If you search deep enough, you’ll find even more web browsers for the Linux platform. However, the chances of you needing anything beyond what is listed here are slim. Whether you want the full-blown experience of Chrome and Firefox or you’re looking to slim down your browsing tools, Linux has what you need.
Which browser is your tool of choice?
In a Core Infrastructure Initiative survey of at-risk software most in need of close attention, many fundamental Linux utilities sit at the top
Linux Format has just printed its 200th issue and is celebrating 15-years of best-selling GNU/Linux coverage. Over 20,000 pages and more than 10 million words (no, we did not count them all) dedicated to promoting and celebrating free and open source software, alongside that ever smiling penguin we all know and love.
I want one. Maybe I've just spent too long on older hardware but it's nice to be able to use a laptop with modern specs without having to compromise on my Open Source and privacy ideals. The Librem 15 was definitely too big for me but while the Librem 13 is bigger than most of my personal laptops, it's about the same size as a modern Thinkpad X series (but thinner and lighter). I'm more than willing to add an inch or so to the width in exchange for such a nice, large, high-res screen. Even though my X200 is technically smaller, it's definitely heavier and just feels clunkier.
Linux and UNIX are very similar to each other, but they have some common differences – discover what they are in this blog to find out which one is right for your organisation.
Bill Kerr has taught Linux Foundation courses in Linux Kernel internals, debugging, device drivers and application development for many years. He helped write the original Linux Foundation Training course materials and has been working with UNIX kernels for 35 years.
I'm in the midst of a new large open-source and (separately) closed-source NVIDIA/AMD Linux graphics card comparison on the latest drivers as part of an upcoming Radeon R7 370 Linux review and to be followed by R9 Fury Linux benchmarks. However, for those interested in the Catalyst 15.7 benchmarks on Linux, I ran some quick tests with a Radeon R9 285 and R9 290.
As part of the other Linux graphics tests running this week, here are the results of eight different graphics cards -- from both NVIDIA and AMD -- being tested on the latest open-source Linux graphics drivers under a variety of OpenGL Linux games. The software stack making up this round of testing was the Linux 4.1.1 kernel and Mesa 10.7-devel atop Ubuntu 15.04.
Wine developers have just revealed that a new version of the application has been released, and it comes with a large number of fixes and various other improvements.
As a quick follow-up to America's Army looking at SteamOS/Linux support from earlier this week, it turns out the developers are indeed exploring a Linux client and server.
KDE Frameworks 5.12.0 has just been released by the KDE Community, and the developers have closed a lot of bugs and various other issues. It's just a maintenance update, but Frameworks is an important component, and any update to it will be very important.
Krita, an open-source digital painting software piece that aims to be the best in its field, has been upgraded to version 2.9.6 and is ready for download.
We are pleased to announce that Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active 2.9.6 have just been released. This recommended update brings further improvements to the 2.9 series of the applications and underlying development frameworks.
If you love Debian, but miss GNOME 2; you should definitely try Point Linux. It comes with MATE desktop environment which is fork of GNOME2. The design goal of this distribution is to provide an easy to setup, user friendly, stable, fast and predictable operating system for the lovers of Linux desktop. This Linux distribution is targeted toward experienced users and IT sector. The latest version of this operating system Point Linux 3.0 is out now. Let’s see how we can install and get familiar with this distro.
The stable version of Q4OS live CD is available for free download and use. Users are now able to perform safe Q4OS testing on a real hardware without installation. Anybody is welcome to try out and see Q4OS system in action. As an option, it's possible to proceed Q4OS installation directly from the live environment using integrated graphical live installer. You can download the live CD iso from our website and burn it onto CD/DVD or create bootable USB stick, we can recommend to use 'unetbootin' or similar tools for this purpose.
Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution that uses musl libc and Busybox, which make up the terminal. A new version of this distributions is out and ready for download.
Q4OS is a Linux distribution based on Debian and powered by a desktop environment called Trinity DE. It receives a constant flux of updates, and the latest one brings the option to run it as a stable Live CD.
