Windows Update does what a developer would need a sledgehammer for
Summary: Microsoft delivers rogue drivers through Windows Update and they brick Arduino microcontrollers
SO, Microsoft says and insists on "loving" Linux, but its actions say otherwise. We previously explained how one of the antifeatures of UEFI ‘secure boot’, promoted by Intel and Microsoft (Wintel), is a potential bricker. Articles about this include:
Today we have another story about ways in which Microsoft bricks Linux devices (by ‘accident’) and to quote a Microsoft booster, the ‘updates’ impacted victims and “bricked some of their hardware”. Define “some”. Microsoft Peter, who wrote about it early on (like ‘damage control’), belittles the seriousness of this:
Hardware hackers building interactive gadgets based on the Arduino microcontrollers are finding that a recent driver update that Microsoft deployed over Windows Update has bricked some of their hardware, leaving it inaccessible to most software both on Windows and Linux. This came to us via hardware hacking site Hack A Day.
It makes one wonder why Arduino developers use a desktop platform that has back doors and a disastrous track record.
The FTDI FT232 chip is found in thousands of electronic baubles, from Arduinos to test equipment, and more than a few bits of consumer electronics. It’s a simple chip, converting USB to a serial port, but very useful and probably one of the most cloned pieces of silicon on Earth. Thanks to a recent Windows update, all those fake FTDI chips are at risk of being bricked. This isn’t a case where fake FTDI chips won’t work if plugged into a machine running the newest FTDI driver; the latest driver bricks the fake chips, rendering them inoperable with any computer.
So Microsoft is bricking Arduino devices now. Great! Mission accomplished.
Microsoft Peter is already seeing backlash to his Microsoft propaganda (‘damage control’) and not for the first time, either.
“The Microsoft press tries to justify this as an attack on “fake” chips,” wrote Will Hill. “Bricking is malicious and intentional. People who reverse engineered the drive claim that the bricking is malicious and intentional.”
“Microsoft Peter is already seeing backlash to his Microsoft propaganda (‘damage control’) and not for the first time, either.”TechDirt said that “IP Is No Excuse: Even If Someone Is Using Fake Chips, It’s Not Okay To Kill Their Devices”. It said that “It’s not entirely clear if this is something FTDI did on purpose or not (though, their comments below suggest they did), but it is worrisome, and it’s simply not okay — whether it was on purpose (in which case it’s potentially illegal) or not (in which case it’s just bad).”
Mike Masnick responded to the Microsoft booster/PR by saying that Microsoft can’t just brick people’s devices. He seems unaware of the background of the author and the gymnastics in logic (not knowledge) that he would stoop to in order to defend Microsoft in every possible situation, especially the most difficult and controversial situations that put Microsoft under a lot of public pressure and backlash, possibly lawsuits too (class action).
Public Knowledgeweighed in, explaining that “being where they are, no one installing the update would ever see them (not even in a blink-and-you-miss-it clickthrough agreement). In other words, it’s a “warning” that’s less than useless.
“Less than useless because not only does it fail to warn, but its inclusion seems pretty clearly an attempt to avoid liability for destroying someone else’s device, without them actually seeing the warning. To extend the earlier metaphor a bit, this would be like a disclaimer posted in the back room of a Nike store that said that, by entering the store, I had agreed to have the shoes I’m wearing inspected and shredded if they turn out to be fake Nikes. In other words, a completely unenforceable term.
“We’ve spent a lot of time talking about how fine print can be used to fool consumers and deprive them of rights over what should be their own property before; this seems to be an extraordinary extreme of that. Maybe this should mark a turning point in the law’s willingness to support this kind of chicanery.”
We found more or less the same party line in The Register, which wrote: “Responding to the growing furor, FTDI now says it has yanked the offending driver from Windows Update so that Windows users will no longer receive it automatically. But it says it has no intention of giving up the fight against (presumably) Chinese chip knockoff artists.”
They are not knockoff artists, there was no legal case, and even if there’s suspicion that something illegal was happening, it does not by any means justify bricking of hardware. Then again, Microsoft is a criminal company (reminder in the videos below), so we have come to expect such behaviour. When it can be conveniently painted as an ‘accident’, then it is usually defensibly. █
Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure buys reality distortion
Summary: Having put a universal tax on many things (not just computers) and evaded tax using the classic ‘charity’ trick, Gates is now buying the media, the schools, politicians etc. and earns as much as 10 billion dollars per year while the public is taught that Gates is a giver, not a hoarder of the worst kind
Bill Gates is following the trajectory of that infamous Rockefeller empire. He has systematically bribed the press at the cost of about a million dollars per day (on average) to tell us he gives away his money. Some people view him as a giver because of this paid-for propaganda, but he is actually getting $10bn (or ~7-8%) richer in just one year, based on last year which is not much different from previous years. This money comes from somewhere, or at the very least it represents the passage of power and wealth (possession).
According to this new article, “Bill Gates is the richest person in America with a fortune of $81.5 billion, up from $70.8 billion last year, according to Wealth-X.”
When will the media abandon this bogus narrative that Gates ‘gives back’ his wealth? He sure gives a small portion of it to the media in order for this media to fool the public. The corporate media is applauding him for getting richer as though that’s some kind of an achievement while actually characterising him as a giver, not a hoarder (which is by definition what happens when his wealth expands like this). It is just another Rockefeller-type PR plot. It is mostly working.
Gates not only uses the media to fool the public. He also uses schools and it indoctrinates pupils. As this new article puts it: “Gates has personally invested $10 million in the Big History Project, which has spread to about 1,200 schools since it launched in 2011.”
That is just a small fraction (a thousandth) of what he earned in one single year and millions of young people are now mentally controlled by a plutocrat and those who financially depend on him.
Billionaires rewriting history is a classic problem as those who can rewrite history can dominate the future. Watch how some vicious people are now celebrated in schools as heroes. This other new article refers to it as the “Gates Foundation’s reckless experimentation” with the school (indoctrination) system in the US and it is far from the only such article. Many teachers are fed up and pissed off by this. There are public protests which only Gates-sponsored media seems inherently resistant to coverage of (unless it’s for demonising the protesters). A publication may develop a sort of sixth sense, knowing that criticising or upsetting Gates would discourage money awards from him or almost certainly stop any further awards from him. It’s a form of systemic bribes, like those which corporations give to politicians.
