Linux Australia has suffered a second leak of data from its servers, according to a message sent to its main mailing list by president Joshua Hesketh.
In this article I’ve tried to put into words the areas where Linux can still use some improvement. I am a happy Linux user and am thankful for the outstanding community that surrounds the operating system, its components and features. I repeat what I said at the beginning of this article – these apparent disadvantages may actually become strengths when viewed from the proper perspective or will soon be.
Until then, let’s keep supporting each other as we learn and help Linux grow and spread. Feel free to leave your comments or questions using the form below – we look forward to hearing from you!
I’m keeping Linux on the desktop box — Korora, for those of you keeping score at home — and on a couple of infrequently used old ThinkPads. However, I’ve spent the last three weeks getting up to speed on PC-BSD, which I have finally installed on the main drive of my daily workhorse ThinkPad T500.
I worked with VMware after VMware first bought Propero back in 2007 and integrated its VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) broker into VMware's product line. One of the questions I heard most often back then was "Does View support Linux as a virtual desktop?" The answer: No, but it will when there's a demand for it.
The development of the famous Paper theme and icon pack has been resumed, and it looks like things are back on track.
ASUS Chromebit CS10 is the latest computer-on-a-stick.
It’s about the size of a candy bar and as you can already guess from its name, it runs Google’s Chrome OS, the same Cloud-based operating system that powers Chromebooks and Chromeboxes.
In this video, I’ll go through many of the perils of dual booting and I’ll also explain why I don’t usually support systems that are configured in a dual boot environment. It’s not just Linux that has problems in a dual boot setup; Windows seems to come up with strange issues when paired with Linux as well. There is also a psychological factor to consider. Constantly comparing and keeping up with two operating systems on the same machine can trigger all kinds of OCD behavior.
The developers of the open-source Docker Linux container engine for GNU/Linux operating systems have published the first maintenance release of the Docker 1.9 stable branch.
With the in-development Linux 4.4 kernel, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 600/700 series (Kepler) graphics cards are manually re-clocking a lot better to allow better performance on this unofficial NVIDIA Linux driver.
Things are looking fairly normal in 4.4-land, with no huge surprises in rc2. There were a couple of late features: parisc hugepage support and some late slub bulk allocator patches were not only merged at the end of the week, but they strictly speaking should have been merge window things.
A few minutes ago, Linus Torvalds released the second RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.4 kernel, which is now available for download and testing from the usual places.
A world without Linux would be a world without good 3D animations. That's the message in the Linux Foundation's latest "World without Linux" short film, which debuted this weekend.
The clip is the fourth in a series that is designed "to illustrate in an entertaining fashion just how pervasive Linux is today," according to the Linux Foundation. Previous episodes explored how the Internet, GPS systems and social media depend on Linux to function.
One of the biggest freedoms associated with free software is the ability to replace a program with an updated or modified version. Even so, of the many millions of people using Linux-powered phones, few are able to run a mainline kernel on those phones, even if they have the technical skills to do the replacement. The sad fact is that no mainstream phone available runs mainline kernels. A session at the 2015 Kernel Summit, led by Rob Herring, explored this problem and what might be done to address it.
Mesa won't end out 2015 with reaching any new OpenGL support level, at least as far as Mesa in released form is concerned.
Mesa 11.0.6 was released this morning as the latest stable, bug-fix release for this important open-source 3D driver component to the Linux desktop.
As a follow up to this morning's article about The Next Mesa Release Doesn't Have Any Major OpenGL Breakthrough, Mesa 11.1 has now been branched and the first release candidate has been sent off.
Red Hat developer Hans de Goede was tasked earlier this year with working on the Nouveau driver for bettering the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver. His latest focus has been on an LLVM TGSI back-end.
Michel Dänzer, a graphics driver engineer working for AMD, has had the great pleasure of announcing the initial release and immediate availability for download of the xf86-video-amdgpu 1.0.0 driver.
The Nvidia developers have been quite busy these days, and they pushed a lot of updates for their drivers. The latest driver update is for users with old GeForce 8 and 9 video cards so that they can continue to use that hardware with modern OSes.
ASTC is a royalty-free texture compression format backed by The Khronos Group. It's hoped that ASTC will eventually replace S3TC, which would be a win for open-source due to the patent situation around S3 Texture Compression.
With Nouveau Kepler re-clocking beginning to work better on the in-development Linux 4.4 kernel, here are some fresh benchmarks comparing the open-source NVIDIA driver on the Git kernel compared to some AMD Radeon graphics cards on its open-source driver.
The Kodi media center is preparing for another major upgrade, and its developers have just pushed a new Beta version for the 16.0 branch out the door.
The Kodi developers are moving really fast, and it looks like they have big plans for this new release. They published Kodi 16.0 Beta 1 only a week ago and now the second one in quick succession. From the looks of it, this fast approach to the development cycle is working very well for them, and they are closing the distance to the stable build.
As you may know, AltYo is an open-source, drop-down terminal emulator, similar to the Guake terminal, written in GTK+3 and Vala. The AltYo terminal emulator can be opened via a keyboard shortcut and has impressive features, like support for multiple tabs, click on links to open them in the browser and multi-monitor support.
As you may know, LiVES is an open source video editor and VJ tool, enabling the users to easily add effects to more than 50 audio and video formats.
Encryption and secure communications are critical to our life on the Internet. Without the ability to authenticate and preserve secrecy, we cannot engage in commerce, nor can we trust the words of our friends and colleagues.
I want to wrap up this post by returning to what I said at the beginning about the Gnome Shell. What I have presented in this post are ways to configure and customize the Gnome Shell - but because of the modular way in which Gnome 3 is designed, it is also possible to replace the Gnome Shell entirely with something else which presents a completely different desktop and has completely different configuration and customization possibilities. In fact, that is what both Cinnamon and MATE do, and I will be discussing them in the next couple of posts.
Wine developers have just revealed that version 1.8 RC1 of their application has been released, which means that a new major stable version is just around the corner.
The Unreal Engine 4 powered 3D puzzle game with elements of mini golf is now officially available for Linux on Steam. After having had a Linux version available for a few weeks to gather feedback, official Linux support was announced earlier this week.
I've been meaning to try out Sheltered for a while, and this Sunday I decided to sit down and give it a go. I’m finding it to be quite a bit like This War of Mine, and it’s just as interesting. The game is currently in Early Access, but I’ve seen people already put tons and tons of hours into it.
Vendetta: Curse of Raven's Cry was released today by TopWare on Steam. Alongside the OS X and Windows binaries is same-day Linux support.
Unigine 2.1 brings improvements to the rendering of atomspheres, improved anti-aliasing, increased depth buffer precision, support for OS X El Capitan, introduction of ObjectText, various performance optimizations, Editor and SDK enhancements, and many other renderer changes.
Sublevel Zero has been updated, and it now launches correctly on Linux. It's a good one to try for fans of Descent, and it's rather vibrant looking.
Another game has just been updated to fix the Linux version. This time ROOT, the rather colourful stealth game should now run correctly on Linux.
Hello guys. I have never written on the planet what I was thinking but today I finally found the courage. Not because I didn't feel like, but because I have always considered this place as a kind of showcase of everything we do. Lately I was a bit busy, I have so many things on my mind and I can concentrate on my passions (free) a little less than I would like. KDE project and the OCS-server unfortunately are among these.
Developing an application where you use or need icons for actions around tables, vectorpaths, animations, text formatting? Looking forward to use Breeze-styled icons, shared with other applications? Then please read on, this is especially for you:
Today, November 20, KDE has had the pleasure of informing users about the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta release of the upcoming KDE Applications 15.12 software suite for the KDE Plasma 5.5 desktop environment.
We don’t want to reinvent all Qt’s display machinery, so unless we can convince Qt to compress textures, any possible savings would be academically nice, but practically impossible. Fortunately, through the QOpenGLTexture class (a KDAB contribution, btw), QQ2, provides all the necessary APIs to let us change the underlying behavior to use compressed textures without mucking around in the internals.
With the latest release the Wireshark Project decided to make the Qt GUI the default interface. In line with Debian’s Policy the packages shipped by Debian also switched the default GUI to minimize the difference from upstream. The GTK+ interface which was the previous default is still available from the wireshark-gtk package.
After 2 days of obscenely unsubsidized drinking and vicious discussions about carrots, the KDE and Kubuntu developers here at the developer sprint in Munich decided to release the Debian package manager Muon in version 5.5.0.
This can be used to create very interesting attacks. It’s one of the reasons why I for example think it’s a very bad idea to start the file manager as root on the same X server. I’m quite certain that if I wanted to I could exploit this relatively easily just through what X provides.
The insecurity of X11 also influenced the security design of applications running on X11. It’s pointless to think about preventing potential attacks if you could get the same by just using core X11 functionality. For example KWin’s scripting functionality allows to interact with the X11 windows. In general one could say that’s dangerous as it allows untrusted code to change aspects of the managed windows, but it’s nothing you could not get with plain X11.
But a task often involves launching several applications. So to resume a complete task quickly, in one step, it either needs some desktop integration, or another application could be responsible to create tasks and resume them. But either way it needs coordination with applications.
GTK+ 3.19.2 was released today as the newest development version of the toolkit in the road to GNOME 3.20.
GTK+ 3.19.2 ports most widgets over to using CSS nodes, the GTK+ Inspector now shows CSS nodes, support for the native file chooser on Windows when using the GtkFileChooserNative API, changes to the GtkFileChooser, GtkShortcutsWindows changes, and various bug fixes. The changes of having widgets ported to CSS nodes require now that third-party themes be ported over to compatibility with this GTK+ 3.20 development release.
The GTK+ developers have announced their plans for GTK+ 3.20, the next major release of the open-source and cross-platform GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit used in numerous software projects and GNU/Linux operating systems.
The GNOME developers are working around the clock these days to release the second milestone of the upcoming GNOME 3.20 desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems.
When I decided to review Linux Lite this time around I was slightly perturbed by the fact that there isn't a UEFI image available and without much software installed I wonder what would make somebody choose Linux Lite over Linux Mint.
Even if you are using older hardware Linux Mint has an XFCE version or even the MATE version meaning that it would be every bit as Light as Linux Lite.
Therefore I needed something that would give Linux Lite an edge over Linux Mint.
Then I stumbled across the Control Centre and the Software Installer and these applications make Linux Lite a worthy Linux distribution.
Linux Lite is every bit as good a Linux Mint and highly recommended especially on older or less powerful hardware.
It is a worthy replacement for Windows XP, Vista and even Windows 7.
Thankyou for reading.
Juergen Daubert from the CRUX development team has had the great pleasure of announcing the final release and immediate availability for download of the CRUX 3.2 GNU/Linux operating system.
One of these days Solus 1.0 will be released, and all the anticipation will be gone. This is not that date, but it’s exciting nonetheless. We have some more news about the new version of Budgie, tentatively called Next, and about various package updates.
As you may know, ArchEX is an Arch Linux flavor that uses LXDE as the default desktop environment to provide a lightweight system, usable on old, low-power computers.
The latest version available is ArchEX Build 151117, which has been updated to use the latest Arch Linux version available and Kernel 4.2.5, among others. Also, a new text-based installer has been implemented, this one permitting the users to choose the default language during installation and GParted has been added, for an easier partition management.
