While some would argue that October 5, 1991 is the actual birthday of Linux (that was when prototype code first dropped), today marks the anniversary of when Linus Torvalds first revealed he was working on a modest "hobby" OS that would go on to "revolutionize the world." To celebrate, OMG! Ubuntu! has rounded up 27 interesting facts about Linux, which includes Steve Jobs offering Linus Torvalds a job in 2000 on the condition he stopped working on Linux (thankfully, he declined).
The Linux 4.19-rc1 kernel is expected to be released today and with that marks the end of feature development on this next kernel version. Here is a look at the new and improved features to be found in Linux 4.19.
Linux 4.19 has been an interesting cycle and was fairly eventful but some problematic pull requests led Linus Torvalds to calling it a horrible merge window From our original reporting over the past two weeks, highlights of the Linux 4.19 kernel include...
So two weeks have passed, and the merge window for 4.19 is over.
This was a fairly frustrating merge window, partly because 4.19 looks to be a pretty big release (no single reason), and partly just due to random noise. We had the L1TF hw vulnerability disclosure early in the merge window, which just added the usual frustration due to having patches that weren't public. That just shows just how good all our infrastructure for linux-next and various automated testing systems have become, in how painful it is when it's lacking.
At least we didn't actually have a lot of problems on that front in the mainline kernel, there seemed to be many more pain points in the backports.
We also had a report of a TLB shootdown bug come in during this merge window, and while the patches for ended up not being a huge problem, TLB invalidation issues is actually one of the things that stresses me out. They're really nasty to debug (thanks to Jann Horn for pinpointing this one), and our interfaces to the architecture specific routines are subtle and pretty complicated. And messy. I think the discussion will result in a few cleanups later, but timing could have been so much better for this.
Oh well. I guess I can partly just blame myself for having delayed 4.18 by a week, which just made everything happen during that first and busiest week of the merge window. Bad luck. Although even the second week - when things usually calm down - was also pretty busy this time around.
Anyway, on to the actual changes. And there' a lot of them. There's just a lot of things going on, and while this isn't the biggest release we've had (4.9 still keeps that crown), this does join 4.12 and 4.15 as one of the bigger kernel releases, at least just judging by number of commits in the merge window.
As usual, there's way too many patches to list even in shortlog format, but appended is my usual "mergelog" of people I merged from and a one-liner overview of the merge. There's actually a couple of pull requests that I might still look at after the merge window, but that are probably in the "there's always the next one" pile.
The "big picture" of the merge window looks pretty normal: just under two thirds of the changes are to drivers (gpu and network drivers being the bulk - as usual), with the rest being architecture updates (all the usual suspects), filesystems, core kernel and networking. There's a fair chunk of documentation and tooling updates too (selftests, tracing, perf..).
Anyway, go forth and test,
Linus
Linus Torvalds has officially kicked off the development cycle of the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel series today by releasing the first Release Candidate (RC).
It's been two weeks since the Linux 4.18 kernel series was launched, so the merge window for the next major release, Linux kernel 4.19, is now officially closed as Linus Torvalds announces today the availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) for public testing.
As expected, Linus Torvalds has closed the merge window for 4.19 and released Linux 4.19-rc1.
Longtime Red Hat developer Jerome Glisse has published his latest patches concerning the Heterogeneous Memory Management support, a.k.a. HMM.
Heterogeneous Memory Management was merged in Linux 4.14 as one of the kernel pieces sought after by NVIDIA and other vendors. HMM allows a process address space to be mirrored and system memory to be transparently used by any device process.
With many of the FreeDesktop.org projects having already transitioned from their CGit and hodgepodge of services over to Gitlab, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) trees appear to be up next.
Having already made the move this year to the new FreeDesktop.org Gitlab deployment has been Mesa, the X.Org Server, and many of the smaller repositories. This FreeDesktop Gitlab instance running on Google Compute Engine has been a big improvement for the project compared to their aging bare metal servers, their administration resources stretched thin, and Gitlab offering a modern UI compared to CGit and friends. Longer term, Gitlab should yield them more capabilities too around continuous integration and other modern development features.
Following Friday's release of Go 1.11, a Phoronix reader pointed out a new open-source Internet router software package written entirely in Go.
Router7 was started by a former OpenWRT user after he began running into problems and ended up deciding to develop his own router software than waiting for a Fiber7 DHCP server setup issue to be resolved. This Router7 software is written entirely in Golang and is capable of serving as a home Internet router platform with DHCPv4/DHCPv6, DNS, and other basic capabilities. Router7 is focused on maximizing Internet connectivity, safe/quick updates, and easy debugging support.
Earlier this year MIPS rolled out the I7200 processor core built on the new "nanoMIPS" architecture. The open-source enablement of this new CPU ISA continues to settle down while the latest accomplishment is support for this new architecture in QEMU.
The nanoMIPS ISA is intended to offer "high performance in substantially reduced code size" and still fulfill the needs of an embedded processor by incorporating all MIPS32 instructions and architecture modules. Yes, it's a 32-bit ISA and intended to co-exist in the embedded ecosystem with MIPS64.
Another week, another roundup of recent Linux app, utility and distro releases.
This week we’re taking in a variety of projects, including a popular terminal tool, a development update a famous Windows compatibility layer, and a Linux distro that many (myself included) forget existed!
As always, these are the releases that either didn’t merit their own dedicated post, or I simply didn’t get around to writing about in the week.
Altium’s Designer Gerber Viewer for Linux is an innovative open source Gerber viewer for Linux. Altium Designer Gerber Viewer is part of Altium Designer as an all-in-one tool. Now you can come up with your idea, design it and convert it to Gerber for viewing inside the software.
You no longer have to use the CAM export function to generate Gerber files for sending to PCB manufacturers. No more wasting of time exporting Gerber files to other 2D drafting and mechanical CAD tools. You no longer need to spend lots of time adding several notes. You no longer need to spend time creating illustrations.
When you generate Gerber files, others can view these files using any EDA tools. Designs can be quickly reviewed, and mistakes can be detected. You can now import Gerber files from other EDA tools on your Linux computer.
We knew that Valve was working on something like this, offering the possibility that Steam Linux users could play video games that have not been officially ported to the platform, that is, the majority of games available for Windows. But now not only has the existence of such a tool been confirmed, we can also test it now. The new Steam Play is basically a modified version of Wine created by Valve, called "Proton", an integrated directly in the Steam client.
It is a container based solution, so you have root privileges which means you can do much more than just use the gcloud tool.
You can for instance run Fedora! My project anyfed just got a small update and it is working in Google Cloud shell just fine.
Running total is a concept of summing data items from the beginning to till current stage. Running total can provide you glimpse of total values as the data sets grows. It mostly useful for may use cases, e.g. to track the total sales value till date, to track current account balance considering withdrawal and deposits and so on. This short tutorial will explain how to create running total column in LibreOffice Calc.
Action RPG Contingent from developer Dark Age Studios seems promising, with a planned Kickstarter coming sometime soon and Linux support is planned.
As in 2016, I entered the 2018 LOWREZJAM on itch.io, a game jam where you have to build a game which runs in a 64x64 pixel square. So, really small — the Game Boy was 160x144, or about six times as big. So you’ve not got a lot of space to do things, but then constraints are the mother of innovation and you do get some really interesting game concepts! So, here are my reviews (which are also posted to itch.io so the developers get to see them; you can only rate and review as part of the jam if you entered your own game, which I did.
I’ve only rated games which are browser playable, mainly because there are loads of entries and I have to find a way to cut them down somehow, the reviews are in no particular order, and I didn’t quite get to them all (I nearly did, so apologies if I didn’t get to yours). Some thoughts on the jam as a whole after the reviews.
It's been a wet and windy day here, so I blew the dust off my copy of Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime to share with the family and it's the single most bit of fun we've had all together with a PC game before.
It's an older game now, seeing as it release back in 2015 but don't let that put you off. There's a serious amount of fun to be had in this absolute gem of a game.
For those who love the classic RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, OpenRCT2 looks like a rather decent open source game engine to give it a new lease of life especially as it continues to be updated.
Chess is a recreational and competitive board game played between two players. It is a very popular game, played by millions across the world, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.
Chess has the virtue of being suitable for people of all ages. It has many positive attributes such as to help individuals develop their memory, improve and enhance their concentration, as well as logical thinking. It also promotes and improves imagination and creativity. Chess is one of those games that takes a few days to learn and the rest of your life to master, with the game being a never ending learning process, even for the top players.
Valve are now offering a chance to test a beta of the next version of Proton in their Steam Play system.
As a reminder: Steam Play is the system built into the Linux version of the Steam client to allow you to play Windows games on Linux. Compatibility varies from game to game, you can see the current titles that Valve have whitelisted in their original announcement.
To provide compatibility with a wide range of Windows-only games to all Linux users, a Beta version of the new and improved Steam Play is now available. It uses Proton, a modified distribution of Wine, to allow games which are exclusive to Windows to run on Linux and macOS operating systems.