The propaganda machine continues to be effective, however, as many newspapers are still bribed by Gates and they routinely show the impact of these financial strings. The Guardian , for example, is a good example of Gates bribing the press in the UK (he even bribes the biggest players such as the BBC, repeatedly even).
Having bribed The Guardian (whereupon it stopped criticising him and his horrible impact through industrial partners like Monsanto) this college dropout, Bill Gates, is now treated by The Guardian as an Ebola ‘expert’ (see puff piece without any disclosure).
Other publications he bribes treat him like an economist, but some show that he does not grasp economics and he has the nerve to blame others for not paying tax (or encouraging further taxation on those whom he is taxing) while he uses his fake ‘charity’ to avoid paying tax. Yes, he points his fingers at poor people or middle-class people when he himself evades tax using a classic trick. He still works on privatising land1, 2]. That’s when when one seeks to profit from what’s public, having reached or exceeded the limit of one’s greed. █
For years, I’ve been annoyed that Lenovo supports GNU/Linux on all its PCs and will ship GNU/Linux for those who demand it but did not advertise GNU/Linux units side by side with units burdened with that other OS.
With Linux, everybody has access to the source code and everyone has the ability to join in and get involved and this means that through collaboration the software evolves at a faster pace and the end product is usually of a very high standard.
Linux isn’t just for programmers though. Linux is for everyone. Most people couldn’t care less what is under the hood in the same way that many people drive their cars without being able to tell a spark plug from a dipstick.
IT is changing organizations across the globe, impacting enterprises, governments and the wider public sector. Open source in particular is a driver in innovation, giving organizations a competitive edge and an ability to scale and adapt to changing market demands.
According to the 2014 Linux Jobs Report, demand for Linux expertise continues to grow, with hiring managers across a number of industries citing Linux talents as one of the top recruitment priorities this year.
As a follow-up to this week’s Btrfs RAID HDD testing on Ubuntu 14.10, I ran some benchmarks of Btrfs in RAID0 while benchmarking every major kernel release from Linux 3.10 to Linux 3.18-rc1.
When Linux 3.18-rc1 was released last week, one week sooner than anticipated, Linus Torvalds mentioned he was willing to still allow OverlayFS to be merged this cycle. One week later, that code is hopefully now ready for merging.
While Linux 3.18-rc2 is expected for release later today, last night Al Viro sent in a new VFS pull request that finally has OverlayFS ready for landing. OverlayFS has been aiming for Linux 3.18 and it’s finally moving ahead while already having a lot of users even though it’s not been part of the mainline kernel tree. OverlayFS is a simple union file-system already used by some live DVD/USB Linux distributions like Mageia and OpenWRT. OverlayFS has been trying for years to get mainlined in the Linux kernel but not all kernel developers have been happy with it — some objecting it’s incomplete, not happy with the design, etc.
Another Sunday evening, another Linux kernel release candidate. The second test version of the Linux 3.18 kernel is now available.
With the Linux 3.18-rc1 release having been one week sooner than previously expressed, for -rc2 there were some late merge requests, which does include the final landing of OverlayFS in the mainline kernel.
Another week, another rc – and now the merge window is *definitely* closed.
I had hoped that the rc1 release would mean that a few stragglers
would quickly surface, and then the rest of the rc would be more
normal. But no, I had straggling merge-window pull requests come in
all week, and rc2 is bigger than I’d like.
Oh well. It’s not like I’m hugely surprised, but it does mean that I’m
probably going to be unpleasant next week to anybody who tries to get
me to pull things that I think looks like “development” rather than
“fixes”. You’ve been warned. I effectively gave you a full three
weeks of merge window, now it’s time for bugfixes, and not random
other noise. Ok?
And to be honest, we’ve had bigger rc2′s in history. Not recently,
though. Both 3.3 and 3.4 had big -rc2 releases, and 3.15 (which was
the largest release ever, iirc) came reasonably close.
At least _part_ of the size is the very long-delayed overlayfs merge
that I already mentioned in the rc1 release message as being pending.
Let’s see how much fallout that all causes, but it’s been around for a
long time (partly because it needed various vfs-layer things to
integrate cleanly), and I think it’s in good shape. Knock wood.
So at least partially as a result of that overlayfs merge, about a
third of the patch is filesystems. It’s not _just_ overlayfs, though,
there was a late ext4 merge request that I think is actually bigger,
at least partly due to some extent handling refactoring.
The rest is the more usual driver updates (thermal, watchdog, scsi
target, ACPI & PM, misc other updates) and architecture updates (arc,
arm, powerpc, mips, x86). Some Documentation and include file updates
rounds out the rest.
Shortlog appended for details, I think it’s still well within the
mailing list size constraints.
Disk images are computer files of a disk volume or an entire data storage device, such as a hard drive, optical disk (e.g. DVD, CD, Blu-ray), tape drive, USB flash drive, or floppy disk. A disk image represents the content exactly as it is on the original storage device, including both data and structure information.
I like Debian 7 and I appreciate the stability and the large number of software packages available. However, some of the software I need is not available in Debian Stable. And there are also packages I would like to access in Ubuntu Software Center, and over 100 Linux games on gog.com. Sounds familiar? In this article I describe my cross-distro Linux setup and how I handle newer Ubuntu software in older distros such as Debian 7.
Here is a look back at the last week on GamingOnLinux, an easy way to for you to keep up to date on what has happened in the past week for Linux Gaming! Sorted from lowest to highest to make sure you don’t miss the smaller news stories.
Argentina is a pretty exciting place to be right now in terms of video game development, with the number of developers and games growing exponentially. Buenos Aires has been the cultural capital of Latin America for at least the past 100 years, and now this thriving creativity has expanded into gaming and – most importantly for us at GOL – Linux gaming.
Dead Island is a survival horror action game released in 2011, centered around a zombie-infested island, with support for single-player, multi-player and co-op.
