04.07.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Wifislax is a Slackware-based LiveCD designed for wireless hacking and forensics. Though it is designed for use as a LiveCD, it is possible to install it to a hard disk drive (HDD) and run it just like a standard desktop distribution.
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04.06.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Mentor and AMD
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With a just-announced agreement between AMD and Mentor Graphics, embedded linux developers will have free access to Mentor Embedded Linux Lite with AMD’s upcoming Steppe Eagle and Bald Eagle platforms. Embedded developers will also have access to Mentor Embedded Linux and Sourcery CodeBench Lite as a GNU-based C/C++ development/debugging tool-chain.
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As a Yocto Project™ compatible product, Mentor® Embedded Linux will now bring standardized features and tools, and ensure quick access to the latest Board Support Packages (BSPs) for AMD 64-bit x86 architecture beginning with the upcoming AMD Embedded G-Series system-on-a-chip (SoC) (codenamed: “Steppe Eagle”) and AMD Embedded R-Series APU/CPU (codenamed: “Bald Eagle”). Embedded systems developers will have comprehensive access to the Mentor Embedded Linux development platform for customized embedded Linux development and commercial support, as well as a no-cost Mentor Embedded Linux Lite derivative providing all the essentials to evaluate Linux on AMD embedded processors.
Cars
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Although big names like Google and Apple are now starting to move into the space, they have just as much of a learning curve as the other players in the market, meaning there is an opportunity for any company of any size to become a leader. With such fierce competition among organizations to dominate this field, I expect we will see some revolutionary new approaches and technologies. Already we are seeing open source technologies like Linux, Tizen, and Android being leveraged for new automotive products.
Chromecast
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Google’s Chromecast remains their hottest selling device. At $35 a piece and an ever increasing list of supported apps, the little dongle has put many set-top boxes and sources of digital media out of business. While many have expressed their love for the device, designer Sam Dirani of Raleigh, NC, feels like there could be a more modern look to the revolutionary device, and he has now revealed his take on it.
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People in UK have good news coming their way. So far, those who wanted to lay their hands on Chromecast had to import one from the United States. But it won’t be necessary anymore. It has been reported in Android Police website that starting Wednesday, interested buyers can source it from a retailer.
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Roku announced a new streaming media stick that’s compatible with standard HDMI ports, in hopes of slowing the growing momentum of Google’s Chromecast.
Amazon
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Rumors have been swirling for a while now that Amazon might release a device similar to the Apple TV. But TechCrunch reports that Amazon’s set top box might actually be similar to Google’s Chromecast device. Is Amazon about to copy Google?
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This week Amazon unveiled the Fire TV as a small network appliance primarily for HD video streaming and complemented by some gaming and mobile app capabilities. The Fire TV is powered by Amazon’s Android-based Kindle Fire OS so in this weekend review are my initial impressions of this Linux-based media system after using it the past two days.
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Fire TV is a tiny box that plugs into your HDTV. It’s the easiest way to enjoy Netflix, Prime Instant Video, Hulu Plus, WatchESPN, low-cost video rentals, and more. With instant access to over 200,000 TV episodes and movies, plus all your favorite subscriptions and streaming services, you can watch what you want, when you want. If you’re a Prime member, you get unlimited access to thousands of popular movies and TV shows, including exclusives like Downton Abbey, The Americans, Alpha House, and Under the Dome.
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Amazon unveiled Amazon Fire TV, a $99 multimedia and gaming oriented TV companion box running Android 4.2 on a 1.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC.
Internet of Things (Surveillance Inside Homes)
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There are several definitions of open source. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) website contains a very useful and detailed definition, which goes beyond access to the source code and includes ten specific criteria concerning the distribution terms of open-source software. We will not enter here into the ongoing debate concerning the differences between open source and free software, as the OSI website provides a short review of the terms.
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Linux Foundation believes it has the code for unlocking Internet of Things and bringing success
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THE NUMBER of connected devices will rise to 26 billion by 2020, according to one analyst, with the market around the Internet of Things (IoT) worth a hefty $300bn.
Research house Gartner revealed its IoT predictions on Tuesday, advising that the growth would have a knock-on effect on data centres, as firms are tasked with collecting and managing the additional data created by these billions of devices and sensors.
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Marvell has reached its Indiegogo goal for “Kinoma Create,” a Linux- and JavaScript-based hardware/software platform for quick and easy development of IoT gizmos.
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If you want to be up to date on what’s going down in embedded Linux, there’s no place like ELC, as in the Embedded Linux Conference. The Linux Foundation has just posted the 90-session presentation line-up for the U.S. show, scheduled for April 29 through May 1 at the San Jose Marriott. The European version (ELCE) ran last Oct. 21-25 in Edinburgh, Scotland.
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Echelon introduced its IzoT Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) framework for peer-to-peer networking of embedded controllers last October. At that time, the building automation and smart grid networking vendor released the IzoT multi-protocol stack in an ARM-ready beta version and reference implementation optimized for the Linux-based Raspberry Pi SBC. Since then, support has extended to the BeagleBone Black.
Raspberry Pi
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Meet Ellie, a six week old robot weighing 100 lbs who can launch a two foot diameter exercise ball over 10 feet in the air! Ellie even has eyes: a webcam fitted to the front of her chassis that uses code written in Python running on a Raspberry Pi to process images. Ellie’s main code is written in Java and allows her mecanum wheels to drive, her claw to catch exercise balls, and her kicker to launch balls into the air. In just a few weeks Ellie will be competing along with more than 50 other robots in her first competition.
