This is a great way to start a new year, writing a review of an absolutely brilliant new computer that I bought over the holidays - an Acer Aspire Z3-710 all-in-one desktop system. I haven't set up a new computer that I was this pleased and impressed with in quite a long time.
Welcome to 2016, dear BetaNews readers. Another year is here, and some trends will continue as before. The most intriguing being Google's push into both education and home with its wonderful Chrome OS. While a bit limited, devices with Google's Linux-based desktop operating system are perfection for many; especially as more and more time is spent in the browser.
In addition to the Chromebase 24, the new systems include a refreshed Chromebook 11 and Aspire Switch 12 S and V Nitro Black Edition notebooks with Intel's latest RealSense 3D camera.
2015 was the year Linux and open-source software took over the IT world, but many open-source and proprietary software fans still haven't figured it out.
2015 was terrific. Looking back, it was the most fascinating year for Linux and open source. Here are some of the top trends of 2015.
On a spring day in 2012, I shut down my MacBook Air for the last time. From then on, my primary computing environmentââ¬Å —ââ¬Å at least on a laptop computerââ¬Å —ââ¬Å was GNU/Linux. I was abandoning, as much as possible, the proprietary, control-freakish environments that Apple and Microsoft have increasingly foisted on users of personal computers.
The year was 2003. I was an underpaid accountant-turned-IT-professional, and father to two children under the age of four. The idea of using Linux was intriguing, but it wasn't until I had a chance to experience it while taking a class on Long Island for work that I was fired up enough to try it out.
The deed was done late in the night the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in 2003. Thankfully, it went off almost without a hitch! Since then it has been a steady slip deeper and deeper into the Linux abyss.
My kids had a hand in pushing me over the edge too. Many late nights were spent with a keyboard in my lap and a baby sleeping on my shoulder as I give my wife a much-needed break from nursing the little piranhas. Together we explored Red Hat then Gentoo Linux, and technologies that would otherwise have time limits or cost associated with them. We explored things like thin clients and 3D model building, and learning things like how long it takes to download and compile the KDE desktop environment on a Pentium 3 system and a dial-up connection (Hint: a really long time!).
Ben Hutchings has announced the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.2.75 LTS (Long Term Support).
Linux is driving into 2016 with new members joining the Automotive Grade Linux project and a new Unified Code Base distribution to enable the next generation of automotive technology.
With Linux 4.4 expected next weekend, here's a look at some of the early features we've already been talking about on Phoronix that should be on the table for the Linux 4.5 merge window.
The Linux Foundation released an Automotive Grade Linux Unified Code Base distribution featuring GENIVI components, and announced new members including Ford.
The Linux Foundation’s Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) working group has released an AGL Unified Code Base (UCB) distribution for open source Linux-based in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems. The Yocto Project based distribution combines elements from the AGL Requirements Specification released last June, as well as the GENIVI Alliance specification and the Tizen IVI stack, which has served as the first AGL reference design.
Last month I showed how AMD's open-source driver performance evolved in 2015 while today's article is looking at how the closed-source AMD / Radeon Technologies Group proprietary driver has evolved over the course of the year.
In 2015 there were just 436 commits for the entire year -- in 2014 there were 923 commits, which was about average recently. The high point of X.Org Server's development was around 2008 when there were 2,114 commits in a single year. Except for 2015, every year saw close to a thousand or more commits going back a decade. In 2004 there were 590 commits while in 2003 there were 125 commits. Of course, prior to 2004 the X.Org Server was technically the XFree86 code-base.
Junio Hamano announced the release this afternoon of Git 2.7.0, the latest stable version of this extremely popular, open-source version control system.
Moritz Bunkus had the pleasure of announcing the release of MKVToolNix 8.7.0, the next major version of the open source and cross-platform MKV (Matroska) manipulation software for Linux, Mac and Windows OSes.
As you may know, Image Downloader is a free and open-source software which is used for downloading photos from websites. It has recently received a graphical user interface, permitting the users to download photos even easier. The user has to add the link, select the target folder, where he wants to place the downloaded photo and press OK.
Under the hood it uses wget to download the photos, has a system that prevents downloading a file more than once and displays both the thumbnail and the original picture.
Last version of Enca has been released more than year ago and now it's time for new release. There are various compatibility fixes which have been committed to the Git repository meanwhile.
If you don't know Enca, it is an Extremely Naive Charset Analyser. It detects character set and encoding of text files and can also convert them to other encodings using either a built-in converter or external libraries and tools like libiconv, librecode, or cstocs.
A new major release of the popular BleachBit open source system cleaner software used by numerous Linux and Windows users to keep their computers clean from junk at all times was made available for download recently.
Bound By Flame is an ambitious Action RPG developed by French development studio Spiders and published by Focus Home Interactive. It was originally released in 2014, but the Linux version was released out of the blue earlier this month. Thus far, it's the only title from the developer that's been released for our platform.
The Steam Hardware Survey for December has been released, and it’s not good news for the Linux platform, which doesn’t seem capable of going past the 1% milestone.
Up until a little over six months ago, the Steam for Linux market share hovered around 1.2%, but something changed overnight, and the usage dropped to about 0.8%. Most likely, Valve changed something in the algorithm, but since nothing of what they do is transparent, it’s simply just a guessing game.
It’s almost the new year, so I’m pleased to have series of patches ready for review that implement an important part of the UI needed for my Outreachy project. As soon as the patches get reviewed (and touched up), you’ll be able to manage the display of GeoJSON overlay files straight from the UI! Next up is the meat of my project: adding support for KML overlay files.
Outreachy is the successor of the Outreach Program for Women (OPW). OPW was inspired by Google Summer of Code and by how few women applied for it.
The program was renamed to Outreachy with the goal of expanding to engage people from various underrepresented groups and was moved to Software Freedom Conservancy as its organizational home.
On the first day of 2016, François Dupoux, the maintainer and lead developer of the SystemRescueCd project, a GNU/Linux Live CD designed for system rescue and recovery operations, proudly announced the release of SystemRescueCd 4.7.0.
The famous hacking group fail0verflow has just released the modified Linux kernel that allowed them to run a Linux distribution on PlayStation 4.
Everyone was taken by surprise when fail0verflow showed a video last week with a Gentoo running on PlayStation 4. The hackers managed to run a Linux distribution on the latest console from Sony and made it sound like it was easy.
In the first day of each month, the Arch Linux developers release of a new ISO image of the fully customizable Arch Linux operating system, bringing the latest software updates released during the month that just passed.
Today in Linux news Arch is currently topping a favorite distro poll beating out former giants Ubuntu and Mint. Jamie Watson got a new Acer machine for Christmas that doesn't like Linux and Dedoimedo isn't enamored with new Mint 17.3. Jesse Smith reviewed paldo Linux today at Distrowatch.com and Jack Germain tipped his hat to new Chapeau Linux.
Reading Jim Whitehurst's The Open Organization, you can hear the voice of a leader on a mission. Achieving a well-described personal transformation to become the Red Hat CEO, Whitehurst chronicles his leadership journey of the last few years, increasingly believing that the "open organization model" he encountered (and then further developed with other Red Hatters) has the potential to become a "new management paradigm." The book further argues that reframing leadership as "engaging and catalyzing participative communities both inside and outside" has helped Red Hat better achieve all-important performance imperatives of speed, agility, and innovation, and that the open model could be applicable to other organizations too—enabling them similarly to achieve higher performance. The essays in this volume, plus the growing contributions to the "movement building" website Opensource.com, reflect a high level of enthusiasm and interest among many other practitioners for exploring further the practice of "open organization."
As it reflects the theoretical cost of buying the company’s shares, the market cap of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) is currently rolling at 15137.67, making it one of the key stocks in today’s market. Hence, the existing market cap indicates a preferable measure in comprehending the size of the company rather than its worth.
Before Christmas I started an initiative with an objective to write AppStream metadata for app add-ons and get them to Fedora packages and ideally upstream. So what are the results after two weeks?
In terms of attracting the community to join me in the effort, it’s been a failure. Maybe everyone just took time off during holidays which is also a good thing, we need to switch off from time to time. Maybe it’s just not an attractive objective for people. Anyway only one other person edited the wikipage and it was just added info about already existing metadata.
New year is there and so new release of DNF and DNF-PLUGINS-CORE. A lot of bugs have been fixed, improved speed of bash completion and documentation has been reviewed. Download plugin has been extended with two additional options. Read complete list of fetures and bug fixes for DNF and DNF plugins.
The Chapeau project's latest version arrived last month and is a good choice for enterprise users who want something a step above the traditional Fedora distro.