While it's true that an NSA analyst sent out an email about KDBUS security, it hopefully shouldn't raise any alarm bells. The thread in question is about credential faking for KDBUS and why it's even there. Stephen Smalley of the NSA was asking why there's support for credential faking for this soon-to-be-in-kernel code while it wasn't part of the original D-Bus daemon in user-space. The preference of Stephen Smalley is to actually get rood of this functionality that could be abused.
But Red Hat VP engineering middleware Dr Mark Little likes to see microservices as the good bits of service-oriented architecture, buoyed by the arrival of more sophisticated engineering and operations technology and techniques.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Red Hat president and CEO, Jim Whitehurst, will speak at Fortune Brainstorm TECH 2015.
One of Canonical's goals is to build an Ubuntu Desktop by using Snappy packages, and that is actually a difficult task. Developers need to build all the regular packages by using the Snappy, and that can take a while. From the looks of it, the first steps have been taken, although it's not something that regular users will be ready to test just yet.
Canonical has just announced that a large number of Firefox vulnerabilities have been fixed and that version 39.0 of the browser has been added to Ubuntu 15.04 and all the other supported Ubuntu versions.
The bq Aquaris E5 is solid device. On the software side there aren't any big issues. Also the hardware of the E4.5 and E5 is so similar that one is as good os the other when it comes to running the installed software.
Last month the BQ Aquaris E5 Ubuntu Phone was launched in Europe. While the hardware may not be the best out there and the Ubuntu Phone software stack is still maturing, early reviews seem fairly positive.
Advantech launched a Pico-ITX SBC and a computer that run Linux or Android on a dual-core i.MX6, and offer 4GB eMMC, dual displays, and two mini-PCIe slots.
Advantech unveiled both a 2.5-inch Pico-ITX board called the RSB-3410 and a box computer version called the UBC-220. The name, design, and distinctive blue coloring of the UBC-220 are similar to that of the recently revealed Intel Quark based UBC-221, but the limitations of the Quark compared to the multi-faceted 1GHz, Cortex-A9-based Freescale i.MX6 SoC on the UBC-221’s RSB-3410 mainboard make these very different computers.
OpenELEC launched a version of a WeTek media player preloaded with Kodi-ready OpenELEC Linux, and a choice of DVB-S2, DVB-C/T/T2, or ATSC broadcast tuners.
The WeTek OpenELEC (Limited Edition) Linux media player is an OpenELEC-optimized version of the Android-based WeTek Play media player, which typically offers OpenELEC Linux as one of its alternative downloads. The $90.33 (99-Euro) OpenELEC version comes with a choice of satellite (DVB-S2), cable (DVB-C/T/T2), or terrestrial broadcast (ATSC) tuners.
The $15 Ethernet adapter is designed to bolster streaming via Chromecast for those with poor WiFi connectivity. Google appears to have quietly released a $15 Ethernet adapter for Chromecast users with spotty WiFi connectivity.
It's unclear when the company released the device, but media reports about its availability appear to have resulted in the product being sold out on Google Store.
Google has released the first update to its Android M developer preview, inching the mobile OS closer to its final release.
Google describes the M Developer Preview 2 as an "incremental update". It brings thousands of tiny fixes and a few major changes to the platform and APIs, as well as other issues reported by developers.
An Australian high school graduate today has experience with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint, and not much else. They are ready for your Windows-centered workplace, Mr. Employer!
When the National Security Agency (NSA) in the U.S. released the Accumulo project into open source territory in 2008, there were not a lot of details about the size and capability of the hardware it was running, although it is safe to say that the NSA found ways to make it scale across some of their larger machines. However, as one might imagine, scale alone did not define a successful NSA database system—the security also had to be robust and guaranteed.
The NSA has released a network security tool that it claims is designed to help organizations "fortify their networks against cyber attacks". But, after being revealed to be spying on just about anyone it wants to, from US citizens to leaders of allied governments, while undermining major tech firms in the process, IT administrators will likely be very skeptical of adopting it.
The NSA today revealed it has uploaded source code to GitHub to help IT admins lock down their networks of Linux machines.