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Rather than partner with a computing company and badge up another machine, Furber believes the BBC would do better helping teachers to learn to program and provide education tools for students to use. He also believes that Linux would be the answer. He feels using Linux would help get children away from the accepted familiarity of a Windows or OS X environment and would help make them question, probe and investigate a lot more.
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The Raspberry Pi has been out for just over two years now, and has been one of the biggest tech success stories in recent times. With millions of Raspberry Pi’s in the wild and countless more millions raised for various charities and open source projects, the foundation has been able to do more than originally expected.
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We reveal some of the people and things you’ll be able to see at the Linux User Raspberry Jam on 5 April in Poole, Dorset
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Having recently co-authored a book about building things with the Raspberry Pi (Raspberry Pi Hacks), I’ve spent a lot of the last couple of years talking about this credit-card-sized Linux computer and seeing fun things people have used it for.
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As I was reconnecting the Raspberry Pi to our TV set yesterday evening (it bounces back and forth between connection on my desk and to the TV), I realised that I haven’t had this much plain old fun with computing in a very long time.
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Raspberry Pi celebrated its second birthday last week. Since its debut on February 29, 2012, Raspberry Pi has ushered in a whole new generation of tiny, inexpensive, single-board computers. Numerous Raspberry Pi based DIY project ideas are popping up over the web, and there are many use cases of Raspberry Pi as low-cost learning media in the developing world. Celebrating its second birthday, I am going to share in this post several interesting facts about Raspberry Pi.
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Probably, the best use you could do with a Raspberry Pi would be turning it in a full-fledged media center. With some tuning, a Raspberry Pi can become indeed a device that audiophiles will love, or a tiny board that can empower you television to become a 2014-like smart TV. All you need is some Unix tools (or Win32DiskImager for Windows OSes) to flash your SD Card, and the need to connect your nerdiness to multimedia-related things. This is why in the last week I kept going around the web, spotting the best projects for a Raspberry Pi, to turn it in my personal media center of choice.
Arduino
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There’s no shortage of tiny, low-power single-board computers that can run Android, Ubuntu, or other operating systems. What helps set the pcDuino line apart is that these little developer boards also support the Arduino ecosystem which means you can add Arduino shields to extend the capabilities of the little device and use Arduino programming tools.
RTOS
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Wind River has bagged a 2014 Network Intelligence Award for its Wind River Intelligent Network Platform. The awards from the Network Intelligence Alliance (NI Alliance) recognize telecom operators and suppliers that have used network intelligence technology to develop and deploy innovative services and products.
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3M has released Android 4.x and Linux 3.x kernel patches for its multitouch displays, supporting screens up to 46 inches.
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Enea(R) (NASDAQ OMX Nordic:ENEA) signs a software license agreement with a global Telecommunications Equipment Manufacturer to deliver the operating systems Enea Linux and Enea OSE together with an OSE Compatibility Platform for running OSE applications in Linux. The total value of the agreement is estimated to 3 million USD over a period of four years. The deal covers software for both ARM and PowerPC processor architectures.
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Today Linux dominates the control plane and simple executives are increasingly called on to perform packet processing functionally in the data plane of network equipment. Specialized multicore network processors are displacing other hardware technologies and their vendors often have their own software enablement strategies. Competition for the software layer in telecom has never been more heated.
TI
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TI released Sitara Linux SDK 7.0, now based on the mainline Linux kernel. The SDK supports the Sitara AM355x, and coming soon, the new Sitara AM4x and AM5x.
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AIS has launched a 7-inch, WSVGA multitouch panel PC that runs Android or Linux on TI’s Sitara AM3354 SoC, and offers a camera and PoE support.
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Android Support
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Like Huawei, ZTE is a major Chinese telecom equipment provider that has more recently moved aggressively into mobile devices. They primarily serve up Android phones and tablets, but ZTE has also been the major hardware vendor behind Firefox OS, along with China’s TCL/Alcatel, recently announcing the Firefox OS based ZTE Open C and Open II. Now it’s expanding its Android portfolio with two very different TV set-top boxes (STBs): the FunBox and the MeBox.
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A Cubestormer 3 robot based on a Galaxy S4 Android phone and eight Linux-driven Lego Mindstorms EV3 bricks aims to beat the Rubik’s Cube solving record.
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Haoyu Electronics announced a sandwich-style $60 “MarsBoard RK3066″ SBC equipped with Rockchip’s 1.6GHz dual-core RK3066 SoC, and running Linux and Android
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NanoPC launched a $69 mini-PC and $67 SBC based on a quad-core Samsung Exynos4412 SoC, with SD, HDMI, USB, camera, and Ethernet, and running Linux and Android.
Silica
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Silica has introduced a development board in its ArchiTech range, which has been optimised for Linux based designs incorporating the Renesas RZ/A1H microcontroller.
It has been optimised to have a small memory footprint together with a BSP (Board Support Package) for the on-board peripherals, minimising development time.
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SILICA, an Avnet company, has launched a new ArchiTech development board that offers a low-cost streamlined platform for Linux-based designs. The ArchiTech Hachiko board is supplied with a Linux kernel optimised for the Renesas RZ/A1H MCU, to work with a small memory footprint together with a BSP (Board Support Package) for the on-board peripherals, minimizing development time.