Fedora is an iconic Linux distro. It is a very popular choice in enterprise shops, but it's less than ideal for home and SMB use without an IT staff to make it work. That is where Chapeau 23 comes to the rescue.
The open source community reacted with sadness this week upon hearing the news that the founder of Debian Linux, Ian Murdock, had passed on December 28, 2015. Murdock publicly announced the start of Debian Linux in August 1993, and the distribution saw its first stable release in 1996. Beyond Debian, Murdock worked at Sun and Salesforce and most recently worked at Docker on their containerization technology.
A lot of gossips had surfaced out about what Murdock executed quickly before he succumbed to death, though they are not established yet. According boingboing.net Murdock had been detained, probably more than once, and had been injured by the police during those circumstances.
Every bit of every tech company comes from the vision and brains of a certain man, the inventor, the visionary, the founder. And what has become a norm and a successful company we all benefit from is the fruit of their labor, sometimes we don’t even give them credit for that and for making our lives easier. The loss of a great young man will be mourned throughout the tech world much like the death of Steve Jobs.
Ian Murdock, one of the unsung heroes of the free/open source software revolution and founder of the semi-eponymous Debian GNU/Linux operating system, has died. He leaves behind an important but little appreciated legacy as a programmer who helped bridge the gap between the Free Software Foundation and the Linux kernel in its early days.
Yesterday, I did a bundle upload of all MATE 1.12 related packages to Debian unstable. Packages are currently building for the 22 architectures supported by Debian, build status can be viewed on the DDPO page of the Debian MATE Packaging Team [1]
Again a big thanks to the packaging team. Martin Wimpress amongst others did a fabulous job in bumping all packages towards the 1.12 release series before the Christmas holidays. Over the holidays, I was able to review his work (99% perfect) and upload all binary packages to a staging repository.
The first time I met Ian Murdock, he was holding a sign with my name on it. He was meeting me at the airport along with three other members of Progeny Linux Systems, and I was in Indianapolis for the final stages of a job interview. We went out to a Greek restaurant, and while I felt myself outclassed by the rest of the team he was putting together, I must have said the right things, because for the next year I handled Progeny's communications and marketing, commuting every few weeks for several marathon days of catching up with everything that couldn't be done by email or phone.
The report talks about somebody "trying to break into a residence". Let's translate that from the spin-doctor-speak back to English: it is the silly season, when many people have a couple of extra drinks and do silly things like losing their keys. "a residence", or just his own home perhaps? Doesn't the choice of words make the motive sound so much more sinister? Nobody knows the full story, so snippets of information like this are not helpful.
[...]
If having a few drinks and losing your keys in December is such a sorry state to be in, many of us could potentially be framed in the same terms at some point in our lives. That is one of the reasons I feel so compelled to write this: it is not just Ian who has suffered an injustice here, somebody else could be going through exactly the same experience at the moment you are reading this. Any of us could end up facing an assault as brutal as the tweets imply at some point in the future. At least I can console myself that as a privileged white male, the risk to myself is much lower than for those with mental illness, the homeless, transgender, Muslim or black people but as Ian appears to have discovered, that risk is still very real.
[...]
A select number of US police forces have been shamed around the world for a series of incidents of extreme violence in recent times, including the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, shooting Walter Scott in the back, death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and the attempts of Chicago's police to run an on-shore version of Guantanamo Bay. Beyond those highly violent incidents, the world has also seen the abuse of Ahmed Mohamed, the Muslim schoolboy arrested for his interest in electronics and in 2013, the suicide of Aaron Swartz which appears to be a direct consequence of the "Justice" department's obsession with him.
What have the police learned from all this bad publicity? Are they changing their methods, or just hiring more spin doctors? If that is their response, then doesn't it leave them with a big advantage over somebody like Ian who is now deceased?
[...]
When British police executed Jean Charles de Menezes on a crowded tube train and realized they had just done something incredibly outrageous, their PR office went to great lengths to try and protect their image, even photoshopping images of Menezes to make him look more like some other suspect in a wanted poster. To this day, they continue to refer to Menezes as a victim of the terrorists, could they be any more arrogant? While nobody believes the police woke up that morning thinking "let's kill some random guy on the tube", it is clear they made a mistake and like many people (not just police), they immediately prioritized protecting their reputation over protecting the truth.
Nobody else knows exactly what Ian was doing and exactly what the police did to him. We may never know. However, any disparaging comments from the police should be viewed with some caution.
[...]
Worldwide, there is an increasing trend to make incarceration as degrading as possible. People may be innocent until proven guilty, but this hasn't stopped police in the UK from locking up and strip-searching over 4,500 children in a five year period, would these children go away feeling any different than if they had an encounter with Jimmy Saville or Rolf Harris? One can only wonder what they do to adults.
What all this boils down to is that people shouldn't really be incarcerated unless it is clear the danger they pose to society is greater than the danger they may face in a prison.
[...]
Recording incidents of police activities can also make a huge difference, such as the video of the shooting of Walter Scott or the UK police making a brutal unprovoked attack on a newspaper vendor. Don't just walk past a violent situation and assume the police are the good guys. People making recordings may find themselves in danger, it is recommended to use software that automatically duplicates each recording, preferably to the cloud, so that if the police ask you to delete a recording (why would they?), you can let them watch you delete it and still have a copy.
Whilst specific circumstances surrounding his passing have not been officially released, there are indications that Ian Murdock had taken his own life. Absolutely tragic and deeply saddening for Ian’s family, friends, colleagues and all of the free and open-source software community.
Prior to his death, Murdock posted a series of bizarre tweets on his Twitter page, leading some people to suspect that his account has been hacked. Murdock’s Twitter page may no longer be available, but the snapshot of the said page reveals that Murdock had what appeared to be a violent altercation with police before his death. Info Q reports that the Debian Linux founder apparently had an unpleasant encounter with the San Francisco police department.
We've been informed by Arne Exton, a GNU/Linux developer known for numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems, about the availability for download of a new build of his DebEX KDE Linux operating system.
On January 4, 2016, Canonical's à Âukasz Zemczak has sent his daily report to inform us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the upcoming OTA-9 software update, due for release on January 20.
A few minutes ago, January 4, 2015, the maintainers of the Lubuntu operating system, a lightweight, official edition of Ubuntu Linux based on the LXDE desktop environment, were happy to announce the release of Lubuntu 16.04 LTS Alpha 1 (Xenial Xerus).
The first Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS Alpha has been released, and it looks like the developers are preparing for a massive upgrade to the operating system.
The first alpha release is now available for Ubuntu flavors opting-in to do their first 16.04 "Xenial Xerus" development release.
I have decided. From now on, no more mercy. I am not going to waste my time and patience and good mood trying to debug stupidity anymore. If and when any distribution starts its live test session with so much as a tiniest network-related glitch, be it Samba, printing, a copy operation or anything or that sort, I will terminate the testing immediately and report back with the most scathing review and a perfect zero score. I've had enough of this half-assed QA, rushed releases, and problems that do not belong in 2015. Bloody Samba copy. Network bugs that I had reported nine months ago and have been floating around the Web for a solid couple of years. GTFO.
To my great disappointment, but not entirely surprisingly, Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa sucks, just like the rest of them. All of them. The most horrible season of distros there ever was this side of the Necromancer multiverse. All the hard work and love, gone in one fell swoop of neglect. Creating distributions is a responsibility. It's not a jerkfest competition who gets their git commit in faster. Yes, blame Realtek. It's always someone ELSE's responsibility. My day is ruined now, thank you. Rosa, 0/10. Total fail. Next please.
P.S. Adding this little comment a few days after I wrote the article and CALMED down - I will probably give Rosa another chance eventually, the same way I did with openSUSE, Fedora and friends. However, my initial impression stays. What makes everything even more disappointing is that Rosa is based on the LTS crop, so we shouldn't be seeing too much pain and trouble. Alas, whatever has changed under the hood hath ate my hamster. Regressions are like a kick to the gonads. The full effect does not immediately register. But I'm still hurting on the inside. Still hurting.
As you may know, the Linux Mint developers have decided to adopt only the LTS versions of Ubuntu as code-base and focus on implementing Linux Mint-specific fixes and enhancements.
According to the Linux Mint Monthly News blog post from December 2015, 2016 will be an interesting year for Linux Mint.
With today's Ubuntu 16.04 Alpha 1 milestone, Lubuntu put out their first "Xenial Xerus" Alpha 1 build, but it's not terribly exciting.
The Lubuntu 16.04 desktop is using the GTK-based LXDE rather than LXQt, the new desktop written in Qt that merges the work of LXDE and Razor-qt. While LXQt has already seen some significant releases and is built atop Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5, it's not coming for Lubuntu 16.04.