Zbigniew Konojacki, the lead developer and maintainer of the independent 4MLinux GNU/Linux distribution, has been happy to inform us earlier about the release and immediate availability for download of Antivirus Live CD 15.0-0.98.7.
The developers of the Studio 13.37 GNU/Linux operating system based on Puppy Linux have recently announced the release of version 2.3 of their distribution targeted at professional audio use.
Today, November 23, the Manjaro development team, through Philip Müller, had the great pleasure of informing all users of the Manjaro Linux distribution about the general availability of the seventh update for Manjaro 15.09 (Bellatrix).
SUSE has been doing things very, very right for a very long time. It never ceases to amaze me that this brilliant company hasn't found more traction in the US. Hopefully openSUSE LEAP will be that which will help them leap in the spotlight here in the States.
Do you SUSE? Will you LEAP?
The new LibreOffice 5.0.3 packages have been compiled for users of Slackware-current only. The 4.4.5 packages that I have for Slackware 14.1 should also work on -current, but I have not tested that. I hope that this package for LibreOffice 5.0.3 survives the day… Pat is planning another (possibly intrusive) update to slackware-current which may break the package.
Yesterday I’ve upgraded to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 on my MacBook Air and I decided to rebuild the wifi and backlight drivers. Wifi broke immediately but I was able to fix the build with a simple patch. I’m now using the newly built kmod-wl-3.10.0-327.el7.x86_64-6.30.223.248-7.el7.x86_64 and it appears to work as expected.
This past weekend, Red Hat Inc. had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Beta release of the upcoming Red Hat Container Development Kit (CDK) 2 software suite.
Red Hat rolled out a new version of its Enterprise Linux distribution with a focus on improving network performance and boosting security, particularly for verticals like government, finance and military.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), of the Technology sector was at a price of 82.44 today, marking a change of 0.28%. Red Hat, Inc. forecasts a earnings per share growth of 2.20% over the next year. Its return on investment is currently 8.70% and its debt to equity is currently 0.53. Red Hat, Inc. has a market cap of 15027.99 and its gross margin is 84.80%.
Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) rose by 5.63% in the past week and 6.23% for the last 4 weeks. In the past week, the shares have outperformed the S&P 500 by 2.28% and the outperformance increases to 5.52% for the last 4 weeks.
Jan Kurik, Fedora Platform and Program Manager at Red Hat, announced the first feature proposals for the upcoming Fedora 24 GNU/Linux operating system, for which the development cycle already started.
We reported the other day that the Fedora developers are discussing the splitting of the main systemd package into two new subpackages, systemd-containers and systemd-udev, for the upcoming Fedora 24 Linux operating systems.
Across the Linux and Fedora communities, there are several members of various communities that write and maintain their own blogs across all four corners of the world. With that being said, both of these communities are large and sometimes it’s a challenge to keep track of an individual contributor’s blog versus all of the other noise on the Internet. How can one expect to keep up with what’s going on in the world of Fedora and the greater Linux community? Fortunately, the Fedora Project offers a solution to this problem: Fedora Planet!
I am pleased to announce you that DNF team updated main wiki pages on fedoraproject.org to be relevant and up-to-date for DNF (Yum procedures are still described there but could be outdated). Moreover in System Administrators Guide for F22 and up on docs.fedoraproject.org, yum commands were replaced with DNF command alternatives.
If you find wiki page, which you consider as crucial and targets yum only, report it or rewrite it by yourself. Thanks.
Fedora 23 is an impressive release and continues the tradition of being one of the leaders and innovators of the Linux world. This community has given so much to the Linux world that I can't even list in one article. After playing with Fedora 23 for a while I call it yet another feather in the hat of Linux distros!
That said, Fedora may or may not be the right distribution for you. It's targeted at more advanced and mature users who not only want an upstream distro but also access to tools and technologies which are or will be used in the enterprise space.c
Today, November 23, Vince Pooley from the Chapeau Linux project had the great pleasure of informing all users of the Fedora-based GNU/Linux distribution about the immediate availability for download and testing of the second Beta build of Chapeau 23.
What is this? What is this?! Introducing a new series being published weekly on my blog – “Gotta Badge ‘Em All!” This series aims to introduce readers to the hundreds of Fedora badges that members of the Fedora community can earn. Maybe you’re a newcomer looking at becoming more involved by earning more badges, or maybe you have been around for a while and just want to grow your badge numbers.
It’s been a long time I haven’t written here. And lots of things happened in the OpenStack planet. As a full time employee with the mission to package OpenStack in Debian, it feels like it is kind of my duty to tell everyone about what’s going on.
Available this weekend is the latest version of Knoppix, version 7.6.
It's been a while since last hearing anything about Knoppix, the Debian-based Linux distribution viewed as the original Live CD/DVD OS, but an update has been pushed out this weekend.
We've just been informed by the developers of the Q4OS GNU/Linux distribution about the general availability of the first stable release of the ARM port of the OS for Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi 2 SBCs (single-board computers).
By now all users of the Meizu MX4, BQ Aquaris E4.5, BQ Aquaris E5 HD, Nexus 4, and Nexus 7 devices should have received the new Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 software update, so the time has come for us to bring you up to speed with the latest developments.
Yesterday, Canonical’s Joseph Salisbury has announced that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will adopt Kernel 4.3 soon:
As you may know, Ubuntu MATE is the newest member of the Ubuntu family and already has a big number of fans, due to the fact that it provides a lighter, GNOME2-style experience.
The Ubuntu Touch OS has finally upgraded to a much newer version of the BlueZ 5.x stack, bringing improved support for Bluetooth connectivity.
Ubuntu Touch will soon provide a full convergence experience and Canonical is taking big steps in this direction, but Ubuntu developers also need to consider what are some of the features for users connecting Ubuntu Touch phones to Ubuntu desktops.
A new OTA update has been released for Ubuntu Touch, the eighth one, and one of the new features that landed on it is a dedicated Twitter scope.
Not everything that lands with OTA updates is about fixes or changes related to the operating system. For example, a new Twitter scope is now provided by default and that should really help users who are dependent on this social network.
Canonical was making a big deal just a few years ago about the lenses and the implementation in Unity. It looks like some of the functions added back then have survived, and some of the Ubuntu developers are actually discovering them right now.
How bad is Linux Mint as a desktop distribution? One redditor shared his...er...frustration with the...er...horrifically difficult experience of installing Linux Mint on his computer.
Cinnamon 2.8.5 has been released for Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa, which is currently available as beta only. Linux Mint 17.3 Beta has been released with Cinnamon 2.8.4, but version 2.8.5 has been pushed to the default repositories today.
Imagination revealed an IoT-focused “Creator Ci40” SBC that runs OpenWRT, Debian, and Brillo on a dual-core MIPS CPU, and offers Raspberry Pi and MikroBus Click expansion.
Imagination’s Creator Ci40, which debuted today on Kickstarter, follows up on the Creator Ci20 hacker board, which launched a year ago. The Ci20 was updated in May in a new version with a squared-off design, better WiFi, and a built-in FlowCloud IoT API.
Over the last few weeks, I have integrated the Body Computing System more and more deeply in to my workflow and moving more and more systems out of my smartphone and shitty decentralized systems.
As you may know, Minibian “Jessie” is yet another operating system for Raspberry Pi ARM boards. As the name suggests, it is based on Raspbian (which is based on Debian Jessie), but it provides only the minimum packages needed, lacking a desktop environment. Desktop environments are available via the default repositories, but not installed by default.
If you are in the market for a new high-performance route you might be interested in a new piece of hardware that has successfully launched over on the Indiegogo crowdfunding website.
The Turris Omnia has been designed to provide an open source route that is capable of being the centre of your home network and entertainment system.
The Turris Omnia is capable of handling gigabit traffic and still be able to do much more such as a home server, NAS, printserve or virtual server, says its creators.
Months after Jolla announced its split and intent to focus on Sailfish OS licensing, its financial situation has not improved. Jolla's latest financing round has been delayed and so they've had to file for debt restructuring in Finland. As part of that, they are temporarily laying off "a big part" of its personnel.
Jolla, the Finnish company founded by ex-Nokia employees, has filed for debt restructuring in Finland after failing to secure additional finances.
Four years after kicking off its ambitious plan to challenge iOS and Android, and tackle the low-margin hardware business, Jolla on Friday announced it would temporarily lay off a "big part" of its headcount until its finances return to order.
The strategy still has a long way to go, but the initial results are successful. Microsoft’s failure to capture any significant market share with Windows Phone (and now Windows 10) was probably the best thing to happen. Rather than limp along with seven or eight percent thinking it might still happen, the crash in market share allowed Nadella to switch away from a hardware focused plan and use the strength of the opposition to Microsoft’s advantage.
According to Gartner, sales of iOS and Android handsets reached an all-time high in the third quarter of this year with the latter shipping about 298.7 million units, while the former shipped 46 million units during the same period. This was in stark contrast to Microsoft, which shipped 5.8 million Windows Phone devices and ceded market share from 3% to 1.7% on a year-on-year basis.
Samsung has introduced a new flip phone, the W2016, in China. The latest Android-based dual-screen flip phone is now listed on Samsung's China site. Unfortunately, there is no word on the pricing and availability details of the Samsung W2016.
BlackBerry, the longtime device maker that helped pioneer the smartphone market but is now struggling to stay relevant, has done what previously might have been considered unthinkable.
Earlier this month, BlackBerry released a phone called the Priv that runs not on one of the company's own, home-brewed operating systems, but on Google's Android. The new phone has a BlackBerry keyboard and some of the company's software, but it looks and works like an Android device.
It won't shock you to hear that Android apps send a lot of data, but you may be surprised at how much of it isn't really necessary... or public, for that matter. MIT researchers have determined that "much" of the hidden data sent and received by the 500 most popular Android apps isn't necessary to the functionality. For example, a Walmart app talks to eBay whenever you scan a barcode -- there's no practical difference when you sever that connection. Out of the 47 apps that MIT modified to prove its case, 30 were virtually indistinguishable from the official versions. The rest only had minor issues, like missing ads.
When a Pentagon communications provider heard the Islamic State had informed adherents that his firm’s secure messaging app was the best tool to evade government surveillance, the moment of reckoning arrived.
Silent Circle made a name for itself with the introduction of its Blackphone line of mobile handsets in the wake of the Snowden revelations pertaining to the NSA’s domestic eavesdropping. The Blackphone and the Android applications the company develops are touted for their privacy and security measures. Just recently the company has released an encrypted private messaging service, and the second generation of the encrypted Blackphone, which is being marketed as the first Android handset for the workplace. Unfortunately, the company’s devices and software are also being highly endorsed by international terrorists.
Would you like to run Android on a computer? Tronsmart thinks customers would, so they offer the Tronsmart Orion R68 Android set-top box for streaming video to a TV or to use as a low profile desktop computer.
After the slightly disappointing launch of Windows 10 -- at least in terms of reception, if not in terms of numbers (well, it was free) -- Microsoft is now switching its focus to Windows 10 Mobile. The aim now is to try to capture Android and iPhone users, convincing them that a Windows-based smartphone is a smart move.
