02.27.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Qemu 2.0 is looking to be released on April 4. Ubuntu 14.04 closes on April 10, with release on April 17. How’s that for timing. Currently the qemu package in trusty has hundreds of patches, the majority of which fall into two buckets – old omap3 patches from qemu-linaro, and new aarch64 patches from upstream.
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Neovim is a new open-source text editor project that advertises itself as “vim’s rebirth for the 21st century”, a more modern version of the incredibly popular vim editor.
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Other Photocrumbs niceties include the ability to add descriptions to each photo (either by entering text into the UserComment EXIF field or by creating an accompanying .php file), and support for basic EXIF info. For each photo, Photocrumbs displays key info like aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and timestamp.
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This release is a significant milestone for us as it marks the first release we consider to be production ready. It features a wide variety of improvements to container security, a consistent set of tools, updated documentation and an API with multiple bindings.
Over 60 people contributed their time to this release, making it the best LXC release yet! The result of all that work can be seen used in areas as diverse as individual laptops, cellphones and cloud instances. And we are confident that with LXC 1.0, we will see LXC’s usage expand even more and be used for a lot of new and exciting projects.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Apache Tomcat is an opensource webserver product of Apache Foundation like Apache HTTP server. It is used to deploying Java Servlet and JSP applications. To deploy any application in Tomcat we can simply create a war file and deploy them. For more details about you can visit apache official site http://tomcat.apache.org/ .
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It’s been months, and I’m still dealing with a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack on my server—an attack that I can see is coming from China, but there’s not really much I can do about it other than try to tweak firewall settings and so on.
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Surveillance, assassination, coups, and human rights abuses (some of the very latest bits of news on these subjects)
Privacy
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Mike Lofgren’s exceptional essay, “Anatomy of the Deep State,” delivers the roadmap that bewildered Americans need to navigate the past year’s glut of news about mass surveillance. The term “Deep State” aptly conveys how the private security industry has melded with government. It is soldered by plutocracy, perpetual war, reduction of industrial capacity, US exceptionalism and political malfunction. Lofgren is a credible and welcome interpreter of how these factors combine to exert control over us.
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Last month, I had a chance to talk with John McAfee, the founder of the popular McAfee computer security programs.
We talked about how people usually don’t read the terms and conditions of the smartphone applications that they download onto their phones.
But McAfee did read the terms and conditions of the Bank of America smartphone application, and what he saw was pretty shocking.
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Deutsche Telekom plans to launch an app for smartphones that encrypts voice and text messages. The move is the latest step taken by the firm to address users’ privacy concerns following NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden’s, mass surveillance revelations.
The cloud-based app will encrypt each voice or text exchange between two devices using a unique code, Reuters cites Deutsche Telekom as saying in a statement.
PRISM
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WhatsApp was already bad before Facebook acquired it. But at least now people woke up and are considering alternatives. Yes, this move could have come earlier, but I do welcome the new opportunity: its the first time wide spread encryption actually has a chance in the consumer market. So for most of the people out there the question is more “which alternative should I use” instead of “should I use one”. Right now I do not have the faintest idea what alternative will make the break through – but you could say I am well prepare.
Snowden
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Many commentators following the NSA scandals have been eagerly awaiting the recommendations of the US government task force on the matter, and the proposed reforms to be implemented by President Obama to bring the spy agency under control. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, you can watch the president’s recent speech and nod your head approvingly when he talks about the “tradition of limited government” in the United States, and the constitutional limits his government is at pains to respect. Oh, and just for good measure, while you’re listening to this magnificent oration being replayed to you on YouTube, the NSA will be recording your internet browser history, or possibly even hacking your computer.[1] If you decide to click on the “like” or “dislike” buttons at the bottom of the video, that little nugget of political information can be added to their “metadata” archives, along with the rest of your internet activities. In fact, in the 42 minutes it will take you to watch the president’s speech, the NSA will have hoovered up around 40 million records of internet browsing from around the world.[2] Perhaps yours will be among them.
