Mom was finding this computer frustrating because the hardware was very old and slow to start with, so I built her a computer in about 2000 that had Linux on it. She liked the Linux computer very much, in part because I had provided her with written instructions about how to perform the basic tasks she wanted to do.
I have been using various Linux distros for many years now. One of the benefits is that I’ve seen many things improve and have been there to celebrate each success as it happened. Unfortunately, like any modern operating system, even the most modern Linux distributions are not without their challenges.
In this article, I'm going to share the biggest issues I've experienced over the years. At no time am I disparaging Linux on the desktop. Rather, I hope to start a dialog so that some of these issues can be addressed.
This malware relies on a security hole in the Magento web e-commerce platform, not Linux.
At some point, applications, whether they run on containers or otherwise, need to run on physical hardware. That's one of the reasons why container startup Rancher Labs is announcing a partnership with Redapt, to develop and build a hyper-converged server infrastructure platform optimized for container delivery.
Rancher Labs is developing a purpose built Linux operating system for containers called RancherOS...
Just a few moments ago, Linus Torvalds had the great pleasure of announcing the start of the Linux kernel 4.4 development cycle with the immediate availability for download and testing of the first RC (Release Candidate) build.
So it's Sunday, two weeks has passed, and so 4.4-rc1 is out there and the merge window is closed.
As usual, the full shortlog is much too big to post, so appended is the usual shortlog of just my merges, which just shows who I did pulls from, with a very short comment on each merge.
Many people are familiar with the impact that The Linux Foundation has had on the Linux community itself, as well as several notable open source projects. Now, the company is setting its sights on the high performance computing environment.
LINUX IS already past the point when, in theory, Skynet should have created a T-800 Terminator to save John Connor, and Linux puppetmaster Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate for kernel version 4.4.
"Just looking at the patch itself, things look fairly normal at a high level, possibly a bit more driver-heavy than usual with about 75 percent of the patch being drivers, and 10 percent being architecture updates," said Torvalds in a release statement.
Early this morning I wrote a brief article about AMD working on an LLVM-based Heterogeneous Compute Compiler and since then more details have come to light.
As you may know, Brackets, the open-source editor created by Adobe is now available for Linux systems. It is very usefull for web designers and developers, because it has support for HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Mailur aims to become the future open source replacement for Gmail.
As a hobbyist Python programmer, over the years I have tried a variety of different editors. Back in the day I used to use Eclipse with the PyDev plugin. I then moved on to use GEdit with a few extensions switched on. After that I moved to Geany. I have to admit, much to the shock of some of you, I never really stuck with Sublime, despite a few attempts.
The second update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp is now on the CRAN network for GNU R. As usual, I will also push a Debian package. This follows the 0.12.0 release from late July which started to add some serious new features, and builds upon the 0.12.1 release in September. It also marks the sixth release this year where we managed to keep a steady bi-montly release frequency.
Discworld Noir was a superb adventure game, but is also notoriously unreliable, even in Windows on real hardware; using Wine is just not going to work. After many attempts at bringing it back into working order, I've settled on an approach that seems to work: now that qemu and libvirt have made virtualization and emulation easy, I can run it in a version of Windows that was current at the time of its release. Unfortunately, Windows 98 doesn't virtualize particularly well either, so this still became a relatively extensive yak-shaving exercise.
If you like your silly arcade games for when friends come around then Hyperdrive Massacre might just be what you need. Fancy flying around a space-car and blowing up others? This is the game for you.
On November 15, Guild Software announced the immediate availability of a new update for its cross-platform massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Vendetta Online 1.8 game for all supported operating systems.
The developers themselves emailed both Age of Fear: The Undead King & Age of Fear 2: The Chaos Lord in for me to take a look at. They told me the games don't look like much, but offer a lot, and they were right.
Falcon Northwest is one of the companies that wanted to release Steam Machines, but it looks like that's not happening anymore.
High-end PC maker Falcon Northwest has decided against rolling out any Steam Machines this year powered by Valve's Debian-based SteamOS, due to problems with the operating system.
StarBreak has somewhat captured my interest, as we don't have many good MMO games, and even an MMO platformer like this looks pretty sweet. You can actually try it out right now in your browser, and it seems to work reasonably well.
Linux has crossed another hardware frontier with the announcement by Valve that Steam Machines based on the open source operating system are finally shipping.
