Issue 19 of Linux Voice is nine months old, so we’re releasing it under the Creative Commons BY-SA license. You can share and modify all content from the magazine (apart from adverts), providing you credit Linux Voice as the original source and retain the same license.
I was listening to my usual round of amazing Linux Podcasts this week (you know who you are) and one of the discussions that made the rounds was about hardware compatibility issues with Linux. One of the hosts was bemoaning the issues with running linux on a repurposed MacBook and trying to get the wireless drivers to work. That led to a discussion about proprietary vs. non-proprietary drivers and you can pretty much guess how the conversation went from there.
Whatsie is a simple, free, open source desktop client for WhatsApp web, it is cross-platform available for Linux, Windows and OS X. Whatsie client offers many features like Themes (7 different variants) & Minimode, Native Notifications, Spell Checker & Auto Correct, Keyboard Shortcuts, Start on Boot up, and AppIndicator/close to tray option. You can also join the development of Whatsie and help developer by any means, see the GitHub page.
The quality of image and video capture has improved tremendously over the years and the capabilities of our digital devices continue to push the limits of image quality. However, there is a bummer! The high-res images we take does come at the hefty price of an increase in the size of images taken.
For this reason, uploading images on the internet can be painfully slow especially if you’re on a network with minimal bandwidth. While there are varying online services and softwares for other platforms that will effectively convert your image files while still maintaining the original quality, it is rather hard to come by native clients for Linux systems.
It was a little over a year ago when I introduced a project code named Dundee to this community. In the intervening year, we've had a number pre-release builds; all introducing ever greater capabilities into what I'm now happy to announce as XenServer 7. As you would expect from a major version number, XenServer 7 makes some rather significant strides forward, and defines a significant new capability.
I decided to try Franz on Linux, and I chose the somewhat less than obvious CentOS 7 for this task, just to show that it can be done with modernity and delight. The installation package is an archive, which you extract, and then run the Franz binary. That is all. An elegant, somewhat flat and utterly HTML-JS-rich client will launch.
Lantern is a free, open source internet censorship circumvention software that was created to "give users fast access to the blocked Internet". The application is available for desktops (Linux, Windows, Mac) and Android.
Moritz Bunkus announced the second major release of his powerful and open source MKV (Matroska) manipulation utility for all supported operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and MacOS.
MKVToolNix 9.2.0 comes a little over a month since the release of MKVToolNix 9.1.0, but users should not expect any many new features, as the developer only had time to fix some of the issues that have been reported during this time. There is, however, an important change in the mkvinfo component, but it only affects those who use the software on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X platforms.
The first Armadillo release of the 7.* series is out: a new version 7.100.3. We uploaded RcppArmadillo 0.7.100.3.0 to CRAN and Debian. This followed the usual thorough reverse-dependecy checking of by now 230 packages using it.
LabXNow is a cloud service provider that offers a free and personal online environment to different users with direct access from a web browser. You can think of it as your personal remote lab, where you can play around, code, develop or whatever you want. You can access it from anywhere with an Internet connection.
You all just want to buy it so you can press the button don't you? I know I do. Please, Don’t Touch Anything is now officially available on Linux with a nice discount.
There's one thing that is consistent with the Xenial family of spring disappointments. The disappointment. When one goes bad, you know they all do, and in this regard, Ubuntu LTS delivers badly across its entire range. 16.04 was meant to be sweet hope, salvation and joy, it is just a string of rushed, badly QA-ed images.
Kubuntu Xerus does not have any redeeming factors. It's pretty all right, but it's buggy, Samba support is weak, smartphone support is sub-par, package management is atrocious, battery life is just average but still much worse than the spectacularly useless Werewolf release, and there are lots of other small problems everywhere. Nothing about this particular edition oozes confidence, quality or long-term vision. Really sad. 2/10. My weekend has been ruined again, thank you. Don't bother. Bye.
My Plasma Wayland ISOs are building nicely fresh each day. I asked Betty the fuzzy Guinea Pig to gave one a try today and there’s still obvious bugs like no text on task bar and the blue window bars are back but she’s generally impressed at how this is likely to be a good replacement for X in the near future.
KStars gained two seats for Google Summer of Code 2016. The first project is to develop KStars Lite, a small footprint KStars aimed for tablet/mobile and low powered devices. The second project is to port KStars to Windows, including migration of INDI Client library and Ekos. Both projects are progressing along quite nicely and we expect to see stellar results by the end of the summer.
Our monthly Kdenlive Cafés (*) really helped us focusing the development on some awesome features. We now have a small team of really involved people that help us evolve towards the best free open source video editor for professionnals.
Today one of the most important steps was performed, the first upload to a microController. The code was a blink compiled with a makefile and uploaded with the KDev-Embedded plugin to an AVR microController (Arduino Nano board).
Verdigris is a header-only library that can be used with Qt. It uses macros to create a QMetaObject that is binary compatible with Qt's own QMetaObject without requiring moc. In other words, you can use Verdigris macros in your Qt or QML application instead of some of the Qt macros and then you do not need to run moc.
Come and join us for a most excellent Gathering of Halflings at Kubuntu Party 4, Friday 17th June 19:00 UTC.
I reached the creator at the IRC channel of KDE to see if he could help me, and Jonathan Riddel gives me the help that I need it, at the selection of bugs that I could work and others things that I was thinking about Umbrello. After two days, one before the end of submission time, I submitted my project to the KDE Community.
Today is the third day that Lakademy is happening at Federal University of State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), and since the first hour, I’m doing a lot of code. The work is concentrate on my GSoC Project, and finally getting on track on my work in Umbrello.
Rio de Janeiro, the “Cidade Maravilhosa”, land of the eternal Summer. The sunlight here is always clear and hot, the sea is refreshing, the sand is comfortable. The people is happy, Rio de Janeiro has good music, food, the craziest parties of the world, and beautiful bodies having fun with beach games (do you know futevolei?).
Just as quick info, with the next KDE Frameworks 5 release, namely KF5 version 5.23, the KTextEditor framework gains a Breeze Dark color scheme. The colors mostly stick to the Breeze color palette, with some minor changes, since KTextEditor needs more colors the the color palette itself ships. To use this color scheme, go to the config dialog and choose “Breeze Dark” in the Fonts & Colors config page. We hope this is useful – mandatory screenshot:
TL;DR: Well Hey there, Chantara here. I will be working with 2 awesome mentors, Stikonas and teo-, to add LVM and hopefully RAID support for KDE Partition Manager and KPMCore library over my summer with Google Summer of Code. If you’re interested, read on!!! :)
KDE Partition Manager and KPMcore 2.2.0 are now released with a proper LUKS support! This is a fairly big feature release but it also got tested more than usual, so a lot of bugs were fixed (including some crashes). Unfortunately there is still one more reproducible crash (bug 363294) on exit when file open/save dialogs are used (and very similar crashes actually exist in some other KDE programs, e.g. kdebugdialog or Marble). If anybody has any idea how to fix it I would be grateful.
Plasma Mobile Emulator will be the solution for developing, testing and accessing plasma mobile system without having to install on real phone.
While the first stable Krita version with animation is just around the corner, I am already rolling up my sleeves with plans to take the feature to the next level. It's Google Summer of Code time again.