Development
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Jason Kridner is the co-founder of BeagleBoard.org, where he has helped create open source development tools such as BeagleBone Black, BeagleBone, BeagleBoard, and BeagleBoard-xM. Kridner is also a software architecture manager for embedded processors at Texas Instruments (TI).
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The Yocto Project’s open source toolset helps developers build a custom embedded Linux distribution on any hardware architecture by automating the low-level details of the build process. Thus, developers who use Yocto become super heroes, vanquishing Frankenstein and restoring their projects.
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Digia announced Qt Enterprise Embedded in October as a commercial distribution for enterprises. Like the Qt 5.2 cross-platform framework it’s based on, Qt Enterprise Embedded supports Android, as well as Linux. The platform combines Qt’s drag-and-drop GUI builder with an IDE based on Qt Creator and Ubuntu, as well as a Boot to Qt embedded stack for Android and Linux targets.
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Avnet announced a COM based on Xilinx Zynq-7000 ARM/FPGA SoCs, and supported by an optional baseboard, power module, FPGA mezzanine card, and Linux BSP.
Misc.
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Some financial firms are looking into Linux, a free, open source operating system. Currently, 30% of all electronic POS systems at U.S. gasoline stations and convenience stores use Linux.
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Building systems that combined a front-end user interface with real-time processing has often led to awkward and complex trade-offs in performance, architecture and costs.
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Nvidia unveiled a $192 Linux-based “Jetson TK1″ SBC based on the 2.3GHz quad-core Cortex-A15 Tegra K1 SoC, and demoed its use in a self-driving Audi.
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Keepod has developed a Linux-based operating system that can act as a portable hard drive by plugging it into the USB port of any recent PC (going back about 8 years, said Pfeffer). “For the first time, we are separating the ‘brains’ of the computer from the hardware, allowing users to take their ‘computers’ with them on a small, cheap device that will enable them to keep their data safe, secure, and accessible,” he said.
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Debugging embedded software can be a challenging, time-consuming and unpredictable factor in the development of embedded systems. Detecting errant program execution begs the question “How did the software reach this state?”
What combination of inputs and timing resulted in the error, and why? Tracing can often provide the answer.
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The free embedded Linux Buildroot project released a quarterly update, featuring enhanced internal and external toolchains, 67 new packages, and bug fixes.
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Arduino
Novena
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We’re launching a crowdfunding campaign around our Novena open hardware computing platform. Originally, this started as a hobby project to build a computer just for me and xobs – something that we would use every day, easy to extend and to mod, our very own Swiss Army knife. I’ve posted here a couple of times about our experience building it, and it got a lot of interest. So by popular demand, we’ve prepared a crowdfunding offering and you can finally be a backer.
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Speaking at the Embedded Systems Conference today, Andrew “Bunnie” Huang introduced a project dubbed Novena. He said that the hardware and software specs for the machine will be made available for anyone to use.
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Earlier this year, the two Singapore-based engineers fashioned a laptop made almost entirely from open source hardware, hardware whose designs are freely available to the world at large. They called it Project Novena. Anyone could review the designs, looking for bugs and security flaws, and at least in theory, that meant you could be confident the machine was secure from top to bottom, something that’s more desirable than ever in the post-Edward Snowden age.
Minnowboard Max
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Intel has beefed up its open source single-board computer and cut its price in half.
The Minnowboard Max features an open hardware design and is targeted at software application development pros and enthusiasts who want to code for the “deeply embedded” market.
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Not to be outflanked by rivals, Intel has released the $99 Minnowboard Max, a tiny single-board computer that runs Linux and Android. It is completely open source – you can check out the firmware and software here – and runs a 1.91GHz Atom E3845 processor.
The board’s schematics are also available for download and the Intel graphics chipset has open-source drivers so hackers can have their way with the board. While it doesn’t compete directly with the Raspberry Pi – the Pi is more an educational tool and already has a robust ecosystem – it is a way for DIYers to mess around in x86 architected systems as well as save a bit of cash. The system uses break-out boards called Lures to expand functionality.
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Looting
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No, there won’t be a global campaign against global inequality. The wealthy have written the rules to guarantee it
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Environment
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The gonads of thick-lipped grey mullets are becoming increasingly feminised in the estuaries of Spain’s Basque Country, according to research carried out by members of the Cell Biology in Environmental Toxicology group from the University of the Basque Country. The cause of this feminisation is thought to be due to certain pollutants, which are increasing oestrogen levels in the fish.
UK
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Homes in south London had to be evacuated last night as a river of brown, murky water swept through the area. Initial reports suggested a sewage pipe had sprung a leak.
Religion
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Yes, even the radical televangelist thinks young-earth creationist Ken Ham is ridiculous VIDEO
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Significantly fewer Republicans believe in evolution than did so four years ago, setting them apart from Democrats and independents, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. But behind this finding is a puzzle: If the views of the overall public have remained steady, and there has been little change among people of other political affiliations, how does one account for the Republican numbers? Shouldn’t the marked drop in Republican believers cause a decline in the 60% of all adults who say humans have evolved over time?
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Apparently the assailant isn’t the only person who thinks hitting people over a “Happy Holidays” greeting is ok. According to the news report, some Walmart shoppers interviewed after the event said “It’s understandable how people can get offended.”