Fleye is a unique drone with all its moving parts shielded, thus, making it safer and robust in case it hits something or someone, kudos to the “ducted fan UAV” concept, which used in larger industrial/defense drones. It is exactly the same size and weight as a soccer ball. It is easily controllable via a smartphone and is compatible with iOS and Android. It comes with options of flying camera mode or in case you prefer manual control, you can go for using a virtual touch- gamepad or Bluetooth game controller.
Aaeon’s “EPIC-BT07” SBC runs Linux on Bay Trail CPUs and offers multiple display, GbE, USB, and COM ports, plus mini-PCIe and stackable PCI-104 expansion.
The Aaeon EPIC-BT07 appears to be aimed at bringing updated features to the PC/104 Consortium’s well worn EPIC SBC form factor. Its I/O includes six COM and six USB ports (including one that’s USB 3.0), plus dual simultaneous display graphics operation, two SATA interfaces, and a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports. The product looks to be a drop-in alternative to Aaeon’s previously announced EPIC-BDU7, but substituting Intel’s 22nm “Bay Trail” Atoms and Celerons for the EPIC-BDU7’s 14nm “Broadwell” processors. Additionally, like the BDU7, the BT07 positions its processor on the bottom of the board for efficient heat dissipation.
Samsung has released a couple of teaser videos showing off something with a massive screen that you can See the weather, calendar (for all family members), and pictures. You can also watch movies and stream music from Pandora and most likely other popular music streaming services. You can also leave digital “Sticki” notes for your family if you so wish ?
Samsung unveiled a new Tizen Smart TV UX with SmartThings IoT hub connectivity and a universal remote, while Roku announced 4K smart TVs.
We still prefer the flexibility of combining a dumb TV with smart devices rather than buying a smart TV, but the latter are becoming more compelling as they add increasingly sophisticated Linux-based GUIs, connectivity options, and OTA updates. A year ago at the Consumer Electronics Show, Samsung announced that all of its 2015 Smart TVs would run Tizen Linux. Prior to this year’s CES show in Las Vegas, the Korean CE giant made a number of Tizen-related smart TV announcements, including plans to bake SmartThings home automation hub capability into all of its 2016 Smart TVs.
Despite the usual shortcomings that come with using a smartphone, I've found that Android offers me the best overall experience for my needs. From its applications to its back-end functionality, no other mainstream mobile platform touches Android, in my opinion.
If a $130 price tag (that's about €£84 or AU$180) on a 5.5-inch phone sounds like it's too good to be true, you might be right. It all depends on how many concessions you're willing to make for an inexpensive Android phone. For me, outdated parts and the past version of Android software on Nuu Mobile's N5L wouldn't make the grade, at least not on paper.
Archos is a company that while not a lot of North Americans will be familiar with, across the pond in Europe they’re a brand many will know of. Famous for offering multimedia devices on the cheap, Archos has been involved in the mobile game for a long time now, making Android tablets with kickstands before Google even released Honeycomb. More recently however, Archos has been known for their budget Android smartphones and even some offbeat Internet of Things products, too.
In a bid to outwit Oracle, Google has seemingly come up with a new strategy. In one of the biggest feud of technological world, Google quietly worked its way out trouble. It removed the parts which were at discord with Oracle.
Google's next Android mobile operating system, Android N, will use OpenJDK, the open source Java implementation, rather than Oracle's proprietary Java environment.
Android tablets don’t get much love these days. Team them with a good keyboard and they’re useful for basic productivity tasks, as proven by our time with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 and Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet. And beyond that they’re still great for playing games, reading books, watching TV shows and listening to music like any other Android device. But hey’re just a little less cool than iPads. And a little less useful than laptops.
Atlassian, parent company of popular chat service HipChat, started in 2002 with just two people. Thirteen years later, there are more than 1,300 of us spread around the world. That kind of growth forced the need for us to organize our open source efforts around a single point of contact, establish a rhythm in the company for contributing to open source projects, and encourage contributions to existing projects as well as the creation of new communities.
Open source software (OSS) has been around for several decades now, and it serves as the foundation for many gadgets and online services that consumers use regularly. Google, Facebook, Twitter -- even some Apple devices -- use open source software. There may even be a growing trend to use open source, but proprietary software is never totally going away, folks.
Popcorn Time is an application that simply refuses to die, and it looks like the community has managed to keep it alive. In fact, the new version is named Popcorn Time Community Edition and it’s still up and working.
Pants has created a light and dark version, and both are included in the archive that you can download so that you can access both HTML documents locally on your system.
W^X ("Write XOR Execute"; spoken as W xor X[1]) is the name of a security feature present in the OpenBSD operating system. It is a memory protection policy whereby every page in a process' address space is either writable or executable, but not both simultaneously. from wikipedia.
As another recent Firefox Nightly change besides enabling WebGL 2 by default is that Firefox's just-in-time compiler supports W^X protection.
OpenBSD has been leading the charge on using W^X by default -- Write XOR Execute. As explained in that earlier article, W^X implies "a memory policy of W^X -- write xor execute where memory can be marked as writable or executable but not both, in order to fend off potential exploits." One of the biggest roadblocks that OpenBSD faced enabling W^X were JIT engines of web browsers.
The year 2015 was the busiest year yet for open source OpenStack cloud technologies, with technology and business development effort in full swing. There likely is no slowdown in sight as 2016 starts and organizations embrace increasingly mature open source technologies to enable cloud application and infrastructure deployment efforts.
On the infrastructure front, there were two big OpenStack milestone releases in 2015 with Kilo out on April 30 and Liberty on October 15. The Liberty release is particularly noteworthy because of the disruptive nature of changes in how OpenStack treats the project that make up the OpenStack platform.
As 2016 begins, more bold predictions for the machine learning space are arriving, and there are some promising, newly open sourced tools to know about.
The Document Foundation has revealed some really interesting LibreOffice numbers that show just how much popularity the office suite has and just how big the project really is.
At conova communications GmbH, the company I work for, we are using the package on all of our Debian VMs, both for customer and internal use. It is essential for us to have properly working open-vm-tools - not only to be able to shutdown the VM from VMware vCenter, but also because tools like vSphere Data Protection and Veeam depend on it. Good thing is that I can work on and test the package at work and breakages are detected early and fast normally.
She has run a series of cross pollinations to see what improvements can be made in carrots. A part of her mission is to stake out some intellectual property for future carrot breeders.
The titles of ad blocking research studies also tell a story (see Resources for links). First came Ad-Blocking Measured, published by ClarityRay (later acquired by Yahoo) in 2012. Then PageFair brought us The Rise of Adblocking, Adblocking goes mainstream and The Cost of Adblocking, in 2013, 2014 and 2015.
The catch-all term for tracking-based advertising is adtech, and nobody has studied or written more wisely about it than Don Marti, former Editor-in-Chief of Linux Journal.
For the album Unforgettable...With Love, Cole recorded versions of songs that had been made famous by her father, Nat "King" Cole, a huge figure in mid-20th-century popular music and culture. Among other things, he became the first black to host a TV show in 1956 and his versions of "The Christmas Song," "Route 66," and "Mona Lisa" and other songs are still standards. On that 1991 album, which ultimately sold around 7 million copies worldwide, Nathalie Cole used various types of overdubbings on the title track to sing a "duet" with her father, who had died in 1965.
Back in 2014 LG announced that it has built an 18-inch-OLED display that rolls up like your daily newspaper. Now the company is ready to remove the drapes of secrecy and unveil its ultra-thin display at CES 2016.
Richard Sapper died New Year's eve at the age of 83, his daughter Carola Sapper confirmed in an email to Co.Design. The German-born, Italy-based industrial designer created all manner of products, from household goods to cars, but is arguably best known for being the chief industrial design consultant for IBM and masterminding the first ThinkPad in 1992.
It was a distressingly close call. A patient had been sent home from the hospital with instructions to take a common medication at a dose that would have poisoned her.
When Dr. Ole Hamberg heard about the mistake, he decided to investigate.
Hamberg, the head liver specialist at Rigshospitalet, the Danish national hospital, soon found something troubling. The hospital’s electronic prescribing system was mistakenly prompting doctors to give the drug, methotrexate, for daily use when it is safely taken only once or twice a week.
As doctors, we embark on a 40-year-plus career in the NHS knowing full well that work life is going to be tough. Long hours, a low starting salary compared to other professions (earning €£23,000 a year, compared with the national average salary of €£27,000), high levels of stress, regularly doing extra work for no extra pay, and emotionally difficult experiences with sick and dying patients await us.
Although it is also extremely rewarding and a privilege to serve and be trusted by the public, a medical career takes its toll on work-life balance. Doctors have high rates of mental health problems and alcohol dependency. Family breakdown is common.