A lot has happened since last year. Import for image sequences was added, the timeline docker was reworked and a large number of smaller changes and fixes were implemented to make the animation tools ready for inclusion in Krita 3.0. For a nice overview, check out GDQuest's video tutorial.
The idea that Free Software has no decent design programs, and that it is impossible to produce quality art without proprietary apps is one of those myths that refuses to die. For quite some time now, OCSmag has been on a mission to prove otherwise. In this latest series we talk to three artists who use Free Software tools to produce their works.
Last weekend, ace Krita hacker Dmitry Kazakov attended KomMissia, the annual Russian comics festival. Best quote award goes to the Wacom booth attendants, who install Krita on all their demo machines because “too many people keep asking about it”!
Using emerge tool, I started to build KStars on Windows. Since this process could be very troublesome, I used a Windows 7 32-bit virtual machine. Actually, for building KDE sources, the KDE developers recommend the 32-bit version of Windows 7.
KDE Neon is the latest and probably the best technology the KDE Community has developed, and I stand to be corrected if it is not so. You can call it a new Linux distro but KDE Neon is basically built comprehensively on Ubuntu Linux as the core, to bring the latest and hottest software developed by the KDE Community in a rolling release format to KDE desktop environment users.
The KDE Neon project is intended to provide users cutting-edge features on a highly configurable and yet stable desktop in a single package. The packages made in KDE Neon are based on Ubuntu and are not compatible with other Linux distros such as Arch Linux and OpenSUSE as stated by Jonathan Riddell, one of the project heads and who was previously in charge of the Kubuntu Linux project.
Hello, GNOMErs! As some of you may be aware, I’m working on porting our beloved GNOME Control Center to match the latest mockups. Not alone, however; we’re a Team.
As some Phoronix readers may have seen from mockups floating around, a new GNOME Control Center is in the works that now has a sidebar-based workflow for configuring the desktop. This new GNOME Control Center is designed to work on small and large screens, improved interaction, easier to find configuration panels, and other enhancements.
While the Linux Mint 18 operating system is still in heavy development, Clement Lefebvre and his team of developers announced a new update for the Cinnamon 3.0 desktop environment.
Cinnamon 3.0.4 is now the latest version of the acclaimed GNOME 3-based open-source graphical desktop interface, which will be used by default for the upcoming Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" OS, on the Cinnamon Edition, of course. It comes a few days after the release of Cinnamon 3.0.3.
Many people liked the Interface of Windows 10 because now it carries all those features which Linux already have from years. Do you like the look of Windows 10 but don't want to use it? Here we brought Windows 10 GTK themes for you, this theme offers two versions Light and Dark, you can use whatever you like. But hold on, now many people will say like 'why you are so obsessed by other operating systems and so, Linux is great OS', yeah I do agree that many geeks consider Linux above all operating systems. The superiority of the Linux shows that you can do whatever you like to do with your OS, change look/design and so, that's called freedom. We should appreciate new comers to Linux instead of letting them down, and people leave Linux because they think it is quite difficult to survive with this OS.
We are happy to announce our first update for Manjaro 16.06-rc1 (Daniella)!
Welcome to Day 2 of the Solus Hackfest 1.2!
Zbigniew Konojacki has informed Softpedia today about the availability of the Beta release of his upcoming 4MRecover 18.0 data recovery Live CD distrolette, which is now ready for public testing.
The root of SELinux's problems is that SELinux is a complex security mechanism that is hard to get right. Unfortunately this complexity is not (just) simply an implementation artifact of the current SELinux code; instead, it's inherent in what SELinux is trying to do.
SELinux has problems. It has a complexity problem (in that it is quite complex), it has technical problems with important issues like usability and visibility, it has pragmatic problems with getting in the way, and most of all it has a social problem. At this point, I no longer believe that SELinux can be saved and become an important part of the Linux security landscape (at least if Linux remains commonly used).
The fundamental reason why SELinux is beyond saving at this point is that after something like a decade of SELinux's toxic mistake, the only people who are left in the SELinux community are the true believers, the people who believe that SELinux is not a sysadmin usability nightmare, that those who disable it are fools, and so on. That your community narrows is what naturally happens when you double down on calling other people things; if people say you are an idiot for questioning the SELinux way, well, you generally leave.
Systemd 230 was released just last week and it has taken heat not only for opening up FBDEV to potential security issues, which already reverted, but also for changing the default behavior of user processes.
Systemd 230 made a change where KillUserProcess defaults to yes. This terminates user processes that are part of the user session scope when the user logs out. This is causing problems for ssh-agent, screen, and other common Linux processes.
Although there are a few weeks remaining before Fedora 24 is released, you can test out the Fedora 24 Beta release today! This is a great way to get a sneak peek at new features and help find bugs that still need a fix.
For the past two weeks I was lucky to have an intern, who worked on Fedora Badges. Badges is a great way to start as a Fedora design contributor, as they have low entry level. Templates are ready, graphics is available to download, all the resources available here.
Puppet 4 has been uploaded to Debian unstable. This is a major upgrade from Puppet 3.
If you are using Puppet, chances are that it is handling important bits of your infrastructure, and you should upgrade with care.
Here are some points to consider.
Budgie Remix 16.04, the unofficial Ubuntu flavor built on top of the Budgie desktop environment created by the amazing team of developers from the Solus Project, based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and powered by Linux Kernel Series 4.4.
Martin Wimpress has posted a detailed report on the work going into Ubuntu MATE, particularly the upcoming 16.10 version that will be launched this October. Some of the key changes involve migrating from the GTK2 library to GTK3.
Ubuntu MATE Welcome and Software Boutique have been updated for 16.10, the New features have been back ported to Ubuntu MATE 16.04 and are available now :-)
Last year, we were impressed by Next Thing Co's $9 CHIP computer. At Maker Faire 2016, we were able to check out their PocketCHIP housing, which puts CHIP into a portable console package that runs Linux and indie game console Pico-8. Here's what you can do with the $49 system!
Microsoft has recently announced a new round of job layoffs at its Mobile unit in Finland, as it moves forward with its restructuring and reorganization plan following the acquisition of Nokia’s Devices and Services unit.
So lets understand the context of when Elop came in. Nokia in 2009 sold 67.8 million smartphones globally (with 39% market share). This was a world record obivously and Nokia set record profits in its smartphone unit. In 2010 Nokia then grew 35.8 million new smartphone sales (growth rate of 53% !!!!). Nokia from 2009 to 2010 grew MORE than Apple even thought Apple released its most popular new iPhone model ever, the iPhone 4. Apple grew 22.4 million units but Nokia grew more, Nokia grew 35.8 million new smartphones. Very literally mathematically irrevocably true - Nokia was WINNING against Apple iPhone in 2010. Nokia GREW MORE than Apple with its MOST iconic new smartphone. The GAP between Nokia and Apple was NOT CLOSING, it was GROWING. Nokia was PULLING AWAY from Apple in 2010. Look at the numbers side-by-side...
Oracle's long and contentious court battle with Google over Java copyright issues ends in defeat. But the open source community can breathe a sigh of relief -- for now.
Amazon has become the latest tech giant that’s giving away some of its most sophisticated technology. Today the company unveiled DSSTNE (pronounced “destiny”), an open source artificial intelligence framework that the company developed to power its product recommendation system. Now any company, researcher, or curious tinkerer can use it for their own AI applications.