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Attorney general says he is aware of particular cases on the basis of intelligence briefings but will not reveal the information
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The main problem with hacktivism “remains with the legislators and officials who fail to see things in analog-equivalent terms,” said Piratpartiet’s Rick Falkvinge. “If getting documents to a reporter was OK in the pre-Internet age as part of our checks and balances on power, then it has to be OK in the digital age, too.” Yet “many powerholders freak out at the slightest occurrence of pentesting.”
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Perhaps one of the most striking and revelatory aspects about the latest NSA surveillance news story, this one published Sunday by The Bild am Sonntag newspaper in Germany, was that it was not based on leaked documents from the now famous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
What the paper reported, based on information provided by a “high-ranking NSA employee in Germany,” was that the U.S. spy agency—after being outed for spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel—responded to an order to refrain from spying directly on Merkel’s phone by intensifying its monitoring of other high-level officals her government.
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During a day-long conference at the Georgetown University Law Center, Dr. George Ellard, the inspector general for the National Security Agency, spoke for the first time about the disclosures made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
NSA
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When the NSA sweeps up your telephone data, including who you call, when you call them, and for how long, they don’t keep that data forever. The deal with the secret FISA courts gives them five years to hold on to your data, then they’re supposed to delete it.
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Obama’s first change to the NSA phone records is to keep more of them – as evidence against the NSA
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Are you worried that you are personally under surveillance?
Yes, 100 per cent: I’m a target. If the FBI tried to get a warrant on my computer based on the fact that I have worked with Snowden documents then the odds they would get it are 100 per cent. And I do take pains. But look at that NSA Tailored Access Operations catalogue from 2008. The fact that I’m running an air-gapped computer is irrelevant – if the NSA wanted in, they would get in.
The reason they are not is because they know that if it ever got out that they attacked US journalists, the shit-storm would be ginormous. I do think the NSA tries to follow the law, and the Attorney General has said [the US government] is not going to prosecute the journalists.
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Tom Engelhardt has a lengthy article in TomDispatch that explores the depth of the US national security state. He argues that people are deluded to think that whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, and Julian Assange revealed the depth of spying in the US.
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We just received notice that SB1156, the Arizona 4th Amendment Protection Act will have a rules committee hearing and vote on MONDAY at 1pm.
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The NSA has taken snooping to a new level with the news that the Orwellian big brother of the U.S. Government wants to create a “national license-plate recognition database.”
The Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) stressed that the database “could only be accessed in conjunction with ongoing criminal investigations or to locate wanted individuals.”
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A lawsuit challenging domestic military spying against citizens engaged in antiwar activism and acts of civil disobedience obtained a public record that further confirms the United States Army was involved in targeting “leftists” or “anarchists” as domestic terrorists in 2007.
Also, according to a “Democracy Now!” interview, one of the activists was pressured by the military officer, who infiltrated groups in the state of Washington, to become more interested in guns and to even publish an article in a magazine that was written from the perspective of hijackers behind the 9/11 attacks.
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If you thought NSA snooping was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet: online criminals have also been watching and should soon be able to copy the agency’s invasive surveillance tactics, according to security guru Bruce Schneier.
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Now surveillance by governments has been exposed, has the NSA scandal affected your trust for leading Internet brands?
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Richard Clarke, the first cybersecurity czar at the White House, said Tuesday that “terrible” internal cybersecurity at the National Security Agency was responsible for allowing former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to download about 1.5 million classified documents.
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The number of attacks exploiting a yet-to-be-patched vulnerability in Internet Explorer has increased dramatically over the past few days, indicating the exploit is no longer used just in targeted attacks against particular groups of people.
The vulnerability affects Internet Explorer 9 and 10 and was publicly revealed on Feb. 13 by researchers from security firm FireEye who found an exploit for the flaw being served from the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) website. Security researchers from security firm Websense later reported that the same vulnerability was being exploited from the compromised website of French aerospace association GIFAS (Groupement des Industries Francaises Aeronautiques et Spatiales).
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Was the National Security Agency exploiting two just-discovered security flaws to hack into the iPhones and Apple computers of certain targets? Some skeptics are saying there is cause to be concerned about recent coincidences regarding the NSA and Apple.