If you have read the review completely, you may have seen some words quite often such as smooth, fast, quick. In the Android ecosystem, the Google Nexus 6P clearly stands much higher than other flagship competition. The Samsung Galaxy S6 series is the only true competitor to the Nexus 6P. But the Nexus 6P has one weapon which is still to come to competition – Android 6.0 Marshmallow!
During the first 2 months, it was like a dream: you develop and give life to all the ideas you have in mind. It is pure bliss.
This phase is what I call the preliminaries. Like in a love affair, that is the best period, just before taking it into more serious territory, where complications can happen.
This is an open source equivalent of Microsoft Project, in a similar way to how LibreOffice was an open source version of Microsoft Office. It says it has been downloaded 1,750,000 in over 210 countries and is used by major firms such as Cisco, Accenture and Boeing.
Open-source coding platform GitHub made it onto this year's list of unicorns, thanks to impressive fundraising. But can it maintain its strong lead?
The most powerful free and open source (FOSS) statistics program, though, is R. Originally a FOSS version of the statistics language S, R has shown explosive growth over the last few years, with some 7,000 add-on packages available to handle nearly any statistical requirement and an increasing number of books, courses, and blogs (e.g. R-bloggers) focusing on practical usage. Some websites concentrate specifically on how to use R for psychological research—an example is William Revelle's Personality Project, which also offers an R package called psych, a toolbox for personality, psychometrics, and experimental psychology.
A little while back, Rikki, Jen, and company at Opensource.com told me that they were asking people to share their open source stories about how they got interested in open source and started contributing.
Well, for the bored among you, here is my story. As usual, share your feedback in the comments. I am curious to hear your mockery of my life choices back then.
In a very general and somewhat nebulous way, open-source software is on the rise. Acknowledging the importance of its large and growing role in enterprise computing has become an increasingly common activity, thanks to the prominence of open-source technology in everything from containerization to the cloud. A possible consequence of this is that major tech companies have been making more frequent gifts of code to the open-source community of late. Take a look at 10 of the most noteworthy.
Bowen, who himself grew up in Kenya then later moved to the US, said: “I would like to see far more diversity. I would like to see far fewer projects that are ‘white men’. I would like to see more Africans involved in our projects.
Open source continues to be a growing influence on the rollout of software deployments across the telecom space, with a greater focus on using open-source platforms to power network functions virtualization and software-defined networking.
Can open source software heat your house? High-performance computing (HCP) provider Qarnot thinks so. The company has produced a Linux-based device called the Q.rad that delivers heat while also crunching numbers in the cloud.
FOSDEM 2016 is going to be great (again!) and you still have the chance to be one of the stars.
Have you submitted your talk to the Desktops DevRoom yet?
While the folks at the Southern California Linux Expo are putting the final touches on the speaker schedule for SCALE 14X, which takes place in January in Pasadena, a little further north in Sebastopol in the San Francisco Bay Area, our friends at O’Reilly are watching the clock wind down to the deadline for their speaker submissions for OSCON. OSCON’s proposal deadline is midnight on Nov. 24 for a conference which takes place in mid-May 2016 in Austin, Texas. This, of course, means that while you’re racing to get that proposal in — and we know you are (and that’s okay) — you’re going to want to keep in mind that it’s still going to have to be relevant in a half-year. Your mantra, then, from here on in is “long shelf life.” And good luck with that proposal.
VIDEO: ClusterHQ CEO Mark Davis discusses the Docker storage opportunity and how his company's open-source Flocker technology fits in.
Mark Davis is no stranger to the world of virtualization storage. From 2007 until 2013, Davis was CEO of storage virtualization vendor Virsto, which he sold to VMware. Now Davis is once again in the storage virtualization space, this time as CEO of Docker storage startup ClusterHQ.
Few technologies are as hyped today as is the open-source Docker container ecosystem. At the the DockerCon EU conference in Barcelona, Spain, held Nov. 16-17, developers, users and vendors from around the world gathered to not only learn more about Docker, but to also demonstrate new technologies and talk about what's next. For Docker Inc., the lead commercial sponsor of Docker, the event was an opportunity to highlight its next big commercial service, the Universal Control Plane, which provides enterprise-grade deployment and management capabilities. Meanwhile, one primary topic of discussion in multiple sessions was security, with new capabilities announced including hardware-based key signing for application images as well as enhanced control of applications through user namespace policies. Docker isn't just about Docker Inc.—it's a broad ecosystem of vendors, with IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise among the big-name supporters. Users of Docker also were front and center at the event, with gaming vendor Electronic Arts talking about how it uses containers to deliver mobile gaming infrastructure and airline software vendor Amadeus discussing how containers can work in a highly regulated, compliance-driven environment. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the highlights of the DockerCon EU event.
Mirantis first publicly released the FUEL library as an open-source effort in March of 2013. Now the FUEL effort has been formally approved by the OpenStack Foundation to be included under what is known as the 'Big Tent' model.
The LibreOffice project is one of the biggest open source endeavours in the world and The Document Foundation announced that there are now more than 1000 developers working on the office suite.
WordPress.com, the fully hosted version of WordPress, has a received one of its biggest updates ever today. Codenamed Calypso, Automattic rewrote WordPress.com from scratch — everything is new under the hood. Here are the big changes.
First, WordPress.com is now fully separated from the WordPress core. WordPress.com is now an admin interface that interacts with the WordPress core just like any other third-party interface and app out there. It uses a REST API to fetch your posts, publish new ones, upload photos and more.
Moodle, an open source software and learning tool, launched a newer version of its digital learning platform that came with functionality improvements, enhancing administrators and learners' quizzes, forums, assignment modules, among others and creating a more personalized learning environment.
Enter Pinterest’s open source committee, a team of engineers that got together two years ago: Pawel Garbacki, Ludo Antonov and Dannie Chu. There wasn’t a formal open source initiative at Pinterest — in fact, engineers at Pinterest didn’t even know they were allowed to open source their technology — which brought Chu, Antonov and Garbacki together.
The PBS Pro HPC workload management technology originated from NASA’s Ames Research Center and was acquired by Altair in 2003. It is currently used for scheduling, management, monitoring and reporting on clusters and TOP500 owners.
The DragonFlyBSD operating system continues to move along.
With the kernel being branched for 4.4 and DragonFlyBSD 4.4 RC being tagged, the latest Git code for the DragonFlyBSD kernel has moved onto DragonFlyBSD 4.5.
Looking at Theo’s status of pledge update there’s a lot of programs on the list, including some which may seem a bit silly. But the effort has turned up some interesting bugs and misfeatures along the way.
While GCC 6 is the next major feature release of the GNU Compiler Collection that will come out in 2016, GCC 5.3 will be here in likely about two weeks.
GCC 5.3 is just the latest point release to GCC 5, per the group's version handling change that began with the GCC 5 release earlier this year. GCC 5.3 is mainly about bug-fixes and documentation updates.
These days we are spoiled with a lot of cheap test equipment. However, you can do a lot of measurements with nothing more than an oscilloscope. Add something like a signal generator and you can do even more. One classic technique for frequency measurement, for example, is using a scope to display a Lissajous pattern. [Franz Schaefer] has a video showing how to generate these useful curves with GNU Radio.
On November 21, 1995, the announcement that there was a program for image manipulation was made.
This program, originally named The General Image Manipulation Program and now known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program (The GIMP), in my opinion, is the best software I have ever used to work with images.
Released GnuTLS 3.3.19 and GnuTLS 3.4.7 which are bug fix releases in the current and next stable branches.
The compiler and assembler now have support for the ARC EM/HS and ARC600/700 architectures and the Power9 variant of the PowerPC architecture.
The GCC mainline sources are now in Stage 3 (bug fixes only) which means that a branch may be happening soon.
The Binutils sources have branched, getting ready for a 2.26 release soon.
GDB's record instruction-history command accepts a new modifier: /s. This behaves exactly like the /m modifier and prints mixed source + disassembly into the history.
GNU Parallel 20151122 ('Bataclan') [stable] has been released. It is available for download at: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parallel/
No new functionality was introduced so this is a good candidate for a stable release.
The first official public release of the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement (known universally as the TPP) on November 5, 2015 generated much heated speculation. The ideal of “open agreements, openly arrived at” remains regrettably unattainable in international affairs. “Fast track” trade negotiating authority in the US means that parties excluded from the negotiating process have a short time in which to mobilize for or against the treaty as a whole in light of their specific concerns. The premium on speed of response to a very lengthy and complex legal document—and the presence of intense public attention—guarantees that hasty judgment and occasional self-promotion will always outrun professional analysis; this is one of the inherent defects of secret legislation.
In this context, early commentary on the TPP draft included much speculation that one provision in the draft’s chapter on electronic commerce might have serious negative consequences for free software and open source licensing, distribution, or government acquisition. Some lay readers marched immediately to the conclusion that, in less than 200 words ostensibly about something else, the negotiators had (a) abolished free licensing; (b) prohibited governments from acquiring, supporting or preferring free software; or (c) had interfered with the enforcement of free licenses. Other non-professional readers invented complex demonstrations that one or more of these catastrophes had not occurred.
This text shaping library used by Firefox, Chromium, LibreOffice, Qt, Pango, and others is up to version 1.1 as its latest stable release. HarfBuzz 1.1 implements a 'stch' stretch feature for supporting the Sryiac Abbreviation Mark, implements shaping of various Unicode space characters, fixes resulting from continous fuzzing, and other bug fixes and optimizations.
Network Time Protocol is a vital part of the Internet that's recently been used in major DDoS attacks. To keep it from misused in the future, the first secure version of NTP beta has just been released.
The Italian province of South Tyrol is taking into production an eGovernment forms system based on open source software. The province’s form engine is based on Orbeon, running on the CentOS Linux distribution.
Engineers Ryan Sipes and Joshua Montgomery wanted their makerspace in Lawrence, Kansas, to be more intuitive. So they borrowed an artificial intelligence system from other makers and used it to do simple tasks, such as controlling the lights or playing music. Then they realized they could create a better one—and sell it.
FDA's Office of Health Informatics contracted with cloud-based genome informatics and data management company DNAnexus to create the precisionFDA platform.
A young boy in some part of India losses both his sisters before their fifth birthday and losses his father before he could complete his 10 year. It all happened because the pharma companies as well as government failed to keep the prices of the drugs under the reach of poor. But one brilliant move can end up this entire situation and may replace the current crippled system and it is named as OPEN SOURCE PHARMA.
With the advent of social entrepreneurship and propagation of market unsettling ideas, such as open data, open software, and crowd sourcing, it is possible that the Open Source Pharma Conference could be the beginning of the end to generations of pain and suffering that community like us endured. Primarily, we need to stimulate a culture of openness, crowd sourcing and data sharing. Exploiting the input of many and sharing information can truly help get us from A to B as quickly as possible. It can also tell us when we need to stop. The ability to also hold out our data to scrutiny is the only true way to truly validate information. It may also open up new ideas and hypotheses that may subsequently advance the field.
The basic Vision for Open Source Pharma is "MEDICINE TO ALL". It can only be achieved by creating a movement that includes existing initiatives and develops an alternative, comprehensive, open source pharmaceutical system driven by principles of openness, patient needs, and affordability.