Proton is an open source tool, allowing advanced users to alter the code to make their own local builds. The included improvements to Wine have been designed and funded by Valve, in a joint development effort with CodeWeavers.
In order to identify games that currently work great in this compatibility environment and solve the issues, if any, they are testing the entire Steam catalog. The list of games that they are enabling with this Beta release include: Beat Saber, Bejeweled 2 Deluxe, Doki Doki Literature Club!, DOOM, Fallout Shelter, FATE, FINAL FANTASY VI, and many more.
Valve announced this week that they are releasing a beta version of Steam Play Proton, an improved version of Steam Play that uses a modified version of Wine, that makes Windows games with no Linux compatibility now able to be installed and run via the Linux Steam Client.
Valve’s goal for releasing Proton is to let Linux Steam users enjoy access to a larger back catalog, and also allow future developers to easily leverage their work from other platforms to target Linux.
KDE developers have announced the release of a dedicated version of KDE Neon for the Pinebook, ARM architecture-based laptops that came out last year with some fanfare due to its tight price: $89. Now there is more than one Pinebook model and none costs $89, all are over $100 including shipping, but the invention - mobile hardware for the desktop - is here to stay and if the label was already used at the beginning Linux to introduce them, it is Linux that is now introduced to them and for everything big, with KDE Plasma.
And we are talking about equipment that assembles components such as 64-bit ARM CPU with quad-core at 1.2 GHz, 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of eMMC storage and an 11 or 14-inch TN LCD screen with a resolution of 1366 Ãâ 768. With the exception of the processor and the storage, they are specifications of a decade ago, but with which it is possible to offer a low cost device with full functionality. However, nobody thought to put Plasma there, right? Well, they have done it.
KDE developers remain on their spree of various usability enhancements and polishing. KDE contributor Nate Graham also continues doing a great job summarizing these enhancements on a weekly basis.
Time for your weekly dose of Usability & Productivity! It’s another big one, and there’s a ton of stuff winding through the review pipeline that didn’t quite make the cut this week.
So, Akademy happened for me this year. And it was AMAZING!
After like 15 hours traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Vienna, I was able to get to the pre-registration event after Akademy with my dear old friend Adriann de Groot aka [ade] , where I was meeting a lot of new KDE people and a few old ones that I met during my time at Randa Meetings 2016. Valorie received me with a great hug making me feel a lot welcome even with all my tiredness and jet lag. (Brazil is +5 hours for Vienna time)
Suppose you want to translate Dolphin File Manager into your language --say, Indonesian-- and quickly preview each change. You can do it as long as you know the basic workflow and commands. You will be able to translate the menubar, toolbar, configurations, and more to your language. Here's a simple guide that is very easy for anyone to try out and have fun.
You must (occasionally) be wondering which Desktop Environment is the best for Linux. And while most long-time Linux users have found their preferred desktop based on experience and computing purposes, some of us and including newbies are still stuck with the same question. I have switched to various Linux distros many times and frankly, all the Desktop Environments have their own advantages and disadvantages. Sticking to one of them depends entirely on the perspectives of the user and his preferences.
However, if you've recently just bought a new computer priced at medium range (say an Intel i5 processor with 8GB RAM and equipped with Solid State Drive) and you're lurking around the Internet searching for a cool Linux distro, so you can get the best Linux experience on your new awesome hardware. Then I recommend trying Linux with GNOME desktop due to its innovative look and ease of use.
GParted is the best graphical disk partition utility for Linux. It is capable of creating, resizing, deleting partitions in Disks, USB drives. Based on libparted, it supports almost all popular file systems.
Welcome to The Roundup #9, your bytes of Solus news. In this roundup, we are focusing on the continued modernizing of our software stack, improved resilience, and what is coming up this week!
The popular Solus Linux distribution has experienced a busy week of updates but more changes are on the way to this desktop-focused OS.
GeckoLinux 150 was supposed to be the cure to all openSUSE Leap 15 ailments. It is not. I was expecting flawless results on all fronts, but then there were big issues with multimedia playback and associated performance, visual glitches, imperfect smartphone support, and of course, the graphics driver bomb. This hardly warrants the effort. I also didn't mention various crashes - the kgreeter crash on logout, every time - but they were there, too. Samba issues, printing issues, and the list goes on. The good things are nice and commendable, but there must be a stable base.
However, the real dealbreaker is the Nvidia setup. This is supposed to just work. If it works in a dozen other distros on this same box, then it should continue working. And I'm certain this has nothing to do with Nvidia drivers but with how the repo contents were compiled and packaged. Then, no easy rescue, none of that SUSE enterprise-like resilience. Finally, you do gain some, but not enough to justify the experience. I will sample Gecko sometime in the future again, but the bad karma around openSUSE remains. So long.
After eight months of work, the UBports Foundation is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-4.
This release features Ubuntu 16.04 as its base (previously 15.04), bringing security fixes and greater stability to unseen corners of the operating system. We've also upgraded from Qt 5.4 to 5.9, bringing a number of improvements. Check out the "What's New" section below for more information on what's been changed or updated in this release!
Users who have Ubuntu Touch OTA-3 will not be receiving this update automatically. See "How do I get it?" below for more information.
Raspberry Pi Trading has launched a $20 Power-over-Ethernet HAT board for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ that delivers up to 15W and ships with a small fan.
The Power-over-Ethernet HAT that was promised with the release of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ SBC has arrived. The $20, 802.3af-compliant “Raspberry Pi PoE HAT” allows delivery of up to 15W over the RPi 3 B+’s USB-based GbE port without reducing the port’s up to 300Mbps bandwidth.
TL;DR: Don’t be a passive consumer of FOSS. It’s going to kill the FOSS community or change it in bad ways. Contribute in any way described in this article, even really basic ones, but contribute daily or on a very regular basis.
I have been a system engineer for more than 10 years now, almost exclusively working with GNU/Linux systems. I’m also deeply involved in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community for a long time and I spend a lot of time on social networks (mostly Twitter and Mastodon these days). And some behaviours always piss me off.
I've been running a #Friendica node for several years now. Some months ago I also started to run a #Hubzilla hub as well. Some days ago I also installed #Mastodon on a virtual machine, because there was so much hype about Mastodon in the last days due to some changes Twitter made in regards of 3rd party clients.
All of those social networks do have their own focus:
Friendica: basically can connect to all other social networks, which is quite nice because there exists historically two different worlds: the Federation (Diaspora, Socialhome) and the Fediverse (GnuSocial, Mastodon, postActiv, Pleroma). Only Friendica and Hubzilla can federate with both: Federation and Fediverse. Friendicas look&feel appears sometimes a little bit outdated and old, but it works very well and reliable.
Hubzilla: is the second player in the field of connecting both federations, but has a different focus. It is more of one-size-fits-all approach. If you need a microblogging site, a wiki, a cloud service, a website, etc. then Hubzilla is the way to go. The look&feel is a little bit more modern, but there are some quirks that appears a little odd to me. A unique feature for Hubzilla seems to be the concept of "nomadic accounts": you can move to a different hub and take all your data with you. Read more about that in the Hubzilla documentation.
Next I joined the Mozilla to work on the Firefox platform partnerships. It has been fascinating working with this team, which originated from the Netscape browser in the 1990's and transformed into an open-source non-profit focusing on the advancement of internet technology in conjunction with their former competitors, Microsoft, Google and Apple.
Twenty years ago, the Open Source framework was published, delivering what would be the most significant trend in software development since that time. Whether you want to call it "free software" or "open source", ultimately, it’s all about making application and system source codes widely available and putting the software under a license that favors user autonomy.
According to Ovum, open source is already the default option across several big data categories ranging from storage, analytics and applications to machine learning. In the latest Black Duck Software and North Bridge's survey, 90% of respondents reported they rely on open source “for improved efficiency, innovation and interoperability,” most commonly because of “freedom from vendor lock-in; competitive features and technical capabilities; ability to customize; and overall quality.” There are now thousands of successful open source projects that companies must strategically choose from to stay competitive.
Personally, I have a harder go of it because very little of my open source software is appealing to the businesses that have the budget to sponsor them. Instead, I rely on the (much smaller and less stable) recurring donations of my individual users. When I started accepting these, I did not think that it was going to work out. But today, I’m making far more money from these donations than I ever thought possible2, and I see an upwards trend which will eventually lead me to being able to work on open source full time. If I were able to add only a few business-level sponsorships to this equation, I think I would easily have already reached my goals.
There are other options for securing financing for open source, some of which Redis has already been exploring. Selling a hosted and supported version of your service is often a good call. Offering consulting support for your software has also worked for many groups in the past. Some projects succeed with (A)GPL for everyone and BSD for a price. These are all better avenues to explore - making your software proprietary is a tragic alternative that should not be considered.
DRM is causing a lot of vibrant discussions this week on the FreeBSD mailing list... And no, it's not even Digital Rights Management but rather colorful commentary about their Direct Rendering Manager code and plans for FreeBSD 12.
