they wish to continue viewing adult material online.
The Drug Enforcement Administration has initiated a massive national license plate reader program with major civil liberties concerns but disclosed very few details, according to new DEA documents obtained by the ACLU through the Freedom of Information Act.
The DEA is currently operating a National License Plate Recognition initiative that connects DEA license plate readers with those of other law enforcement agencies around the country. A Washington Post headline proclaimed in February 2014 that the Department of Homeland Security had cancelled its “national license-plate tracking plan,” but all that was ended was one Immigrations and Customs Enforcement solicitation for proposals. In fact, a government-run national license plate tracking program already exists, housed within the DEA. (That’s in addition to the corporate license plate tracking database run by Vigilant Solutions, holding billions of records about our movements.) Since its inception in 2008, the DEA has provided limited information to the public on the program’s goals, capabilities and policies. Information has trickled out over the years, in testimony here or there. But far too little is still known about this program.
WikiLeaks is fighting back in an escalating war with both Google and the US government, threatening legal action the day after demanding answers for the tech giant’s wholesale handover of its staffers’ Gmail contents to US law enforcement.
The targets of the investigation were not notified until two and a half years after secret search warrants were issued and served by the FBI, legal representatives for WikiLeaks said in a press conference on Monday.
President Cristina Fernandez plans to disband Argentina's intelligence agency amid suspicions that rogue agents were behind the mysterious death of a state prosecutor investigating the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center.
In her first televised address since Alberto Nisman was found dead with a single bullet to the head, Fernandez said on Monday night she would send Congress a bill creating a new security body that would be more transparent.
The TSA is disappointed that so few Americans have opted out of its bottle-tossing, package-groping screenings by signing up for its PreCheck program. For a few years now, the TSA has been selling travelers' civil liberties back to them, most recently for $85 a head, but it's now making a serious push to increase participation. The TSA can't do it alone, so it's accepting bids on its PreCheck expansion proposal.
Here is a very short summary of the surveillance discussion in Finland.
Ministry of Defence of Finland published a report that proposes internet intelligence activities. The problem is that they also propose (Swedish FRA style) MITM to cross-border communication.
The government released two new FISC opinions this evening, both of which concern the transition of NSA surveillance to the oversight of the FISC in 2007. Neither of the two documents, available here and here, is the Raw Take order or the 2008 FAA order. The government has one additional production deadline in this case on March 2, 2015.
Yesterday’s Lords debate ended up with the future of the Snooper’s Charter amendments uncertain, after considerable criticism of both the process and the principle of reintroducing the Communications Data Bill into the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill. Further debate on the amendments may come back at the report stage of the Bill.
We have a problem when it comes to stopping mass surveillance.
The entity that’s conducting the most extreme and far-reaching surveillance against most of the world’s communications—the National Security Agency—is bound by United States law.
Europe’s top rights body has said mass surveillance practices are a fundamental threat to human rights and violate the right to privacy enshrined in European law.
The parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe says in a report that it is “deeply concerned” by the “far-reaching, technologically advanced systems” used by the US and UK to collect, store and analyse the data of private citizens. It describes the scale of spying by the US National Security Agency, revealed by Edward Snowden, as “stunning”.
The Justice Department has been building a national database to track in real time the movement of vehicles around the U.S., a secret domestic intelligence-gathering program that scans and stores hundreds of millions of records about motorists, according to current and former officials and government documents.
A decade ago, 1,500 Holocaust survivors traveled to Auschwitz to mark the 60th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation. On Tuesday, for the 70th anniversary, organizers are expecting 300, the youngest in their 70s.
About 300 Auschwitz survivors have gathered at the site of the former Nazi death camp to mark the 70th anniversary of its liberation.
The commemoration will be held at the site in southern Poland where 1.1 million people, the vast majority Jews, were killed between 1940 and 1945.
It is expected to be the last major anniversary event that survivors are able to attend in considerable numbers.
[...]
On the eve of the anniversary, German Chancellor Angela Merkel drew attention to discrimination against Jews in contemporary Europe, saying it was a "disgrace" that Jews faced insults, threats and violence in Germany.