Yesterday there were “what if” articles about KDE using client-side decorations and Windows 10 components. On a serious note today, the same KDE parties involved, have proposed Dynamic Window Decorations (DWD) as an alternative/hybrid to client-side and server-side decorations.
When the first CSD “what if” was made in the KDE community forums it became the catalyst that got me in touch with some of the fine developers who really do make KDE happen, from them and members of the VDG I was educated on a new method of decorating windows with clean yet powerful widgets, and I have the privilege of presenting the idea we have worked and iterated on for some weeks now today…
So, KDE people makes up for 40-60% of the weekly commits to QtBase. This is again shows that KDE is important to Qt, just as the reverse is. So, let’s keep KDE healthy.
In this regard, I offered to propose a new way or method that we can use for the KDE Color picker. We have a few ways that this was done in the past and maybe it can be improved. KDE currently uses this from the KColor Chooser
I made the jump on all available computers, and am now running Plasma5 on the foundation of Kubuntu 14.10 everywhere. Once the upgrade work was done, I filed a few bugs, and then wanted to test accessibility (often abbreviated a11y), since Qt5 has a11y built-in.
This live image contains GParted 0.20.0 which improves resizing for multi-device btrfs file systems. Also included is a patched version of parted 3.2 that fixes a crash that would occur when resizing fat16 file systems.
The Chinese-made SteamOS is considered as the next major threat to the living-room gaming providers according to reports because it has more powerful specs and a cheaper price that will likely hit the world by storm.
Popular Linux distro Ubuntu recently turned 10 and Canonical could think of no better way to celebrate the milestone than with the release of a new version of the operating system. Okay, maybe not. To be honest, Utopic Unicorn (codename) isn’t in any way a celebratory release. On the contrary, it might well be one of the least ambitious Ubuntu releases in recent memory — at least on the desktop front.
In comparing the open-source graphics driver performance of Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS and Ubuntu 14.10, the newer Ubuntu Linux release does offer up some performance improvements to the R600 and RadeonSI graphics drivers, but already in the latest kernel and Mesa Git code is faster performance. Here are benchmarks of Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS vs. Ubuntu 14.10 for several OpenGL benchmarks with different AMD Radeon graphics cards while also adding in the results of the Oibaf PPA and vanilla Linux 3.17 kernel.
Like Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 15.04 will be also using Unity 7 and X.org by default, but Unity 8 and Mir will be installable via the default repositories.
It was a pretty long project. I didn’t work on it full time, obviously, but I probably worked on it over a period of six months, and most of the time was writing the software. A lot of the software was written in Python – like the controls for the webcam, the soundboard and everything – so most of the time was getting the software running and getting the kinks worked out. Like where if it loses a Wi-Fi connection it tries to rejoin and things like that. So, yeah, I definitely want to revisit it, and obviously the second time round you can do it a lot better than you did the first, so I’d like to go back.
Navigating around the display is a breeze with swiping down from the clock face bringing down quick controls for volume, screen brightness and also the do not disturb setting. Swiping left brings you the user selectable and also installable widgets. This means that you can have the app widgets that matter to you most within striking distance. Swiping right from the clock face brings you to you notifications, where you are easily able to select notifications from different applications such as SMS, Whatsapp, email etc.
It’s safe to say that CyanogenMOD has changed Android for the better, breathing new life into aging smartphones abandoned by their manufacturers. What started as a side project based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) now has over a million active users clambering to install the latest builds on their devices — even ones that have not been forgotten by their makers.
Before I started volunteering with Code for America as Chicago’s Brigade Captain, I worked in a field office for the Illinois Department of Employment Security. I was hired at the start of the recession to help the state deal with the massive number of people who had been laid off in our city.
Someone drove up a ramp near the Oklahoma Capitol steps overnight and into a disputed granite monument of the Ten Commandments, smashing it to pieces in an apparent act of vandalism, authorities said.
Oklahoma Highway Patrol Capt. George Brown said the person abandoned the car and fled the scene after destroying the monument Thursday night, and that investigators are searching the sedan for clues. He said he didn’t know if there were any witnesses, but that investigators are reviewing security video.
Although China lags behind neighbors South Korea and Japan in automation on a per capita basis, things could change as Chinese authorities claimed Sunday China is now the world’s largest industrial robot market with over 30 robot factories under construction.
There were three stories on Ebola in the first four pages of the Oct. 17 newspaper. Meanwhile, on page 6 was a story that the Affordable Care Act has not hurt corporate America (oh, thank heaven), and relegated to page 7 was a story on CIA torture, a matter some of us feel is rather important.
A 2011 CIA operation to locate Osama bin Laden using a staged hepatitis vaccine programme didn’t help matters either. Since then, at least 30 vaccinators and 30 security personnel have been killed in attacks by the Taliban, while on duty. The obvious solution: beefed up security and awareness drives, still haven’t managed to break through the phobias of the tribal belt. How do you combat a conspiracy theory when your attempts are viewed as proof of it?
Suspicions grew after the CIA used a Pakistani doctor in 2011 to stage a hepatitis vaccination programme as cover to try to find Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
Analysts say actions by anti-government groups, such as the Pakistani Taliban, have slowed vaccinations and helped spread the disease. In 2012, the Taliban banned vaccinations in territory it controlled, claiming the government campaign was similar to a hepatitis vaccination program run by a doctor who allegedly aided the CIA in helping find Osama bin Laden.
On March 15, the FCR commissioner had upheld the conviction of Dr Shakil, who is also suspected of helping the American CIA track down Osama bin Laden through a fake vaccination campaign but reduced the sentence given by the APA court from 33 years to 23 years imprisonment and fine from Rs320,000 to Rs220,000.
The harmonious collaboration between the CIA and racist regimes of an overall Nazi outlook began with the importing of Nazi scientists. Among the CIA’s friends in later years was South Africa’s apartheid regime. It was, for example, a CIA tip that led the arrest of Nelson Mandela and his imprisonment for more than twenty years. Close CIA cooperation with South Africa’s intelligence agencies continued unabated and indeed mounted during the Reagan years, with close collaboration in attacks on Mozambique and other neighbors of South Africa deemed to be threats to South African and U.S. interests.