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The Obama administration has been presented with four wide-ranging options on how to reform the National Security Agency’s (NSA) phone data collection program — including doing away it altogether — according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. Citing officials close to the matter, the Journal reports that intelligence officials presented the options ahead of the March 28th deadline that President Barack Obama set forth in a speech about NSA reform earlier this year.
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Jaffer, who argued the Supreme Court case on behalf of the plaintiffs, said that questions remain about how the Justice Department arrived at its initial policy. “They don’t actually explain how they could have concluded that it was lawful to conceal the role that the FISA Amendments Act played in criminal investigations,” he said. “They haven’t explained their prior policy or how they arrived at it.’’
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The government is notifying some defendants accused of terrorism that it used more National Security Agency surveillance than it disclosed during their court proceedings.
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Art Coviello says security company’s relationship is strictly above board as he calls for the breakup of the NSA into separate organisations
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After long debate over whether to give the NSA Data Center a $6 million tax break on its electric bill, the Senate passed a bill Tuesday that keeps the authority to tax the center intact, but makes it unlikely the state will ever actually levy the tax.
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The slogan “Amazon and you’re done” may have just taken on a whole new meaning — at least for enemies of the state.
Privacy advocates and media watchdogs are challenging a contract between Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, calling it a potentially “ominous” convergence of mass surveillance and perpetual war.
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In the months since Edward Snowden revealed the nature and extent of the spying that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been perpetrating upon Americans and foreigners, some of the NSA’s most troublesome behavior has not been a part of the public debate.
This behavior constitutes the government’s assaults on the American legal system. Those assaults have been conducted thus far on two fronts, one of which is aimed at lawyers who represent foreign entities here in America, and the other is aimed at lawyers who represent criminal defendants against whom evidence has been obtained unlawfully and presented in court untruthfully.
GCHQ
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Mike’s coverage of leaks showing the NSA and GCHQ using the internet to “manipulate, deceive and destroy reputations” (as reported by Glenn Greenwald at firstlook.org) hit the front page of Reddit yesterday, generating lots of traffic for Techdirt. This traffic truly should have gone to firstlook.org, but never made it there. A look at the top comments on our coverage show why…
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The Internet has provided a forum for average people throughout the world to disseminate, share and debate information unattenuated by gatekeepers in the mainstream media and their politically connected friends. New media outlets like Personal Liberty Digest™ have, for years, been warning readers that the well-connected and ruling elite, displeased by this newfound proletariat freedom, have been prolific in attempts to undermine and marginalize information provided by any media outlet unwilling to obey the same unspoken rules that govern the content choices of major media outlets.
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The leaks just don’t stop from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, with Glenn Greenwald reporting on his latest leak that US spy agencies manipulate and control online behavior in more ways than one.
Assassination by Drones
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Kareem Khan’s brother and son were killed in a Pakistan drone strike in 2009. Now he is in the UK to meet MPs and tells Channel 4 News “most drone strikes are killing innocent people”.
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A draft resolution sponsored by the Green group of MEPs and enjoying cross-party support will be debated today (26 February) and voted on tomorrow between 12 and 2pm. The resolution condemns the extrajudicial killings resulting from drone strikes, notes an increase in strikes in recent years in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and demands full transparency from those Member States that possess drones technology (including the UK).
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Human Rights Watch issued a 28-page report investigating the attack in December 2013 on a wedding procession in Yemen. The attack killed at least 12 men and wounded at least 15 others including the bride.
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President Obama should be justly haunted by the slaughter of innocents, especially the ones he has personally condemned to death on untested evidence. But it’s hard to imagine him actually being haunted by any of his lethal failures, perhaps least of all by innocents condemned by the mere turning down of his imperial thumb in these or any other circumstances. The Nobel Peace Prize winner hardly sounds haunted when he’s quoted saying, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”
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On Feb. 10, mass media were embroiled with an intense debate. The debate was about the United States government’s possible drone strike on a U.S. citizen who lives abroad. The target is not just an ordinary U.S. citizen, but a terrorist affiliated with al-Qaeda who happens to hold a U.S. citizenship due to his original place of birth.