Will I be putting Ubuntu back on it? Probably not. SteamOS certainly has its annoyances, and niggling issues, but it is still far nicer to use from across the room. I am hoping due to the very nature of Steam updates that these issues will be sorted quickly.
The development of the open source Enlightenment desktop environment used in numerous GNU/Linux operating system by default, or available from the default software repositories, announced the release of Enlightenment 0.19.13.
Neofytos Kolokotronis of the Chakra GNU/Linux project has had the pleasure of announcing earlier today, November 15, the immediate availability of the latest KDE technologies in the default software repositories of Chakra GNU/Linux.
Since last few weeks I was working on the Lockscreen integration with KWin Wayland session, this is most important bit of the Plasma on Wayland session. Currently in X11 lockscreen is managed by ksmserver (KDE’s session manager). It suffers from various security problems which are mentioned on blog post by Martin Gräßlin. This blog post also mentions that in Wayland lockscreen functionality should be moved in kwin_wayland, so that compositor is aware that screen is locked, what windows are owned by greeter, and what should get input events.
About two months ago I blogged about clazy, a Qt oriented static analyser.
Since then it has moved to an official KDE repo http://anongit.kde.org/clazy, got an IRC channel (#kde-clazy @ freenode) and also many fun new checks.
It's only been a couple of days since our 2015.11-Fermi ISO release, but it is already time for new updates!
KDE's Plasma 5.4.3, Applications 15.08.3 and Frameworks 5.16.0 are now available in Chakra. These releases contain mostly bugfixes and translation updates, so they should be safe to update for everyone.
Bhushan Shah has shared the recent work he's been doing on KDE's KWin to have proper screenlocker integration on Wayland.
As reported earlier this week, the GNOME Project announced the release of the second and last maintenance version for the current stable GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, bringing updates to numerous GNOME apps and core components.
Part of the GNOME 3.18 stack, Nautilus 3.18.2 brings impressive new features. GNOME’s default file manager brings a new features that displays external disk drives and SD cards in the sidebar instead of the Other Places menu, better support for Samba shares has been implemented and improved support for opening a new window via command-line has been added as well.
The rewrite of Budgie has seen some considerable progress and development that has been accelerated by the need to resolve issues that arose during the GNOME 3.18 Stack upgrade.
We were at SUSECon 2015 earlier in the month, where the company announced the release of OpenSUSE Leap 42.1. (We’ll have more on the event and a review of the distro in Linux Voice issue 23!) Richard Brown, Chair of the OpenSUSE board, made an interesting statement at the show: rolling releases are the future of distros. And not just hobbyist desktop distros, but enterprise ones as well (somewhere far down the line).
Franceso Milesi, the creator of the Birds Linux open source operating system based on the latest GNU/Linux technologies and designed for students, informs Softpedia readers about the release and immediate availability for download of Birds Linux 6.0.
The Solus developers have announced a few important changes, improvements, and updates that have landed for their distribution. There are quite a lot of items that have landed over the past few days, so users do have a lot to look out for.
We reported a week ago that the developer of the 4MLinux project informed us about the Beta release of the 4MLinux Core 15.0 distribution. Today, November 15, Zbigniew Konojacki announces the immediate availability of 4MLinux 15.0 Beta.
Chapeau 23 is on it’s way, in the meantime enjoy Chapeau 23 Beta!
This build is a feature-complete release of the next major version of Chapeau built from Fedora Workstation 23, packages from the RPMFusion’s pre-release testing repos and packages from Chapeau’s 23 repo. If you love having the latest software and don’t mind the odd issue that may crop up go ahead and check it out. If you find an undocumented issue it would be appreciated if you report it either in the the support forum or if you can figure if a particular Chapeau package is to blame for an issue then you can also log & track issues on Github.
Vince Pooley of Chapeau Linux has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta build of the future Chapeau 23 Linux operating system.
Notable Changes:
ZFS kernel modules were added in preparation for ZFS support in Cnchi v0.14
Fixed issue that caused a 20+ second delay in booting the ISO images
Like many of you, dear BetaNews readers, I use various operating systems throughout the day, such as iOS, Windows and Ubuntu. On the desktop, Linux is my true love. While Ubuntu is the reliable friend that is always there for me, I love other distros too, such as Fedora.
Of the three distributions, I think Fedora is closest to the cutting edge, with openSUSE and Ubuntu both fairly close behind. However, Fedora and Ubuntu have relatively short support cycles with Fedora releases usually supported for about 14 months, Ubuntu 15.10 for just nine months and openSUSE 42.1 will receive three years of support.
