04.20.15
Posted in Microsoft at 5:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: There are signs of relinquishing Microsoft’s control over Yahoo! after Marissa Mayer worked to end the company’s suicidal/abusive relationship with Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft
Firefox and other bits of software have become tools of spying by Microsoft because Yahoo! had essentially turned into a Microsoft proxy when it comes to search in several countries (I recently saw that happen in the UK, not just the US). We chronicled Microsoft’s hijack of Yahoo for many years. It was entryism.
“Microsoft can try all it wants to pretend it’s about “choice” after destroying Yahoo as a search contender.”Several years ago it seemed like Microsoft was destroying Yahoo! altogether (reducing the number of options for searchers while it was falsely described as ‘choice’ because of Google’s dominance), but with Mayer entering Yahoo! there are some signs of hope. According to this new report, Yahoo’s “Mayer had reportedly plotted to end the relationship [with Microsoft] as recently as February.”
Microsoft’s booster Peter seems to suggest that Yahoo is distancing itself from Ballmer’s gang, whereas a more objective source says that the latest development “means that Yahoo could, for example, augment the results with those of Duck Duck Go or Wolfram Alpha.”
In conclusion it says: “It now appears that Yahoo is looking to make itself distinct from Bing by having the freedom to sell its own advertising and make searches more its own.
Microsoft can try all it wants to pretend it’s about “choice” after destroying Yahoo! as a search contender. If Yahoo! ever manages to become independent from Microsoft again, that would really be something. █
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 5:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Humans do lie, press should do better
Marion Jones lied repeatedly
Summary: Poor fact-checking by relatively large media/news sites results in Microsoft’s patently false claims being repeated uncritically
IT is widely known by now that Microsoft works closely with intelligence agencies that conduct mass surveillance and Microsoft's top privacy chief, Caspar Bowden, got fired by Microsoft for suggesting that Microsoft should protest itself and users of Microsoft software from such mass surveillance. Only a fool would actually believe that Microsoft is interested in privacy.
Nevertheless, some utterly poor reporting, if not complete nonsense, was published the other day, relaying a lie from Microsoft’s “chief security officer” (the fake one, not the one they fired). He tried to frame NSA leaks as a blessing to Microsoft despite the fact that Microsoft repeatedly said that it had hurt Microsoft’s business (and rightly so).
What kind of authors (or ‘journalists’) are they if all they do is quote officials and won’t do the most basic fact-checking?
The other day we wrote about Microsoft’s boosters (propagandists masquerading as journalists) framing the shutdown of Microsoft's defunct proxy "Open Tech" as something else, much like framing layoffs as “reorg”. Darryl K. Taft, another occasional Microsoft booster, repeated these talking points, but we were more surprised to see Michael Larabel doing more or less the same thing. He wrote: “The latest open-source play at Microsoft under Satya Nadella’s leadership is bringing the MS Open Tech subsidiary formally back within the organization, establish a Microsoft Open Technology Programs Office, and other efforts to make Microsoft more open and engage in open standards.”
Why is Phoronix acting like a marketing avenue or a parrot? Microsoft does not engage in open standards, it promotes OOXML and it was attacking ODF as recently as last year. It is adding spyware to Android, it is attacking GNU/Linux on many fronts and the list goes on and on. Here is a reminder of how Microsoft attacks GNU/Linux and Free software:
Some older posts about this ‘unit’ (malicious proxy and Trojan horse which Microsoft called “Open Tech” in an Orwellian fashion) include:
Writers should at least make an attempt to objectively assess Microsoft’s statements, not just reprint them as if Microsoft always says the truth. Such negligent writing leads to a lot of bad things, albeit some writers (like Microsoft’s boosters) make a career out of it. █
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04.19.15
Posted in News Roundup at 5:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Launched this week on Kickstarters was Endless Computers, a $169 Linux PC for the developing world. Quite quickly the project has already surpassed its $100k USD goal.
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Desktop
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For everyone else out there I strongly recommend getting in on their kickstarter, not only do you get a cool looking computer with a really nice Linux desktop, you are helping a company forward that has the potential to take the linux dektop to the next level.
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According to the ITU, they are among the top countries in ICT development. Good for them. Despite being fabulously wealthy, they appear to be doing IT the right way with lots of FLOSS.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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The latest documents released by Wikileaks reveal some uncomfortable – yet unsurprising – truths about the relationship between Hollywood and the US Government. In its propaganda efforts against Russia, the US State Department may have pressured Sony – and some of the biggest stars – into cooperating.
The latest Wikileaks release includes thousands of documents which reveal ties between the White House and Sony pictures. It’s taking journalists a long time to comb through the weeds, but some troubling details are emerging.
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Kernel Space
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The EXT4 file-system updates for the Linux 4.1 kernel have been sent in and it features the file-system-level encryption support.
Earlier this month we wrote about the newly-published patches for EXT4 encryption support coming out of Google and intended to land in the next major release of Android. Those patches for file-system-level encryption will now be landing upstream with the Linux 4.1 kernel update.
Besides this native encryption support for EXT4, the rest of the updates for this merge window pull request equate to mainly fixes. More details via the pull request itself.
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New F2FS file-system features for this next kernel release include an in-memory extent_cache, an fs_shutdown feature to test power-off recovery, now uses inline_data to store a symlink path, F2FS is now shown as a non-misc file-system.
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World-renowned Unix master Chris Siebenmann has written an article entitled ‘I wish systemd would get over its thing about syslog’. It addresses the strained relationship between the systemd init system and the traditional syslog approach to logging used on many Linux systems.
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Applications
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Quick on the heels of tree and ddir, a loyal reader pointed out ncdt, which takes the tree model and adds a small feature or two.
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One week after the debut of the GCC 5.1 Release Candidate, a second release candidate was made available today in facilitating last-minute testing of the big GCC 5 compiler update.
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Paul Davis from the Ardour development team had the great pleasure of announcing today, April 18, the release of Ardour 4.0, a major version that includes a number of new features, numerous bug fixes, and dozens of improvements.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The colourful action platformer Freedom Planet now has been officially launched for Linux.
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The early access racer Coffin Dodgers has been updated and now has Linux support. As far as premises go, this one is one of the more original ones I’ve seen in a while.
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You would hopefully have seen my previous articles talking to multiple developers about their Linux sales, so to begin a new year we are talking to a few more about their sales.
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Fallen: A2P Protocol is a pretty good looking turn based strategy currently in Early Access, and I have been graced with a key to take a look at it.
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It’s a dark and stormy night as you make your way to a small American town. A flash of lightning illuminates the sky to reveal a zombie in the middle of the road, causing you to wreck your car and leaving you stranded. Now you must escape from a zombie apocalypse while finding out who’s responsible and stopping them for good in Trapped Dead: Lockdown, a hack & slash RPG for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The board of KDE eV has launched a new initiative to ensure that KDE remains awesome and relevant for the foreseeable future. Unlike previous approaches it is not a point-in-time solution, it is a continuous process of improvement. And it is a good thing.
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Reviews
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ChromeOS is a crafty devil. If you are not paying attention you can miss the fact that you’ve received an update. Its a little like a dog near to a buffet table, turn away and it will have a cake off there and carry on as normal without you being any the wiser.
I decided to pen a few thoughts on the latest build which has found its way through the interwebs and landed on my HP 14″. When I say land, the image I’d like to convey is not so much a smooth journey opening up a wealth of treats but more of a thump and an exercise in wasting my time.
These are the things I’ve noticed within the first few hours of the update. There will be more.
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New Releases
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Matthias Klumpp announced today, April 18, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Alpha version of the upcoming Tanglu 3 Linux operating system.
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There are too many Linux distributions nowadays. Choice and variety is wonderful, but in this case, it spreads resources very thin. Linux-based operating systems might be further along by now if more developers came together to work on projects. For someone new to Linux, finding a distro can be a daunting task. Many of the releases are simply noise, making it hard to find the quality operating systems.
KaOS is one of those quality operating systems. It is a wonderful Linux distribution that focuses on KDE. Quite frankly, if you are a KDE purist, this should be on your radar. To cerebrate the two-year anniversary of the distro, the team releases 2015.04. Whether you are a Linux noob, or even an an expert, you should give it a try.
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4MRescueKit provides its users with software for antivirus protection, data backup, disk partitioning, and data recovery. It is distributed in the form of a multiboot CD, which includes four (extremely small) operating systems.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Arch Family
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The Manjaro development team announced that the first Preview release of the upcoming Manjaro Linux 0.8.13 operating system is now available for download in Xfce and KDE Live CD flavors.
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Debian Family
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Today I upgraded my main web-host to the Jessie release of Debian GNU/Linux.
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Debian Installer, the official installation system for the Debian distribution since the Sarge release, developed the Debian Installer Team, has been upgraded to version 8.0 RC3 and is now available for download and testing.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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Elementary OS is a Linux desktop distribution that’s being primed as a “fast and open replacement for Windows and OS X.”
It’s safe to say that that’s the goal of every Linux distribution. Some distributions have, to a large extent, succeeded, while some are partially or completely misguided. Elementary OS, even though it’s still just at version 0.3, belongs to the first group.
Some of the design decisions make it slightly painful to use, but as a unit, the distribution is moving in the right direction. Will it ever get to the point where it replaces Windows and OS X for all users? No, because there’ll always be those that love Windows and Mac OS X no matter what. And there are still applications that have no real alternatives in Linux.
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Phones
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Android
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Sprint has released the Android 5.0 Lollipop update to owners of the Sprint Spark version of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 smartphone.
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Android has a large, vibrant ecosystem of applications. From Heartstone to Plex to Twitter, Google Play is home to over 1.5 million mobile apps, according to AppBrain.
Wouldn’t it be great to run all these apps on your computer, too? Now you can, thanks to Android Runtime for Chrome.
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WhatsApp Android app has undergone a complete makeover. The new version sports a material design with several changes. The new design gives a refreshing look to one of the most used chat platform. Starting from the layout, the new design pays attention to minute details which makes the app look good.
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Today’s businesses are becoming increasingly familiar with the many benefits of open source software. In fact, 74 percent of IT professionals, in the U.S. alone, agree that the software offers better quality of continuity and control than that of proprietary. However, some CIOs are still skeptical about adopting open source software into their IT infrastructure as they’ve grown accustomed to their proprietary software vendors.
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When I was writing daily about Linux, the operating system and open source apps were already hard at work in data centres, on servers and on high-end workstations.
The IT market was still moving away from a model where servers came with an expensive to buy and expensive to support operating system linked to the hardware maker.
Some of those OSes were fully proprietary. Others were versions of Unix although they often had proprietary branding and non-open components.
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Debian brings peace of mind (for me)
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation is preparing the groundwork for the next major version of LibreOffice, 5.0, which should be available by the end of July, if everything goes according to plan.
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Project Releases
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Licensing
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Ask any developer where to turn for access to the latest software code for open source projects, and you’ll likely be directed to GitHub—one of the largest providers of open source code online.
While GitHub has always been a great site for developers to come together, network and share code, up until a few years ago, the website had a problem. Though it was easy for developers to share code, finding the right software license to go along with it was much harder. The majority of downloads on GitHub, therefore, were taking place without the critical software license component.
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Standards/Consortia
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Last year Google announced QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) as a stream multiplexing protocol running on a new flavor of TLS over UDP rather than TCP. Google’s been expanding their testing of QUIC internally and the results are showing great results.
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Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas became an Internet sensation on Thursday when his cell phone went off in the middle of a senate finance committee hearing, filling the somber room with the first few bars of a song from Disney’s “Frozen.”
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Nicola Sturgeon is to be congratulated for refusing to back off from the goal of independence, and the right of the Scottish people to self-determination, under pressure from Andrew Marr today.
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A little over 24 years ago, as a young freelance journalist on the Independent on Sunday, I telephoned the Leicester office of Raymonds News Agency and arranged for a reporter to cover an imminent pre-trial hearing at the city’s magistrates court. It was the sort of mundane hearing that would not normally trouble the media. A few days before, in a Leicester pub, I had met a solicitor’s clerk, to whom I had been introduced by a source on a previous story. The clerk told me that at the hearing a former children’s home manager called Frank Beck, who stood charged of sexually abusing the children in his care, would claim the man responsible for the offences was actually Leicester West’s long-standing MP, Greville, now Lord, Janner.
Events played out exactly as I had been told they would. At the hearing’s conclusion, Beck shouted out his claims and was duly wrestled to the floor by the clerk of the court, before being taken back to the cells. Rumours about Janner that had circulated in the city for some years were now recorded by the journalist I had placed there and thus out in the public domain.
Last week, the director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, announced that the now 86-year-old Janner would not be facing any charges on the grounds that he was suffering from dementia and therefore unfit to stand trial. It required the CPS to add that “this decision does not mean or imply that… Janner is guilty of any offence”. In turn, Janner’s family issued their own statement praising the man’s “integrity” before adding: “He is entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.”
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Rayner states “The establishment, in the shape of his fellow MPs, men such as Labour’s Keith Vaz, Tory David Ashby and the then Lib Dem MP now Lord Carlile, closed ranks.” In the 1991 House of Commons debate deploring accusations against Janner, Carlile played a prominent part, describing Janner as a man of “integrity” and “determination”. Carlile should have known Janner fairly well. They were both MPs, both QCs, both members of Friends of Israel, both patrons of UK lawyers for Israel. The appear still to both be patrons of the Friends of Israel Educational Foundation. They were regulars on the same parliamentary committees dealing with legal affairs. They were both to leave the Commons at the same time and both to join the Lords only slightly apart.
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Science
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Fifty years after deadly plutonium was lost on India’s second highest mountain, the enigma continues
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In 1950, with the Cold War in full swing, Soviet journalists were looking desperately for something to help them fill their anti-American propaganda quota. In January of that year, a Time Magazine cover appeared that seemed to provide just the thing. It showed an early electromechanical computer called the Harvard Mark III, and boasted the cover line, “Can Man Build a Superman?”
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Money has infiltrated our schools through another portal as well. Bankers and businesspeople have decided that they are the ones to improve our schools. In 2010 the educational historian Diane Ravitch did a dramatic about-face regarding educational testing and the promise of charter schools. Having been a loud and influential proponent of both (among other things, she worked in the administration of George H.W. Bush), in recent years she began to see that the national obsession with tests was in fact corrupting rather than improving the process of education in our schools. She also began to think that charter schools were sucking the lifeblood out of the public school system as well as allowing business interests to shape what was happening in classrooms. In her book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” she documents some of the ways that people in business and finance have been wielding their influence and sidelining the input of parents and teachers. The signs of this influence are not always subtle or ephemeral either. They can be seen and heard within the halls and classrooms of schools all over the country.
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Health/Nutrition
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The production of opium increased 40-fold in the 13 years of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and thanks to CIA covert aid.
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The Pakistani branch of the Taliban, the TTP, has seized on evidence that the vaccination campaign was used as cover by the CIA to gather intelligence. The US government said last year that the practice had stopped and the CIA director had instructed the agency “to make no operational use of vaccination programmes, which include vaccination workers”.
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Modern society deeply depends on doctors. Which is why recent international reactions against doctors – from mistrust to outright attack – represent a disturbing trend that can not only lead to an immediate threat to global health workers but also precipitate that all-feared outbreak of an uncontrollable epidemic.
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Said Mr. Morales: “One point (in the drafted declaration) was important: health as a human right, and the U.S. government did not accept that health should be considered a human right … President Obama did not accept” that concept.
The 8-point draft had resulted from four months of negotiations between the participating countries prior to the Summit in Panama, which was held on April 10-11. There was such strong sentiment for declaring health care to be a right, so that this provision was included in the draft despite Obama’s opposition to it.
A report from the Latin American television network Telesur (majority-owned by the Venezuelan government, which Obama unsuccessfully tried to overthrow via an aborted February 2015 coup, announced at the start of the conference, that, “The Seventh Summit of the Americas begins Friday in Panama without a final declaration because the US Government has expressed its disagreement with some of the clauses, which blocked agreement.” Furthermore, this was personally done by U.S. President Obama: “This information was confirmed by Foreign Minister of Argentina, Hector Timerman, who described the event as ‘a debate among presidents.’” That’s how personal, and top-level, the ideological disagreement here was.
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Security
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Many women gamers and developers, as well as those who support them, have lately come under attack from online trolls. A common intimidation tactic that trolls use is “doxxing,” or publicly exposing their targets’ personal details, including home address, phone number, and even financial records.
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US Federal law enforcement officials are investigating the online leak of addresses of senior and former Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials.
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Hacker could penetrate the firewall between aircraft’s entertainment system and the other flight software
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A mail carrier is back home in Florida where he’ll await his next hearing for flying his gyrocopter onto the U.S. Capitol lawn. Doug Hughes spoke to reporters early Sunday morning about his experience and why he pulled off the stunt.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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It’s been over two years since President Obama promised new transparency and accountability rules when it comes to drone strikes, yet it’s become increasingly clear virtually no progress has been made. The criteria for who gets added to the unaccountable ‘kill list’ is still shrouded in secrecy – even when the US government is targeting its own citizens.
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They’re terrifying machines – capable of operating without human control and built with a vicious streak that could steal the lives of thousands of humans in a split second.
As artificial intelligence develops and improves, who’s to say the killer robots we put together with our own hands won’t one day cause serious devastation to the human race and maybe even turn against us?
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If the US wanted Rizzo and Banks prosecuted we could do it ourselves. We have the means. US drone strikes in Pakistan are unsanctioned by international humanitarian law because the United States is not engaged in an armed conflict with Pakistan; drones do not distinguish between civilians and combatants; and the staggering number of civilian deaths is vastly disproportionate in relation to the numbers of Taliban and Al-Qaeda killed. This qualifies drone strikes as “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions punishable under the US War Crimes Act. Since the US has decided not to prosecute Banks and Rizzo why should anyone believe the US will allow Pakistan to prosecute them?
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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as “drones” have been the subject of heated debate in recent years. Without a doubt, the number of strikes has increased at an astonishing rate. Consider that between Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, the U.S. government has launched over 1,500 known drone strikes since 2008. (This visualization of strikes in Pakistan is particularly illustrative)
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Nothing shows the decay of the Republic like our drone wars, almost mindless killing — now including execution of Americans by Presidential decree.
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On Jan. 23, 2013, after an afternoon of hanging out with friends and chewing qat at a marketplace a few miles outside of the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, Saleem al-Qaweli, a 27-year-old university student, was approached by a group of six men who asked for a ride back to their nearby village in his truck. Saleem agreed, and asked his cousin Ali Saleh al-Qaweli, a 32-year-old schoolteacher, to come along. A little after 7:30 p.m., as the pickup passed through the village of al-Masna’ah, a U.S. drone fired four missiles into Saleem’s vehicle, obliterating it. Investigators on the scene would find bone fragments 150 meters away from the car.
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The issue of drones or Unarmed Aerial Vehicles provides an intriguing legal debate as drones are increasingly being used in warfare and counter-terrorism. There are divergent views and opinions as to their legality in international law. Some argue that the use of armed drones by the U.S military for example in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries is illegal under international law, while some argue that drones are an acceptable tool of war. The use of drones raises many questions. But for purposes of this article, the main question is whether their use amounts to a war crime.
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Civilians who were injured during the attacks said they have been suffering from suffocation, nausea and diarrhea since the start of the attacks.
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When U.S. special operations forces exited Yemen last month, it was seen as a severe blow to the fight against al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which President Barack Obama had previously held up as a success in the global effort against terrorism.
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Joining a growing list of U.S. foreign policy failures in the Middle East, including Iraq, Syria and Libya, Yemen is fast becoming a humanitarian disaster. Its indigenous conflict, cruelly fueled by Washington and Saudi Arabia, has killed hundreds of people, wounded more than 2,000, and displaced more than a quarter million people, according to the United Nations. All this at a time when 16 million of its desperately poor inhabitants are critically short of food, water and fuel.
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An all-out political process is needed as soon as possible to ensure long-lasting peace in Yemen, says Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Secretary-General Tan Sri Iyad Ameen Madani.
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Street battles and air raids are driving more and more Yemenis from their homes, the United Nations said Tuesday as the worsening conflict forced the impoverished Arabian Peninsula country’s liquefied natural gas company to shut down production.
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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called for an “immediate cease-fire” in Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition is conducting airstrikes against Houthi rebels, saying the impoverished country was “in flames”.
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Almost a month ago, on March 25, the Saudis launched what they called Operation Decisive Storm to stop the onslaught of the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen. It turns out that, to no one’s surprise, Decisive Storm isn’t actually decisive.
The Saudis have been bombing rather freely, killing by UN estimates more than 600 people, at least half of them civilians. On March 31, for example, Saudi bombs hit a dairy factory killing 31 civilians, the kind of mistake that would be greeted with global outrage if it were committed by the Israeli Air Force but it is met with polite silence when it’s the Saudis.
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An investigation of American drone strikes in Yemen concludes that the Obama administration has not followed its own rules to avoid civilian casualties and is setting a dangerous example for other countries that want to use unmanned aircraft against terrorists.
The study, by the Open Society Justice Initiative, a legal advocacy group based in New York, was released on Monday at a time when Yemen has been engulfed in violence and American drone strikes have been slowed or halted. But its observations about the performance of American counterterrorism strikes from 2012 to 2014 remain relevant for assessing a novel weapons system that the United States has used in several countries and has now approved for export to a limited number of allies.
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The brother of a drone strike victim told researchers, “We had hoped that America would come to the region with educational and development projects and services, but it came instead with aircrafts to kill our children.” (Image via Open Society Justice Foundation/ Mwatana Organization for Human Rights)
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The first known airstrikes carried out by the Obama administration came on December 17, 2009, when a cruise missile loaded with clusters bombs slammed into the village of Al Majala in Abyan province. While purportedly targeted at an AQAP training camp, it killed at least 44 civilians, including five pregnant women and 21 children. A separate strike the same day killed four people in Arhab.
Since then, there have been at least 121 drone and other airstrikes that have taken the lives of as many as 1,100 people, most of them officially classified as combatants. As a means of limiting the official civilian casualty count in any particular attack, President Obama approved the redefinition of a “combatant” as any male of military service age killed or injured by a drone strike.
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The report further points out that real problems will arise holding people accountable for wrongful actions of autonomous weapon systems (e.g., striking the wrong target) – an “accountability gap” as the study calls it. Thus, technological problems may perhaps be only one obstacle to overcome before the future use of autonomous “killer robots” in the U.S. military.
