OPSWAT, provider of solutions to secure and manage IT infrastructure, today announced the next generation of Metascan, that can be deployed on Linux. Metascan is a multi scanning solution for ISVs, IT admins and malware researchers that detects and prevents known and unknown threats. Metascan for Linux offers improved security and scalability, as well as enhanced usability and a new user interface.
ERNW security analyst Florian Grunow says North Korea's Red Star Linux operating system is tracking users by tagging content with unique hidden tags.
The operating system, developed from 2002 as a replacement for Windows XP, was relaunched with a Mac-like interface in 2013's version three. The newest version emerged in January 2015.
Tianhe-2 is the most powerful supercomputer in the world, and it resides in China. Besides the awesome power that it commands, it's also running Ubuntu.
Another Sunday, another Linux kernel release is available for testing, as announced by Linus Torvalds a few minutes ago. The third Release Candidate version of the forthcoming Linux 4.2 kernel series is now ready for download.
We reported a few days ago on a very interesting and awesome fact about the creator of the Linux kernel, Mr. Linus Torvalds, who apparently loves to go Zero-G in a T-33 fighter jet aircraft to relax in between kernel pulls, besides scuba diving.
The Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) has launched The Census Project.
Linux is an attractive platform for professional audio production. It is an extremely stable operating system that has good support for audio hardware. Using a Linux machine as the focus of your recording setup opens a world of possibilities for an affordable price.
Software that creates music can often be expensive. The heavyweight Cubase, Apple LogicPro, FL Studio, Adobe Audition, and Sony ACID Pro are all impressive software music production environments. Unfortunately, they cost hundreds of dollars and are released under a proprietary software license. Fortunately, there is a good range of open source software that lets you produce professional quality recordings.
Celestian Tales: Old North was sent in by the publisher Digital Tribe Games, and I'm pretty impressed by what I'm seeing from this JRPG game.
Should you be using a Radeon graphics card with the AMD Catalyst Linux driver and are disappointed by the poor performance, there is a very easy workaround for gaining much better performance under Linux... In some cases a simple tweak will yield around 40% better performance!
Ken was even experimenting with ways for Fiber to potentially remove the address bar from his browser, but those experiments haven't panned out and instead will be complemented by many browser extensions. The design of Fiber are many extensions: everything down to basic navigational elements and bookmark handling will be through extensions.
Arne Exton, the creator of numerous GNU/Linux and Android-x86 distributions, has informed us earlier about the immediate availability for download of a new build for his Exton|OS Linux distribution based on the Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) and Debian 8 (Jessie) operating systems.
The OpenWrt project, through Steven Barth, announced recently that the third RC (Release Candidate) version of the anticipated OpenWrt 15.05 (Chaos Calmer) open-source third-party firmware for routers is available for download and testing.
Cuma Temmuz from the Pisi Linux development team has been glad to inform us all earlier today about the immediate availability for download of the final release of Pisi Linux 1.2, a GNU/Linux distribution forked from Pardus Linux.
This confirms Megatotoro's finding: Pisi Linux is alive!
Packages for Fedora 21 are available in updates-testing, RPMs and .debs can be found on the main Gluster download site.
This is a bugfix release. The Release Notes for 3.5.0, 3.5.1, 3.5.2, 3.5.3 and 3.5.4 contain a listing of all the new features that were added and bugs fixed in the GlusterFS 3.5 stable release.
Mostly Fedora has a plenty amazing services, but right now we suffering from a lack of integration to the desktop back and forth (between users – devs, and our infra and services between them) , and this doesn’t serving us well as I see. But Fedora .Next doesn’t stopped, it’s rolling like a thunder, and Mizmo Hub design can be our critical piece of the puzzle…
The Meizo MX4 is no regular consumer handset. You need an invitation to buy one; only the committed need – and actually can – apply. If you really want an Ubuntu phone, however, bearing in mind how rough-around-the-edges the operating system feels, then this is the best place to jump in.
The specifications are good on paper, and it looks stylish to boot. It’s an improvement on the BQ Aquaris E4.5, albeit not as big a one as it should be.
With only a couple of days left until the official launch of the OTA-5 software update for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, Canonical's à Âukasz Zemczak has sent in his daily report informing users about some interesting aspects of the Monday launch.
Canonical's Alejandro J. Cura has sent in his report on the work done by the Ubuntu Touch team in the first two weeks of the month of July 2015, informing us all about the new features implemented in the forthcoming OTA-5 update.
With Ubuntu Touch OTA-5 Update ready but not released yet, Canonical is already working at the OTA-6 features.
According to Canonical’s Mr. Cura, the developers have successfully implemented the refunds for purchased apps in the first 15 minutes of usage, the developers being focused right now on working at the new Thumbailer.
Canonical Ltd., the Ubucon Germany 2015 team, and the UbuContest 2015 team, are happy to announce the first UbuContest today! We are excited to bring you an engaging, enlightening, community-organised competition, where the Ubuntu community brings forward innovative, creative and incredible apps, scopes and ideas for the converging Ubuntu world of the future. Contestants from all over the world will have until September 18, 2015 to build and publish their apps and scopes using the Ubuntu SDK and Ubuntu platform, starting today.
Canonical, the company behind the world's most popular free operating system, Ubuntu, the UbuContest 2015 team, as well as the Ubucon Germany 2015 team are proud to announce the first UbuContest event.
The Ubuntu MATE project already has a nice Welcome screen, but the developers are still improving it and a version is now available for download and testing.
Reach Technology, Inc. a leader in Linux Touchscreen Display Modules, today launched a new 7ââ¬Â³ Standard Resistive Display Module (Model: G2H2-7R) to help engineers add user interfaces that look like an iPad€® or iPhone€® (scrolling, sliding, transparencies, 3D graphics, and animations) to their medical or industrial products
Android-x86, a port of the Android operating system for the x86 platform that allows user to experience a mobile OS as a desktop experience, has been upgraded to version 4.4-r3 and is now ready for download.
While Android 5.0 Lollipop has been available since November of last year, Android-x86 stable is still currently based on 4.4 KitKat. Nevertheless, this independent effort for bettering Android support on Intel/AMD x86 systems is continuing to improve.
The open source Sailfish OS is getting the “biggest update” in its history: Sailfish OS 2.0. It’s an alternative not just to Android but to iOS too, and it’s about to appear on a whole bunch of handhelds. How does it compare? Let’s pit Sailfish OS 2.0 vs Android.
Today, Samsung hopes to change this with the all new Galaxy Tab S2 tablets. Consumers can choose between a 9.7 inch screen or an 8 inch variant. In other words, Samsung is offering options with its tablets -- much like Apple with the Air and mini -- which is rather smart. After all, one size does not fit all when it comes to tablets.
Thinner by the year, that's how smartphones seem to have evolved since forever. However, although smartphone makers seem to have always considered thinness an important marketing point, some say that the matter has been blown out of proportion over the past couple of years, and looking at the thinness of current-generation flagships, this assumption seems to hold water.