Tens of thousands of junior doctors will stage their first strike in 40 years after crunch talks broke down.
Medics confirmed today they will walk out three times including next Tuesday, January 12, over new contracts for Jeremy Hunt's 7-day NHS.
Striking doctors will provide emergency care only for 24 hours from 8am, followed by another 48-hour period of emergency care only from 8am on Tuesday, January 26.
A full strike involving all doctors will then take place from 8am to 5pm on Wednesday, February 10 unless the crisis is resolved.
These cohorts might change if you examine the data using different age buckets, different diseases, and a different timeframe. Who knows? Regardless, if you're going to put forward an explanation about why this is happening, it better account for all three age groups. You can't just pretend the data points only to "middle-age" whites and then spin your theories from that.
Internal company reports have revealed that DuPont had for many years either known or suspected that Teflon contained a harmful ingredient.
[...]
On October 7, after less than a day of deliberations, the jury found DuPont liable for Bartlett’s cancer, agreeing with the defendant that the company had for years negligently contaminated her drinking water supply in Tuppers Plain, Ohio with a toxic chemical formerly used to make its signature brand of nonstick coating: Teflon.
Microsoft knew that Chinese spies hacked people using Hotmail accounts for years — and didn’t tell any of the people who were hacked.
Note that there are parts of this chain I’m not a part of, and obviously linux distributions I’m not involved in that support Secure Boot. I encourage other maintainers to offer similar statements for their respective involvement.
I just moved my web server’s SSL/TLS certificates to Let’s Encrypt and I am positively surprised how relatively easy it was.
In all honesty, it started as a simple “Hullo! What’s this all about?” and after toying with it a bit, I decided to simply use it to replace all my CAcert.org and StartSSL certificates.
The Dutch government has formally opposed the introduction of backdoors in encryption products.
A government position paper, published by the Ministry of Security and Justice on Monday and signed by the security and business ministers, concludes that "the government believes that it is currently not appropriate to adopt restrictive legal measures against the development, availability and use of encryption within the Netherlands."
The conclusion comes at the end of a five-page run-through of the arguments for greater encryption and the counter-arguments for allowing the authorities access to the information.
Eight suicide bombers attacked a base outside Camp Speicher, where they killed 19 security members and wounded at least 18 more. Many of the casualties were police recruits in training.
Now, in the clearer light of morning, we learn more about that “very concrete” tip that set all this off.
According to Reuters, a German policespokesperson said “We received names. We can’t say if they were in Munich or in fact in Germany. At this point we don’t know if these names are correct, if these people even exist, or where they might be. We have no information that these people are in Munich or in Germany.”
Germany’s interior minister added “Security forces anticipate the high threat of international terrorism to persist.” Who knew?
The train stations were reopened by morning and the police presence significantly reduced, apparently because the vague tip from the night before was seen as even more vague a little while later. I guess “very concrete” tips have limited life spans, or Germany is really sure terrorists are always right on time with their suicide bombs. Heck, maybe they missed their bus or something, or their watches were still set to Syrian time.
[...]
Time to get a new catchphrase Mr. War of Terror — “out of an abundance of caution” has worn out its welcome and means little more than over reaction. Yes, yes, of course something could always happen somewhere. But that’s the point, and panic, overreacting and crying wolf does nothing to protect against that.
Hans Blix ponders his long career in international politics and diplomacy, the state of the Middle East...
GISELA RAQUEL MOTA OCAMPO, the first woman elected mayor of Temixco, a city in the central Mexican state of Morelos, was expected to take on organized crime directly. She never got the chance. The 33-year-old assumed office on New Year’s Day. Less than 24 hours later she was dead, murdered in her own home by an alleged crew of paid assassins.
The British Government left Saudi Arabia off a list of thirty countries to be challenged by diplomats over their continued use of the death penalty - despite executing over 90 people a year.
The Kingdom is the only major death penalty state to be omitted from a 20-page Foreign Office document setting out the UK’s five-year strategy to reduce the use of executions around the world.
The brutal Saudi execution of Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Al-Nimr has led to protests around the globe, as well as the burning of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran, followed by the Saudi severing of relations with Iran. This exacerbation of Sunni-Shia tensions is the result of the reckless Saudi action against a popular, nonviolent Shia leader. Also reckless is the US government’s response, which has failed to condemn the Saudi government and distance itself from the abusive regime.
On January 2, the Saudi government executed 47 people, most of them by beheading. Those executed included Sunnis convicted of Al Qaeda-affiliated attacks, as well as Shia opponents—Sheik Nimr Al-Nimr and three others arrested when they were still juveniles. The killing of Al-Nimr has sparked a massive reaction because he was a prominent religious leader who defended the Shia minority and criticized the abuses—both domestic and foreign—of the Saudi regime. He supported the 2011 anti-government protests in the Eastern Province, protests that erupted in the wake of the Arab Spring. The oil-rich Eastern Province is home to some 2 million Shiites, who have long complained of discrimination by the Sunni government.
Saudi Arabia’s well-funded public relations apparatus moved quickly after Saturday’s explosive execution of Shiite political dissident Nimr al-Nimr to shape how the news is covered in the United States.
The execution led protestors in Shiite-run Iran to set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran, precipitating a major diplomatic crisis between the two major powers already fighting proxy wars across the Middle East.
The Saudi side of the story is getting a particularly effective boost in the American media through pundits who are quoted justifying the execution, in many cases without mention of their funding or close affiliation with the Saudi Arabian government.
Meanwhile, social media accounts affiliated with Saudi Arabia’s American lobbyists have pushed English-language infographics, tweets, and online videos to promote a narrative that reflects the interests of the Saudi regime.
When Saudi Arabia was elected to the UN Human Rights Council in 2013 – with Dave Cameron’s help – we all regarded it as farce. Now, only hours after the Sunni Muslim Saudis chopped off the heads of 47 of their enemies – including a prominent Shia Muslim cleric – the Saudi appointment is grotesque. Of course, the world of human rights is appalled – and Shia Iran is talking of the “divine punishment” that will destroy the House of Saud. Crowds attack the Saudi embassy in Tehran. So what’s new?
David Cameron’s governments have overseen the sale of over €£5.6 billion of military licences to Saudi Arabia since 2010, according to new research published by Campaign Against Arms Trade.
The kingdom is by far the largest buyer of arms from the UK, and the UK is the largest military supplier in the world to the Saudis, selling them equipment including night sights, fighter jets, bomb components, machine guns, and tear gas. Some of these weapons have been used by the Saudi-led coalition in bombing raids in Yemen that have raised war crime concerns.
Only a few days into the new year, the Middle East has already taken a significant turn for the worse. The region's greatest rivalry, between Saudi Arabia and Iran, has become rapidly and significantly more toxic in the past few days, and it could have repercussions across the Middle East.
On Saturday, protesters in Tehran attacked the Saudi embassy, ransacking and burning it as Iran ignored or refused Saudi requests to protect the building. Saudi Arabia formally broke off diplomatic relations with Iran on Sunday, on Monday saying it would cut commercial ties and ban Saudi travel to Iran as well. Sudan and Bahrain, both Saudi allies, severed ties as well.
Three Saudi juveniles remain at grave risk of execution, international human rights NGO Reprieve has warned, as fresh details emerged of the cases of several young protestors who were executed on Saturday.
Ali Saeed al-Rebh and Mohammad Faisal al-Shioukh, two protestors who were teenagers when they were arrested in 2012, were among 47 prisoners executed across Saudi Arabia on Saturday (2nd). They were killed alongside a third young man, Mohammad Suweimal, and the prominent activist Sheikh Nimr.
He criticized U.S. political figures across the political spectrum for not meaningfully challenging Saudi Arabia and argued that money from Saudi Arabia and wealthy individuals from there had purchased influence in U.S. institutions including the Clinton Foundation. In contrast, the new leader of Labor in the UK has seriously challenged that country’s support for the Saudi regime, see: “Corbyn’s honourable record on Saudi Arabia puts Cameron to shame.” Also, see from the British Independent: Exclusive: UK Government urged to reveal its role in getting Saudi Arabia onto UN Human Rights Council.”
Seymour Hersh’s recent revelations about an effort by the US military leadership in 2013 to bolster the Syrian army against jihadist forces in Syria shed important new light on the internal bureaucratic politics surrounding regime change in US Middle East policy. Hersh’s account makes it clear that the Obama administration’s policy of regime change in both Libya and Syria provoked pushback from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).
That account and another report on a similar episode in 2011 suggest that the US military has a range of means by which it can oppose administration policies that it regards as unacceptable. But it also shows that the military leadership failed to alter the course of US policy, and raises the question whether it was willing to use all the means available to stop the funnelling of arms to al-Nusra Front and other extremist groups in Syria.