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Obama is a skilled murderer in a wide range of places. While his “cowboy” predecessor George W. Bush has him beat by far on total body count (thanks to “the American-led war in Iraq”), Obama takes the prize when it comes to geographical scope. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism last January, “At least 2,464 people have now been killed by US drone strikes outside the country’s declared war zones [Iraq and Afghanistan] since President Barack Obama’s inauguration six years ago.” The Nobel champion’s drones, bombs, missiles, and Special Forces have wreaked havoc in many more Muslim nations than were invaded by Bush’s troops, something that has helped Washington spread and intensify Salafist jihad across a much broader territory (including Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria) in the Age of Obama
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Obama’s secret execution approval process denies citizens due process.
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Lawmakers are pushing Obama take a page out of the World War II playbook—and let Jordan borrow Predator drones to keep the terror group at bay.
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It is the same professional methodical coldness with which the drone operator kills. In his book, Chamayou argues that assassination, combat, and law enforcement have become jumbled together in US counterinsurgency programs. He wants to re-separate them. He points out that the Obama administration has defended drone strikes as justified by both the laws of war and the norms of law enforcement, even though the legal frameworks regulating war and policing are quite different, indeed often opposed. Under the laws of war, combatants are excused from the usual prohibition against killing, but on condition that they kill in carefully circumscribed ways. The killing is of and by combatants, and must take place in a declared war zone, within which soldiers are free to kill their enemy counterparts at will, even shooting them in the back, unless the target is trying to surrender. Those engaged in law enforcement, on the other hand, can hunt criminals more freely across space, but killing them is considered a last resort, justified only by exceptional circumstances. Quoting UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston, Chamayou writes that in law enforcement, “the use of lethal force should remain the exception … it is permissible only if it is the sole available means in the face of a threat that is ‘instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.’”
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The gravity of targeted killings via drones and the factual basis upon which we built our petition warranted this expression of disaffection. Academic institutions, after all, are supposed to be places for honest and critical debates. At times, we have known NYU Law to be such a place—that is, a setting where compassionate and thoughtful people confront, rather than dismiss uncomfortable facts.
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Journalist Andrew Cockburn joins Alyona to discuss his new book, “Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins,” and the evolution of technology in warfare.
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Brandon Bryant’s story provides a rare glimpse into a secret world and raises questions about the nature of 21st Century warfare.
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Drone wars signal a future in which weapons may think for themselves.
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The U.S. Navy will launch up to 30 synchronized drones within one minute, possibly from a single cannon-like device, in what marks a significant advance in robot autonomy. The drones, when airborne, will then unfold their wings and conduct a series of maneuvers and simulated missions with very little human guidance over the course of 90 minutes.
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The US Navy says its system will be able to launch a 30 drone ‘swarm’ in under a minute. They will then be able to fly together to carry out missions. The US Navy says the drones are a ‘new era in autonomy and unmanned systems for naval operations’.
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“It’s bad enough to be creating more profit incentive for war,” I told former head of Blackwater Erik Prince, “but you recycle part of the profits as bribes for more war in the form of so-called campaign contributions. You yourself have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to political parties and candidates. The three of you,” I said, referring to Prince, another guest, and the host of a television show that had just finished filming and was taking questions from the audience, “you seem to agree that we need either mercenaries or a draft, ignoring the option of not having these wars, which kill so many people, make us less safe, drain the economy, destroy the natural environment, and erode our civil liberties, with no upside. But this systemic pressure has been created for more war. Will you, Erik Prince, commit to not spending war profits on elections?”
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It is often alleged that the basis for US-Israeli relations lies in “shared concerns and interests”. However, what really holds the relationship together is a systemic aspect of American politics: the system of special interest lobbying and the money that underlies it. That practice is just about as old as the country itself, and the Zionist lobby is a past-master at exploiting this system. With the Supreme Court rulings telling us that political spending and donations are forms of free speech, this rather perverse aspect of US politics is not going to change in the foreseeable future.
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Last week, Republican Senator Tom Cotton criticized President Obama’s nuclear deal framework with Iran, saying Obama was refusing to admit that airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities would only take “several days” and wouldn’t require any longer-term military commitment to be effective. Obama, he said, was offering a “false choice” between the deal and war.
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The lead editorial in today’s New York Times titled “Iraq’s cycles of Revenge,” reminds me of my thoughts about sword-rattling in America before we invaded Iraq in 2003. It was clear that President Bush and his advisers were considering an invasion of Iraq, which I felt would be a grave mistake. Even in my wildest flights of the mind, however, I didn’t begin to imagine the damage that the American invasion of Iraq would cause. Even though I didn’t imagine the destruction that our invasion of Iraq would bring about I was right on one essential point. I understood that by intervening in Iraq we were exposing ourselves to the terrible risks of waging war in a part of the world where revenge is a main part of, if not the driving force within ,the overall culture.
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It’s already election season in the United States, and that means it’s time to start hearing from people who believe they’re uniquely qualified to run America’s wars, drones, nuclear deals, trade partnerships, and everything else.
There are already a handful of front-runners. And when it comes to foreign policy, unfortunately for us all, they’ve each said things that are — to put it gently — a little out of touch with reality.
Hopefully they’ll brush up on world affairs before really hitting the campaign trail. Until then, here are a few of the clueless things that they’ve said about the rest of the world.
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Now, we all know that resentment and blame are tools of war propaganda. So, in Mary’s defense and mine: neither of us called anybody a name in the presence of that person or proposed to harm any person or armed ourselves with massive machinery of death in preparation for books going missing or a basketball team losing. I didn’t put any Michigan State fans on a kill list and blow them and everyone near them to bits with hellfire missiles. Neither of us launched any invasions.
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If we want war to end, we are going to have to work to end it. Even if you think war is lessening – by no means an uncontroversial claim – it won’t continue doing so without work. And as long as there is any war, there is a significant danger of widespread war. Wars are notoriously hard to control once begun. With nuclear weapons in the world (and with nuclear plants as potential targets), any war-making carries a risk of apocalypse. War-making and war preparations are destroying our natural environment and diverting resources from a possible rescue effort that would preserve a habitable climate. As a matter of survival, war and preparations for war must be completely abolished, and abolished quickly, by replacing the war system with a peace system.
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Rep. Luz Ilagan of Gabriela said the executive session is important because she will be able to get answers to her questions related to the alleged involvement of the US in the Mamasapano operation.
“The resource persons were very cagey . . . We can extract this info. Unfortunately it may not be shared with the public and the media,” Ilagan said.
While matters discussed in the executive session cannot be divulged publicly, Pagdilao said these will have a bearing in the evaluation and result of the House inquiry.
He added that the report should be finished by the time the ad hoc panel tasked to review the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) will resume its hearings.
Over 60 people were killed in Mamasapano, Maguindanao including 44 members of the SAF who were in an operation to capture Marwan and his protégé Abdulbasit Usman. Members of the MILF and civilians were also among the casualties.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has confirmed that the police commandos were able to kill Marwan.
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The US government’s tactic of releasing details about its targeted killing programme in only a piecemeal way is “very dangerous”, the American Civil Liberties Union warns in this week’s Drone News.
Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, tells the Bureau’s Owen Bennett-Jones that for the sake of accountability it is vital to understand the reasons why targets are selected for execution – and this can only come through the fullest transparency.
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A front-page article in last Friday’s Australian reported that, for the first time, an Australian citizen—Mostafa Farag—had been placed on the Obama administration’s “kill list” for assassination by drone attack. The lack of any response, let alone criticism, from any section of the Australian political and media establishment underscores not only its support for Washington’s criminal actions but its contempt for democratic rights at home.
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The initial reports of the death of al-Rubaysh do not state whether he was the target of the alleged U.S. drone strike. If he was, a key legal and moral question that major media outlets (AP, NYT, etc.) are not asking: is a cleric like al-Rubaysh a legitimate military target?
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The Supreme Court rejected on Monday petition filed against the federal government to put an end to the drone program launched by the United States in the tribal areas, Express News reported.
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The Supreme Court Monday dismissed a petition that sought direction to the federal government to stop drone attacks, which had killed hundreds of people in the Federal Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
A three-member bench headed by Justice Saqib Nisar, hearing the petition filed by Syed Muhammad Iqtidar remarked that the court could not issue a war order to stop the drone attacks, adding the petition did not fall under the jurisdiction of Article 184 (3).
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There is ample evidence to show that General Khalifa Haftar is untouchable no matter what he does to directly snub his nose at the UN-supported peace talks promoted by the U.S. and other countries.
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U.S. President Barack Obama and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on Friday urged a political solution to the conflict in Libya, saying foreign military operations were unlikely to solve the crisis there.
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Restoring stability in Libya is the only way to solve the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said Friday, as President Barack Obama warned re-establishing peace could not be achieved by military force.
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Twenty eight people were rescued in the incident, which happened in an area just off Libyan waters, 120 miles south of the southern Italian island of Lampedusa
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Clashes broke out in a district and a suburb of Libya’s capital on Saturday, home to groups opposing an alternative government controlling Tripoli and parts of western Libya, residents said.
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The Turkish Consulate General building in the Greek city of Thessaloniki was struck by Molotov cocktails several times during a demonstration against high-security prisons Friday night, consulate sources told the Anadolu Agency.
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To wage war in Yemen, Saudi Arabia is using F-15 fighter jets bought from Boeing. Pilots from the United Arab Emirates are flying Lockheed Martin’s F-16 to bomb both Yemen and Syria. Soon, the Emirates are expected to complete a deal with General Atomics for a fleet of Predator drones to run spying missions in their neighborhood.
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A landmark case may open the door for a possible multibillion-dollar class-action lawsuit launched by relatives of the alleged 960 civilian victims of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan
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As the elected Iraqi government seeks diplomatic respect and struggles to save its ancient sites from the rampages of the Islamic State group, American military members, contractors and others caught with culturally significant artifacts they brought home from the war there are going largely unprosecuted.
Years after the war, swords, artifacts and other items looted from Saddam Hussein’s palaces are still turning up for sale online and at auctions, and in some cases U.S. agents have traced them to American government employees, who took them as souvenirs or war trophies.
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The pictures also show that China is building similar infrastructure in two other places, Johnson South Reef and Gaven Reefs. This naturally put the U.S. at extreme unease. The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence has just published its first report on the Chinese navy since 2009, and says that China “appears to be building much larger facilities that could eventually support both maritime law enforcement and naval operations.”
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According to Clark, Wolfowitz said: “We should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein. The truth is, one thing we did learn is that we can use our military in the Middle East and the Soviets won’t stop us. We’ve got about five or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes – Syria, Iran (sic), Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.”
It’s now been more than 10 years, of course. But do not be deceived into thinking Wolfowitz and his neocon colleagues believe they have failed in any major way. The unrest they initiated keeps mounting – in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Lebanon – not to mention fresh violence now in full swing in Yemen and the crisis in Ukraine. Yet, the Teflon coating painted on the neocons continues to cover and protect them in the “mainstream media.”
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A week after it became clear that the neocons were not going to get their war in Syria, I found myself at the main CNN studio in Washington together with Paul Wolfowitz and former Sen. Joe Lieberman, another important neocon. As I reported in “How War on Syria Lost Its Way,” the scene was surreal – funereal, even, with both Wolfowitz and Lieberman very much down-in-the-mouth, behaving as though they had just watched their favorite team lose the Super Bowl.
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In 1952, the British government asked the U.S administration for assistance in removing the democratically-elected Prime Minster Mosaddeq. The CIA then covertly helped the MI6 take Mosaddeq out of power and funneled money to General Fazlollah Zahedi’s regime. Afterwords, the U.S and Britain put a pro-west leader, who they called the Shah, into power. Over the course of his regime, the Shah ruled brutally and implemented pro-western policies that caused disdain for his leadership.
Then, in 1979, the Iranian people, fed up with the Shah, violently revolted against him in what is know as the Iranian Revolution. After the revolution, the Iranian people replaced the Shah with an Islamic Republic under the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Soon afterwords, the U.S helped prop up Saddam Hussein and sold chemical weapons to him in order to fight Iran and their new Islamic Republic. This all escalated to what is now known as the Gulf War and the Iraq War.
The last example is referred to as Operation Cyclone. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union tried to expand its control into Afghanistan. In order to prevent expansion, the CIA supplied and trained Islamic militant groups to fight the Soviet Union upon expansion. The most prominent group was called the Mujahideen. Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive CIA operations ever undertaken.
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But fewer people remember the Haditha massacre of 2005, when a squad of United States Marines murdered 24 innocent Iraqis in a revenge killing spree. It started when one of their Humvees hit an improvised mine, killing one and injuring two more. The squad immediately killed five people in the street. They then went house to house, and killed 19 more civilians, ranging in age from 3 to 76. Many were shot multiple times at close range, some still in their pajamas. One was in a wheelchair.
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Today, we know that those combat operations had barely begun. Almost 12 years later, with the Obama administration pursuing a bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State, they have yet to end. On only one thing was President Bush right: with the invasion of Iraq, a new era had indeed been launched. His top officials and their neoconservative allies imagined the moment as the coronation of a new order in the Middle East, the guarantee of another American half-century or more of domination. Iraq, that crucial state in the oil heartlands of the planet, was to be garrisoned for decades (on the “Korea model”); the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad was to be brought to heel; and above all, fundamentalist Iran was to be crushed. That country’s rulers were to find themselves in an ever-tightening geopolitical vise, with American Iraq on one side and American Afghanistan on the other. (A quip of the moment caught the mood of Washington and its high-flown hopes perfectly: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”) The Bush administration would ensure that the great blemish on the American half-century in the region, the reversal of the CIA’s coup by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 and the humiliation of having American diplomats taken hostage for 444 days in Tehran — would be wiped away. The regime of the Ayatollahs was soon to be history.
Of course, it all turned out so unimaginably otherwise, leaving us today knee-deep in the chaos of that “new era.” Shock and awe, indeed! The American half-century has been swept away as definitively as was the Soviet Cold-War version of the same before it. Someday, the disastrous invasion of Iraq will have its historian and we’ll understand more fully just what that moment really launched, what forces already building in the region it let devastatingly loose. It certainly blew a hole in the heart of the Middle East in ways we have yet to come to grips with and prepared the ground, as dynamite does a construction site, for the disintegration of both the European and the American versions of “order” in the region, as well as for the building of we know not what… yet.
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But both terrorists themselves and those who study them present a dramatically different explanation. Osama bin Laden himself, for example, said the 9/11 attack reflected his deep anger at America’s Middle East policies. He was appalled by the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who died from lack of food and medicine due to American sanctions and resented the deployment of American forces throughout the Gulf states, particularly in his own homeland, Saudi Arabia. He repeated such sentiments many times.
American authorities did not consider them mere propaganda. Michael Scheur, the CIA’s top Middle East specialist, accepted that Mr. bin Laden “has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy, but have everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world.”
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Slaying anonymous tribesmen has been mostly without consequence for the US drone program, apart from growing anti-US sentiment in the area. One exception was a 2009 strike which killed three civilians, and which has led to murder charges against a former CIA station chief.
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Two days before he’d tell the United Nations that Iraq was training al-Qaida operatives to use chemical weapons, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell dragged his chief of staff into a private room at Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Va.
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American spooks may have been partly to blame for horrific civilian casualties in Yemen, human rights campaigners claimed.
Dozens of non-military Yemenis were slaughtered and at least 11 injured in Saudi Arabia’s air-strikes on local factories last month.
But it is suspected that US special forces and CIA officers on the ground may have helped call in the strikes last month by Saudi warplanes.
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A European MP and leader of Poland’s conservative KORWiN party said that the 2014 Euromaidan riots in Kiev were organized by the CIA and also by Polish spooks.
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The evocative imagery used in militant activism fails to address the historical underpinnings of trafficking and slavery while reinforcing neo-colonial representations of the ‘saviour’ and the ‘saved.’
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In a September 2014 address to the nation, President Obama attacked ISIL (or ISIS) as “terrorists… unique in their brutality. They execute captured prisoners. They kill children.”1 But of course such terrorism in the last half-century is hardly “unique.” Nor is it unprecedented. Still less is it confined to America’s foes. In fact the first major Muslim extermination campaign against civilians killed without trial for their “Westernness,” occurred a half century ago, on a far, far vaster scale, and with active American support and encouragement.
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Twelve helicopters, bristling with guns and US Marines, breached the morning horizon and began a daring descent toward Cambodia’s besieged capital. Residents believed the Americans were rushing in to save them, but at the US Embassy, in a bleeding city about to die, the ambassador wept.
Forty years later, John Gunther Dean recalls one of the most tragic days of his life — April 12, 1975, the day the United States “abandoned Cambodia and handed it over to the butcher.”
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On the war’s 50th anniversary, peace activists will be challenging the Pentagon’s whitewashed history.
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Over four million were killed in Washington’s aggressive war upon a very poor largely peasant society beginning in the mid-1950s when the U.S. took over from the defeated French colonialist armies. France had occupied and oppressed Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (Indochina) for over 100 years, then it became America’s turn. U.S. bombings killed at least a million more people in Laos and Cambodia.
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It is one of the iconic images of the Vietnam war: a line of desperate citizens climbing to the top of a building to board one of the last American helicopters leaving before the North Vietnamese invade Saigon. Though most remember it as a photograph of the U.S. Embassy, it was actually a neighboring building, and most of the men and women were CIA station personnel, not civilians, “but it indicated to what extent chaos had descended on this entire operation,” says Frank Snepp, a CIA analyst who was there that day. Even our shared memories of the Vietnam War are wrong.
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“There was a certain amount of lying going on,” he says. “But what I thought much more interesting was the wishful thinking … people who looked into the maw and said “it’s gonna be alright,” just out of sheer belief,” he says.
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In December 2012, NBC chief correspondent Richard Engel and five other members of a news team were allegedly kidnapped in Syria near the Turkish border. According to Engel, the gunmen claimed to be Shiite supporters of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. After five days, the NBC newsman said at the time, the news team was rescued by anti-Assad Sunni rebels in a gun battle.
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The term “regime change,” widely used among the United States’ policy-makers has no basis in international law; US-organized “regime change” operations have never solved international conflicts but have only led to incessant civil wars and fierce internal strife, Hans von Sponeck, former UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, noted, according to Sputnik.
“Following years of clandestine co-operation between US spies and Iraqi opposition groups, the US Congress came out into the open by approving the Iraq Liberation Act, which stated that US policy should seek to ‘support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein’.”
Curiously enough, the Act was signed by US President Clinton on October 31, 1998, and five years later a full-scale military campaign was launched by George W. Bush under an utterly false pretext.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Five years after the massive BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Gulf Coast communities are still waiting for the billions promised to help them recover from the nation’s worst environmental disaster.
Local officials and environmentalists from the five affected states — Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — have taken steps to identify which projects would be financed with fine money paid by BP.
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In 1997, this little fish was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. It made an easy target: dry faucets, fallow fields, and dessicated lawns all to save a fish the size of a newborn’s pecker. Don’t judge. These farmers and cities have been worried about California’s water situation for a lot longer than you’ve been wringing your hands over almonds. Actually, you know what? Delta smelt is the almond of endangered species.
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The Organization of Petroleum Export Countries (OPEC) increased oil output strategy was a direct retaliatory strike at the massive U.S. oil boom not seen since the 1970s. The main feature of the war is about political dominance, relevance and survival. But while one side sees this was war the other sees it as a private matter. By flooding the market, OPEC cut international prices in half from $115 last June to $57 per barrel as of today.
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With all the attention focused on California’s water woes, an observer might conclude that the Golden State’s drought is the exception. It isn’t. Forty states expect to see water shortages in at least some areas in the next decade, according to a government watchdog agency.
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Finance
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I have been arguing for years that the American political system is broken. Not in the way that everyone else says it is — the Democrats and Republicans unable to compromise or get anything done. Given what happens when the two major parties cooperate — “free trade” agreements that send American jobs overseas and cut wages for those that remain, wars we have no chance of winning, and tax “reform” that only benefits the extremely wealthy and the corporations they control — we could use a lot more Washington gridlock.
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The biggest star of today’s ECB’s press conference was not Mario Draghi but 21-year-old German feminist, Josephine Witt, an ex-Femen activist who jumped on Draghi’s desk wearing an “ECB Dick-tatorship”, a slogan she repeatedly screamed as she was led away by security guards. She threw paper copies of her demands at Mr Draghi, while showering him with confetti that were created from her finely chopped up manifesto.
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The emails drew criticism because New York offers the most generous film-tax breaks in the nation, and Cuomo reportedly took in $900,000 from Hollywood for his political campaign since taking office in 2011.
In one email dated Jan. 6, 2014, a Sony executive urged CEO Michael Lynton to have the company raise $50,000 by July for Cuomo’s re-election bid.
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The mobilization day organized by alterglobalization movement Attac found great success in Germany. Over 200 German cities held protests Saturday against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) currently being negotiated between the European Union and the United States.
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Szubin has been director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence since 2006, where he played a key role in devising U.S. economic sanctions against Iran and Russia.
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Szubin, nominated Thursday to be undersecretary for terrorism and financial crimes, would if confirmed by the US Senate be the third Jewish undersecretary in the role.
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Obama speaks with his usual florid lexicon about “an historic turning point”. But the fact is that the US still maintains its economic stranglehold on Cuba. This American boot on Cuba’s neck has been condemned around the world in the forum of the United Nations General Assembly and among Latin American nations. Yet still the American boot remains firmly in place. Obama will be long out of White House and the gung-ho US Congress will ensure that the strangulation of Cuba will continue.
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As Fortune predicted (tongue-in-cheek), it looks like blogging alone isn’t going to pay Ben Bernanke’s bills for long.
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Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed a bill Thursday instructing poor families about what they can’t spend their state cash assistance on.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The US media industry has been the arm of the government for decades, but now the Cold War tool is being resurrected in a “big way” to tackle any Russian influence on the information flow, foreign affairs expert Richard Becker told RT.
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A lot of theories are written off as conspiracy by the public because they are just too wild to believe, or if they were to be true, they are too shameful and shocking to comprehend. Sometimes these theories spread like wildfire because they sound so crazy, but a recent study by political scientists Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood showed that 50% of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory. Though they may seem unreal, some of these conspiracy theories end up being true, and test the limits of possibility. Here are ten of those theories that, as it turns out, weren’t just a figment of someone’s imagination.
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John Pilger, an Australian based journalist and filmmaker in London, has been subjected to persistent abuse, in Britain and his native Australia, for his reportage that spreads over last 50 years across Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Burma and Palestine. One of his books ‘Tell Me No Lies’, is an anthology of write-ups from diverse people like Edward Said, Seymour Hersh, James Cameron and some committed reporters. The book ranges across many of the critical events, scandals and struggles of the past, exposing the lies perpetuated through media by the people in power.