The open-source software is called the System Integrity Management Platform (SIMP). It is designed to make sure networks comply with US Department of Defense security standards, but the spy agency says it can be adapted by admins to meet individual security needs as well.
Encryption 2.0 features a brand new set of encryption capabilities. Notably, ownCloud claims the new release includes enhancements that will enable up to a 4X performance for uploads and downloads, as well as improved scalability through efficient handling of massive parallel requests, enabling support for 50 percent more users per ownCloud server instance.
Most notably the server does not know the target filename of the uploaded file upfront. Also it does not know the final size or mimetype of the target file. That is not a problem in general, but imagine the following situation: A big file should be uploaded, which would exceed the users quota. That would only become an error for the user once all uploads happened, and the final upload directory is going to be moved on the final file name.
The Document Foundation has released the first RC for the new LibreOffice 4.4.5 branch. It's a maintenance update for the entire 4.4.x branch and it's not the last one in the series.
It's Stallman's philosophy that 'a program must not restrict what jobs its users do with it' -- and that includes the NSA.
Security and privacy seemed to be my theme this week and tonight's news brings more. Richard Stallman, "software freedom fighter," told Swapnil Bhartiya, "A program must not restrict what jobs its users do with it." In related news, the same RMS was included in the Business Insider "12 most influential programmers working today" list. Back to the NSA, Michael Larabel said you should be wearing tin foil hats if you're worried about them working on KDBUS. The NSA also uploaded code to Github for sysadmins to "lock down" their Linux machines.
The apps and games you use every day don't exist in a vacuum — someone, somewhere, wrote the code.
Open source licensing is important to GitHub in two ways: First, as the host of the world's largest collection of code, we have a unique opportunity—and arguably an obligation based on that opportunity—to do what we can to support the open source community, and that obviously includes open source licensing. Second, as a company built on open source, it's important that the open source code we depend on and the code we contribute to the open source community are both properly licensed so that others can use it. After all, that's the point of open source.
Over on the Chromium Blog is a new posting about the work Google is doing on a new JavaScript compiler for V8 in Chrome, codenamed TurboFan.
TurboFan is their new compiler that has started to be used for certain types of code since Chrome 41 but will be used for more code in future web browser updates. TurboFan is designed to be faster than their previous compiler (CrankShaft) while allowing for new features and functionality.
The final draft version of the RGI (general interoperability framework), still awaiting final validation, maintains ODF as the recommended format for office documents within French administrations. This new version of the RGI provides substantiated criticism of the OOXML Microsoft format. April thanks the DISIC (French Inter-ministerial IT directorate) for not giving in to pressure and acting in the long-term interest of all French citizens and their administrations.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Rosaria Silipo about her upcoming talk at OSCON: Advanced analytics for the Internet of Things. I recently taught a group of librarians about Internet of Things and how we can use it to provide better services to our patrons, so when I saw Rosaria's talk summary I thought it was right up my alley.
At least five children have been left with severe burns after coming into contact with a toxic plant, whilst playing in public parks around Greater Manchester.
In two separate incidents, the children, one aged as young as seven, brushed past a hogweed plant, resulting in painful chemical burns.
Heartbleed may have brought on a major case of heartburn last April for system admins worldwide, but a positive offshoot of the biggest of the Internet-wide bugs was that it opened a lot of eyes to the lack of support afforded even ubiquitous open source software projects.
The Linux Foundation Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), backed by companies like Google, Facebook, Salesforce, HP, and others, has announced a new Census Project that automates the collection and analysis of data on different open source projects, ultimately creating a risk score for each project based on the results. It's not the first approach to auditing open source usage, but has many unique aspects.
Just when you thought you were safe, a new hacking toy comes along and rocks your world. Imagine a tool exists that lets hackers pluck encryption keys from your laptop right out of the air. You can’t stop it by connecting to protected Wi-Fi networks or even disabling Wi-Fi completely. Turning off Bluetooth also won’t help you protect yourself.
US authorities are investigating after a United Airlines pilot flushed bullets down a toilet on a flight to Germany.