The current release marks the most profound API revision in the project's history. The new API is designed to reinforce the best practices for implementing Genode components. It is the result of countless experiments and the practical experiences made while developing over hundred genuine components during the past ten years.
The Community Leadership Summit (CLS) is an annual event for community managers, developer evangelists, people who work on public-facing forums, and those with a general interest in engagement or community development for free-software projects. The 2016 edition was held in Austin, Texas the weekend before OSCON. Several sessions at CLS 2016 dealt with the differences exhibited between old and new free-software projects where community management is concerned. One of those tackled the problem of how to foster community around an older software project, which poses a distinct set of challenges.
Last week was OSCON 2016, and the first year that the conference was held in Austin, Texas. OSCON has always been an important conference for Conservancy and for me personally. In 2011, it was the first conference I ever keynoted (I was also on a keynote panel in 2008, which was the closest I’d gotten before then), and where I really started talking about my heart condition and medical devices. OSCON was also the conference where we had the first Conservancy booth and debuted Conservancy t-shirts and stickers.
I reached Portland two days back, was happy to see that Remy helped us to find a hotel just opposite to the conference center. As I am typing this, I can see the empty roads, and the main doors of the venue. Yesterday also I woke up by 5AM, the virtue of being in a place 12:30 hours apart from your standard timezone :) After writing the article about Microbit support in Fedora (it is still under review) I moved to the conference venue. It was very easy to find the staff room. As usual Doug,Lvh,Eric were already there, later I met Ewa, and then met Betsy for the first time. While discussing security practices when I asked, Lvh pointed out that getting golang vendored sources in the source code repository and then not updating them later, is more of a software engineering problem than a security problem as he sees.
I wrote parts of this post after our last monthly assembly at Athens Hackerspace. Most of the hackerspace operators are dealing with this monthly meeting routinely and we often forget what we have achieved during the last 5 years and how many great things this physical space enabled to happen. But this post is not about our hackerspace. It's an effort to distant myself and try to write about the experience of running a hackerspace.
Thunderbird, powered by SoftMaker, is a custom version of the popular email client featuring enhancements that come all in the form of extensions.
[...]
SoftMaker, a company best known for its SoftMaker Office suite, announced recently that it plans to include the Thunderbird email client into the 2016 version of the office suite.
The Document Liberation Project: empowering creators to free their data from proprietary formats.
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.0.1, the first security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 7.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons. If you are running an earlier release of NetBSD, we strongly suggest updating to 7.0.1.
NetBSD 7.0.1 is now available as the first point release to NetBSD 7.0 that happened last October.
The NetBSD team has announced the general availability of the first point release of the NetBSD 7.0 operating system, adding assorted bug fixes and security updates to its core components.
Traditional Unix has allowed memory to be mapped W | X. Everyone now knows that’s a bad practice from a security standpoint, but the software ecosystem hasn't made much progress in this area. Theo de Raadt has just committed a change to begin blocking W^X violations in OpenBSD.
OSI General Manager Patrick Masson was one of the session's attendees, and he pushed back on that last point. There is too much "open-washing" these days, he said, but it does not come from the OSI. There is still only one Open Source Definition; the dilution of the term comes from others who use "open" to describe organizations, workflows, processes, and other things unrelated to software licensing. "We have open hardware and open data, but also 'open cola' and 'open beer.' That blurs over an important distinction. Not everything fits."
[...]
Among the other points raised during the session, attendees noted that it was important that the community distinguish between minting new project contributors and minting new free-software activists, and that it was important for projects to put a check on flamewar-style debates—particularly those that focus on dismissing certain technologies. It is easy for experienced developers to become attached to a language or framework, but there will always be new languages and projects popping up that are the entry points for new coders. Project members deriding language Y because it is not language X may only serve to tell newcomers that they are not welcome.
Within the context of an event dedicated to discussing free and open-source software (FOSS) legalities, such as the Free Software Legal & Licensing Workshop (LLW), the topic of conflicting licenses was bound to come up. The decision by Canonical to start shipping the ZFS filesystem with its Ubuntu server distribution back in February led to a discussion at LLW about distributing the kernel combined with ZFS. Discussions at LLW are held under the Chatham House Rule, which means that names and affiliations of participants are only available for those who have agreed to be identified. This year's LLW was held in Barcelona, April 13-15.
Helping older European people to be part of the open government process and encouraging their access to civic participation through mobility are the main goals of the Mobile Age project, launched last February.
And, according to the new Innovation Principle, new European legislation must take account of its impact on innovation. These are the main outcomes of the meeting of the Competitiveness Council in Brussels on 27 May.
A few weeks ago we wrote about how the European Union is pushing ahead its support for open access to EU-funded scientific research and data. Today at the meeting of the Council of the European Union, the Council reinforced the commitment to making all scientific articles and data openly accessible and reusable by 2020.
Connecting a headless Raspberry Pi to a wireless network can be quite a paradoxical situation. To connect it to the network, you need to open an SSH connection to configure the wireless port. But to do so, you need a network connection in the first place. Of course, you can still get command-line access using a USB-to-UART adapter or the Pi’s ethernet port – if present – but [Arsenijs] worked out a much more convenient solution for his Hackaday Prize entry: The pyLCI Linux Control Interface.
The RepRap project started in 2005 by Adrian Bowyer – “Mister RepRap”, when the patent about this technology expired. 3DPrintings isn’t a new technology, history dates that the first model of stereolithography printing emerged in 1984. The main idea around RepRap projects is to produce 3DPrinters that can auto-replicate most of the parts itself. And in 2006, the RepRap 0.2 successfully printed the first part of itself and in 2008, the first 3d model was printed by an end-user. Currently, the printer more replicated and customized of the 67 printers that are listed on RepRap website, is the Prusa Mendel, the model created by Josef Prà ¯ša, that was disponibility to the public in 2011 and had a lot of development since.
Like I mentioned in a previous post, I wanted to try out a more hackable wifi plug. I got a Kankun “smart” plug. Like the other one I have the software is horrible. The good news is that they left SSH enabled on it.
Anyone who has worked with the Compute Module will find the LeMaker Guitar immediately familiar. The system-on-chip processor, an Actions S500, sits alongside 1GB of memory, a combined audio and power management unit, and 8GB of NAND flash storage on an over-sized small-outline DIMM (SODIMM) form factor circuit board. This board then connects to a baseboard, supplied with the Guitar, which provides more accessible connectivity than the SODIMM’s 204 electrical contacts.
Should GitHub remove contribution graph from the personal profile of the contributors or the developers? This step might be taken for the personal well-being of the developers. Open source is good but personal life cannot be ignored either.
In walking the long path to VR on the PC, I’ve built a new gaming computer from scratch, bought peripherals out the wazoo, and, of course, pre-ordered both an Oculus Rift and an HTC Vive so I wouldn't have to choose between the two. If we’re including things like the peripherals I use when playing some VR games—like my Warthog HOTAS and Slaw Device pedals—then my grand total is hovering at $4,000 or so in VR-related expenses.
That’s a hell of a lot of cheddar to drop in pursuit of gaming, but the results make me happy. There isn’t a PC VR-related thing I can’t have. If it exists for Oculus Rift or SteamVR, I can play it. And I’ve been casting that net wide, jumping from VR game to VR game, trying over the past six weeks to eat as much as I can from this new buffet of experiences.