The event was co-organized by Keen Team, a security unit of Shanghai-based Keen Cloud Tech that focuses on helping worldwide leading software manufactures to discover and fix security vulnerabilities, and XCon Conference, one of the largest security conferences in China.
Attackers are also using a wider variety of devices to launch assaults, with cable modems, smartphones and embedded devices all being targeted. Hackers are also looking to gain control of Linux systems by exploiting vulnerable web- based applications in order to strengthen botnets.
“DDoS attack size and volume have gone through the roof this year,” says John Summers, vice president of Akamai’s security business unit. “. “In the third quarter alone, Akamai mitigated 17 attacks greater than 100 gigabits-per-second, with the largest at 321Gbps.
“Interestingly, we witnessed none of that size in the same quarter a year ago and only six last quarter. These mega-attacks each used multiple DDoS vectors to deliver large bandwidth-consuming packets at an extremely high rate of speed.”
There was a famous exchange in the British Parliament in the last two years of Queen Victoria’s reign. During a debate on Irish policy, an English member found it helpful to recount, “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” His opponent in the debate, a member from Northern Ireland, responded with, “Of course not, God doesn’t trust you people in the dark.”
Were such an exchange take place today in the congress, the response would simply be, almost no one trusts this government anymore.” You doubt that? A CNN poll that found only 13 percent of those polled believe the government can be trusted to do the right thing most of the time.
Although Saudi Arabia is the Arab country putting the most effort into raising awareness of the threat of the Islamic State (ISIS) and fighting the group, Saudi citizens are the most responsive to joining ISIS, as indicated by new semi-official statistics, which show that the number of Saudi fighters in ISIS reached 7,000.
On February 19, 1998, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Frank Carlucci, Doug Feith, Bernard Lewis, Robert McFarlane, Donald Rumsfeld, Caspar Weinberger, Paul Wolfowitz, and many others, addressed an open letter to Bill Clinton demanding that Saddam Hussein’s regime be brought down. On March 20, 2003, a coalition led by the United States invaded Iraq. Saddam Hussein was hung on December 30, 2006. This intervention was followed by a series of coups and military operations whose ultimate goal was the dismemberment of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the establishment of a state of chaos in the Middle East. The objective was met. Yet, today the United States is caught in an incredible quagmire with no exit strategy. Let’s examine briefly the main consequences of the Iraqi invasion.
We really should be used to this by now. After almost six years in office, President Obama is far more like George W. Bush in national-security matters than he led the American people to believe.
A 90-year-old chocolate company in Belgium got tired of its name of Italo Suisse last year and settled on what it thought was a sure winner: ISIS. Then along came the extremist group Islamic State, known by various names, including, of course, ISIS. “Had we known there was a terrorist organization with the same name, we would have never chosen that,” a company exec tells Reuters. Amid declining sales, the company is switching yet again, to Libeert, after the company’s owners.
Blackwater Worldwide guards were found guilty Wednesday of killing 14 Iraqis and wounding 17 others after they fired machine guns and threw hand grenades into Baghdad’s Nisour Square seven years ago. Jurors ultimately rejected the guards’ claims that they were acting in self-defense, as none of the victims were insurgents. The conclusion of the 11-week trial brings a close to one of the darkest chapters of the Iraq War.
And in many cases we nourish such elements. It is now an open secret that Osama Bin Laden was propped up by CIA of the US. Taleban too were a US creation to deal with the Russian forces in Afghanistan. When the embers of fire that you nurture begin burning your own hands you call them evil forces and terrorists that need to be destroyed.
Moscow wanted to improve its negotiating position with the US in order to force Washington to suspend the project. And according to the paper, Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov considered several options for countering SDI, like “increasing the number of missiles, reinforcing missile silos to increase their survivability, using decoys on missiles to make intercepts more difficult,” and “developing and deploying an underwater missile that would not be affected by the space-based missile shield.”
The hostages were taken out of their cell one by one.
In a private room, their captors asked each of them three intimate questions, a standard technique used to obtain proof that a prisoner is still alive in a kidnapping negotiation.
James Foley returned to the cell he shared with nearly two dozen other Western hostages and collapsed in tears of joy. The questions his kidnappers had asked were so personal (“Who cried at your brother’s wedding?” “Who was the captain of your high school soccer team?”) that he knew they were finally in touch with his family.
It was December 2013, and more than a year had passed since Mr. Foley vanished on a road in northern Syria. Finally, his worried parents would know he was alive, he told his fellow captives. His government, he believed, would soon negotiate his release.
[...]
“They checked my camera,” Mr. Suder said. “They checked my tablet. Then they undressed me completely. I was naked. They looked to see if there was a GPS chip under my skin or in my clothes. Then they started beating me. They Googled ‘Marcin Suder and C.I.A.,’ ‘Marcin Suder and K.G.B.’ They accused me of being a spy.”
Unconventional warfare isn’t popular among Western strategists these days. Whether it’s supporting insurgent groups (the strict definition) or supporting militias allied with government forces, proxy warfare has a bad reputation. The complex situation in Syria and Iraq isn’t helping matters: the US is struggling to find a reliable proxy in Syria and confidence in Iraq’s security forces and associated militias is low. In a recent editorial in the Canberra Times, Hugh White said, “For half a century America and its allies have been trying to win messy civil wars without fighting themselves and by training and equipping one side or the other. It never works.”
Ukrainian government forces used cluster munitions in populated areas in Donetsk city in early October 2014, Human Rights Watch said today. The use of cluster munitions in populated areas violates the laws of war due to the indiscriminate nature of the weapon and may amount to war crimes.
Critics believe this policy would have been easy three years ago, when the opposition to Assad was more secular and democratic. It’s a fact that the demonstrations against the Assad regime in the initial months seemed to be carried out by more secular and liberal people. This was also true in Libya and Egypt. But over time, more organized, passionate and religious forces triumphed. This is a familiar pattern in revolutions including the French, Russian and Iranian. They are begun by liberals and taken over by radicals. Now all the effective ground forces of rebels in Syria are radicals.