The mental hygiene arrests suggest Lutchman could be a dangerous person -- not because of his allegiance to ISIL -- but in general. Mental hygiene arrests occur when a person is considered to be a danger to themselves or others. He may have been a threat, thanks to his mental issues, but a terrorist? Certainly, the mental instability could have made Lutchman much more susceptible to outside suggestions that he commit violence, but his arrest record suggests Lutchman didn't have the mental (and, apparently, financial) capacity to provide much "support" for the Islamic State's violent aims.
One of the policemen shoved the would-be assailant. Another shot him, hitting him in the leg. The police chased him, shooting him in the legs again.
None of the police officers were hurt in the incident, but the teenage girl was hit by what the police believe to be ricocheting bullet fragments.
A few months ago, entrepreneur Charles Devenish contacted me to tell me about his plans to develop various mining enterprises across India. He spoke about the massive amounts of untapped mineral resources lying beneath India that is just lying there and has been for a long time. What he thought I might find appealing were his plans for how small-scale mining could dovetail with a model of agriculture aimed at restoring Indian soils, which have been seriously degraded by decades of ‘green revolution’ chemical poisoning, and a rolling back of the increasing and harmful corporate control of farming.
Devenish wants to set up co-operative mining enterprises in rural areas that would involve local farmers, who would then have a say and a stake in these local mines (see this report). The farmers would also benefit from the profits that would supplement their farming income and also be funnelled into investment in research and knowledge, which would enable them to restore their soils and move towards organic agriculture that would be in harmony with the local ecology.
Most of former NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s emails on his desktop computer were deleted at the end of his tenure despite an order they be preserved for a high-stakes class-action suit alleging a summons quota system within the department.
New filings in Manhattan Federal Court show the city backtracking in an ongoing fight over Kelly’s missing electronic correspondence.
“The majority of former Commissioner Kelly’s locally stored emails were inadvertently deleted at the conclusion of his tenure,” city attorney Curt Beck wrote to Manhattan Federal Judge Robert Sweet.
In December, in an unprecedented demonstration of international unity, 195 countries adopted the first-ever, universal, legally-binding agreement to take action on climate change.
[...]
Humans cannot go back to the beginning and start again, but if they had to, Walt Patterson’s new book would be as fundamental a guide to the challenges as any.
Humanity is not abandoning fossil fuels fast enough to avoid some massive changes to our world’s climate, with all the implications that change has for sea level, coastal erosion, extreme weather, and desertification and drought. There have been impressive advances in adoption of solar and wind technology in 2015, but compared to the crisis, it is not nearly enough. I say this not to provoke despair but simply to underline that the crisis can be bad, or worse, or the absolute worst. We get to decide for future generations the kind of world they will live in.
The U.S. Department of Justice, on behalf of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, today filed a civil complaint in federal court in Detroit, Michigan against Volkswagen AG, Audi AG, Volkswagen Group of America, Inc., Volkswagen Group of America Chattanooga Operations, LLC, Porsche AG, and Porsche Cars North America, Inc. (collectively referred to as Volkswagen). The complaint alleges that nearly 600,000 diesel engine vehicles had illegal defeat devices installed that impair their emission control systems and cause emissions to exceed EPA’s standards, resulting in harmful air pollution. The complaint further alleges that Volkswagen violated the Clean Air Act by selling, introducing into commerce, or importing into the United States motor vehicles that are designed differently from what Volkswagen had stated in applications for certification to EPA and the California Air Resources Board (CARB).
The lawsuit, filed Monday by the U.S. Department of Justice, alleges that Volkswagen violated the Clean Air Act by finding ways to evade emissions standards on hundreds of thousands of its vehicles. It comes about four months after news of the emissions cheating scandal first broke in September.
The success or failure of a farming operation depends hugely on the vagaries of weather and climate. For a farmer, a single intense rain event or prolonged dry period can mean a year of lost crops and income.
China, the largest coal producer in the world, won’t be approving new mines for the next three years as it grapples with alarming pollution and pursues other energy sources, including nuclear plants.
The country announced the move last week, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency. This ban on new mines is unprecedented, published reports note, though mines have been closed in the past and will continue to be shut down in the coming year.
EPA requests that reservation residents reduce all sources of air pollution as much as possible, including excess driving and idling of vehicles, and the use of woodstoves and fireplaces, unless they are the only adequate source of heat.
As we are constantly reminded by its supporters, the TAFTA/TTIP agreement currently being negotiated between the US and the EU is huge: together, the two regions account for around half of global GDP. Given that scale, and the impact that TTIP is likely to have on both the US and EU, you might expect there would be dozens of detailed studies looking at the likely effects -- and whether, on balance, it would be a good idea. And yet such studies are very thin on the ground.
I’ve never been a fan of the “sharing economy”. Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with Uber, Airbnb and their peers, it’s just that there doesn’t really seem to be much “sharing” going on. It’s more like adding a technological middleman to a rental market.
Now having shaken up the taxi and hotel market, the sharing economy has its eyes on a new market: housing for the digital workforce. This time it may have gone too far.
Leading the charge is WeWork, a company that has turned the yawn-inducing business of leasing office space into a $10bn valuation by trendifying the office experience and attracting like-minded businesses to “share” its spaces. Sounds so much better than a lease, right? (Full disclosure: the Guardian’s New York office is in a WeWork building).
The strategy has paid off for the startup real estate company. It is now bigger than all but the three largest publicly traded office management firms, if only in terms of the value its investors place on it: it manages only a fraction of the number of square feet of office space.
If you are black, you’re far more likely to see your electricity cut, more likely to be sued over a debt, and more likely to land in jail because of a parking ticket.
It is not unreasonable to attribute these perils to discrimination. But there’s no question that the main reason small financial problems can have such a disproportionate effect on black families is that, for largely historical reasons rooted in racism, they have far smaller financial reserves to fall back on than white families.
“At Drexel we recognize the benefits of sports but are not burdened by the distractions that come with maintaining a football program,” Fry wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on Sunday. “Drexel hasn’t fielded a team since 1973 when administrators realized its budget burden.”
We are no longer a nation of self-governing people. Our democracy has been captured by American corporate enterprise, and now we confront a documented plutocracy in its place. If we intend to challenge this and contest it, we will need a President Sanders in the White House.
Sanders raised more than $33 million in the last three months of the year, bringing his 2015 total to $73 million “from more than 1 million individuals who made a record 2.5 million donations,” the campaign said in a release. “The 2,513,665 donations to Sanders’ campaign broke the record set four years ago by President Barack Obama’s re-election committee. Through Dec. 31, 2011, Obama chalked up 2,209,636 donations.”
However, along with the other pretty banners behind which political candidates hide their true nefarious intentions, the word capitalism bears no relation to reality in how it governs the behavior of those who claim allegiance to it. The billionaire bankers certainly were not restrained by sacred free market principles when they accepted billions in government bailout money, and allegiance to capitalism doesn’t deter fat cat sports team owners from accepting public welfare to build new stadiums. Furthermore, adherence to laissez-faire philosophy never has amounted to much with the elected advocates of big business. From its inception that Grand Old Party that serves as the sword and shield of the rich has incorporated policies based upon those same insidious, destructive socialist ideas they decry in Bernie Sanders. Strangely enough, when and where they have done this the result has been prosperity for millions; not necessarily for billionaires but for the masses.
Here's the problem: as near as I can tell, the world is awash in minimum wage studies. With no disrespect intended toward Clemens—whose conclusions sound reasonable—a single study just isn't that meaningful these days.
Paul Krugman now has some official numbers on his side to make the case that having Obama in the White House instead of Mitt Romney has made a serious difference to the country. In Monday's column, Krugman looks at the IRS’s tax tables for 2013, which were released last week, and concludes that elections have real consequences. His argument is directed to people on the left, who are disappointed with Obama and argue that there is no major difference between the two parties (except Bernie Sanders) and that the wealthy will always dominate.
For starters, look at Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago. Rahm Emanuel, a major inner-circle supporter of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, is not a stupid man. Nonetheless, he’s finding it harder and harder to hold things together.
Capitalist enterprises have little incentive to work for ordinary people, and instead they do whatever is necessary to enrich the owners of their corporate stock. Choosing the leading job-killing industry is a difficult task with so many candidates. But technology, pharmaceuticals, and the "sharing economy" are clearly in the running.
The companies in the spotlight are specialists in the disdainful business practices that permeate their industries.