Well… A few weeks back, I receive a feedback about the main class of the Br-Print project. This main class was friendly called a God Class. The God Class complex is when a class knows too much and does too much. Well, when a problem on this project is shown to me, starts to bug’s me. So I start the Divide and Conquer branch. Breaking the main class in others minor classes, to increase the level of abstraction and make the code more easy to read.
We have been so focused on ARM that somehow we have missed the Intel latest development.
With all the technology we have today, there are so many possibilities. The whole world can collaborate and create open-sourced information to help develop thousands of scientific uses for various new technologies like 3-D printing.
3D printing is quickly becoming a global phenomenon, thanks in large part to open source hardware and software, which enable even those regions seen as resource-poor to freely access the information they need to create functional 3D printing machines and materials. However even with these advances, many developing countries still lack basic access to technology, which can be harmful to their economic development as a whole. One such country is Nicaragua, where the kinds of materials taken for granted in the US are extremely difficult to obtain, slowing the nation’s progress in terms of digital manufacturing at all levels, and particularly for the individual workers and families who could stand to benefit the most. 3D printed tools, repair parts, or even prosthetics could improve people’s work, economic or medical situations—but only if they have access to design and create them themselves.
Anyone with an interest in this futuristic tech can explore it. Open BCI, a collective of engineers and artists, has created affordable open source hardware that allows everyone to experiment with creating an interface between their brain and a computer.
ODF - open document format - is an open, XML-based rich document format that has been adopted as the standard for exchanging information in documents (spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents), by many governments and other organisations (see, for example, here), including the UK Government. This is despite strong opposition by Microsoft; but I have seen Microsoft's proposed "open XML" standard and, frankly, it is huge and horrid (in the word of standards, these go together). If I remember correctly, the early draft I saw even incorporated recognition of early Excel leap-year bugs into the standard.
ODF is now a pukka ISO standard, maintained by OASIS, under the proud banner: "The future is interoperability".
My personal thoughts, below, are prompted by an ODF session at ApacheCon Core titled "Beyond OpenOffice: The State of the ODF Ecosystem" held by Louis Suárez-Potts (community strategist for Age of Peers, his own consultancy, and the Community Manager for OpenOffice.org, from 2000 to 2011), and attended by very few delegates - perhaps a sign of current level of interest in ODF within the Apache community. Nevertheless, and I am talking about the ODF standard here, not Apache Open Office (which is currently my office software of choice) or its Libre Office fork (which seems to be where the excitement, such as it is, is, for now), the standards battle, or one battle, has been won; we have a useful Open Document Format, standardised by a recognised and mature standards organisation, and even Microsoft Office supports it. That's good.
Children will make choices in life that baffle or enrage their parents. For most of us, these choices never result in anything worse than a few icy dinners before mom finally accepts that the nose ring is a part of you, dammit. But for some young Muslims, mostly women, the cost of disappointing mom and dad is much, much higher. In fact, it can be deadly. Cracked sat down with Azime (not her real name), who lives in fear that her parents will discover her "secret life" as a normal adult woman and murder her for it.
Sepp Blatter has said he was “close to dying” upon being hospitalised this month following a health scare.
The Fifa president, who is facing a multi-year ban from football and is currently serving a 90-day provisional suspension, spent several days being treated for stress before being discharged from hospital a week and a half ago.
Although you wouldn't know it, the UK's Department of Health has been running a consultation on NHS England. It has kept this quiet in the hope that no one would reply, and it could just do what it wanted.
For many years NIST has officially claimed that AES-128 has "comparable strength" to 256-bit ECC, namely 128 "bits of security". Ten years ago, in a talk "Is 2255âËâ19 big enough?", I disputed this claim. The underlying attack algorithms had already been known for years, and it's not hard to see their impact on key-size selection; but somehow NIST hadn't gotten the memo, and still hasn't gotten it today.
Unfortunately, the debate is hampered by poor terminology.
[...]
The term is a bit of a misnomer really — as researchers our responsibility is to users, though often the term is seen as meaning a responsibility to vendors. This is the biggest issue I have with the term, it’s used as focusing on the wrong group in a disclosure. As a security researcher my responsibility is to make the world a safer place, to protect the users, not to protect the name of a vendor.
There is no prescription here. Only a warning, a feeling I picked up during that ill wind that blew me from the Bekaa Valley to Brussels, via Paris.
It’s a simple one: Worse lies ahead down the road that world leaders are currently plotting. A Russian-French agreement to work together to punish IS, while necessarily empowering the remnants of the al-Assad regime to expand back into parts of the country where it is feared and reviled, will not stem the refugee flow from Syria. Nor will it convince the country’s Sunni Muslims that we care about their interests. The same applies in Iraq, where we bolster the Kurds and a hated national army against IS there.
“Why don’t they stay and fight for their country?” is one barb often aimed at the young men fleeing Iraq and Syria.
The root of the problem is, they don’t have one.
A terrorist arsenal has been discovered during overnight searches in a suburb of Brussels.
Chemicals and explosives were among the items found in the Molenbeek suburb, a rundown neighborhood where Paris attacker Abdelhamid Abaaoud was suspected of operating a terrorist cell.
The find came as Belgium’s capital entered a security lockdown. The government has warned that there could be a repeat of Paris-style attacks in the country’s capital, prompting the closure of subways in Brussels and the deployment of heavily armed police and soldiers.
The assignments arrive on slips of paper, each bearing the black flag of the Islamic State, the seal of the terrorist group’s media emir, and the site of that day’s shoot.
“The paper just gives you the location,” never the details, said Abu Hajer al-Maghribi, who spent nearly a year as a cameraman for the Islamic State. Sometimes the job was to film prayers at a mosque, he said, or militants exchanging fire. But, inevitably, a slip would come with the coordinates to an unfolding bloodbath.
U.S. DRONE OPERATORS are inflicting heavy civilian casualties and have developed an institutional culture callous to the death of children and other innocents, four former operators said at a press briefing today in New York.
The killings, part of the Obama administration’s targeted assassination program, are aiding terrorist recruitment and thus undermining the program’s goal of eliminating such fighters, the veterans added. Drone operators refer to children as “fun-size terrorists” and liken killing them to “cutting the grass before it grows too long,” said one of the operators, Michael Haas, a former senior airman in the Air Force. Haas also described widespread drug and alcohol abuse, further stating that some operators had flown missions while impaired.
In addition to Haas, the operators are former Air Force Staff Sgt. Brandon Bryant along with former senior airmen Cian Westmoreland and Stephen Lewis. The men have conducted kill missions in many of the major theaters of the post-9/11 war on terror, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“We have seen the abuse firsthand,” said Bryant, “and we are horrified.”
Has the U.S. drone war "fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like ISIS"? That’s the conclusion of four former Air Force servicemembers who are speaking out together for the first time. They’ve issued a letter to President Obama warning the U.S. drone program is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism. They accuse the administration of lying about the effectiveness of the drone program, saying it is good at killing people—just not the right ones. The four drone war veterans risk prosecution by an administration that has been unprecedented in its targeting of government whistleblowers. In a Democracy Now! exclusive, they join us in their first extended broadcast interview.
Radio host and Fox News personality Sean Hannity grossly misrepresented a Pew Research poll detailing views of ISIS in countries with significant Muslim populations to misleadingly claim that there are "significant levels of support for ISIS within the Muslim world." The survey actually found that Muslim views of ISIS are "overwhelmingly negative."
I did not believe the official story of Hasna Ait Buolacehn the moment I saw it. The official line was that she was a suicide bomber who blew herself up when the police stormed the apartment in St Denis where the alleged terrorist ringleader was hiding out. But that story seemed to me completely incompatible with the recordings on which she could plainly be heard screaming “He is not my boyfriend! He is not my boyfriend” immediately before the explosion. She sounded like a terrified woman trying to disassociate herself from the alleged terrorist. It was a strange battle cry for someone who believed themselves on the verge of paradise.
[...]
I have no difficulty with the principle that the police should shoot people who are shooting at them. I outraged many friends on the left for example by not joining in the criticism of the police for killing Mr Duggan. People who choose to carry guns in my view run a legitimate risk of being shot by the police, it is as simple as that. Jean Charles De Menezes was a totally different case and his murder by police completely unjustifiable. In Paris it appears plain that the police were in a situation of confrontation with armed suspects.
[...]
The media could help if they were in any way rational and dispassionate, or ever questioned an official narrative. It is an urgent and irrepressible question as to why the BBC journalist did not ask the French policeman “and why did you not say this 48 hours ago when you were content to allow the story to run that she was a suicide bomber?”
Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia. In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other. This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.
Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that arose in the 18th century, hopes to restore a fantasized caliphate centered on a desert, a sacred book, and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina. Born in massacre and blood, it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws. That translates into an obsessive hatred of imagery and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and freedom. Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it.
If The Island report is correct, the Sri Lanka HRC has concluded that that the conflict was NOT an Armed Conflict as defined by Protocol 3. The impact on Sri Lanka as a result of the position taken by the Sri Lanka HRC would be to categorize acts such as No-Fire Zones, Shelling of hospitals, shortfalls in delivery of food, medicine and other humanitarian aid to the civilians and post-conflict treatment of combatants and non-combatants as Human Rights violations, whereas all of them could be explained and found acceptable under provisions of International Humanitarian Law applicable to Non-International Armed Conflict. Therefore, without arbitrarily declaring that the Geneva process should be based on Human Rights Law, the task for Dr. Udagama and the HRC is to first establish grounds for rejecting the UNHRC’s categorization that the conflict in Sri Lanka was a Non-International Armed Conflict.
A Saudi Arabian Court has ordered a Sri Lankan housemaid to be stoned to death for having a clandestine affair with another Sri Lankan man working in Saudi Arabia.
Sri Lankan Foreign Employment Bureau stated that the Saudi Court has ordered that the man, a bachelor be whipped as punishment.
However a Ministry official said that the Sri Lankan Embassy in Saudi Arabia has contacted the Saudi Authorities to ascertain whether there would be a possibility of reconsidering the verdict.
The Paris attacks have prompted American war-hawks to advocate even more US intervention in the Middle East; unfortunately, none of them have ever tried to understand the genuine motivation of the attackers, former Republican congressman Ron Paul underscores.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Saturday called for Republicans to abandon the corrupting influence of the Koch brothers and other wealthy energy magnates.
“This is a party that rejects science and refuses to understand that climate change is real,” he said of GOP during the annual Blue Jamboree in North Charleston, S.C.
“I understand if you stand up to the Koch brothers and the fossil fuel industry, that you’ll lose your campaign contributions,” the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate added.
[...]
“When you have people like the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil today spending huge amounts of money trying to deny that reality, it slows up the entire world from aggressively addressing what is an international crisis,” he said late last month. "This is serious stuff.”
Despite recent rain, the effects of the fires that have been ravaging Indonesia since July have left much of the country in an ecological disaster.
The fires have taken a toll on the environment with 5.1 million acres scorched. They are also responsible for, "21 deaths, more than half a million people sickened with respiratory problems and $9 billion in economic losses, from damaged crops to hundreds of cancelled flights," The Associated Press said.