An international poll found that the United States is ranked far in the lead as “the biggest threat to world peace today,” far ahead of second-place Pakistan, with no one else even close.
After the “accidental” death of socialist candidate Eduardo Campos, Brazilians were asked to choose their president among three main candidates: outgoing President Dima Rousseff, the Social Democrat Aecio Neves, or Campus’ substitute, the environmentalist Marina Silva, known for her links with George Soros. Silva’s decision to rally behind Neves seemed to ward off foreign interference, but it is having the opposite effect, observes Wayne Madsen.
All CIA information and propaganda resources are used to support Neves. Around 80 million Brazilians have access to Internet, 150 million are cell phone users. The US special services have perfect command of destabilization techniques. The recent protests and social unrest in Brazil threatened the World Cup proving that the forces are ready to react as the «color revolution» scenario to be implemented at any time.
Former President Salvador Allende, the president who was overthrown in the coup, was everything U.S. President Richard Nixon was threatened by at that time. Allende was a
socialist.
The U.S. feared an “irreversible Marxist regime” would take hold in Chile, according to Kristian Gustafson in an article on the CIA’s website.
Allende did not sanction violence, but his softer brand of socialism was no less alarming for the CIA and other vested interests. The perception was that Allende’s regime might in the long-run prove a more durable model than the Cuban one, not just for Chile, but for other countries in South America.
The ex-prime minister also confirmed the cooperation of Australian secret services with the CIA in the fall of Chilean president Salvador Allende’s government, overthrown in a rightwing military coup in 1973.
Acclaimed Australian author Peter Carey says that the Abbott government is ‘inhumane’, becoming the second high-profile writer in a week to criticise Australia’s political leadership.
The Islamist-dominated militias who control Tripoli and Benghazi convened the General National Congress(GNC), which appointed a prime minister who formed a government but the internationally-recognized elected government is in Tobruk, in eastern Libya.
General Khalifa Haftar, often called a “renegade,” now has the support of the internationally-recognized Libyan government in Tobruk. His coup has been successful.
This week marks the three-year anniversary of the Western-backed assassination of Libya’s former president, Muammar Gaddafi, and the fall of one of Africa’s greatest nations.
On December 20, 1989, US Army Captain Linda Bray, then 29 years old, was the first woman to command American soldiers in battle, during the invasion of Panama. She ordered her team of 30 to fire on soldiers of the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) who refused to surrender their positions at a dog kennel which was being used as a barracks for Special Operations troops. According to the Women In Military Service for America Memorial Foundation, “She anticipated a routine operation, but the battle turned into a three-hour, infantry-style firefight.” Three PDF soldiers were killed, and one was taken prisoner. Captain Bray is one of the women featured in the PBS Makers episode “Women in War,” which airs Tuesday, October 21 at 9 pm.
The Nicaraguan people dared overthrow a US-backed dictator and, in the name of democracy, the Reagan administration responded by funding and arming a right-wing insurgency that killed over 50,000 people – on a per capita basis, fewer people died in the US civil war. When that insurgency failed to seize power by force – again, in the name of democracy – the Reagan administration encouraged the conservative opposition to boycott the free and fair election Nicaragua did indeed have in 1984, seeing that as the only way to harm the legitimacy of a popular government that would no doubt win the election (which it did, with 70 percent of the vote).
THIS month marks the three-year anniversary of the Western-backed assassination of Libya’s former president, Muammar Gaddafi, and the fall of one of Africa’s greatest nations.
In 1967 Colonel Gaddafi inherited one of the poorest nations in Africa; however, by the time he was assassinated, Gaddafi had turned Libya into Africa’s wealthiest nation. Libya had the highest GDP per capita and life expectancy on the continent. Less people lived below the poverty line than in the Netherlands.
After NATO’s intervention in 2011, Libya is now a failed state and its economy is in shambles. As the government’s control slips through their fingers and into the militia fighters’ hands, oil production has all but stopped.
Four six-by-six quilts are on display for the next month throughout the Capital District as part of an exhibit to make the general public aware of military drones and their civilian casualties.
A high court bench on Monday summoned the Secretariat police station house officer (SHO) for not registering a case against a former Central Investigation Agency (CIA) station chief over the deaths of civilians in a 2009 drone strike in North Waziristan.
The Islamabad High Court (IHC) Monday summoned Station House Officer (SHO) Secretariat Police Station for not registering First Information Report (FIR) despite court’s orders against former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) station chief in Islamabad Jonathan Banks over deaths of civilians in US drone attacks.
Here’s a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” stat from our new age of national security. How many Americans have security clearances? The answer: 5.1 million, a figure that reflects the explosive growth of the national security state in the post-9/11 era. Imagine the kind of system needed just to vet that many people for access to our secret world (to the tune of billions of dollars). We’re talking here about the total population of Norway and significantly more people than you can find in Costa Rica, Ireland, or New Zealand. And yet it’s only about 1.6% of the American population, while on ever more matters, the unvetted 98.4% of us are meant to be left in the dark.
In October 2012 two girls were wounded in two different armed actions in the north-western reaches of Pakistan. The first victim was Malala Yousafzai, the recent Nobel Prize recipient. The lesser known girl is Nabila ur-Rehman, then eight years old. Nabila was shot at by a CIA-operated drone while picking okra in a field near her home and Malala by the Taliban. Six of Nabila’s siblings were also shot and her grandmother killed in the attack.
Some argue that the Nobel Peace Prize is given to the less deserved candidate, Malala Yousufzai, as a political move by the West. Since being shot, Malala has spoken about girl’s education everywhere and has acted as a global citizen. She also speaks in favor of “Bring Back Our Girls,” which is an initiative that was started to bring kidnapped Nigerian girls, back to their families. In addition to her work with girl’s education and the ‘ Bring Back Our Girls’ initiative, she started her own foundation called the “Malala Fund,” for education.
The Pentagon acknowledged Wednesday that an airdropped pallet of weapons, ammunition and medical supplies intended for the besieged Kurds of Kobani missed the drop zone and was taken by ISIS.