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We’re going to remember historian Stanley Kutler. He died Tuesday at the age of 80. Kutler helped uncover some of the dark secrets of the Nixon administration. Some of Nixon’s secretly recorded White House tapes were released in April 1974. Nixon resigned that August.Nixon tried to prevent the release of the remaining tapes, but in 1992 Kutler and the advocacy group Public Citizen sued the National Archives which led to the 1996 release of about 200 more hours of Nixon White House tapes. Those recordings detail how the Nixon administration tried to destroy Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon papers and how the group of former CIA agents known as the Plumbers broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist looking for incriminating information.
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Censorship
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Every time I learn about the latest antics of the anti-Israel thought police on university campuses, I find myself offering silent thanks that they are, for the moment, just thought police. Because if these kids and their faculty supporters ran a real police force, the pro-Israel students and academics they didn’t manage to arrest would be driven underground.
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Sunday saw the city host the second edition of Litmus Festival, and the weighty speakers ensured that Bengalureans went home intellectually satiated.
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Earlier this week, Gawker broke the news that BuzzFeed Beauty Editor Arabelle Sicardi has resigned from the site. She wrote a piece last week criticizing a Dove soap advertising campaign that BuzzFeed deleted and later republished at the direction of Editor in Chief Ben Smith. Her resignation is the latest chapter in the evolving “DoveGate” scandal.
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In March, artist and poet Rupi Kaur uploaded an image to Instagram, depicting Kaur curled up on the bed in sweats and a t-shirt. She’s also on her period, and the blood has dripped through her pants onto the sheets. The image was flagged and removed from Instagram — twice.
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Various people in Florida and Wisconsin might find climate censorship as humorous but other states have not been seen laughing over it. Contrastingly political and environmental experts have asked this news to be used as a model.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott became the leader of this potential trend last month when news emerged that he had ordered environmental staffers not to use the terms “climate change” or “global warming” in communications or reports. Wisconsin established a similar policy this month, voting to ban staffers who manage thousands of acres of forests from working on or talking about global warming.
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Two weeks ago, a group of Harvard College students launched Renegade, a magazine that seeks to provide an outlet for students of color on Harvard’s campus. This past week, the Crimson reported that several posters parodying the publication had been posted in Pforzheimer House. The House Masters subsequently issued a statement condemning the fake posters, while also indicating their intention to remove the satirical posters
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Privacy
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For many years now, we’ve been writing about the need for ECPA reform. ECPA is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, written in the mid-1980s, which has some frankly bizarre definitions and rules concerning the privacy of electronic information. There are a lot of weird ones but the one we talk about most is that ECPA defines electronic communications that have been on a server for 180 days or more as “abandoned,” allowing them to be examined without a warrant and without probable cause as required under the 4th Amendment. That may have made sense in the 1980s when electronic communications tended to be downloaded to local machines (and deleted), but make little sense in an era of cloud computing when the majority of people store their email forever on servers. For the past few years, Congress has proposed reforming ECPA to require an actual warrant for such emails, and there’s tremendous Congressional support for this.
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If you thought your Facebook chats are safe from prying eyes, you’re apparently wrong. Bosnadev says that Facebook’s chats are being scanned by a CIA-funded company, a discovery Bosnadev made after looking into some unusual activity on a website triggered by a link present in a Facebook chat.
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According to the post, the group built an app that was never published and posted its link in Facebook through a private chat box. They then noticed some unusual activity after keeping track of any attempt to access the link.
“During the testing of an application we’ve set up in a non-published area we have noticed some unusual activity,” said Bosnadev. “The link for the app was sent via Facebook chat and afterwards comes the interesting part.”
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Recorded Future is an American-Swedish firm which identifies real-time online risks through web-based source collecting and analyzing. These include analyzing links that have never been published anywhere else.
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The public site Recorded Future is referencing is Pastebin. A commenter on the original post laid out what happened: Some time after the URL was published, it was posted to Pastebin, which is a public text repository, like imgur. There, it was crawled by Recorded Future.
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“Even the most extensive monitoring system would never be able to make us perfectly safe from terrorism,” Snowden said, while taking part in a debate via video link, which was broadcasted by Ansa News agency.
“Yet, mass surveillance is often used by intelligence agencies to spy on citizens regardless if a crime is being committed or not,” he added.
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It can be unsettling to watch a computer spit out your personal information before it even knows your name. Especially when the information appears in a terminal font, superimposed over a map of your area.
That’s probably what you’ll see if you take the Burner Challenge, which uses your phone number to show you just how much information those digits can reveal – everything from names of acquaintances, to lists of old employers, to your current and previous addresses. And it’s all gleaned from public sources.
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The National Security Agency’s authority to collect the phone records of millions of people is scheduled to end on June 1, and a bipartisan privacy coalition of 39 organizations wants to make sure it stays that way.
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Civil Rights
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A 14-year-old eighth grader in Florida, Domanik Green, has been charged with a felony for “hacking” his teacher’s computer. The “hacking” in this instance was using a widely known password to change the desktop background of his teacher’s computer with an image of two men kissing. The outrage of being charged with a felony for what essentially amounts to a misguided prank should be familiar to those who follow how computer crimes are handled by our justice system.
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Uruguay was polarized between between revolutionaries and a militaristic right wing. Nueva Cancion performers and other musicians rooted in the working-class struggle were heavily repressed alongside political activists and suspected guerrillas. The members of Camerata and Daniel Viglietti were arrested, and singer Mercedes Sosa was banned from the country entirely. Singer Braulio Lopez was arrested and tortured there before being sent to prison for a year in Argentina.
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Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, recently sent a letter to Ashton Carter, the new defense secretary, urging him to “end the unnecessary force-feedings of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility.”
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Years ago, Chalmers Johnson took a term of CIA tradecraft, “blowback,” and put it into our language. Originally, it was meant to describe CIA operations so secret that, when they blew back on this country, Americans would be incapable of tracing the connection or grasping that the U.S. had anything to do with what hit us. The word now stands in more broadly for any American act or policy that rebounds on us. There is, however, another phenomenon with, as yet, no name that deserves some attention. I’ve come to think of it as “blowforward.”
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The Chicago police, America has learned, operate a secret interrogation facility in a nondescript warehouse called Homan Square. Prisoners — both adults and juveniles, some as young as 15 — are disappeared there, often shackled for endless hours, denied their right to counsel, and beaten. At least one man, found unresponsive in an interview room, later was pronounced dead.
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Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and several Chicago aldermen are offering a $5.5 million reparations package for people who were tortured during the tenure of former police commander John Burge.
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More than 30 years after he was brutally tortured by Chicago detectives, Darrell Cannon may finally see what he calls a “measure of justice.”
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Searching for the “best kept secret in outsourcing,” one that can “provide you with all the advantages” of domestic workers, but with “offshore prices”? Try prison labor!
That’s the message of Unicor, also known as Federal Prison Industries, a government-owned corporation that employs federal workers for as little as 23 cents an hour to manufacture military uniforms, furniture, electronics and other products.
Though FPI markets itself as an opportunity for inmates to obtain skills training, critics have attacked the program as exploitative. Small business owners have also complained that FPI’s incredibly low wages make it impossible to compete.
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I was found not guilty of the charges against me, by reason of insanity. But with the way our society operates, I may have been better off had I been motivated by evil, anger, greed or malice and been found guilty. Society understands malice. We understand retribution. But we do not understand mental illness and are often unable to see the humanity in those with mental illness. Thus, instead of being locked in a prison for three years, I was locked in a mental hospital for seven years. And I am one of the lucky ones. I know many others who have recovered from their illness but still have spent decades, even their whole lives, locked inside mental hospitals, simply because we choose to fear rather than understand mental illness. It is just so much easier and more convenient to throw people away. Many people with mental illness would love to have the rights that are given to convicted criminals.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has added his name to a growing list of Australian journalists, academics, politicians, trade unionists and solidarity activists calling on U.S. president Barack Obama to revoke his executive order against Venezuelan . On March 9, Obama issued the order which imposed sanctions on a number of Venezuelan state officials and deemed Venezuela to be an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
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Ben Affleck insisted on censoring the fact that one of his ancestors owned slaves from PBS show “Finding Your Roots,” the Sony email hack has revealed.
In a hacked Sony email from July 22, 2014, now available on WikiLeaks, the show’s host, Henry Louis Gates Jr., writes to Sony USA chief Michael Lynton asking for advice: “One of our guests has asked us to edit out something about one of his ancestors–the fact that he owned slaves. Now, four or five of our guests this season descend from slave owners, including Ken Burns. We’ve never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found. He’s a megastar. What do we do?”
Lynton’s advice was to take Affleck’s family secret out of the show, as long as nobody would find out. The Sony chairman and CEO writes, “On the doc the big question is who knows that the material is in the doc and is being taken out. I would take it out if no one knows, but if it gets out that you are editing the material based on this kind of sensitivity then it gets tricky.”
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Robyn Gritz spent 16 years at the FBI, where she investigated a series of major national security threats. But she says she got crosswise with her supervisors, who pushed her out and yanked her security clearance.
For the first time, she’s speaking out about her situation, warning about how the bureau treats women and the effects of a decade of fighting terrorism.
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A federal judge issued a stern rebuke Friday to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s method for breaking up an illegal online betting ring. The Las Vegas court frowned on the FBI’s ruse of disconnecting Internet access to $25,000-per-night villas at Caesar’s Palace Hotel and Casino. FBI agents posed as the cable guy and secretly searched the premises.
The government claimed the search was legal because the suspects invited the agents into the room to fix the Internet. US District Judge Andrew P. Gordon wasn’t buying it. He ruled that if the government could get away with such tactics like those they used to nab gambling kingpin Paul Phua and some of his associates, then the government would have carte blanche power to search just about any property.
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We need a sense of the unity of all mankind to save the future, a new global ethic for a united world. We need politeness and kindness to save the future, politeness and kindness not only within nations but also between nations. To save the future, we need a just and democratic system of international law; for with law shall our land be built up, but with lawlessness laid waste.
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Supreme Court president Lord Neuberger said judges must have “an understanding of different cultural and social habits,” as part of their duty to show fairness and impartiality in trials.
[...]
His speech comes after nearly a year after the European Court of Human Rights upheld the April 2011 ban on niqab in British courts.
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The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
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DR SAM RAPHAEL wants to know if the flights which landed at Prestwick and Glasgow Airports violated Scottish law and if Holyrood or Westminster was aware of what was going on on board.
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A Police Scotland probe into CIA flights is yet to find any evidence Scots airports were used to transport terror suspects.
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Dying CIA officer Normand Hodges claims he assassinated 37 people, including Marilyn Monroe. The 78-year-old said he worked for the CIA for 41 years as an operative. He also admitted to acting as a hitman for the governmental agency.
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When people are on their deathbed, they have nothing to lose and nothing to gain. One of the most awe inspiring stories from the entertainment industry is that of Marilyn Monroe and the 78 year old retired CIA officer, Norman Hodges, who made some of the most ground breaking confessions ever noted from an ex CIA officer.
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There were a lot of bad days during the Cold War, but 54 years ago this weekend was one of the worst, at least for the United States. President John F. Kennedy sent an army of anti-Castro exiles backed by the CIA onto the beach at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs to suffer bloody, catastrophic defeat. It was “the beating of our lives,” the despondent Kennedy would say a few days later as he wondered aloud why nobody had talked him out of it.
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Four Alabama airmen killed during the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba will be honored by the Alabama Air National Guard in a ceremony at Forest Hills Cemetery today at 3:30 p.m., according to a news release from the Guard’s 117th Air Refueling Wing.
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Though everyone would surely prefer otherwise, public relations crises are part of the CIA’s ordinary business. The fact that so much of its work is classified puts the Agency in one of those tricky, plumber-like governmental roles: when it does its job right, no one should notice. But when it screws up, there’s a mess, and things smell awful.
The nature of any covert enterprise is rigged against popularity: the Agency can’t ordinarily brag about its hard-won successes or even update Americans with news of general competence. The FBI, by contrast, gets to issue press releases detailing high-profile arrests and convictions. But with rare exceptions, the CIA hits the front page only when something has gone badly sideways.
This asymmetry naturally gives rise to an image problem, so the CIA needs a way of loopholing if it wants to shape public perception. Fiction about the Agency—particularly television and movies, the most potent and culture-shaping mediums—has turned out to be that loophole. But it has its risks.
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The CIA just released 99 documents which laid out its plan to publish “Doctor Zhivago” in Russian for the first time in 1958, which experts believe might have been part of an agency plot to reveal the shortcomings of Soviet life.
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As violators of human rights move to issue stronger guidelines for selective recourse and expect victims to comply, reports on past human rights violations offer invaluable testimony on the link between power and abuse. At the helm of various forms of abuse, including sexual violence, are U.S. military personnel and United Nations-affiliated personnel involved in peacekeeping operations.
Even in instances in which it’s not been directly involved in acts of sexual violence, the United States has certainly ensured the backing of dictatorships that have committed severe sex crimes. A prime example of this is Chile under the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990.
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A white paper published by the Chinese government on Wednesday accused the Dalai Lama of receiving armed support from the CIA and urged the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader to relinquish his attempt to divide China and achieve independence for Tibet, reports the state propaganda service Xinhua.
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Perhaps of greatest interest to Tibet-watchers is his account of his early involvement with the CIA, and the agency’s encouragement, sponsorship and eventual abandonment of anti-Chinese resistance inside Tibet.
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The Dalai Lama group has got armed support from the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), says a white paper issued on Wednesday.
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The Chinese government on Wednesday issued a white paper on southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, lauding its development path and denouncing the “middle way” advocated by the Dalai Lama.
The white paper, “Tibet’s Path of Development Is Driven by an Irresistible Historical Tide”, holds that Tibet’s current development path is correct.
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According to the report, during the armed rebellion in Tibet in the late 1950s, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) not only sent agents to help the 14th Dalai Lama flee Tibet but also trained militants to support his forces and airdropped a large quantity of weaponry.
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Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, was assassinated on October 16, 1951 while addressing a public meeting in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. His assassin, later identified as Saad Akbar Babrak was shot dead on the spot. Saad Akbar Babrak was an Afghan national and a professional assassin. For more than 63 years controversy continued about the motives and perpetrators after the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan. Conspiracy theories abounded with little to substantiate. However, the controversy is now coming to end as declassified documents of the US State Department disclosed that Americans murdered the first elected prime minister of Pakistan through the Afghan government.
The US documents, released several years ago but highlighted recently by the Pakistani media and social media.
A leading English newspaper of Pakistan, the Nation and also the Express News reported on April 17: The United States wanted to get contracts of oil resources in Iran. Pakistan and Iran enjoyed cordial ties and Afghanistan used to be the enemy of Pakistan during 1950-51. The neighboring Afghanistan was the only country that didn’t accept Pakistan at that time.
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Major American media organizations diligently parrot what US officials want the public to know about global affairs, historian Noam Chomsky told RT. To US leaders, any news outlet that “does not repeat the US propaganda system is intolerable,” he said.
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Jeffrey, in a somewhat ingenious tactic but meretricious strategy terminated his discourse by concluding “a strategy much wider in scope had to be developed for alliance alone could not bring down the PPP.” Tucked away at the beginning 14 lines earlier his analysis did identify 1961 as the year in point, artfully omitting that in 1964 a post-electoral alliance, stage-managed by the USA/UK via the Governor of British Guiana did oust the PPP from government. This fact is made clear in a stunningly researched publication, US intervention in British Guiana: a Cold War story by Stephen G Rabe, Professor of History at the University of Texas, authographed and presented to me in 2009 by a former Senior Vice-President in the Burnham government, a Guyanese of rare erudition and universal recognition.
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NATO’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 was the deliberate targeting of factories and manufacturing plants.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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After telecom and information technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad backed an open internet three days ago, a note prepared by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) for a meeting of the committee on net neutrality said the concept may help the government’s Digital India programme and ensure equitable and inclusive development.
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Mark Zuckerberg says Internet.org and net neutrality “can and must coexist,” despite a backlash against his organization, which aims to bring free internet access to the developing world.
It can’t, at least not from where users sit.
The trouble started this week when several Indian publishers decided to remove their services from the Internet.org app, claiming the app violates the basic tenets of net neutrality. The app offers users in developing countries access to a select group of services, like Facebook, news sites, and health information, without paying data charges. That’s possible because, in the countries where Internet.org operates, the group has negotiated these terms with local carriers. The Indian publishers took issue with this setup, often referred to as “zero-rating,” arguing that giving away some services puts those services that aren’t available on the app at a disadvantage.
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The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), whose members have been at the receiving end of the Net neutrality campaign, on Sunday called for a debate on the issue from an Indian perspective.
“The association urges all stakeholders to have a comprehensive and informed debate on the subject of Net neutrality keeping in mind the requirements of India and its citizens,” a statement said. A subject as important and complex as Net neutrality should “not be left to the opinion of a few.”
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DRM
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It’s no secret that the DMCA’s section 1201 is extremely problematic. It’s the “anti-circumvention” part of the law, that makes it illegal to circumvent “technological protection measures” even if it’s for non-infringing purposes. This is a mess — especially in an age of DRM trying to lock up everything. Try to get around it, and it’s a violation of the law — even if you’re not trying to infringe on the underlying material. This is why Cory Doctorow is running a new effort to eradicate DRM with a target placed firmly on Section 1201.
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Sony doesn’t like pirates—except, perhaps, when Sony feels like pirating.
Hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment emails, published in full on Thursday by WikiLeaks, reveal that Sony had pirated ebooks on its servers. This is particularly notable because Sony has engaged in aggressive and even illegal anti-piracy actions in the past.
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It’s been five years since the launch of Apple’s iPad but how was the device initially received by the Hollywood studios? A leaked analysis reveals the MPAA’s hopes and fears for the ground-breaking tablet, with a few spot on predictions and a notable shift in the piracy landscape it simply didn’t envisage.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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LAST NIGHT, WIKILEAKS unleashed thousands of leaked Sony e-mails onto the internet.
The website has republished all of the documents accessed by hackers during the now infamous cyber attack on the film studio.
Among the e-mails published? Tons of documents and e-mails related to One Direction.
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According to former CIA officer, the US asking Sony Pictures Entertainment to find a Muslim version of Western rock musician Bob Geldof to counter Islamic State propaganda demonstrates that US President Barack Obama lacks a coherent strategy to address extremist information operations.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.18.15
Posted in News Roundup at 7:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Last year we reported that another British giant, Ryman (smaller than Argos, but still a highstreet chain), had moved to GNU/Linux. They told me that had dumped it due to Windows malware.
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Desktop
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Uruguay is one of the countries that has pushed GNU/Linux in education and that effort is paying off. GNU/Linux is growing every year and more rapidly every year in Uruguay. It’s all good, something to emulate if we want the best IT for the lowest cost.
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Ultra-high-resolution displays with high pixel densities are all the rage now, and for good reason: They look amazing compared to conventional displays. The big problem for PC users is that a lot of software isn’t designed with that level of pixel density in mind.
If you’re running GNOME 3 in Linux, your first boot will have you looking for your reading glasses. (Windows suffers from similar issues with high-DPI displays.)
Luckily, you can save your eyes and enjoy that glorious screen you paid for with a few steps. This article will show you how to change the scaling settings for GNOME 3, Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird, and Chromium.
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Server
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In this release of Network Bits & Bytes, we discuss the networking requirements of Linux containers, which present an alternative to virtual machines for carving up x86 server resources that is seeing very strong interest in the web 2.0 vertical and may become a core building block in cloud data centers over the next few years.
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Kernel Space
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The latest good stuff for the Linux 4.1 kernel are the block core improvements, which mostly are focused on improving the multi-queue block layer (blk-mq).
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As a quick Friday note, if you’re looking for a 802.11n/g USB WiFi adapter that’s very affordable and will work great with Linux, here’s one of my recent purchases. After being pleased with one of them, I’ve since ordered a few more of these Wireless-N adapters for Linux usage.
[...]
…it also very clearly advertises Linux support.
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Graphics Stack
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This summer there should be six students working on new projects for X.Org/Mesa/Wayland via the foundation’s annual participation in the Google Summer of Code.
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Applications
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With WiMAX not being too popular and other competing wireless standards taking over, NetworkManager is discontinuing its support for this technology.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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If you haven’t heard, there are a few KDE projects testing Phabricator for patch review and project management.
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… a KDE PIM sprint happened in Toulouse! And what happened during that sprint? Well, read this wholly incomplete report!
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KDE began its life as a desktop project and Qt showcase back in 1996. Since then KDE has evolved to become something more significant; the modern KDE is a global community of technologists, designers, writers and advocates producing some of the world’s finest user-centric Free Software. As we have evolved, so too has the world around us. The user’s experience is no longer restricted to the desktop. It has expanded to the user’s hands, wrists, glasses and more and will continue to evolve into areas we have yet to imagine.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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After having announced his new RaspArch distribution that helps users run the powerful Arch Linux distribution on a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B computer board, Arne Exton informed Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of the ExTiX 15.2 Linux operating system.
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Elementary OS is a Ubuntu based GNU/Linux distribution, which started as a theme and application set for Ubuntu. From eye-candy theme and wallpaper it turns out to be an independent Linux distribution. It inherits legacy of Ubuntu OS and shares Ubuntu’s software Center for package management. It is known for its lightweight nature which is low on resource that makes it easy to run on old PCS, simple yet effective user interface, beautiful themes and wallpaper serves as an eye-candy to users and one of the best Linux OS for Linux newbies.
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Arne Exton had the pleasure of informing Softpedia about a new distribution of GNU/Linux created from the ground up for the Raspberry Pi 2 tiny computer board and called RaspArch.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Android
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During NAB, video technology provider Kaltura launched what the company is calling the industry’s first open source video library for HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) playback on Android devices.
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The concept of streaming games to a mobile device is nothing new. Nvidia’s Grid service, for example, allows players to access PC games via the company’s Shield console and tablet, while Limelight Game Streaming opens the door to Android devices — provided you have an Nvidia GameStream-compatible PC.
Remotr opens the door even further, letting you play just about any PC game on just about any Android device. It’s free, and it works — but with some caveats.
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Google Play services made a rather lofty jump from 7.0 to 7.3 a couple days ago. While there don’t appear to be any big API changes for developers, a couple of pretty obnoxious issues were cleared up for regular users. It looks like the Home address in Trusted Places is not only working again, but there may be an improved UI that makes it even easier to set up safe zones (if you didn’t already have it). Android Wear owners will also be pleased to say goodbye to the persistent notification. As always, we’ve got a download link below.
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Google just recently began rolling out Android 5.1 Lollipop within the last few weeks, but there may be another software version already on its way sometime soon. The next version is Android 5.1.1, and it was recently found running on the Nexus 9 and Wi-fi Nexus 7 (2013) model on Google’s Android Audio Latency information page. The Nexus 9 is running build number LMY47S and the Wi-fi Nexus 7 (2013) is shown running build number LMY47W. We’ve attached a screenshot below so you can see for yourself.