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Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pontiff, elected nine months ago, was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2013, leaving whistleblower Edward Snowden in second place, the magazine revealed on Wednesday.
Science
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It’s alarming that few girls or students of color are taking computer science classes.
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Here’s the thing, though: Americans actually fared better than Europeans who took similar quizzes — at least when it came to the sun and Earth question. Only 66 percent of European Union residents answered that one correctly.
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LOOK up at the sky tonight and count how many stars you can see. Ten? A couple of dozen? Then you’re in good company. Several hundred thousand stars should be visible on a clear, moonless night. Yet 75 per cent of the world’s population has never seen the majesty and wonder of the star-strewn Milky Way – and they never will.
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Other Curious News
From beginning of of this year
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Tomorrow, the House of Lords will debate Labour’s proposed amendment to the children and families bill, a piece of legislation that would result in compulsory sex and relationships education being taught in all English schools. It is, I believe, a matter of some urgency, not only because Labour says that violence in teenage relationships is increasing, but also because of the many ways in which online porn’s dominance is affecting sexual relationships and behaviour in the real world. You might say that this is not the case, of course. The links have not yet been convincingly drawn, and until they are, it’s my word against yours. So here they are: my words.
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120-year old city without government functions just fine
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Shortly after Occupied America was published in1972, I attended a historians’ conference. In a session I was asked why I wrote with so much emotion. I replied that I was not a prostitute; I did not make love without emotion. How can a person write about lynching and injustices and not get emotional? For me it was like a personal relationship, which should mean something.
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The vast majority of feature-length silent films made in America have been lost due to decay and neglect over the past 100 years, allowing an original 20th century art form to all but disappear, according to a study released Wednesday.
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A few events this week showed how EU support is helping innovation help the lives of millions.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Advocacy
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The APC Chris Nicol FLOSS Prize recognises initiatives that are making it easy for people to start using free/libre and open source software (FLOSS). The prize will be awarded to a person or group doing extraordinary work to make FLOSS accessible to ordinary computer users.
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Imagine a world with fewer queues in banking and retail, and more self-service options. Imagine no longer relying on one cubical or terminal for service. Sounds unreal? This world is now a possibility in South Africa thanks to the partnership between LSD and Cashware.
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Essentially, an open-source software or OSS is a kind of computer software which has its source code made available and licensed by virtue of such a license agreement which authorizes the copyright holder to study, modify and distribute the software to anyone, without any further charges and for any purpose whatsoever.
Open-sourcing
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As part of the ROS team the engineers at Willow Garage wanted a low price point entry available for new programmers. The TurtleBot’s SDK contains a collection of programs that range from basic to advanced. Instructions show how to set up the bot, operate with a keyboard, operate with a joystick, and fully utilize the Kinect camera data. There’s also a cleverly titled section about maintenance called TurtleBot Care and Feeding.
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Cisco may be a multi-billion entity that was built around a proprietary operating system, but if recent moves are any indication, a wave of open interoperability has been steadily reshaping how Cisco is bringing next-generation IT infrastructure to market.
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A few months ago we wrote about Linksys Reviving The WRT54G Router In 802.11AC Form. Belkin, which owns Linksys, has begun releasing code for this new router — the WRT1900AC — but with this early code is still some glaring problems.
Misc.
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XBMC, an open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media that is available for multiple platforms, has just reached version 13.0 Beta 3 and is now available for testing.
Events
Apache and Nginx
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Two of the world’s most widely deployed web servers have both recently been updated to fix security vulnerabilities.
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With so many Apache Hadoop distributions on the market, what sets them apart? MapR is hoping that bringing feature-rich open source searching to its Big Data platform via integration with Elasticsearch will help draw users by making Big Data analytics and business intelligence faster and more comprehensive.
Mozilla
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Mozilla and the Rust community are pleased to announce version 0.10 of the Rust compiler and tools. Rust is a systems programming language with a focus on safety, performance and concurrency.
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If you’ve ever done any web development work, you are probably intimately familiar with the fact that what you build on the web may show up fine in one browser, yet be completely broken in another. It used to be that this problem simply meant testing sites and pages across popular desktop browsers, but in the age of mobile technology, you now have to test your creations across mobile devices, too.
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While Mozilla has mostly been in the headlines this week for news related to contributions made by its new CEO Brendan Eich, another piece of meaningful news regarding the company is largely being ignored: Google Chrome has moved past Firefox to take second place in desktop browser market share, according to web traffic stats from Net Applications. In March, Chrome grabbed 17.5 percent of desktop brower traffic, while Firefox sat in third place with 17.2 percent. This is a first for Chrome, according to Net Applications’ data, and is possibly driven by Google’s extensive advertising for Chrome and Mozilla’s new focus on Firefox OS and mobile technology.
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The latest Mozilla Firefox nightly builds have begun enabling the generational garbage collector to better compete with Google’s Chrome on performance grounds.
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In an exciting collaboration with Mozilla and Google, Intel is bringing SIMD to JavaScript. This makes it possible to develop new classes of compute-intensive applications such as games and media processing—all in JavaScript—without the need to rely on any native plugins or non-portable native code. SIMD.JS can run anywhere JavaScript runs. It will, however, run a lot faster and more power efficiently on the platforms that support SIMD. This includes both the client platforms (browsers and hybrid mobile HTML5 apps) as well as servers that run JavaScript, for example through the Node.js V8 engine.