Late last month, authorities raised the alarm after the thick haze has spread and covered many parts of Indonesia and neighboring countries like Malaysia, Singapore and southern part of the Philippines. The haze enveloped the atmosphere, turning the skies into a toxic sepia-color.
Torrential rains have helped doused the fires but there the Indonesian government said it needed at least three years to tackle the haze problem.
More than half a million people are affected by the choking smoke. Thousands of Indonesians have inhaled the fumes and are now suffering from respiratory diseases. Six provinces in Indonesia already declared state of emergency. Schools were closed down and there were also flight cancellations in Singapore and Malaysia and even in the Philippines.
The highlight of Saturday night’s Democratic debate was when former Secretary Clinton invoked the September 11 attacks to try to defend her courting of Wall Street donors. The awkward defense of her political ties even spawned a rare New York Times editorial criticizing Clinton.
The fact is, there is no way that Hillary Clinton can pretend she doesn’t have a cozy relationship with an industry that personally enriched her family, formed the basis of political support for her career and is doing everything it can to make her president.
In a speech Thursday afternoon at Georgetown University, Senator Bernie Sanders made it clear that what he calls “democratic socialism” has nothing to do with either socialism or the defense of democratic rights.
The candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination explicitly rejected any connection with socialism as a movement of the international working class to put an end to capitalism and establish a society based on collective ownership of the means of production.
Janine Jackson: Whether the federal minimum wage should be raised was the first question of the recent Republican presidential candidates’ debate. Unsurprisingly, the responses ranged from no to hell no, but given a media environment in which some pundits claim that there is no wage too low to pay someone, it’s significant that the question even came up.
When you think of the fight to raise the minimum wage, you might think of fast food workers who’ve been at the forefront of the Fight for $15 movement that’s put a higher wage on the agenda in places like Seattle and Los Angeles and here in New York. You don’t, most likely, think of business owners, as media’s standard presentation often pits business owners, with their eyes supposedly on profits, against workers looking to earn enough to live on.
Daily News writer Shaun King called a graphic shared by Donald Trump on Twitter that falsely claimed 81 percent of white murder victims are killed by African-Americans "bogus," "racist," and "from a source that does not exist."
Daniel Holtzclaw is a former Oklahoma City police officer now standing trial on 36 counts, including rape, sexual battery and stalking. Twelve women and one 17-year-old girl have come forward, saying Holtzclaw assaulted them while on patrol. Most of the victims were black, poor and embroiled in the criminal justice system for things like prostitution and drug use—a precarious state Holtzclaw allegedly used to threaten and coerce them.
When content is taken down in response to a DMCA notice, should service providers be required to stop the same content from reappearing? Major copyright holders believe they should but the issue is complex. Speaking at a copyright conference this week a Google counsel outlined several problems, concluding that the system "just won't work."
Europe is very close to the finishing line of an extraordinary project: the adoption of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a single, comprehensive replacement for the 28 different laws that implement Europe's existing 1995 Data Protection Directive. More than any other instrument, the original Directive has created a high global standard for personal data protection, and led many other countries to follow Europe's approach. Over the years, Europe has grown ever more committed to the idea of data protection as a core value. In the Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights, legally binding on all the EU states since 2009, lists the “right to the protection of personal data” as a separate and equal right to privacy. The GDPR is intended to update and maintain that high standard of protection, while modernising and streamlining its enforcement.
At an FCC hearing today, Representative Joe Barton (R-TX) asked the FCC if it could take action to shut down social media sites in order to hamper and block terrorist communications. The entire episode seems at least partly sparked by erroneous reports that the Paris terrorists used PS4 games to communicate and coordinate their attacks (those reports have been retracted).
Another case is the controversial 2012 anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims, which was uploaded to YouTube but then blocked in a number of countries after it sparked riots.
People who want to report blocked content can answer a series of questions on the Online Censorship website.
"We will use that data to present more detail about how companies are censoring content," according to Jillian.
As the CBFC continues to face ire of the society for its extreme censorship policies, filmmaker Sudhir Mishra says censorship in India was always a problem.
Facebook, Instagram and other social media websites had been in hot water many, many times in the past for purging content other users deem inappropriate. In order to pinpoint the exact reasons for those takedowns and to determine trends in content removals, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a website that tracks censorship across social media outlets. The EFF has built the platform called Online Censorship along with data-driven design company Visualizing Impact. It has resources, such as articles that talk about unjust removal of posts, but it relies on user reports to gather the data it needs.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Visualizing Impact launched Onlinecensorship.org today, a new platform to document the who, what, and why of content takedowns on social media sites. The project, made possible by a 2014 Knight News Challenge award, will address how social media sites moderate user-generated content and how free expression is affected across the globe.
While two-thirds of Americans correctly believe the U.S. government should not prohibit speech that offends minorities, a shockingly high number of millennials—40 percent—support such censorship. Young people, it turns out, are more likely to favor suppression of offensive speech than older Americans.
Posters for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 have reportedly been censored in two Jewish cities, Jerusalem and Bnei Brak, with star Jennifer Lawrence removed to leave only the flaming “mockingjay” background.
Examples of the Lawrence-free poster, seen below, have been shared by the Israeli newspaper Ynet and on Twitter.
Malaysia’s government is raising pressure on journalists and opposition figures who criticize the prime minister’s administration or allege wrongdoing over a development fund he created that is now under investigation, say activists and people affected by the moves.
You can't release a film in the UK without a certificate from the British Board of Film Certification, a censorship authority that's been rating and banning movies since it was established in 1912 to prevent 'indecorous dancing,' 'references to controversial politics' and 'men and women in bed together."
It costs €£7.09/minute to get your movie rated by the BBFC -- about €£1000 per movie, out of the budget of many indie filmmaker. But the censors have to sit through whatever you pay them to rate.
Is the right to free speech truly exercised at University, with students fearful of the repercussions if they do turn to activism and is this fair? Jay Harris comments.
The idea that educators should attempt to anticipate — and palliate — every variety of subjective response their teaching might elicit is both absurd and unrealistic. It’s also self-deluding. But maybe that’s what Mr. Eosphoros is really proposing: that we redefine education as a comforting mode of self-delusion. Perhaps the new motto would read: “I feel safe, therefore I am safe.”
Theresa Meyer, chair of the student group Smith Bipartisan Coalition, said the minorities in this case are not students of color at a largely white campus, but those students who hold opinions that do not march lockstep with those of a liberal majority.
Beijing maintains strict control over the narrative surrounding violence in the troubled Xinjiang region.
Those opposing Marí’s candidacy are especially concerned because the South Korean government has increasingly imposed “censorship and bureaucratic restrictions on artistic freedom,” as the Petition 4 Art statement puts it. The group cites allegations against Arts Council Korea (ARKO) of censoring plays; government funding cuts for this year’s Busan International Film Festival, a decision some suspect stems from the screening of a documentary critical of the Sewol passenger ferry‘s sinking; and last year’s sudden removal of South Korean artist Hong Sung-dam’s caricature of the country’s president from the Gwangju Biennale. The group also describes many cultural organizations that seem to value institutional needs over creativity and artistic freedom, claiming instances of “biased financial support and self-censorship” at an array of public art organizations — one of them being MMCA itself.
A few days ago a petition popped up on the website Change.org urging Mark Zuckerberg to “support freedom of expression in India” by unblocking an atheist Facebook group there with over 13,000 members.
Facebook, the petition said, had not given any reason for the blockade. One day users in India who tried to visit the site were simply hit with a message that the content was “unavailable.” This was not the first time a Facebook page for atheists had been censored in the secular state. In June, another atheist Facebook group was reportedly labeled “unsafe” and its members were unable to share its content.
Over the past three days, Twitter has been preventing its users in France from viewing certain images and keywords related to the Paris attacks. The censorship, first reported today by the French newspaper Le Monde, applies to a keyword used by supporters of the Islamic State, tweets advocating terrorism, and, more controversially, graphic photographs taken inside the Bataclan after the terrorist attacks there left dozens dead.
When Net Neutrality was sold to the American people, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler promised there would be no regulation of content. No censorship. The rules would allow the FCC to regulate content, but they would "forbear" and leave things alone. Now where have we heard that before? It sounds too much like, "If you like your Internet, you can keep your Internet." Now, like with Obamacare, the truth is coming forward as lawmakers and experts warn of a coming political censorship of the Internet.
After having failed twice to enforce Net Neutrality, Wheeler's most recent attempt began with an op-ed piece written for Wired. The February 4 article was his attempt to make the case for the necessity of government regulation of the Internet. In it he claimed that regulation of ISPs was needed to save the Internet. He also claimed that regulation of "edge providers" — companies that provide content to the Internet — would not be regulated, saying, "My proposal assures the rights of internet users to go where they want, when they want."
Last week, three parents and their children took the government to court. They asked a judge to affirm that in refusing to allow for the detailed study of non-religious beliefs in the new Religious Studies GCSE, the government improperly marginalised those beliefs, discriminated against those who hold them, and, as a result, failed to treat them equal to their religious fellow-citizens.
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Agriculture.
PEER says that the USSDA should stop censoring scientific findings for political reasons and significantly strengthen its Scientific Integrity Policy.
The suit targets official restraints on USDA scientists publishing or speaking about their findings in peer-reviewed journals, before professional societies, and in other unofficial settings.
This March, PEER filed a formal rulemaking petition pressing USDA to end censorship policies and to bolster its extremely weak Scientific Integrity Policy adopted in 2013.
The petition asked USDA to adopt “best practices” from other federal agencies’ integrity policies and to end politically driven suppression or alteration of studies.
In a letter dated June 11, 2015, USDA Chief Scientist Catherine Wotecki wrote that the agency refused to consider the substance of the petition because scientific integrity only affected its “internal personnel rules and practices” and was therefore exempt from the public notice and comment process normally required of agency rules.
The Polish government has begun censoring independent media in the country. The first one to fall is the Polish commercial radio station Radio Hobby.
The Polish National Broadcasting Council (KRRiT) canceled the broadcasting license of Radio Hobby, which airs Radio Sputnik Polska.
We demand answers as to why our voices are silenced and others are not.
The truth is, proclaiming your white guilt or censoring social media won’t stop racism or help minorities. Instead, we must promote moral strength, fortitude and personal autonomy, while expressing solidarity with, and support for, victims. No doubt this is not fair. But – here’s the hard part – life isn’t always fair.
On Saturday, a sudden ban on the social media network Reddit in Turkey was reported by The Verge, causing many to wonder what could have sparked this latest move by authorities to crack down on the Internet. At the time, the site was said to have been blocked on the DNS level, meaning that it was possible to circumvent the ban with a simple foreign DNS service.
Turkish Cypriot daily Afrika reported on 30 August 2015 that the Turkish military forces in Cyprus had accused the paper of being against “the army and the flag”. Afrika’s articles had allegedly offended Turkish forces and made “people alienated from the army”, according to the case.
Editor-in-chief Sener Levent and writer Mahmut Anayasa, both of whom had shared an Afrika article from July on social media, were called to the prosecutor’s office for questioning. According to Costas Mavridis, a Greek Cypriot Member of the European Parliament, this is not the first time Levent has faced accusations. Both were later released.