Fight the Fakes campaign “represents a great opportunity for a multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary collaboration,” said Adrian van den Hoven, Medicines for Europe director general. He also highlighted the fact that fake medicines are “illegal and dangerous.”
Public health advocates – and many nations – had high hopes that this year’s World Health Assembly could finally agree on some alternative ways to fund research and development that can lead to affordable medical products by de-linking R&D costs from prices, through the long-awaited discussion of a landmark 2012 report of a WHO expert group on medical R&D. This week, that discussion has spread across the highest profile topics of the week such as antimicrobial resistance and emergencies, but some are concerned that the public health safeguards recommended by the expert group may be being left behind.
Today, the annual World Health Assembly is poised to approve a new plan on research and development into medical products that are affordable to all. NGOs, industry and other observers welcomed the outcome.
On Thursday, researchers revealed that for the first time, they’ve found a case of U.S. bacteria resistant to last-resort antibiotics. Researchers at Walter Reed found the germ in a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman diagnosed with an E. coli infection last month. The E. coli carried a specific gene, MCR-1, that rendered it immune to the antibiotic colistin — the drug doctors turn to to kill an infection when nothing else works.
On another day, in another life, these vegetables would have all been taken to a very different place. The eggplants — some a little too small, some a little too bruised — would have been carted to a landfill and left to rot. The cauliflower pocked with tiny dark splotches — a sign of oxidation — would have been mistaken as moldy and passed over by customers at the supermarket until they, too, joined the eggplants in the landfill. The carrots — some the size of wine bottles — might not have even made it to the supermarket, turned away because they would not have blended into the store’s uniform display. They too, probably, would have ended up in a landfill.
The two multinationals that teamed up during the Vietnam War to poison millions of people with its Agent Orange herbicide—St. Louis, Mo.-based Monsanto and Germany’s Bayer AG—are looking to become one.
Bayer has announced a bid to buy Monsanto in a deal that would expand Bayer’s GMO and pesticide holdings and add drugs to Monsanto’s global portfolio. Monsanto has rejected the latest bid, but the two are still in talks.
FBI agents, one armed with an assault weapon, reportedly raided the home of a security professional who discovered sensitive data for 22,000 dental patients was available on the Internet, according to a report published Friday.
In a recent study, researchers from Google and the universities of Illinois and Michigan dropped nearly 300 USB sticks off at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus and measured how many of these were plugged into student machines.
The strategic importance of Montenegro is inversely proportional to its size. With it, NATO will have full control of the Adriatic Sea, finish the encirclement of Serbia, and be emboldened to pursue a more aggressive stance towards Russia.
Like Steven Starr, Stephen Cohen, myself, and a small number of others, the Saker understands the reckless irresponsibility of convincing Russia that the United States intends to attack her.
It is extraordinary to see the confidence that many Americans place in their military’s ability. After 15 years the US has been unable to defeat a few lightly armed Taliban, and after 13 years the situation in Iraq remains out of control. This is not very reassuring for the prospect of taking on Russia, much less the strategic alliance between Russia and China. The US could not even defeat China, a Third World country at the time, in Korea 60 years ago.
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A helmet for a F-35 pilot costs $400,000, more than a high end Ferrari.
During a visit to Greece intended to repair ties with the EU, Vladimir Putin said that Russia has “no choice” but to target Romania, which has recently opened a NATO missile defense base, and Poland, which plans to do so within two years.
“If yesterday people simply did not know what it means to be in the crosshairs in those areas of Romania, then today we will be forced to carry out certain measures to ensure our security. And it will be the same with Poland,” Putin said during a joint press conference with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in Athens on Friday.
The Agreement makes Sweden a possible host country for aggressive NATO exercises during peacetime. In addition, the Swedish government may allow NATO to invade the country if a crisis or a conflict should occur. Inevitably, Sweden will become directly involved in NATO’s armament proliferation and their aggressive provocations against Russia. Large-scale fleet exercises in the Baltic Sea will further increase the danger of confrontation and war.
Tony Blair will not be accused of breaking any laws in the Iraq War inquiry report, the Telegraph can disclose.
Sources close to the inquiry said the report – which will be published in six weeks’ time - was not set up to take a view on the legality of the acts of individuals or events. That includes whether the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was legal.
The U.S. Defense Department is still using — after several decades — 8-inch floppy disks in a computer system that coordinates the operational functions of the nation's nuclear forces, a jaw-dropping new report reveals.
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The report shows that creaky IT systems are being used to handle important functions related to the nation's taxpayers, federal prisoners and military veterans, as well as to the U.S. nuclear umbrella.
Mythology about the rightness of dropping two atomic bombs on Japan is relevant to today’s “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and the revving up of a new Cold War with Russia, says ex-Pentagon military analyst Chuck Spinney.
With a population of only 1.8 million people, Kosovo has sent more of its young people per capita than any other country to fight and die in Iraq and Syria. Since 2012, some 314 Kosovars have joined the Islamic State, including two suicide bombers, 44 women and 28 children. Even Belgium, widely seen as a hotbed of extremism after the attacks on Paris and Brussels, lags behind it in the recruitment rankings. …
The United States and NATO invested heavily in helping Kosovo gain independence from Serbia in 2008 and establish democracy. That Saudi Arabia should be using Kosovo as a breeding ground for extremists, or allowing it to be used as a breeding ground by any Saudi entity or citizen, is a cruel reminder of the contradictory and even duplicitous behavior of America’s partners in the Persian Gulf and helps to explain why its relationships with those countries have become increasingly troubled.
Kosovo, rescued from Serbian oppression after months of NATO bombing in 1999, has been known as a tolerant society. For centuries, the Muslim majority has followed the liberal Hanafi version of Islam, which is accepting of others. Since the war, that tradition has been threatened by Saudi-trained imams, their costs paid by Saudi-sponsored charities, preaching the primacy of Shariah law and fostering violent jihad and takfirism, which authorizes the killing of Muslims viewed as heretics.
Most Kosovars have resisted such proselytizing, and officials in Kosovo say that support for the United States and the West remains strong. Yet experts point to a number of reasons the country has been fertile ground for recruitment to radical ideology: a large population of young people living in rural poverty with little hope of jobs; corruption and an attendant lack of faith in government; and, according to a 2015 report by the Kosovar Center for Security Studies, an education system that does not encourage critical thinking.
Donald Trump made a pretty penny off a program to help small businesses hurt by 9/11, one of many times where The Donald took advantage of government programs to save or make money off the taxpayer.
The self-proclaimed billionaire, who has so far refused to release his tax returns, was one of many wealthy individuals and businesses who used a loophole in a program intended to help smaller companies in lower Manhattan recover after the Sept. 11 tragedy.
Trump got $150,000 for his swanky property at 40 Wall Street because the Empire State Development Corporation, run by the state, didn't enforce federal guidelines on what defines a small business. Instead, the state used much looser rules that let The Donald and others including Morgan Stanley and Bank of China take money that was earmarked by Congress to help small business owners in the neighborhood recover after the tragic attacks, a 2006 Daily News expose found.
I am staggered by the amount of firepower the US used, and the incredible death and destruction it caused on an innocent people.