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Thimble is actually a subset of Mozilla’s Webmaker project, which is aimed at teaching all kinds of web literacy and development skills.
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Many, many people have noticed that if we had a way to reliably record program execution and replay it later, with the ability to debug the replay, we could largely tame the nondeterminism problem. This would also allow us to deliberately introduce nondeterminism so tests can explore more of the possible execution space, without impacting debuggability. Many record and replay systems have been built in pursuit of this vision. (I built one myself.) For various reasons these systems have not seen wide adoption. So, a few years ago we at Mozilla started a project to create a new record-and-replay tool that would overcome the obstacles blocking adoption. We call this tool rr.
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We support the Mozilla community and the vital work they’ve done—and must keep doing—for the open Internet. EFF has been following the discussions around the choice of Brendan Eich as Mozilla’s CEO, including the announcement that he is stepping down.
As partners to Mozilla in campaigns that have included the fight against SOPA/PIPA, the StopWatching.US Coalition against mass surveillance, the effort to Encrypt the Web, the battle to prevent non-consensual online tracking, and ongoing work to make Firefox a more secure browser, we appreciate the frank and honest discussion that the community has undergone over this issue and respect the openness of the process. In that respect, as in many others, the difference between a closed and an open community is profound.
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McAvoy clearly appreciates his ability to speak his mind without fear of retribution. But he also demands the termination of employment of a person that he disagrees with.
That sounds like hypocrisy, and intolerance, to me.
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The worst of what I’m seeing is this – people who have steadfastly supported gay rights (and minority rights in general) but don’t like seeing how Eich is being treated are being called bigots and worse by their colleagues.
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Chrome(ium)
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Google’s Chrome Remote Desktop app beta is released for invite-only. Chrome Remote Desktop allows you to set up your computer for secure remote access. This includes setting up your computer so that you can access it later from another machine; or you can also use the app to let a friend remotely access your computer temporarily, perfect for times when you need help solving a computer problem.
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Last April we introduced Blink as the new rendering engine for Chromium. Since then, the project has grown to include over 200 active contributors, and code complexity has been reduced significantly. We’ve also made encouraging progress on our top priority for 2014: mobile web performance.
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Domestic
Snowden
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Edward Snowden and reporter Glenn Greenwald, who brought to light the whistle-blower’s leaks about mass U.S. government surveillance last year, appeared together via video link from opposite ends of the earth on Saturday for what was believed to be the first time since Mr Snowden sought asylum in Russia.
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Privacy
NSA
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“Identity theft is a growing problem, Tom. The personal information you willingly gave about yourself exists forever in the digital ecosystem. That gives savvy technical people lots of opportunities to steal your identity and destroy your finances.”
“I didn’t realize it was that easy.”
“Identity theft is less worrisome than what government entities could do to you. Look how the IRS has been used to attack political enemies. Now imagine what government entities can do when they know EVERYTHING about you! That’s why I called you today, Tom. I called to help you.”
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The night before President Barack Obama’s Jan. 17 speech, O’Neil, a Justice Department lawyer, and his boss, Deputy Attorney General James Cole, got on the phone with attorneys for five major technology companies. All five were suing the U.S. government for permission to disclose the extent of those same classified government orders, which require them to hand over records of customers’ emails and Internet use.
Germany
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Only a fraction of the NSA’s spying activities has been revealed to the public, claims German journalist Holger Stark in his new book. In an interview, he tells DW more about how the “surveillance matrix” functions.
Europe
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European Union governments are worried about cyberattacks from Palestine and Palestinian supporters, so will increase cybersecurity
UK
Ukraine
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The Germans had been looking for subject nationalities of the Russian Empire, which they could play against the Tsar. The obvious candidates would have been the Poles, and the Germans did later create the Kingdom of Poland as a puppet state in November 1916 on territory they had conquered. But Germany had been ruling harshly and attempting to Prussianize their part of the former Poland for more than a century, and they ran the new Kingdom of Poland in a very oppressive way, so many Poles from Russia were reluctant to have anything to do with Berlin.
Backstabbing
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US allies should wake up and realize that the FIVE EYES GROUP remains the real allies and in the Asian continent to balance issues Australia, India and Japan are used. However given that Australia belongs to the Five Eyes Group, India and Japan must seriously wonder what they are getting out of betraying their own continent just to rub shoulders with the white man?
Deception
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Investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald published an expose this week detailing how the NSA has been feeding “propaganda” to various news publications, which have happily played along. The propaganda isn’t limited just to schlock networks like Fox News, but is promulgated also by widely trusted newspapers, including The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.
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Drones
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Captain America directors say new film about Obama kill listMarvel’s newest film, “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” is meant to be direct slam on President Obama’s private terrorist kill list, according to the film’s directors.
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Egypt, Syria, and Libya
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In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.＊ Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.
Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.
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USAID/Betrayal
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The U.S. government masterminded the creation of a “Cuban Twitter” — a communications network designed to undermine the communist government in Cuba, built with secret shell companies and financed through foreign banks, The Associated Press has learned.
The Obama administration project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba’s stranglehold on the Internet with a primitive social media platform. First, the network would build a Cuban audience, mostly young people; then, the plan was to push them toward dissent.