"Plunging their apps even deeper into encryption"? I don't even know what that means, but let's flip it around: How many hacked credit cards, medical information and email accounts will it take for the Gods of Silicon Valley to wake up and recognize they need to better protect user data. Because that's what's actually happening. Encryption is not about "allowing jihadists to plot behind an impenetrable wall" it's about protecting your data -- even that of Clare Foges -- from malicious attackers who want access to it. Or does Foges and her former boss David Cameron communicate out in the open where any passerby can snoop on their messages?
Does this mean some bad people can use encryption? Yes. But it's not as "impenetrable" as she seems to think (we'll get to her knowledge of technology and encryption in a moment). Even if you're using encryption, there is still plenty of metadata revealed. Furthermore, there have always been ways to communicate in less-than-understandable or less-than-trackable way -- and the terrorist community has used them forever. They don't need to rely on "Silicon Valley" giants.
Earlier this week the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) warned that an Indian firm called SilverPush has technology that allows adverts to ping inaudible commands to smartphones and tablets.
Now someone has reverse-engineered the code and published it for everyone to check.
SilverPush's software kit can be baked into apps, and is designed to pick up near-ultrasonic sounds embedded in, say, a TV, radio or web browser advert. These signals, in the range of 18kHz to 19.95kHz, are too high pitched for most humans to hear, but can be decoded by software.
It was another terrorist attack, years ago now and an ocean away in Boston, that awakened a debate about the panicked rush to judgment about who may be guilty and what may have gone wrong.
In the frenzied, chaotic moments after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, we knew only one thing: "We" had to find those responsible. Thus began a high-stakes online scavenger hunt that, though well-intentioned, was ultimately doomed. Internet users combing through clues fingered the wrong suspect, 22-year-old Sunil Tripathi, putting him through what one remorseful reddit user would later call "hell." The media ran with the suspicions and hounded Tripathi. He was later discovered dead of an apparent suicide in a Rhode Island river. The real perpetrators, of course, were Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Prosecutors in the Los Angeles suburb responsible for a huge share of the nation’s wiretaps almost certainly violated federal law when they authorized widespread eavesdropping that police used to make more than 300 arrests and seize millions of dollars in cash and drugs throughout the USA.
“It’s still a capital crime, and I would give him the death sentence, and I would prefer to see him hanged by the neck until he’s dead, rather than merely electrocuted.”
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, known for having strong words about Edward Snowden, said this week that the National Security Agency whistleblower deserved to be "hanged by the neck." Woolsey, speaking to CNN Thursday, blamed Snowden for the recent Paris terrorist attacks that killed 129 people. He said Snowden was a "traitor" for leaking classified NSA information in 2013.
His comments came after CNN host Brooke Baldwin said that the Paris killers allegedly used encrypted apps to hide their messages as they were planning the massacre. She suggested the attackers knew to protect their communications because Snowden had revealed the extent of government monitoring, then asked Woolsey for his thoughts, the Hill reported.
A former CIA director says leaker Edward Snowden should be convicted of treason and given the death penalty in the wake of the terrorist attack on Paris.
John Brennan calls for review of reforms such as USA Freedom Act, saying they may have created ‘inadvertent or intentional gaps’ in security services
Though it was revealed by Edward Snowden in June 2013, the National Security Agency's (NSA) infamous secret program to domestically collect Americans’ e-mail metadata in bulk technically ended in December 2011. Or so we thought. A new document obtained through a lawsuit filed by The New York Times confirms that this program effectively continued under the authority of different government programs with less scrutiny from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
Newly revealed documents (not from Snowden this time) show that the NSA has continued to collect Americans' email traffic en masse using overseas offices to get around curbs introduced domestically.
Shortly after the September 11 attacks, President Bush authorized the NSA to collect bulk metadata on emails sent by Americans (although not the content) to help The War Against Terror (TWAT). The surveillance was authorized by the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which mostly rubberstamped such requests.
But the collection was stopped in 2011, the NSA said, although it still monitored emails from Americans to people outside the nation's borders. However, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit started by The New York Times against the NSA's Inspector General has uncovered documents showing that the NSA carried on collecting domestic data.
When the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of records about Americans’ emails came to light in 2013, the government conceded the program’s existence but said it had shut down the effort in December 2011 for “operational and resource reasons.”
While that particular secret program stopped, newly disclosed documents show that the N.S.A. had found a way to create a functional equivalent. The shift has permitted the agency to continue analyzing social links revealed by Americans’ email patterns, but without collecting the data in bulk from American telecommunications companies — and with less oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Thanks to the global nature of the Internet, when you send an e-mail it could bounce through data centers all the way around the world -- even if you're sending it to someone down the street. A new report from the New York Times suggests the U.S. government used this quirk to continue collecting data on Americans' e-mail records, even after halting an earlier program approved by a secretive surveillance court for that purpose.
Among the many revelations about U.S. government spying revealed by former federal contractor Edward Snowden was that the National Security Agency was collecting records about Americans' e-mail in bulk. When details about the program came to light in 2013, the government said it had shut down that program in 2011.
It is perhaps not surprising that an event like last Friday’s Paris attack would raise questions about why government surveillance didn’t spot such a sweeping and apparently coordinated assault in advance. But the speed with which intelligence and law enforcement professionals worked to play down their own possible shortcomings — and in some cases invoke the attacks in a play for broader powers — has caught the attention of security experts, privacy rights advocates and editorial boards.
Venezuela will conduct a “comprehensive review of relations with the United States” and submitted a formal protest over new evidence that the National Security Agency spied on state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, the country’s president announced.
One former NSA official said the discontinued program he helped to build could have "absolutely prevented" some of the worst terror attacks in living memory.
When I told friends that I'd be driving across America to find The Cloud, many of them brought up the NSA's Utah data center, assuming it was on my itinerary. Which was understandable—since 2013, it's become a monument to the anxieties of big data and mass surveillance, a black box just out of reach and far beyond comprehension.
I tended to respond to these friends with a little bit of fatigue. It's not that I don't care about the NSA Data Center. It’s just that every good story about driving to see the NSA Data Center has been written. It's the infrastructure/national-security writer equivalent of the “Why I'm Leaving This Interesting, But Expensive City” essay. Most of them were written right after the first Snowden stories started dropping, taking advantage of the (slightly) more lax security before the data center became fully operational. Kashmir Hill probably did it best.
Firms owned by the Chinese state are looking to manufacture their own privacy enabled smartphones for Chinese officials.
The country is sceptical about US based technology and its potential to spy on state officials, particularly in the light of the Edward Snowden NSA snooping revelations
Private Chinese tech firms are also helping in the effort, which is part of wider Chinese strategy to be self reliant on its technology, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The effort is part of a push to develop home-grown Chinese technology and software to replace foreign offerings that could be used by foreign spy agencies to monitor communications.
A federal appeals court has granted a stay that will allow a controversial National Security Agency telephone surveillance program to continue through its planned end on November 29.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued the order Monday afternoon without offering any explanation beyond saying that the government had "satisified the requirements for a stay pending appeal."
Last week’s opinion in Klayman v. Obama by Judge Richard Leon dealt another, emphatic(!) blow to the constitutionality of the NSA’s bulk phone record surveillance program under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. The ruling concludes that NSA’s bulk metadata collection likely violates the Fourth Amendment, but as others have noted, the victory may not have tremendous practical significance. It is limited to specific plaintiffs and has now been stayed by the DC Circuit. Moreover, by the time the appellate court decides the government’s appeal — even with the expedited review the court has ordered — the 215 program as we know it will probably have ended. As a result, the panel could find the appeal moot and vacate Judge Leon’s opinion, as Steve Vladeck observes.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, who has described the metadata collection as “almost Orwellian,” ordered a halt to it Nov. 9. But on Monday a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit stayed the decision while the Obama administration prepared an appeal.
The battle over the legality of NSA surveillance is heating up again. Just last week, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon ordered the NSA to stop collecting the telephone data of a California lawyer. Without any real delay, an appeals court set that injunction aside, allowing the NSA spying program to continue unabated in its vacuuming up of data about the phone conversations of Americans.
On Monday, a United States District Court in the District of Columbia said that the National Security Agency’s controversial PRISM Program may be unconstitutional. While the court did not order that the PRISM Program be stopped, the Honorable Richard J. Leon did order that the NSA stop collecting the phone records of the plaintiff in the case: of a Californian lawyer and his firm.
The NSA’s national surveillance program should be a prominent subject in the 2016 campaign
Rubio is going to try to ride his self-proclaimed foreign policy expertise gleaned from sitting on the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees (never mind that he's missed half of those committee meetings). But as a member of the Intelligence Committee there are a few things he should know about our foreign and domestic intelligence capabilities.
Marco Rubio is out to set himself apart from the crowded field of Republican presidential hopefuls by staking out the most hawkish positions on every national security and foreign policy issue, and now he is working to paint his rivals as weak on national security, pointing to their past opposition to the massive surveillance operation of the National Security Agency (NSA).
It never fails in this country. Some part of the world experiences a horrific terrorist attack, and one of our esteemed legislative leaders almost pulls a hamstring rushing to the nearest microphone to explain why we need to give up a few more civil liberties so that the government can keep us safe.
Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas is the latest offender. The far-right conservative is using last Friday’s slaughter in Paris to introduce the Liberty Through Strength Act, which would delay the upcoming implementation of the USA Freedom Act. (I look forward to a super PAC called Liberty Through Strength raising money for Cotton’s inevitable presidential run in 2020.)
The USA Freedom Act was passed in June to curtail the National Security Agency’s bulk metadata collection program, which a federal appeals court had recently ruled unconstitutional. That program, authorized under the Patriot Act after 9/11, had allowed the NSA for years to collect Americans’ phone records in bulk and store them in enormous databases. Critics had fought for years to end the program, the scope of which came to light with the leak of NSA documents by Edward Snowden. The court’s decision was an enormous victory for privacy advocates and decried by right-wingers, who claimed it would make it harder for the nation’s intelligence services to track potential terrorists.
While it’s suspected that encrypted communication services may have helped ISIS coordinate attacks on Paris, there’s no evidence to actually prove it. Even so, some members of Congress are already talking about legislating encryption, potentially requiring tech companies to include backdoors into encrypted products that could be used by spy agencies to prevent similar tragedies in the future. In fact, Senator John McCain already said he’s determined to outlaw encryption that the U.S. government cannot crack.
Bush has long been a supporter of the program, which started under his brother's administration and continued under President Obama.
Senator Rand Paul, better known by some as the Matthew McConaughey of politics, has thrown us something of a curve ball, folks. In a recent interview, the presidential hopeful took a surprisingly empathetic approach to "whistleblower" Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee and government contractor who leaked documents about unethical surveillance being used by the NSA.
Paul noted Thursday that the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone data is still running, under a six-month window to wind down the program.
Paul, who has opposed military intervention in the Middle East, is calling for a halt in visas for countries with "significant jihadist movements" following the Paris attacks.
Senator Rand Paul criticized claims that the government needs to ramp up surveillance following the attacks in Paris, calling the idea “bulls—t.”
A wave of coordinated terror attacks that killed at least 130 people in Paris last week have had experts grappling with how French intelligence could have missed an operation that was most likely months in the making.