The pilot initially threw the bullets in a rubbish bin before disposing of them in the toilet, a spokeswoman for United Airlines said.
In the US, pilots are permitted to carry loaded weapons aboard planes under security measures put in place after the 9/11 attacks.
Ban said new information uncovered by a UN panel on the death of the former secretary-general should be probed to establish whether his plane was attacked just before it crashed in southern Africa.
After receiving the report, he said “a further inquiry or investigation would be necessary to finally establish the facts” surrounding the mysterious crash.
The panel “found new information, which it assessed as having moderate probative value, sufficient to further pursue aerial attack or other interference as a hypothesis of the possible cause of the crash,” said UN spokesman Farhan Haq.
Mr. Hammarskjold, a Swede, was killed with 15 others in the crash on the night of Sept. 17 to 18, 1961, in a forest in the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia, an area that is now part of Zambia. Mr. Hammarskjold was on his way to broker a truce in the mineral-rich Katanga Province of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mr. Hammarskjold was awarded the 1961 Nobel Peace Prize after his death.
The panel reported that the continued refusal by intelligence agencies of the U.S. and other governments to declassify documents may be hindering the “final revelation” into what caused the crash. The panel recommended Mr. Ban continue to urge governments to disclose or declassify the documents, or allow him “privileged access” to information the governments may possess about the circumstances of Mr. Hammarskjöld’s death.
To refute the federal agencies' warnings, the conservative news publication turned to scientists affiliated with the fossil fuel-backed Heartland Institute. Daily Caller first quoted Canadian biologist Mitchell Taylor, who dismissed the USGS' report because he said it is "based on climate models, not empirical data." The agency's climate models are "an expression of their opinion," said Taylor, adding that "it's simply their idea of what will happen if the carbon models are correct."
As most of the world knew it would, the financial demands made by Europe have crushed the Greek economy, led to mass unemployment, a collapse of the banking system, made the external debt crisis far worse, with the debt problem escalating to an unpayable 175 percent of GDP. The economy now lies broken with tax receipts nose-diving, output and employment depressed, and businesses starved of capital.
Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Alexis Tsipras, and we do get fooled again. If you will forgive me I should like to crow a little about the accuracy of my predictions on Greece in the last week or so. Now comes the bit where they stay in the Euro there is another fudge, the bankers get hold of more cash and more state assets, and nothing much changes.
This is an interesting assessment. Those of us who are less expert on China than the experts consulted for this article might wonder how the regime managed to survive a stock market crash between October 2007 and October 2008 in which the market lost over 60 percent of its value. This is more than twice as large a decline as the market has experienced in the current downturn. In spite of this plunge, China’s economy grew more than 9.0 percent in 2009, although it did require a substantial government stimulus program.
Despite the nonstop coverage of the 2016 presidential election—still 16 months away—it can be difficult to sort out the actual policy differences between the candidates. That’s especially true when it comes to education, where policies once seen as conservative—high-stakes standardized testing, closing public schools and replacing them with charters, weakening teacher’s unions—now share a generally bipartisan consensus in the political establishment.
Buzzwords and phrases like “accountability,” “Common Core” and “school choice” abound in media coverage of candidates’ education policy, with little explanation provided to actually unpack what it means that a candidate is pro or con these things. In a media landscape focused on the differences between Democrats and Republicans, rather than a comprehensive understanding of the policies at hand, only a small fraction of what’s at stake in education actually get covered.
It turns out that if you suddenly fire a valuable member of the community, that community will get very angry at you. Reddit CEO Ellen Pao learned that the hard way late last week when it abruptly dismissed Victoria Taylor, the company's former director of talent who was instrumental in popularizing the site's "AMA" (Ask Me Anything) feature. A slew of subreddits, mostly run by volunteer moderators, went private in protest of the firing over the weekend as a result. Pao eventually posted an apology for the lack of communication and promised to improve things going forward. But in an op-ed posted today in the New York Times, those same volunteer moderators said that the apology was not enough.