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The US Agency for International Development established a microblogging platform similar to Twitter for Cubans. It used it to promote critical discussion of the government but also to gather private information of users. Covert operations are supposed to be approved by the White House but it is not clear this one was. The whole thing may have been illegal. Sen. Patrick Leahy said he knew nothing of the project and criticized the use of US AID as the agency to pursue it. He is right. Here’s what’s wrong with this picture:
Censorship
Attack on Journalism
Barrett Brown
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Barrett Brown, the activist-journalist whose prosecution linked to the 2012 Stratfor email hack sparked first-amendment concerns among internet activists, lawyers and publishers, has agreed to a plea deal, according to Wired.
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Over time, the authorities dropped most of the charges, which included identity theft and possession of stolen credit card numbers. The hyperlinking charge was also dismissed, setting aside a high-profile constitutional battle over posting links.
Foreign Affairs
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Such suspicion of NGOs is not a Pakistani phenomenon alone. Globally speaking, NGO-government relations are not only tenuous but also generally straitened. Civil society organizations have quadrupled in number across the developing world over the last 20 years. This in turn has generated a sense of mistrust between the state and NGOs.
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The candidates include US groomed politicians, and drug-dealing warlords from the Tajik and Uzbek north. Chief among them, Rashid Dostam, a major war criminal and principal CIA ally who ordered the massacre of over 2,000 Taliban prisoners.
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The Nationals, on the other hand, are part of the promotion of the worst crimes our society is currently engaged in. A National’s game is packed, inning after inning, with songs and cheers and announcements promoting war. Fans are told that the U.S. Navy is “keeping the world’s oceans safe and free” — and they stand and cheer for that, even as the U.S. Navy and Army and Air Force and Marines and assorted special forces and mercenaries and CIA kill, and kill, and kill, building hostility around the world.
Torture
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Tony Blair knew in detail about the CIA’s secret kidnap and interrogation programme after the September 11 attacks and was kept informed “every step of the way” by MI6, a security source has told The Telegraph.
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04.05.14
Posted in News Roundup at 12:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Drones
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A federal judge was unable to find no remedy in United States law for a claim that United States citizen’s due process rights were violated when they were targeted and killed by a drone. The case was dismissed because the judge determined the citizen had been properly designated a terrorist, posed a threat to US interests, and the judiciary should not interfere in the areas of “warmaking, national security and foreign relations.”
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A US federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed against the government by the families of three American citizens killed by drones in Yemen, saying senior officials cannot be held personally responsible for money damages for the act of conducting war.
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A bipartisan Bill that would force President Obama to reveal casualties from covert US drone strikes has been put before the US Congress.
If successful, the bill would require the White House to publish an annual report of casualties from covert US drone strikes.
The reports would include the total number of combatants killed or injured, the total number of civilians killed or injured, and the total number of people killed or injured by drones who are not counted as combatants or civilians.
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Americans of conscience, of all political persuasions, are concerned over our use of unmanned armed drone aircraft as an instrument of foreign policy. Kalamazoo Nonviolent Opponents of War (KNOW) urges our fellow citizens to seriously consider the issues raised by this remote-controlled death from the skies.
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Statements made by Brandon Bryant, a former drone pilot for the US Air Force, reveal that Germany plays a greater role in the US drone war than previously thought.
“The entire drone war of the US military wouldn’t be possible without Germany,” Bryant told German media. During his time in the US Air Force, Bryant flew more than 1,000 operations from the US.
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The National Organization for Drone Victims has been established by families of drone victims along with human rights activists in Yemen. The group is seeking to end the US drone program in Yemen.
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While President Obama told the country to “look forward, not backward” when it came to Bush’s torture program, the United Nations has taken a different route. Recently, the UN Human Rights Committee issued a report excoriating the United States for its human rights violations. It focuses on violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the country is party. The report mentions 25 human rights issues where the United States is failing. This piece will focus on a few of those issues – Guantanamo, NSA surveillance, accountability for Bush-era human rights violations, drone strikes, racism in the prison system, racial profiling, police violence, and criminalization of the homeless.
Torture
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Thursday’s vote marked the end of a four-year Senate probe of the CIA’s past use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ a euphemism used to sugarcoat a number of brutal torture techniques, including hypothermia, stress positions and waterboarding against detainees following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
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The CIA is a rogue operation run by people who think they’re entitled to do whatever they want. For years they’ve gotten away with it. But if President Obama agrees to release a summary of a declassified report on the agency’s torture program, they won’t be able to cloak their abuses in secrecy any longer.
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The CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” introduced after 9/11, were not just cruel, but rarely led to valuable intelligence, a report by the US Senate is likely to say. A summary is expected to be declassified.
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By law, the president has authority to declassify information, and he surely has the authority to decide the process for declassifying this landmark report.
The CIA should never have had a torture program, never should have lied about what it was doing and never should have been given broad authority to review the Senate oversight report.
Obama cannot now hand the agency a black-out pen to continue to hide the horrors it inflicted around the globe and the harm it caused to our American values. It’s time for someone other than the CIA to decide what all Americans can know about its wrongs.
Fooled twice, yes. Let’s not be fooled again.
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In our post about the Senate Intelligence Committee agreeing to declassify the executive summary and major findings of the $40 million, 6,300 page “devastating” report on how the CIA tortured people for no good reason and then lied about it, we noted that there was still a battle over who would handle the declassification process. Senator Mark Udall directly noted that the White House had a choice
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Unless, of course, you think spies redacting 6,300 pages of their own sins is transparency. Look how much leaks told us this week
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CIA employees are known to work under stressful conditions and high stress is considered part of the job, the website adds. Employees are usually intelligence analysts and support personnel, technical services operators, or members of the clandestine services.