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Google appears to be an indomitable force. But, with today’s release from the US military’s research arm of its Memex search technologies and Europe’s competition investigation into the Mountain View giant, it might be a propitious time for tech-minded entrepreneurs to start building a Google killer.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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With Rust 1.0 now in beta and v1.0 being in good shape, developers are beginning to form plans for what to add to this Mozilla-sponsored language in the post-1.0 era.
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BSD
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While GCC 5 hasn’t been officially released yet, DragonFlyBSD has pulled in a near-final revision of the open-source compiler for use by their BSD operating system.
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Project Releases
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Two weeks ago Wine 1.7.40 added kernel job object support (after previously being a feature of Wine-Staging) and now with today’s v1.7.41 release this Windows feature has been further improved.
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Public Services/Government
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Openness/Sharing
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Science
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It makes perfect sense. The sensors that capture images for a digital camera and the sensors that convert light into electricity for a solar cell rely on the same technology. So why not build a device with a sensor that does both, and create a self-powered video camera? Some Columbia University researchers did just that.
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Health/Nutrition
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With Abenomics seemingly a total failure (aside from managing to collapse the currency and living standards of the population – worst Misery Index in 33 years) the demographic crisis that Japan faces just got more crisis-er. As NHKWorld reports, Japan’s population continues to fall (4th year in a row) but what is worse, there are now 33 million people over the age of 65 (a record 26%), more than double the number under the age of 14 (16.2 million). The ministry says the population will likely continue declining for some time as fewer babies are born and society ages.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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When I spoke at this forum nine months ago, in June 2014, I warned that the Ukrainian crisis was the worst US-Russian confrontation in many decades. It had already plunged us into a new (or renewed) Cold War potentially even more perilous than its forty-year US-Soviet predecessor because the epicenter of this one was on Russia’s borders; because it lacked the stabilizing rules developed during the preceding Cold War; and because, unlike before, there was no significant opposition to it in the American political-media establishment. I also warned that we might soon be closer to actual war with Russia than we had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
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A TOP-SECRET U.S. intelligence document obtained by The Intercept confirms that the sprawling U.S. military base in Ramstein, Germany serves as the high-tech heart of America’s drone program. Ramstein is the site of a satellite relay station that enables drone operators in the American Southwest to communicate with their remote aircraft in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and other targeted countries. The top-secret slide deck, dated July 2012, provides the most detailed blueprint seen to date of the technical architecture used to conduct strikes with Predator and Reaper drones.
Amid fierce European criticism of America’s targeted killing program, U.S. and German government officials have long downplayed Ramstein’s role in lethal U.S. drone operations and have issued carefully phrased evasions when confronted with direct questions about the base. But the slides show that the facilities at Ramstein perform an essential function in lethal drone strikes conducted by the CIA and the U.S. military in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa.
[...]
Former drone sensor operator Brandon Bryant, who conducted operations in Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq, said that without Ramstein, the U.S. would either need to find another base in the area, with the ability to hit satellites in the Middle East and Africa, or place U.S. personnel much closer to the areas they are targeting. “Instead of being able to be [inside the U.S.] with their operations, they would have to do more line-of-sight stuff, more direct deployments, more people going over there rather than [operating] in the states,” Bryant, who has become an outspoken critic of the drone program, told The Intercept. The U.S. is “doing shady stuff behind the scenes like using satellite and information technologies that, if able to continue being used, are going to just continue to perpetuate the drone war,” he charged.
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On Aug. 31, 2012, a top-secret U.S. intelligence report noted that “possible bystanders” had been killed alongside militants from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in a drone strike in eastern Yemen two days earlier. The source of the intelligence, a Yemeni official described in the cable as “reliable,” identified two of the dead as Waleed bin Ali Jaber and Salim bin Ali Jaber, “an imam of a mosque who had reportedly preached a sermon that had insulted AQAP.”
The source believed that Salim and Waleed “had been lured to the car by the two AQAP militants when the airstrike hit.”
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Just minutes before Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for the 2016 presidential election, Israeli Channel One News interviewed Haim Saban, an American-Israeli media magnate and long-time Clinton supporter. Noticeably excited, he explained that she had waited to make the announcement until she had carefully prepared the ground for her campaign.
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Concerned about reports of hundreds of civilian casualties, Obama administration officials are increasingly uneasy about the U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led air war against rebel militias in Yemen, opening a potential rift between Washington and its ally in Riyadh.
Backed by U.S. intelligence, air refueling and other support, Saudi warplanes have conducted widespread bombing of Yemeni villages and towns since March 26 but have failed to dislodge the Houthi rebels who have overrun much of the Arab world’s poorest nation since last fall.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, widely regarded as the terrorist network’s most lethal franchise, has capitalized on the chaos by sharply expanding its reach. Fighters loyal to the group claimed control Thursday of a military base and other key facilities near Mukalla, an Arabian Sea port in southern Yemen.
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According to Filmus Facebook, the conference “Militarization and the Illegal exploration for oil in the South Atlantic: the Argentine response” follows on a similar and successful event held in Paris on the sidelines of the Unesco congress on Wednesday.
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As usual when Latin America’s leftist leaders get together with United States officials, there were plenty of swipes at the US during the seventh Summit of the Americas.
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The historic handshake with Raul Castro has taken place for the cameras. President Obama has declared that the United States is done meddling in Latin America. There will be rough patches, but this is happening: the relationship with Cuba is on the mend.
That should remove one very sore spot in Washington’s ties to the region, a policy that often embarrassed even friends of the U.S.
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The White House has submitted documentationin support of removing Cuba from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, on which it’s been for more than 33 years, longer than any country but Syria, which was placed on the list in 1979. The other two countries on the State Department’s list, Iran and Sudan, were placed there in 1984 and 1993. Cuba’s placement on the list, like the Cold War era sanctions, have done nothing to improve the situation in Cuba or advance any of the U.S.’s stated goals.
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The Obama administration’s decision to negotiate with Tehran triggered near hysteria among U.S. politicians and pundits who advocate perpetual war in the Middle East. One complaint is that the talks failed to address Iran’s regional role.
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It’s probably a good time to remember that in its various guises, the company had close ties to influential people in the U.S. government and Republican politics.
Directors included former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, former CIA Counterterrorism Director Cofer Black, former Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat and former NSA Director Bobby Inman.
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But what makes the 52 percent number, featured in the story’s subhead (“Army Data Show 52% Pessimistic About the Future”), any more meaningful than 9 percent? Each is an arbitrary cutoff, dividing those who “score poorly” from a “positive result.” Depending on how many pessimism-related questions were asked, you could get virtually any result you wanted by moving that cutoff up or down. And since that number could be anything, it means nothing.
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Transparency Reporting
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Julian Assange’s lawyer has attacked judges for withdrawing from a legal conference because the WikiLeaks founder was taking part.
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Finance
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So now we have a situation in which the budget is in deficit, tax receipts from transnational corporations are falling and abuse of tax loopholes is widespread.
Isn’t it great that someone is looking out for the privacy of oppressed billionaires?
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In 2011, Australia enacted a tough new anti-smoking law that requires cigarette companies to distribute their wares in plain green packages. Anti-smoking activists see Australia’s law as a model for the world. They hope that replacing logos with graphic health warnings will make them less appealing to consumers, especially minors.
Naturally, tobacco companies hated the law. And they found a surprising way to fight back: they persuaded governments in Ukraine and Honduras to file complaints with the World Trade Organization, alleging that the new regulations violated global trade rules.
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With the war of words – and cashflows – between Greece and Germany showing no sign of dying down, The Local meets one young Greek who’s come to see what the Germans have to teach about running a country successfully.
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…Bonn University, when the professor asked students to name the ‘worst’ country to have joined the EU.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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But far too often, journalism falls short. Reporters often seem to take what politicians and their handlers say at face value, writing what they hear without ensuring that the facts bear it out. They look for winners and losers at the expense of nuance. They strive to give the appearance of even-handedness by creating a false balance between two sides that do not deserve equal weight. They elevate politics, polls and personality over substance and measured analysis.
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An ambitious young journalist who wanted to speak truth to power, Matt Kennard, wrote for the Financial Times. He quickly learned the corporate media was not the place to tell truths that the power structure did not want to hear. Now he has written a new book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter Takes on the Masters of the Universe,” which does speak truth to power.
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Censorship
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The Internet is the largest knowledge base that has ever existed. Its rapid development became possible greatly due to its unregulated nature at its starting point. The “anarchical” character of the Internet allowed all users to contribute their share of knowledge and make it accessible to other users around the world. The vision of Wikipedia is based on this simple, yet revolutionary, concept of allowing free and unlimited access to the sum of all human knowledge.
As knowledge is the most fundamental tool to free people from having their rights and freedoms infringed, this vision has become a great source of hope to oppressed people all over the world. At the same time, it has become one of the greatest sources of fear to oppressive regimes. When knowledge is accessible to everyone, it is much harder to control the people by imposing false consciousness of limited choices. When information is quickly communicated on social media platforms with no governmental command, revolutions have better chances to succeed. When the Internet connects the world to a small global village, human rights violations are less likely to hide unnoticed in the dark.
When considering the issue of regulating the Internet, we must not overlook the possible harmful implications of even seemingly minor regulation. Every governmental intervention carries with it limitation of personal rights, whether its primarily aim is to serve the governments’ interests and control or even where it is limited solely to the legitimate purpose of protecting and serving the citizens themselves.
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“Facebook has more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president.” Those prescient words came from law professor Jeffrey Rosen way back in 2010. Five years later, the Times is willingly handing its censorship keys over to that king of kings.
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In 2013 when site-blocking was hitting the courts in Norway (again,) Sony’s legal team briefly considered the threat of a challenge from the Norwegian Pirate Party or other groups opposed to filtering the internet. But any fears of a challenge were quickly brushed aside. Why? Because, in all likelihood, no one could take the financial risk of challenging the site-blocks in court.
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Privacy
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Helgi Hrafn Gunnarsson, an MP for the Pirate Party, posed a formal question to the Ministry of the Interior on police wiretapping in 2008. Yesterday, Stundin reports, he shared what he learned with parliament.
A police warrant to tap someone’s phone is granted in 99.3% of all cases where one was requested. Of the 720 wiretap warrants police have asked for, in only five cases was the request denied.
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The latest revelation about New Zealand’s intelligence doings has stirred little interest.
A report that says Kiwi spies are passing intelligence material on terrorists in Bangladesh to local security forces with a reputation for murder and torture would in previous years have been a major scandal.
But the story yesterday, which you may well have missed, seems to have left eyebrows unraised across the nation.
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Leaked documents show that New Zealand’s intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), has spent more than a decade collaborating with the US National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on targets in Bangladesh. The agencies passed on information to Bangladeshi security agencies, which are notorious for torture, murder and “disappearances.”
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On Auckland’s busy Great South Rd in the suburb of Greenlane, the Chinese consulate, a white modern building, is tucked behind a row of bushes and small trees.
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New Zealand spies teamed with National Security Agency hackers to break into a data link in the country’s largest city, Auckland, as part of a secret plan to eavesdrop on Chinese diplomats, documents reveal.
The covert operation, reported Saturday by New Zealand’s Herald on Sunday in collaboration with The Intercept, highlights the contrast between New Zealand’s public and secret approaches to its relationship with China, its largest and most important trading partner.
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Our spies and America’s top government hackers cooked up a plan to crack into a data link between Chinese Government buildings in Auckland, new Edward Snowden documents reveal.
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Twitter has updated its privacy policy, creating a two-lane service that treats US and non-US users differently. If you live in the US, your account is controlled by San Francisco-based Twitter Inc, but if you’re elsewhere in the world (anywhere else) it’s handled by Twitter International Company in Dublin, Ireland. The changes also affect Periscope.
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The National Security Agency is probably among the best-equipped parts of the federal government at recruiting, training and staffing an elite team of cybersecurity professionals.
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The NSA is implementing a huge migration to custom-designed cloud architecture it says will revolutionize internal security and protect against further leaks by data analysts with unfettered access to classified information.
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A host of technology trade groups are lobbying Congress to end the government’s controversial metadata collection program that was brought to public prominence by Edward Snowden almost two years ago. In a letter sent to intelligence and judiciary leadership yesterday, groups representing a vast array of tech firms, including Google, IBM, Facebook, and Apple, expressed support for fundamental surveillance reform.
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The Pentagon wants cyber weapons that can inflict “blunt force trauma.”
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On 5 June 2013, Edward Snowden initiated a cascading exposé that would open the eyes of the world to the surreptitious and wholesale surveillance of digital communications by the NSA in the US and GCHQ in the UK.
The revelations laid bare the activities and programmes that have been intercepting and analysing the vast majority of internet and phone communications at a global level for many years, including programmes that obligated the world’s largest technology corporations to provide access to their networks and data centres through the use of secret court orders that not only forced these corporations to hand over data about their users en masse but also prevented them from disclosing anything about these orders.
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Backed up against a rapidly approaching do-or-die deadline, bipartisan lawmakers are poised to introduce legislation next week that would roll back the National Security Agency’s expansive surveillance powers.
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The impending USA Freedom Act seeks to stop NSA phone record collection, leaving Section 215 intact, which activists say will only prolong mass surveillance
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The National Security Agency’s authority to collect the phone records of millions of people is scheduled to end on June 1, and a bipartisan privacy coalition of 39 organizations wants to make sure it stays that way.
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With key provisions of the Patriot Act set to expire on June 1, a bipartisan group of lawmakers could introduce as soon as next week legislation that would place some limits on the surveillance powers of the National Security Agency (NSA), reports National Journal.
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With the clock winding down, lawmakers in both chambers are staging one last attempt to rein in the government’s surveillance powers.
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The powers that be want to control your phones and your drones. And who can blame them? It was inevitable. Of course they’re upset that smartphones are making it hard to catch speeders. Of course manufacturers are hurrying to ensure that drones refuse to fly to certain locations, before they’re forced to do so by law. Those are the instruments of power in today’s and tomorrow’s world.
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NSA director Michael S Rogers says his agency wants “front doors” to all cryptography used in the USA, so that no one can have secrets it can’t spy on — but what he really means is that he wants to be in charge of which software can run on any general purpose computer.
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This paragraph was unclassified in the original document, suggesting that the NSA plan to adapt to the new world through tailored access wasn’t at all a secret even back in 2000. Of course, the document in which this paragraph was contained was originally classified Secret (and is now declassified), so having access to this document would not have been easy. Still, it’s interesting to me as an example of refusing to believe that they had lost the crypto wars. And we have since learned that they had the technical capability to be justified in that belief.
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Edward Snowden, famous for leaking classified information about the US government and former NSA contractor, could be looking to Iceland for citizenship status.
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One of the most controversial figures of the world in the past couple of years, whistle-blower Edward Snowden, might get Islandic citizenship, Forbes reports.
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When I met with Jonsdottir at the Pirate Party’s small office within Iceland’s small parliament building in Reykjavik this week, she kicked off the interview without any prompting by sharing the news that the Academy Award-winning documentary about Snowden, “Citizenfour,” had recently been well received at its Icelandic premiere. I took the opportunity to ask if she was still pursuing Icelandic citizenship for the controversial American after nearly two years of being blocked in the Althingi (Iceland’s parliament).
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It seems unlikely that the world’s most infamous whistleblower and scourge of the NSA, Edward Snowden, will be visiting the White House anytime soon. But according to Google Maps, he’s quite literally set up shop on the front lawn.
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Wikileaks boss Julian Assange complicated Edward Snowden’s escape from Russia by tipping off the NSA with a false rumour about the Bolivian President.
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On the Friday, two days before her expected announcement that she is officially running for President, a public-interest attorney for a government watchdog group threw down his gauntlet and notified the news media that he will not allow presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton and her minions to get away with wiping clean her computer server in a suspected obstruction of justice case.
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Fed up with DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart over a long litany of scandals in the drug-fighting agency she heads, 22 members of the House Oversight and Government Reforms Committee issued a statement saying they had “no confidence” in her leadership.
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The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) came under intense criticism this week in the wake of Congressional hearings highlighting reports that agents in Colombia attended sex parties with prostitutes paid for by criminal gangs, among other allegations. A House Oversight Committee hearing this week led to a no-confidence vote for DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart, symbolically refuting her arguments that agent improprieties named in a recent report were due to a few “bad apples.” Hearings on the scandal extended past oversight into a Judiciary Committee subcommittee, where the DEA’s Office of Responsibility Chief defended the botched allegations and echoed Leonhart’s testimony.
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The war on drugs has a surprising soldier amongst its ranks: Italian spying software. As Motherboard’s sources tell it, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s dropped $2.4 million on surveillance tools that are capable of intercepting phone calls, texts, social media messages, and can even take hold of someone’s webcam and microphone. Oh, Remote Control System (as its officially called) can grab passwords, too.
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The Obama administration has repeatedly used the threat of post-9/11 terrorism to justify secretly vacuuming up the telephone records of virtually every American.
Now it turns out the government was grossly violating innocent citizens’ privacy much earlier and for a more questionable reason.
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As sympathetic as Stone is to the idea of keeping citizens safe, he believes the collection of phone records was an overreaction.
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The first thing revealed by U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden was a government program that collects records of every single phone call made in the United States. That program could soon come to an end, unless both houses of Congress vote to reauthorize Section 215 of the Patriot Act before the June 1 deadline. But given that we now know the U.S. government, and its “Five Eyes” allies (including Canada), have also been vacuuming up just about every piece of information that’s sent over the Internet, allowing Sec. 215 to expire will barely make a dent in the massive surveillance state that Snowden revealed.
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The bill would legally dismantle the National Security Agency’s most aggressive surveillance programs, including the bulk collection and retention of virtually all Americans’ landline phone records justified under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The repeal of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act would also prevent the agency from tapping the physical infrastructure of the Internet, such as undersea fiber cables, to intercept ‘upstream’ data in bulk, which critics including the ACLU claim the NSA uses to collect data on Americans.
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While Snowden’s leaks may be old news, the central debate they raise about how much domestic surveillance should be tolerated in a modern age of terrorism has not yet been resolved on a national level.
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Americans are not the only victims of the U.S. intelligence agency; the entire world is being spied on.
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A documentary screening of Terminal F or Chasing Edward Snowden was launched on 13 April during the inauguration ceremony of Russia Today’s (RT) documentary channel, RTDOC, in Moscow.
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Human rights groups have warned that France’s proposed “anti-terror” bill, which would grant more powers to the intelligence services, puts the country in danger of NSA-style mass surveillance powers, creating an undemocratic state.
Campaigners have said the proposals will produce a “deja-vu” effect, effectively creating a French version of the NSA, the United States’ intelligence body.
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Liberty, the movement for civil liberties and human rights in the UK, has filed an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights against the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruling that UK intelligence agencies’ mass surveillance activities are legal.
Liberty is challenging the Tribunal’s December 2014 judgment that GCHQ’s Tempora programme – which sees the agency intercept and process billions of private communications every day – complies with human rights law.
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The Senate Intelligence Committee kicked off budget season this week with a slew of appearances from Washington’s top spies. CIA Director John Brennan, National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Vincent Stewart all made trips up to the Hill this week to talk budget lines.
Lawmakers leaving the briefings said the Senate panel’s meetings were fairly broad. The intelligence leaders touched on a variety of issues, they said, but dollar signs were the hearings’ main focus.
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An overwhelming majority of British adults are now concerned about the online security of their private information, the threats posed by hackers and the possibility of unauthorised access to their data. This was the key finding of recent YouGov research in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks.
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Members of Congress – most of whom can’t secure their own websites, and some of whom don’t even use email – are trying to force a dangerous “cybersecurity” bill down the public’s throat. Everyone’s privacy is in the hands of people who, by all indications, have no idea what they’re talking about.
Leaders are expected to bring its much-maligned series of “cybersecurity” bills to the floor sometime in the next couple weeks – bills that we know will do little to help cybersecurity but a lot to help intelligence agencies like the NSA vacuum up even more of Americans’ personal information. The bills’ authors deny that privacy is even an issue, but why we’re trusting Congress at all on this legislation, given their lack of basic knowledge on the subject, is the question everyone should be asking.
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Governments should not neglect the importance of judicial oversight in the implementation of surveillance programs, OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatovic said Friday at the Global Conference on CyberSpace 2015.
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Infiltrate A default feature of Cisco routers can readily be abused to collect data, security researchers warn.
Embedded Packet Capture (EPC) was designed by Cisco as a troubleshooting and tracing tool. The feature allows network administrators to capture data packets flowing through a Cisco router.
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The debate in the nation’s capital and across the country over whether police should wear body cameras has quickly evolved into a new and perhaps more difficult question: Who gets to see the video?
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Police body cameras do raise a host of legitimate privacy concerns. But police body cameras are often used to record encounters that occur in public where, given the state of modern technology, none of use can reasonably expect the degree of privacy that, perhaps, we might otherwise like. The police encounters that take place inside private residences and inside hospitals and schools are being considered in ongoing conservations on body cameras, where the language of privacy is often heard.
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Labour has promised that every property in the UK will be able to get high speed broadband if it wins the general election.
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US authorities filed just ten subpoenas with code-sharing site GitHub in the past year.
The company said in its debut transparency report published Thursday that it complied with just seven of those subpoenas. That means in three cases there was nothing disclosed. In just shy of half of those demands, the company notified the affected account holder.
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Over the next 18 months, amidst all the posturing, grandstanding and bitching that will swallow up all the actually important factors in the race to become president, many Americans will head to the websites of Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul (Jeb Bush is having some, erm, trouble with his site). As they follow the candidates, so too they will be followed. It’s just many won’t know it, or will be oblivious to just how their information is used.
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The Pentagon desperately wants to be more agile and flexible, but decades of cultural bureaucracy often prevent the nation’s largest organization from being that. Now, a tech-savvy physicist is in charge of the military and he is about to ask companies like Google and Facebook for solutions.
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The federal government, local police departments and the Harris Corporation are participating in a coordinated effort to keep the public in the dark about the full capabilities of cell site simulator surveillance devices, also known as Stingrays.
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How do you keep tabs on federal agencies amassing mountains of secret data?
Secretly, of course.
And, no, that’s not a punch line. Government’s surveillance of the public is no joke.
Congress is at least trying to get a handle on the endlessly proliferating masses of data that alphabet-soup agencies are collecting on friends and foe alike, at home and abroad.
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The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA) is the main federal law that governs data stored electronically, including email, business data, your photographs, social media, etc. But ECPA literally predates the Internet, so it predates the widespread use of home computers, email, and social media. It predates cloud storage. Almost any 30 year-old law probably requires updating, but ECPA is so out-of-date that it demands it.