"We've got to fight anti-Semitism and all racism from the outset," she said at a memorial event in Berlin.
"We've got to constantly be on guard to protect our freedom, democracy and rule of law."
Jesselyn Radack, a Justice Department whistleblower, attorney and director of the Government Accountability Project’s National Security and Human Rights Division, reacted, “It is a new low in the war in whistleblowers and government hypocrisy that CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling was convicted in a purely circumstantial case of ‘leaking.’ It shows how far an embarrassed government will go to punish those who dare to commit the truth.”
The conviction is a significant victory for the Obama administration, which has conducted an unprecedented crackdown on officials who speak to journalists about security matters without the administration’s approval. Prosecutors prevailed after a yearslong fight in which the reporter, James Risen, refused to identify his sources.
A former CIA officer was convicted Monday of leaking classified details of an operation to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions to a New York Times reporter.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/26/deliberation-to-reach-third-day-in-cia-leak-case/#ixzz3Q1X5Pwhm Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter
I’m not surprised the jury found Sterling guilty of some of the charges: of leaking Risen information on Merlin and the operation he was involved in, and of retaining and then leaking Risen a document involved in that. The government multiplied the charges for both the 2003 New York Times story (at which point, Sterling and Risen had only spoken for two minutes and 40 seconds) and the 2006 book (by which point they had had more lengthy discussions), such that each leak amounted to multiple charges. In addition, the jury convicted Sterling of passing government property worth over $1,000, and of obstruction of justice.
Also this week, reports emerged showing that a Mexican mayor ordered a cop to kill a journalist he didn't like; the "officer said they decapitated the journalist, mutilated his body and abandoned it in a ravine." The journalist and social justice activist had been reporting about government corruption and killings. Now he's dead and so cannot report on his own death at the hands of his government.
British citizen and investigations editor of Wikileaks, Sarah Harrison, has had all her emails and digital data handed over to the US government by Google. It took two and a half years to provide the details and the delay has potentially limited her ability to challenge the communications data grab.
Google’s willingness to surrender the private emails of WikiLeaks staffers to the United States government amounts to an “attack on journalism,” a representative for the whistleblower group says.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic journalist who joined WikiLeaks as the group’s spokesman in 2010, said he’s “appalled” that Google gave up his personal correspondence and other sensitive details to the US government in compliance with a search warrant served to the tech giant, apparently in an effort to bring charges against the anti-secrecy organization and its editor, Julian Assange.
A single rose was left in front of the Longview police station on Cotton Street in memory of the teenager shot Thursday night.
Investigators say the woman, identified as Kristiana Cognard, 17, of Longview, walked in the front doors of the empty lobby and made her way to the after-hours assistance phone.
"We don't know how she got here," said Longview police officer Kristie Brian.
After hours the police lobby is closed and all the windows are shut down. Police say Coignard came up to the courtesy phone and was connected to dispatch who then sent officers out to her.
We Are Social report shows 20 percent increase in broadband Internet users throughout 2014
If you've been a Techdirt reader since the days of SOPA/PIPA, you probably know that Namecheap is a big supporter of a free and open internet, and was one of the first registrars to speak out against the bills. More recently, they've been big supporters of Techdirt directly, providing matching funds to our crowdfunding campaign for net neutrality reporting and sponsoring our sitewide switch to HTTPS. In October, they were one of only two companies that got a perfect score on the EFF's ranking of service providers that stand up to copyright and trademark bullies, and many of us here at Techdirt use them for all our personal domain registration needs.
Say goodbye to the musical hits of the 50s and 60s, if you like that sort of thing and listen via online services. Chances are they may start to disappear, as the places where you now get your streaming music realize they need to protect themselves against a possible massive liability. As we've covered for some time, there have been a few lawsuits filed recently over the licensing status of pre-1972 sound recordings. There's a lot of history here, but a short explanation is that in 1909, when Congress redid copyright law, it didn't think that sound recordings (then a relatively new concept) were copyrightable subject matter. Of course, in the years following that, as the "music business" turned into the "recording industry" pressure mounted by that industry led to a bunch of state regulations and common law creating copyright or copyright-like rights for sound recordings.