It began by an announcement made back on 21 August that DRM/DRM2 has been removed from the upcoming FreeBSD 12.0 release. For Direct Rendering Manager kernel graphics driver support moving forward, users should use graphics/drm-legacy-kmod if running really old graphics hardware otherwise one of the drm-stable-kmod / drm-next-kmod / drm-devel-kmod options from FreeBSD Ports.
Regarding CVE-2018-15473: a few people have asked why we just committed a fix for this without any secrecy or treating it as a security problem. The reason is that I and the other OpenSSH developers don't consider this class of bug a significant vulnerability - it's a partial disclosure of non-sensitive information.
We have and will continue to fix bugs like this when we are made aware of them and when the costs of doing so aren't too high, but we aren't going to get excited about them enough to apply for CVEs or do security releases to fix them. The following explains our reasoning.
Using two sets of weak, easy-to-guess usernames and passwords, a security researcher accessed an internal Sprint staff portal. Because the portal’s log-in page didn’t use two-factor authentication, the researcher — who did not want to be named — navigated to pages that could have allowed access customer account data.
I meant to write this post much closer to the end of Hacker Summer Camp, but to be honest, I’ve been completely swamped with getting back into the thick of things. However, I kept feeling like things were “unfinished”, so I thought I’d throw together at least a few thoughts from this year.
The Seagate Media Server is a UPnp / DLNA Network Attached Storage mechanism incorporated into the Seagate Personal Cloud for individual level use. In an advisory on the IoT security bug hunt website Summer of Pwnage, several SQL injection vulnerabilities in the Seagate Media Server were discovered and discussed, risking the retrieval and modification of personal data stored in the database used by the media server.
The Seagate Personal Cloud is a cloud storage facility that is used to store photos, videos, and other kinds of multimedia in its media server. As personal data is uploaded into this cloud, it is protected with authorization checks and password security, but within its layout, a public folder exists to which unauthorized users have the right to upload data and files.
In an advisory published on the Confluence website maintained by the ASF community, a remote code execution vulnerability in the Apache Struts 2.x was discovered and elaborated upon by Yasser Zamani. The discovery was made by Man Yue Mo of the Semmle Security research team. The vulnerability has since been given the label CVE-2018-11776. It is found to affect the Apache Struts versions 2.3 to 2.3.34 and 2.5 to 2.5.16 with possible remote code execution exploit opportunities.
Systemd will now resort to using Intel's RdRand hardware random number generator directly if the Linux kernel is unable to provide the init system with sufficient entropy.
This systemd change stems from the issue of the Linux boot process getting stuck if there's not enough entropy due to a kernel change to eliminate CVE-2018-1108 over early boot processes potentially having weak random seed data. With systemd's random-util change, systemd will now use RdRand directly if the kernel can't provide any randomness, rather than having to block/stall.
Epic Games’ decision to make its popular game Fortnite available on Android through its own website instead of Google Play Store seems to have backfired.
Google has publicly disclosed an extremely dangerous security flaw in Fortnite’s installer that allows attackers to download anything on an Android phone.
Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American citizen, thinks the government is trying to kill him. And he might be right.
Kareem’s story, recently chronicled in Rolling Stone, neatly captures the havoc that the war on terror has wreaked on the legal system and the dangers of abandoning legal traditions that have served us well for centuries.
Kareem resides overseas and is struggling to determine why he is apparently on the government’s secret “kill list,” which targets terror suspects for drone strikes. Kareem finds that objects in his vicinity tend to explode with some frequency, and he has taken the issue to court, arguing that the American government cannot blow him up without due process.
On Sept. 1 the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington will present the story of how CIA pilots of the Republic of China Air Force (Taiwan) “Black Bat Squadron” flew a daring nighttime mission to deploy secret surveillance equipment near a Chinese nuclear weapons base in 1969.
A senior US Army official warned Tuesday that drones are “not a panacea” because “drones don't smell, they don't feel” and can’t deliver the same battlefield intelligence humans can. However, a leading anti-war activist told Sputnik, don’t expect this to mean drone warfare will be in any way curtailed in the future.
"There is value to having an unmanned aerial system teamed with a manned system," Gen. James McConville, Vice Chief of Staff of the US Army, said at the National Defense Industrial Association's 2018 Army Science & Technology Symposium and Showcase in Washington, DC, Tuesday. But, he warned, "it's not a panacea."
[...]
She noted how Defense Department officials boast that "we're going to spend a lot of money, this is the future of warfare, we're going to use these unmanned systems, working with manned and unmanned together, and maybe unmanned and unmanned together."
"Congress just approved a 700-plus billion dollar 'defense' budget and a lot of money for drone technology, and all the drone manufacturers are now getting richer and richer. And it's not just the United States — dozens of countries have drones, many countries have armed drones, and it's just — it's a Pandora's box." And with the US using drones to drop bombs on countries it's not even technically at war with — Pakistan being one example — how long will it be before this practice spreads?
"If you fly your drone anywhere near a wildfire, you could get someone killed," said the warning.
FAA and aviation law experts advised federal, state and local agencies that due diligence is needed before deploying anti-drone systems.
The FAA, which has been testing drone detection systems with airports around the country since 2016, cautioned that federal laws can preclude the use of some systems.
A 1951 letter to the Central Intelligence Agency from a former spymaster warned of Russian infiltration in North America’s northern territories. A copy of the letter, which postdates the beginning of the joint CIA, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Air Force stay behind program, was sent from the Assistant CIA Director directly to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, with a copy being sent to the leadership of G-2 (Army intelligence). As described by the CIA’s cover letter, “the Soviet threat to Alaska and Canada is discussed in very general terms.” Despite the letter’s “general terms,” its information and warning were considered important enough to send to Hoover in a package marked SECRET, and it remained classified until late 2018 - 67 years after it was written.
The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the little-acknowledged US government body employing thousands of journalist and media professionals, has been rebranded the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM).
In a statement, the newly-minted USAGM's CEO John F. Lansing boasted the organization operated "far beyond traditional broadcast mediums", such as television and radio — the name change was thus necessary as "the term ‘broadcasting' does not accurately describe what we do".
However, the new moniker arguably doesn't accurately describe what the organization does either.
Reggae legend Bob Marley tragically died aged only 36-years-old, leading music lovers world-wide to grieve.
The Jamaican icon’s life and career were cut short following a four-year battle with cancer.
However, startling claims have emerged of a deathbed confession made by an ex-CIA officer, where he admitted to the killing.
79-year-old Bill Oxley is alleged to have claimed the murder of Marley among 17 other assassinations for the American government between 1974 and 1985, at a time when he said the CIA “was a law unto itself.”
Defense attorney Titus Nichols, who was part of the team of attorneys that represented former NSA contractor Reality Winner, contends the Espionage Act makes it very difficult for a person accused of violating the law to defend themselves.
In an interview with Shadowproof, Nichols also suggested Winner was treated more extraordinarily than other criminal cases. However, generally, he said Winner and the legal defense team were “satisfied with the result” because “the judge accepted the plea deal” and “directed her to be placed” at Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas.
Winner pled guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act when she disclosed an NSA report that alleged Russian hackers targeted United States voter registration systems in the 2016 election.
Winner was sentenced on August 23 to five years and three months in prison. She was in detention for one year and 83 days prior to the judge accepting the deal. That time served will count toward her sentence, according to Nichols.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange remains in solitary confinement inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was granted asylum in 2012 against the threat of extradition to the United States for his publishing activities. In recent months, Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno, under pressure from the U.S. began threatening to evict this political refugee.
In response to this dire situation, people across the political spectrum began to form solidarity through #Unify4J, an online platform to organize a social media movement in support of Assange. Among those include prominent Trump’s supporters. In the midst of Trump administration’s draconian measures on immigrants and empowerment of white supremacist groups, the idea of working with Trump’s key allies triggered reaction among the left. Recently, Classconscious.org, an outlet spearheading global civic action for Assange’s freedom, scrutinized the idea of uniting with ultra right forces that back Trump and urged the movement to draw a line.
[...]
Without understanding the essence of this new invention, people’s attitudes toward WikiLeaks swing back and forth. Whether it is capitalism or socialism, Democrats or Republicans, many demand WikiLeaks to demonstrate its allegiance to their political ideology and support their preferred candidate. They conflate the invention with the inventor, becoming obsessed with Assange.
One publication put him in a category of a leftist, while another turns him into a right wing. People speculate and get overly attached to Assange’s political views. Ultimately, the opinion of this inventor does not and should not matter. In the same way that people don’t have to know who invented electricity to have a light or a combustion engine to drive a car, everyone can benefit from this new journalism and use it to enrich society at large.
Yet, for those who still feel the need to know, Assange’s thoughts are not shaped by a conventional political dichotomy of left and right. The ideas that conceived WikiLeaks originated from the philosophy of cypherpunks, an electronic mailing list that advocates privacy through the use of strong cryptography.
Reality Winner stood in a county jail in rural Georgia, phone receiver pressed to her ear, staring at a brick wall and racking her brain, trying to remember the minimum sentence for violating Chapter 18, Section 793(e) of the U.S. Criminal Code. She’d signed papers acknowledging the penalty so many times — it was a requirement for anyone who handled classified information — but whatever recess of her mind the details were tucked away in, she was having trouble accessing it.