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ITV News has obtained a statement from former Libyan opposition politician Abdel Hakim Belhadj, who claims he was tortured by the CIA and says British authorities were aware of it.
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While Joe Biden publicly called for releasing the Senate report on CIA interrogation, the State Department warned that revealing foreign “black sites” could risk American lives.
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Sen. Ron Wyden declared that Americans would be dismayed by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s classified 6,200-page report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, which he called “torture.” You can read about it here:
Sen. Wyden: Americans will be ‘profoundly disturbed’ by report on CIA’s terrorist interrogations
Cuba, Ukraine and Other Destabilisation at the Borders
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An eye-catching A.P. story, published Thursday, revealed that, in 2010, the United States Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.) covertly deployed a social-media program in Cuba in the hope of bringing about a Cuban Spring. The network, called ZunZuneo, was offered to Cubans via the country’s mobile-phone network as a free text service, and attracted forty thousand subscribers before mysteriously ending operations in 2012. The contractors who ran the program are said to have concealed its U.S.-government origins via an offshore system of front companies and foreign servers, and to have collected data on subscribers’ “political tendencies” and “receptiveness,” among other useful information. The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, declared that ZunZuneo was a “neither covert nor an intelligence program,” preferring instead to call it a “discreet” form of humanitarian assistance to Cubans who lived in a “non-permissive environment.”
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In a recent interview in Havana, a former CIA collaborator, Cuban Raúl Capote, revealed the strategy of the CIA in Venezuelan universities to create the kind of destabilizing opposition student movement the country is currently facing. He also discusses media manipulation, and alleges that one of the U.S. diplomats that President Maduro expelled from Venezuela last September was in fact a CIA agent.
Award
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The Guardian was awarded Thursday with the 2013 IRE medal for investigative reporting for its work to expose secret government surveillance programs.
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The Investigative Reporters & Editors medal for 2014 goes to Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill and others for the Guardian’s reports on the NSA, which “revealed a story that continues to reverberate in the United States and across the globe,” the judges say. (Greenwald and Poitras now work for Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media.)
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The Guardian has won the IRE Medal for investigative reporting in the 2013 IRE awards.
Snowden
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The German parliament has just started examining the NSA affair with the help of an investigation committee. But the panel members have not been able to agree on the role Edward Snowden should play in the process.
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Parliamentary hearings into the scandal involving NSA spying on Germany have started. Some members of the investigative committee have suggested bringing in the document leaker Edward Snowden himself to testify. Some expect this to anger Washington.
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NSA
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Americans trust the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the National Security Agency with their personal data more than than they do Facebook and Google, reveals a shocking poll findings released Thursday morning.
The question asked by the Reason-Rupe public opinion poll was “Which of the following (IRS, NSA, Facebook and Google) do you TRUST THE MOST with your personal information?”
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When Edward Snowden made a name for himself last June by leaking classified NSA information, he did so by working with The Guardian and a documentary filmmaker. As such, the public learned of much of the NSA’s surveillance measures through the medium of a single media outlet. In the ensuing months, much more has come to light, and today the American Civil Liberties Union is unveiling “NSA Documents Database,” a searchable, categorized database of just over 200 previously classified NSA documents.
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Note the reference to 1947. It’s part of the public record that President Truman, who created the CIA when he signed the National Security Act of 1947, publicly regretted that the CIA had become a nexus of covert operations.
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A recent Harris poll asked over 2000 US adults aged 18 years and older whether they had actively changed their attitude towards online security as a consequence of the controversy surrounding the NSA’s actions. 47% of respondents said that they had changed their behaviour and now considered with much more care what they did and said online.
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Meet Shenna Bellows, Maine’s former ACLU chief who’s looking to unseat Susan Collins with a mix of left and right issues that might appeal to millennials.
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The allegation that NSA weakened the dual elliptic curve random number generator has been floating around for some time, and it has already had some policy impact. The President’s Review Group was reacting to the story when it declared that the US Government should “fully support and not undermine efforts to create encryption standards [and] not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable generally available commercial software.”
A careful reading of the actual study, though, suggests that there’s been more than a little hype in the claim that NSA has somehow made us all less safe by breaking internet security standards. I recognize that this is a technical paper, and that I’m not a cryptographer. So I welcome technical commentary and corrections.
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With Box heading toward an IPO, the normally gregarious CEO can’t say much about anything. But when it comes to the topic of government surveillance and what that might mean for the future of the Internet, he offers a few tidbits.
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As the internet and mobile companies constantly strive for spy-proof, secure technology for customers who use smart phones, laptops or tablets, a team of scientists have shown how a novel quantum cryptography technology can help them achieve an ‘NSA proof’ world.
Europe
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The European “right to be forgotten” could help protect U.S. citizens against blanket data surveillance.
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US officials on Friday slammed plans to construct an EU-centric communication system, designed to prevent emails and phone calls from being swept up by the NSA, warning that such a move is a violation of trade laws.
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The United States on Friday criticized proposals to build a European communication network to avoid emails and other data passing through the United States, warning that such rules could breach international trade laws.