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Leland Stanford once said that government is founded upon the doctrine of the consent of the governed and the principle that people are endowed with certain inalienable rights.
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Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Technologist Jeremy Gillula claims that allowing the US government access to bypass encryption software in Americans’ personal technology devices would likely make it easier for hackers to exploit their information.
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With that in mind, technologists are now building better ways for people to shield their communications from prying eyes.
The technology driving most of these programs is called “end-to-end encryption,” which means that a message is ciphered before it’s sent and then deciphered after its received. This way, anyone looking to snoop on intermediary servers won’t be tablet to understand what the message says.
While end-to-end encryption is a known standard, it’s a hard practice for the layperson to adopt into their everyday work. Now developers are figuring out new ways to make message-sending as easy as possible using this kind of encryption.
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Chief Justice Roberts recently named two new judges to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) — Judge James P. Jones from the Western District of Virginia and Judge Thomas B. Russell from the Western District of Kentucky. Roberts has now appointed three judges to the FISC since the Snowden revelations, and all three were originally nominated to the bench by a Democratic president (Clinton). This marks a stark departure from Roberts’ thirteen pre-Snowden appointments, eleven of whom were appointed by Republican presidents. The question naturally arises: does this change in composition herald a change in the FISC’s approach?
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It is bad news for freedom here in Delaware now that the New Castle County police have their own Fusion Center. Virtually every state now has one in operation or formation after more than $1.4 billion dollars of Homeland Security money was spent to create 77 of them nationwide to assist in the overstated war on terror.
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In a YouTube extra from his interview with John Oliver posted late last week, Snowden offered some password security advice: He pans Oliver’s comically awful suggestions like “passwerd,” “onetwothreefour,” and “limpbiscuit4eva,” and instead wisely recommends that computer users switch from passwords to much longer passphrases. He goes on to offer an example: “MargaretThatcheris110%SEXY.”
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You probably have some variation of sequential numbers (‘123456′ or ‘000000’), a very obvious word (‘password’ or ‘access’) or something right in front of your nose (‘qwerty’).
These are some of the most common passwords, tech firm SplashData found in last year’s annual report.
Blue has also been identified as the most popular colour used in passwords, possibly because it is used widely by social media sites like Facebook, Google and Twitter.
So you may be fixating on whatever is close at hand.
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Princeton University will feature a live discussion with Edward Snowden and Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Bart Gellman on May 2.
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In addition, the NSA is colluding with the corporations to spy on Americans. According to CNET, this agency asks tech companies to hand over their customers’ data. The NSA also wiretaps on fiber-optic Internet cables to gather data about Americans’ Internet usage. It also tries to justify its mass surveillance as an anti-terrorism effort that has stopped dozens of attacks. However, two U.S. Senators have debunked this claim by stating that the same terrorist plots were instead foiled by standard law enforcement. The NSA’s surveillance eerily resembles that of 1984’s Big Brother, who also claimed to protect people for the price of privacy. As Benjamin Franklin once stated, “Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”
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Nick Williams, Amnesty International’s legal counsel said: “The UK government’s surveillance practices have been allowed to continue unabated and on an unprecedented scale, with major consequences for people’s privacy and freedom of expression. No-one is above the law and the European Court of Human Rights now has a chance to make that clear.”
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Michael Chertoff, co-author of the Patriot Act, a set of laws that provided the U.S. government with broad surveillance powers in the wake of 9/11, is unashamedly proud of what he built.
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U.S. technology companies and their trade groups immediately sounded their support for the proposed bill.
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Over the past few weeks, the U.S. Congress has been churning out privacy-threatening cyber surveillance proposals like popcorn at a movie theater. They’re up to five different bills, and none of them are good. Each bill protects companies that share our private data with the government — which often must give it to the NSA and the FBI — instead of protecting users’ privacy.
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NEARLY one year after it was reported that the United States was intercepting and monitoring Bahamian telephone calls, America has agreed to use the “lawful” authority to obtain surveillance information from this country, according to Foreign Affairs and Immigration Minister Fred Mitchell yesterday.
Following a wave of backlash over the US spying allegations, it was agreed that information gathering would only be used for interdiction purposes. This includes information that aids in the clamp down of illegal activity, The Tribune understands.
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Politicians, to put it bluntly, don’t understand the internet. And he is palpably correct. This has been a Parliament where the prime minister suggested he might ban Snapchat, where disastrous and ineffective ‘opt-in’ porn legislation was introduced, and where it emerged a Baroness who sits on the Lords technology committee thought Google Maps kept a camera trained on her home address.
“You have the Home Secretary actually saying things like telephone metadata is just the same as your phone bill,” Davis railed in his Portcullis House office. “I can’t imagine she’s telling fibs, so she plainly doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
Davis, 66, blames the glaring lack of any discussion of digital issues at the election by politicians or the media on a “grotesque misunderstanding about it, mostly by people over 40… [they] don’t understand how intrusive the powers are. Most of my colleagues are ignorant of where this is, and where it’s going.”
One of the most famous examples Davis can give is the knee-jerk pledge by Cameron to ban all kinds of communication that the government cannot access, immediately drawing references to the photo sharing service Snapchat.
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Mining users’ data to sell to advertisers and brokers is, of course, the primary business model of internet giants that provide a free service, one that has created billionaires from grad students almost overnight. Because it has been such a phenomenally successful money-spinner it should really be no surprise that companies such as Facebook sometimes resort to means which, if not actually illegal, certainly sail pretty close to the wind. Anything to maintain the flow of personal data that feeds the machine.
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Human rights activists accuse Beijing of ‘blatant political persecution’ after the writer Gao Yu is jailed for allegedly leaking a Communist Party memo
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This is not the first time we’ve been here. Back in the 1990s the Federal government went as far as to propose a national standard for ‘escrowed’ telephone encryption called the ‘Clipper’ chip. That effort failed in large part because the technology was terrible, but also because — at least at the time — the idea of ordinary citizens adopting end-to-end encryption was basically science fiction.
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More than 65 cybersecurity professionals and academics have come out against a trio of bills moving through Congress that are meant to enable information sharing about digital threats between businesses and the government.
In a letter sent today to ranking members from both parties of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, they are urging Congress reject the controversial Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act and two similar bills.
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A former director of the National Security Agency (NSA) Bill Binney says mass surveillance is a big problem, and covers the entire planet, including Africa and SA, with no exceptions.
Stories about NSA surveillance programmes have littered the headlines since 2013, following the leaks of secret documents by famous whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
However, it seems the more we hear, the less clear things are, and questions have been raised as to whether mass surveillance is even relevant to businesses and other organisations in SA. Binney believes it is, and will be presenting at ITWeb Security Summit 2015, to be held at Vodacom World from 26 to 28 May.
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All authoritarian regimes utilize information to try and stifle those people and organizations that seek to speak truth to power. In the U.S. we have the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press. With the U.S. already being an authoritarian national surveillance state that has two sets of laws, a law enforcement and administrative state that supports the parallel track of laws, and utilizes private/public cooperation to engage in these activities; how would the U.S. government look to use administrative law to place limitations on speech through the utilization of information technology? That is the topic of my next research post.
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Civil Rights
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A cop took a deal in relation to charges of sexually assaulting a teenage girl and will not receive a felony conviction, will not have to register as a sex offender, will only serve a year in jail, and still currently has his law enforcement certification.
The rapist cop used a small amount of marijuana found during a traffic stop to extort a young woman into performing sexual acts. The officer made her boyfriend walk down to a nearby lake and wait for him to finish assaulting the young woman. The former deputy, Cory Cooper, is 31 years old. The victim is 19.
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Why the viciousness of modern Israeli law directed against Palestinians must be taken as seriously as the cruelties of war
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One of the world’s foremost experts on counter-threat intelligence within the cybersecurity industry, who blew the whistle on vulnerabilities in airplane technology systems in a series of recent Fox News reports, has become the target of an FBI investigation himself.
Chris Roberts of the Colorado-based One World Labs, a security intelligence firm that identifies risks before they’re exploited, said two FBI agents and two uniformed police officers pulled him off a United Airlines Boeing 737-800 commercial flight Wednesday night just after it landed in Syracuse, and spent the next four hours questioning him about cyberhacking of planes.
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Apparently, the two screeners, one male and the other female, worked out a system. The female screener operating the body scanner would misidentify attractive men as women on the scanner, so that the machine would flag the extra, uh, bulk in their groin area, which then initiated a pat-down from her partner in lechery.
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Going to Disney World this summer? Don’t laugh excessively with widely open staring eyes — because those behavior indicators could identify you as a potential terrorist. Packing a Mickey Mouse costume? Wearing a disguise is another indicator.
Yes, the Transportation Security Administration’s embattled $900 million behavior detection program, called Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT, is not just used at airports. It’s also used at theme parks.
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The AcTVism Munich media collective is releasing a film on 19th April featuring Noam Chomsky, The Real News Network’s Paul Jay and myself.
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New York Police Department officers repeatedly denied an epileptic man his medication while detaining him in a holding cell, resulting in two seizures and hospitalizations before he could be taken to Brooklyn central booking more than a day later, a new federal lawsuit alleges. The man was never charged with a crime.
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It’s that bad. The headline grabbing line that many news sites have run with is the unchangeable WEP encryption key used on the machines was “abcde.” Meaning it was crazy easy for people to hack into (even if you didn’t know the password originally, it would not be difficult to figure that out just by monitoring the system).
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High-profile whistleblowers have joined forces for the first time in demanding that the United Nations change a global system they say deters its thousands of staffers from exposing crime, corruption and other wrongdoing.
In a letter sent to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday, nine current and former U.N. workers say current policies offer “little to no measure of real or meaningful protection” from retaliation that can include firing, harassment and intimidation.
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He left a note for the mailman: “Please call 911 — tell them to go to red barn building.”
There, officers found the body of Christopher Kirkpatrick, a 38-year-old clinical psychologist who had shot himself in the head after being fired from the Tomah Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
Kirkpatrick had complained some of his patients were too drugged to treat properly, but like other whistleblowers at the facility, he was ousted and his concerns of wrongdoing were disregarded.
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Ars recently reviewed two “Tor routers”, devices that are supposed to improve your privacy by routing all traffic through the Tor anonymity network. Although the initial release of Anonabox proved woefully insecure, the basic premise itself is flawed. Using these instead of the Tor Browser Bundle is bad: less secure and less private than simply not using these “Tor Routers” in the first place. They are, in a word, EPICFAIL.
There are four possible spies on your traffic when you use these Tor “routers”, those who can both see what you do and potentially attack your communication: your ISP, the websites themselves, the Tor exit routers, and the NSA with its 5EYES buddies.
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With the passage of half a century, it may be difficult to understand why so many political and cultural organizations, led by individuals with a generally liberal or leftist outlook, covertly collaborated with the CIA in the 1950s and first half of the 1960s, before exposés in Ramparts and other publications put an end to most such arrangements. After all, many of the activities of the Agency in that era are among those that we now regard as particularly discreditable. These include the CIA’s cooperation with the British intelligence services in overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953; its cooperation with the United Fruit Company in overthrowing the democratically elected government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954; and its cooperation with the Republic of the Congo’s former colonial rulers, the Belgians, in overthrowing the country’s newly elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, in 1960.
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If American whistleblower Edward Snowden were French, he would have had a good chance of remaining a free man — despite having leaked thousands of classified intelligence documents.
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French MPs have voted through a new amendment to the controversial surveillance bill, which would allow whistleblower spies to be protected by law.
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If you had plans to anonymously turn over sensitive data to the feds, you might want to think twice.
That hot tip you’re sending in could be snaking its way through an unencrypted network, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
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A trio of anonymous artists are demanding that the NYPD return a sculpture depicting Edward Snowden, seized after the artists secretly installed it in a public park last week. The artists call the work, depicting the NSA whistle-blower, “a gift to the city.” It was briefly on view in a war memorial in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park (see Guerrilla Artists Celebrate Whistle-Blowers with Edward Snowden Statue).
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Three artists on Tuesday demanded that New York police return a bust of fugitive U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden to public display or threatened legal action.
Civil rights lawyer Ronald Kuby said the artists would remain anonymous because they feared arrest and prosecution after authorities removed the sculpture from a Brooklyn park last week.
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Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, co-director of Human Rights Watch’s U.S. Program, went further, suggesting the U.S. government undermines human rights standards. The U.S. is an active participant in the United Nation’s human rights review process, she explained, but the last set of recommendations resulted in zero domestic reforms. That lack of responsiveness could undermine the review’s credibility going forward, she warned.
The U.S. is set to undergo its second United Nations review in Geneva, Switzerland, on May 11.
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Two TSA agents posted at Denver International Airport have been fired after it was discovered that they had worked out a scheme allowing one of the agents to grope unsuspecting male passengers as they passed through security checkpoints. TSA authorities were first alerted to the situation earlier this year thanks to an anonymous tip. An investigation of the two agents revealed that a clever–though troubling–system where the male agent would identify male passengers he found attractive at which point his female accomplice would flag them to be pulled aside for pat-down inspections.
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Is it laziness? Ignorance? Or have Britain’s political parties and the London media conspired to turn Britain’s 2015 general election into a dreary series of rehearsed arguments?
One thing’s for sure, the straight-talking of traditional hustings, where prospective MPs ran the gamut surrounded by querulous voters in town centers, is history. Nothing original or spontaneous can permeate the squeaky clean studio as party leaders sleepwalk into Britain’s latest US import, the TV election debate.
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Yet another election is about to be held under the UK’s dreadfully insecure postal ballot system, which an English judge who presides over electoral fraud cases has said “would disgrace a banana republic”.
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Given the court’s growing stature as the final arbiter in political battles between Republicans and Democrats, along with its own increasingly partisan nature, their replacements will be imbued with a level of power and authority almost unparalleled in American judicial history. And it is progressively more likely that the person who gets to decide what that future court looks like will be the next president of the United States.
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With the stated aim of protecting the country against terror attacks, the U.S. has since gigantically expanded its surveillance programme allowing it to intercept day to day phone conversations and internet browsing of civilians. The policy of monitoring lives of the public dates back to the days of Cold War when the FBI spied on civilians to track their political leanings as well as to clamp down on Anti-Vietnam War protestors.
The personal information which is gleaned could thus be misused not only to tarnish reputations of government critics by tracking their browsing history on pornography but also to target peaceful civilians fighting for civil liberties or against unjust policies of the State.
For example, the FBI conducted raids in the homes of Palestine and Colombia solidarity activists in September 2010 based on a warrant that the activists had provided material support to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and Hizballah, which were considered terrorist organizations by the U.S.
[...]
The fallout of hounding of Snowden is that well-intentioned, discerning civilians would refrain from exposing wrongdoings of people in positions of power, especially in the government. If Snowden was to be the last whistleblower, democracy in the U.S., for those who care, would be the casualty.
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In South Carolina, white police officer Michael Thomas Slager gunned down unarmed black man Walter Scott with eight gunshots to the back as Scott fled. Slager has been fired and charged with murder, and he should be convicted.
[...]
Meanwhile in San Bernardino, Calif., police were caught on camera giving suspect Francis Pusok a brutal beating after he had been shocked with a stun gun and surrendered to police. Lying in the prone position with his hands behind his back, Pusok was violently kicked in the genitals and repeatedly struck on the head by multiple police officers. Because Pusok is white, the story will receive almost no coverage.
If the media can’t help incite racial hatred, like the kind that led to the execution of two police officers in New York City or the shooting of two white police officers in Ferguson, Mo., they are uninterested in reporting police brutality.
[...]
American hero Edward Snowden revealed just how criminally out of control our government is in spying on both Americans and victims abroad.
Meanwhile NSA whistleblower William Binney alerted Americans that the federal government has been bugging nearly every citizen’s phone for years, just like in every other dictatorship.
With the protests in Ferguson, American people were able to see that after being militarized, today’s police departments look more like a storm-trooper occupying army than our friends and neighbors.
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In it he states it is essential that the use of drones be restricted to protect the privacy of citizens, as it is likely drones will become a standard law enforcement tool. He also said that Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA surveillance program shows how that power can be abused if not checked.
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A public execution is a spectacle of official homicide that endorses killing to solve problems, the worst possible example to set for the citizenry, especially children. The death penalty only satisfies a desire for revenge and can never promote social justice or a sense of humanity. An outdated response to violent crime, retribution does not break the cycle of violence. Imagine hanging someone or a botched lethal injection. Now imagine that the person executed was innocent.
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The United States government will now inform US citizens placed on the No Fly List whether they have, in fact, been put on the No Fly List and possibly some details related to the basis for the listing. But an attorney for an American challenging the government’s No Fly List authority has suggested that the changes are “meaningless.”
The new procedure comes after a federal court in Oregon ruled in June of last year that US citizens placed on the No Fly List had their rights to “procedural due process” violated and instructed the government to provide a “new process” that satisfied the “constitutional requirements for due process.”
In a case involving Gulet Mohamed, a US citizen who claims his constitutional rights were violated when he was placed on the No Fly List, the government informed the judge that this new procedure was now available to Mohamed and that the government would no longer refuse to confirm or deny whether Mohamed was listed [PDF].
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Citizens of the internet: here is some welcome news. Your downtrodden digital rights might be getting a well-overdue booster shot. But it comes with some warnings.
This week in the Hague, a high-level group of 29 internet policymakers and influencers – including prominent ex-US and UK security and intelligence officials Michael Chertoff, Joseph Nye, Melissa Hathaway and David Omand – issued a clarion call for the protection and promotion of human rights online. Self-styled the Global Commission on Internet Governance, the group made this call as part of the broader objective of restoring trust and confidence in the internet.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Wikileaks has just now released the entire trove from the Sony hack. According to a press release on WikiLeaks, the entire archive which contains 30,287 documents from Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) and 173,132 emails, to and from more than 2,200 SPE email addresses has been leaked because “This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation. It is newsworthy and at the centre of a geo-political conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there.”
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Just when you were starting to forget about the Sony email hack scandal, WikiLeaks comes back with a vengeance. Recently, the controversial online whistle-blower website made the more than 170,000 emails as well as 30,000 private documents searchable on their site.
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Two years ago, we were among those who noted how odd it was to see the MPAA in court arguing in favor of fair use, since the MPAA tends to argue against fair use quite frequently. The legal geniuses at the MPAA felt hurt by our post and some of the other news coverage on the issue, and put out a blog post claiming that the MPAA and its members actually love fair use. According to that post, the MPAA’s members “rely on the fair use doctrine every day” and the idea that it “opposes” fair use is “simply false, a notion that doesn’t survive even a casual encounter with the facts.”
Now, as you may have heard, Wikileaks has put the leaked Sony emails online for everyone to search through for themselves. I imagine that there will be a variety of new stories coming out of this trove of information, now that it’s widely available, rather than limited to the small group who got the initial email dumps. In digging through the emails, one interesting one popped up. It’s Chris Dodd revealing the MPAA’s true view on “fair use” in an email to Michael Froman, the US Trade Rep in charge of negotiating agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP).
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A powerful Hollywood lobby group has been working hand in glove with one of Australia’s most outspoken voices against online piracy.
Hacked Sony Pictures emails published by WikiLeaks reveal that CreativeFuture, the US film industry’s main anti-piracy lobby, regards Village Roadshow co-chairman Graham Burke as one of its champions, engaged in a critical fight for the future of the internet.
In an email sent in September 2014, CreativeFuture chief executive and Hollywood veteran Ruth Vitale wrote to alert US movie studios including Sony Pictures, 21st Century Fox, Disney, Viacom and Warner Brothers to “what is going on in Australia” where Burke “is at the centre” of campaigning against online piracy.
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In emails leaked from Sony Pictures following a cyber attack, it has been revealed that Sony Pictures has lobbied Netflix into cancelling customer accounts associated with users accessing the service from places where the streaming video company has not yet launched.
WikiLeaks published on Thursday a trove of searchable emails and documents believed to have been obtained as a result of a massive cyber attack on the studio in 2014. More than 30,000 documents and 170,000 emails belonging to Sony Pictures were leaked as a result of the attack.
Sony has slammed the whistleblower website for publishing and indexing the “stolen employee and other private and privileged information”.
The documents and emails range from financial information to negotiations between the company and its distributors — including Village Roadshow and Foxtel in Australia — and also revealed the company’s delicate relationship with streaming video service Netflix.
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Sony Pictures Entertainment reacted harshly on Thursday to word that WikiLeaks, a web portal devoted to disclosing confidential information from governments, corporations and other large and powerful entities, had posted a searchable archive of emails and other documents stolen from the studio last year by hackers.
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David Boies, a lawyer for Sony Pictures Entertainment, began warning news media outlets on Friday that WikiLeaks’s posting of emails and documents stolen from Sony does not, in the media giant’s view, make them fair game.
“WikiLeaks is incorrect that this Stolen Information belongs in the public domain, and it is, in many jurisdictions, unlawful to place it there or otherwise access or distribute it,” Mr. Boies wrote in a letter that was prepared for distribution to outlets that post or publish the material.
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Emails from the Sony hack reveal that the MPAA asked its member studios to pay $165,000 each to upgrade the screening rooms of several U.S. embassies. American ambassadors could then utilize these private theaters as indirect lobbying tools by showing off Hollywood content to high level officials.
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WikiLeaks made the wrong decision in releasing the cache of data hackers obtained from Sony Pictures Entertainment in November 2014, former National Security Agency Director General Keith Alexander said on Friday.
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The Sony attack, widely suspected to be the work of North Korea, sent shockwaves through the U.S. entertainment industry when hackers leaked sensitive corporate data. The WikiLeaks archive, which contains 30,287 documents and 173,132 emails, sheds light on Sony Pictures’ relationships with government and industry.
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 5:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches,” Microsoft’s long-serving CEO Steve Ballmer once said. Not much as changed except pretense (face change).
Satya Ballmer
Summary: Microsoft dumps its proxy (misleadingly named ‘Open Tech’) and other attacks on Free software persist from the inside, often through so-called ‘experts’ whose agenda is to sell proprietary software
MICROSOFT’S long-term assault on GNU/Linux is in some ways worse than ever before. Changing Ballmer’s face with another is about as effective as swapping Bush for Obama. Things are only getting worse, even if it’s branded differently. The attacks on users’ rights (DRM, blobs, spying) have exacerbated. It’s just not as visible as before (like the infamous “Get the Facts” marketing campaign), it’s more subtle or altogether covert.
There are concrete sign of Microsoft’s strategy to destroy FOSS from the inside (entryism) not quite succeeding, which leads to a Plan B, like infecting Android with proprietary spyware, controlling GNU/Linux through Azure, etc.