The date was June 4th, 2017. Winner was 25 years old, blond, blue-eyed, 5-foot-5, approximately 145 pounds, according to an FBI search warrant executed the day before. She’d spent exactly one night in jail. She didn’t fully recognize it yet, but life as she knew it — her day job as a subcontractor for the National Security Agency, the yoga classes she taught in her spare time, the date she’d missed because of her arrest — was rapidly slipping away from her.
Winner worked as a linguist and translator in Arabic and Farsi with the National Security Administration in Fort Meade, Maryland.
NSA whistleblower Reality Winner was sentenced Thursday to five years and three months in prison—the longest sentence ever imposed in federal court for leaking government information to the media. Twenty-six-year-old Reality Winner is the first person to be sentenced under the Espionage Act since President Trump took office. Reality Winner was arrested by FBI agents at her home in Augusta, Georgia, on June 3, 2017, two days before The Intercept published an exposé revealing Russian military intelligence conducted a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software company just days before the U.S. presidential election last November.
African cities generally use less electricity than their European equivalents, as people own fewer appliances and have greater need for thrift. Jet engines are essentially the same as turbines used for electricity generation, and the engines on a single jumbo would power a small African city had they generators attached. Remember that next time you fly.
Worldwide aviation emissions pump slightly more pollution into the atmosphere than the entire United Kingdom economy, and aviation emissions continue relentlessly to increase year after year. Air transport is simply far too cheap for the damage it causes and the resources it consumes. You cannot cause more damage to the Earth’s atmosphere with €£30 worth of resources, than by buying a €£30 Ryanair ticket to Barcelona. If you spend that €£30 on fuel for your diesel car, or on coal and burn it in your garden, you will not come close to the damage caused by your share of emissions on that Ryanair flight.
The fundamental reason air travel has expanded to be so harmful is the international understanding that tax and duty is not charged on aviation fuel – unlike vehicle, train or maritime fuel. Even citizens of Saudi Arabia or Venezuela no longer can access fuel as cheaply as you do in effect when you fly.
The Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (Zacc) is reported to be investigating former Minister of Finance, Tendai Biti over a transaction which took place during the Government of National Unity (GNU) era. This comes after the National Social Security Authority (Nssa) alleged that Biti had unprocedurally ordered the social authority to release $30 million to Renaissance Bank between 2009 and 2013. Rennaisance is now defunct.
THE Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission is investigating former Finance Minister Mr Tendai Biti over a $30 million deal between the National Social Security Authority and the now defunct Renaissance Bank.
This comes at a time Zacc has stepped up the fight against corruption by hiring 30 lawyers, forensic auditors and investigators. The anti-graft body has also opened provincial offices countrywide.
Shell companies, pseudonyms, shady lawyers, and secrecy: The president’s and his lawyer's business practices match the classic pattern of suspicious activity.
William A. Galston’s prescription to cure wage stagnation—expanded government wage subsidies—would be worse than the disease (“Wage Stagnation is Everyone’s Problem”, op-ed Aug. 15). Employers will quickly incorporate the expected subsidies into their salary planning activities. Because subsidies won’t change the market price for labor, it is more likely that they will be used to offset current wages as to raise them. What business wouldn’t want the government to pick up part of its labor costs? Once embedded, the subsidies will become a permanent part of the economic landscape, forever misallocating labor to jobs and...
If you are like most people I know, you quite reasonably hate Donald Trump. You loathe him for accelerating the climate crisis and the destruction of a livable environment, the biggest issue of our or any time (since nothing else we care about is going to matter on a dead planet). You detest hate him for being a racist, a nativist, a sexist, an arch-authoritarian, a gross and plutocratic oligarch. a record-setting pathological liar, and an agent of what can fairly be called “creeping fascism.”
These aren’t the reasons that much if not most of the U.S. ruling-class disapproves of Trump. Let’s be candid. The lion’s share of the nation’s financial and corporate masters have long been comfortable with: dog-whistling racism and nativism as a Machiavellian political tool; the relentless oligarchic smiting of democracy; the reckless plunder and pollution of the natural and social commons; the upward concentration wealth and money through various means including giant bailouts (as under Bush43 and Obama44) and big tax cuts for the rich (as under Bush 43 and Trump45 last year).
President Donald Trump sent multiple tweets Friday morning, attacking Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not investigating corruption on the "other side."
"‘Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.' Jeff, this is GREAT, what everyone wants, so look into all of the corruption on the "other side" including deleted Emails, Comey lies & leaks, Mueller conflicts, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr……" Trump tweeted. The quote Trump referenced was from a statement Sessions released Thursday, where the attorney general defended his tenure at the Justice Department. Sessions released the statement after the president attacked him during a "Fox and Friends" interview, which aired earlier Thursday morning.
President Trump publicly pressured Attorney General Jeff Sessions to "look into all of the corruption" of his adversaries Friday morning, after Sessions issued a rare statement Thursday saying the Justice Department will "not be improperly influenced by political considerations." Sessions' statement Thursday appeared to be a direct response to Mr. Trump's claim on Fox & Friends Thursday that Sessions "never took control" of the DOJ.
Mr. Trump has long pressured his attorney general — in a very public way on Twitter — to investigate Hillary Clinton and current and former top Justice Department officials he dislikes. But those urgings have intensified in recent days, as many in the president's former circle face charges. On Tuesday, former longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance law and claimed the president directed him to take the actions to do so. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was found guilty on eight counts related to bank fraud.
President Donald Trump has returned fire in a dispute with his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, calling on him to examine what Trump described as "all of the corruption" of Trump's critics and those investigating him, including Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and the special counsel Robert Mueller.
US President Donald Trump has continued to engage in a public spat with his own top law enforcer, Jeff Sessions, accusing him of being "unfair" for applying "double standard" in prosecuting suspects.
In a Friday morning rant on social media, Trump complained that a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor is getting 63 months in jail over "classified information".
"Gee, this is 'small potatoes compared to what Hillary Clinton did! So unfair Jeff, Double Standard," the US president wrote, naming his Democrat opponent in the 2016 presidential election.
An Ambassador is evidently not as important as a Scottish First Minister, but there is one interesting similarity. You get to live in a palatial Residence at public expense, and you host numerous social events there, from intimate lunches to grand dinners to receptions for many hundred people. Indeed as a diplomat you do this throughout your career – as an Ambassador, Deputy High Commissioner, First Secretary and even Second Secretary I hosted many scores of such events in my home, and in every case was supported by office and domestic staff who worked under me, both British and local.
The U.S. is now a endless machine for war profiteering and endless war itself. Simultaneously a hyper Imperialist machine directed toward global hegemony. Domestically it is a McCarthyesque empire of propaganda and censorship and mass incarceration.
[...]
Many of these bases are as large as small cities. Camp Liberty in Iraq has concrete sidewalks, traffic signals, spas and cinemas as well as coffee shops and Burger Kings. Generals and Admirals employ private jets, and siphon off taxpayer money for vacations at luxury resorts and shopping trips for their wives and family. The bookeeping has been described as functionally fictive. The vast amounts of monies misplaced or unaccounted for is in the trillion of dollars. Everything….from shower heads to gym equipment, to electrical cable is from private firms that usually have spent small fortunes lobbying Pentagon officials or even state department higher ups to *win* these contracts. So ponder that a moment: TRILLIONS of dollars. When anyone asks why *we* are still in Afghanistan after 17 years, this is but one of the answers.
Meanwhile, media critics Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson offered this pre-spin news brief—titled “Don’t Let the Media Erase McCain’s Far Right Legacy“—as a warning against the inevitable narrative that will dominate the coming days in which efforts to venerate the lawmaker will steadfastly ignore the sizable and documented damage his political career left in his wake:
Ex-Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado now runs the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting, a federal agency that creates pro-American "news" and blasts it in the vague direction of Cuba. It would be perhaps inaccurate to say the OCB's stations — Radio Martí, TV Martí, and Martí Noticias — "broadcast" in Cuba, because even the U.S. government admits the Cuban government is easily able to jam the signals.
Critics argue that as bad as the Castros are, the federal government's ongoing, near-slapstick attempts to sabotage the administration have done little but ratchet up the tension between the two nations for no real reasons other than spite and force of habit.
Rumours that the film's script was the source of the disagreement have been reported, with producers alleged to be unhappy with the decision to focus on contemporary political tensions with Russia and a "modern-day Cold War".
However one industry source told the Telegraph the split was due to a fall out over whether to cast Tomasz Kot as the lead villain. The 41-year-old Polish actor stars in Cold War, a love story set in 1950s Europe, and was described as a "left-field" decision for a Bond enemy.
"Craig has a big say in all the casting decisions. None of the Bond girls have been chosen without his say so," the source said.
Theatre artists in 15 cities across the U.S. will unite during Banned Books Week (September 23–29) for Banned Together 2018, a series of “censorship cabarets” featuring material from plays and musicals that have been censored or challenged on American stages.