There is a strange relationship between Israel and a small sect of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) based next to the Golan Heights. The very presence of a group like ISIS so close to Israel brings up many questions.
Firstly why has ISIS not attacked Israel – a country they have sworn to destroy – from said base? Similarly why has the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) not attacked this small and weak group of extremists on their border? The answers to such questions show the truth behind the rhetoric all actors use in this conflict.
The Yarmouk valley is wedged between Jordan, Syria and the Israeli occupied territories of the Golan Heights. The valley consists of a few small towns, the majority of which are now controlled by the ISIS affiliated Liwa Shuhada al-Yarmouk or the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade (YMB). This group was established by Mohammad al-Baridi, known by his nickname 'The Uncle' in 2012 in southwest Syria. The group started off relatively moderate, with a close alliance to the Free Syrian Army. But the moderation quickly dissipated during the course of the Syrian civil war.
[...]
There seems to be very different treatment for rebel groups on the south of the Golan Heights border than for those in the north. But why would Israel, which authorised multiple bombings on Syrian militant groups, take such a relaxed view towards ISIS on their doorstep?
Israel is focused not on ISIS and Sunni groups, but on the Shia groups in Syria. Israel's airstrikes have hit Assad’s Shia backed regime and Hezbollah, not ISIS or al-Nusra. Correspondence between the then-Sectary of State Hillary Clinton and political advisor Jacob Sullivan about Israel’s aims in the region tried to rationalise why Israel ignores ISIS.
The House’s Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on Tuesday where legislators from each party took cracks at Saudi Arabia.
The country has come under heavy criticism of late after the Senate unanimously approved legislation that would allow the families of 9/11 victims to sue over Saudi Arabia’s alleged connections to Al Qaeda.
Agence France Presse got the scoop on Thursday, with their reporters in Fatisa just 19 miles from Daesh territory in northern al-Raqqa Province, Syria saying they saw some 20 US special operations troops embedded with leftist Kurdish YPG units and wearing YPG insignia. (The latter move is to prevent friendly fire incidents, signaling to the Kurds that despite their foreign appearance, they are white hats).
Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies was commissioned by the Pentagon to analyze U.S. military strategy and force posture in the Asia-Pacific region and produced its report in January 2016. It was not surprising that a major recommendation was that “the United States should sustain and expand U.S. military presence in the Asia-Pacific region.” Always tell your paymasters what they want to hear, especially when it was made clear by President Obama that his “pivot to Asia” is aimed at military dominance.
President Obama should overcome political constraints in Hiroshima this week to say 'sorry' for the nuclear bombs, writes Linda Pentz Gunter. Even more important, he must change his stance on nuclear weapons - abandoning the US's $1 trillion WMD modernization program and lifting the threat of world-destroying nuclear conflict.
It’s interesting to see a US commander crossing the border to cheer on participants in a civil war. That’s also what the American military has been doing in Iraq, where forces have been encouraging Shia militias fighting on the outskirts of Fallujah, and even providing air support to the forces of the perilously weak government in Baghdad.
A schizophrenic aspect of the entire Assange affair from the Swedish perspective is the inability of the legal establishment to let go. Despite the contrarian wishes of his alleged victims; despite dissent within the Swedish legal establishment that Assange be hauled over the coals; despite the evidence, the higher authorities insist that he can be detained on suspicion of rape by prosecutors.
The quixotic efforts of Utah politicians to seize and sell national forests and other public lands poses a dire risk to tourism and visitor spending in the state, according to a new public awareness campaign that launched this week.
Time was, picturing what Donald Trump’s presidential energy policies might look like required parsing his fact-defying tweets, forehead slap-worthy comments and threats to seize Middle Eastern oil by force. Now that the presumptive Republican nominee has unveiled his “America First” energy policy, there’s less guesswork to do.
Two federal agencies on Friday quietly finalized two reports, set for release next week, that found offshore fracking in California poses no "significant" risk to the environment—paving the way for oil and gas companies to resume the controversial extraction method in the Santa Barbara Channel and imperiling the region's wildlife in the process, opponents said.
The announcement Friday from the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (OEM) and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement puts an end to a court-ordered ban on offshore fracking in federal waters off the coast of California. The moratorium was put into place in January as part of a settlement with the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), which challenged the Obama administration's 'rubber-stamping' of offshore drilling activity without an environmental review.
In May of 1998 we held a conference dedicated to two Government-sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In my statement to that assembly, I noted that both corporations had been enjoying good times, but cautioned that one of the unintended consequences of fat profits over a long period is the tendency of both government and private corporations to start believing in the fantasy of ever-rising profits. GSEs often escape the accountability that Congress or regulatory agencies should impose.
Recent hearings in the U.S. House and Senate have provided some much needed oversight on another GSEââ¬â¢the Farm Credit System (FCS).
The Farm Credit System was the first GSE to be established by the United States in 1916. Unlike Fannie and Freddie, the Farm Credit System can make direct loans to farmers, ranchers and others involved in agriculture. However, as The Wall Street Journal reported back in 1985: “the Farm Credit System would lend money to anyone. Herbert Ashton, an Indiana fruit farmer, recalls being wined and dined at a local country club by bankers from his local [farm credit] system bank who extolled the virtues of inflation and offered to lend him $1 million on the spot. ‘I turned it down,’ he recalls. ‘But they sounded like a soap testimonial. They were giving money to whoever passed their way, and they didn’t ask too many questions.’”
The just released State of North America’s Birds report is grim reading. Based on a comprehensive evaluation of species population size and trends, ranges and threat severity the assessment reaches a stark conclusion.
Memo to Gates: It just might be time to rethink your position when the biggest corporate climate villain on planet Earth embraces your climate policy. And it might be time to rethink your message when the head of the company that has funded disinformation about climate science and solutions longer than any other says he has “had this conversation” with you and you are in total agreement.
Meanwhile, PSEG is pushing ahead with its plan to install taller and wider utility poles throughout Long Island with their bottoms coated with pentachlorophenol or penta—a cancer-causing substance banned by nations around the world.
After a long battle to even get on the agenda for ExxonMobil’s 2016 Annual Meeting, the company’s shareholders on Wednesday voted against four initiatives to address climate change, even while the company is facing an investigation for its climate denial activities.
Investors were hoping to force Exxon to add a climate expert to its board, to enact a policy to avoid 2€°C warming, to increase capital distributions (with the understanding that continued investment in assets likely to be stranded is not a good long-term strategy), and to report on the impact climate change policies worldwide to the company’s bottom line.
A new report highlights a stark truth: the UK’s dependence on international coal not only devastates the environment, but disenfranchises local communities.
He will also have to decide what he would actually do with U.S. energy and climate policy. He’s already offered some rhetoric about saving coal jobs, denying climate science, and bashing renewable energy. But on Thursday he is expected to reveal his agenda in keynote speech at an oil expo in Bismarck, North Dakota.
Brazil’s interim government is orchestrating a stunning transfer of power to the country’s elites.
More is never enough. By now we really don’t need yet another statement of inequality, but here goes anyway: The average ratio of chief executive pay to employee pay has reached 335-to-1 in the United States.