“For Microsoft, “Open Tech” shutting down is somewhat symbolic, even poetic.”“So,” some people ask, “what’s new at the ‘new’ Microsoft?”
There’s nothing new except worsening levels of aggression.
Microsoft’s ‘Open Tech’ proxy is shutting down, anti-Android lawsuits expand (or threats of lawsuits, based on the latest reports from Taiwan), new bribes are reported (e.g. Cyanogen), antitrust by proxy (against Free software) is succeeding… welcome the ‘new’ Microsoft, the Microsoft that’s more aggressive than the Mafia led by Steve Ballmer.
For Microsoft, “Open Tech” shutting down is somewhat symbolic, even poetic. It’s almost as though Microsoft gave up pretending to be “Open”. The Microsoft “Open Tech” proxy (assimilation strategy) is dead, says Microsoft’s Mouth (people have left it for quite some time, even senior people). but Microsoft’s Mouth (the booster Mary Jo Foley) released quite a misleading piece which is essentially hogwash and PR, pretending that shutdown is “rejoining”, like “reorg” meaning layoffs.
Is there no point keeping this Trojan horse in tact? Is Microsoft not interested in “Open”? Or is there no point pretending anymore? Microsoft has been aggressive against Linux as of late, as we wrote in the following series a month ago:
We also wrote about Microsoft ‘Open’ Technologies in the following older articles:
Meanwhile, alas, Microsoft is googlebombing 'Open Source', which helps fool some politicians. As we put it yesterday, Microsoft's plot to associate Windows with 'Open Source' is proving effective, despite being just a Big Lie. Shame on IDG for continuing the googlebombing of “Windows Open Source” in an article by Mac Asay. We are also saddened to see an article from SoftPedia about Black Duck, the Microsoft-linked source of FUD (anti-copyleft). Another publication giving them marketing space is always bad news because it’s anti-FOSS really, disguised as pro-FOSS. It is part of the latest marketing blitz from Black Duck, relying on the so-called “Future of Open Source Survey” [1, 2, 3], which has been annual propaganda for many years. Why do journalists continue to waste time on this? It’s not an analysis, it’s just marketing for Black Duck’s proprietary software.
Speaking of Black Duck, it recently hired a top executive from Veracode and Chris Wysopal, CTO of Veracode, continues the FUD over FOSS security (article from yesteday); he does it after Veracode did the “Heartbleed” recall/birthday in the same site a just over a couple of days beforehand (14th of April), as we noted with concern at the time. IT Pro Portal seems to be thinking that some Microsoft-connected firm giving a name and logo to a FOSS bug is such a major event that we need to celebrate its anniversaries, too. If they wish to see real security problems, then they should speak about Windows in terminals, ATMs, etc. The new report titled “New malware program ‘Punkey’ infecting point-of-sale systems” does not even call out Windows, almost as if this fact is just irrelevant.
These so-called ‘analysts’ are — more often than not, to not risk overgeneralising — little more than frauds, like so-called ‘counter-terrorism experts’ whose goal is to scare people (e.g. through the corporate media or parliamentary avenues) in order for them to sell their ‘services’.
The 451 Research is now using some biased yardstick to help generate favourable press for Microsoft, but that’s another point and another topic, probably worth raising another day. 451 Research staff always refused to tell me whether Microsoft paid them or not (they answered all my other questions) — a denial which in itself spoke volumes. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: German and Dutch translations of the Le Monde article are now available
GERMANY- and Holland-based staff of the EPO (locations of main ‘branches’ with top bureaucrats) can now easily read the article that we mentioned here before (focusing on yet more suicides), shortly ahead of an English translation which was kindly provided to us.
“The EPO’s response to suicides (from the arrogant Battistelli) took some people by surprise; these people include Merpel from IP Kat.”The EPO’s response to suicides (from the arrogant Battistelli) took some people by surprise; these people include Merpel from IP Kat. Merpel wrote that she “has received word of an article published by the major French newspaper Le Monde on 6 April 2015, reporting on the industrial unrest and social tensions within the European Patent Office (EPO). The original article linked appears to require a subscription and is naturally in French, but those good people at SUEPO have published a version with a translation in French and German which you can access on their news page (item of 9 April 2015) here.”
Merpel linked to this page which says: “Le Monde, one of the reference newspapers in France, published an article on the deleterious social climate at the European Patent Office culminating with an authoritarian management style and four suicides since 2012. Translation are available in English, German and Dutch by scrolling through the document” (links on the page).
Even the pro-patents circles are unhappy with the EPO, based on this article (recently cited above), so we expect major changes. In the coming days we will write a lot about patent reform. █
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04.17.15
Posted in News Roundup at 5:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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For years, the classical desktop has been the main interface for interacting with computers. Consisting of a menu, a panel, and an area to display widgets and open windows, its main virtue was originally its easy access to applications and files. It remains popular today, featured in at least five of the seven major Linux desktop environments. Increasingly, though, it is becoming inefficient — a trend that is not helped helped by experimental designs that decrease access to resources rather than increasing it.
When the classical Linux desktop emerged years ago, it was a marked improvement over the command line for the casual user. Icons on the desktop and menu items ensured that executables were always one or two clicks away, and that users spent more time on productivity than in interacting with the desktop.
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Windows is infamous for the “blue screen of death” that millions of users have encountered over the years. But I’ve never heard of a Linux user getting one…until today. Yes, a Linux user actually got a blue screen of death. This may be the first time in history that we’ve seen something like this in Linux.
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System76 has announced the immediate availability of Sable, a powerful desktop computer powered by the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu Linux.
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An “Endless Computers” Kickstarter project is pitching a Celeron-based PC for emerging markets starting at $169, featuring a new “Endless OS” Linux distro.
A San Francisco based startup called Endless Computers, is close to its $100,000 goal on Kickstarter. Funding packages for its Linux-based Endless Computer start at $169 with 32GB, moving to $189 when you add WiFi and Bluetooth. The price goes to $229 when you also add a 500GB HDD. There are also options to give computers away to poor schools and students around the world. The project closes May 15, with shipments due in June.
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Today we bring good news for Linux users, especially for the Ubuntu lovers. Nimbini mini-PC is the youngest and smallest member of the cirrus7 mini-PC family. As you may know, Cirrus7 is a Germany-based company which received Red Dot Product Design Award last year. Just like its big brother Cirrus7 Nimbus, the Nimbini is completely fan-less and as a result is a quite, compact desktop for everyday usage.
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A couple weeks ago I bought the Lenovo T450s, this is my first laptop-upgrade in about three years and I have to say… I am so glad that I did upgrade. Over the last two weeks I’ve been using the T450s as my daily-driver and its been working almost perfectly under Fedora Linux.
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Server
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Docker has shot to prominence as a developer tool but version 1.6, available today, shows further evidence of efforts to make life easier for the ops teams that put containers into production.
The latest iteration of the open-source platform that first appeared in early 2013 also offers a rewritten, backwards-compatible registry, an improved engine, and new features for the orchestration technology launched in December at the DockerCon EU conference in Amsterdam.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds this week released the Linux 4.0 kernel — a relatively small release that still holds some interesting new features. It’s also a milestone for the project in a few unintentional ways, which Torvalds spells out in his 4.0 release notes.
First, rather than rollover the kernel version from the previous release, 3.19 to 3.20, Torvalds in February polled the community and determined that a slim majority favored pushing the new version to 4.0. (The same poll in which the community voted in the 4.0 release code name, “Hurr Durr I’ma Sheep.”)
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The AllSeen Alliance, a cross-industry collaboration to advance the Internet of Everything (IoT) through an open source software project, today announced 10 new members are joining the initiative. Through collaborative development, Alliance members are looking to leverage their broad industry expertise to advance a common platform for devices, services and applications within the Internet of Everything. Back in February, we interviewed the Alliance’s senior director of IoT, Philip DesAutels (shown), who said, “We are building out an open source software project that delivers code that will help people build interoperable tools and devices.”
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Takashi Iwai sent in his sound driver updates for Linux 4.1, which includes major modernization with the standard bus for ALSA in the sequencer core and HD-audio code.
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The live kernel patching support was one of the big additions to what became Linux 4.0, but with Linux 4.1 there aren’t many improvements to show for the past cycle.
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While full DynTicks support has been part of the mainline Linux kernel for quite a while, it’s now become possible to use it with KVM guest virtual machines.
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Rafael Wysocki of Intel sent in the ACPI and power management updates for the Linux 4.1 kernel. As usual, there’s a lot of new code part of this big pull request.
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With the new GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) versioning where they’re going to be bumping the major version number every year, Linux kernel developers are now re-working the way they handle the compiler’s quirks/changes within the kernel.
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Ingo Molnar sent in the perf subsystem updates for Linux 4.1 on Tuesday and one of the biggest changes is the ability to attach eBPF programs to KProbes. This means that there’s support for user-defined, sandboxed instrumentation running on a live kernel that at the same time can’t cause the kernel any harm.
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Earlier this week I wrote about how it looked like KDBUS would be included in the Linux 4.1 kernel given the pull request sent to Linus Torvalds by Greg Kroah-Hartman. However, since that pull request, KDBUS is taking a lot of heat and there’s calls for it to be postponed from mainlining.
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Graphics Stack
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Linux users have long had a love-hate relationship with Nvidia. On the one hand, Nvidia’s proprietary graphics drivers have always been the best-performing ones for Linux gaming. On the other hand, Nvidia has been so hostile to the open-source community that Linus Torvalds literally gave it the middle finger a few years ago. Torvalds also called them “the single worst company” the Linux developer community has ever had to deal with.
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To the dismay of linux die hards, the Linux 3.19 kernel only has basic support for the new Nvidia Maxwell GPUs. This includes only the basic mode-setting without hardware acceleration (Phoronix via Fudzilla) in Nouveau. Just in case you don’t already know, Nouveau is the beloved reverse-engineered, open source driver used by the Nvidia-Linux community as an alternative to the proprietary linux driver.
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Open sourcers are furious that while Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 900 series is a dominant card for Linux gamers it is about as open source friendly as an Apple fanboy who has been queuing for two months for the latest pointless tool he cant use.
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The NVIDIA 349 driver series has been stabilized today for Solaris, FreeBSD, and Linux with the debut of the NVIDIA 349.16 update.
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While the GeForce GTX 900 series are in garbage shape with the open-source driver, Nouveau on Linux 4.1 does bring some improvements for the original Maxwell GeForce GTX 750 series along with the GK20A Tegra K1 graphics processors.
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It looks like AMD might finally be close to publishing the code to their new AMDGPU kernel driver that’s key to their new unified Linux driver strategy where their open-source stack and Catalyst share a common, open-source kernel driver.
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Windows users this week saw the release of an AMD Catalyst 15.4 Beta driver, but if you’re looking out for the equivalent Linux build, sadly it has yet to surface.
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Benchmarks
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All of the continuous Linux benchmark results from these systems aren’t part of the routine flow of new Linux performance data published on Phoronix.com, but will be available at LinuxBenchmarking.com in the near future. These systems are still all powered by the Git code of the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic. The final piece left to code of the project is to export all of the data in real-time to an external server from the local Phoromatic Server with having a read-only results viewer similar to what’s been done at OpenBenchmarking.org. I hope to have that done in the near future or if you would like to help out or test there is the Phoronix-Test-Suite on GitHub.
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Applications
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Calibre, a complete application to edit, view, and convert eBook files, has been updated yet again, and the developer has added a number of new features and various other fixes.
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I released 3.16.0 a couple weeks ago without much fanfare. Despite many months of 16-hour days and weekends, it lacked some of the features I wanted to get into the “initial” release. So I didn’t stop. I kept pushing through to make 3.16.2 the best that I could.
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The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence 5.0.0. This is a major release with new features, enhancements and important bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use and upgrading from previous versions is strongly advised.
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In an operating system, logs are all about keeping track of events, be it critical system errors, resource usage warnings, transaction history, application status, or user activities. These logs, which are stored as (text or binary) files in the system, are useful for system auditing, debugging and maintenance. However, with so many different system entities generating log files, and even at growing rate, the challenge as a system admin is to how to “consume” these log files effectively.
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Production-ready Open Source Puppet 4 is now available! We’re excited to announce new features and enhancements that will extend your use of Puppet for faster, more consistent management of server configurations. We’ve added capabilities to help you save time, reduce errors, and increase reliability.
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textprint takes a flat data file as input, and arranges it graphically to fit the terminal without distorting the image. From there, textprint goes from zero-to-60, in about two seconds.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Age of Wonders III has been highly requested by Linux fans, and now that it’s fully released I decided to take a look.
The developers graciously gave me a copy to test, so many thanks to them for this.
The Linux (and Mac) versions came alongside a new patch, and a brand new expansion. You can see their official news post on Steam linked here.
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The Banner Saga has been highly sought after from Linux users, and the day has finally come. The new update also adds controller support.
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It’s a great time to be a fan of space combat games, and the latest release for us is Gratuitous Space Battles 2 which I’ve taken a look at.
The game was ported to Linux thanks to Ethan Lee, who has done quite a number of ports for us now. He’s much like Ryan Gordon in the way that he ports a lot of other people’s games. His ports are usually good too.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Qt 5.5 is a very exciting release for new features and functionality being added to this open-source toolkit, but it’s continuing in the Qt5 tradition of running behind schedule.
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When we were porting Kamoso to Qt5/KF5, at some point I realized that it was about time we came up with whatever we’d want to do with sharing. Kipi is definitely an interesting technology, but no matter how I looked at it I found that it missed an iteration in the concept. In some aspects it’s very specific, in some others very broad. In fact, I already tried to improve it, back in 2009.
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In the last Qt on Android episode we learned the basics of JNI on Android in a Qt way. In this episode I’d like to focus on tools that will help us to be more productive when we extend our Qt on Android applications.
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The Kdenlive team is happy to announce the release of Kdenlive 15.04.0. While there are very few new features in this release, it is a huge step towards a bright future!
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As you might know, Calligra now also started porting to Qt5/KF5. We are currently reaching the end of stage 1, where everything is readded to the build (“links and installs? done!”), with next stage then to fix anything that broke or regressed (see screenshots!1!).
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This is fairly straightfoward: These plugins were still using the old .desktop plugin manifest files. Now they are using the embedded JSON manifests. This isn’t something user visible, but it’s needed as the old .desktop method is now deprecated.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The Gnumeric open source spreadsheet editor used in numerous distributions of GNU/Linux, including Xubuntu and Lubuntu, received a new maintenance release today, April 17, as part of the GNOME 3.16.1 desktop environment.
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The GNOME development team has announced the first point update for the GNOME 3.16.x branch, which comes with a fair number of changes and various improvements.
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GNOME 3.16.1 — like other GNOME point releases — is mostly about fixing bugs and further polishing of the 3.16.0 release that came out last month. All major developments meanwhile are now focused on GNOME 3.18, which will be released in September.
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Here comes our first update to GNOME 3.16, it has many fixes, various improvements, documentation and translation updates, we hope you’ll enjoy it.
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I am following the discussion caused by Greg Kroah-Hartman requesting that kdbus be pulled into the next kernel release. First of all my hat of to Greg for his persistence and staying civil. There has already been quite a few posts to the thread at coming close to attempts at character assassination and a lot of emails just adding more noise, but no signal.
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I’ve been an advocate of change on the Linux desktop for some time—at least until Ubuntu Unity came around. Once I started using Canonical’s entry into the desktop space, the race (for me) was over. Unity was my choice. I was fairly certain it would take a massive improvement on the desktop to get me to move away from my default.
That improvement might have come along—with the number 3.16. I’m talking about GNOME. The latest iteration of what was once the ruling king of the Linux desktop has made a strong case for wooing me away from Unity.
With that said, I wanted to take a moment to not just introduce you to the GNOME 3.16 desktop, but show you how to get a few things done with it. But first … what’s new?
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Reviews
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Elementary OS Freya is the latest release of Elementary OS. This release based on ubuntu 14.04 LTS featuring the latest version of pantheon desktop as the main desktop enviroment. Powered by kernel version 3.16, Gtk 3.14, and Vala 0.26.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Slackware Family
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Chrome 42 is released. Big jump: a major version change. Mostly changes under the hood again it seems. The Chrome binaries for this version contain a new version of the PepperFlash plugin, which I have extracted for use with the chromium browser – see my earlier blog. The packages for Slackware 14.1 and -current are available for download so that you can enjoy the latest Chromium browser (and its optional Widevine plugin) in your trustworthy Slackware environment.
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Note I compiled the packages on Slackware 14.1 which is the cause of one bug in the package if you use it on Slackware-current: the ProjectM visualisation plugin does not work because of a libGLEW library version error. I have not yet been able to find a fix for it, but the impact is fairly minor so I let it pass.
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Red Hat Family
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So Red Hat are now formally a member of the Khronos Groups who many of probably know as the shepherds of the OpenGL standard. We haven’t gotten all the little bits sorted yet, like getting our logo on the Khronos website, but our engineers are signing up for the various Khronos working groups etc. as we speak.
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Red Hat has announced Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.2 has been awarded the Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+ – the highest level of assurance for a commercial middleware platform.
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In an article last month, I talked about a software company that had surged more than 11% following its solid fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report. On the other hand, I also talked about how near-term upside would be a little harder to come by given the impressive pop.
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RPM of PHP version 5.6.8 are available in remi repository for Fedora ≥ 21 and remi-php56 repository for Fedora ≤ 20 and Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).
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Fedora
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Early this week, Linus released version 4.0 of the Linux Kernel. Now, this updated version of the Linux Kernel is available in the official Fedora repositories for users running the alpha release of Fedora 22.
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The major version change wasn’t done because of any major feature or change in process or really anything exciting at all. Linus Torvalds changed it because he felt the minor version number was getting a bit large and he liked 4.0 better. It was really a whim more than any thing contained within the kernel itself. The initial merge window builds of this kernel in Fedora were even called 3.20.0-rc0.gitX until the 4.0-rc1 release came out.
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In what I first thought was a joke, GNU Hurd 0.6 was released yesterday. GNU Hurd is the GNU project’s answer to the Linux kernel and this release brings bug fixes and enhancements. Elsewhere, Jaroslav Reznik today announced that the Fedora 22 Beta is a Go and Josh Boyer said Final will ship with Linux 4.0.
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As reported by Softpedia last week, the Fedora devs decided to delay the release of the Beta version of Fedora 22 by a week. The Fedora 22 Beta Go/No-Go Meeting took place on April 16, and the distribution received green light for the April 21 release.
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Flock to Fedora is our yearly conference where Fedora contributors from all around the world gather to discuss the past year, talk about where we’re headed, hack on various projects, see old friends, and meet new faces. This year, we’ll converge on Rocheseter, NY, where I went to college. I’m excited to take a trip back east, and hopefully see some friends who are still living in the area. The event will take place from August 12-15, and is sure to be a good time.
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One of the new features in upcoming Fedora 22 will be Django-1.8. Django project released its most recent version earlier this month, and it’s going to be a long term supported version after Django-1.4 became a bit ancient nowadays. Fedora had release 1.6 in which is now deprecated by Django upstream.
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Debian Family
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For Debian GNU/Linux users wishing to have ZFS file-system support and libdvdcss (for DVD playback) without having to use third-party package archives, that should soon be a reality.
Neil McGovern was this month elected the 2015 Debian Project Leader. Lucas Nussbaum, the former Debian Project Leader for the past two years, today posted his final remarks as the DPL. His final message went over his accomplishments as the leader of this popular distribution and he ended with talking about the ZFS and libdvdcss packages soon in Debian.
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McGovern, who lives in England, is an engineering manager at open-source consultancy and development firm Collabora, and has been a Debian developer since 2005. He ran unsuccessfully for project leader last year.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical’s efforts are going in a single direction, and developers are focusing on an important task: to make a single operating system that can run on any platform. It might seem like an impossible goal, but the truth is that they are getting closer with each new release.
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Ubuntu Touch has received quite a few fixes in the past few weeks, and now Canonical has decided to make the changelog much clearer for regular users.
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According to The Inquirer, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, has confirmed that the recently announced Linux kernel 4.0 will be included in the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 operating system in October 2015.
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Ubuntu developer Stéphane Graber announced the final freeze for Ubuntu 15.04. The first candidate images of Ubuntu 15.04 are expected while new package uploads now should just be about release critical fixes.
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Canonical, through Stéphane Graber, has announced today that the forthcoming Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) computer operating system is now in Final Freeze and will be released to the public next Thursday, April 23, 2015.
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Last week, the first Ubuntu phone to ever be commercially available came out on BQ’s website. Although there is just one Ubuntu device on the market right now, and it hasn’t been out for long, Canonical has already released an update.
This development should show, both to consumers interested in Ubuntu phones as well as OEMs who might consider another open source alternative to Android and Firefox OS, that Canonical is serious about supporting its mobile operating system.
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Canonical has announced that a few NTP vulnerabilities were found and corrected for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.
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Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) has hit final freeze, and users will now be confronted with an important choice, to upgrade or not to upgrade.
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Canonical has finally released a third OTA update for Ubuntu Touch, and users should start receiving them in the next few hours.
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Ubuntu 15.04 “Vivid Vervet” entered its Final Freeze period on 16 April 2015, which means the release is locked down and it is unlikely new features will be added before it launches on 23 April.
During Final Freeze, only critical bugs or exceptional circumstances will be considered for alteration.
A number of significant changes made it into Vivid, including a change in the initialisation system, a new version of the Linux kernel, upgrades to the Unity desktop manager, and updated applications.
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Flavours and Variants
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Among others, Elementary OS 0.4 Loki will bring support for Wayland, Red Hat’s new display server, support for HiDPI high resolution displays will be implemented, AppCenter (a new Software Center) will replace the existing one.
Also, an elementary Account will be created for connecting the users with the elementary services and other elementary users, new user account pictures, improved icons and smarter audio management will be implemented, support for synchronizing system settings will be added, while automatic driver detection during installation, smarter software updates, AppArmor integration are also planned.
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The Apple II holds a special place, not just as a piece of computing history, but also in the hearts of lots of the people that used it back in the day. Alongside machines like the TRS-80 and, at least over here in Britain, the BBC Model B — which was one of the inspirations behind the Raspberry Pi — it’s one of the machines we grew up with, and for a lot of us, it’s the machine we cut our teeth on when we were kids.
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iWave unveiled a Qseven COM with 1080p support that runs Linux on TI’s DSP-enabled DaVinci DM8168 SoC. iWave also updated an i.MX6 Qseven COM with 2GB RAM.
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Like the idea of a TV box that runs Android and has access to thousands of apps including Netflix, Hulu Plus, and XBMC, but don’t want to buy one unless it can also handle desktop apps like Office or LibreOffice?