Organized by the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund, the non-profit organization that advocates on behalf of writers and other theatre artists facing censorship, the concert series will kick off September 23 in Atlanta, continuing throughout the week with performances taking place in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, Nashville, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and more.
Social media companies, being privately owned businesses, can establish their own terms of use and enforce them as they see fit. The problem arises when they wield the massive platform they’ve created to push or silence a certain narrative. Many people rely solely on social media for their news, whether it be from Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, etc.. All of these outlets have displayed a tangible bias against conservative viewpoints. Reddit “curates” their front page content, showing favor towards liberal articles. Twitter allegedly “shadowbans” conservative accounts. Facebook filters their news, and is now banning conservative accounts.
In 2002 , CNN reported fake news that there were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. This was part of former President George W. Bush’s narrative to rally public support for the Iraq War. To Facebook, Jones may have reported a false and offensive story, but CNN’s false reporting helped push Americans into an unnecessary and ungodly war, which is considerably worse than any consequence Jones may have fostered.
Recent First Amendment rulings by the Supreme Court could force courts and university administrators to take a closer look at controversial practices that have marginalized certain political views – often conservative ones – on campus.
t seems like each week brings yet another example of strange and amateurish Facebook censorship. Last Friday morning, the immensely popular PragerU platform tweeted that Facebook had blocked access to its videos. PragerU screen-capped the proof. By the evening, Facebook reported that it had “mistakenly” removed the videos and was restoring access.
Then, yesterday, journalist and bestselling author Salena Zito reported that Facebook seemed to be censoring a story she wrote for the New York Post detailing why many Trump supporters won’t be shaken by the Paul Manafort conviction or the Michael Cohen plea deal. Some of her readers reported that it was being marked as “spam.” Others told her that Facebook was reporting that the article “did not follow” its “Community Standards.”
One year ago this week, the World Socialist Web Site published an open letter to search monopoly Google demanding that it end its censorship of the internet.
The letter documented that a change in Google’s search algorithms that the company claimed was aimed at promoting “authoritative” news sources had led to a substantial decline in search traffic to left-wing, socialist and anti-war sites. Google, the letter from WSWS International Editorial Board Chairperson David North stated, was “engaged in political censorship of the Internet.”
One year later, it is clear that the allegations against Google were both correct and extremely prescient. The measures taken by Google initiated a sweeping system of corporate-state censorship adopted by all the US technology monopolies, including Facebook and Twitter. A campaign that began under the pretext of combatting “Russian meddling” and “fake news” is ever more openly targeting left-wing views.
The latest and most extreme attack on democratic rights came Tuesday, when Facebook announced that it has removed hundreds of user accounts and pages, many opposing the crimes of the American, Saudi, and Israeli governments in the Middle East, claiming they were the result of “influence campaigns” by Iran and Russia.
Secure Open Access addresses void created by Google, Amazon decision to disallow domain fronting, company says.
Wickr has added a new Secure Open Access capability to its instant messaging app, which the company says enables encrypted communications that is far more resilient to Internet traffic restrictions and censorship attempts than typical domain-fronting approaches.
The new feature is based on the open source Psiphon Internet censorship circumvention tool developed by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab for users of Windows and mobile devices. It uses domain fronting as just one of multiple techniques, including SSH and VPN technology, for directing encrypted traffic around blocking attempts.
"Use Signal, use Tor" remains the gold standard for securing personal communication, but they are not a good fit for enterprise deployments where corporations want to use mobile device management (MDM) software to provision thousands of employee devices. A new partnership between secure messaging service Wickr and censorship circumvention tool Psiphon proposes that enterprises instead "use Wickr, use Psiphon."
Wickr’s latest solution is a partnership with the circumvention service Psiphon, which will be available to enterprise users starting today and rolling out to free users in the weeks to come. Similar to a VPN, Psiphon will disguise Wickr traffic through proxies and other routing protocols designed to make the traffic hard to spot and even harder to block.
On Thursday, Wickr announced that paying, and soon free, users will be able to route their Wickr traffic through a network used to circumvent internet censorship, which could be useful for users in Iran, Russia, or perhaps China.
Encrypted collaboration app Wickr has added a feather to its cap with a partnership with Psiphon, provider of smart VPN tools. Wickr will use Psiphon’s tech to guarantee your packets get where they need to go regardless of whether you’re at home, at a cafe with bad Wi-Fi or at a cafe with bad Wi-Fi in China.
The idea is that the user shouldn’t have to be auditing their own connection to be sure their apps will work properly. That can be a matter of safety, such as a poorly secured access point; connectivity, such as one where certain ports or apps are inoperable; or censorship, like requesting data from a service banned in the country you’re visiting.
Encrypted chat apps aim to keep you communicating securely, but they have a problem: Some governments want to block them from operating entirely. What's more, some parts of their services can be easily blocked on a local level by anyone with a Wi-Fi network.
To keep conversations flowing, encrypted communications app maker Wickr said Thursday it's implementing new tools that make its app of the same name immune to blocking attempts. The company will partner with software maker Psiphon, the brainchild of anticensorship researchers at the Citizen Lab, to roll out Wickr Open Access.
Encrypted chat apps are being heavily targeted by government organizations, and one of the most popular victims is Telegram. Wickr seeks to evade censorship laws and any state’s ability to block traffic to and from its servers at a national level. Most of the government organizations order ISPs to block traffic from the official servers of the apps. However, if the data is untraceable, it becomes highly difficult to identify the traffic and block it.
Wickr has partnered with Psiphon to include anti-blocking mechanisms. The added anti-blocking features will be available to only enterprise users for now, and it will be made available to free users in the coming weeks. While the new anti-blocking technology made by Psiphon offers features similar to that of a VPN, traffic is routed through proxies and complex routing protocols to make the data almost untraceable.
Wickr, a private, secure messaging company, has teamed up with Psiphon (previously), a spinout from Citizen Lab (previously) to allow its users to communicate even when they are behind national firewalls.
Messaging platforms had long used "domain fronting" -- whereby secure messaging traffic was undetectably mixed in with traffic from Amazon, Google and others -- to beat national firewalls, but these were largely discontinued by the major platforms in the face of threats of censorship by authoritarian governments.
Wickr proposes using Psiphon (which uses a variety of techniques to circumvent censorship) as an alternative to domain fronting, initially rolling it out for paid business users, with a promise to extend the feature to all users in the near future.
Youtube has removed one of her videos, published in 2012, and given her video channel a "strike."
After three "strikes," she could be shut down for good.
"Basically it will mean it will silence your voice on the Internet for anybody to see your video. That's a problem," she warns.
Taylor is the founder of the New Century Foundation, which “purports to show the inferiority of blacks to whites,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Taylor describes himself as a “racialist” who believes in “racial realism.” Taylor alleged that Twitter won’t allow him and his publication “to respectfully share their views on its open platform.”
I recently accompanied my son to his first university open day. He wants to study politics and was inspired by the lecturers he met. Unfortunately, just before we left, he picked up a copy of the student newspaper and his excitement turned to disappointment. A controversial YouTube star he’s interested in had been invited to speak on campus, but the debate had been cancelled.
Hours before the event was to take place, the students’ union decreed that a neutral chairperson was needed, and no one suitable could be found. There had been no recourse to the law and no charges of hate speech. No doubt those convinced that campus free speech controversies are fabricated will shrug and say this is bureaucracy, not censorship. But a speaker some wanted to hear, a debate that had been months in the planning, was halted.
In Hate, Nadine Strossen brings wisdom garnered from decades at the forefront of arguing for civil liberties to bear on the polarised and often inflammatory discussion of free speech. Her central contention, that hate speech laws are “at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive”, is well made. She argues that hate speech should be met by more speech, “counterspeech”, rather than legal restrictions.
The ACLU is seemingly concerned about social media censorship.
In his conversation with HuffPost, the director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, Ben Wizner, drew parallels to how the situation might play out if the government were in charge of determining what is considered hate speech.
China has become a very hostile nation for cryptocurrency. It is a very worrisome trend, but it appears there is nothing that can be done about it. In another crackdown, the country is now targeting WeChat content pertaining to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Dorsey had been reluctant to commit to an appearance, even amid reports that Congress was preparing to subpoena him.
The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) has condemned a coordinated move to block its channels on social media platforms, describing it as a "clear example of censorship" aimed at preventing the dissemination of truth and alternative viewpoints online.
In a Saturday statement, the IRIB World Service said "stifling independent media" amounts to a "political scandal" taking place in the age of communications and freedom of press.
On Thursday, Google removed 39 YouTube channels linked to the Iranian state broadcaster. Google terminated those accounts, along with six blogs on its Blogger service and 13 Google+ accounts linked with Iran. The move came after Twitter and Facebook also blocked hundreds of accounts on suspicion of possible ties with Iran.
Tehran, Aug 25 (Prensa Latina) Iran condemned today the international censorship of its media on social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google Plus.
The foreign service of the Radio and Television of the Islamic Republic of Iran issued a statement, which expresses its strongest protest against the blockade of several accounts in the country in internet.