The best distribution for the job will depend on the person and, of course, the role the distribution is to play. I think Fedora is aimed mostly at more technical users and people who like to tinker. Ubuntu is aimed squarely at Linux newcomers who generally want to just use their computer and openSUSE appears to be aiming at a sort of middle ground: people who have a little Linux experience and want options, but also want reliability and longer support cycles.
SUSE’s Douglas DeMaio has announced that OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has received major updates for both the kernel and the app stack. Kernel 4.3 has been installed by default, Firefox has been updated to version 42.0, Wine 1.7.54 has been released, video decoding enhancements have been implemented and the the Btrfs file system has received multiple updates.
In one of my previous articles, where I wrote about the upcoming Slackware Live edition, I added some premature screenshots of the Plasma 5 packages I am announcing today. Just when I was preparing for upload, Pat released his big November 14th batch of updates to Slackware-current (including new kernel, compilers and X.Org), dubbing it “almost a beta”. That delayed the release process for my November Plasma 5 packages because I needed to check the impact of these updates to my already compiled packages.
The Koozali SME Server development team, through Terry Fage, announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming SME Server 9.1 server-oriented operating system.
OpenShift Enterprise 3.1 and Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform provide a comprehensive, modular solution for developing, delivering and managing container-based applications across the open hybrid cloud
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) has dropped 3.94% during the past week, however, the bigger picture is still very bullish; the shares have posted positive gains of 0.27% in the last 4 weeks. The counter has underperformed the S&P 500 by 0.32% during the past week but Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) has outperformed the index in 4 weeks by 0.77%.
fedmsg has a few Meetbot-related topics corresponding to Meetbot commands which I gathered daily, weekly, and monthly IRC meeting data from. You can construct queries for a time period by specifying the start and end parameters for the query. Using count variables from JSON data dump, I found the total number of messages pertaining to our query. You can also use Datagrepper Charts API for some basic visualizations.
There are some less known features in Ubuntu, but they are usually announced or presented at some point during the development cycle. There is a really nice feature that allows users to change the volume in the OS, but it's not advertised.
Canonical's Michael Vogt informs us about the release and immediate availability for download of the tenth image of the stable Snappy Ubuntu Core 15.04 operating system for embedded and IoT (Internet of Things) devices.
Ubuntu still provides one of the best and most intuitive desktops for Linux.
Installing Ubuntu is simple and hardware support is handled brillliantly.
The repositories are full of great applications and the default applications within Ubuntu whilst small in number are well thought out and fully featured.
Unfortunately the one let down is the Software Centre. The software is old, tired, confused, unintuitive and fails to do the one thing for which it is designed to do.
My advice is to install Ubuntu and then get Synaptic. After you have done that replace Totem with VLC and Firefox with Chrome.
Michael Vogt, one of the Canonical developers, has announced that Snappy Ubuntu Core 15.04 for Internet of Things devices has been updated, a lot of interesting features and enhancements being implemented.
Submitting a bug is not on anyone's list of favorite things to do in a day, but that doesn't mean that you can't make it fun. Someone notified the Ubuntu devs about a potential problem in the login screen, but it requires a cat to replicate the bug.
Minibian "Jessie," a Linux distribution developed for all the available Raspberry Pi devices, has arrived and is now ready for download.
There are a lot of Linux distributions for the Raspberry Pi (first and second generation), so you might think that there is not a lot of room for another one, although this pun is intended as you'll immediately see.
In the modern era, it seems to be aboug getting as much bang for the buck as possible, and although the Raspberry Pi itself is rather budget friendly, another board barges in to take the Cheapest title, and the specs are not to be dismissed.
The C.H.I.P, created by Net Thing Co, costs $9 USD, and runs a slim version of Debian, on a 1GHz Allwinner ARM SOC, coupled with 512MB of Ram and 4GB of flash storage, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, standard and micro USB ports, and a composite AV jack and can also be extended with snap-on “shield” modules such as VGA and HDMI connectivity.
Moto X 2013 devotes can jump for joy as Sprint has just released the Android 5.1 upgrade over-the-air. This upgrade should soon arrive on all Moto X 2013 smartphones running stock Android, it is only a matter of patience.
