08.11.13
Links 11/8/2013: Fedora Flock, Qualcomm Changes Course on Blobs
Contents
GNU/Linux
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“Linux Jobs Are On The Rise”
If you are working in the open source space, you have all the chances of being hired by the biggies. Linux jobs are on the rise, claims Ralf Flaxa, vice president, Engineering, SUSE. And he has his reasons for making this claim.
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Desktop
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One Laptop per Student
The most recent complement to the developments taking place in the education sector in this country is the ‘One Laptop per Student’ initiative. On Friday, December 3rd, 2010, over two thousand laptops arrived in the state and were officially handed over to Dr. the Honourable Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
On Monday February 28, 2011 another shipment of just under 13,000 net books is anticipated to arrive at the E.T. Joshua Airport. During the month of March 2011, the Ministry of Education will deliver an aggressive public awareness effort at the level of the educational institutions.
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One Laptop per Student (OLPC) Made a Big Impact In St. Vincent And The Grenadines
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Crowd-Funded KHR_Debug Code For Mesa Published
Last month I reported on the effort by a lone individual to try crowd-funded Mesa development. The developer wants to implement a new OpenGL extension in Mesa while providing some documentation on the process. For showing he’s true to his word, he published some experimental Mesa code today for the GL_KHR_debug extension.
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Profiling Support For Gallium3D’s OpenCL Clover
A set of six patches were published for Mesa on Friday that allow for profiling support with Gallium3D’s “Clover” state tracker for OpenCL support.
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Applications
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gnubg: A better player than I ever will be
Things have gotten a little serious lately, what with macchanger and gnupg out there.
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Giada – Audio tool for DJs, live performers and electronic musicians
Giada is a free, minimal, hardcore audio tool for DJs, live performers and electronic musicians. How does it work? Just pick up your channel, fill it with samples or MIDI events and start the show by using this tiny piece of software as a loop machine, drum machine, sequencer, live sampler or yet as a plugin/effect host. Giada aims to be a compact and portable virtual device for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows for production use and live sets.
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Instructionals/Technical
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How to version control /etc directory in Linux
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Perl Testing with Test::More use_ok, can_ok, is, isnt, like, unlike Functions
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Accessing the Raspberry Pi’s 1MHz timer, via kernel driver
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How to install MariaDB on debian 7 (Wheezy)
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Using Nvidia Graphics Drivers With Initial Optimus Support In Ubuntu 13.10 Got Easier With Nvidia-Prime
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Accessing the Raspberry Pi’s 1MHz timer, via kernel driver
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Install openQRM 5.1 on Debian Wheezy
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Games
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Valve Updates the Original Half-Life 14 Years After Launch
The original Half-Life game, the one launched all the way back in 1998 and recently ported on the Linux platform, has just received a major update.
Valve is trying to make sure that its games run flawlessly, even 14 years later. With this in mind, an update has been released for Half-Life Beta.
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The Cheapskate’s Corner 13 (Aug 9th-15th)
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Gorgeous bug-based adventure game Morphopolis enters alpha today
Two-person studio Micro Macro Games has released the PC and Android alpha build of its beautiful, hand-illustrated adventure game about insects, Morphopolis.
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Strike Suit Zero Officially Available On Linux
The developers of Strike Suit Zero tweeted to us to let everyone know that the game is now out of beta and anyone can now purchase it and play.
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Is Saint’s Row Coming To Linux?
I’ve often wondered what’s more upsetting; being set on fire only to have the fire put out with buckets of urine, or a new Humble Bundle for Windows only. Well, I’ve yet to be set of fire and put out with a firehose-style golden shower, but regardless of the fact, I’m infinitely disappointed by Windows-only Humble Bundles. However this latest bundle has almost been remedied by Guido Eickmeyer, Creative Director at Deep Silver. Just hours ago, Guido started a popular AMA thread over on Reddit.
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Electronic Super Joy On Steam Early Access For Linux
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Natural Selection 2 Developers Aim For A September Linux Release
This is probably a game I will personally be spending a fair amount of time on, we don’t really have a game like it yet (Unvanquished is close but far from finished).