And some of the highest paid CEOs were at the companies that stash the most money in overseas tax havens. Among the giant corporations that comprise the Standard & Poor’s 500, the 25 at the companies with the most unrepatriated profits hauled in 79 percent more than other S&P 500 chief executive officers, reports the AFL-CIO union federation’s Paywatch 2016 report. Just 10 corporations — Apple, Pfizer, Microsoft, General Electric, IBM, Merck, Cisco Systems, Johnson & Johnson, Exxon Mobil, and Hewlett-Packard successor HP Inc. — are believed to be holding about $948 billion in accounts outside the reach of tax authorities.
Once EU’s and US’ common aim of imposing austerity and anti-popular economic restructuring on Greece has been concluded, then the two partners-um-competitors jostled the one against the other for the terms and the consequences of the necessary debt relief for Greece. Debt relief is necessary because the troika’s Economic Adjustment Program for Greece is unfeasible and Greek debt is unviable. A few days ago, IMF in its recent preliminary debt sustainability assessment had accepted this.
Live with your parents, again? Chances are you’re not lazy, nor a loser, nor any other stigma that might be hovering in your subconscious due to cultural stereotyping—you’re just a normal millennial responding to the economic realities of the age. For the first time in 130 years, more Americans between ages 18-34 are living with their parents than in any other living situation. That is according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center published May 24. The study is based on national census data from 2014.
“Liberalism, which Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name—opportunism—is an integral component of capitalism,” he said. “When the citizens grow restive, it will soften and decry capitalism’s excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased.”
Hedges also said: “Luxemburg’s murder illustrated the ultimate loyalties of liberal elites in a capitalist society: When threatened from the left, when the face of socialism showed itself in the streets, they would—and will—make alliances with the most retrograde elements of the society, including fascists, to crush the aspirations of the working class.”
People who make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour can’t find an affordable place to live anywhere in the country, according to a new report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
But perhaps even more surprising is that even if the minimum wage were raised to $15 an hour — the level low-wage workers have been demanding in a constant flow of strikes and protests and the highest level supported by Democratic lawmakers — they would still be out of luck.
Citizens in Europe and elsewhere are harassed by software patent trolls, and experience issues regarding sequential innovation, remixing, and access to knowledge and culture. The FFII has argued that the EU should bring its IP law into line with human rights obligations. [4] TTIP may undermine this through exportation of EU law.
The anti-immigration tactics being used by the Leave campaign in the EU referendum amount to a “divide and rule trick”, Yanis Varoufakis has said.
The former Greek finance minister – who faced down EU institutions in his previous job negotiating with the Troika – said the British establishment was trying to use fear of immigrants to distract from the effects of austerity.
“Lest we forget: turning the native poor against migrant labour is a variant of the old divide and rule trick that the British establishment honed ages ago to dominate the empire,” he said.
When the College Cost Reduction and Access Act took effect in 2009, neither lawmakers nor school administrators had any idea how many college students would check the box on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) -- the document that determines eligibility for Pell grants, subsidized loans and work-study awards that help students pay for college or vocational training -- to indicate that they were homeless.
At last tabulation, the number was 58,000, a small percentage of the 20.2 million students presently enrolled in both undergraduate and graduate study. Nonetheless, school counselors and advocates believe the number is starkly inaccurate and represents a mere fraction of university students who actually lack a permanent home.
It hasn’t just been about insults, put-downs, and smears. There’s also the Clinton-captive Democratic Party’s systematic and authoritarian distortion and, yes, rigging of the primary nomination process at the local, state, and national levels. There are abundant reasons to believe that Hillary has benefitted from electoral and administrative shenanigans across the (seemingly endless) primary season. The fixing process was evident in Las Vegas recently, when the Nevada Democratic Party chair “shut down debate behind a screen of uniformed police” after the party excluded 58 Sanders delegates with sudden “rules changes” clearly made to block Sanders’ rightful claim to have won Nevada. No wonder a Sanders delegate grabbed a chair and thought about tossing it.
Donald Trump reneged on his intention to debate Senator Bernie Sanders on Friday in a brief statement on his website.
Granted, the newly minted Republican nominee for president has long insisted that his is not himself anti-Semitic, and regularly points out that his daughter is a Jewish convert. Yet Trump has done little to quell a rising tide of anti-Semitism among his supporters since launching his campaign last year: Trump initially refused to disavow anti-Semitic Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, a Trump surrogate implied at a rally that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders should convert from Judaism and “meet Jesus,” prominent anti-Semites went on radio shows to encourage their supporters to "get out and vote" for Trump, and a man was filmed leaving a Trump rally shouting in Cleveland shouting “Go to fucking Auschwitz.”
But which social media sites have the largest portion of users getting news there? How many get news on multiple social media sites? And to what degree are these news consumers seeking online news out versus happening upon it while doing other things?
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is making the west coast late-night rounds ahead of California’s primary, stopping by “Real Time with Bill Maher” last night for a one-on-one interview.
Maher mentioned the great missed opportunity that was Sanders’ rumored debate with GOP nominee Donald Trump, who backed out on Friday.
After making guttural noises, Sanders said he “would have loved” to debate Trump.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump went before AIPAC this year and pandered to those who blindly support Israel’s hard-line policies, but Bernie Sanders’s more evenhanded approach is better for Israel, says Rabbi Michael Lerner.
[...]
As if not to be undone by the Times, Jane Eisner, editor of the center/right Jewish Forward magazine, issued a statement that insisted that Sanders unveil a full plan for how to achieve peace in Israel and Palestine. Clinton’s plan has been to give 100 percent unconditional support to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Tim Canova, the progressive challenger running to unseat embattled Democratic National Party (DNC) chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, on Friday was endorsed by the grassroots advocacy group Democracy for America (DFA), which called Canova a "political revolutionary."
In a statement on Friday, DFA chairman Jim Dean criticized Wasserman Schultz for allying with "wealthy interests" that fuel inequality and said that "if Democrats are going to be the party that confronts the wealthy and powerful who dominate our political process and enable growing income inequality, we need political revolutionaries like Tim Canova in the U.S. Congress."
Clinton praises Latin America for its high rate of economic growth, which she revealingly claims has produced “more than 50 million new middle-class consumers eager to buy U.S. goods and services.” She also admits that the region’s inequality is “still among the worst in the world” with much of its population “locked in persistent poverty” — even while the TPP that she has advocated strongly for threatens to exacerbate the region’s underdevelopment, just as NAFTA caused the Mexican economy to stagnate.
Last October, however, she publicly reversed her stance on the TPP under pressure from fellow Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley. Likewise, the entire two-page section on the conference in El Salvador where she expresses her support for the TPP is missing from the paperback.
Heidegger cuts Jaspers off abruptly. “Education is irrelevant,” the moral philosopher of Nazism shouts. “Just look at his wonderful hands!”
Moral: the smaller the hands, the more fanatic the compensation.
San Diego police arrested 35 protesters Friday outside a Donald Trump rally after a peaceful demonstration devolved into chaos, according to police.
Three hours into the calm protests, which drew up to 1,000 people, a number of demonstrators tried to breach an off-limits area, resulting in arrests, the police department said on Twitter.
Supporters and opponents of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump have clashed in the city of San Diego in California.
Police declared a gathering outside the city's convention centre unlawful and made 35 arrests, as stones and water bottles were thrown.
Mr Trump was in the city near the Mexican border to hold a rally ahead of the 7 June California primary.