The admission followed the posting of a video Tuesday to a YouTube account affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that purported to show a masked militant inspecting crates of grenades and other weaponry, and walking past a large bundle that appeared to have come from an airdrop.
I haven’t read the story in years. It’s in a box in the garage probably overrun by silverfish. But I do recall how it featured the CIA’s assistant station chief handing me a CIA job application during one of our encounters in a coffee shop in San Francisco’s financial district and providing me with a personal introduction to CIA boss Richard Colby before Colby gave speech to the local Council of Foreign Relations chapter at the Sheraton Palace Hotel.
BND is the German version of the CIA. Malaysian Airlines flight 17 was shot down over the Eastern Ukraine. All 288 onboard died. Accused of shooting down the plane was the Russian speaking separatists group in the Eastern Ukraine.
The German BND is not an independent intelligent service but more like a CIA branch, Manuel Ochsenreiter, Editor-in-Chief of Zuerst magazine, told RT. Its so-called evidence on the MH17 tragedy is questionable and contradicting, he added.
German journalist Udo Ulfkotte has decided to blow the whistle and has made allegations that intelligent agents across some countries have influenced the media. According to RT Ulfkotte made the revelations during interviews with RT and Russia Insider.
Ulfkotte told Russia Insider, “I ended up publishing articles under my own name written by agents of the CIA and other intelligence services, especially the German secret service,” He made similar comments to RT in an exclusive interview at the beginning of October.
Dr. Udo Konstantin Ulfkotte, a German journalist, was formerly an editor for one of Germany’s main dailies, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), and worked there for 17 years. Earlier Ulfkotte had studied jurisprudence and politics at Freiburg and London and was on the staff of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation of the Christian-Democrats from 1999 to 2003. He won the security-issues related prize of the Annette Barthelt Foundation in 2003.
[...]
Working for the mainstream media means today that one’s career is preprogrammed from being a journalists to becoming a propagandist. If you’ve read this book (English editions coming soon), you will see most of the mainstream newspapers with entirely different eyes, you will more often just turn off the TV, and you will know what you still can believe from the radio transmissions: almost nothing.
German journalist and editor Udo Ulfkotte says he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, adding that noncompliance ran the risk of being fired. Ulfkotte made the revelations during interviews with European media, has also published a book which quickly became best seller on Amazon.
He went to Harvard, served in in the Navy during WWII and worked for the CIA’s European propaganda unit during the 1950s before fully embarking on his journalistic career.
As mentioned, Bradlee was at the time the Washington Bureau Chief of Newsweek. He is now, this campaign season of October, 1964, in possession of a blockbuster of a story. The President of the United States was conducting an affair with the ex-wife of a high-ranking CIA official.
The murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer was never solved, and is still a regular fixture of JFK conspiracy narratives. The police apprehended a man shortly after her shooting, but without much by way of evidence against him, he was acquitted at trail. Regardless, the psychic blow of Mary’s murder, coming so soon after his friend Jack Kennedy’s, had a profound effect on Bradlee.
When I told Ben that I hoped my book might finally shed light upon the secret cooperation that went on between reporters and the CIA, he smiled broadly and said: “Good luck.” I knew it was a sensitive subject, since a 1979 biography of Katharine Graham—Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and The Washington Post—by a Washington-based journalist, Deborah Davis, had alleged that Bradlee willingly engaged in a CIA propaganda campaign while serving as a press attaché at the American embassy in Paris during the early 1950s.
Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee began as a preppy but soon got over it. The scion of a Boston Brahmin family, he left Harvard to join the Navy in World War II, serving on a destroyer in the Pacific and learning how to swear (any tape of editorial meetings at the Post in Bradlee’s time would have been more profane than anything uttered by Nixon in the Oval Office). Daily journalism was considered to be slumming it by most of Bradlee’s boyhood social peers, but Bradlee loved hanging around with gamblers and hard-bitten types. He covered crime for the small and insignificant Washington Post after the war, then took off to Paris for a time to serve as an embassy staffer (and, according to probably inaccurate rumor, as a CIA agent). He came back to Washington with Newsweek and immediately made a source of a rising politician named John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy was elected president, Bradlee and his second wife, Tony, would dine at the White House with Jack and Jackie, while other newsmen stood in the cold and jealously muttered that Bradlee was too close to the president.
The report was the first time state-run media had linked militants from Xinjiang, home to ethnic minority Uighur Muslims, to militants of the Islamic State group of radical Sunni Muslims.
China’s government has blamed a surge of violence over the past year on Islamist militants from Xinjiang who China says are fighting for an independent state called East Turkestan.
However, it isn’t just China’s government that claims militants in Xinjiang seek to carve out an independent state in western China – the militants themselves have stated as much, and the United States government fully backs their agenda to do so.
Last month, 43 politically active “leftist” students (male and female) hijacked a school bus to return them to their small campus. They disappeared before they arrived.
In this new and original analysis, Thierry Meyssan exposes the geopolitical reasons for the failure of the war against Syria and the real objectives of the so-called war against Daesh. This is particularly important for understanding current international relations and the crystallization of conflict in the Levant (Iraq, Syria and Lebanon).
Official Washington treats whatever comes out of Russian President Putin’s mouth as the ravings of a lunatic, even when what he says is obviously true or otherwise makes sense, as the New York Times has demonstrated again, writes Robert Parry.
Since bursting onto the U.S. foreign policy stage in the 1980s, the neocons have been masters of “perception management,” devising emotional (and often false) messaging to justify aggressive war, as Maidhc Ó Cathail sees in recent Holocaust-themed propaganda against Syria’s government.
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s prophetic words in a 1961 speech at Michigan State University:
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – econo0mic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved, so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
An intelligence-sharing network headed by the CIA and used by six South American dictators, eliminated those who resisted them.
Operation Condor, also known as Plan Condor — developed by Henry Kissinger and George Bush Sr., who was head of the CIA at the time — was a secret, transnational, state-sponsored terrorist coalition amongst the genocidal civic military dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia.
Argentine Secretary on Human Rights, Martín Fresneda, who gave a public address on the matter this week said “It hasn’t been very hard to understand what occurred in as much as the political, economic and social plan they had for Latin America and the south of our continent. What has been very hard to understand is how far they actually went. How they exterminated our people, in the worst way possible.”