The Android Wear update to version 1.4 brings support for a number of watch gestures. While they are turned on by default after the update, you can double check this by waking up your watch face with a touch. Swipe left, and scroll down until you see Settings. Tap on it, and touch Wrist Gestures. Not only will you be able to enable or disable wrist gestures, there is also a tutorial in the settings. Keep in mind that having the gestures on will negatively affect your battery life. With gestures, your watch will respond to the speed and direction that you move your wrist.
While Android is what XDA is mostly about today, we have a rich history of tweaking beyond (and prior to) Android. You likely had a phone before your Android devices, too. Which devices did you own prior, and back then, did you tinker and tweak those at all?
Android Wear has been around for over a year, and despite numerous software iterations and two generations of hardware filled with alternatives, the smartwatch game still hasn’t trickled down into the mainstream, and it has certainly not matched the prediction that analysts have been putting forth for years now.
If you've only recently started to get deeper into the whole smartphone tech thing, immersing yourself in the layers of geeky information that lie beneath the shiny surface, you've probably encountered the terms "stock Android" and / or "vanilla Android" more than a couple of times by now. What do they mean? They are basically used to describe phones that run a version of the Android operating system that looks, feels, and acts as close as possible to how Google — Android's creator — designed it to be.
BlackBerry has rolled out a new BlackBerry Priv emulator to help Android developers build apps for its latest smartphone. The tool could help developers who want to take advantage of Priv’s unique physical keyboard, which isn’t available on other popular Androids.
Sometimes you’re in the market for a super cheap phone. Whether you’re just looking for a stopgap replacement, a backup or a burner, having a cheap and cheerful smartphone around is something worth considering.
Today, Motherboard spotted a TracFone on WalMart’s website, developed in partnership with LG, that has pushed the price of an Android smartphone down to less than $10.
Specifically, the Open Sequencer Project is an attempt to design and build an automated DNA sequencer costing under $1,000. But it’s more: The goal is to introduce students to the world of genetics by providing access to capabilities normally found only in well-funded commercial and academic labs, and to achieve this using open source and open design methods.
ersonally, this whole business weighs on my heart and mind. There are software titles I use daily and I cannot understand their lack of widespread usage. Open source developers work tirelessly on their craft and, in the end, get little in return. It's time something is done about that.
What's the solution?
Based in Pune, India, Srikanth owes a lot of OpenSpecimen’s ease of use to its open-source software, which he views as the key to several of the firm’s successes. Open-source software, as opposed to software like Microsoft’s or Apple’s, is free to download and use. Examples include the Firefox web browser and the Libre Office suite. It allows for more creativity, because once it is downloaded, the user is free to modify the software for his or her personal needs. Sure enough, OpenSpecimen made some updates to the project, then turned around and made the software available for the international market.
Stickers are a big part of open source culture, but what are the rules for designing and collecting them? In this article, open source community members share what they like (or don't like) in a sticker, their "rules" for collecting and displaying them, and their sticker wish lists.
If you value image quality and accuracy, calibration of your monitor will be important. Anyone involved in digital photography, graphic design or artwork will recognise the importance that their monitor is producing the best results, showing true colors and black levels. The objective when calibrating a monitor is to ensure the monitor has color references known by everyone (humans and software). This will mean the colours are represented accurately on your monitor.
I got an idea to create conference management system. We have created an project in Red Hat faculty lab. With Petr and Standa we have decided to create something from scratch and now we have some proof of concept result.
The project is hosted at github and it is targeted to OpenShift deployment.
For those with FFmpeg present on their system, Mozilla developers have finally enabled FFmpeg support to be used by default.
Firefox on Linux has relied upon GStreamer for media support, but with the patches merged last month is support for Libav 9 or FFmpeg 1.2 or newer by default.
Firefox has released an experimental app in the form of ‘Developer preview’version of its web-based Firefox OS for Android users. It is now available as an 88MB APK and works any launcher you will see in Google Play store.
The Mozilla developers have announced that Firefox 43.0, scheduled for release on December 15 2015, will be replacing GStreamer with FFmpeg. This is not surprising at all, since FFmpeg is available on the most popular Linux systems by default, or make it available via the default repos.
FFmpeg is present in most Linux distributions, so it's not really surprising that Mozilla finally decided to make an important change to Firefox and allow it to use the latest FFmpeg packages that are present in a system.
Question: what's better than predictive analytics?
Answer: predictive analytics and anomaly detection with pipeline aggregation intelligence, of course... so here's an argument for why.
Elastic, the company behind the open source projects Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana, finished its European developer-focused tour this month.