My question is: Why would the government even discuss conducting such an extreme measure? Why wouldn’t they just send some UDT/NAVY SEAL teams to capture him and bring him to American soil for judicial proceedings? Under what authority and right can the government of the United States attempt to kill an American citizen by bombing without a trial or judicial review, ignoring fundamental human rights, not to mention the Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments? What happened to “due process” and “right in judicial proceedings?” There are so many questions to be answered, and I would like to narrate several points mentioned from a CNN debate, and past statements of government officials.
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On my way to work one morning this week, I was listening to Fox News on Sirius. Bill Hemmer was interviewing Ralph Peters, a retired lieutenant colonel. The two were complaining the Defense Department was proposing cuts to our troop levels. Currently, they said, our army has 520K members, but now defense is proposing cutting it “about a 100K down to 440K-450K.” They then stated how Turkey will have a bigger army than us.
I knew this was untrue. When I got to work and looked up the numbers, I found that Turkey has 450K active duty and 378K reserves. We have 1.4 million active and 850K reserves. The report was beyond misleading as it was comparing just our Army to Turkey’s full force. I could say we have a smaller force than Cambodia if I only counted our Coast Guard. This wasn’t misleading, it was outright deceitful.
We also spend more than the next 10 countries combined in our military. And sorry, but I don’t think one Turkish soldier is equal to an American soldier. We have the best jets, tanks, ships, carriers, soldiers, seamen, airmen, and let’s not forget the Marines.
[...]
On a different note, but one rarely discussed: Do we think the Iraq War, Afghanistan War, Gitmo and drones make us more safe or are terrorist organizations using these as propaganda to recruit more terrorists?
Torture
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What the British state did to me for opposing their torture programme was bad enough, but nothing to what Moazzam suffered. Yet he is much less embittered than I am.
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Lisa Hajjar, a sociologist from University of California, Santa Barbara, presented a lecture Feb. 24 discussing her research about the military commission trial at Guantanamo Bay for the men responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“Let’s Go to Guantanamo! An On-the-Ground Perspective on the 9/11 Trial” was an in-detail discussion of 9/11 accountability, the issue of secret prisons and CIA torture.
Benghazi
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In an op-ed piece in the online Wall Street Journal on Wednesday night, Rove, once President George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, said it would be too difficult for Congress to get National Security Adviser Susan Rice to testify under oath — and he blasted her expressed lack of regret Sunday for having said at the time that the siege was a result of protests against an offensive video denigrating Islam.
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Ukraine
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The award-winning journalist Max Blumenthal is exactly right to suggest, as he does in his recent AlterNet piece, that the U.S. has ties to Nazi and fascist protesters in Ukraine. The CIA agrees with him, and so did George Bush Sr. The only difference in their appraisal is the use of the term Neo-Nazi , rather than Nazi. It is just too hard for anyone to fathom that large communities of World War II Nazis not only survived, but have thrived and been protected all these years in Lviv (a city and provincial district in western Ukraine), the USA, and Canada.
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American neocons helped destabilize Ukraine and engineer the overthrow of its elected government, a “regime change” on Russia’s western border. But the coup – and the neo-Nazi militias at the forefront – also reveal divisions within the Obama administration, reports Robert Parry.
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The US and the EU are supporting the formation of a coalition government integrated by Neo-Nazis which are directly involved in the repression of the Ukrainian Jewish community.
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The Washington-paid schemers are now reaping their just reward as they sit in craven silence while neo-nazi Muzychko wielding an Ak-47 challenges government officials to their face: “I dare you take my gun!”
FBI/Police
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Jim Sensenbrenner among those concerned by proposals on the table and says stance to end bulk surveillance is ‘unwavering’
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Edward Snowden ripped the blinds off the surveillance state last summer with his leak of top-secret National Security Agency documents, forcing a national conversation about spying in the post-9/11 era. However, there’s still no concrete proof that America’s elite intelligence units are analyzing most Americans’ computer and telephone activity — even though they can.
Los Angeles and Southern California police, by contrast, are expanding their use of surveillance technology such as intelligent video analytics, digital biometric identification and military-pedigree software for analyzing and predicting crime. Information on the identity and movements of millions of Southern California residents is being collected and tracked.