The practice of the American political establishment has for decades been to marginalize dissenting views as a means of silencing them. The dominant Parties have long contended that eligible voters who don’t vote don’t care, and therefore don’t matter. However, a more plausible explanation for their abstention (in addition to institutional impediments to voting) is that the great majority of voters want neither of the dominant Parties in power. In other words, the American system of political and economic representation neither includes nor represents true democratic participation. The growth of registered Independent voters (graph below) at the expense of the dominant Parties adds credence to this view. So does that fact that other alleged democracies have much higher voter participation rates than the U.S.
This could be a big year for a Libertarian candidate. Trump and Clinton are deeply unpopular, and a recent poll found that nearly half of all voters would consider supporting a third-party candidate if Trump and Clinton are the nominees. The Libertarians already credit Trump for a surge in new party memberships and are eager to pull in disappointed Sanders fans.
An internal government watchdog has concluded Hillary Clinton broke government rules by using a private email server without approval while she was secretary of state. That was the key finding of a long-awaited report by the State Department inspector general. The report concluded that Clinton would not have been allowed to use a private server in her home had she asked department officials in charge of information security, because it posed "significant security risks." This contradicts claims by Clinton that use of a home server was allowed and that no permission was needed. The report also criticized Clinton for not properly preserving emails she wrote and received on her personal account. According to the report, Clinton and eight of her deputies, including Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan and Huma Abedin, declined to be interviewed for the inspector general’s investigation. Clinton’s use of a private email server for State Department business is also the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation. We speak to journalist Michael Tracey.
All references to Australia have been removed from a UN report on climate change after the Environment Department expressed concerns it could cause confusion and negatively affect tourism.
The report, jointly published by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), the Union of Concerned Scientists and the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), initially contained a chapter on the Great Barrier Reef and sections on Kakadu and Tasmanian forests.
The EU continues taking baby steps towards a Digital Single Market, when what we need is a leap: An “anti-geoblocking” regulation that does not cover online video, like the one presented by the European Commission today, misses the mark. The Commission’s sector inquiry and the public consultation on the topic have proven just how widespread digital borders are in Europe today, and that Europeans overwhelmingly support broad action.
When Ethan Klein found out he was being sued by a fellow YouTube creator over a video he had produced for his channel, he never thought his personal legal battle would spark a backlash that raised tens of thousands of dollars and could change the way users of the video site fight lawsuits.
But three days after the lawsuit was made public by Klein on May 24, YouTube creators and their fans have collected more than $130,000 to help the embattled video star and his wife (and co-star) Hila fight back against a copyright claim by another YouTube user, Matt Hosseinzadeh. And with all that money, Klein, the 30-year-old founder of h3h3productions, now has his sights set on bigger things: protecting other YouTube creators who need a legal defense but lack his own stature.
As Klein tells it, the entire affair began when Hosseinzadeh sued him, alleging that a Klein video mocking Hosseinzadeh improperly used Hosseinzadeh’s content. In a video revealing the lawsuit, Klein vigorously defended himself, saying the footage he used was covered under fair use law.
The revelation that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s sex tape lawsuit against Gawker sent shockwaves through the media industry. Commentators had barely recovered from the $140 million in damages awarded to Hogan. Now they were grappling with a bigger question: Is this kind of financial arrangement even legal? Could it happen to them?
According to one of the former Facebook curators located by Gizmodo, the site that broke the story, the alleged political bias on the social network’s Trending Topics site amounted to a preference among the curators for outlets “like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN” instead of those “like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax.” Given the respective reputations of those media outlets, in the real world, that would look like simple prudence. But, presumably because a story headlined “Anonymous Source Alleged Intelligent News Judgment in ‘Trending’ Choices” would not have resulted in a fraction of number of page views, Gizmodo bannered its “scoop.”
There’s been wide-ranging criticism of the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) decision to stop showing visuals of property being destroyed by protesters, with some comparing it to media censorship during apartheid.
Today, the national broadcaster announced it will no longer be showing visuals of protesters destroying public property as this incites violence.
The SABC insists this is not self-censorship but rather a duty to ensure that such footage doesn’t encourage others to follow suit.
Freedom of expression groups and opposition parties have condemned the South African state broadcaster's (SABC) decision to stop showing violent anti-government protests, claiming the move disregarded the right to dissent in the country.
In a response to this critique, Moxie wrote about how he feels that innovation can not happen as quickly and easily as needs be with federated and decentralised structures. To prove his point, he argued that the premise that the internet could not have gotten to where it is without interoperable and federated protocols is false.
If you have $1 million just sitting around and dream of living out the premise to M. Night Shymalan’s psychological thriller The Village, have we got a deal for you.
An entire town, which was once part of the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance operation, includes 80 single-family homes, a fire station, a swimming pool and a bowling alley in picturesque rural West Virginia, is up for auction with bids starting at $1 million.
Now, at 650 pages, there's far too much to go into in depth here, but fortunately, as you can see from the table of contents...
you don't have to go very far before this takes a hard turn into "Dungeons and Dragons campaign/Classics major's undergraduate thesis" territory. The preface employs a comical number of metaphors to describe what the internet is and isn't - sometimes two a paragraph.
A version of this post titled “NSA’s ode to the Internet” originally appeared in the Cyber Saturday edition of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily tech newsletter.
Given our open-source/Linux reader base and many of our readers being very privacy-minded, Anonabox sent over their Tunneler and Pro products for us to try out. The Anonabox Tunneler is a WiFi VPN router and the Anonabox Pro is a WiFi Tor and VPN router.
A controversial surveillance company whose products have been detected in Iran and Sudan was recently issued a powerful encryption certificate by a US cybersecurity company. The certificate, and the authority that comes with it, could allow Blue Coat Systems to more easily snoop on encrypted traffic. But Symantec, the company that provided it, downplayed concern from the security community.
Blue Coat, which sells web-monitoring software, was granted the power in September last year, but it was only widely noticed this week.
The company's devices are used by both government and commercial customers for keeping tabs on networks or conducting surveillance. In Syria, the technology has been used to censor web sites and monitor the communications of dissidents, activists and journalists, The Washington Post reports.
Your smartphone can be easily hacked easily if you plug it in to charge via USB at a public place like an airport, cafe or on public transport.
Researchers at security firm Kaspersky Labs found that they could install a third-party application, like a virus, onto the phone via its USB cable connection to a computer. It took them under three minutes.
Facebook will begin tracking people without Facebook accounts across the web as the social media giant expands its advertising empire.
The company’s advertising network plans to install pieces of code known as “cookies” on internet user’s browsers, even if they do not have Facebook accounts, it has announced.
Cookies monitor the websites that internet browsers visit and are used to target adverts at users. For example, after looking for furniture online you may see an IKEA advert on another page.
A little more than 11 years ago, one of the creators of Tor, and the current President of the Tor project, Roger Dingledine, gave a talk for the members of the Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG). A video of the talk was recorded, and today, thanks to the great help from David Noble, I finally was able to publish the video of the talk on Frikanalen, the Norwegian open channel TV station where NUUG currently publishes its talks. You can watch the live stream using a web browser with WebM support, or check out the recording on the video on demand page for the talk "Tor: Anonymous communication for the US Department of Defence...and you.".