The development team behind the Arch Linux ARM project has announced earlier on their Twitter account that it is now possible to install the famous, customizable and lightweight Arch Linux operating system on the ARMv7l ODROID-XU4 board.
BIOMIO, a US-based start up, has announced it will be open sourcing its core product – a multi-factor authentication (MFA) framework, which includes client and server-based biometric capabilities, as well as other authentication options like one-time passwords and context awareness.
OSCON is next week, but if you are looking for me, I won't be there.
The "why" behind that decision is kind of complicated, but it's a decision that has been brewing for quite awhile.
“If you have a big problem like fraud you don’t want to wait three years until you can act on your insights,” said Ingo Mierswa, founder and CTO of RapidMiner, a predictive analytics firm that ranks in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms. The company, which grew out of research at the Artificial Intelligence Unit of the Technical University of Dortmund in Germany, became a company in 2006 and set up its headquarters in Boston in 2013. It received a $15 million B round of funding in February.
Thanks to issues surrounding how to make the open source MySQL databases scale and concerns about Oracle’s ongoing stewardship of the project, interest in an open source MariaDB, which is compatible with MySQL applications, is on the rise.
Vitt has university degrees in mathematics and computer science. According to CIO magazine, he started his career as an operating systems specialist working for computer manufacturer Univac and as system engineer at one of the first software manufacturers Applied Data Research.
UMBC Training Centers, a mid-Atlantic provider of technical, engineering and professional skills training, has announced a merger with /training/etc Inc., a leader in the design, development and delivery of content-rich Open Source technology training.
The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) Version 1.2, the native file format of LibreOffice and many other office applications, has been published as International Standard 26300:2015 by ISO/IEC.
The royal family were of course German themselves – completely so. Since George I every royal marriage in line of succession had been conducted in strict accordance with the Furstenprivatrecht, to a member of a German royal family. The Queen Mother, who was of course not expected to feature in promulgating the line of succession, was the first significant exception in 220 years. She was evidently trying hard to fit in. But I am not sure German-ness has much to do with it. Nazi sympathies were much more common in the aristocracy than generally admitted. Their vast wealth and massive land ownership contrasted with the horrific poverty and malnutrition of the 1930’s, led the aristocracy to fear a very real prospect of being stood against a wall and shot. Fascism appeared to offer social amelioration for the workers with continued privilege for the aristocrats. It is completely untrue that its racism, totalitarianism and violence was unknown in 1933-4. They knew what they were doing.
Happily fascism was defeated. The royal family is of course only the tip of the iceberg of whitewashed fascist support – without even starting on industrialists, newspaper proprietors, the Kennedys, etc. etc. But the Buckingham Palace option of outrage that anybody should ever remember is very sad – still more sad that such a position gets such popular support.
A court in Belgrade on Monday sentenced Darko Saric, for years one of the most wanted crime figures in the Balkans, to 20 years in jail for trafficking cocaine from Latin America to Europe and laundering 22 million euros, the Tanjug news agency reported.
Venezuela has been suffering from food shortages for a while now. Shortages of basic needs have become the norm in Venezuela over the past few years, but as images from citizens continue to swarm social media sites it only seems to be getting worse. The government has reportedly taken control of all major television stations, leaving only social media as one of the few ways to see what’s going on inside the country.
On a Saturday afternoon in early May, Gertrude Marshall stood on a sidewalk in front of Flint City Hall holding a hand-printed sign that declared, “We Need Affordable Water.” A 48-year-old grandmother with a kind face and determined eyes, she had come alone to protest the city’s skyrocketing water rates. In the month of April, the city had issued shutoff notices to 378 customers who could not afford to pay their bills.
Michigan’s new prison food vendor got a sweeter contract that includes higher meal prices, potentially higher annual increases, and a waiver of experience requirements for kitchen workers.
Trevor Stokes, ALM’s chief technology officer, put his worst fears on the table: “Security,” he wrote. “I would hate to see our systems hacked and/or the leak of personal information.”
Talking with deraadt and millert, however, I wasn’t quite alone. There were some concerns that sudo was too big, running too much code in a privileged process. And there was also pressure to enable even more options, because the feature set shipped in base wasn’t big enough. Hurray, tension. It wasn’t the problem I was trying to solve, but it was an opening from which to launch my diabolical plan.
Shortly, the €«gruesome twosome€» of U.S.-Russian relations, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland and NATO Supreme Commander General Philip Breedlove, will be joined by a third neo-Cold Warrior, Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, the prospective Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to become the €«terrible troika€» of American officials clamoring for a military showdown with Moscow.
So when Peter Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley investor and a fan of JRR Tolkein’s fiction, first envisaged a company that could find answers in the deluge of “big data” available in the digital age, he thought Palantir was an apt name.
According to reports, the new round of funding apparently reflects investors’ eagerness to gain access to a startup seen as one of the most successful in the world, although many probably haven’t even heard of it.
CIA-backed Big Data analytics outfit Palantir is about to embark on a fundraising round that will value the biz at $20bn (€£13bn), according to reports.
A federal judge has ruled the CIA and Defense Department (DOD) do not have to confirm or deny whether they have records on the “factual basis for the killing” of either Samir Khan or Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who were killed in two separate drone strikes in September and October of 2011.
A suicide bomber killed at least 18 people in Afghanistan on Sunday near a CIA-operated military base where US troops are stationed.
Forced to divulge Vietnam War records on prisoners of war or soldiers missing in action, the CIA must now pay more than $400,000 in attorneys' fees, a federal judge ruled.
Roger Hall, Accuracy in Media and Studies Solutions Results brought the challenge 11 years ago after the CIA rejected their request under the Freedom of Information Act.
A federal judge in Washington issued two slam-dunk decisions for the record seekers over the years.
After ordering the CIA in 2009 to divulge all nonexempt records, to search its database for 1,700 names, and to explain its reasons for nondisclosure, the CIA attempted to look for just 31 of the files because it said searching for 1,700 names without additional identifying information would be unduly burdensome.
The fact that Duelfer states quite clearly that he found none of the alleged WMD stockpiles cannot be repeated enough, with 42 percent of Americans (and 51 percent of Republicans) still believing the opposite. A New York Times story last October about the remnants of a long-abandoned chemical weapons program has been misused and abused to advance misunderstanding. A search of Iraq today would find U.S. cluster bombs that were dropped a decade back, without of course finding evidence of a current operation.
The National Security Archive has posted several newly available documents; one of them an account by Charles Duelfer of the search he led in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, with a staff of 1,700 and the resources of the U.S. military.
Geopolitics is a murky game. Precisely how murky is reflected in the well-worn phrase, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
What happens, though, when you follow that ancient proverb with the faith of a religious believer?
Now that the war on the “Islamic State” (IS) is, ostensibly, in full-swing, the US is making “friends” out of enemies, old and new. Among our new friends is al-Qaeda.
Except they are supposedly not “our” friends, but friends of our allies.
Tehran’s Ferdowsi Avenue commemorates Iran’s national poet. It is also home to the British Embassy, still shuttered and closed after the attack on it four years ago - at a low point in relations between the Islamic Republic and the country Iranians have often called the Little Satan - alongside the Great American one.