Civil Rights
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As has been widely reported (BBC, Daily Mail, Guardian, Telegraph) the Court of Appeal has approved the use of “whole life tariffs” for murderers, seemingly contradicting the European Court of Human Rights. But as the reporting seems to miss some of subtleties of the judgment it is worth a closer look.
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02.26.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Roundup of Linux (kernel) news from the past few days, including some rather exciting announcements
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Hey, things are looking pretty normal, and rc4 is smaller than rc3, so
I’m happy.
The biggest patch in here (accounting for about a sixth of the total)
is just DaveJ re-indenting a reiserfs file. Ignoring that whitespace
cleanup, the rest is mostly the usual mix of drivers, networking and
some architecture updates.
Nothing big, and nothing that looks particularly scary.
So get to it, and test it all out.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few minutes ago, February 20, that Linux kernels 3.13.4, 3.12.12, 3.10.31 LTS, and 3.4.81 LTS are now available for download.
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Lennart Poettering has announced the release of systemd 209 and once again it’s another massive release with stuffing more features into the init system, including preparing the user-space side for the kernel D-Bus implementation.
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This example can be used to setup a minimal Linux installation for any task. In this tutorial however I am going to use kernel development as an example. Since the process I have used in the past have been from sporadic sources, I wanted to consolidate the information for my own need. This tutorial is the result of that effort. So that next time if I feel like doing something kernel related, I don’t have to start over again.
Graphics Stack
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Good news: AMD’s press / global communications team is finally talking up their open-source Linux graphics driver features. Bad news: they appear to still need lots of training over their own Linux graphics drivers. Or is there some Linux driver shake-up happening? Here’s some of what they are promoting right now with the AMD Linux graphics driver.
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Back on Tuesday I delivered a launch-day review of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti on Linux. This first graphics card built on NVIDIA’s new Maxwell architecture has been running fantastic under Linux for being a mid-range graphics card. The GM107 GPU core found on the GTX 750 Ti is incredibly power efficient, as was shown in numerous articles on launch-day. For those curious more about the GeForce GTX 750 Ti Linux performance, here are some more OpenCL and OpenGL performance results.
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Wayland clients running on the Weston compositor now have support for the minimize button.
Clients using an XDG shell surface now support the state of being minimized with this Git commit on Tuesday.
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Broadwell support has been a work-in-progress on Linux for many months and most of the hardware enablement is complete. The Mesa driver has had mainline support for Intel Broadwell graphics for some time now, but only today is it being enabled by default and not hidden behind the Intel preliminary hardware support flag. The latest Broadwell work was with this commit and other changes.
Benchmarks
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Early Linux 3.14 kernel benchmarks indicated there might be some slowdowns in disk/file-system performance for this next major kernel release. That early testing was done from an Intel ultrabook with solid-state drive while we’re now in the process of carrying out more focused testing of Linux 3.14 on both HDDs and SSDs. In this article are our first hard drive benchmarks from the Linux 3.14 Git kernel compared to the stable 3.12 and 3.13 kernels.
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After running through some challenges in setting up PC-BSD/FreeBSD 10.0 and its many changes, here are benchmarks of the feature-rich operating system update. Benchmarks were done on the same laptop of PC-BSD 10.0, the former PC-BSD 9.2 release, and Ubuntu 13.10.
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In my last article on next-gen filesystems, we did something in between a generic high altitude overview of next-gen filesystems and a walkthrough of some of btrfs’ features and usage. This time, we’re going to specifically look at what ZFS brings to the table, walking through getting it installed and using it on one of the more popular Linux distributions: Precise Pangolin. That’s the most current Long Term Service (LTS) Ubuntu release.
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02.25.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: This week’s news about absence of legal adherence and other moral issues
Brazil and EU/Germany
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The European Union and Brazil have agreed to lay a fibre-optic undersea communications cable across the Atlantic, between Lisbon and Fortaleza. The cable — which will cost $185 million (£110 million) — is designed to “guarantee the neutrality” of the internet and “enhance the protection of communications”.
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There was something of an international uproar last year when it was revealed that the NSA, in addition to snooping on its own citizens, had bugged the personal cell phone of Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany. The prospect of the U.S. spying on the head of state of a country it supposedly considers an ally infuriated many, especially Merkel, and President Obama quickly promised to stop. That promise was quickly walked back by administration officials, and on Sunday, the Bild am Sonntag newspaper reported that the NSA is still tapping the phones of Merkel’s closest aides, including Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere.