Less than three months before Lenca leader Berta Cáceres was brutally assassinated, the social arm of Desarollos Energeticos SA (DESA)–the Honduran company leading the Agua Zarca dam project Cáceres was campaigning against–signed a contract with USAID implementing partner Fintrac, a Washington DC based development contracting firm.
The DESA representative who was present for the public signing of the USAID agreement was none other than Sergio Rodríguez, the company’s Social Investment Manager, who is now accused of Cáceres’ assassination along with another former DESA employee and individuals with military ties. The arrests also included Douglas Geovanny Bustillo, a retired military officer and the former head of DESA’s security detail. The trial against the accused murderers began on Monday.
During much of her three years awaiting trial in New York’s Rikers Island jail, Candie Hailey was locked in a solitary confinement cell ventilated by a mold-covered air duct. The purpose of the vent was, of course, to pump fresh air into her 6-by-10-foot concrete room, but the mold infestation instead added to an array of hazards and discomforts that made her life unbearable at Rikers, where she made multiple attempts at suicide. “There was big, dark, gray, blackish mildew around the air vent and that’s where the air was coming from,” Hailey told me. “It’s what I was inhaling — it smelled like death.”
Two officers charged in the case surrounding Freddie Gray’s death for failing to get the 25-year-old medical help are now suing Baltimore’s top attorney for her decision to prosecute them.
Court documents filed by Sgts. Alicia White and William Porter claim that State Attorney Marilyn Mosby charged them “not for the purpose of prosecuting crimes that had allegedly been committed by White and Porter, but rather for purposes of quelling the riots in Baltimore.”
Both officers blame Mosby and the state for damaging their reputations. They’re seeking at least $75,000 for defamation and invasion of privacy, arguing that “they continue to suffer mental pain and anguish, and humiliation.”
If the Left is serious about changing society it has to appeal to the mainstream. To everyone’s shock, Occupy did that. But once people like the whites in Albuquerque started saying more than “We are the 99%,” many Leftists were outraged. This is naïve. How often do activists denounce American society as racist, sexist, heterosexist, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, or transphobic? Is it so hard to believe then that many who joined Occupy reflected those biases in their language, ideas, and even deeds? Rather than analyze how systemic oppression is reproduced at the molecular level and how to dismantle it, Taking Sides sows distrust, creates divisions, and encourages self-righteousness.
A Pakistani Islamic council has sparked outrage after suggesting husbands may “lightly beat” their wives as a form of discipline in their draft of a women’s protection bill.
In the draft bill, released on Thursday, the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) said it was permissible to beat a woman lightly should he need to punish her.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing Wen practices “emotional” and “extreme” politics because she is a single woman, according to a member of China’s political body that handles relations with the self-ruled island of Taiwan. The criticism comes at a time when tensions have been stoked between Beijing and Taipei officials after Tsai indicated that she supports formal Taiwan independence, which challenges Beijing’s “one-China” stance.
The French Open, the second Grand Slam of the tennis year, is underway at Roland Garros, which means that, like clockwork, it’s time to question whether women’s tennis players deserve equal pay — something they’ve had at all four major tournaments since 2007 and at the U.S. Open since 1973.
That argument has been particularly heated in recent months, sparked by (now former) Indian Wells CEO Raymond Moore saying women’s tennis players “ride the coattails of the men,” which No. 1 Novak Djokovic followed up by referring to the female athletes’ “hormones.” Earlier this month, Madrid tournament owner Ion Tiriac fueled the flames when he openly ogled women’s tennis players for having “long legs” but complained that he had to pay them so much money.
These comments inspired a recent Associated Press column: “Women need five-sets tennis to win equality battle.”
Music and video streaming services take a lot of bandwidth, and now that most people have cellular plans that charge by the amount of data they use, streaming becomes a lot less attractive. Even at home, a sizable percentage of U.S. broadband customers have data caps that work against streaming media displacing standard TV and radio.
Thus, the carriers and Internet service providers have come up with a new notion called zero rating, best known in the form of T-Mobile's BingeOn and Music Freedom programs.
Many Republican leaders in Congress loathe US rules protecting net neutrality, the principle that all content on the internet should be equally accessible—and they’re expressing their feelings by targeting the Federal Communications Commission, the agency charged with upholding those rules.
That much became clear this week when the GOP released its fiscal 2017 financial services appropriations bill, which slashes funding for the FCC by $69 million, and severely hobbles the agency’s ability to enforce its net neutrality rules, crack down on abusive “zero-rating” practices, and move ahead with reforms designed to open up the video set-top box market.
As the 69th World Health Assembly draws to a close, member states are in the process of approving a series of draft global health sector strategies for HIV, viral hepatitis, and sexually transmitted infections. And the issues involve some questions of intellectual property rights.
A closed-door drafting group this evening arrived seemingly easily at agreement on a resolution on broadening work on new ways to fund research and development into medical products, according to participants. The agreement includes the creation of a new expert committee on health R&D, and calls for a WHO proposal on a pooled fund, they said.
But while states were largely favourable to the new forms, money once against appears to be the shoal on which the ship is in danger of foundering.
[...]
The United States and United Kingdom – WHO’s two largest overall funders – endorsed the increased budget request. So did Germany, who’s delegate admonished the committee, “Let us not fool ourselves. We knew that this would not be cost-neutral.” Australia announced it is contributing $4.3 million ($6 million AUD) and Japan will donate $50 million over 5 years.
With the end of the annual World Health Assembly looming tomorrow, member states are working away behind closed doors to finalise a resolution on how the World Health Organization shall work with outside actors going forward.
This Kat was busy obtaining his daily fix of sports news on the BBC website when he spotted an unusual headline - 'Jose Mourinho Image Rights Hold Up Manchester United Deal.'
The Business Software Alliance, a trade group representing Adobe, Apple and Microsoft, is known to offer cash payments to people who help them find companies that run unlicensed software. Today we speak with an attorney who has represented more than 250 defendants in these cases, which are regularly triggered by disgruntled employees.
Our right to take photos of public art and buildings and share them on social media and photo sharing websites is under serious threat.
This right is called the Freedom of Panorama and the European Commission is discussing proposals that could remove it. This could put a huge burden on people sharing or using pictures they’ve taken that contain sculptures, buildings, and skylines.
Holiday photos, photos by professional street photographers, and images that sites like Wikipedia use to illustrate articles could all be badly affected.
If the artist or architect is alive or died in the last 70 years, you might have to ask for their permission before sharing your photos on social media or photo sharing websites. This would be a huge and unnecessary burden.
The Commission wants to harmonise the rules governing the sharing of theses pictures across the European Union. One of the big questions is about whether there should be Freedom of Panorama for commercial as well as non-commercial purposes. This might not seem controversial but individuals sharing pictures on Facebook, Flickr or Instagram would count as commercial sharing because the sites are commercial entities.
UK law currently allows the sharing of these pictures without asking permission – the so-called Freedom of Panorama. But lots of European countries don’t allow it. Because photos you share can be accessed from those countries, your photos could be blocked or removed in those countries. You could even be threatened with court action by the rightsholder of the public art or building.
Instead of placing restrictions on public photography, the EU should remove the current mess of laws and replace it with a simple Europe-wide rule allowing people to share images of public art, buildings and skylines for all purposes.