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Gunpoint Stealth Puzzle Game Will Come To Linux
Gunpoint is a stealth puzzle game that lets you rewire its levels to trick people.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDEConnect improvements
After the feedback we have received (you guys are awesome), we have made some improvements and fixes to KDEConnect.
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Krita Lime (2.8prealpha). New features overview
Some time have passed since I was talking about new features of the current development version of Krita. But there are lots of them actually! Let me show them to you
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME Display Manager 3.8.4 Fixes Slave Sessions
The GNOME developers announced a few days ago the immediate availability for download and testing of the GDM (GNOME Display Manager) 3.9.5 package, as well as the stable 3.8.4 release.
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GNOME Photos 3.9.5 Implements Thumbnailing for Flickr
The fifth development version of the upcoming GNOME Photos 3.10 photo viewer and organizer application for the GNOME desktop environment has been released a few days ago.
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Distributions
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mageia 4 Alpha 1 Is Now Available for Download
The Mageia development team announced a few minutes ago, August 10, the immediate availability for download of the first Alpha release of the upcoming Mageia 4 operating system.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Fedora Flock Recap: Day 1
The fact that I’m able to post a recap of the first day of Flock is really due to the excellent organization of the many staff and volunteers who are doing an amazing job making Flock accessible to remotees. I’m not actually in South Carolina, folks!
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Flock for Remote Attendees Part 2: IRC & Call for Help!
Here’s the lineup of IRC channels we created on irc.freenode.net for remote attendees to follow along. You may want to configure them in your IRC client now to make your remote attendance easier. I’ve linked each channel name up to the freenode web client just in case it’s helpful.
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The Performance Impact Of Fedora 19 Updates
With Fedora more liberally pushing down package updates compared to Ubuntu Linux and other fixed-release distributions, how has the performance evolved since the release of “Schrödinger’s Cat” in early July? Here’s some benchmarks showing how the Fedora 19 performance has evolved with a newer kernel and other changes.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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With 15 days to go, Ubuntu Edge well short of crowdfunding goal
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Edge project, a mobile edition of the desktop OS Ubuntu currently being crowfunded, may fall short of its goal. The smartphone, according to the company, will only be made if users pledge a total of $32 million through the crowdfunding site Indiegogo. And the project comes with a strict time limit of 30 days.
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Ubuntu Edge crowdfunding campaign ‘doomed to fail’
Canonical’s ambition is admirable, but with less than two weeks to raise another $23 million, the chances of the company meeting its crowdfunding target are slim, says Sophie Curtis.
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XMir now available for Ubuntu 13.10 ‘Saucy Salamander’
XMir, display server developed by Canonical for Linux is now available for Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy salamander. XMir will be the default display server for the Ubuntu 13.10, however X server will be provided as fallback session.
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Ubuntu Edge Gets Its First Major Corporate Backer In Bloomberg, But Funding Still Off Needed Pace
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Devices/Embedded
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Phones
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Is it too late for new platforms in the U.S.?
Earlier this year there was a lot of talk of new open-sourced platforms that we were supposed to see come to fruition this year. Canonical’s Ubuntu for Android, Mozilla’s FireFox OS, Samsung’s Tizen and Jolla’s Sailfish OS were four of the more well-known ones. But since earlier this year there has been very little talk about any of these platforms, and although I initially had high hopes of seeing at least one of them succeed by this time, I wonder now if there is any reason for hope given the current state of our own four main platforms that we primarily use in the U.S. now.
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Ballnux
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Android
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iPhone Loses Ground to Worldwide Leader Android, Windows Phone
Apple’s share of the worldwide smartphone operating system market declined year-over-year in the second quarter of 2013, while Android and Windows Phone saw “slight increases,” according to new data from IDC.
Overall, smartphone vendors shipped a total of 236.4 million smartphones in the second quarter, up 51.3 percent from the 156.2 million units shipped during the same period last year, the research firm said. Smartphone shipments also grew 9.3 percent over the first quarter of this year.