Reddit managed to get most of our online news space in the previous weeks after the abrupt departure of Victoria Taylor. Taylor acted as the main facilitator for Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions and was one of the most prominent employees of the company. While Taylor refused to give out any details, it was believed that she wasn’t okay with the commercializing of AMAs that the management was interested in. With stark opposition from Reddit communities who shut down several of the site’s most popular sections, today comes the big news that Ellen Pao, Reddit’s Chief Executive, is leaving the company.
Amos Yee Pang Sang is a teenage blogger, due to be sentenced today for a backdrop of last-minute hospitalization. People turned up a protest, calling the government to free Amos Yee Pang Sang.
Perhaps ‘dissident’ is an inaccurate term to describe these critics. After all, they are neither opposition politicians nor veteran revolutionaries. Yee is clearly just an articulate teenager who is not connected to any political party. But their peaceful protests and the subsequent legal persecution they suffered highlighted the sorry state of political freedom in their own countries. They became icons of free speech even if many of their fellow citizens disagreed with their views and bold actions. By challenging the propaganda of the state, despite the existence of restrictive media laws, they somewhat earned the recognition as dissidents who could inspire others to defy authorities.
Two new reports on EU databases have been released by the EU's Agency for Large-Scale IT Systems (eu-LISA), which is responsible for managing and developing the Schengen Information System (SIS), the Visa Information System (VIS) and Eurodac (used by Member States to compare the fingerprints of migrants and asylum seekers). The new reports concern SIS and Eurodac.
United Kingdom is set to ban popular mobile messaging application, WhatsApp, under new strict laws on social media and online messaging services.
British Prime Minister David Cameron pressing ahead with new legislation which plans to stop people from sending any form of encrypted messages. If the law is passed all online messaging services which scramble communications between their users could be banned.
Tuesday, a group of cryptographers and security experts released a major paper outlining the risks of government-mandated back-doors in encryption products: Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications, by Hal Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steve Bellovin, Josh Benaloh, Matt Blaze, Whitfield Diffie, John Gilmore, Matthew Green, Susan Landau, Peter Neumann, Ron Rivest, Jeff Schiller, Bruce Schneier, Michael Specter, and Danny Weitzner.
Late last month, the Maine House approved a bill to turn off support and resources to the NSA in the Pine Tree State, only to have it rejected by the state Senate.
Sen. Eric Brakey (R-Androscoggin) introduced LD531 on Feb. 26. The Maine Fourth Amendment Protection Act would have banned “material support or resources” from the state to any federal agency collecting electronic data without meeting one of four conditions.
The U.S. on Thursday refused to comment on a report that an American intelligence agency spied on a Turkish security meeting in 2014.
"We're not going to comment publicly on every specific alleged intelligence or disclosure activity," said State Department spokesman John Kirby.
Asked about a Germany-based magazine's claims that the NSA had spied on a top Turkish security meeting that discussed Turkey’s possible intervention in Syria to protect a Turkish enclave, Kirby directed all related questions to the NSA.
The magazine’s claims include that the NSA tapped the Turkish intelligence chief’s phone and collected audio from the meeting.
Despite their intended roles as representatives of the United States abroad, new WikiLeaks cables reveal the extent to which US diplomats are asked to gather intelligence, the same intelligence used by the NSA to target foreigners.
Earlier on Thursday, WikiLeaks revealed that the US National Security Agency eavesdropped on the German chancellery for decades, most recently during secret briefings between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her advisors regarding European finance plans.
Every week, thanks to Wikileaks, evidence of the NSA's boundless surveillance of Germany piles higher. As a sovereign state, the Federal Republic shouldn't put up with this, writes DW's Matthias von Hein.
The US National Security Agency tapped phone calls involving German chancellor Angela Merkel and her closest advisers for years and spied on the staff of her predecessors, according to WikiLeaks.
Documents released by WikiLeaks appear to show the US spied on close aides of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other officials for years. The leaks show Merkel's private and professional opinions on a range of issues.
The U.S. National Security Agency tapped phone calls involving German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her closest advisers for years and spied on the staff of her predecessors, WikiLeaks said on Wednesday.