Taking a significant step toward making it simpler to deploy multiple types of application environments on top of a common set of IT infrastructure, VMware at the DockerCon Europe 2015 conference today fulfilled a pledge to open source a Photon Controller project through which organizations can invoke a common set of loosely coupled components and services.
AMD has been open-sourcing several components of their Linux HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) stack for the past several months including the AMDKFD kernel driver and HSAKMT run-time. In cooperation with SUSE, they also hope to have HSA accelerator support in GCC 6. Besides the GCC support, AMD is apparently planning to publish a Heterogeneous Compute Compiler.
GPUCC is their name for an open-source GPGPU compiler built atop LLVM. They call it "the first fully-functional, open-source high performance CUDA compiler" that is up to 51% faster on internal end-to-end benchmarks, on par with open-source benchmarks, compile time is 8% faster on average and 2.4x faster for pathological compilations compared to NVIDIA's official CUDA compiler (NVCC).
I’m relatively proud of my track record of being a staunch advocate for improved security in text editor package installation. I’d like to think I contributed a little to the fact that MELPA is now available over HTTPS and instructs you to use HTTPS URLs.
But the situation still isn’t very good in Emacs-land. Even if you manage to get your package sources from an authenticated source over HTTPS, it doesn’t matter, because Emacs won’t verify TLS.
A few months ago, the FCC proposed regulations that theoretically banned the use of open source firmware on your WiFi router. Needless to say, that rubbed a lot of enthusiasts the wrong way -- how were you supposed to improve features or security on your own terms, especially on routers that were designed to be hacked? Well, you needn't fear any longer.
The IEEE Standards Association (SA) said "development work" has already started on the new standard. It said the aim of the standard is to "improve the availability, accessibility and affordability of first-level screening for hearing-impaired people".
A computer glitch that brought the Paris airport of Orly to a standstill Saturday has been traced back to the airport's "prehistoric" operating system. In an article published Wednesday, French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné (which often writes serious stories, such as this one) said the computer failure had affected a system known as DECOR, which is used by air traffic controllers to communicate weather information to pilots. Pilots rely on the system when weather conditions are poor.
DECOR, which is used in takeoff and landings, runs on Windows 3.1, an operating system that came onto the market in 1992. Hardly state-of-the-art technology. One of the highlights of Windows 3.1 when it came out was the inclusion of Minesweeper — a single-player video game that was responsible for wasting hours of PC owners' time in the early '90s.
Just over the border from New Hampshire in the Massachusetts city of Lowell, a woman identifying herself as a follower of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), otherwise known as Pastafarianism, has been approved by the state’s Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV) to wear a spaghetti strainer on top of her head in her state issued driver’s ID.
The approval to wear the helmet was initially denied. However, citing religious grounds, Lowell resident Lindsay Miller filed an appeal. Following intervention by the American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center, the RMV reversed their decision and allowed her to put on her colander and get her driver’s license picture taken.
It's that time of year when technology predictions start to infiltrate your social networks, inbox, and news feeds. To kick off prediction season, ZME Science reminds us of perhaps the most accurate tech prediction of all time, coming from Ray Kurzweil in 1908. He says, “An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant.”
US-based iPower Technologies has discovered that body cameras sold by Martel Electronics come pre-infected with the Conficker worm (Win32/Conficker.B!inf).
This is really no surprise: embedded system vendors aren't good at carrying out quality assurance on their firmware images, and their embedded Web server software is what you'd expect from something written in the last 20 minutes of Friday afternoon.
The White House correspondent for French television network Canal+, Laura Haim, reported an interesting tidbit during a live report with MSNBC’s Brian Williams Friday evening.
Haim stated that Central Intelligence Agency director, John O. Brennan, recently met with his counterpart, French intelligence (DGSE) director Bernard Bajolet.
The French authorities will face serious problems in detecting additional terrorist plots despite the current state of emergency after the attack in Paris, former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Paul Pillar told Sputnik.
The series of apparent Islamic State attacks in Paris can be compared to the 2001 destruction of the WTC towers in the US, says Jack Rice, a former CIA officer. The French capital is an iconic European city, and terrorists target icons.
Documents released by the CIA show details of over a dozen investigations into serious allegations of misconduct by agency employees, including child pornography, torture and war crimes. In many cases, the Justice Department decided not to prosecute.
Redacted records of the investigations, part of the 111 probes conducted by the CIA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) between January 2013 and May 2014, were obtained by Vice News under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
This may be one of the more interesting ways to describe an airstrike against ISIS and it comes courtesy of former CIA Director Michael Hayden.
Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Hayden was talking about how airstrikes are being used to go after the terror organization’s infrastructure.
Then General Hayden made an unexpected comparison that seemed to temporarily stun Brzezinski and elicit a too-eager response from Deutsch. Hayden continued, “Airstrikes without ground power is a lot like casual sex: it offers gratification without commitment!”
Deutsch hopped in unabashedly, “Sign me up for that!”.
“Oh, my god,” responded Brzezinski.
As Mediaite reported over a year ago, General Hayden has made similar suggestions to this military approach before.
The CIA urged Turkey and Saudi Arabia to provide certain Syrian rebels with anti-aircraft weapons capable of shooting down airplanes, including high-flying passenger jets, Hildegard von Hessen am Rhein wrote for Boulevard Voltaire.
The fact that Syrian rebels fighting against Bashar al-Assad, a Russian ally, had CIA-sponsored weapons capable of downing a commercial airliner flying above 10,000 meters, makes a very uncomfortable situation for the US government amid the crash of the Airbus A321 operated by the Russian airliner Kogalymavia on October 31, the author said.
This all comes at a time when opinion polls in the West show a majority favor Russia’s Syria intervention.
The CIA’s targeted killing program has long been shrouded in secrecy. Recent leaks given to the Intercept, as well as thorough reporting by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, have shed light on the execution of such attacks, but interviews with former CIA directors for an upcoming documentary puts the ethical quandaries of the program, which has few regulations, in stark relief.
“We do not know what the rules of engagement are,” former CIA director Porter Goss, who resigned under George W. Bush due to frustration, told Chris Whipple for the documentary The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs. “Are we dealing with enemy combatants? Are we dealing with criminals? Are the rules shoot first? Do we only shoot when we get shot at? Can we ask questions? Do we have to Mirandize people?”
The UN Special Envoy to Libya became involved in conflict of interest after he was offered a high-paying job by the UAE while still a supposedly impartial head of dialogue talks to forge a peace agreement between the two rival Libyan governments.
Ali Awad, 14, was chopping vegetables when the first bomb struck. Adel Tormous, who would die tackling the second bomber, was sitting at a nearby coffee stand. Khodr Alaa Deen, a registered nurse, was on his way to work his night shift at the teaching hospital of the American University at Beirut, in Lebanon.
All three lost their lives in a double suicide attack in Beirut on Thursday, along with 40 others, and much like the scores who died a day later in Paris, they were killed at random, in a bustling urban area, while going about their normal evening business.
Could we please skip the empty bravado? This is a time for grief above all else, and a time to refrain from soundbites and posturing. France – our closest neighbour, oldest friend, beloved rival, what Philip Sidney called ‘that sweet enemy’ – France is stricken, and we should weep with her.
Over the past 40 years or so, most of us have heard quite enough politicians and others pledging to stand firm against terror, hunt down the vile perpetrators, ensure that it never happens again, and the rest.
Then there have been the emergency meetings of grandly titled committees, the crackdowns, the increased surveillance, the billions spent on spying and snooping, not to mention the various wars on terror which have certainly killed a lot of our troops, but never seem to make us any safer. It is remarkably hard to defend yourself against an enemy whose language few of us speak, yet who speaks ours and can move freely in our world, and who is willing, even happy, to die at our hands – or his own – if he can kill us first.
The hacker collective Anonymous released a video message on YouTube Sunday declaring war on the Islamic State in the wake of Friday's bloody terror attacks in Paris.
The video, posted in French, announces the beginning of #OpParis, a coordinated campaign to neutralize ISIS's social media channels.
“Anonymous from all over the world will hunt you down,” an (anonymous) Anonymous spokesperson, his face shrouded in the group's signature Guy Fawkes mask, says in French. “Expect massive cyber attacks. War is declared. Get prepared.”
On October 21, 2015, WikiLeaks (1) posted emails that were supposedly taken from the hacked AOL account of CIA Director John Brennan. The private email account was hacked by a supposed teenager who allegedly posed as a Verizon agent in order to gain access (2).
According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), some of the information that’s been released is correct. The journal attempted to contact many on the contact list as well as verify other pieces of information leaked. The WSJ also reported that some of the people whose addresses appeared on the list were actually contacted “by intelligence officials telling them their information had been compromised” (3).
For example, France already has more extensive surveillance laws than UK, and the atrocities still happened.