Ron Paul expressed support for President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran in two interviews this week, saying in one that the agreement was “to the benefit of world peace.”
The former Texas congressman’s position stands in contrast to that of many Republicans, including his son, Kentucky senator and current presidential candidate Rand Paul.
Speaking to Ed Berliner of Newsmax TV’s “The Hard Line” on Wednesday, elder Paul said that “[o]ur foreign policy is basically driven by the military industrial complex, and if they can sell something, they will keep stirring the pot.”
In 1990 and 1991, the United States deployed a huge army to Saudi Arabia and then fought and destroyed much of Iraq’s army. After the war, US military forces stayed in the kingdom and in Kuwait in significant numbers. More bases came in Qatar and the UAE. In 2003, President George W. Bush launched another war with Iraq and US military forces, except for a brief interruption, have been in Iraq since. What had been a backwater for the US military has become since 1990 the principal arena of conflict. This shows no sign of ending anytime soon.
But Agee was no Edward Snowden, Private Manning or Ray McGovern, three good liberals who stuck their necks out, publishing secret information and making public criticism with the aim of making the military and intelligence services less politicized and more professional. Agee was not looking to improve the CIA’s functioning but to undermine it every step of the way and even destroy the Agency if that were possible, and so deal a blow to US imperialism. That was his calling until the end of his days. He died in Cuba in 2008 at the age of 72, surrounded by the affection and appreciation of the Cuban revolution, which always thanked him for his courage.
[...]
As you can see, Latin America’s jealous defense of its sovereignty is no whim, and it is certainly not a populist gimmick. Here in the South, our sovereignty is under constant threat and protecting it requires our never ending vigilance.
Washington has given a human rights award to a Kyrgyz man who was arrested for instigating ethnic strife in his country, in yet another example of the US exerting its strategy of full spectrum global dominance, political experts tell RT.
The US State Department has decided to hand its Human Rights Defenders Award to Kyrgyz national, Azimzhan Askarov, who, in 2010, played an active role in ethnic riots between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in his country. Askarov was arrested during the violence and convicted of taking part in the murder of a Kyrgyz police officer.
Known as Plan W, it was intended as a response to Nazi Germany's plan to invade Ireland and use it as a staging area for the Luftwaffe's attacks on Britain. Churchill had made several offers to DeValera to give back the Six Counties if Ireland joined the Allied effort against the Nazis, however DeValera believed it would cause another civil war in Ireland. There was a real belief in British political and military circles that Nazi Germany could invade Ireland quite easily, with some believing that DeValera could side with the Nazis if an advantageous offer was made to them. The Abwehr, Nazi Germany's intelligence service, had several contacts with the IRA and were using them for information on the ground.
Nixon’s administration gave men like future Defense secretaries Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, future Supreme Court justices William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, future CIA director Bill Casey, and many more of their first real tastes of power. These men became central to American conservative policies and politics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Weiner discounted Nixon's fear of communism as being responsible for turning his back on the Bangladesh genocide .
"Nixon repeatedly calls the people of India savages and cannibals. He repeatedly mourns the fact that Yahya is going down and Indira Gandhi will emerge stronger.
“He didn't give a fig for the genocide that was being committed in present-day Bangladesh, for which people are still being tried and convicted. The origin of this is simply loyalty for Yayha for smuggling Kissinger to China."
As a bonus, you also get a preview of the kinds of money machinations that, with the backing of the Supreme Court four decades later, would produce our present 1% democracy. The secret political funds Nixon and his cronies finagled from the wealthy outside the law have now been translated into perfectly legal billionaire-funded super PACs that do everything from launching candidate ad blitzes to running ground campaigns for election 2016.
Richard Nixon once told an administration adviser that African-Americans were “just down out of the trees.” Our 37th president also, without fanfare and without credit, oversaw a peaceful transition from segregated schools to integration in the old Confederacy.
How the long-forgotten story of a minister's son from Nebraska could remind Tehran and Washington of a common heritage.
The genocidal war being waged in South Sudan today is “Obama’s War”. Why? Because the Obama regime is paying for it.
Thanks to Wikileaks we know that the CIA began paying the salaries of what is today the South Sudanese “rebel army” led by Reik Machar in 2009. And the CIA is still paying them today. We know this because
Americans and Israelis who hate the new nuclear agreement with Iran are already focusing on one part in particular: It doesn’t authorize snap, no-notice inspections of all locations. Israel’s hard-right Education Minister Naftali Bennett claims the accord is a “farce” because “in order to go and make an inspection, you have to notify the Iranians 24 days in advance.”
This is not exactly right, but close enough. (Iran’s declared nuclear sites will be under continuous monitoring. If the International Atomic Energy Agency wants to inspect a non-declared site and Iran refuses, Iran has 14 days to convince the IAEA it’s doing nothing wrong without providing access. If it can’t, the commission governing the agreement has seven days to vote on whether to force Iran to provide access, and if it does Iran has three more days to comply. The exact procedure is established in paragraphs 74-78 of the agreement text.)
For people unfamiliar with the history of arms control generally and in the Middle East in particular, this might seem like a bad deal. If Iran doesn’t have anything to hide, why wouldn’t it allow the IAEA to go anywhere at anytime?
But another terrorist attack by the group Al Shabaab on an African Union military base in Lego, Somalia, received little attention and no widely publicized official condemnation by Western governments. Fifty Burundian troops were killed and dozens were injured after the Somali terrorist group stormed the African Union military base, which is currently occupied by troops under the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). It was one of the worst attacks against a military target in Somalia since the collapse of that country in 1991.
"An interminable political and legal soap opera" is how South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu described 25 years of back and forth in the quest to bring former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré (1982-1990) to trial for crimes against humanity.
Former leader of Chad is going on trial Monday on charges of crimes against humanity. He's been living in exile in Senegal since he was driven from power in 1990. Human rights campaigners and survivors of alleged torture have been trying to get him to court ever since. NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton reports.
Traditionally, military force emanated the ultimate form of power as the strong subjugated and proselytized the weak; this is how empires were formed. This profound emphasis on military force was conceived during a time when war was more acceptable, rights to self-determination were not enshrined in international law, nuclear threats were a nonissue and globalization did not exist.
Today, as the world grows increasingly interdependent with each passing minute, the foundations of power have shifted. While war still exists, its allure that marked earlier eras has been undermined by its costs in the contemporary world. America had to learn this the hard way.
[...]
Multilateral diplomacy captures the essence of the world we live in far better than unilateral coercion (e.g. Iraq invasion). The United States led the P5+1 in this unprecedented diplomatic effort, effectively recognizing the limitations of American power and demonstrating strong leadership in resolving a major geopolitical issue.
Iranians: are they normal human beings like us, or are they weirdos whose foreign, mysterious thought processes can only be understood by highly trained experts?
Michael Rubin, a mideast expert at the American Enterprise Institute, says it’s the latter. (Rubin previously worked from 2003-4 for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, which is benefitting to this day from his applied expertise.)