Less than a month after Germany abandoned its probe into alleged NSA spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel, a new Wikileaks drop suggests snooping on the Chancellory goes back decades.
The leak, published here, draws the inference that prior chancellors were targeted, based on the list of telephone numbers targeted by the NSA.
Restriction of cooperation, identification of personnel: U.S. intelligence expected to mirror information with harsh reactions, after it was revealed that she bugged the phone of the Chancellor. The reluctance of the German surprised her.
While encryption and secured messaging has long been a topic of interest in tech circles, the issue became a mainstream and hot-button issue in 2013 following a series of Edward Snowden leaks detailing the NSA’s extensive efforts to bolster their electronic snooping capabilities.
In the back and forth battle over consumer privacy, one tends to think of government cryptographers looking to outwit engineers at companies like Google and Apple who help churn out some of the most widely used software across the globe.
But playing an instrumental role in this cat and mouse game is a man you might not ordinarily expect to see in such a discussion.
A German magazine has claimed a video of a key high-level security meeting on Syria was recorded and leaked by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), according to the Turkey-based Today’s Zaman.
According to German magazine The Focus, the video, which was leaked online last year, was exposed by the NSA after it was instructed by unnamed U.S. political leadership to gather information about the “intentions” of the Turkish leadership and monitor Turkeys operations in 18 other key areas.
German weekly magazine Focus has said that last year's leaked audio of a high-level security meeting at the Turkish Foreign Ministry about possible military action in Syria via a false flag operation was recorded and then leaked by the US National Security Agency (NSA).
Last Wednesday, The Intercept published an expose on the NSA's XKeyscore program. Along with information on the breadth and scale of the NSA's metadata collection, The Intercept revealed how the NSA relies on unencrypted cookie data to identify users.
Because of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA)—passed in 1986, long before electronic communications became prevalent in the United States—email content is easily accessible to many civil and law enforcement agencies as soon as it is at least 180 days old.
Most Americans are familiar with the National Security Agency as the face of domestic spying.
Few, however, have heard of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that critics say knows more about you than even the NSA’s purveyors of bulk telephone data.
The government published its latest Wiretap Report on July 1. The headline finding was that encryption wasn't foiling federal and state law enforcement officials, despite a growing chorus of people suggesting that we're all gonna die unless the tech sector builds backdoor access into their products to enable government access.
In all, the federal agency that oversees the courts reported to Congress that there were 3,554 wiretaps in 2014, about 1 percent less than the year prior. Of the total, only four were thwarted via encryption.
But the reported number of wiretaps by the Administrative Office of the US Courts (AO) simply doesn't add up. That's according to Albert Gidari, one of the nation's top privacy lawyers.
The NSA is gathering and eavesdropping on practically all communications emerging from South America, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Chilean publication El Mostrador Tuesday.
“Ninety-eight percent of Latin American communications are intercepted by the NSA while passing through the United States to the world,” Assange said in an interview with the publication.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) can resume the bulk collection of telephone records, at least temporarily, a US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled Monday.
The service utilizes more than 700 servers located in multiple nations, and apparently the US is not the only one using it.
That includes pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation (CNE) targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, VOIP streams taken from Skype sessions, and more.
Edward Snowden has once again provided fodder for the surveillance fears of American citizens: New leaked documents show that the National Security Agency's (NSA's) XKeyscore search engine hoovers up vast amounts of private communications information, to the tune of 700,000 voice, fax and video files every day.
Many were not surprised when NSA-contracted analyst Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the government organization, revealing massive, likely illegal domestic spying programs.
As the details came out, the government went into full damage control, and one keyword that surfaced was "metadata." It was just metadata they were collecting without a warrant, they said, not the kind of data that would reveal anything personal about its owner. The word left the mouth of every government official who spoke on the subject, and the common belief became that it was not wiretapping going on, just mass surveillance.
On July 3rd, the top choice for the UN's first digital privacy investigator, Katrin Nyman-Metcalf, was rejected by the German president of the Human Rights Council (UNHRC), who cited complaints from activist groups that she was not a strong enough critic of government surveillance.