‘Reform’ on Privacy
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Representatives Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, introduced HR 4291, the FISA Transparency and Modernization Act (.pdf), to end the collection of all Americans’ calling records using Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Both have vehemently defended the program since June, and it’s reassuring to see two of the strongest proponents of NSA’s actions agreeing with privacy advocates’ (and the larger public’s) demands to end the program. The bill only needs 17 lines to stop the calling records program, but it weighs in at more than 40 pages. Why? Because the “reform” bill tries to create an entirely new government “authority” to collect other electronic data.
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Last week the Obama administration set forth a proposal to reform one part of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program: the indiscriminate collection of American phone records. Under the president’s proposal, the government would no longer collect call data in bulk but would be allowed to ask for it from phone companies with court approval, and only for numbers linked to terrorism.
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Dream on. The significant thing about Obama’s announcement is the two things it left out: surveillance of the Internet (as distinct from the telephonic activity of American citizens); and of the rest of the world — that’s you and me. So even if Obama succeeds in getting his little policy swerve through Congress, the central capabilities of the national surveillance state will remain in place.
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An effort from the White House to revamp the rules that govern how the National Security Agency goes about getting telephone data may actually force service providers to start logging more records that they do now, a new report suggests.
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President Barack Obama’s plan for overhauling the National Security Agency’s phone surveillance program could force carriers to collect and store customer data that they are not now legally obliged to keep, according to U.S. officials.
One complication arises from the popularity of flat-rate or unlimited calling plans, which are used by the vast majority of Americans.
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Linux 3.15
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A Radeon pull request for drm-next changes was sent in this morning for ultimately landing with the Linux 3.15 kernel.
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Intel Broadwell processors introduce a new RDSEED CPU instruction that is used as a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG). The RDRAND instruction (also known as Bull Mountain) that was introduced with Ivy Bridge CPUs is considered by the US NIST as a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator. The RDSEED instruction meanwhile is considered a non-deterministic random bit generator in compliance with NIST’s SP 800-90 B and C.
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Landing into the latest Linux kernel code for version 3.15 is EFI mixed mode support that will allow 64-bit kernels to run from 32-bit EFI firmware.
One of the features that was merged into Git this afternoon as part of the EFI pull request for the Linux 3.15 merge window is EFI mixed mode support. The EFI mixed mode support allows 64-bit kernels to be booted from 32-bit EFI firmware as long as the boot-loader supports EFI’s handover protocol.
Collaboration Summit
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Last week, I attended the Linux Storage, Filesystems, and Memory Management summit (LSF/MM) on Monday and Tuesday, and the Linux Collaboration Summit (aka Collab) from Wednesday through Friday. Both events were held at the Meritage Resort in Napa, CA. This was by invitation of some Linux developers who wanted to find out more about what PostgreSQL needs from the Linux kernel. Andres Freund and I attended on behalf of the PostgreSQL community; Josh Berkus was present for part of the time as well.
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In the last five years I have experienced a few professional transitions, changing employers from a Software Engineering role to System Administrator role, and from developing and/or testing software for “Legacy” operating systems and proprietary software to infrastructure services delivery using large scale UNIX and Linux customer environments. I have gone from only imagining what challenges Systems Administrators have in developing systems management software, to actually knowing them first hand. Now in the last year, I have a new job working on process, procedures and tools improvements and knowledge management activities for UNIX and Linux Infrastructure Delivery at Dell.
Linus Torvalds
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An argument between developers of some of the most basic parts of Linux turned heated this week, resulting in a prominent Red Hat employee and code contributor being banned from working on the Linux kernel.
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Just as anthills have their strange way of getting repaired, the stresses between two huge tectonic plates of FLOSS will seek equilibrium and life will go on, until the next time…
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The Linux kernel developers and systemd developers locked horns this week over a bug in systemd which would stop systems from booting up. The bug was filed by Borislav Petkov where he explained that systemd bug was not allowing him to log into the machine. Kay Sievers, the co-author of systemd, suggested kernel developers not to use ‘generic’ term “debug”, “Like for the kernel, there are options to fin-grain control systemd’s logging behaviour; just do not use the generic term “debug” which is a convenience shortcut for the kernel AND the Base OS.”
Graphics Stack
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As anticipated, X.Org Server 1.16 when released this summer will feature initial support for XWayland.
XWayland is the compatibility layer for running legacy X11 applications atop Wayland. The XWayland code has been baking for a while and as of a few hours ago the initial support was finally merged. This XWayland merging came just in time as the merge window for the six-month update, X.Org Server 1.16, is soon closing.
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The Jetson board was announced with a $192 MSRP and a pledge to ship in April. Now that it’s April, some Phoronix readers who also jumped on this bandwagon may be wondering about more details… Through more sources, I’ve found out that it’s planned for a late April debut. Those who pre-ordered the Jetson will find their boards shipped in about three weeks if they ordered via NewEgg or NVIDIA.com. Everything I’ve heard from my sources about this Tegra K1 board remain very positive and that it’s performing very well. Stay tuned and in three weeks we’ll have up some very interesting new ARM benchmarks on Phoronix.
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Going back numerous months has been a proposal for a full-screen shell protocol initially for the Weston compositor but could be promoted to an official Wayland protocol in the future. The fullscreen shell protocol is designed to make it easy to support simple full-screen clients like splash screens and terminal emulators in an easy and convenient manner rather than having the simple clients talk to DRM/KMS directly, input/output abstraction, easing up development of compositors, and allowing support for screen sharing and recording.
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