A report from a commission chaired by the former Director of GCHQ has called on the British Government to implement “safeguards” to ensure that UK drone personnel “remain compliant with international law.”
Citing the “sinister cultural and political salience” of US drone operations, the commission – which is chaired by Sir David Omand and was initiated by the University of Birmingham – recommends that measures be taken to ensure that where intelligence is shared with the US, “the UK government does not inadvertently collude in RPA [drone] actions contrary to international law.”
In 2004, Stuart Bowen of Texas was asked by a friend to take on a difficult and important job, which he did.
Bowen’s friend was George W. Bush, and the job was to investigate corruption and waste in Iraq, where his buddy George had launched a misguided and very costly war, as well as an effort to reconstruct that country’s fractured economy. The watchdog soon learned that Air Force transport planes had been airlifting whole pallets of shrink-wrapped $100 bills from the US to Baghdad – totaling some $14 billion!
But a new book, “Back Channel To Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana,” reveals that behind the scenes, the U.S. and Cuban governments maintained secret communications, often via covert intermediaries, that included dialogue and negotiations on a range of issues, including repeated efforts to improve relations. One previously unknown potential crisis point described in the book, were plans for an all-out U.S. war against Cuba initiated in 1976 by then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was outraged that Fidel Castro deployed Cuban troops to Angola in the mid 1970s to defend the African nation against CIA and South African sponsored rebels.
Congressional neocons are determined to sink negotiations to constrain but not end Iran’s nuclear program – all the better to get on with bombing Iran at the heart of their agenda. They are now disguising their sabotage as a constitutional argument, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.
That’s it. Sweden was informed – and accepted – that US/NATO would regularly be present in Swedish waters.
Naturally, a formally neutral country couldn’t that say aloud.
Things may have changed since the 1980s, of course. But with the increased confrontation thanks to NATO’s expansion and the Ukraine crisis leading to a kind of resumption of Cold War attitudes, this interpretation would indeed be relevant today too.
The Center for Public Policy Analysis (CPPA) and Lao- and Hmong-American leaders are meeting with key members of the U.S. Congress, and Senate and House offices on Capitol Hill, urging the passage of legislation to grant burial honors, and benefits, to veterans who served in the U.S. Secret Army in Laos during the Vietnam War.
The CIA has been secretly supporting rebel groups around the world since its inception. Before making his Syrian decision, Mr. Obama asked the CIA for one instance where this covert activity paid dividends for the United States. When it couldn’t do it, Mr. Obama decided not to arm the Syrian rebels for fear the weapons would one day be used against us.
Panetta accuses Mr. Obama of being too professorial — meaning he thinks logically. In all my years in politics, Panetta said, I’ve learned that “logic doesn’t work in Washington.” I have never heard a statement so revealing and frightening concerning the state of our union. Absent reason and logic, we are openly governed by our emotions and our prejudices.
Is it any wonder that we have been at war almost constantly since Vietnam for fear, irrationally, that we might be attacked, and that the dogs of war are still crying for more?
How much of our cash for this misadventure will be stolen or “missing?” And just think how much good that money would do if we invested it here in our own people?
Putin spoke October 24 at the annual meeting of the Valdai Club, where foreign policy experts from around the world gather to talk about Russia. Although its major themes were previewed by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov a few days before, the Russian website slon.ru said that the speech “could confidently be placed in the same rank as the 2007 Munich speech” (his first substantial criticism of the U.S. and the unipolar world it led) and was “the most anti-American speech Putin has given since coming to office 14 years ago.”
“I don’t oppose all wars,” said Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator, in 2002. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.”
Few would describe Obama’s use of military force against the Islamic State as rash. But the more we learn about this intervention, the more it appears to violate the “dumb” half of the president’s dictum. The purposes, parameters and prospects of the war are increasingly uncertain. Americans have a right to be concerned about the whole enterprise.
Last week the international anti-corruption body Transparency International (TI) awarded its annual Integrity Award to Thuli Madonsela, South Africa’s Public Protector. The Berlin-based organization is best known for its yearly Corruption Perceptions Index ranking levels of corruption in each of the world’s countries. Since 2000, TI has also presented its Integrity Award to “recognise the courage and determination of the many individuals and organisations confronting corruption around the world, often at great personal risk.”
Beyond that, government attorneys also took the opportunity to rebut the court’s criticism of the use of the state secrets privilege, and to defend several past assertions of the privilege.
Sao Paulo residents, half of whom are already complaining of hours-long water shortages, were warned by a top water regulator Tuesday to brace for more severe cutoffs.
“If the drought continues, residents will face more dramatic water shortages in the short term,” Vicente Andreu, president of Brazil’s National Water Agency, known as ANA, told reporters in Sao Paulo as he prepared to speak to the state legislature. “If it doesn’t rain, we run the risk that the region will have a collapse like we’ve never seen before,” he later told lawmakers.
Climate change – what the Pentagon calls a “threat multiplier” – could put the world on course toward worsening chaos or even extermination as nuclear-armed nations scramble to cope with environmental dislocations and resource shortages, a danger that could define the future, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
The higher the ratio is of the mean/median, the more heavily skewed that nation’s wealth-distribution is. The lowest such ratio on this list is Slovenia, $33,395/$21,855, or 1.53. Malta’s is 1.71. Belgium’s is 1.75. Italy’s is 1.84. Luxembourg’s is 1.98. Spain’s is 1.99. All others are above 2. The highest wealth-inequality is found in U.S., 6.60; Denmark, 6.57; and Switzerland, 5.71. However, Denmark is one of the most-equal countries in terms of annual incomes. The U.S. is the only country that is extremely skewed in terms of both wealth and income. What’s shown below relates only to wealth; not at all to income.
As a deputy national security advisor, McDonough hosted similar engagement meetings, one source said. And when he became chief of staff, he very publicly made the rounds in Congress, trying to broker a budget deal — an effort reporters christened the McDonough “charm offensive” and the “outreach offensive.”