In late spring of last year, more than 100,000 taxpayers had their personally-identifiable information accessed by criminals. It wasn't a security breach, nor was it accomplished by "hacking." Instead, it was the result of the IRS using common static identifiers to verify accounts -- information that could easily be found elsewhere. These were deployed to access transcripts of taxpayers' filing histories. The transcripts gave criminals the information they were actually seeking: Social Security numbers, birth dates and current addresses.
The Washington Post highlighted how Republican presidential candidates "are staying mum as an armed group has taken over part" of the Malheur National Wildlife Headquarters in Oregon, even those candidates who previously championed the same cause as the protesters by criticizing federal land ownership.
Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s first television ad relies on the same anti-immigrant sentiment that has characterized his positions on the campaign trail. In the ad, Trump promises to “make America great again” by banning Muslim immigration and building a southern U.S. border wall that he assures that Mexico will pay for.
“He’s calling for a temporary shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until we can figure out what’s going on,” a narrator states in the television spot. “He’ll quickly cut the head off ISIS and take their oil. And he’ll stop illegal immigration by building a wall on the southern border that Mexico will pay for.”
Donald Trump, who is currently leading the GOP primary field by an average of a little more than 15 points,* released his first TV ad this morning, after previewing it to The Washington Post yesterday. The tone of the ad is aggressively doomy and gloomy, with darkened images of masked men carrying the ISIS flag and grainy shots of what are supposed to look like crowds of immigrants, presumably streaking across the U.S. border. At the end, there’s a shot of Trump himself, standing at a rally, declaring his intention to “make America great again.”
If you think Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic nominee for President in 2016, you’re out of your mind.
There is no way the Democratic Party will allow that to happen, for two main reasons.
First, this is Hillary’s turn to be the nominee. And although that’s pretty distasteful for many of Bernie’ supporters, it’s the truth and has been decided by people who actually matter in the party’s hierarchy (read: not you).
Second, it is simply impossible that a neoliberal, right-wing political party like the Democrats in a country with a nominally right-leaning electorate will allow their standard bearer to be a self-described socialist.
Since President Obama took office, Congressional Republicans have made it their business to obstruct everything he does. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said it best in 2012: “Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term.”
And that’s how they’ve governed in the Obama era. Like political arsonists, they’ve pursued no real positive agenda, choosing instead to undermine the president and stage symbolic protest votes to appease a disillusioned base. This is a big reason why something like 13 percent of the country approves of the job Congress is doing.
For a brief moment, when Paul Ryan was elected Speaker of the House, there was hope that things might change, if only a little. Although Ryan is hardly a moderate, he is nonetheless a serious legislator. His victory, one hoped, was a sign that House Republicans finally saw the light, finally realized that obstructionism wasn’t a viable governing philosophy.
Artistic and cultural freedom was at the centre of a heated political debate throughout 2015. And the Censor Board was under the scanner in many controversies, thanks to a chairman with clear political leanings enforcing a range of arbitrary bans.
Fourteen years ago, after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the United States government initiated its “war on terror,” with the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001, which expanded into Pakistan, and of Iraq in 2003. The conventional methodology of American politics emphasizes American financial, strategic, and human costs. Since then, the corporate media has occasionally acknowledged the 6,800 American soldiers, and the 7,000 contractors who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, corporate media and the American government have consistently ignored Iraqi and Afghani deaths, which exceed one million. Without acknowledging this modern “reign of terror,” the western public has no context to understand the current attacks lead by the Islamic State in Syria and Levant (ISIL).
The Education Ministry of Israel - you know, the People of the Book - has banned an award-winning young adult novel of love between an Israeli translator and a Palestinian artist because it "threatens the separate identity” of Jews. Explaining their disqualification of Dorit Rabinyan’s “Gader Haya” (published in Hebrew as “Hedgerow,” but "Borderlife” in English), officials cited the need to maintain "the identity and the heritage of students in every sector,” worrying that "young people of adolescent age don’t have the systemic view that includes considerations involving maintaining the national-ethnic identity of the people and the significance of miscegenation.” Ministry officials, including one who's boasted he's "killed lots of Arabs in my life and (has) no problem with it,” argued that young readers don't have "the full tools to weigh the decisions" of inter-racial love - Translation: "They're not quite sure yet who to hate" - and that "many parents... would strongly object to having their children study the novel" - Translation: "They're racist, too, so let's go with it." The book was recommended for advanced curricula by the literature head of secular state schools and a committee of academics, and had been requested by multiple teachers.
Singaporean film director Tan Pin Pin withdrew her film from a festival celebrating Singapore-Malaysia ties this month after Malaysia's Film Censorship Board insisted that a scene be amended as it was a "security threat".
The director of Singapore GaGa said the board wanted a scene where a character says "binatang-binatang" (Malay for animals) to be removed from the film, liberal news portal Malaysian Insider reported.
It was the first made-in-Singapore documentary to get a theatrical release here and has been shown in festivals around the world.
I decided to enable the WeeChat Relay plugin. Until now, I only used the ZNC IRC bouncer because it allows me to use any standalone IRC client. Now, I also want to have acces to weechat-android and Glowing-bear so I enabled the Relay plugin.
On September 5, 2013, The Guardian, The New York Times and ProPublica jointly reported – based on documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden – that the National Security Agency (NSA) had compromised some of the encryption that is most commonly used to secure internet transactions. The NYT explained that NSA “has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world.” One 2010 memo described that “for the past decade, NSA has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies.”
In support of the reporting, all three papers published redacted portions of documents from the NSA along with its British counterpart, GCHQ. Prior to publication of the story, the NSA vehemently argued that any reporting of any kind on this program would jeopardize national security by alerting terrorists to the fact that encryption products had been successfully compromised. After the stories were published, U.S. officials aggressively attacked the newspapers for endangering national security and helping terrorists with these revelations.
All three newspapers reporting this story rejected those arguments prior to publication and decided to report the encryption-cracking successes. Then-NYT Executive Editor Jill Abramson described the decision to publish as “not a particularly anguished one” in light of the public interest in knowing about this program, and ProPublica editors published a lengthy explanation along with the story justifying their decision.
So, yes, it was just revealed that, of course, the NSA spied on Congress as it was intercepting phone calls of foreign leaders, leading to hypocritical bloviating from folks in Congress who regularly support the NSA.
The Wall Street Journal's recent revelation that the NSA swept up Congress members' communications in a dragnet, which had been assumed to have shut down, has provoked a variety of reactions from Capitol Hill. Some Congress members have angrily expressed their displeasure at being spied on like so many citizens of so many nations (including ours).
Sweden has introduced identity checks for travellers from Denmark in an attempt to reduce the number of migrants arriving in the country.
All travellers wanting to cross the Oresund bridge by train or bus, or use ferry services, will be refused entry without the necessary documents.
A Sudanese man who was arrested after walking through the 31-mile (50-kilometer) Channel Tunnel from France to England has been granted asylum in Britain.
Police detained Abdul Rahman Haroun in August near the British end of the tunnel at Folkestone in southeastern England. He was charged with "obstructing a railway carriage or engine" under the Malicious Damage Act.
One was Louisiana, where Taurus exemplified how mandatory sentencing could render a defendant's youth meaningless. Once he was charged with second-degree murder, Taurus was automatically tried as an adult because he was over the age of 14. If convicted, he would automatically be sentenced to life without parole.
Riverside County, CA — Simply put, the War on Drugs is a war on people. One of the more despicable ways in which it manifests is the manipulation of vulnerable school kids by undercover cops. These “drug stings,” better known as entrapment, typically prey on special needs students who have a hard time making friends.
From May to October of 2015, the Phillips Black Project collected information about people sentenced to life without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles. Using this data, we recently issued a report concluding that juvenile life-without-parole sentences are clustered in a handful of counties, and that these sentences are disproportionately handed to people of color.
The release references the Indiana criminal code regarding the killing of domestic animals. Under Indiana law, it is legal to kill a domestic animal if someone “reasonably believes” that killing the animal is necessary to “protect the property of the accused person from destruction or substantial damage.”
Edward Herman is professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania; he writes about politics and media, and is best known as the co-author (with Noam Chomsky) of “Manufacturing Consent.”
This year will go down in the record books as one of the safest for police officers in recorded history, according to data released this week from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. There were 42 fatal shootings of police officers in 2015, down 14 percent from 2014, according to the organization.
Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday cited Hitler in support of his contention that a presidential system can coexist with a “unitary state,” i.e., with a non-federal government. The United States has a presidential system, but the presidency’s powers are limited because it is a federal system with enormous rights and prerogatives retained by the state. I suppose the context is that people are arguing to Erdogan that if he takes Turkey into a presidential system, it could break up the country because there would be regionalist responses to this concentration of power. He was trying to deflect this critique, and what his mind happened on was the example of fascist Germany!