In recent days, the current and former heads of the CIA have hinted that the attacks might have been prevented had efforts not been made in the past few years to undermine the national-security apparatus.
Others have cast doubt on those assertions, noting that terror groups have been working for years to avoid surveillance.
But the most obvious flaw in government reasoning is the most depressing: If U.S. technology isn't secure, terrorists -- like most customers worldwide -- will just buy somebody else's.
American technology is the gold standard. Undercutting it in the name of terrorism is folly. The last thing we need in the face of this new, heightened danger is a weakening U.S. economy.
Like the U.S. National Security Agency with its worldwide program of satellite interception called Echelon, the French have long had their version, nicknamed Frenchelon. Run by the Directorate-General for External Security and headquartered on boulevard Mortier in Paris, it has a major base near Sarlat in Périgord, and others around the country as well as overseas. Last summer it was a beneficiary of a large post-Charlie Hebdo boost in intelligence funding and new laws giving the electronic spies more power to eavesdrop on Internet communications, metadata, phone calls and hidden microphones.
You're probably going to hear this lie furiously repeated in the coming weeks and months as security hawks in the US and Europe march toward another ground war in Asia, and renew their calls for a radically strengthened surveillance state. Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept has thoroughly documented the genesis of this lie, but here's the short version: the government can't have it both ways on security. It can't ask that companies and individuals strengthen their defenses against attacks while at the same time demanding companies like Apple and Google to sabotage their users by giving the government the means to break encryption.
As politicians and security officials rush to shift the blame—with the mainstream media following suit —for Friday’s Paris attacks onto NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, a chorus of voices is warning that, in addition to being “unbelievably irrational,” these claims are also very, very dangerous for civil liberties.
The dust hardly settled in Paris before former CIA director James Woosley said that Snowden had “blood on his hands.”
And Monday, current CIA director John Brennan told a Center for Strategic & International Studies forum that the power of spy agencies to detect such a threat were undermined by new surveillance restrictions in the wake of recent leaks. In nearly the same breath, Brennan also called for increased security to help thwart other attacks currently “in the pipeline.”
Brennan said that the attackers had “gone to school” to learn complex encryption to evade potential dragnets, presumably referring to those exposed through Snowden’s disclosures. He also said that “a number of unauthorized disclosures” led to “a lot of handwringing over the government’s” expansive surveillance powers.
The first to take part in the “Snowden’s fault game,” as described by journalist Glenn Greenwald, was former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell.
No evidence has surfaced yet that Snowden's revelations made a difference in this case, or that the perpetrators of Friday’s attacks used encrypted communications to conceal their activities. Many private-sector computer specialists surveyed by POLITICO were skeptical about those arguments, which if true would mesh with more than a year of warnings from intelligence officials about the growing ability of terrorists and criminals to hide their tracks online.
As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in an incisive article on The Intercept today, the claims CIA Director John Brennan made this week, stating that whistleblowers and civil libertarians are keeping the US from stopping terrorist attacks, are insidious and duplicitous.
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Brennan's history of thuggish lying on behalf of the military-industrial-intelligence complex is so blatant that, as Greenwald notes, even The New York Times Editorial Board took Brennan to task on November 17. As Greenwald writes, the editorial "mercilessly shames the despicable effort by U.S. government officials to shamelessly exploit the Paris attacks to advance long-standing agendas."
No clear evidence has emerged to indicate Islamic State militants used Snowden's disclosures to help plan last Friday's murderous rampage in Paris.
So it’s a bit irrational and intellectually dishonest to suggest that terrorists suddenly became aware of surveillance and encryption on June 5, 2013, when The Guardian published the first of its many reports on state surveillance programs. One of two things is happening: These public figures haven’t done their homework on terrorist communication security, or they’re bending the truth for political ends. Either way, it’s putting whistleblowers in the crosshairs, and this is not where people like Snowden belong.
A truly superb New York Times editorial this morning mercilessly shames the despicable effort by U.S. government officials to shamelessly exploit the Paris attacks to advance long-standing agendas.
[...]
The editorial, which you should really read in its entirety, destroys most of the false, exploitative, blame-shifting claims uttered by U.S. officials about these issues. Because intelligence agencies knew of the attackers and received warnings, the NYT editors explain that “the problem in [stopping the Paris attacks] was not a lack of data, but a failure to act on information authorities already had.” They point out that the NSA’s mass surveillance powers to be mildly curbed by post-Snowden reforms are ineffective and, in any event, have not yet stopped.
A federal judge says warrantless surveillance programs used to gather evidence against a Denver-area man accused of helping a terrorist group didn't violate his constitutional rights.
After the terrifying events in Paris this weekend, questions are again being asked as to why intelligence services failed to detect the threat in advance.
Encryption is one of the most vexed subjects in both the political and technology spheres. Here is a guide about what encryption is, and why interest in it is growing.
The particular brew of jackassery of which I speak is that sheepish yet pervasive bromide used to defend the NSA mass surveillance programs, I have nothing to hide. A statement which is most certainly a lie nine times out of ten and is just as certain to transform into the prying inquisition “do you have something to hide?” as soon as the sentiment drips from the lips of authority.
Just as with 9/11, the Boston marathon bombings, and other recent attacks, governments are pretending “it wasn’t foreseeable”.
But CBS reports that law enforcement sources say that 7 of the 8 terrorists were known in advance to U.S. or French intelligence services.
Cisco was unintentionally tied to secret documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden by a photo that showed NSA employees around a box labeled “Cisco” during an "interdiction" operation, which involves secretly modifying high tech equipment before delivery to the customer.
Civil liberties advocates are trying to bring to light a secret legal document that could upend the congressional fight over cybersecurity.
For years, the Obama administration has repeatedly declined to reveal a 2003 decision from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), claiming that it no longer relies on the opinion.
But the continued secrecy has digital privacy experts worried the decision addresses the government's right to access data and could give license to warrantless surveillance.
Current and former government officials have been pointing to the terror attacks in Paris as justification for mass surveillance programs. CIA Director John Brennan accused privacy advocates of “hand-wringing” that has made “our ability collectively internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging.” Former National Security Agency and CIA director Michael Hayden said, “In the wake of Paris, a big stack of metadata doesn’t seem to be the scariest thing in the room.”
Ultimately, it’s impossible to know just how successful sweeping surveillance has been, since much of the work is secret. But what has been disclosed so far suggests the programs have been of limited value. Here’s a roundup of what we know.
A former employee of Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency, charged with treason for giving the CIA more than 300 secret documents, has told a court that lax controls meant he felt he was running no risk.
The man, identified only as Markus R, told the court the documents included a database on BND employees he found on a USB stick he took home. The documents were copied at work, scanned at home, and emailed to his CIA handlers, the court heard.
Prosecutors said he also passed three sensitive documents to the Russian consulate in Munich.
The call to weaken smartphone encryption was made by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gave a speech yesterday all about the fight against ISIS in the wake of the Paris attacks. While most of the attention (quite reasonably so) on the speech was about her plan to deal with ISIS, as well as her comments on the ridiculous political hot potato of how to deal with Syrian refugees, she still used the opportunity to align herself with the idiotic side of the encryption debate, suggesting that Silicon Valley has to somehow "fix" the issue of law enforcement wanting to see everything.
Increasingly, politicians and assorted bureaucrats in the U.S. and Europe are calling for backdoors and/or other means of circumventing encryption, all in the name of thwarting the increasingly amorphous phenomenon of terrorism. Ironically, the term terrorist originates from the French Revolution. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a terrorist was originally “an adherent or supporter of the Jacobins, who advocated and practised methods of partisan repression and bloodshed in the propagation of the principles of democracy and equality.” (My, oh my. Are we coming full circle or what?) One immediately wonders how the western crusade to bring democracy and equality to the Middle East is viewed, particularly by relatives of anyone “droned” to death at a wedding party.
This approach of acknowledging the fundamental technical problem of providing a backdoor to encryption while at the same time insisting that a way be found to work around it has been called "magical thinking" and is something that the top levels of the US government has explicitly referenced, including an FTC Commissioner who is for encryption and the FBI's top lawyer, who still wants a workaround.
Telegram, the messaging app which allows for on-the-fly secret encrypted messages to be sent from mobile phones, seems to be playing a game of cat-and-mouse with jihadis, removing any accounts they find which are being used to promote extremist behaviour.
Don't expect our so-called intelligence agencies to learn any real lessons from the Paris attacks.
Yahoo Mail is purportedly locking out people who use ad-blockers.
Millions of people swear by the ad blocker, software that lets you browse the web free of online advertising. The companies who want you to see the ads are starting to push back.
The technology for encryption can keep data and conversations private, making it a double-edged sword that can equally be used by democracy campaigners, law enforcement or violent extremists.
Rep. Will Hurd (R., Texas), a former CIA officer, also warned against overreaction. “Our civil liberties are what make our country great, and they’re not burdens,” he said. “Encryption is good and we shouldn’t do anything to weaken it."
Since terrorists struck Paris last Friday night, the debate over whether encryption prevents intelligence services from stopping attacks has reignited. The New York Times and Yahoo reported on vague claims that the terrorists’ use of encryption stymied investigators who might have thwarted their plans. CIA Director John Brennan made equally vague comments Monday morning, warning that thanks to the privacy protections of the post-Snowden era, it is now “much more challenging” for intelligence agencies to find terrorists. Jeb Bush piled on, saying that the United States needs to restore its program collecting metadata on U.S. phone calls, even though that program won’t be shut down until the end of this month.
In a survey, 74 percent of Passcode Influencers cautioned against a knee-jerk response to a tragedy that could give US intelligence and law enforcement agencies a power that could harm all consumers’ security and privacy.
Well, this is alarming: a new study revealed that only 31 percent of 12 to 15 year-olds could recognize the difference between Google Ads and regular Google search results. In kids ages 8 to 11, the number was much lower, at only 16 percent.
The study was conducted by Ofcom, the UK’s regulatory agency in charge of communications, and examined results from several hundred children in each age group. The kids were shown an image of a search for “trainers,” and most either did not identify the paid results or trusted that they were still reflective of the best possible results.
Can a life—or even a moment—be represented by data? A single moment can contain an infinite amount of information. And when we think about these moments, it’s not necessarily information that characterizes our experience. Often the futility of our attempts to create the fullest possible record of a life is a source of comedy: In Laurence Sterne’s novel, Tristram Shandy spends a year writing down the events of a single day. When the data actually misrepresent reality, it is a source of tragedy. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov is accused of murdering his father, a murder he maintains he did not commit—even though all the facts line up against him. Still the possibility of capturing a life in words, images, numbers, remains tantalizing to consumers as well as to the government. While the NSA collects metadata on our phone calls and emails, we sign up for Fitbit and Nest—the smart thermostat with a security camera add-on—in pursuit of self-improvement.
It is hard to believe anything Mr. Brennan says. Last year, he bluntly denied that the C.I.A. had illegally hacked into the computers of Senate staff members conducting an investigation into the agency's detention and torture programs when, in fact, it did. In 2011, when he was President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, he claimed that American drone strikes had not killed any civilians, despite clear evidence that they had. And his boss, James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has admitted lying to the Senate on the N.S.A.'s bulk collection of data. Even putting this lack of credibility aside, it's not clear what extra powers Mr. Brennan is seeking.