The Interior, Justice and Defence ministries are considering constitutional changes to facilitate more effective civilian and military intelligence operations. Web surveillance powers for the security and intelligence police Supo are among the reforms on the table. Meanwhile President Sauli Niinistö says it's time to raise the level of Finnish intelligence work to meet European standards.
The German government plans to make it illegal for the country's intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), to spy on citizens or institutions in EU countries. This follows revelations that the BND has been helping the NSA to snoop on European politicians and companies, as Ars reported in April. More recently, it has emerged that the BND's own spying extended far more widely than thought: those kept under surveillance included the interior ministries of EU member states, the Vatican, and non-governmental organisations such as Care International, Oxfam and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The French authorities are just a day into investigating the horrid events in Paris on Friday. We’ll know, over time, who did this and how they pulled it off. For that reason, I’m of the mind to avoid any grand claims that surveillance failed to find the perpetrators (thus far, French authorities say they know one of the attackers, who is a French guy they had IDed as an extremist, but did not know of people identified by passports found at the Stade — though predictably those have now been confirmed to be fake [update: now authorities say the Syrian one is genuine, though it’s not yet clear it belonged to the attacker], so authorities may turn out to know their real identity). In any case, Glenn Greenwald takes care of that here. I think it’s possible the terrorists did manage to avoid detection via countersurveillance — though the key ways they might have done so were available and known before Edward Snowden’s leaks (as Glenn points out).
Unfortunately, given recent political statements, we fear that the only response will lie in further bombings in the Middle-East and the escalation of security measures evermore harmful to fundamental rights. But when will we take the time to carefully analyse the failed policies carried on for the past fifteen years on a global scale, and through dozens of laws in France?
In the light of the declaration of the state of emergency and of political statements made over the weekend, La Quadrature du Net solemnly asks political leaders to take the time to reflect and engage in a rigorous, critical and transparent evaluation of France's international, diplomatic, military, geo-strategic and commercial commitments; to think about the strategy of intelligence services and to complete a thorough examination of their workings; to defeat a warmongering rhetoric drive us towards a "clash of civilisations" doubled with an internal civil conflict within our society; to also address the tensions that ripple through French society, the discriminations stirred by a part of the political and media elite, the shared responsibilities into the largely misunderstood phenomenon of violent radicalisation, the dissolving of perspectives for social progress.
Ben Wizner, who is perhaps best known as Edward Snowden’s lawyer, directs the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project. Wizner, who joined the ACLU in August 2001, one month before the 9/11 attacks, has been a force in the legal battles against torture, watch lists, and extraordinary rendition since the beginning of the global “war on terror.”
On October 15, we met with Wizner in an upstate New York pub to discuss the state of privacy advocacy today. In sometimes sardonic tones, he talked about the transition from litigating on issues of torture to privacy advocacy, differences between corporate and state-sponsored surveillance, recent developments in state legislatures and the federal government, and some of the obstacles impeding civil liberties litigation. The interview has been edited and abridged for publication.
The FBI is denying that it paid $1 million to Carnegie Mellon University to exploit a vulnerability in Tor.
"The allegation that we paid [Carnegie Mellon University] $1 million to hack into Tor is inaccurate," an FBI spokeswoman told Ars in a Friday morning phone call.
Two days ago, the head of the Tor Project accused the FBI of paying Carnegie Mellon computer security researchers at least $1 million to de-anonymize Tor users and reveal their IP addresses as part of a large criminal investigation.
Matt DeHart, the former U.S. airman and Anonymous hacktivist who made a failed asylum bid in Canada — claiming torture over his access to secret U.S. government documents — has accepted a plea deal in a Tennessee court, avoiding a possible 70-year prison term but admitting to having explicit photos of under-aged teenagers.
According to Investigative journalist Will Potter, the secret prisons emerged during the last Bush administration in response to the 9/11 destruction of the New York Twin Towers.
A Senate security officer stepped out of the December chill last year and delivered envelopes marked Top Secret to the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the State Department and the Justice Department. Inside each packet was a disc containing a 6,700-page classified report on the C.I.A.s secret prison program and a letter from Senator Dianne Feinstein, urging officials to read the report to ensure that the lessons were not lost to time.
The report tells the story of how, in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the C.I.A. began capturing people and interrogating them in secret prisons beyond the reach of the American judicial and military legal systems. The report’s central conclusion is that the spy agency’s interrogation methods — including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other kinds of torture — were far more brutal and far less effective than the C.I.A. acknowledged to policy makers, Congress and the public.