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Smart TV boxes may not have yet caught the imagination of mainstream consumers the same way smartphones have, but that hasn’t meant that vendors and OEMs are not trying to do something about it. Smart TV boxes are essentially devices that let you access thousands of apps including Netflix, Hulu Plus, XBMC etc. that allow you to stream content over the internet, in essence, turning your old TV into a ‘smart’ one. Now, some enterprising OEMs are finding ways to attract would-be buyers by promising them what Roku or Apple TV won’t, for now at least – the ability to handle desktop apps like Office or LibreOffice! They do it by adding a desktop Operating System to their devices in addition to Android, thereby giving users the flexibility to use the device either as a smart box or as a regular PC.
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Ambarella has announced the availability of a reference design for battery-powered IP cameras, supported with a Linux board support package (BSP). The design showcases the company’s recently announced, Cortex-A9 based S2Lm system-on-chip, which is specifically designed for battery-powered full HD security cameras suitable for consumer entry-level commercial security applications, says Ambarella.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Tizen is an Open Source Linux project and therefore we encourage developers to join and contribute to the Tizen project and the Tizen Community, and to show you how Philippe Coval has created a webinar session. You can see the Tizen development process and what can be done with Tizen community repos. Learn how packaging is done with Tizen development tools such as git & gerrit and also find out about the duties of maintainers including how to track and maintain your patches.
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Android
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Google has announced a new version of Chrome for Android is hitting the stable release channel, and this one is a rather big deal for a few reasons. There are some interesting features, but it’s also the last release for Ice Cream Sandwich. At least there’s some good stuff.
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Long story short, if you’re lazy and you value convenience over getting top dollar for your phone, Apple’s Android trade-in service is a terrific option — just like carrier trade-in services. If you want to make twice as much money selling your used phone, look elsewhere.
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Ready for more Material Design in your life? These 30 Android apps make Google’s latest design standards look amazing — and they have the functionality to match.
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Console favorite WWE 2K is now available on iOS and Android. Priced at $7.99, the new mobile game puts all the craziness of WWE wrestling in the palm of your hand, with a playable roster of superstars including Hulk Hogan, John Cena, Sting, Triple H, Undertaker, Daniel Bryan, Roman Reigns, Seth Rollins, Dean Ambrose, and Bray Wyatt.
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Amazon’s own Android phone may have been an absolute bust, but the company’s Android app store is an entirely different story. The Amazon Appstore is accessible on all Android smartphones and tablets, and it offers a solid alternative to Google’s Play store. In fact, we recently called it the one app every Android device owner needs to install immediately thanks to Amazon’s promotions that offer one new paid app for free every day.
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Echoing others’ sentiments, Luke Wallace, who leads Android development at software developer Bottle Rocket Studios, told an audience at a technical conference in San Diego Wednesday that it probably should not use the popular Eclipse IDE anymore for building Android apps. Android Studio is now the way to go; Eclipse represents the old method of development for Android, Wallace said, during his presentation on mastering Android development tools at the Mobile Dev + Test conference.
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Apple CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto let you use your car to have your phone make calls, send and receive texts, handle emails, and even control some apps without ever having to pick up your handset.
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When Google first previewed Android Auto, its Android-based in-car system last year during Google I/O, many wondered if Waze would eventually make its way to the platform.
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Google has published Android for Work, its BYOD app for older Android smartphones that allows users to carve out a secure space for their business apps.
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The LG G3 is a pretty great device, but the Verizon model had been left out of the Android Lollipop parade.
The wait is finally over, with this device joining several Sony phones in finally seeing the most recent version of Android. They join a list that includes most flagship devices in getting their taste of all those new Android 5.0 features.
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Recon has shipped its Android-based “Jet” eyewear for $699. The sports-focused Jet integrates a WQVGA display, 720p camera, Bluetooth, WiFi, ANT+, and GPS.
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Performance analysis to optimize HPC applications is challenging at many levels, not the least of which is the availability of adequate performance analysis and measurement tools. Underappreciated at best, most organizations rely on vendor-supplied tools included as part of a machine procurement. While generally good for analysis on a single node, such performance analysis tools typically do not provide the capabilities needed to analyze heterogeneous systems containing accelerators and/or distributed applications running across large numbers of nodes. As a result, most programmers are stuck having to guess at performance issues. The patchwork nature and lack of consistency amongst performance tools available across various HPC centers also means that many programmers lack proficiency in using the performance tool(s) provided at a new site or installed on a new machine.
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As a quick update to the initial Veyron motherboards being added to Coreboot, Google has now added more Veyron boards to mainline Coreboot.
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A similar line of reasoning predates Raymond’s rise to prominence, and even the introduction of Linux. As far back as the early 1980s, Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU project and the man some authorities have called the “last true hacker,” declared that the source code of software should be freely shared because “the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it.”
So, from an early date, advocates of open source development argued that open code is essential for two reasons: First, it’s simply a superior way to program; and second, there’s a moral imperative to share.
That all sounds grand. And it’s certainly true that both the functional and moral dimensions of open code are key motivations for many open source programmers today.
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Catalyst IT founder Don Christie says one argument in favour of open source is that coding isn’t difficult.
Most of the time that means others can quickly replicate closed software. He says: “They are going to replicate it anyway. It can be better to make it open source and get the benefits of better code.”
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In a blog post this week and in an interview with Light Reading, Rice says there are several reasons being an active contributor is beneficial. But he admits with a laugh that AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) doesn’t have the same methods to make money on open source as software vendors, who can release a “free” version of their open source software for customers but then sell upgrades or back-end support.
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So, you’re about to start a new company and you want to make open-source software the driving force behind all technology decisions. Outside of it being an incredibly noble and honorable cause, what are the key data points you need to fully understand before implementing this strategy?
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google today announced the Chrome/Chromium 42 web-browser reaching the stable channel and with it comes many improvements.
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Today’s Chrome 43 Beta release brings Web MIDI support for connecting to MIDI devices like synthesizers, DJ decks, and drum machines from the web browser. Aside from supporting the Web MIDI API, thre’s also now a Permissions API to let developers query permissions for Geolocation, Push, Notification, and Web MIDI APIs.
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SaaS/Big Data
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This week, immediately following startup company AtScale coming out of stealth mode to show its tools for making data stored in Hadoop’s file system accessible within Business Intelligence (BI) applications, Think Big launched its Dashboard Engine for Hadoop, designed to make it easy for business users to cull insights from Hadoop data stores. And now, Pepperdata, which develops Hadoop cluster optimization software, announced that it has secured more than $15 million in strategic and venture financing to scale to serve enterprises who rely on Hadoop in production.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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While we’ve been looking forward to the new features of LibreOffice 4.5 as the leading open-source office suite, version 4.5 is no more. The next version of LO is now going to be LibreOffice 5.0.
To some surprise, this morning in Git, the version was bumped to 5.0 (5.0.0.0.alpha0+). There was no branching of LibreOffice 4.5 as it seems LibreOffice 4.5 is itself being renamed to LibreOffice 5.0.
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CMS
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Our Parisian web agency and software company, Lp Digital, is open sourcing its content management system, BackBee CMS. In this article, I’ll explain the tools that helped us release BackBee as open source software and measure the results.
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The government’s govCMS project will make its own Drupal distribution publicly available for download, it announced today.
The distribution will be a fork of the aGov distribution, which was developed by local development shop PreviousNext and is the building block for govCMS sites.
aGov was released in 2013 after a beta period involving a number of federal and state government agencies. High profile end users include the NSW government’s ‘one stop shop’ for services, Service NSW.
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Education
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This will also pave the way for other FLOSS like GNU/Linux on the desktop instead of That Other OS. Altogether this could save half the cost of desktop IT or permit more/better IT for the same money in Hungarian universities. What about your local university? This is yet another indication that this is the Year of the GNU/Linux Desktop. Hungary as a whole is not doing badly on GNU/Linux desktops (1.48%). It’s time the universities pulled their share up.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Released at the beginning of the month, Chef Delivery is already getting some purchase in the fast growing DevOps market with the help of some blue-chip IT companies like HP. With Chef Delivery, the company says it “has captured success patterns of its most innovative customers and distilled them into a product”.
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BSD
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pfSense, a free open-source customized distribution based on FreeBSD designed to be used as a firewall and router, has advanced to version 2.2.2 and it’s now available for download.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The GNU Hurd, the free open source replacement for the Unix kernel, has a new release that is still not suitable for production environments. There are also new releases of GNU Mach and GNU Mig, both of which have reached version 1.5.
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Key congressional leaders have just agreed on a deal to fast track the fast-tracking of TPP. While the threat of TPP has persisted for years, now is the time to fight back!
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Version 0.6 of GNU Hurd was released today. Before getting too excited about GNU Hurd, it’s still bound to x86 32-bit and doesn’t offer any compelling new features.
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Project Releases
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The Wine development release 1.7.41 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
- More Known Folders supported in the shell.
- Some more support for kernel job objects.
- More MSI patches improvements.
- Some theming fixes.
- Various bug fixes.
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Alexandre Julliard announced the immediate availability for download and testing of a new maintenance release of Wine 1.7.41, which brings better support for kernel job objects, improves MSI patches, enhanced support for Known Folders in the shell, and fixes theming issues.
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Public Services/Government
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For its Summer of Code open source development traineeships, the European Space Agency (ESA) is looking for sponsors to increase the number of students and projects and to help with promotion. “We would like the major firms in the space industry to participate”, says Maxime Perrotin, coordinating the Summer of Code for ESA.
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The Dutch government’s lack of vendor independence is too high a cost for society, the Dutch Parliament concludes. The government should enforce its policy on open standards in ICT procurement and should also devise exit strategies – to reduce its dependence on ICT suppliers.
[...]
Member of Parliament Astrid Oosenbrug (Pvda), one of the two MPs who authored this week’s open source resolution, says the BIT will help public administrations to require open standards and determine strategies that result in a level playing field for open source.
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The Dutch Parliament has determined that vendor dependency is a much greater risk, and they have voted on a resolution that would encourage the government to also look at open standards in ICT procurement.
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The primary goals of developing the open source Forge.mil community were to create a more open and transparent development process that could remove barriers to reuse, encourage collaboration, and discourage proprietary or closed systems. Build such an extensive, collaborative community required a powerful and adaptable Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform to enable code reuse and quality improvements, as well as improve of time to market for new applications. Ultimately, the DoD chose CollabNet’s TeamForge ALM platform as a foundation on which to build Forge.mil.
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Wipro said the rapidly increasing pace of adoption of open source software and methodologies led by advancements in analytics, cloud computing and the Internet of Things ( IoT) have catapulted open source into a core technology asset for enterprises across the globe.
The company further said that Wipro has identified open source as a core technology initiative and the company’s investments in building a large cadre of skilled personnel, including world class open source industry veterans and community experts, were beginning to reap dividends as reflected by the increasing customer interest.
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Openness/Sharing
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As you may have noticed, this column is pretty keen on opening things up – whether that’s open source, open access or open government. But what about open-sourcing your body – releasing as open data the most intimate aspects of your physical existence? That’s what the Open Humans Network is asking.
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Open Hardware
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I didn’t pay anything for the USB keyboard and USB optical mouse that I use with this tiny computer, because they were donated to the public library where I work. Two weeks ago someone dropped of 10 new USB keyboards and 10 new USB mice; they were surplus from a computer upgrade cycle at a nearby office. To be sure, the value of the $35 USD Raspberry Pi 2 computer is extended when free USB keyboards and mice are available. There is a role, then, for schools, libraries, and makerspaces to collect these donated items in order to redistribute them to those who need them.
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Standards/Consortia
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So what’s new? Well, basically one thing: we now have a related standard for formulas in ODF spreadsheets! This is something that obviously occurred 5-10 years too late, but better late than never. The Wikipedia article on OpenFormula is a fairly amusing example of the need to justify and rationalize mistakes that seems to surround the OpenDocument standard.
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Nicola Sturgeon was ahead of the Labour leader by 7 points in the question of who had the best personality: 30% of the liked her over Nigel Farage (23%), Ed Miliband (21%) and the Leader of Plaid Cymru Leanne Wood (16%).
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Science
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Change the world. Power. Influence. Innovation. Hand gestures. Literal self-comparisons to royalty. Slides. Rosenstein’s keynote at this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference has it all. There’s a banal, pseudo-do-gooder theme (“Do great things”). There are several venn diagrams. There are repeated tone deaf calls to “have your cake and eat it too,” an exhortation for all techies to embrace their Stanford dropout privilege and remake the world as they desire.
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Hardware
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ARM, the leading designer of mobile processors, announced the launch of ARM Cordio, a portfolio of low-power wireless communications technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT).
ARM Cordio is comprised of the intellectual property (IP) from two acquisitions, Sunrise Micro Devices and Wicentric, also announced on April 16. The terms of the deals were not disclosed.
The Cordio name originates from Sunrise Micro Devices’ sub-volt Bluetooth wireless radio technology. A year ago, Sunrise Micro Devices and Wicentric, a maker of Bluetooth Smart software, announced an alliance to develop software for the Cordio BT4 radio core for IoT sensors and devices.
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When you’re strapping on the latest smart watch or ogling an iPhone, you probably aren’t thinking of Moore’s Law, which for 50 years has been used as a blueprint to make computers smaller, cheaper and faster.
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Health/Nutrition
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Earlier this year, WalMart became one of several corporate heavyweights to lift wages for its meagerly compensated workers, around 500,000 of which are now set to receive at least $9/hour and $10/hour by Q1 2016 (that of course assumes they make it on $9 an hour for another 12 months and don’t seek out other employment by sheer necessity).
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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That the battlefield of tomorrow will be abuzz with death is clear. Say hi to America’s drone cannons.
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A new era in autonomy and unmanned systems for naval operations is on the horizon, as officials at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) announced April 14 recent technology demonstrations of swarming unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – part of the Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology (LOCUST) program.
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Were people’s lives and livelihoods not at stake, it would have been an almost sublime piece of parody. During the trial of four teenage Israeli settlers who set fire to a Palestinian-owned cafe in the West Bank town of Dura, which concluded on Monday, the defendants’ attorneys – as reported by Ynet – brought forth the claim that because the arson was an act of revenge, their clients were not guilty of breaking the law.
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Earlier this week, Russia announced it was ending its five year ban on selling S-300 defensive missiles to Iran. There’s no indication yet Iran is even going to buy any, but Israel was immediately furious, predicting doom and gloom over the possibility.
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One of the first measures taken by Saudi Arabia, when announcing its war against Yemen, was a full-scale naval blockade. For a nation that imports over 90% of its food, that was a devastating move, and one Saudi officials assured wouldn’t keep the food out of the country.
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The world of private defence contractors, the modern version of the fabled Condottiere without the flags and the city-state veneration, received a blow with the handing down of stiff sentences on four former Blackwater operatives. Last year, the four in question, part of Blackwater’s Support Team Raven 23, were convicted in the Washington, D.C. federal court for killing 17 Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour square in 2007.
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Almost half of all Americans want to support Israel even if its interests diverge from the interests of their own country. Only a minority of Americans (47 percent) say that their country should pursue their own interests over supporting Israel’s when the two choices collide. It’s the ultimate violation of George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address warning that “nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded. … The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.”
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The Obama administration’s explicit policy is to capture suspected terrorists, not drone them. So why is there so much droning and so little capturing?
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More than seven years after his nine-year-old son, Ali, was killed by contractors working for the American security firm Blackwater Worldwide, Mohammed Kinani says he’s finished his mission “to push these people to the law.”
Four former Blackwater employees were given long sentences yesterday for killing 14 unarmed Iraqis, including Kinani’s son, and wounding many others, when in 2007 they shot at a crowd in Baghdad’s Nisour Square with machine guns and grenade launchers.
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The US Secretary of State expressed appreciation for Russia’s action in evacuating Americans from Yemen, after the United States refused to engage in evacuation efforts for its citizens.
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Some cover-ups are scandalous. Others, like those surrounding the First Gulf War, suggest an official callousness that shocks and awes.
During and immediately after the war, 200,000 of 700,000 U.S. troops were exposed to nerve gas and other chemical agents. The Department of Defense (DOD), fully aware of the chemical hazards and the troop exposure, deployed a litany of lies. After this, it concocted a cover-up. That cover-up continues to this day.
Don Riegle, the senator who presided over Senate committee hearings in 1993-1994 about the veterans’ illnesses, recently told me: “Every effort was made for years to hide the truth and deny the medical research needed to fully treat the U.S. troops suffering from Gulf War Syndrome.”
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American Anwar al-Awlaki has been dead for over four years now, but The New York Times is still giving substantial ink to the U.S. government’s self-serving meme that Awlaki was an “operational” terrorist,” even though we still don’t know whether ISIS or AQAP is responsible for the recent attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.
I called out New York Times reporter Scott Shane for carrying the government’s water by pimping the “Awlaki was operational” narrative last year. Yesterday, Shane penned another lengthy article rehashing the U.S. government’s post hoc justification for targeting and assassinating Awlaki without due process.
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By the time four former Blackwater security guards were sentenced this week to long prison terms for the 2007 fatal shooting of 14 civilians in Iraq, the man who sent the contractors there had long since moved on from the country and the company he made notorious.
Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, a former member of the Navy SEALs and heir to a Michigan auto parts fortune, has spent the last few years searching for new missions, new fields of fire and new customers.
He has worked in Abu Dhabi and now focuses his efforts on Africa, with ties to the Chinese government, which is eager for access to some of the continent’s natural resources. Mr. Prince’s current firm, Frontier Services Group, provides what it describes as “expeditionary logistics” for mining, oil and natural gas operations in Africa, and has the backing of Citic Group, a large state-owned Chinese investment company.
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Transparency Reporting
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The lawyer for Julian Assange says his client has agreed to be questioned in the Ecuadorian embassy over sex crime allegations.
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Russia’s pledge to deliver anti-aircraft missiles to Damascus at a time when world powers are trying to end Syria’s civil war is consistent with a pattern of using the weapons system as a bargaining chip in its power struggle with the West.
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While the 2013 operation to evacuate whistleblower Edward Snowden from Hong Kong, where he faced impending arrest, involved a degree of subterfuge, no Chinese or Russian intelligence agents were involved in it, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange said.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said that Russian special services were not involved in former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden’s arrival in Russia.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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As hopeful US investors buy everything oil-related on the back of a lower than expected crude build this week (after the biggest build in 30 years the week before), The Kingdom has stepped up overnight and ruined the dream of supply-restrained price recovery as it announced a surge in production output in March to yet another record high. The nation boosted crude output by 658,800 barrels a day in March to an average of 10.294 million a day, which as Bloomberg notes, is about half the daily production from the Bakken formation. WTI Crude prices have slipped by around 2% from yesterday’s NYMEX Close ramp highs as it appears Saudi Arabia is not willing to just let this effort to squeeze Shale stall.
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California is in its fourth year of an unprecedented drought, with no end in sight and water reserves dwindling. It’s exactly the type of scenario climate scientists have warned about, and new research sees global warming’s fingerprints on the drought. But a new FAIR study shows that, rather than investigating this connection, network news is largely ignoring it.
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Finance and Politics
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That probably should have been the headline of a Politico article (sorry, behind paywall) on a letter signed by 13 former Democratic governors urging Congress to approve fast-track trade authority to facilitate the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP). The most newsworthy aspect of the letter is that the governors apparently do not understand the basic economics of trade.
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Former secretary of state, senator and first lady Hillary Clinton has formally entered the 2016 race for the White House in a second bid to become the first woman U.S. president. We host a roundtable discussion with four guests: Joe Conason, editor-in-chief of The National Memo, co-editor of The Investigative Fund, and author of “The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton”; Michelle Goldberg, senior contributing writer at The Nation; longtime journalist Robert Scheer, editor of Truthdig.com and author of many books; and Kshama Sawant, a Socialist city councilmember in Seattle and member of Socialist Alternative, a nationwide organization of social and economic justice activists.
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It’s “just politics,” said one major Democratic donor on Wall Street, explaining that some of Clinton’s Wall Street supporters doubt she would push hard for closing the carried-interest loophole as president, a policy she promoted when she last ran in 2008.
“The question is not going to be whether or not hedge fund managers or CEOs make too much money,” said a separate Clinton supporter who manages a hedge fund. “The question is, how do you solve the problem of inequality. Nobody takes it like she is going after them personally.”
Indeed, many of the financial-sector donors supporting her just-declared presidential campaign say they’ve been expecting all along the moment when Clinton would start calling out hedge fund managers and decrying executive pay — right down to the complaints from critics that such arguments are rich coming from someone who recently made north of $200,000 per speech and who has been close to Wall Street since her days representing it as a senator from New York.
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“Why don’t you tell me what Hillary Clinton is campaigning on, do you know?” he said on MSNBC’s “Live with Thomas Roberts,” when asked if he believed her campaign message that she’s running to represent the “little guy.”
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Kshama Sawant, the socialist on the City Council, is up for re-election this year. Since joining the council in January of 2014 she has helped push through a gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Seattle. She has expanded funding for social services and blocked, along with housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle Housing Authority to allow a rent increase of up to 400 percent. She has successfully lobbied for city money to support tent encampments and is fighting for an excise tax on millionaires. And for this she has become the bête noire of the Establishment, especially the Democratic Party.
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Four years before the financial collapse, Goldman Sachs executive George Herbert Walker IV had much to be thankful for. “I’ve been fortunate to be a small part of teams leading U.S. restructurings, European privatizations, global pension management and now hedge fund and private equity investing,” he said in the annual report of a banking colossus that would soon be known as the “great vampire squid” of Wall Street.
“The world,” said Walker, “just keeps getting more interesting.”
As the head of Goldman Sachs’ alternative investment unit, Walker’s ebullience was understandable. At the same time he was raising $100,000 for his cousin George W. Bush’s successful presidential re-election effort, the administration of another cousin, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, returned the family favor, delivering $150 million of Florida pension money to an alternative investment fund run by Walker’s firm. Like other executives whose companies received Florida pension money, Walker is now renewing the cycle, reportedly attending in February a high-dollar fundraiser for Jeb Bush’s political committee.
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Hillary Clinton’s announcement that she’s stepping down from her family foundation’s board of directors while running for president was well received, but that won’t shield her from the roiling controversy over the foundation’s acceptance of tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments.
The boards of the Clinton Foundation and the affiliated Clinton Health Access Initiative are scheduled to meet this week to consider additional actions as a result of her candidacy, possibly including new curbs on foreign donations.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Among the bottomfeeders of the Internet ecosystem are “news scrapers”–websites that automatically harvest posts from actual news sites and repackage them in hopes of snagging some search engine hits and the accompanying online ad revenue.