Snowden and Judgment
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Edward Snowden, who exposed these illegal activities — much like Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed the “Pentagon Papers” in the early 1970s — due probably to his conscience, is now a hunted man hiding in Russia. He is reviled by President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, House Speaker John Boehner, former Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. John McCain, to name a few.
On Dec. 18, 2013, a panel gave the president 46 recommendations, all of which meant shut down the spying on American citizens.
That same month, a federal judge ruled the NSA spying was unconstitutional.
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A few weeks ago, Glenn Greenwald, while working with NBC News, revealed some details of a GCHQ presentation concerning how the surveillance organization had a “dirty tricks” group known as JTRIG — the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group. Now, over at The Intercept, he’s revealed the entire presentation and highlighted more details about how JTRIG would seek to infiltrate different groups online and destroy people’s reputations — going way, way, way beyond just targeting terrorist groups and threats to national security.
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Another slide lists ways to “discredit a target”: “Set up a honey-trap,” “Change their photos on social networking sites,” “Write a blog purporting to be one of their victims,” “Email/text their colleagues, neighbours, friends, etc.”
There’s also a slide on how to discredit a business: “Leak confidential information to companies/the press via blogs etc,” “Post negative information on appropriate forums,” “Stop deals/ruin business relationships.”
Blackphone
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Whether classed as the device for the clinically paranoid or the suitably vigilant, the Blackphone is a compelling reason to surface from the Android seas. Periscope up!
What we’re looking at is a phone that’s well-timed if nothing else. In recent years Earth’s paranoia has been inflated like it was some sort of mad blue-green balloon having a panic attack in space, and we’re all now super vigilant about protecting our privacy. (Aren’t we?)
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Zuckerberg ‘Anger’
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Never let it be said that the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is one to overhype a crisis. Asked about the National Security Agency’s spying scandal, which has hit Internet firms with widespread fears among users about being snooped on, he responded: “Well, it’s not awesome.”
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CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the NSA spy scandal that broke this past summer has strained some of the company’s relationships overseas.
Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft
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After Amazon signed a lucrative, long-term cloud computing contract with the CIA, concerns surfaced that the Internet giant might divulge customer information to the agency. So far, a petition for Amazon’s owner to address these concerns has gathered over 29,000 signatures.
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IBM is creeping towards the cloud, picking up startups on the way, including a NoSQL database company to fill in some of the perceived shortcomings of DB2.
The acquisition of Cloudant was announced on Monday and will give IBM control of a NoSQL “database-as-a-service” (DBaaS) [As a service? What the hell was a database beforehand? A pleasure cruise? – Ed]. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
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Microsoft’s Lync communications platform collects a surprising amount of sensitive, analyzable data about its users, making employers who use Lync privy to some very personal information about their employees.
Software developer Event Zero told Microsoft’s Lync 2014 conference that by using call data collected by the platform, companies could analyze information to the point of discovering intimate personal details about employees’ lives, like which are dating one another, or who in the company may be looking for another job.
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A former White House security advisor has suggested that you, dear reader, are naive if you think hosting data outside of the US will protect a business from the NSA.
“NSA and any other world-class intelligence agency can hack into databases even if they not in the US,” said former White House security advisor Richard Clarke in a speech at the Cloud Security Alliance summit in San Francisco on Monday. “Non-US companies are using NSA revelations as a marketing tool.”
Security
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We talked about “Certification Authorities” in the previous installment when discussing how X.509 certificates function. In the X.509 world, you don’t assign trust to people’s certificates, but instead pick an authority who signs all the keys. Any key bearing the CA’s signature is implicitly assumed to be fully valid. Usually, there are several levels of authorities, commonly referred to as “Root authorities” and “Intermediary Authorities,” and together they form a “certification chain.”
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Local Law
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A pair of bills in the Utah State Legislature are taking a look at the National Security Agency’s massive data center in Bluffdale.