As the complicity of US allies in CIA torture comes to light, New Zealand has become the next nation to investigate its own possible ties to the secretive programs and illegal tactics that found favor with Washington in a post-9/11 frenzy.
New Zealand’s spy watchdog is acting on information disclosed in last year’s controversial US Senate Intelligence Committee Report, which outlined both the torture methods used and the countries that made it all possible; although “the names of those countries have been redacted,” according to Cheryl Gwyn, New Zealand’s Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security.
On the strength of a claimed turnover of $1 billion, the Australian Financial Review reported in early February 1978: “At this sort of growth rate Nugan Hand will soon be bigger than BHP.”
But two years later, on January 27, 1980, one of the bank's two founders, Frank Nugan, was found dead near Lithgow in NSW from a gunshot wound to the head. An inquest found it was suicide. Meanwhile, the other founder of the bank, Michael Hand, was busy shredding documents, including “files identifying clients regarded as sensitive”.
Most of us who recall the extraordinary story of the Nugan Hand Bank never expected to live to hear an explanation for some of its notorious activities, never mind see anyone prosecuted for their conduct.
But now, thanks to Sydney investigative journalist Peter Butt, one of the bank's co-founders, Michael Hand, has been found and we might at last get some answers.
Hand slipped out of Australia in June 1980 following the apparent suicide of his partner, Frank Nugan.
Butt, researching his book, Merchants of Menace, discovered him living under the name Michael Jon Fuller in the small US town of Idaho Falls where Channel Nine's Sixty Minutes confronted him
After the body of Nugan was found in his Mercedes-Benz on a deserted road outside Lithgow on January 27, 1980, the bank collapsed, costing Australian investors millions of dollars.
Last month, the ACLU filed a civil action in the Eastern District of Washington on behalf of Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud and Gul Rahman. They assert that the CIA secretly detained them in Afghanistan and subjected them to torture. Two of the plaintiffs, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, survived their time in CIA detention, were eventually released and now reside in Libya and Tanzania. The third plaintiff, Gul Rahman, died in CIA custody in November 2002. The complaint names as defendants James Mitchell and John Jessen, former military psychologists. Plaintiffs claim that while serving as CIA contractors, defendants helped design and implement the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Mitchell and Jessen are both described in the controversial December 2014 report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The Senate's 6,700 page, $40M report on the CIA's participation in torture has apparently never been read by a single member of the Executive Branch of the US Government, because the Department of Justice has ordered them all to stay away from it.
Why does the DoJ want to keep the Executive from finding out about the CIA's use of torture? Because Senate documents are not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests, but Executive documents are, and the DoJ is so pants-wettingly afraid of the public discovering official wrongdoing that they have banned anyone subject to FOIA from touching the document, lest it become subject to transparency rules.
CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou and psychologist Bradley Olson will headline two free events Thursday bringing torture into the spotlight.
My drive was worth it. Kiriakou's revelations in 2007 led to exposure of crimes, lies and cover-up all the way to the top of the Bush White House. It also brought the full weight of the federal government down on Kiriakou. We knew then that torture was illegal (against U.S. and international law), ineffective (yielding no actionable intelligence), and immoral (brutally sadistic). We know now from the Senate Intelligence Committee Summary Report, American Psychological Association's Hoffman Report, flight logs of extraordinary rendition flights (many from Johnston County airport), and personal testimony that torture was widespread, systematic, orchestrated from the top, falsely justified by White House legal counsel, and counterproductive to fighting terrorism. Yet, no one except the person who spoke truth to power is being prosecuted. Even Bush and Cheney boast in their memoirs that they endorsed torture.
Multiple government agencies are doing their best to ignore a 6,900-page elephant in the room: a mammoth report, authored by the Senate Intelligence Committee, detailing the horrors of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture programme.
Why is Mark Zuckerberg so concerned about his ‘charity’ initiative that he had to re-jig it in the face of opposition, star in another breathless video about it, and start a misleading campaign about it among users in India? Bear with me, it’s an interesting story.
Facebook is in a bit of a jam, and opposition to this one pet project in India is probably pointing to the seams of a larger story worldwide. But it all starts with a simple pair of numbers.
The seminal Anne Frank's Diary is elevated to public domain in a month and a half. But the foundation holding the copyright is trying legal trickery to extend its monopoly by decades, and almost nobody reports it as the fraud it is.