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Amazon says oops, Chromecast not delayed after all
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Google Updates Android Action Bar App Feature
A new backward-compatible version of the Android Action Bar is now being offered to developers for their apps.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Google Nexus 7 factory images published
Google and Qualcomm seemed to have resolved their apparent dispute as Nexus 7 (2013) factory images have been published. Just a few days ago Jean-Baptiste “JBQ” Quéru, the head of Android Open Source Project, quit from the position (supposedly) due to the delay in the publishing of these images.
The arrival of factory images code named ‘razor’ means enthusiasts can now root their devices without worrying about not being able to restore it. So, I take back my previous recommendation of not buying the Nexus 7 (2013) due to lack of the factory images.
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Legal Issues With Qualcomm May Prevent Factory Images For New Nexus 7 (‘Flo’) From Ever Being Published, JBQ Strongly Implies
ROM developers and Android tinkering enthusiasts alike have probably noticed at this point that the new iteration of the Nexus 7, unveiled two weeks ago, does not yet have factory images or driver binaries posted on the appropriate Google Developers page. A similar issue plagued the Nexus 4 in its early days, though eventually images were posted. At the time, legal issues were speculated as a possible reason for the delay, and Android build maintainer JBQ – largely responsible for the images / binaries – said only this in response: “I can’t comment.”
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Google posts binaries and factory image for new Nexus 7, including controversial Qualcomm files
Since officially releasing the Nexus 7 (2013), Google’s latest device has been receiving positive reviews in general. However, some issues have come up, like some GPS problems that Google is aware of and is working on a solution. Another problem that surfaced that has the potential to impact Android fans beyond those who own the new Nexus 7 have been issues revolving around the release of Qualcomm binaries for the device. The issue was so contentious, that Jean Baptiste-Queru went so far as to submit his resignation and walk away from the AOSP project due to the difficulties in getting factory images released. Apparently the bad press related to that was more than Google could fathom as they have now released the factory image and binaries, including the Qualcomm files in question.
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Google/Qualcomm Relent On Binary Distribution Of Drivers
There it is. Qualcomm apparently decided with Google that a bit more openness was a good thing even if it is not opening the source code of those drivers. Was it an oversight? Was it a change in policy? Is Qualcomm going to become more open? We shall see.
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Free Software/Open Source
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice 4.1.1 RC1 Arrives with New Features
The Document Foundation has announced that the first Release Candidate version for LibreOffice 4.1.1 is now available for the Linux platform, bringing a lot of bug fixes and improvements.
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BSD
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FreeNAS 9.1 Screenshots, and Some Suggestions
freenas-ixsystems-new-logoFreeNAS 9.1 has been released. We have read the blog posts, the press releases, and we probably all agree that this FreeBSD based NAS is becoming better and better with each release. FreeNAS is still ‘growing up’ and new features are added to each new version.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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gNewSense 3.0 released
Most notably, gNewSense 3.0, codenamed “Parkes,” is now based on Debian rather than Ubuntu. gNewSense is a fully free GNU/Linux distro and one of the growing number of GNU/Linux distributions that are endorsed by the FSF for providing and recommending only free software. gNewSense now runs on three architectures: i386, amd64 and MIPS.
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Video: You broke the Internet. We’re making ourselves a GNU one.
This is the video from the talks given by Christian Grothoff, Carlo von Lynx, Jacob Appelbaum and Richard Stallman in Berlin on August 1st. The talks are in English, even though the welcoming words are in German.
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Programming
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Open Line on GitHub
Felix Geisendörfer recently wrote Vim Trick: Open current line on GitHub. The idea is to open a repository with GitHub in a browser for the current file and line number in Vim.
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Leftovers
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YouTube founders take on Vine and Instagram with MixBit video app
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Hot Startups Tap Google’s Legal Talent
The attorneys atop six hot tech ventures have at least one thing in common: They’ve Googled it.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Rand Paul toasts a drone program
But the Republican senator from Kentucky tweeted Friday that he approved of a certain kind of drone after all. And it can’t conduct surveillance or kill people.
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U.S. slowly opening up commercial drone industry
The Federal Aviation Administration’s recent certification of two expensive unmanned aircraft for commercial use further opens up the U.S. market for drones, but cheaper unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will still have to operate in regulatory limbo.