Saudi Arabia’s binge of head-choppings – 47 in all, including the learned Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, followed by a Koranic justification for the executions – was worthy of Isis. Perhaps that was the point. For this extraordinary bloodbath in the land of the Sunni Muslim al-Saud monarchy – clearly intended to infuriate the Iranians and the entire Shia world – re-sectarianised a religious conflict which Isis has itself done so much to promote.
The impetus for the change is a series of fatal shootings by cops. One of the most infamous involved 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was carrying a pocketknife and walking away from police when Officer Jason Van Dyke shot him 16 times. The other officers at the scene had called for a Taser and were waiting for it to arrive.
Between the shooting deaths of three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood, the Supreme Court's decision to hear its first abortion-related case in nine years, and the more than 50 new abortion restriction laws enacted by state governments, abortion access was one of the most important issues of 2015. With presidential politics and ongoing legal challenges in the states, abortion rights will continue to be under fire in 2016.
"Last year's big events, like the Planned Parenthood videos and the Supreme Court case, have actually ginned up even more interest in restricting abortion," Elizabeth Nash, a senior state issues associate at the Guttmacher Institute, tells Mother Jones. "If it was possible, they've actually added more energy to decreasing abortion access."
And that is despite the fact that even-numbered years are generally slow when it comes to legislative pushes—elections cut off the legislature calendars, and general assemblies in many states don't even meet. But Nash says next year will be different.
SAUDI ARABIA’S King Salman has dedicated his first year on the throne to bold and sometimes reckless moves to shore up the royal family’s power both at home and abroad. Now he has taken a step that was as risky and ruthless as it was unjustified: the execution of a leading Shiite cleric who had spoken out for the kingdom’s repressed minority sect. It was an act that appears bound — and maybe was intended — to further inflame conflict between Shiites and Sunnis across the Middle East.
On Saturday, a group of heavily armed anti-government militia members, including three members of the notorious Bundy family, seized a government building in Oregon. They are still occupying the building and say they are prepared to stay “for years.”
But according to Fox News Contributor Deneen Borelli, any criticism of these actions is the result of dishonesty by the “the left-wing media.” During the segment, which aired Monday morning, the chyron on Fox News was “DEBATE SPARKED OVER WHETHER MILITIA IS TERRORIST GROUP OR PATRIOTIC.”
The Ballots Not Bullets Coalition, a group of organizations from across the country concerned by the increasing use of violence—and threats of violence—to affect public policy in the United States, is deeply concerned about the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and other heavily armed anti-government radicals. In response, the Coalition is calling on federal authorities to enforce the laws and hold the occupiers accountable for their criminal actions.
And, in related news, of course, Tamir Rice is still dead.
As Ed Krayewski noted yesterday, the armed men who are occupying an office building at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon broke off from a demonstration protesting the sentences received by two ranchers, 73-year-old Dwight Hammond and his 46-year-old son Steven, who in 2001 and 2006 set fires on their own property that spread to public land. In addition to the long-running conflict between ranchers and the federal government over control of land in the West, the case illustrates the practical impossibility of challenging harsh mandatory minimum sentences as violations of the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishments."
Law enforcement agencies are remaining mum about plans to end militiamen's occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters.
A splinter group of militia in town to support a local ranching family took over the federal office Saturday afternoon in a development that stunned the community and visiting militia.
Tennessee state Rep. Andy Holt (R) tweeted on Sunday evening asking how to “send support” for an armed militia occupying a federal facility in Oregon.
Officer Brady Pratt, 23, was inside an office at the airport Wednesday around 4 p.m. when he drew his gun from his holster to practice "his quick draw skills," according to a police report. Pratt, who joined the force in 2013, "unknowingly" had his finger on the trigger and fired a round from the gun, the report states.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said the FBI has been monitoring the situation and is in "close coordination" with the state police and the Harney County Sheriff’s Office.
The sometimes-coded but increasingly overt ways that some Americans are presumed guilty and violence-prone while others are assumed to be principled and peaceable unless and until provoked — even when actually armed — is remarkable.
Two interlocking issues drove what appears to be slightly more than a dozen armed men to seize control of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service building in Oregon on Saturday evening. The first was the incarceration, release and eventual reincarceration of two men convicted of arson by a federal court. The second is a much broader dispute over whether ranchers are free to encroach upon federal lands without interference by the federal government itself.
We’re not supposed to question juries. They’re our peers. They put in long hours, working hard essentially for free. Most of all, they see all the evidence. We don’t. We have to assume that they know what they’re doing.
Sometimes, however, a jury verdict relies on so many false assumptions, baseless assignments of privilege and twisted logic that you have to call it out. The decision of a Cleveland grand jury not to indict the cop who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice to death is one such time.
Former CIA employees Robert and Adlynn Harte, along with their 7- and 13-year-old children, were held at gunpoint by sheriff's deputies for several hours as a search for drugs was conducted in their home. The probable cause that led to the raid? A visit to a hydroponics store for a horticultural project and wet tea leaves in the family's garbage bin.
Worried that their new landlord was trying to turn their Venice apartment building into a kind of illegal hotel, Phyllis Murphy and her neighbors wrote a letter to city officials.
The residents complained that some of the units were being rented out to tourists for short stays, bringing a revolving door of strangers into the complex on a tranquil stretch of Third Avenue. Murphy said her landlord once asked her, not-so-subtly, what it would take to get her out of the building.
The landlord denies saying that. He also said that a tenant, not he, was responsible for the rentals. But the city housing department nonetheless ordered him to make sure they came to a halt.
The driving force of imperialism the search for profits, The people pushing it were the bourgeoisie, the principal capitalists. Until the 1870s, the bourgeoisie were content to leave politics to others, and focus on manufacturing and infrastructure in the home country. Politicians were generally wary of the push into foreign countries.
Beginning in the 1870s as the money invested in foreign lands increased, the risks to the bourgeoisie and their money increased, as nations expropriated their assets or refused to cooperate, or threw them out. The bourgeoisie liked the enormous profits of these investments, but were not interested in taking the risks. They demanded that the nation-state provide the armed forces necessary to protect their profits, and the nation-states complied. Arendt says that this demand for intervention was its assertion of control of the government. She dates the Imperialist period to 1889-1914.
The goal of imperialism was neither assimilation nor integration.
Beyond the storm of commentary and criticism, however, quite a different reality presents itself. In the simplest terms, there is no war on the police. Violent attacks against police officers remain at historic lows, even though approximately 1,000 people have been killed by the police this year nationwide. In just the past few weeks, videos have been released of problematic fatal police shootings in San Francisco and Chicago.
The FBI recently released its data on assaults on police officers in 2014. The good news is that reported assaults are down sharply. Unarmed and assaults with guns both dropped, while assaults with knives and edged weapons went up slightly. But overall, as this chart tweeted by University of South Carolina law professor Seth Stoughton shows, assaults on cops are at their lowest point since 1996 and have been dropping consistently since 2008.
What do you think the response would be if a bunch of black people, filled with rage and armed to the teeth, took over a federal government installation and defied officials to kick them out? I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be wait-and-see.
Probably more like point-and-shoot.
Or what if the occupiers were Mexican-American? They wouldn’t be described with the semi-legitimizing term “militia,” harking to the days of the patriots. And if the gun-toting citizens happened to be Muslim, heaven forbid, there would be wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the “terrorist assault.” I can hear Donald Trump braying for blood.
In 2011, high school senior Taylor Bell, a local rapper in Itawamba County, Mississippi, made a song in support of several female classmates who claimed they had been inappropriately touched and subjected to harassing comments by two male coaches. In Bell’s song, he rapped: “Looking down girls’ shirts / drool running down your mouth / Going to get a pistol down your mouth.” For these remarks, school officials accused Bell of harassment and intimidation. He was suspended and sent to another school. In the next few weeks, the Supreme Court will decide whether to hear the case of Bell v. Itawamba County School Board.
Extremism comes in different colors, ethnicities, beards and head coverings – which is why racial profiling cannot protect us from all extremist violence.
AP published a more detailed follow-up piece on the night of January 3 with the ambiguous, contextless headline, “Oregon Standoff Latest in Dispute Over Western Lands.” This article did point out in the opening line that the right-wing occupiers are armed and motivated by “anti-government sentiment.”
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NBC (1/3/16) characterized the militants as “rancher’s rights protesters.” It headlined its report on the story “Ammon Bundy, Rancher’s Rights Protesters Occupy Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.”
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The infamous “terrorism” double standard was sometimes remarked upon in corporate media itself. The Washington Post (1/3/16) published an op-ed asking “Why Aren’t We calling the Oregon Occupiers ‘Terrorists?'” CNN (1/3/16) ran a more forceful opinion piece, “Face it, Oregon Building Takeover Is Terrorism.”