The reason this matters right now, obviously, is that the U.S. and Iran are trying to come to an agreement on limiting Iran’s enrichment of uranium. So Rubin wants us to know that we can’t allow “political correctness to trump accuracy” by assuming “that everyone shares our values.” No, he explains, “different peoples can think in very different ways.” And certainly Rubin isn’t alone in this: varieties of his perspective suffuse the Wall Street Journal, Time, and pretty much every prestigious U.S. news outlet.
According to the New York Times, they are the Cheikh Manour and Djokhar Doudaïev batallions , mainly composed of Chechens from Georgia and Ouzbekistan, and the Crimée battalion, composé of Tatars [1], the CIA has been coordinating the Nazis and the Islamists since the end of the Second World War. Concerning Ukraine, the CIA organised an €« anti-Imperial Congress €» (meaning anti-Russian), on the 8th May 2007, in Ternopol (western Ukraine), in which the Ukrainian Nazis and the Islamists from the Caucasus were already participants. The coordination which was created on that day lifted Dmytro Yarosh (head of Pravy Sektor) to the Presidency, and received the blessing of Dokou Oumarov (the fifth President of the Islamic Emirate of Ichkeria, then Emir of the Caucasus).
Official Washington often exacerbates foreign conflicts by shoving them into misshapen narratives or treating them as good-guy-vs.-bad-guy morality plays, rather than political disputes that require mediation. The problem is particularly tricky with “terrorist” groups, writes ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller.
The myth of the lone drone warrior is now well established and threatens to become as enduring as that of the lone lawman with a white horse and a silver bullet who rode out into the Wild West to find the bad guys. In a similar fashion, the unsung hero of Washington’s modern War on Terror in the wild backlands of the planet is sometimes portrayed as a mysterious Central Intelligence Agency officer. Via modern technology, he prowls Central Asian or Middle Eastern skies with his unmanned Predator drone, dispatching carefully placed Hellfire missiles to kill top al-Qaeda terrorists in their remote hideouts.
In 1953 Iran’s democratically elected premier, Mohammad Mossadeq, sought to nationalise the country’s hugely lucrative oil industry. From his appointment in 1951 he quickly turned on British oil concerns in the country, calling for their expropriation.
Both British and US intelligence services watched the developing situation with concern. In the middle of the Cold War period, there were genuine fears that Mossadeq could lead Iran into the sphere of the Soviet Union. Just as importantly, both countries relied on Iranian oil fields for a cheap supply of the increasingly precious commodity.
The CIA and British intelligence services began to form alliances with pro-Western and pro-Shah elements in Iran in the hope of usurping Mossadeq. A first attempt at a coup d’etat was thwarted in 1952 when Iranian citizens took to the streets to protest the overthrow of their democratically elected Premier. The intelligence services continued to build their influence in Iran through dubious means, and in 1953 the country’s military, with financial and political support from the CIA, overthrew Mossadeq.
It wasn’t until 1953 that the CIA publicly admitted to the role it had played in the coup d’etat. The British Foreign Office, at least officially, continues to deny any involvement.
Sifton’s project at the outset is to see violence objectively, as a human phenomenon. One aspect is its sheer difficulty: killing other people is no easy business, and it’s hardest at close range, when you can look into the other’s face. Even if a killer is untroubled by conscience, the deed itself may put him in a state of physical exhaustion, as if it required a tremendous effort to overcome an instinctive aversion. “People are not wired for unfettered violence,” Sifton writes. For theoretical support he turns to “On Aggression,” by the Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who proposed that intraspecies violence, while innate in human beings and animals, is held in check by the impulse to submit or retreat.
In 1965, after a trip through China and Japan, the Iranian modernist Sohrab Sepehri found his voice. It could be heard in a new poem he had written, called “The Sound of Water’s Footsteps.” Sepehri puzzles over his identity as a writer, as a Muslim, as a widely travelled painter, and as a man from Kashan, where, in the seventh century, according to legend, Arab invaders intent on spreading Islam subdued the poet’s home town by throwing scorpions over the walls. Sepehri muses on the space race and “the idea of smelling a flower on another planet,” and he writes in free verse, inspired by Nima Yushij, a kind of Ezra Pound figure in the history of modern Persian poetry, who was inspired by the poetic notions of French Symbolists. Reflecting on a country with centuries of bumpy foreign contact, he draws out figures of confusion and displacement:
It was probably doomed from the start: the battlefield marriage of a left-wing academic discipline and the hidebound U.S. Army. The military has now confirmed that the Human Terrain System program, which sent anthropologists into the Afghan combat zone, has been terminated. Yet with no shortage of asymmetric conflicts and foreign insurgencies in America's future, it's worth examining why the Pentagon's foray into the social sciences failed in order to see how it can do better.
Who killed UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold is a mystery as murky as any penned by a Swedish thriller writer.
[...]
But documents that may be vital to solving the mystery are still being withheld by countries like the U.S. and Britain, who had deep interests in Congo during its turbulent transition to independence. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says he will ask them to share any “relevant information.”
Stake out a corner in Miami's Little Havana, and you can observe Luis Posada Carriles walking around freely, despite his blowing up a Cuban airliner in mid-air in 1976 and killing 73 people, according to declassified CIA and FBI documents. And Posada is only one of dozens of old men living in South Florida who freely admit planting bombs and machine-gunning beaches in Cuba to discourage foreign tourists, plus bombings carried out on U.S. soil and never punished.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) said in a statement it was "deeply concerned" that the deal "would fail to block Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon and further entrench and empower the leading state sponsor of terror."
Seated on a dais above thousands of cheering loyalists and the country’s elite, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei restated a key tenet of his late predecessor and the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution: relentless, uncompromising opposition to “America and its political and intelligence system.”
The myth of the lone drone warrior is now well established and threatens to become as enduring as that of the lone lawman with a white horse and a silver bullet who rode out into the Wild West to find the bad guys. In a similar fashion, the unsung hero of Washington’s modern War on Terror in the wild backlands of the planet is sometimes portrayed as a mysterious Central Intelligence Agency officer. Via modern technology, he prowls Central Asian or Middle Eastern skies with his unmanned Predator drone, dispatching carefully placed Hellfire missiles to kill top al-Qaeda terrorists in their remote hideouts.
History has shown us, however, that acts of violence, with or without declared sponsorship, are not the exclusive province of crazy loners or renegade regimes. In fact, we know from experience that, as horrendous as it sounds, those in power have sometimes terrorized their own populace while blaming the violence on others. The reasons for this vary widely, but include justifying retributive acts abroad or domestic repression.
On July 11, 1995, over three years into the civil war in Bosnia, Bosnian Serb militants overran a UN-established safe zone in the eastern town of Srebrenica, separated about 8,000 Muslim men and boys from the women who had sought shelter in the area, led them into fields and warehouses in surrounding villages, and massacred them over the course of three days. It was the worst single atrocity in Europe since the end of World War II and is generally considered to be an act of genocide.