Newly released documents leaked by Edward Snowden shed light on the scale and scope of the XKeyscore program, a program described by one classified document as the "widest-reaching" system for gathering information from the internet.
Every time anyone uses a computer to send an e-mail, watch a video, do a Google search, or update a Facebook status, the National Security Agency (NSA) is probably collecting and collating that activity on one of its many servers.
XKEYSCORE — the codename of the computer code used by the NSA to perform these actions — is massive and more intrusive than most people understand.
President Barack Obama got a list of talking points that United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon hoped to hit on during a one-on-one meeting, courtesy of the NSA’s X-Keyscore program.
The NSA’s Google-like search engine for the world’s private communications data, XKEYSCORE, has more information than previously thought, including router information and VoIP streams from Skype calls.
The evidence for these plots? As usual, none was provided. Just the word of “US officials.”
In a guest post on the Lawfare blog, FBI Director James Comey argued that “to protect the public, the government sometimes needs to be able to see an individual's stuff,” though only “under appropriate circumstances and with appropriate oversight.”
On Tuesday, a who’s who of cybersecurity essentially slammed the door in the face of the United States and Great Britain. The experts’ report said giving the governments access to encrypted data passing through the likes of Apple, Twitter and Facebook represented an existential threat to the most sensitive information on the Internet.
This week, expert cryptographers, computer scientists and security specialists released a study titled “Keys Under the Door Matt,” looking at proposed mandates for government access to all data and communication. The paper concludes that “analysis of law enforcement demands for exceptional access to private communications and data show that such access will open doors through which criminals and malicious nation-states can attack the very individuals law enforcement seeks to defend.”
Testifying before two Senate committees on Wednesday about the threat he says strong encryption presents to law enforcement, FBI Director James Comey didn’t so much propose a solution as wish for one.
FBI Director James Comey is set to testify against encryption before the Senate Intelligence Committee today, as the United States and Britain push for "exceptional access" to encrypted communications. Encryption refers to the scrambling of communications so they cannot be read without the correct key or password. The FBI and GCHQ have said they need access to encrypted communications to track criminals and terrorists. Fourteen of the world’s pre-eminent cryptographers, computer scientists and security specialists have issued a paper arguing there is no way to allow the government such access without endangering all confidential data, as well as the broader communications infrastructure. We speak with one of the authors of the paper, leading security technologist Bruce Schneier.
Jeb Bush may be among the strongest Republican contenders in the 2016 White House race, but he is unlikely to win support from Edward Snowden after he ruled out any "leniency" for the National Security Agency (NSA) leaker, CBS News reported.
Congress recently passed a bipartisan bill (USA Freedom Act). Some of us thought a bipartisan bill outside its ken. The act curtails the National Security Agency program of storing phone records of millions of Americans, even those not suspected of any crime. Now, phone companies will store the records. Also, a special panel of experts will be added to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to represents the public when NSA wants to obtain records.
Katherine Archuleta, head of the Office of Personnel Management, resigned after it was revealed that the hack affected a staggering 21.5 million people, far more than initially believed.
If federal authorities have their way, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites will be forced to report users' activities under a new provision of the 2016 Intelligence Authorization Act.
The European Data Protection Supervisor, Giovanni Buttarelli, who is responsible for ensuring that the machinery of EU government respects the privacy of a citizen's data when processing their data, says that it is time to "move beyond the false fad of discussing security vs. privacy." In an article published on The Mark News site, Buttarelli writes that governments should "focus on implementing laws that take into account privacy rights as well as the indisputable need to fight terrorism."
Buttarelli insists that as European Data Protection Supervisor he is not necessarily "for or against any specific measure that interferes with the right to privacy and involves handling large volumes of personal information," for example through large-scale surveillance. However, he points to a post by the security expert Bruce Schneier that shows, in the US at least, there is little evidence that mass surveillance prevents terrorist attacks.