They set up phony news sites with stories ripped from other sources, backing up their state-sponsored agenda. They stole photos for their social media profiles and made up names to catfish unsuspecting victims. They formed an incestuous web of promotion across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Reddit, and other platforms. They seemed to have a thing for Bernie Sanders. And then they got caught.
Yes, that's the story of the infamous Russian trolls who spread divisive content throughout the 2016 presidential campaign season. But it just as easily applies to the recently discovered propaganda network that Facebook and Google have linked to Iran's state media corporation, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. They and Twitter have since deleted hundreds of accounts between them, thanks to a tipoff from vigilant researchers at the cybersecurity firm FireEye.
Big Tech corporations in the United States have tightened their social media dragnet, censoring accounts that criticize the US government and its allies.
In a Russiagate hysteria promoted incessantly by the US government and corporate media, social media accounts that were identified by shady private cybersecurity firms as supposed “Russian trolls” were targeted first. Then pro-Venezuelan government websites like the state-funded media outlet TeleSUR English and even the independent Venezuela Analysis had their Facebook pages temporarily removed.
Now Silicon Valley has set its sights on Iran. While the Donald Trump administration is banning Iranians from traveling and imposing suffocating sanctions on their country, Big Tech is banning them from using social media.
Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election may be motivating other foreign adversaries to use social media to try to disrupt U.S. elections going forward, security experts warn.
Experts point to Facebook's announcement this week that it shuttered hundreds of pages tied to foreign governments, with many of the pages — as well as accounts shut down on Twitter and Google — linked to the government of Iran.
The development boosted the Trump administration's claim that other foreign groups, not just Russians, are intent to sow discord while putting a fresh spotlight on the need to ward against election meddling coming from any country.
Google is the latest Silicon Valley giant to find new evidence of misinformation campaigns by Iranian accounts.
The search giant said in a blog post Thursday that it removed 58 accounts with ties to Iran from YouTube and other sites.
They were the kind of social media posts that regularly get shared in liberal circles, but they were coming from sham accounts originating in Iran, the most recently uncovered attempt by a foreign adversary to sway U.S. voters.
One meme on Facebook from a page called the Progressive Front showed former First Lady Michelle Obama holding a doctored sign that read "An Immigrant Took My Job," a swipe at Slovenia-born Melania Trump. A tweet from the account Liberty Front Press urged people to watch a video of a parent and child reunited after being separated at the border "and be reminded of why we fight every day against the monstrous and evil policies of the Trump regime." YouTube channels featured videos like "Everything You Need to Know about Impeachment."
Facebook said that 652 Facebook pages and groups run by the Iranian and Russian governments were deleted because they were found to be “misleading,” by which it meant that the pages and social profiles presented themselves as something other than what they really were.
A LEADING member of the Iranian opposition in exile has said Iran’s clerical regime has devoted “significant” funds and personnel to social media over the years, with the aim of spreading disinformation in pursuit of its own aims.
Accounts linked to an Iranian "influence operation" are being removed from major social media platforms. Facebook and Twitter announced their efforts to prevent the operation from levering their platforms earlier this week, and now Google has done the same for several of its sites.
The number of accounts Google removed from YouTube, Blogger and Google+ pales in comparison to the number of accounts Facebook and Twitter removed. Google cut some 39 channels with "13,466 total U.S. views on relevant videos" from YouTube, removed six blogs from Blogger and deleted 13 accounts on the Google+ social network.
The YouTube channels generated few views, according to Google, only 13,466 U.S. views in all. Walker said there was not much he could say at the moment because Google was working with law enforcement. He did say that the operation has been ongoing since 2017.
FireEye, a California-based cybersecurity firm, has been credited twice just this week with helping two of the biggest tech companies uncover midterm election threats — and got a stock bump as a result.
"Actors engaged in this type of influence operation violate our policies, and we swiftly remove such content from our services and terminate these actors' accounts," he added.
"In addition to the intelligence we received from FireEye, our teams have investigated a broader range of suspicious actors linked to Iran who have engaged in this effort," the company said, referring to an alleged cybersecurity firm, on whose tip it had started the crackdown.
Google has also removed 39 YouTube channels and six blogs on Blogger and 13 Google+ accounts.
A group of students have filed a federal lawsuit against the College of Charleston for allegedly violating their right to free speech.
The lawsuit, filed by South Carolina Politics Club and members Jeremy Turner and Adam Gainey, alleges the College of Charleston repeatedly refused to recognize the group — which describes itself as “student-led” and “non-partisan” — as an official, registered student organization. Without that designation, the group is unable to reserve space, invite speakers or access school funds, according to the complaint, filed Tuesday.
A spokesman for the College of Charleston declined to comment, as the college does not comment on pending litigation.
The college denied the South Carolina Politics Club’s application because it is too similar to other, non-partisan, political student organizations, according to the complaint. When the club appealed the decision, the university told members in order to become a recognized group, it would have to either change its views or assimilate into another, existing group at the College of Charleston, according to the complaint.
My guess is that the post was deleted by a Facebook employee who applied a simple standard: the post wasn’t critical of President Trump. Facebook can’t defend that standard, of course, so when Salena persisted, it relented. Again, without explanation or apology.
The tactic for which The Weekly Mail is most famous was the use of black lines as a form of subversive self-censorship. It consisted of publishing an article that contained material that violated the censorship restrictions and then placing black lines over the “illegal” words, phrases, sentences or paragraphs. This tactic was developed during a particularly stressful evening the night before the newspaper was to be distributed.
The minister of information declared that the first edition of The Weekly Mail to be published under the new emergency regulations contained subversive material and ordered police to confiscate all copies of the newspaper from newsstands across the country. It was a devastating blow to the paper and revealed the lengths to which the government would go.
Nadine Strossen, the former president of the ACLU, argues that censorship does more harm than good—especially when it comes to social media platforms. In an interview filmed at the 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival in June, Strossen explains that hate speech is not a recognized legal concept in the United States. “That said,” she continues, “speech that conveys a hateful message—along with speech that conveys any message—may, in a particular context, be punished if it directly causes specific, imminent, serious harm.” Strossen goes on to demarcate the difference between free speech and hate speech. Ultimately, she makes a case for leaving the conversation about hate speech to citizens rather than government entities or social media platforms.
Pakistan’s newly elected Prime Minister, Imran Khan, commenced his work as the PM and as one of the first and welcome move, he ended the political censorship on the state run radio and television. Henceforth, Pakistan Television (PTV) and Radio Pakistan will be allowed to air shows without any political interference or discrimination.
The Intern€ational Press Institute (IPI) — a global network of editors, media executives and leading journalists — has welcomed the decision of Prime Minister Imran Khan to lift censorship on the state-run media.
In a press statement released on Thursday, IPI executive director Barbara Trionfi said: “The annou€ncement by the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan that state media will be allowed editorial independence appears to be an important step towards restoring respect for press freedom in Pakistan.”
In what seems like an attempt to “democratize” Pakistan, the main agenda of the recently held Pakistan Elections, the newly elected Prime Minister Imran Khan has lifted the censorship of state-run media outlets Pakistan Television (PTV) and Radio Pakistan.
Pakistan’s Information Minister Fawad Hussain Chaudhry announced that the Imran Khan-led PTI government has lifted all censorship that existed on the state-run media houses.
Google announced Thursday that it deleted 58 accounts with ties to Iran on its video platform YouTube and its other sites, the latest sign that foreign agents from around the world increasingly seek to spread disinformation on a broad array of popular websites.
The new removals targeted 39 channels on YouTube, which had more than 13,000 views in the United States, as well as 13 accounts on the social networking site Google Plus and six accounts on Blogger, its blogging platform, the company said. Kent Walker, Google's senior vice president of global affairs, said in a blog post that each of the accounts had ties to the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, or IRIB, which is tied to Iran's ayatollah, and that they "disguised their connection to this effort."
Google's announcement comes days after Facebook suspended hundreds of accounts on its site and photo-sharing app, Instagram, that originated in Iran as well as Russia, and Twitter made a similar move. At the time, YouTube confirmed it had removed one account, called Liberty Front Press, which appeared to have connections to Iranian state media.
The news comes as President Trump tweets opposition to take-down efforts by the tech giants.
In the wake of influence-campaign takedowns by Facebook and Twitter, Google has issued a report detailing its own efforts to root out foreign influence operatives allegedly tied to an Iranian state-run media broadcaster.
Google followed in the footsteps of fellow tech giants Twitter and Facebook by blacklisting accounts a CIA-backed cybersecurity firm claims with “moderate confidence” are linked to Iran’s government.
Google banned 58 accounts allegedly linked to Iran from its platforms on Thursday after "working closely with FireEye," a cybersecurity firm bankrolled by the Central Intelligence Agency.
"In recent months, we've detected and blocked attempts by state-sponsored actors in various countries to target political campaigns, journalists, activists, and academics located around the world," he added.
Google issued a statement saying, "In addition to the intelligence we received from FireEye, a leading cybersecurity group, our teams have investigated a broader range of suspicious actors linked to Iran who have engaged in this effort.