Hillary Clinton has on her liberal mask. She is all smiles and is trying hard to “out Bernie” Bernie Sanders. She is hitting all the populist talking points about helping others: Immigration, campaign finance reform, voting rights, gay marriage, economic equality, and middle class families. But she has accumulated a lot of baggage over her political career of 40 years. Hillary and the main stream media have forgotten early scandals such as Whitewater, cattle futures trading, and trying to take the White House dishes when she and Bill moved out in 2001.
In its quest to not support radical groups, American policy has so narrowly defined the term “moderate” that it excludes most opposition groups in the country, including Ahrar al-Sham, Nahhas said.
Consider two heart-wrenching scenes that recently emerged from Syria. The first one is of children lining up behind 25 soldiers in the historic city of Palmyra, pointing pistols at the soldiers’ heads. The second is of a child killed in his Aleppo home by a barrel bomb that failed to explode.
"The U.S. is going the way of Rome!" has become practically a catchphrase among so-called "declinists" of all stripes. The parallels are so legionary (so to speak) and the general feeling of malaise so prevalent, you'd think our version of 476 AD — the year the last Roman emperor abdicated — is just around the corner. Another decade, and we're done for.
Morocco quickly became one of the United States' "partners" in their "war against terrorism."
Two B-52 bombers conducted a nonstop, long-range simulated mission to Australia recently that is part of the Pentagon’s effort to bolster allies in Asia against a growing Chinese threat.
There have been many books written about the assassination of President Kennedy, so many, generating so much bewildering debate, in fact, that many people have given up trying to understand the event and its significance. But despite all that, I want to recommend without reservation this book by a Catholic theologian and peace activist, which is unique in many respects and provides an education that all supporters of peace and progress need as we struggle to overcome the danger of right-wing extremism.
Aynesworth was a newspaper man who dismissed conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination. Mack worked in radio and TV and felt differently. One day, sometime in the 1980s, Aynesworth and Mack had lunch, and everything changed.
“We suddenly became friends. And we kicked around a lot of different things and investigated a lot of things together and he became quite a historian," says Aynesworth. "He did so much for the Sixth Floor Museum.”
Mack joined the staff there in 1994 and became curator six years later. Wednesday, his colleagues were reeling.
Montgomery has a history working with federal agencies as an outside contractor and now calls himself a CIA and National Security Agency whistleblower. He also has been the subject of high-profile media accounts alleging that he conned the federal government into buying bogus counter-terrorism technology he had created. Montgomery denies those allegations.
We go to Vienna for an update on what could be the final stages of a historic deal between Iran and six world powers that would limit Tehran's nuclear ability for more than a decade in exchange for sanctions relief. Negotiators are still smoothing over key details, including what limits to set on Iran's nuclear research, the pace of sanctions relief and whether to lift a United Nations arms embargo on Iran. If a deal is brokered, Congress will have 60 days to review it, keeping US sanctions in place in the meantime. An extra 22 days are set aside for voting, a possible presidential veto and then another vote to see if opponents can muster 67 Senate votes to override the veto. We speak to Flynt Leverett, who is following the talks. He is author of "Going to Tehran: Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran" and is a professor of International Affairs at Penn State. He served for over a decade in the US government as a senior analyst at the CIA, Middle East specialist for the State Department, and as senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council.
From the mid- to late 19th century, Guatemala endured the chronic instability and civil strife that was endemic to the region. Beginning in the early 20th century, it was ruled by a series of dictators backed by the United Fruit Co. and the U.S. government. From 1960-96, Guatemala underwent a bloody civil war fought between the U.S.-backed government and leftist rebels, resulting in massacres of the indiginous Mayan population. Since then, the country has witnessed both economic growth and successful democratic elections, though it continues to struggle with high rates of crime, the drug trade and political instability.
Are Washington’s relentless bombings and military immersions in sectarian battles within Arab and neighboring regions accelerating the spread of terrorist attacks? Yes. The recent rash of terror attacks in Kuwait, Tunisia, Somalia, France, and other countries are tragic examples of the strategic failures of our government and its very heavy reliance on military interventions, including the omnipresent drones that terrorize civilians.
From the first bombings of al-Qaeda’s small band of fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan to the toppling of the Taliban government there by President George Bush in 2001, all Washington’s weaponry, soldiers, and trillions of dollars have accomplished is to spread al-Qaeda’s numerous offshoots into over a dozen countries.
The CIA calls this “blowback.” For fourteen years this “blowback” has destabilized countries, initiated civil wars costing millions of mostly civilian lives and leaving others sickened and injured, and caused many families to be driven out of their homes as masses of weeping refugees.
The US-backed Colombian government has presided over what now appears to be one of the worst cases ever of mass atrocities perpetrated against innocent civilian populations. According to new reports as many as 6,000 civilians may have been killed under the orders of generals and colonels seeking to boost their reputations as rebel-killers.
The New York Times and Washington Post should expand their coverage of civilian deaths in Yemen caused by a US-backed military campaign.
In a paper titled “Robotics and Lessons of Cyberlaw,” Calo explores how the development of cyberlaw starting in the 1990s could provide a foundation regarding how the law deals with the transformative technology of robotics.
It’s time to start building an expertise among lawmakers in the relevant technology, Calo said.
“This particular article represents my most current thinking,” and “I’ve been thinking about the concepts for a few years now,” he added.
There was commotion in Tokyo this April when a drone with traces of radioactive material, a bottle with unspecified contents and mounted with a camera was discovered on the roof of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s office. The 50cm diameter drone had a symbol that warned of radioactive material. Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yoshihide Suga, said the incident was a wakeup call to the potential dangers of drones including possible terror attacks. Earlier in January 2015, a drone had crashed on the White House grounds, raising questions about safe use commercial and consumer drones in the US. Significantly, Japanese aviation laws have had no restrictions for unmanned drones flying at or below 250 metres above ground except along flight routes. But now with a drone landing on the roof of the Prime Minister’s office, a comprehensive review is underway. The magnitude of terror that drones can unleash may can be gauged from the fact that the Aum Shirikyo cult that executed multiple Sarin Gas bombings on Tokyo subway in 1995 was later found to have possessed two remote controlled helicopters and enough Sarin Gas to kill one million people. It was just providence that during practice, both helicopter drones crashed and the cult went had to execute the bombings nn foot. But why to talk of a cult or group of people, a recent study in the US brings home the chilling conclusion that one single disciple of ‘Lone Wolf Terrorism’ is capable of killing millions.
It seems apparent to me that the counterterrorism strategy employed by the U.S. is a strategy of decapitation. Kill the leaders and the phenomenon of terrorism will cease to exist. The government views terrorist leaders similar to leaders of a cult (as defined by Weber). The leaders have omnipotent control over members and followers, and inspire them to act in ways that, without such leadership, they would not undertake. Therefore, if one kills the charismatic leader, the members and followers will cease to undertake terrorist operations, lacking inspiration from the charismatic figure, similar to a cult.