The hunters become the hunted. Yesterday, hackers released what they claimed was 400 GB of internal documents stolen from Hacking Team – an Italian company that sells surveillance tools to governments and intelligence agencies.
The release of the documents has exposed the reality of the lucrative cyberweapons market.
Ever since, security experts have been poring over the files and publishing their findings. For one thing, the documents suggest Hacking Team marketed its products to a wide range of governments – including a host of repressive regimes.
The NSA has been spying on politicians and common citizens, domestically and abroad, for decades now. Now, a recent online hack of private documents has revealed that national governments are able to obtain software services to hack into Bitcoin and other private digital currency accounts through an Italian subcontractor.
400GB of documents captured from a popular international surveillance technology company called Hacking Team has been uncovered by CSO Online’s Steve Ragan. These documents reveal what spy technology is available and how much countries are investing in it.
It's called Hacking Team. And the world knows about it, because Hacking Team has been hacked.
On Sunday, a massive load of stolen documents were uploaded to the Internet. It revealed contracts, invoices and internal presentations of Hacking Team. And it offered a glimpse into a shadowy world of selling high-powered cyber weapons -- even to genocidal maniacs.
CNNMoney could not verify the authenticity of these documents. However, specific details in several separate documents form a consistent picture of Hacking Team's business dealings.
Hacking Team, an Italian company offering security and surveillance services, has apparently fallen victim to exactly the thing it promises protection from: security breaches.
An Italian firm with the appropriate name Hacking Team suffered a massive breach in its company data Sunday, and 400GB of internal documents so far have been released and are being analyzed by reporters and security researchers. Hacking Team’s customers are government agencies, including both law enforcement and national security, and the ostensibly legal software it sells to help them intercept communications includes not-yet-exploited vulnerabilities, known as zero-days.
Forget about voiding your warranty and potentially rendering your iPhone unusable if something goes wrong, Apple fans now have another reason to avoid jailbreaking their smartphones: Government agencies like the NSA have the ability to spy on jailbroken iPhones, and now we have proof.
T-Mobile received nearly 351,940 government requests for data in 2014, the most out of any of the four national wireless carriers.
The nation's fourth-largest carrier by subscriber base disclosed in its transparency report on Wednesday that it had fielded 177,549 criminal and civil subpeonas, 17,316 warrants and more than 3,000 wiretap orders.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) has been conducting surveillance of top-of-the-line businessmen and politicians in France and Germany for over ten years, alleges WikiLeaks that published series of new documents on June 29 and July 1, 2015.
Imprisoned journalist Barrett Brown is Courage’s fifth beneficiary
Courage is raising funds for Brown’s commissary, restitution and legal costs Brown continues to write from prison, for D Magazine and soon for The Intercept Currently in solitary confinement, Brown needs continued support and assistance
US journalist and satirist Barrett Brown, author of Flock of Dodos and Keep Rootin’ For Putin, is the Courage Foundation’s fifth beneficiary. Brown is currently serving a 63 month sentence after being persecuted for his work. In 2012, the FBI raided his house, and later that year Barrett was indicted on 12 federal charges relating to the 2011 Stratfor hack. The most controversial charge, linking to the hacked documents, was dropped, but in 2015 Brown was still sentenced to prison.
PINAC correspondent Michale Hoffman was found guilty today for trespassing on public property, a decision our attorney plans to appeal immediately.
He faces up to a year in jail. He will be sentenced Thursday, which is tomorrow.
“While we are disappointed in the jury’s verdict we look forward to appealing the judge’s rulings on the First Amendment issues that the jury was not allowed to hear or consider,” said attorney Eric Friday.
Hoffman was arrested in August while standing on the property of Jacksonville International Airport holding up signs that were critical of the government, including TSA and the IRS.
However, the judge did not permit Hoffman or our Friday to use the First Amendment as a defense.
Duval County Judge Brent Shore also refused to answer the jury’s question about whether or not holding up signs on public property is illegal.
One can appreciate the importance of this issue with Native Americans and, as the legal battle has been drawn out over the years, it seems that this combination of commercial and constitutional issues is surely destined for the Supreme Court.