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Are US drone killings in Yemen working?
The US has hit Yemen with seven drone strikes in a little more than a week.
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‘Australian Sarah Palin’ withdraws from election race after stating ‘Islam is a country’
An Australian parliamentary election candidate with the anti-immigration One Nation party has quit the race following an embarrassing interview in which she called Islam a country, confused the Koran with “haram,” and said that Jews worship Jesus Christ.
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Finance
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The legal jujitsu of Goldman Sachs
Vanity Fair has timed the publication of its latest 11,000-word Michael Lewis opus perfectly to coincide with Fabrice Tourre being found liable on six counts of misleading investors while he worked at Goldman Sachs. Lewis also profiles a former Goldman employee charged with serious misdeeds; in his case, it’s Sergei Aleynikov. And in both cases — Aleynikov and Tourre — the government ended up in a position of overstretch.
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Privacy
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NSA revelations remind me of Cold War Romania: Column
For Marcel Proust, a madeleine cookie triggered a flood of childhood memories. For me, cookies usually signify less about memories of childhood and more about information collection, often surreptitious, through bits of code inserted on unsuspecting users’ computers. Recently, though, revelations about the NSA’s information-collection efforts have brought together thoughts about surveillance and memories of my childhood.
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‘Nobody is listening to your calls’: Obama’s evolution on NSA surveillance
Barack Obama insisted on Friday that the NSA reforms he has proposed would have happened all along and that his views on surveillance programs had “not evolved”. But since the president first responded to Edward Snowden’s revelations in June he has rejected any suggestion that more safeguards were required.
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Four Ways To Escape The NSA Dragnet
Start by switching to an alternative search engine, using an alias on Facebook, and supporting allied nonprofits. This article was written by Nick Pearson, the CEO of IVPN. IVPN is a privacy platform, and Electronic Frontier Foundation member, committed to protecting online freedoms and online privacy.
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EU among priority spy targets for NSA: report
The European Union is ranked as a key priority in a list of spying targets for the US National Security Agency, German weekly Der Spiegel said Saturday, citing a document leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
The classified document, dated April 2013, states that the US secret services are especially interested in gathering intelligence concerning the 28-member bloc’s foreign policy, international trade, and economic stability, the magazine reported.
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What the Chomsky-Žižek debate tells us about Snowden’s NSA revelations
Rather than backing one or the other thinker, why not embrace both to inform a leftist critique of the surveillance scandal?
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In light of the recent NSA surveillance scandal, Chomsky and Žižek offer us very different approaches, both of which are helpful for leftist critique. For Chomsky, the path ahead is clear. Faced with new revelations about the surveillance state, Chomsky might engage in data mining, juxtaposing our politicians’ lofty statements about freedom against their secretive actions, thereby revealing their utter hypocrisy. Indeed, Chomsky is a master at this form of argumentation, and he does it beautifully in Hegemony or Survival when he contrasts the democratic statements of Bush regime officials against their anti-democratic actions. He might also demonstrate how NSA surveillance is not a strange historical aberration but a continuation of past policies, including, most infamously, the FBI’s counter intelligence programme in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s.
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NSA FISA Surveillance: Attention Shifts To Email Surveillance
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LIVE: Lavabit Closing – The Beginning of an NSA Coverup?
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Two email providers close rather than comply with NSA data requests
Two encrypted email providers closed down Thursday to avoid being forced to turn over user data to the federal government, The New York Times is reporting.
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The guys that fight dodgy megacorps and surveillance-happy governments
Our freedom to share information, speak our minds, come up with new ideas and keep our lives private is being threatened. Governments are continually seeking new ways to monitor what we’re doing, while big businesses are constantly trying to lock us into their products. Bit by bit, our freedoms are being eroded.
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N.S.A. Said to Search Content of Messages to and From U.S.
The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.