The current drone strategy as well as the continued emphasis on special ops teams, such as the one that killed Osama Bin Laden, reflect the fact the U.S. counter-terrorism strategy as one of decapitation. However, terrorism continues to proliferate even in the wake of Bin Laden and countless other high profile terrorists' deaths. Al-Qaeda branches flourish in the Maghreb and Yemen; ISIS continues to besiege towns in Syria and Iraq; and Boko Haram stalks northern Nigeria looking for prey. The world is more threatened by terrorism now than in 2011 when Osama Bin Laden was killed. The U.S. counter-terrorism strategy of decapitation has unsurprisingly failed; unfortunately it was never much of a strategy.
The shelling occurred in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir and the border villages near the eastern Pakistani city of Sialkot, a Pakistani army statement said.
Pakistan has lodged a complaint against India with the UN military observer group for "ceasefire violations" along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir.
"United Nations Military Observers Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) was asked to use its good offices to investigate Indian ceasefire violations," the Pakistan army said, claiming the Indians were using heavy mortars and machine guns on civil population living along the Working Boundary and the LoC, resulting in casualties.
At least five civilians were killed as India and Pakistan exchanged fire in the disputed Kashmir region, days after a meeting between leaders of the two countries in Russia.
Being a drone pilot (if you're flying a drone used to deploy weapons) is about the most unhappy profession imaginable. You carry the weight of knowing you are responsible for killing people, but you're doing it from a darkened room halfway around the world while looking at a screen, relying on others' judgments that what you're doing is morally acceptable or strategically useful, deprived of even the sensory experience, physical challenge, and danger that a pilot of a manned craft might be distracted by.
While sitting at a computer terminal on U.S. soil, troops operating combat drones do not have to imagine killing Islamic State targets thousands of miles away in the afternoon and that evening sitting down to dinner with their families, they do so.
The costs of America’s wars have been enormous, in dead and injured American soldiers and wasted resources. The results, including the ignominious defeat in Vietnam, have left the U.S. and the world in worse shape. Wounded veterans from each of these extended wars have returned home, with many ending up homeless or suicidal.
Lately, child defiance has even been pathologized. “Official” psychiatry’s diagnostic manual now lists a “condition” called “Oppositional Defiant Disorder,” or “ODD.” ODD is defined as an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior,” and its symptoms include questioning authority, negativity, defiance, and argumentativeness.
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Children who resist this regimentation, or defy the orders given them by teachers, principles, and other school authority figures, are punished with detention or extra work. They may even be given solitary confinement, or arrested and sent to juvenile hall. Students who are independently boisterous and vocal are also punished and frowned upon as “disruptive.” Rewards are meted out to “star students” who exceed their fellows in deference, obsequiousness, and the vigor with which they undertake their given assignments.
An air force official has confirmed that two missiles fell off an RAF Tornado fighter jet as it landed at a base in Cyprus.
Two Brimstone missiles, which cost around €£105,000 each and are designed to destroy ground targets, fell from the aircraft as the jet went in to land at RAF Akrtoiti in Cyprus.
Fortunately, the missiles did not explode, and no-one was injured in the incident.
RAF Akrotiri is one of two British military bases on Cyprus, both of which are currently of major strategic importance due to their proximity to Isis-controlled areas in Syria and Iraq - the Syrian coast is only around 80 miles from Cyprus.
David Cameron said on Monday he had tasked Britain’s defence chiefs to see how they could do more to counter terrorism.
That, he added, “could include more spy planes, drones and special forces. In the last five years, I have seen just how vital these assets are in keeping us safe.”
He may have seen, we have not.
Operations involving Britain’s special forces are shrouded in official secrecy. The rules of engagement covering the RAF’s use of drones are far from clear, something former senior intelligence officials themselves say they are worried about.
Greater roles for the SAS and drones reflect closer links between the armed forces and intelligence agencies - something that will allow ministers to widen the scope of what can be included in the “defence budget” (see below).
A sampling of statements from Hamid Karzai and his aides critical of the U.S.-brokered coalition government and its allies.
1. May: A statement from Karzai’s office on the memorandum of understanding between Afghan and Pakistani spy agencies.
“Former president Hamid Karzai expresses his deep concerns over MOU between [the two agencies]. He asks the leaders of government to immediately cancel the MOU and to avoid the signature of any document that is against national interests in the future.”
In the old days, an enemy combatant was someone wearing a uniform on a field of battle.
Levine spoke mostly about militarization, which she considers to be state terrorism. She said state terrorism challenges citizens' constitutional rights, puts an overwhelming number of people in jail for minor offenses, promotes surveillance of individuals and groups and arms local police forces with military-style weapons.
But the official statistics are meaningless. Because U.S. pilots are flying blind. To a great extent, they don’t know what — if anything — they’re hitting.
US President Barack Obama's former top military intelligence official has launched a scathing attack on the White House's counter-terrorism strategy, including the administration's handling of the ISIL threat in Iraq and Syria and the US military's drone war.
In a forthcoming interview with Al Jazeera English's Head to Head, retired US Lt. General Michael Flynn, who quit as head of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in August 2014, said "there should be a different approach, absolutely" on drones.
"When you drop a bomb from a drone ... you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good," Flynn told Al Jazeera's Mehdi Hasan. When Hasan pressed Flynn on whether drone strikes are creating more terrorists than they kill, Flynn said, "I don't disagree with that" and described President Obama's approach to using drones "an overarching ... failed strategy."
President Obama’s former top military intelligence official has described the administration’s reliance on drones as a "failed strategy" that creates more terrorists. In an interview with Al Jazeera, retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn said, "When you drop a bomb from a drone … you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good." Flynn served as head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency up until last August. Meanwhile, the U.S. reportedly carried out another drone strike in Somalia Thursday targeting militants with al-Shabab.
US President Barack Obama's former spy chief has admitted that drones are causing "more damage than good" and that US prisons in Iraq "absolutely" helped in radicalising young Iraqis who later joined al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
The White House confirmed reports Monday that the Obama administration is working closely with countries in Northern Africa to try to combat threats from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and other extremist activity in Libya, but declined to say specifically whether the U.S. is trying to establish a drone base to improve surveillance capabilities.
The video shows what appears to be a homemade drone with a gun attached to it. The trigger is attached to a remote activating mechanism which allows the drone pilot to fire a gun from his remote location. The video also shows that drone can compensate for recoil just fine, and quickly reset on position to fire again at the same target.
There are eight documented cases of American citizens killed in drone strikes since 2002.
But not every act of political violence is terrorism. Terrorism has a specific legal meaning. Some definitions, such as the one in Title 18, Section 2331 of the U.S. Code (dangerous crimes intended “to influence the policy of a government”), are so absurdly broad that they could cover almost any politically motivated crime. The tightest and best definition is the one in Title 22, Section 2656 of the U.S. Code: “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets.” That’s the definition our government applies when documenting terrorism overseas.
IS has become a convenient catch-all explanation, just as al-Qaida was in the first decade of the 2000s.
Emily Schneider reviews two new books about the U.S. drone program, Sudden Justice and Kill Chain, that, read together, inform our understanding of U.S. drone policy in new ways.