Media double standards vis-à-vis far-right extremism are a commonplace by this point. The hands-off response of the government—which said it had no plans to deal with the armed occupation—is striking, if not unexpected; the response of the media even more so.
As much as the right complains about the US media’s supposed “liberal bias,” news outlets were enormously euphemistic and gracious in their portrayal of the Oregon occupation. Such graciousness is not extended to other extremist groups.
Did last month's mistrial of an officer charged in connection with the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore man who died of a severed spine while in police custody, reveal a paradox that limits the potential of achieving serious police reform through the legal process?
And 30 years ago, a similar standoff between police and a black anti-government group in Philadelphia played out very differently. Armed members of a fringe liberation group called MOVE were bombed and burned alive for directing their weapons at police. The bombing highlighted the stark contrast in the way cops treat black and white radicals.
Bundy’s family reportedly fasted and prayed for the “spirit of their forefathers to be with them” during the 2014 incident, and Bundy’s son, Ammon Bundy, articulated a similar vision to explain his involvement in the recent takeover in Oregon. In a video posted on January 1, Ammon — whose name is the same as a famous figure from the Book of Mormon — explained that it was God who called him to leave his home and campaign on behalf of the Hammond family in Oregon.
This wrongful rape conviction wasn't the result of some vengeful ex or whatever else stereotypes might conjure. A wealth of evidence suggests Avery was failed by the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Office's single-minded commitment to proving and maintaining his guilt. By fall 2005, Avery was in the midst of a major lawsuit against Manitowoc County, with individual liability at stake for various local officials.
It seems fitting that 2015 would end with yet another example of our justice system failing to hold police accountable for killing an unarmed African-American. The Tamir Rice case was especially poignant because the victim was only 12 years old. He was playing in the park with a toy gun — like millions of kids do all over the country. And the video that everyone saw with their own eyes showed that police rolled up and within seconds shot him dead. The prosecution and a grand jury decided they were justified in doing that for reasons that make little sense to rational people.
The D.C. medical examiner’s office said Monday that McBride’s cause of death was “blunt force injuries” of the neck. It also said the injuries involved “cervical spinal cord transection” and “vertebral artery compression.” They did not offer a further explanation.
So now it’s Poland. For the last five years Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban has dismantled democratic checks and balances and declared the end of the liberal aspect of liberal democracy.
The other EU member states and Brussels huffed and puffed, but did not want to take any serious action against the erosion of democracy.
The Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), Turkey’s top religious body, has stated that engaged couples should not hold hands or spend time alone together during their engagement period.
“In this period, it is not inconvenient for couples to meet and talk to get to know each other, if their privacy is considered. However, there could be undesired incidents with or without their families’ knowledge … such as flirting, cohabitating or being alone [with one another]. This encourages gossip and holding hands, which Islam does not allow,” the Diyanet said, responding to a public question.
It urged couples to fulfil their engagement period “in line with Islamic norms,” encouraging couples not to have a religious marriage unless a civil marriage had been decided upon.
The Diyanet - which is one of Turkey’s best funded state institutions, largely provided for by public taxation - has previously made headlines with controversial rulings on the usage of toilet paper and cleaning products containing alcohol.
The use of cattle chutes has been developed by our police since 9/11 and it now is a weapon in their arsenal used unabashedly to divide and control the population when there is some volatility in the air. Interestingly, the city of Philadelphia virtually shut the city down when Pope Francis was here recently. Many felt the control was way over the top. The most absurd use of metal cattle chutes is to create “first amendment zones” in an out of the way place where those in power won’t be bothered by discordant voices. But their use in something so humanly joyful as the Two Street Mummers Parade — something that’s about the interaction between performers and citizens — seems a particularly distasteful omen for Philadelphia’s future.
Twenty years ago this month, RFC 1883 was published: Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification. So what's an Internet Protocol, and what's wrong with the previous five versions? And if version 6 is so great, why has it only been adopted by half a percent of the Internet's users each year over the past two decades?
The first result of our test confirms that when Binge On is enabled, T-Mobile throttles all HTML5 video streams to around 1.5Mps, even when the phone is capable of downloading at higher speeds, and regardless of whether or not the video provider enrolled in Binge On. This is the case whether the video is being streamed or being downloaded—which means that T-Mobile is artificially reducing the download speeds of customers with Binge On enabled, even if they’re downloading the video to watch later. It also means that videos are being throttled even if they’re being watched or downloaded to another device via a tethered connection.
Big companies often have a way of tap dancing around the truth. It's rarely lying, because they will choose their words carefully, in a manner that clearly misleads or distorts, but is not necessarily outright lying. T-Mobile, however, appears to be flat out lying. We recently wrote about the charges from YouTube that T-Mobile was throttling YouTube videos as part of its Binge On program that zero rates video on mobile phones so it doesn't count against data caps. We noted the problems with this program when it launched, but YouTube's claims take it even further.
Up to 3 million Egyptians lost their connection to the internet last week when Facebook’s Free Basics program was shut down on Wednesday. The reason for the shutdown of Facebook’s controversial Free Basics program, which launched in Egypt in October, is still not clear.
The more we learn about T-Mobile’s “Binge On” video streaming program, the more it seems to violate one of the basic tenets of the open internet: the idea that service providers shouldn’t have any control over what their connections are used to access.
A new investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation has found that T-Mobile is throttling data speeds for videos from services that are not Binge On participants.
So far, the Wi-Fi Alliance is being pretty vague on the details about the new standard in terms of how much power it will consume, how far it will travel, and how much data it will be able to transfer (and how quickly). It does say that the new standard will use the 900 megahertz spectrum, which is currently unlicensed and used by microwave ovens, baby monitors and all sorts of other wireless devices. This means Wi-Fi will now work in three bands; the 2.4 GHz band, the 5 GHz band and the 900 MHz band.
UAEM, the international student organisation, has turned its attention to narrowing the gap in access to affordable medicines, especially those affecting developing countries, by calling for a new model for delinking the cost of R&D from prices of medical products.
In a decision issued last summer that has so far escaped the IPKat's attention, the Board overturned the earlier decision of the examiner and allowed designation of the European Union (EU) in respect of the international registration of the word mark ‘Le Journal d’Anne Frank’.
The following analysis provided by IP enthusiast Nedim Malovic (Stockholm University) - also to be published as a Current Intelligence note for the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (Oxford University Press) - explains what happened.
The Authors Guild has officially asked the Supreme Court to hear its case against Google — a long-running dispute over whether copyright law allows for Google to scan and post excerpts from books for its Google Books service. The group filed a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court Thursday.
Last month, we were actually the first publication to report that Homeland Security had very quietly "returned" two domains that it had "seized" five years ago based entirely on totally bullshit claims from the RIAA. We focused our story on the search engine torrent-finder, but also mentioned that it appeared that DHS had returned OnSmash.com as well. As we had noted, back when the domain was first seized, OnSmash was a popular hip hop blog that many in the industry purposely sent their music to, because it was great for marketing and publicity. In fact, Kanye West had been known to promote OnSmash himself. That doesn't sound like a site "dedicated to infringement" as Homeland Security's ICE division claimed in the affidavit used to seize the website.
Each year, for the past few years, the wonderful Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University publishes a blog post highlighting key works that should have entered the public domain on January first, but did not. And each year, we write about it again. Here is the list for 2016. These are mostly works that were published in 1959. Under the law at the time they were created, the maximum copyright term was 56 years, and that apparently was more than enough of a bargain for the work to be created. That we retroactively extended those works, taking away the public domain for no actual benefit, remains a travesty. The list includes books like Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, William Burroughs' The Naked Lunch, Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate, and Strunk and White's famed The Elements of Style. Films that should be in the public domain today include Ben-Hur, North by Northwest, and Some Like It Hot. The original season of the seminal Rocky and Bullwinkle show would also be in the public domain.
“Mein Kampf”, the manifesto of Adolf Hitler, will be available to buy in Germany for the first time in 70 years after the book’s copyright expired.
Anne Frank and Adolf Hitler both died in 1945 -- with Frank's death being caused by Hitler. European law (for now) says that copyright lasts 70 years "after death" of an author, and that means that the published writings of each of those individuals are now in the public domain in Europe -- though there's serious controversy about both. Even though we won't see any new public domain works here in the US for quite some time, over in Europe, at least some works are able to enter the public domain each January 1st.
Dropbox has obtained a patent for peer-to-peer synchronization. The technology allows users to securely share files across different devices without uploading these to Dropbox's centralized servers. According to the company this should improve download speeds while cryptographic keys ensure that there are no sync conflicts.