"The tragedy and acts of terrorism recently perpetrated in Paris, France, have inspired impassioned responses to our nation's problems," Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said in a statement on Tuesday. "However, these horrific actions are no excuse for the knee-jerk reactions, political platitudes, and fear mongering we've been experiencing from some of my colleagues in its aftermath."
From this brief survey we can see, outside the area of tracking down terrorists, that Big Data is a threat to our democratic freedoms on many levels. So while they are trying to keep us safe, our elected leaders also need to effectively address these adverse effects before it is too late.
According to a report Wednesday from The Daily Beast, National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake was listed alongside “Ft. Hood killer Nidal Hasan, Navy Yard killer Aaron Alexis, and FBI-agent-turned-Soviet-spy Robert Hanssen” in a list of “insider threats.”
I sometimes say the government turned me into a dissident — after I spent 14 years at the CIA and two more at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
I only say it half-jokingly. While I'm proud of winning this year's PEN Center's First Amendment award, I never intended to make a career out of being at odds with the government.
Sometimes, though — like when I spent two years in prison for blowing the whistle on the CIA's torture program — it's felt like the government's gone out of its way to be at odds with me.
And it's clear that our government demonizes people who disagree with the official line. Things got bad for anyone who disagrees with the official line right after 9/11.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden made some interesting comments during a recent interview, suggesting that everybody should be running an ad blocker, if not for the ads but just for security's sake.
Are you feeling safe because New Zealand has a "watchlist" with 40 people on it? You shouldn't.
But you shouldn't feel unsafe either.
Over the past year, increased public interest and a greater level of disclosure by the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (SIS) has led to talk of a "watch list". The list is said to contain between 30 and 40 people of concern.
There is also said to be another 30-40 people of lesser priority beneath the "watch list".
What is not clear is that the list is as much a measure of the SIS capability as it is of danger. It's not a fixed number of the only people in New Zealand known to hold ISIS sympathies, or to have possible al Qaeda links or to be planning armed insurrection in Fiji.
It's a number which is manageable and watchable -- there's not much point in "watch list" filled with people you don't have the capability to watch.
Here’s my best description from last year of the mind-boggling fact that NSA conducted 25 spot checks between 2004 and 2009 and then did a several months’ long end-to-end review of the Internet dragnet in 2009 and found it to be in pretty good shape, only then to have someone discover that every single record received under the program had violated rules set in 2004.
The UK Prime Minister has seized on the tragic deaths and injuries in Paris as an excuse to terroise Britons into allowing him to pass his Snoopers Charter, a sweeping, badly written surveillance bill that will end security research in the UK, cause Internet bills to soar, and riddle critical software with back-doors, threatening anyone who reveals these vulnerabilities, even in court, with a year in prison.
Dublin Airport uses a queue monitoring system which records the metadata of internet enabled devices to track how long it takes passenger to pass through security .
Through "Mobile Location Analytics" it tries to make sure that passing security takes no longer than 30 minutes - but privacy activists have raised concerns over how this data is being tracked and stored.
If you walk through with a smartphone, laptop, tablet, smartwatch, or any other WIFI or Bluetooth device your WIFI or Bluetooth media access control (MAC) address is recorded.
This is a number which is unique to that device - and you do not have to consent to sharing this information, or to log on to the airport's WIFI for this data to be recorded and stored.
On 6 October 2015, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that the Commission's decision in relation to the adequacy of the US Safe Harbor Framework (Safe Harbor) is no longer valid. Our analysis below, provides our insight as to what this case may mean for businesses transferring data to the US under the Safe Harbor regime.
Like the Patriot Act, the French law allows the government to monitor phone calls and emails of terrorism suspects without obtaining a warrant. It also requires internet service providers to collect metadata, which is then processed by an algorithm to detect strings of suspicious activity—a page taken right from the NSA’s playbook.
In January, terror descended on the French capital when black-clad gunmen stormed the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing magazine staff and triggering a three-day manhunt.
A crackdown on extremists was promised -- yet within the year, Islamist terrorists have struck Paris again in an even deadlier attack, killing 129 people in coordinated terror attacks Friday.
A spokeswoman for France's ruling Socialist Party has conceded there was a failure of intelligence and that improved surveillance measures in the wake of the Hebdo attacks were not yet fully operational.
News outlets from Paris are reporting that a phone with an unencrypted text message was found at the scene of the attack on Bataclan concert hall. The message, sent shortly after gunfire began, read “It begins.” Police used the phone’s geolocation data to find the safehouses used by the terrorists who carried out the attacks, according to Paris prosecutor François Molins.
Of course, these attackers could’ve used encryption at other points as they planned and carried out their killing spree. We don’t have the whole story. But what we do know — that the police used a phone with information and communications left out in the open — gives us evidence that at least a portion of the plotting happened without the use of encryption.
The British satire Yes, Minister once captured the politician’s reaction to any crisis with this syllogism: “We must do something. This is something! Therefore we must do it.” In the case of the Paris terror attacks, American politicians have grabbed at two somethings: refusing to accept Syrian refugees, and demanding encryption backdoors so that intelligence agencies can better spy on people. And as one would expect from any instant-reflex policy proposal, neither will do a thing to prevent terror attacks. And in the case of encryption, at least, the politicians and intelligence leaders are too technologically ignorant to even understand what they’re asking for.
The UK and other countries might be pushing for greater spying powers than they've ever had before, but don't tell that to Germany -- it's doing just the opposite. The country hopes to ban its intelligence agency, the BND, from indiscriminately spying on European Union citizens or organizations. Effectively, it'll give the EU the same privacy rights as it would offer people within its own borders. The proposed law will limit digital snooping and wiretaps to extreme situations, such as when there are suspicions of terrorism, organized crime or broken arms embargoes. It also explicitly forbids spying on allies' institutions (ahem, NSA) and economic espionage.
"We don't know how these people were communicating and with whom," he said. "If they were communicating with homegrown software and there's some indications of that, then a mandatory backdoor is not going to do any good."
It’s no surprise that most criticism of Obama administration lawlessness has come from the right — political opponents of a president have more of an incentive to highlight bad things the administration has been doing, and supporters, in turn, tend to play down, ignore or even defend such things.
Back in the 1980s, when I was younger and much more naive, I was astounded that so many conservative Republicans defended the Reagan administration’s insane arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. “Iran-contra,” as the scandal came to be known, was not just an embarrassing negation of America’s stated policy of not negotiating with terrorists, but also represented a clumsy but willful attempt to circumvent a duly enacted law that prohibited providing the Nicaraguan contras with weapons.
Today, I’m hardly shocked by such partisanship. The most common defense of the Obama administration acting through executive order when there is minimal to nonexistent legal authority to do so is that President Obama simply must do so, because Congress is so obstructionist. There is no “Congress won’t act, so the president’s power is expanded” clause of the Constitution, and I’m willing to bet that almost no one making this argument made a similar argument during any of the last three Republican administrations, nor would they make it in a Bush III, Rubio or Cruz administration if a future Republican president found his policies blocked by Congress.
Internet giants Google, Twitter and Facebook were recently subjected to a compliance test by the Open Technology Institute's Ranking Digital Rights initiative. Cynics will not be surprised to hear that these companies all received failing grades when evaluated on user privacy and data security practices. In a world that has absorbed Edward Snowden's revelations on the NSA's snooping on private communications, with the alleged collaboration of the largest internet platforms, we can expect such cynics to be many.
What's really surprising here is how little we have come to expect from these companies who once positioned themselves as champions of a "...more open and connected world", to cite Facebook's mission statement. One might also wonder how these brands feel about such repeated slights to their image. When it comes to helping or hindering human rights across the world, does reputation still matter to the leading social networks? Or have they, perhaps, simply grown too big to care?
Churchill once said: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” More recently, former Obama White House chief of staff/current Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel said earlier: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Congress passed a sweeping overhaul of policies that allowed extensive electronic surveillance. A source of controversy ever since, the Patriot Act has been both lauded for thwarting attacks in their planning stages and criticized for allowing the National Security Agency to collect Americans' call records. Now, following the attacks in Paris on Friday, it seems that the EU and France may pass Patriot Act-like surveillance laws, bringing the debate between security and personal privacy to a head in Europe.
The headlines were sensational. Fox News: “Joystick Jihad.” The Daily Express: “Did Isis terrorists use a PlayStation 4 to plot Paris massacre in the streets?”
They all seemed to suggest that a games console had played an integral part in planning the Paris terror attacks. Fuelling this were comments made by Belgium’s deputy prime minister, Jan Jambon, about potential tactics of Islamic State and reports that a PS4 console had been recovered from the apartment of one of the suspected attackers.
PS4 is, according to Jambon, harder to keep track of than popular messaging service Whatsapp.
Suddenly, there were articles quoting experts talking about how attackers could use all sorts of ways to communicate in games without ever uttering a word: spelling out plans in a hail of bullets was one suggestion.
This is much like the anti-Semitic arguments against letting Jews into America during the Holocaust. “Well, they are different, and some of them could be communists.” True enough. I know my, now deceased, communist relatives blew up nothing and killed no one. Although you could make the case that some of the more ideological ones might have bored some folks to death. When measured against certain death, the threat posed by a very few should have meant next to nothing.
“This isn’t about Surveillance, It’s About Democracy”
Attacks that shook Paris and Beirut last week make us feel compassion for the survivors, empathy for those who lost loved ones and, yes, fear for our own safety. Political terrorism aims to strike fear in the hearts of millions — and it’s a disturbingly effective tactic.
So, perhaps it’s not surprising that Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and dozens of other elected officials responded to the Paris attacks with fear, including a call to halt U.S. plans to provide a safe harbor for Syrian refugees.
Peter and Mickey spend the hour with David Talbot, author of “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.”
A little background: NSQ is a queue that you send to messages to. The way you publish a message is to make an HTTP request on localhost. It really should not take 40 milliseconds to send a HTTP request to localhost. Something was terribly wrong. The NSQ daemon wasn’t under high CPU load, it wasn’t using a lot of memory, it didn’t seem to be a garbage collection pause. Help.
France’s intellectual property office has rejected a number of trademark applications for the terms ‘Je suis Paris’ and ‘Pray for Paris’.
In a statement published on Friday, November 20, the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) said it has rejected the applications on the grounds that they are contrary to ordre public and the terms cannot be used commercially considering the recent events in Paris.
‘Je suis Paris’ and ‘Pray for Paris’ became popular rallying cries for Twitter users following the shootings and bombings in Paris on November 13.
It appears that, like a number of reggae artists at the time, Bob Marley may not have been fairly compensated by certain parties for his work, which included (he contended) not receiving royalties under two publishing agreements. As a result, in order to gain control of the copyrights and/or revenue streams, Marley deliberately misattributed songs to various associates. Reportedly, the songwriting credits for “No Woman, No Cry” for example, were given to a friend to use the subsequent royalties to run a soup kitchen in Trenchtown, Jamaica, where Marley grew up.
Google is facing a never-ending flood of takedown requests from copyright holders, breaking record after record. The company currently processes a record breaking 1,500 links to "pirate" pages from its search results every minute, which is a 100% increase compared to last year.