Are we entering an era of robotic war? The rise of the machines raises both technical and moral challenges
Yousafzai has made it clear that she misses her homeland and she even told Obama that sending drones into Pakistan is not a good idea because it can perpetuate terrorism. Otherwise, her rhetoric focuses on the power and importance of education.
The Pilot grins, struts and swaggers in those ways we’ve come to expect flyboys to behave. Only the flyboy in “Grounded” is a woman with the confident, knowing temperament of an Air Force fighter pilot. Alicia Hunt’s Pilot speaks in curt declarative sentences that nearly become annoying in their cocky cadence. Is there anything that can knock down that bravado just a bit? There will be. In George Brant’s lean one-woman play, what comes at The Pilot are unpredictable and mostly fascinating events that change her forever.
These repetitive headlines should signal the kind of victory that Washington would celebrate for years to come. A muscular American technology is knocking off the enemy in significant numbers without a single casualty to us. Think of it as a real-life version of Arnold Schwarzenegger's heroic machine in certain of the Terminator movies. If the programs that have launched hundreds of drone strikes in the backlands of the planet over these years remain "covert," they have nonetheless been a point of pride for a White House that regularly uses a "kill list" to send robot assassins into the field. From Washington's point of view, its drone wars remain, as a former CIA director once bragged, "the only game in town" when it comes to al-Qaeda (and its affiliates, wannabes, and competitors).
This is the second of a three-part series investigating the forces behind the unending war waged primarily by police against Black people.
The court of federal appeal confirmed that the images supported by Google Earth or any other satellite imagery will be considered as an evidence in the trials of any court prosecution.
Deputy Wallace blew the lid on a deal which saw nearly €10million diverted to an Isle of Man account which he claims was “earmarked for a Northern Ireland politician”.
A review of the Freedom of Information Act will be "open-minded", former Home Secretary Jack Straw has said.
Mr Straw introduced the act in 2000 but his place on a panel examining its work has been criticised by campaigners.
The ex-Labour MP has said inquiries about ministerial communications and the formulation of government policy should not be allowed any more.
But he told the BBC the review would weigh the evidence carefully including that from groups opposed to the act.
Hospitalizations for heart conditions, neurological illness, and other conditions were higher among people who live near unconventional gas and oil drilling (hydraulic fracturing), according to new research from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University published this week in PLOS ONE. Over the past ten years in the United States, hydraulic fracturing has experienced a meteoric increase. Due to substantial increases in well drilling, potential for air and water pollution posing a health threat has been a concern for nearby residents.
The red flags and marching songs of Syriza during the Greek crisis, plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above. For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse.
Trump is a product of American society, but he’s not unique. His mixture of murky wealth, extreme arrogance and vulgar chauvinism can be found all over the world, albeit with local spins. Here are just a handful of the world’s other Donald Trumps:
Donald Trump drew 9,000 people to a rally in Phoenix on Saturday. He is placing first or second among Republican primary candidates in some polls, including those in early voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire.
A former Gannett reporter, Brendan O'Shaughnessy, has linked the downturn in the news industry into something workers in all industries are feeling: the disparity between the very rich and everyone else. In an article for Notre Dame Magazine, O'Shaughnessy details how Gannett employees agreed to a 10 percent pay cut, only to see that money given to executives in the form of bonuses.
When I heard the news about the nuclear deal with Iran, I decided to seek out the sage wisdom of Scott Walker. Because surely, with his vast national security experience — fighting unionized workers, lobbying for a Milwaukee Bucks arena, running a state that ranks 38th in the nation in job creation — he would know what’s best for America on the world stage.
A number of pithy foreign quotes circulate in the Russian political language as common currency. But turn to the original language and no one can find them. There is the Dulles Doctrine (a supposed plan by the CIA to destroy the Soviet Union) and Churchill’s apparent claim that “Stalin came to power when Russia had only a wooden plow, and left it in possession of atomic weapons”. There’s Margaret Thatcher allegedly saying that the Russian population could happily be cut in three, and there is Albright’s quote about Siberia and the Far East not lawfully belonging to Russia.
So what’s a poor boy to do? After kissing the asses of the two authorized political parties good-bye, what do I do with all this energy? Americans are, for the most part, living in a bubble of illusion. They’ve been poisoned by their owners. Not enough to kill most of them outright, but poisoned in mind and body. Brains filled with corporate media doubletalk and nonsense. Bellies filled with corporate fast foods until most of them look like cartoon caricatures of themselves. Veins filled with Monsanto’s glyphosate, poisonous ink from head to toe tattoos, and untold dozens of other carcinogenic chemicals. Souls filled with false hopes of a heavenly home in the sky at the end of the bumpy road of their meaningless lives.
Polls are ever-changing, but Americans will never long for a king or queen. When Run the Jewels rapper Killer Mike tweeted "I cannot support another Clinton or bush ever," he echoed the sentiments of Americans throughout the country tired of entrenched political factions in Washington. As for why political dynasties are ruinous to any democracy, the Atlanta rapper says, "I am beginning to see American political families like monarchs and I have no affection for monarchs." This sentiment, in addition to the reasons Killer Mike has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, can't be accurately assessed by opinion polls or political wonks.
The world has not been short of really big, consequential stories the past few weeks, from the volatility of China’s markets to the drama of Greece in the eurozone and the endgame of negotiations to ring-fence Iran’s nuclear program from weapons. Meanwhile in Australia, a royal commission into union shenanigans has come close to ensnaring Bill Shorten, leader of the opposition Labor Party. With impeccable timing and questionable judgment, Prime Minister Tony Abbott distracts attention from these stories and keeps alive the controversy over government meddling in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
In introducing its sweeping security bill earlier this year, the government said the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada's spy agency, did not have a legal mandate to take action concerning threats. Rather, CSIS was limited to collecting and analyzing information as well as advising the government.
The government characterized the bill's proposed new powers — which have since received royal assent — as a means of bringing the spy service's capabilities in line with those of allied counterparts.
How accurate were the government's claims?
Spoiler Alert: The Canadian Press Baloney Meter is a dispassionate examination of political statements culminating in a ranking of accuracy on a scale of "no baloney" to "full of baloney" (complete methodology below).
This one earns a rating of "a lot of baloney."
Privacy advocates have something new to complain about. ProxyHam, a router that can hide your location, has been terminated under mysterious circumstances. ProxyHam is equipped with a 900 MHz radio, allowing it to connect to Wi-Fi as far as two miles away and then broadcast the signal to your device.
Rhino Security Labs' Benjamin Caudill, the proprietor of the anonymizing router, was set to present and sell ProxyHam at this year's DefCon hacking conference in Las Vegas, but his presentation was abruptly cancelled without explanation. Additionally, Rhino Security Labs Tweeted they'll be destroying all their ProxyHam routers and won't release any more of its source code or details.
The device acted as a point-to-point bridge using 900 MHz signals to distance a user from the access point they're logged into. This would prevent cops or feds from noting the location of a hotspot used by a person of interest - say in a Starbucks - and arresting them at that location.