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Edward Snowden, the Espionage Act and First Amendment Concerns
Last month, Edward Snowden, a former government employee and contractor, disclosed to newspaper reporters information about US intelligence activities that he obtained during the course of his work. Specifically, he revealed that the NSA engaged in widespread, warrantless surveillance of domestic and international telephone and Internet communications and also engaged in cyber spying on other governments, including allies. The revelations caused a public stir, especially given the questionable constitutionality of the NSA’s domestic surveillance. But far more press, much of it hyperbolic, has focused on Snowden himself. Many officials and observers have called him a traitor while others labeled him a hero and a whistleblower who exposed massive government wrongdoing. The federal government recently brought criminal charges against him for theft of government property and violations of sections 793(d) and 798(a)(3) of the Espionage Act. These crimes carry possible prison sentences of up to thirty years and signal that the government does not view Snowden as a whistleblower. What are the implications of these particular charges for Snowden, especially in light of the First Amendment, which exists largely to protect public criticism of government and serve as a check against government wrongdoing?
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Constitution Check: Is the Chief Justice’s power to pick judges of the secret wiretap court a bad idea?
Lyle Denniston looks at a growing debate about Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ power to select judges who sit on a top-secret court – a power assigned to him by Congress.
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If Bruce Schneier ran the NSA, he’d ask a basic question: “Does it do any good?”
For the last two months, we’ve all watched the news about the National Security Agency and its friends over at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which approves secret orders on behalf of the NSA and other spy agencies. But more often than not, a lot of these articles take the same basic structure: documents provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden show X, and then privacy advocates and civil libertarians decry X for Y reason.
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NSA Surveillance: Obama is Using Loophole to Conduct Domestic Spying
Ever since Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s wiretapping to the world, President Obama have been trying to assuage Americans’ fears and apprehensions over domestic spying — and much to no avail. Obama’s latest effort came on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, where Obama made clear that America does not have a domestic spying program. Unfortunately, the facts show otherwise.
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The president is wrong: The NSA debate wouldn’t have happened without Snowden
At Friday’s news conference, President Obama was asked by Chuck Todd whether the debate that has arisen in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations made Snowden a patriot. Obama disagreed.
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Assange blasts Obama for denying Snowden’s role in NSA reforms
While praising US President Barack Obama’s Friday surveillance reforms as a “victory of sorts for Edward Snowden,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange delivered a written blow to the administration for its “hypocritical” treatment of the subject.
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Snowden Who? U.S. and Russian Officials Say NSA Leaker Not Part of ‘2+2’ Meetings
A canceled summit and the rogue NSA contractor’s asylum had some expecting fireworks at the bilateral talks with Kerry and Hagel. Somehow, it was business as usual.
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Civil Rights
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Why Your Cell Phone’s Location Isn’t Protected by the Fourth Amendment
In a major decision last week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the location of your cell phone when you place a call is not protected by the Fourth Amendment, which guards against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
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FLOSS after Prism: Anonymity by default
In my last blog post I discussed that we have to protect the user’s privacy better by giving the user the choice to decide which data gets submitted to services. In this blog post I want to share some thoughts about the case that the data is submitted and how to protect the user in such a case.
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DRM
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Publishers object to Department of Justice’s punishment for Apple in eBooks case
Five publishers have filed objections with the US Department of Justice regarding the DOJ’s choice of punishment in a recent anti-trust ruling against the Cupertino company. The ruling found Apple guilty of conspiring to fix e-book prices, forcing customers to pay a higher price. The proposed punishment would require them to cut off their current agreements with the five publishers in question and avoid entering new agreements for five years that could prohibit competitiveness in the market.
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Apple faces major day in court on patents and e-books
It’s a big day for Apple in court today, as the Cupertino-based company remains entangled in a massive web of litigation that seems to have ensnared the entire tech sector.
First, the company will be squaring off against the Justice Department in a hearing about possible remedies for the company’s practices in developing its e-book business, which a judge recently ruled were in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Ambry hits back at Myriad’s “bad faith enforcement” of breast cancer gene patents
For many years, all testing of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes in the US was under control of one company: Myriad Genetics of Utah. But many expected that monopoly to be over when the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that Myriad can’t claim patent rights to those genes. In fact, the court ruled, such “isolated” DNA sequences can’t get patents at all—although a lab-made form of the gene called the cDNA version still can.
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