"We've updated US lawmakers and law enforcement about the results of our investigation, including its relation to political content in the United States," the statement continued.
"Our investigations on these topics are ongoing and we will continue to share our findings with law enforcement and other relevant government entities in the US and elsewhere, as well as with others in the industry."
I read with alarm a recent article by Doug Wead on The Federalist website. It described how he has been shadow banned on Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Wikipedia defines "shadow banning" as "the act of blocking a user or their content from an online community such that it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned."
Wead is not a member of the Ku Klux Klan or a neo-Nazi. He does not promote hate speech. Wead is a conservative commentator. He has taken positions supportive of President Donald Trump, and for that he has been punished by these social media platforms.
Free speech is a core value of this nation. So, why do these platforms think they have the right to silence voices that are contrary to the liberal narrative? Is it because they are not so confident in their arguments?
As China combines internal censorship and a major crackdown in its Xinjiang region, with aggressive verbal attacks and informal pressure on overseas academics, the self-censorship dilemma is becoming acute for overseas China scholars who comment China’s human rights, Tibet, Taiwan independence and other sensitive topics.
Self-censorship is rife and some who previously spoke out on China matters have gone silent fearing access to the country, on which much of their research depends, could be curbed if they irritate the Chinese authorities.
“There is a constant reminder with certain topics that this or that could get you into trouble with Beijing. It influences graduate topics and choices for academics and even their behaviour on social media. There is a very widespread concern about this,” says Kevin Carrico, a lecturer in Chinese studies at Macquarie University, Sydney.
An Auckland student newspaper fears university bosses censored them during a busy open day by hiding magazines critical of campus mental health services.
Debate magazine editor Julie Cleaver alleged "stifling freedom of speech" after magazine stands were moved from their usual prominent places inside AUT's main building today.
But uni officials denied censorship, saying the magazine stands were only temporarily moved during the AUT Live open day.
"Magazine stands in the main building (WG) were not in their usual locations, but this was an issue of clearance rather than censorship," a spokeswoman said.
In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in “electronic democracy,” in which a single citizen, selected to represent an entire population, responded to questions generated by a computer named Multivac. The machine took this data and calculated the results of an election that therefore never needed to happen. Asimov’s story was set in Bloomington, Indiana, but today an approximation of Multivac is being built in China.
For any authoritarian regime, “there is a basic problem for the center of figuring out what’s going on at lower levels and across society,” says Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist and China expert at Villanova University in Philadelphia. How do you effectively govern a country that’s home to one in five people on the planet, with an increasingly complex economy and society, if you don’t allow public debate, civil activism, and electoral feedback? How do you gather enough information to actually make decisions? And how does a government that doesn’t invite its citizens to participate still engender trust and bend public behavior without putting police on every doorstep?
Hu Jintao, China’s leader from 2002 to 2012, had attempted to solve these problems by permitting a modest democratic thaw, allowing avenues for grievances to reach the ruling class. His successor, Xi Jinping, has reversed that trend. Instead, his strategy for understanding and responding to what is going on in a nation of 1.4 billion relies on a combination of surveillance, AI, and big data to monitor people’s lives and behavior in minute detail.
“First, CIG was literally nothing more than an interdepartmental committee subsisting on handouts of money, people, and facilities from three departments which — capriciously or otherwise — could withdraw their sustaining support at any moment,” a CIA history says. “Also, while CIG could enumerate the many functions assigned to it, the embarrassing truth was that it lacked the power to carry them out.”
The CIG was also beset by bureaucratic jockeying as the senior military officials, diplomats and former OSS officers all fought for influence in the new national security order. “Wild” Bill Donovan, founder of the OSS, once said the CIG was “a good debating society but a poor administering instrument.”
Still, American leaders understood the need for a peacetime espionage agency and CIG lived on 20 months before the National Security Act took effect in September 1947, transforming the CIG into the CIA. For the next 70 years that agency would grow into the global spying, drone striking organization it is today.
The ACLU announced this week that the NSA’s PRISM program, revealed by national security whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, will be reviewed in court. The PRISM program allows the NSA, as well as other U.S. intelligence agencies, to access U.S. citizens’ international emails, internet calls and chats without a warrant.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most important – and controversial – privacy law passed in recent years. Despite its origin in the EU, its reach is truly global, since it affects anyone storing the personal data of EU citizens, no matter where the organization is located. In part because of a flurry of annoying pop-ups asking visitors to sites to agree to new terms and conditions, most people know about the GDPR by now. But few have heard of its sibling, the EU’s proposed ePrivacy Regulation, which in many respects will be even more far-reaching than the GDPR.
Where the GDPR protects personal data when it is gathered and stored, the ePrivacy Regulation protects personal data when it is transmitted. Traditional telecoms companies are already subject to laws in this area; the ePrivacy Regulation aims to extend that to the new generation of online services that transmit personal data over the Internet. In particular, the proposed law seeks to regulate how metadata is gathered and used, and to limit how people are tracked online, for example using cookies.
[...] Onavo is a virtual private network app that lets you access the internet on your phone through a private Facebook server. While that makes it harder for third parties or hackers to spy on your phone activity, it gives Facebook full access to it. [...]
Facebook removed 652 pages, groups and accounts on Tuesday for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” after it was tipped off to the accounts by FireEye, a cybersecurity firm bankrolled by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Unlike Facebook's last round of bans, the company has a attributed the operators of the newly removed accounts to the usual scapegoats: Russia and Iran.
"These were distinct campaigns, and we have not identified any links or coordination between them," the company said.
You have been told that it is dangerous to trust yourself to move through life ungoverned by rules and authority and social pressures, but it isn’t dangerous. Rules and authority and social pressures are what got us to this point, and now we’re staring into the abyss of extinction because of them. Rules and authority and social pressures are what’s dangerous. Living authentically is safety. Once you move past all the voices telling you you mustn’t and you shouldn’t, you will find that your own inner truth is so much wiser and healthier than society’s dead ideas about how we all ought to live.
Trust yourself to be bravely and defiantly true to the truth, clear-eyed rebel. I trust you. Life trusts you. You can trust yourself. Climb up over that slaughterhouse rail and go live a life uninhibited by the painted lanes of a servile society, for the good of our species and for the honor of your own majesty. Leave the cage they built for you in a ditch by the freeway and stride out boldly into uncharted lands beneath the open sky.
Recently I was on a private mailing list thread where there was debate about whether or not the project should take on steps to improve diversity. One of the mailing list participants was very upset about this idea, and said that they didn't like when people accused them of the "original sin" of having white male privilege.
I suspect this is at the root of a lot of misunderstanding and frustration around the term "privilege". Privilege is not a sin... you are not a sinner for having privilege. However it is a responsibility and a debt to be repaid and corrected for, stemming from injustices in society.
A popular social narrative is that everyone has an equal place at the starting line, so the winners and losers of a race are equally based on their merit. Unfortunately this isn't true. Privilege is being able to show up at the starting line having had sleep and a good meal and the resources to train... you still worked to be able to get to the finish line and having privilege does not take that away. But if we look at the other people on the track we could see that they not only maybe didn't get enough sleep or were not able to allocate time to train (maybe they had to work multiple jobs on the side) or couldn't afford to eat as healthily. Some of them actually may even have to start back farther from the starting line, there are rocks and weeds and potholes in their paths. If we really want to treat everyone based on merit, we'd have to give everyone an equal place at the starting line, an equal track, etc. Unfortunately, due to the way the race is set up, that does mean needing to correct for some things, and it requires actual effort to repair the track.
The Lithuanian government has decided not to appeal against the European Court of Human Rights' ruling that Lithuania hosted a secret CIA detention facility.
"It was decided that it would make no sense to appeal the judgement to the Grand Chamber, because there are no legal criteria for that," Karolina Bubnyte-Sirmene, the government's representative at the ECHR, told BNS on Wednesday.
Although Lithuania has doubts about the standard for evaluating evidence used by the Strasbourg-based court, this cannot serve as a ground of appeal, Bubnyte-Sirmene said.
Under the rules, judgments can only be reviewed if it is proved that the court's case law is unclear or that the case dealt with a matter of universal importance, she said.
The ECHR ruled on May 31 that Lithuania hosted a secret CIA prison for terror suspects between 2005 and 2006.
The court ordered Lithuania to pay 130,000 euros to Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi Arabia-born Palestinian, in compensation for his arbitrary detention in Lithuania.
Lithuania on Wednesday (22 August) said it would not appeal a European court ruling that the Baltic state had been complicit in a clandestine CIA programme by holding terror suspects at a secret detention site on its territory.
“We decided it would make no sense to appeal to the Great Chamber because there are no legal criteria for that,” government official Karolina Bubnyte Sirmene told AFP.
Lithuania decided not to appeal the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that the Baltic country hosted a secret CIA jail, where the agency held and interrogated terrorism suspects, the press service of Lithuania's representative at the court said in a statement on Thursday.
"A decision was taken not to refer to the Grand Chamber over the case Abu Zubaydah v. Lithuania. Such a decision is a result of several factors which would ultimately prevent the appeal from achieving its goal and could possibly undermine Lithuania's reputation on the international scene," the statement read.