POLICE Scotland is refusing to deny that it is one of the forces which has breached a new law designed to clampdown on officers spying on journalists.
A watchdog criticised two unnamed forces last week for failing to get judicial approval before obtaining “communications data” such as phone records to flush out journalists’ sources.
Asked if Police Scotland was behind one of the breaches, a spokesman repeatedly declined to answer the question.
Once again, another convenient shooting has helped supercharge anger, hatred, fear, and division across the Western World after an alleged "Islamist extremist" opened fire on and killed 4 US Marines at a recruiting station in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Without any knowledge of how the US has in fact created Al Qaeda and its many global affiliates, including vicious terrorist groups plaguing Southeast Asia, and the most notorious to date, the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIS), the American public will predictably react in a manner that will simply further justify America's meddling across the globe amid its self-created and perpetuated "War on Terror." It will also help in efforts to further tighten control over the American public itself, with increased justifications for expanding police state measures and future pushes to disarm the American people.
CHINA claims to have found almost 30 surveillance bugs, including one in the headboard of the presidential bed, on a Boeing 767 that had just been delivered from America to serve as President Jiang Zemin’s official aircraft.
Facebook users beware! Not only does this media giant know almost everything about you, the company now has an algorithm that can identify you from a photo even if your face is covered. Thanks to a new software breakthrough, a computer can identify you by hair style, body shape or pose. Facebook developed this algorithm in its artificial intelligence lab. Although presently banned in Europe for privacy reasons, the technology can be used in the U.S. For more info on this development, visit www.newscientist.com/article/dn27761-facebook-can-recognise-you-in-photos-even-if-youre-not-looking/. Hello George Orwell. Good bye privacy. Yikes! This is scary.
In his book, a British journalist argues that modern surveillance is no substitute for old-fashioned spying
Apple has patented new technology which checks your bank account to target ads. No, you didn’t misread that. Maybe Fox’s popular animated sitcom Futurama were onto something when they showcased the great lengths some companies are willing to go to try to sell you something. A new pair of red space briefs probably aren’t in your immediate future, but something else more affordable may be.
“There may be a perception that the rule of law is eroded, so if that perception grows, that role of the judges is threatened and it’s not good for democracy,” Madonsela said in Johannesburg.
The torture scandal consuming the US’s premiere professional association of psychologists has cost three senior officials their jobs, part of a reckoning that reformers hope will lead to criminal prosecutions.
A new report disclosed by James Risen of the New York Times on Friday tells in greater detail than ever before the story of how members of the American Psychological Association colluded with the CIA when it came to the application of brutal interrogation techniques.
The report describes how repeated expressions of concern from within the CIA itself that psychologists had no place in the abusive treatment of detainees were brushed asided by leaders of what was supposed to be a highly ethical professional association. Psychologists with close ties to the CIA, in some cases even involving financial relationships, cited national security as the reason to ignore their fundamental oaths to do no harm.
The PBJ's Elizabeth Hayes followed up yesterday on word, as revealed by the Oregonian, that an Oregon Health & Science University professor may have somehow participated in the CIA's enhanced interrogation program.
Operation Ajax was a pivotal moment in US and world history. It was the first time the CIA overthrew a government.
Yet even today the US government would rather not talk about it. That’s why it remains an unknown story for many Americans.
The year was 1953. The objective was to oust Mohammad Mossadegh, the elected leader of the Majlis, Iran’s parliament.
Mossadegh was not a communist or a radical Islamist. He didn’t follow any objectionable ideology. Instead, he was a secular nationalist. But he was inconvenient.
And just in strategic terms, torture is a bad idea because the tortured are likely to hold resentments which may ultimately lead to the very acts the torture was trying to prevent. It also tarnishes America’s image abroad and creates distrust of Americans among foreign populations leading to the kind of blowback Americans suffered on 9/11.
...part of the CIA's global campaign of kidnapping and torture.
Sandra Bland, a 28-year old African-American civil rights activist from Chicago, was found dead in her cell at Waller County Jail in Houston, Texas Monday morning.
She had been booked in the jail just three days prior when a Department of Public Safety trooper claimed that Bland had been combative about a traffic violation.
On Thursday, the Harris County medical examiner ruled that her death was a suicide. An unlikely story, friends and family say, who describe Bland as someone who was “mentally and spiritually strong” and never one to back down when it came to “speaking out about police brutality.”
Lauri Love, now 30, was arrested in October 2013 on charges he and associates hacked into networks operated by the US Army, the US Missile Defense Agency, NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other US government agencies. The objective behind the hacking spree, US prosecutors said at the time, was to disrupt the operations and infrastructure of the US government by stealing large amounts of military data and personally identifying information of government employees and military personnel. "You have no idea how much we can fuck with the US government if we wanted to," Love allegedly told a hacking colleague at one point.
For much of Barack Obama’s presidency, he has steered away from the topic of race, and stopped short of making criminal justice reform a top White House priority. But on Tuesday, weeks after giving an emotional eulogy on race in Charleston, South Carolina, Obama’s long-awaited call for sweeping criminal justice at the NAACP annual convention was just what his audience in Philadelphia wanted to hear, at the moment when they wanted to hear it.
After I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, I agreed to a plea deal that sent me to a federal prison for 23 months. Like most American prisons, mine was full of nonviolent drug offenders — people who had made a mistake, in some cases many years ago — or who had supposedly been caught up in drug rings.
These people had never physically hurt anyone. Many had never committed a crime before, but our nation’s sentencing laws are so tough that many are spending decades locked up.
One example is my friend Mark. He’s 45 years old and from the south side of Philadelphia.
Despite the best efforts of some to sound the alarm, the nation is being locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.
California uses a controversial method to recover contraband from inmates believed to have swallowed it or concealed it in body cavities: “potty watches” where inmates are handcuffed and shackled for days or even weeks while guards watch around-the-clock until nature takes its course.
A federal judge has rejected — for now — a bid to force Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to testify in a lawsuit brought by a Florida woman who claims the U.S. government illegally disclosed private information about her in connection with an investigation that ultimately led to the resignation of former CIA director David Petraeus.
Green J accepted the claimants' application, however he did not expressly rule on the actual compatibility of UK exception for personal copies for private use with EU law, and actually envisaged the possibility of a reference for a preliminary ruling to the Court of Justice of the European Union ('CJEU').
As police forces up and down the country turn the screw on sellers of illegal streaming boxes, the government is now considering whether pirates in general should receive tougher sentences. Currently, infringers face up to two years in prison, but an amendment to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act could increase that punishment to 10 years. Government ministers have launched a consultation and are calling for feedback on tougher penalties. They argue that the "vast majority" of copyright offenders, focusing more on those who control the distribution of illegal content in the first place, have links to "further criminality" and tougher punishments could "have a deterrent effect" on criminals seeking to make money from file-sharing.
The UK Government has announced a new proposal to increase the maximum jail term for online piracy from two to ten years. According to the authorities longer prison sentences are needed to deter large-scale and commercial copyright infringement on the Internet.