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Torture
Air Strikes
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A senior security official confirmed to The Express Tribune that CIA Director John Brennan traveled to Islamabad last Friday and held meetings with Army Chief General Raheel Sharif and his Pakistani counterpart Lt General Zaheerul Islam.
However, the official, who requested anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the media, insisted that he only ‘paid a courtesy call’ on the Army Chief. “It was a routine visit,” the official added.
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The Obama administration’s proposals, some of which are likely to face resistance in Congress, reflect changing fortunes for once-sacrosanct defense spending.
Drones
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It’s been more than a year since incoming CIA Director John Brennan signaled his intention to shift drone warfare to the Pentagon as soon as possible. Brennan, a career spook, was said to be determined to restore the agency to its roots as an espionage factory, not a paramilitary organization. And President Obama endorsed his plan to hand drone warfare over to the military, according to administration officials.
But a funny thing happened on the way back to cloak-and-dagger. According to intelligence experts and some powerful friends of the CIA on Capitol Hill, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the agency may simply be much better than the military at killing people in a targeted, precise way—and, above all, at ensuring that the bad guys they’re getting are really bad guys. And that distinction has become more important than ever at a time when Obama is intent on moving away from a “permanent war footing” and on restricting targeted killings exclusively to a handful of Qaida-linked senior terrorists.
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The U.S. government’s drone use as a means to combat global terrorism was one of the main topics at an event hosted by the Amnesty International Chapters of Georgetown University and Georgetown Law Center on Sunday night in the Intercultural Center Auditorium.
Foreign Policy
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Ukraine is delaying the formation of a new government until Thursday following the ouster of democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych after months of protests that killed dozens of people. The Obama administration has indicated it no longer recognizes Yanukovych as Ukraine’s leader and has pledged financial support to Ukraine. President Yanukovych had come under fire for strengthening ties with Russia instead of Europe. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has rejected the interim government.
Police
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Christopher Roupe, 17, was shot by a Euharlee police officer on Friday when he answered the door. Police say he was pointing a handgun, not the video game device. Roupe was an aspiring Marine, his family said.
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02.23.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Just a few months ago, the developers behind Nuclear Dawn, InterWave Studio, announced that a Linux version of the game was incoming. As a follow up to the announcement a beta was made available for the game on Linux. But right after that everything went silent for the development house.
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Valve’s digital game distribution service now hosts 333 games for Linux, compared to 60 games last February. (Strangely, Steam’s store page claims that 541 games are now available, but when you search the entire catalog it shows only 333 titles. We’ve asked Valve for clarification. UPDATE: Valve confirmed that 541 are available for Linux. The 333 count appears to be a glitch.)
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There is an “ask me anything” going on in reddit-land right now with the folks from the current Humble Bundle, I decided to ask the question a lot of people have been wondering.
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I think it harms their reputation with Linux fans to have a game completely missing for the sake of what sounds like their egos.
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The Legacy of Mirimotha is an open world, fantasy role playing game. At the beginning of the game, the player is provided with eight unique races in which they can customize their appearance and profession. The professions are: trader, thief, fighter, or a mixture of all three. The player has the choice of changing these options at any point during the game.
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Linux gaming used to be a wasteland. The only options were simple open source games and the handful of commercial ports that could still be obtained. By comparison, the present day seems like a jungle some times, with more and more options emerging, and it can feel like a full time job keeping up on developments.
Today, we’ll take a brief look at the various options available to you, and what benefits and drawbacks you can run into. This isn’t meant to be completely exhaustive, but rather a good introduction, if you are new to Linux or to the concept of Linux gaming in general. As such, we’ll be covering four primary sources.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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As we all know that JBoss AS has been renamed to WildFly. A lots of new features has been added and lots of has been upgraded. Finally WildFly 8.0.0 Final has been released on Feb 11.2014. WildFly Project Lead Jason Greene announced the same.
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The latest Wine development release is now available for offering the best support for running your Windows games and other applications on Linux.
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Cantata, a Qt-based music player for MPD (Music Player Daemon), has reached version 1.3.0 just yesterday, and a fix for compiling it in KDE, 1.3.0.1, was put out a few moments ago. This release comes with 87 fixes and improvements. Some major changes and new features include:
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