The ECHR ruled in late May that Lithuania was complicit in CIA's secret rendition program which led to rights violations and arbitrary detention in CIA "black sites" of al-Qaeda* suspects, including Palestinian Abu Zubaydah.
Neil Roberts: What I wanted to do was to have, in a single volume, something that had not been made before. That’s a single volume that combines new essays with reprints of important essays from Frederick Douglass’s contemporaries, all on Douglass’s political thought. Douglass has, rightly so, been written about extensively in the areas of literature, history, rhetoric and public policy. But interestingly, he has not been treated as widely and as systematically in terms of his political thought, in terms of his contribution to different concepts.
I wanted to assemble this volume so that scholars of Douglass, lay intellectuals, and even those who are relatively unknowledgeable about Douglass could all access very accessible works. In addition, the book has a very extensive, thematic bibliography. So beyond just the book it offers a lot for those who are interested in biographies of Douglass, works by Douglass, or secondary works either about Douglass or about themes that Douglass wrote about in his wide career.
In my introduction (“Political Thought in the Shadow of Douglass”), instead of writing a summation of the essays in the book, I spent a large degree of time trying to reflect on, 200 years after his birth, why Douglass is significant in our current moment. I am really excited about its publication this summer, and my hope is that it can be a resource for readers who are interested in Douglass and in wanting to keep his legacy alive.
The late Republican senator was a strong moral voice against torture. But his willingness to compromise his principles tarnished that legacy.
During the Vietnam War, John McCain, then a 31-year old Navy pilot, was shot down in his plane over North Vietnamese territory, leading to five brutal years of captivity as a prisoner of war.
The torture McCain endured at the hands of his captors produced lifelong physical effects, including the inability to raise his arms above his head and a slight limp.
Glorifying McCain as a war hero allows us to imagine away the sins of Vietnam by making ourselves the victim. He encouraged unjust war in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and more as a cornerstone of his career.
When given the chance, he sold out and took Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate, enabling a change in the GOP and political discourse we are still paying for and he is responsible.
As a victim himself of torture, McCain stood mostly silent when America tortured, finally mouthing some mild public platitudes while allowing the coverup to hide what we did. The American public knows 10x as much about McCain’s own torture as we do about what was done by American torturers to other human beings. Honor is not allowing torturers to go unpunished. Duty is not helping a coverup. Country deserves better from someone who knows better.
A former top Vatican official has accused Pope Francis of having known of allegations of sex abuse by a prominent U.S. cardinal for years and called on him to resign, in an unprecedented broadside against the pope by a Church insider.
In a detailed 11-page bombshell statement given to conservative Roman Catholic media outlets during the Pope’s visit to Ireland, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano accused a long list of current and past Vatican and U.S. Church officials of covering up the case of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who resigned last month in disgrace.
On August 21, North Dakota state prosecutors offered attorney and activist Chase Iron Eyes a plea deal for charges filed against him. They stem from protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline on February 1, 2017.
The plea agreement dropped all serious charges against Iron Eyes, which included inciting a riot and criminal trespass. He faced a maximum of six years in state prison and would have lost his license to practice law.
It reduces his charges to a class B misdemeanor of disorderly conduct, keeping him out of jail and removing the risk that he may lose his license to practice law.
North Dakota Supreme Court Judge Lee Christofferson approved the plea deal on August 23.
Private military contractor TigerSwan identified Chase Iron Eyes as one of the leaders of the No DAPL movement during the protests to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline and conducted surveillance on him according to documents obtained by the Intercept. He ran as the Democratic candidate in the 2016 election to try to unseat incumbent Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer to represent North Dakota’s at-large congressional district.
In his first interview since the plea deal was offered and accepted, Iron Eyes explained why he accepted the deal.
Much has been written recently about the rise of the far right and its growing impact on mainstream politics. While the campaign and election of Trump remains the most covered event, the strong performance of the Freedom Party in Austria, the Front National in France, the Lega in Italy and the victory of Brexit in the UK amongst others have made such discussions ubiquitous. Countless texts focus on the ways in which the discourse of parties and movements once considered toxic have evolved or been adapted.
While the concepts of ‘mainstream’ and ‘mainstreaming’ have commonly been invoked, their definition has been elusive, or rather avoided by scholars and experts on the topic – partly due to the fact that defining the mainstream is itself a challenge. Defining the mainstream is itself a challenge.
It is therefore not surprising that much of the scholarly work about the mainstreaming of the far right in Europe has been based on electoral performance. Yet, focusing solely on parties and electoral politics risks both underestimating and exaggerating certain phenomena. In the 2007 French presidential election, for example, the defeat of the Front National was only a result of Nicolas Sarkozy’s absorption of many of its ideas, leading in turn to the mainstreaming of the far right party and its return to the forefront of politics. UKIP faced a similar fate after the Brexit victory, and Farage, who has continued to receive disproportionate coverage, was only too happy to say as he stood down from the party leadership that “The Ukippers will have been the turkeys who voted for Christmas.” In the US, white supremacists such as Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer, whose electoral weight is close to nil, have also received disproportionate coverage, including by the more liberal media. This occurs in a context where the far right has endorsed and been supported and emboldened by Trump.
Therefore, we believe that it is essential to move beyond electoral politics to understand the way the far right is being mainstreamed. To do so, a few ‘common sense’ tropes must be challenged...
This note discusses the gap in intellectual property protections for the fashion industry. First, it details why fashion is art of the type that typically qualifies for copyright protection, and not just a means of covering the body. Next, it discusses why this hybrid nature makes it unique and worthy of protection under current U.S. copyright law. Because designs are often chosen not just for their functional purpose, but for their artistic and expressive qualities, clothing is different from many other types of works protected by IP frameworks, including trademark and patent. The dual purpose and ability of fashion to be used as a form of expression should not keep if from the protection it deserves. The Supreme Court addressed the standard for copyright protection in the context of clothing design in Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands. This Note suggests that this recent development marks an opportune time to push for new legislation that will expand the Star Athletica ruling. These increased protections for the fashion industry should be developed by drawing on other forms of IP protection for fashion in the United States, and protections in place in other countries. These hybrid works call for a hybrid solution. Though its solution, this Note fills the gap for fashion designs, particularly for designers that are just starting out or less conspicuous when it comes to branding.
Intellectual Property ordinarily includes patent, design, trademark and copyright. Due to the technological growth and globalization. Intellectual Property (IP) has acquired an international character. The greater importance on Intellectual Property all over the world can be traced from the concern of different international organization. WIPO and WTO are playing the leading role jointly for the protection of Intellectual property. Under the WTO agreement developing countries and transition economies were given use years to ensure that their laws and practices conform with the TRIPS agreement (1995 to 2000). Least-developed countries had 11 years, until 2006 conform to the TRIPS agreement. This papers described about the critical review of Intellectual property and its issue, challenge and opportunity.
In April, 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled by members of Congress in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. in a series of questions about the company’s best effort to protect privacy and act against Russian interference in the 2016 election. For the reason that Facebook merely considers itself as “a technology company—one that has built a ‘platform for all ideas’,” it allows the News Feed Algorithm to respond to what the company deems the most important “kind” of information for the users. However, those contents in the information flow are sometimes cheaply generated by what we called “content farms” and can be intentionally manipulated by data analytics firms, such as Cambridge Analytica. Everyone is asking: everyone thinks Cambridge Analytica is dangerous, but no one can describe in great detail what it has done. Just the same as what we are facing now: everyone thinks Big Data is an ever-changing and far-reaching technology, but no one exactly knows why intellectual property (IP) laws should play an important part in regulating Big Data. Here, in a downright way, the issue is: is the function of IP laws “disrupted” or “undisrupted” by the News Feed Algorithm?
The insight to answer this question may be obtained from the classical debate, “law of the horse,” between Judge Easterbrook of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Professor Lawrence Lessig: do we have a special need to adjust IP laws specially for Big Data, or we should go back to the basics: what is IP law in general and what kind of role does IP play in the society and cyber-society? Significantly, the News Feed Algorithm is targeting the mass who read the information, while IP laws are about the protection of Big Data companies’ valuable IP assets, such as patent protection for the algorithm. All the issues have the same concern: does public law have the supremacy to “disrupt” private property protection?
Yochai Benkler is a giant within the intellectual history of IP law; some of his work will surely end up on my Classic Patent Scholarship page if I expand it to post-2000 works. Even though I don't agree with all of his conclusions, I think IP scholars should at least be familiar with his arguments. For those who haven't read his earlier works—or who just want a refresher on his take—you might enjoy his recent review article, Law, Innovation, and Collaboration in Networked Economy and Society, 13 Ann. Rev. L. & Soc. Sci. 231 (2017).
Court-ordered pirate site blockades are pretty common nowadays. While not everyone sees these as the ideal solution for the problem at hand, they follow the letter of the law. More problematic are the private blocking efforts by various Wifi providers, which we are frequently the target of. Apparently, TorrentFreak is a pirate site too.