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The Office of the United States Trade Representative, the agency responsible for negotiating two massive upcoming trade deals, is being led by former lobbyists for corporations that stand to benefit from the deals, according to disclosure forms obtained by The Intercept.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a proposed free trade accord between the U.S. and 11 Pacific Rim countries; the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a similar agreement between the U.S. and the E.U.
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Throughout 2012, numerous American factions were pushing for U.S. intervention in Syria to bring down the regime of Bashar Assad, who throughout the War on Terror had helped the U.S. in all sorts of ways, including torturing people for them. But by then, Assad was viewed mostly as an ally of Iran, and deposing him would weaken Tehran, the overarching regional strategy of the U.S. and its allies. The prevailing narrative was thus created that those fighting against Assad were “moderate” and even pro-western groups, with the leading one dubbed “the Free Syrian Army.”
Whether to intervene in Syria in alliance with or on behalf of the “Free Syrian Army” was a major debate in the west through the end of that year. Then-Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry was openly discussing ways for the U.S. to aid the rebels to bring about regime change. Senator Joe Lieberman was saying: “I hope the international community and the U.S. will provide assistance to the Syrian Free Army in the various ways we can.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while ruling out direct military intervention, said: “[W]e have to redouble our efforts outside of the United Nations with those allies and partners who support the Syrian people’s right to have a better future.”
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NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel is re-reporting a key detail of his December 2012 kidnapping in Syria after new information surfaced suggesting he may have been misled about the identities of his captors, according to sources familiar with the matter.
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But wait a second–isn’t Voice of America itself a propaganda outlet? Not in the New York Times stylebook, apparently. The piece, by Ron Nixon, describes VOA as “the government agency that is charged with presenting America’s viewpoint to the world.” Later on, the Times refers to what it calls “America’s public diplomacy.”
The US’s enemies, on the other hand, have “sophisticated propaganda machines that have expanded the influence of countries like China and Russia and terrorist groups like the Islamic State.” The difference between “propaganda machines” and “public diplomacy” is never explained in the article, but the former appears to be what “they” do while the latter is what “we” do.
The only source quoted in the article who’s not directly connected to the government is Glen Howard, president of the Jamestown Foundation, described as “a Washington think tank.” (“We are getting our butts kicked…. Countries like Russia are running circles around us,” Howard says.) Not mentioned is the fact that Jamestown was founded with the help of then-CIA Director William Casey to provide financial support for the Agency’s spies (Washington Post, 1/10/05).
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Censorship
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The April 4 viral video of a South Carolina police officer shooting a fleeing suspect has cost the cop his job and his freedom. But there’s now another cost attached to the video, perhaps in the $10,000 range or more. A publicist for the man who captured the footage—which led to homicide charges against North Charleston officer Michael Slager— says news outlets must pay a licensing fee to carry the footage.
Australian publicist Max Markson, the chief executive of celebrity management firm Markson Sparks, told The New York Times that “I think that the people who might be put off by this are the media outlets that had it for free. Now they will have to pay.” Markson did not respond to Ars’ requests for comment.
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Privacy
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Open Rights Group, Privacy International and a group of internationally acknowledged experts have filed amicus curiae briefs with the Hungarian Constitutional Court. The case has been brought by the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU) against two major service providers, in an attempt to force the Hungarian Constitutional Court to repeal the Hungarian Electronic Communications Act.
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With about 45 days remaining before a major post-9/11 surveillance authorization expires, representatives of the National Security Agency and the FBI are taking to Capitol Hill to convince legislators to preserve their sweeping spy powers.
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The report dutifully examines how hard it is for the federal government to hire and keep top cybersecurity talent when the private sector pays so much more.
Its very sensible recommendations include modernizing the creaky civil service hiring system and making compensation more competitive.
But in a eye-popping bit of irony — even by Washington standards — the report was written by Booz Allen Hamilton, the giant “Beltway Bandit” government contractor known for regularly raiding the National Security Agency and other government organizations for its best and brightest cyber talents, especially after they’ve gotten valuable government training and security clearances.
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WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange believes SNP supporters were not being “paranoid” that their communications were being spied on during the independence referendum.
Speaking via videolink at the Commonwealth Law Conference in Glasgow on Wednesday, Mr Assange said the “full capacities” of the British intelligence services were deployed during in the run-up to last year’s vote.
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The Australian expert in espionage believes independence amounted to a “national security threat” to the UK, justifying the mobilisation of the “full capacities” of the British state’s surveillance network.
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In a rare public appearance, the Wikileaks founder, who has spent the past 34 months in the building after claiming asylum, will discuss how intelligence gathering abuses privacy in the internet age.
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An Arkansas lawyer is seeking sanctions after his computer expert found malware on an external hard drive supplied in response to a discovery request.
Lawyer Matthew Campbell of North Little Rock says he became suspicious when he received the hard drive by Federal Express in June 2014 from a lawyer for the Fort Smith Police Department, the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette reports. Previous evidence in the police whistleblower case had been provided by email or a cloud-based Internet storage service, or had been shipped through the U.S. Postal Service.
“I thought, ‘I’m not plugging that into my computer,’ ” Campbell told the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette. “Something didn’t add up in the way they approached it, so I sent it to my software guy first.”
The technology expert found four Trojans on the hard drive. “These Trojans were designed to steal passwords, install malicious software and give someone else command and control of the infected computer,” Campbell says in a brief supporting his motion for sanctions (PDF).
The security expert said in an affidavit that the Trojans were in a subfolder rather than the root directory, indicating they were “more likely placed in that folder intentionally with the goal of taking command of Mr. Campbell’s computer while also stealing passwords to his account.”
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An Arkansas lawyer representing current and former police officers in a contentious whistle-blower lawsuit is crying foul after finding three distinct pieces of malware on an external hard drive supplied by police department officials.
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Australia has passed data retention laws that force telecommunications companies to retain some types of phone and web metadata. This data can be requested by government agencies and has been used to investigate leaks of government information to journalists.
It now takes a warrant to access a journalist’s metadata to identify a source, but this offers limited protection. Government agencies can still seek data from suspected sources without a warrant. This game shows how a whistleblower can still be identified.
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The German domestic secret service is setting up a new department to improve and extend its internet surveillance capabilities, investing several million Euros. We hereby publish the secret description for the new unit named „Extended Specialist Support Internet“. More than 75 spies are designated to monitor online chats and Facebook, create movement patterns and social network graphs and covertly „collect hidden information.“
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Often forgotten in the new reporting on the DEA dragnet is the story of Shantia Hassanshahi, the Iranian-American accused of sanctions violations who was first IDed using the DEA dragnet. That’s a shame, because his case may present real problems not just for the allegedly defunct DEA dragnet, but for the theory behind dragnets generally.
As I laid out in December, as Hassanshahi tried to understand the provenance of his arrest, the story the Homeland Security affiant gave about the database(s) he used to discover Hassanshahi’s ties to Iran in the case changed materially, so Hassanshahi challenged the use of the database and everything derivative of it. The government, which had not yet explained what the database was, asked Judge Rudolph Contreras to assume the database was not constitutional, but to upheld its use and the derivative evidence anyway, which he did. At the same time, however, Contreras required the government to submit an explanation of what the database was, which was subsequently unsealed in January.
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The examination of French Intelligence Bill ended this Thursday at the National Assembly. After 4 days of debate, very few enhancements were made to a text that was denounced by an incredibly large number of groups for its dangerous, intrusive and liberty-infringing nature and whose control dispositions are totally inadequate. La Quadrature du Net calls on French representatives to listen to the citizens’ demands to reject this text during the final vote on 5 May.
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Last week, Facebook was forced to admit that it tracked the online activity of people who do not even have an account with the social network, which is a pretty egregious violation of most people’s assumptions of online privacy. After all, the people who are not on Facebook in 2015 have most likely made a very explicit decision not to be on Facebook.
The admission came in response to a report commissioned by the Belgian data protection authority, which found Facebook in breach of European data privacy laws, but the social networking giant claimed the tracking only happened because of a bug that is now being fixed, while disputing many of the details of the report.
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A pair of Internet providers who defied TV company demands to switch off their VPN services will be sued in the coming days. CallPlus and Bypass Network Services face legal action from media giants including Sky and TVNZ for allowing their customers to use a VPN to buy geo-restricted content.
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Nearly all of the main parties at this General Election have now published their manifestos. Where do the parties’ manifestos stand on surveillance?
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Secret documents reveal New Zealand’s electronic eavesdropping agency shared intelligence with state security agents in Bangladesh, despite authorities in the South Asian nation being implicated in torture, extrajudicial killings and other human rights abuses.
Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB, has conducted spying operations in Bangladesh over the past decade, according to the documents. The surveillance has been carried out in support of the U.S. government’s global counterterrorism strategy, primarily from a spy post in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, and apparently facilitated by the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.
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Civil Rights
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The Director of Public Prosecutions has decided that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute serial paedophile Greville Janner, for many years the leader of the Zionist lobby in the UK. I presume that his convenient senility is the reason for non-prosecution.
But the facts of Janner’s activities in Leicester care homes have been known for decades, and there was overwhelming evidence in one particular case. The failure of the state to act against Janner when he was a Labour MP and Chairman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, is another example of the disgraceful impunity of the powerful in this country. In a pattern that has become familiar to us, police investigating the case were in 1989 warned off by their superiors.
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CPS says evidence against Labour peer would have warranted trial but the severity of his dementia means he is not fit to take part in any proceedings
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The Jewish institutions in the UK are acting precisely like the Catholic Church of twenty years ago on this issue. Where is the openness? Where is the angst? Where is the admission? Above all, where is the apology?
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Adam Werritty’s friend and long term contact, the British Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, accompanied Greville Janner to visit a kindergarten in Israel in 2012, which was named in Janner’s honour. I wonder if the government of Israel will now change the name?
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Torres isn’t an all-American guy. He’s an FBI informant, one of more than 15,000 domestic spies who make up the largest surveillance network ever created in the United States. During J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO operations, the bureau had just 1,500 informants. The drug war brought that number up to about 6,000. After 9/11, the bureau recruited so many new informants — many of them crooks and convicts, desperate for money or leniency on previous crimes — that the government had to develop software to help agents track their spies.
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Since the “no fly” list was formalized in 2001, the only way to know if the U.S. government would allow you to get on a plane was to show up at the airport and try to board a flight. The government would generally neither confirm nor deny that you were on the list, let alone tell you why.
On April 14, the government announced a new procedure for blacklisted travelers to try to clear themselves. Passengers who are denied boarding can lodge a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security, which will provide confirmation of their “No Fly List status,” and an unclassified summary of the reason why — unless providing that information would go against “national security and law enforcement interests.” The passengers can then appeal their status.
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The Lord President of Scotland’s judges, Lord Gill, has made a complete fool of himself by leading British judges in a walk-out from the Commonwealth Law Conference. The action is in protest against Julian Assange’s participation by video-link in a panel discussion on surveillance and the role of the security services.
The walk-out happened after Julian’s talk, not before it, which rather gives the impression that what Lord Gill and his fellow judges objected to was the content of Assange’s talk, rather than the fact of it. Assange stated among other points that nationalists were right to believe that MI5 were active against them in the referendum campaign.
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Got a hot tip about federal waste, fraud or corruption? You should think twice about using the government’s own online systems for collecting such complaints.
Many of them promise confidentiality but for years have sent sensitive data – including names, addresses and phone numbers of whistleblowers, as well as the details of their allegations – across the Internet in a way that could be intercepted by hackers or snoops. Or, perhaps worse still, by the agencies named in the complaints.
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This week, the ACLU submitted a letter to the U.S. Chief Information Officer at the White House alerting him to serious cybersecurity lapses by numerous federal agencies. We identified dozens of inspectors general, including those at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, who do not use encryption to protect online whistleblower complaints of waste, fraud, and abuse. The State Department’s “Rewards for Justice” online terrorism tip line also does not use encryption.
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The Justice Department eventually determined that the FBI had retaliated against Kobus for reporting misconduct.
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Former Pirate Bay operator Fredrik Neij can’t play games on his Nintendo 8-bit console in prison. The prison denied the request because there’s no way to open the box to check it for concealed items, a decision the Pirate Bay operator is now appealing before the administrative court.
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Local Tulsa station KTUL reports that police responded to reports of an altercation at the Evergreen Apartments complex at 1 a.m. on Friday morning. Police learned that two roommates who lived in one of the apartments had been drinking and arguing over which popular smartphone platform was superior. Eventually they smashed their beer bottles and began stabbing one another with them. One roommate also smashed a beer bottle across the back of the other man’s head.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Why are we still talking about Net neutrality — didn’t that fight end in a victory dance for advocates?
Perhaps in a parallel universe ISPs graciously conceded defeat and an open Internet was secured for the ages, but in this reality, it’s not over until telecom companies have unleashed a full fury of lawyers. Gear up for another summer sequel, Net Neutrality Wars: The Lawyers Strike Back.
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The advent of smartphones and the mobile Internet has lead to a collision of both these worlds. In a world where bandwidth is abundant and cheap, the concept of metering based on distance will fade away. This is the reason that telcos are mortally scared of services like Skype, Whatsapp and others that take away their voice and SMS revenues. The death of distance is a consumer friendly evolution that the telcos will keep resisting till their last breath.
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DRM
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Netflix says that the company is pushing down piracy in countries where illegal sharing is prevalent. Part of its strategy is to determine the price of its service based on local piracy rates, so it can better compete in places where piracy is rampant.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights/Sony
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In the new Wikileaks archives of leaked Sony documents (Link here), there is a memo (https://wikileaks.org/sony/docs/05/docs/DECE/DECE%20CP1%20-%20ss.doc.pdf), which describes Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) concern over the proposed WIPO treaty for copyright exceptions for persons who are blind or have other disabilities.
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Today, 16 April 2015, WikiLeaks publishes an analysis and search system for The Sony Archives: 30,287 documents from Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) and 173,132 emails, to and from more than 2,200 SPE email addresses. SPE is a US subsidiary of the Japanese multinational technology and media corporation Sony, handling their film and TV production and distribution operations. It is a multi-billion dollar US business running many popular networks, TV shows and film franchises such as Spider-Man, Men in Black and Resident Evil.
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Today, WikiLeaks published a new searchable archive containing the leaked email inboxes of top Sony executives. Disturbingly, it shows that months after the hack, we’ve still only just begun investigating the close ties between Sony and the US government.
“This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation,” WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange said in a statement. “It is newsworthy and at the centre of a geopolitical conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there.”
A search through the WikiLeaks Sony archive for “state.gov” email addresses—WikiLeaks reports that there are nearly 100 government email addresses in the archive—reveals an exceedingly cozy relationship between Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton and US government officials including the State Department, various international ambassadors, and the president.
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Top Hollywood executives including James Murdoch have been recruited to help the United States counter Islamic extremist propaganda, according to hacked Sony Pictures emails published by WikiLeaks.
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The searchable archive shows employees at the studio discussing new releases and arranging meetings with top politicians
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Just when Sony Pictures thought it was done with the devastating hacking attack that brought the studio to its knees last winter, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks published thousands of internal documents and correspondence — totally blindsiding the studio and its public relations team early Thursday.
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WikiLeaks has republished the Sony data from last year’s hacking scandal, making all the documents and emails “fully searchable” with a Google-style search engine.
The move provides much easier access to the stolen information. Searching the name of, for example, former Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal, whose controversial comments were revealed by the hack, immediately yields nearly 5,700 results.
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WikiLeaks published more than 200,000 internal Sony Pictures Entertainment documents and e-mails, opening a new chapter in the hacking saga that enveloped Sony Corp.’s Hollywood studio late last year.
The release includes 30,287 documents and 173,132 e-mails, sent from or received by more than 2,200 Sony Pictures e-mail addresses, according to a WikiLeaks statement Thursday. The material is searchable, giving legions of journalists and Sony competitors access to the information that was quickly taken down after it was first posted by hackers tied to North Korea.
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Whistleblower site WikiLeaks on Thursday put hundreds of thousands of emails and documents from last year’s crippling cyberattack against Sony Pictures Entertainment into a searchable online archive. It’s the latest blow for the entertainment and technology company struggling to get past the attack, which the company estimates caused millions in damage.
The website founded by Julian Assange said that its database includes more than 170,000 emails from Sony Pictures and a subsidiary, plus more than 30,000 other documents.
Sony Pictures blasted WikiLeaks for creating the archive, saying the website was helping the hackers disseminate stolen information.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 7:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Fooled by Microsoft into treating Free/libre software as ‘abuse’
Summary: Microsoft’s vicious war on Linux (and Android in its current incarnation) takes more sophisticated — albeit illegal (as per the RICO Act) — forms
Using all sorts of proxies, such as TurboHercules a few years ago in Europe, Microsoft loves to attack the competition at a regulatory level. It even bribes some journalists (or lobbyists in disguise) to produce complementary dirt with with to bamboozle politicians and regulators. This is not new; this is not surprising. This is same old Microsoft. It’s an extension of AstroTurfing, which culminates in legal actions.
To quote this article from a few years back [hat tip Will Hill]:
Thomas Vinje, the founder of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), … “They have learned how to play the game in Europe,” Vinje said of Microsoft, which itself has been the target of antitrust regulators there. Microsoft has invested huge amounts in attacking its rivals, including Oracle and Google as well as IBM, in Brussels in recent years, he said.
A lot of readers must have heard by now about antitrust fire aimed at Google, or more specifically at Android. Google is the wrong target of course; as pointed out in some responses, there are perhaps 1,000 types of Android devices and over “18,000 Android Phone Models in the Wild,” according to Google (not exact quote). There’s no monopoly here and the code is Free software, so it’s not the same as Windows (where only one company controls the source code and controls the end product). As Google can defend itself just fine and we are not some kind of lawyers (having to speak to other non-technical lawyers), we are going to spare the counter arguments for now and instead focus on Microsoft's role in such action (Microsoft loves to hide behind proxies when it attacks Android).
“Using all sorts of proxies, such as TurboHercules a few years ago in Europe, Microsoft loves to attack the competition at a regulatory level.”A few days ago we wrote about a couple of lawyers staging action against Android apps in a lawsuit which they portrayed as a public action. Their goal, based on the article, was to push Microsoft apps into Android. They dropped their action only after Microsoft had managed to use patent extortion against Samsung to put Microsoft spyware inside Galaxy devices (the most widely used Android devices) and based on this new report, “Microsoft royalties dispute was settled in February and was swiftly followed by the bundling of Microsoft apps” (i.e. extortion by Microsoft leading to a ‘compromise’). The Microsoft-friendly The Verge does not tell the whole story. Microsoft is still a deeply criminal company that attacks Android/Linux and Free software using patents; by using threats of litigation it violates the law. This is clearly a crime based on readings of the RICO Act.
“And the EU concentrates anti-trust action on Google,” bemoans Will Hill. This could certainly be used as a timely decoy while Microsoft ‘rescues’ us from ‘evil’ Google. Do not forget how Microsoft actively attacks GNU/Linux, as we noted in the following series a month ago:
More extortion from Microsoft, much as we expected, is now going beyond Samsung, confirming what happened with Samsung in February and proving us right all along. Quoting the British press (yesterday): “A new report claims Microsoft hasn’t been offering Android device vendors any money to bundle its mobile apps on their phones and slabs; rather, it has offered to reduce the tolls it collects from the mobe-makers.
“Citing sources among supply chain players in China and Taiwan, DigiTimes Research says Redmond has offered to cut its patent licensing fees if Android vendors agree to ship their kit with Microsoft apps preinstalled, including OneDrive, OneNote, Skype, and in some cases Office.”
Here is the original report. It says: “According to Digitimes Research’s latest findings from Taiwan’s and China’s smartphone/tablet upstream supply chain, in exchange for hardware players to pre-install its software applications such as Office, OneDrive or Skype onto their Android-based devices, Microsoft is offering them discounts on the patent licensing fees it charges their Android devices.”
In less surprising news, which again proves us right all along, Microsoft and Cyanogen officially join forces. “After many rumors claimed that Microsoft would either buy or invest in Cyanogen,” says BGR, “the two companies on Thursday confirmed that they’ve formed a strategic partnership.” (Cyanogen is confirmed as a Microsoft Trojan horse also elsewhere, so it’s not merely a rumour)
So Cyanogen is now a Microsoft proxy. See our previous analysis of it. We got it 100% right, even months in advance. Microsoft is now advancing to yet more victims.
Rupert Murdoch gave money to Cyanogen and his Android-hostile newspaper is now attacking Android using the European probe, invoked to a large degree by Microsoft’s proxies network, which had lobbied Europe to launch antitrust action against Android for several years now.
To summarise what we have here, first there is blackmail from Microsoft, which says it “loves” (to extort) Linux. Microsoft is apparently so ‘nice’ towards Linux that it now seeks to preinstall Microsoft spyware or will sue those who resist, using software patents which it refuses to even name. “And now install our apps on CM and we will extort you less with software patents,” said Jesse Bufton. At the same time we have Free software facing antitrust charges due to a lot of Microsoft lobbying, as Glyn Moodt noted. “Part of a long predicted attempt to make free software illegal,” wrote Will Hill, “Calling free software cooperation, “dumping”.”
Here are some more articles about it [1, 2, 3]. Someone (maybe FSFE representatives) should explain the European regulators what Free software is and how it works. Currently, Microsoft lobbyists and proxies deceive them into the ludicrous idea of Free software ‘monopoly’.
Android is eating Microsoft’s lunch and getting Microsoft’s money (even in money processing machines), so no wonder Microsoft lobbies/begs so hard for the European authorities to harass Android, or by extension Google. Anybody who still thinks that Microsoft has become kinder is clearly not paying attention. Lawsuits by proxy, regulators misled, patent lawsuits etc. are no kindness.
The Mafia says, “do as we say and our “protection money” demands will vanish/decrease” and in very much the same way Microsoft now deals with Android backers. These are the tricks of a cartel, which under RICO Act rules should be considered a crime. If Google’s motto was “do no evil”, then Microsoft’s motto should be “always be evil”.
Will Hill remarks on the idea that Microsoft will treat more gently companies that put Microsoft spyware inside Android “They simply won’t ruin them today,” he stresses, “with lawsuits and breakage in Windows and other Microsoft properties.”
As long as Microsoft is connected to (and serves) evil monopolistic/imperialistic apparatuses like the NSA don’t expect it to be subjected to laws such as the RICO Act. Microsoft is now just subjected to the law of rule (by surveillance, espionage, back doors etc.), not the rule of law. Microsoft is a political company and like the country it is strongly connected to (staff overlap), it uses blackmail to get its way and always enjoys impunity. Google does not deal with an ordinary company when it competes with Microsoft; antitrust complaints not over privacy but over Free software, and a few other things by extension. This has become a political battle because Microsoft cannot win technical battles. █
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