The Obama administration is fighting a bitter rearguard action against the release of further damning evidence that the US military engaged in the torture of prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Her continuous comments on Turkey led her to achieve popularity among Turkish Twitter users. A good portion of her 22,200 Twitter followers are Turks, many of whom put her diplomatic position aside and ask her random questions. “Could we have a coffee together,” one asked, while another user said, “Marie is like a member of our family now.” One follower said Harf is more of a “show-off person” than Polat Alemdar, a character in a popular Turkish TV series in which Alemdar is a cool agent attempting to infiltrate the Turkish mafia. She even received a tweet that said, “hey Marie, any photo without glasses??”
Republicans are promising to confront the Obama administration at every turn if they win the Senate, fighting environmental regulations, health care reform and presidential nominees.
The $103 million taxpayer funding of New Zealand’s intelligence agencies is effectively a membership fee for joining the Five Eyes surveillance club with the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, according to a de-classified report.
Google is not just an internet company any more, but a huge all-encompassing monopoly closely involved with the political agenda of the United States, WikiLeaks co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange said in an article published in Newsweek.
The article, in which Assange reveals Google’s connections with the White House, is based on the author’s encounter with Google’s chariman Eric Schmidt.
Let’s face it: Feminism is hot right now. Like, actually fashionable. Chalk it up to a boom in online journalism critiquing tired media tropes and holding politicians accountable with acerbic wit. But there’s one related trend that doesn’t seem to be getting fashionable again: “Cyberfeminism.” Remember that?
Film looks at cybersleuth’s life in Russia and how journalist Glenn Greenwald and director Laura Poitras may be in contact with an important new source
Internal National Security Agency documents published by the Intercept earlier this month provide powerful evidence of active collaboration by the large technology corporations with the US government’s worldwide surveillance operations. The documents give a glimpse of efforts by the American state—the scale and complexity of which are astonishing—to penetrate, surveil and manipulate information systems around the world.
One of the most high-profile ways in which mathematicians are implicated in mass surveillance is in the intelligence agencies’ deliberate weakening of commercially available encryption systems — the same systems that we rely on to protect ourselves from fraud, and, if we wish, to ensure our basic human privacy.
It was Cohen who, while he was still at the Department of State, was said to have emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance in order to assist the aborted 2009 uprising in Iran.
In what has been called an “unprecedented” expansion of its legacy, a Manhattan judge recently allowed the NYPD and its former commissioner, Ray Kelly, to neither confirm nor deny possession of documents requested by a Harlem imam in the case of Abdur-Rashid v. NYPD.
In his new book “Worthy Fights ,” Leon Panetta says the CIA “got important, even critical intelligence from individuals subjected to these enhanced interrogation techniques” — meaning waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other torture-like actions.
In 2005 the Bush administration revealed that it interpreted the UN Convention Against Torture banning “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” as not applicable to the CIA or military prisons overseas.
Like so many other things Barack Obama thought were so terrible about his predecessor in office—war in Iraq, executive orders, lack of transparency—he may have decided that torture isn’t so bad when you’re on the delivering end. Having inherited the collector’s edition bamboo splinter set (with user’s manual!), the administration, reports the New York Times, sees no reason to let it gather dust. So it’s considering airing out the old regime’s legal justifications for extracting information under duress.
TORTURE Over the weekend, The New York Times’ Charlie Savage reported that State Department attorneys are urging the president to “officially abandon” the George W. Bush Administration’s stance on the United Nations Convention Against Torture, arecommendation that has been met with some skepticism by defense and intelligence attorneys, who say they need more time to consider implications of adhering to the torture treaty. The Bush Administration interpreted the treaty, which bans “cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment” of prisoners, as not applying to CIA and military prisons overseas. That position drew bipartisan ire and was opposed by then-Senator Barack Obama. The Obama Administration must make its final decision on the matter before it travels to Geneva next month to appear before the United Nations Committee Against Torture, which monitors compliance with the torture treaty.
Don’t expect the release of a Senate report on acts of torture committed by the CIA to become an uncomfortable election year October surprise.
Asked Tuesday what was taking time to reach an agreement on redactions with the Senate Intelligence Committee, the White House responded with a statement from National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan that pointed to deliberative discussions, but no time element for their conclusion.
White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough is deeply involved in negotiating how much to redact from a classified US Senate probe into the CIA’s post-9/11 detention and interrogation program, according to a new report.
Pope Francis has renewed the Catholic Church’s call to eliminate the death penalty, going one step further to blast life sentences and urge countries to prohibit the practice of transferring prisoners to torture centers.
That Pope Francis spoke out today against capital punishment is no big surprise. But he made headlines by coming out against life sentences as well, reports the Guardian. In a speech to the International Association of Penal Law, the pope urged all “people of good will” to fight for the abolishment of the death penalty and the improvement of prison conditions in general. “And this, I connect with life imprisonment,” he said, as quoted by the Catholic News Service. “Life imprisonment is a hidden death penalty.”
In a sane Western society, Putin’s statements would have been reproduced in full and discussions organized with remarks from experts such as Stephen F. Cohen. Choruses of approval would have been heard on television and read in the print media. But, of course, nothing like this is possible in a country whose rulers claim that it is the “exceptional” and “indispensable” country with an extra-legal right to hegemony over the world. As far as Washington and its prostitute media, named “presstitutes” by the trends specialist Gerald Celente, are concerned, no country counts except Washington. “You are with us or against us,” which means “you are our vassals or our enemies.” This means that Washington has declared Russia, China, India, Brazil and other parts of South America, Iran, and South Africa to be enemies.
Comedian Jon Stewart’s debut as a movie director entertains, enlightens and even inspires. But be warned, fans of “The Daily Show”: In case you haven’t heard, it’s not a comedy.
Not unless you get your laughs in the sarcastic way that I often do, from the endless ways with which the people who run governments give government a bad name.
New details about CIA spying on the U.S. Senate suggest agents impersonated Senate Intelligence Committee staffers to access computers used to compile a report about the agency’s post-9/11 torture and imprisonment techniques.
Ah, but this week we learned that the current White House is very much involved in the declassification of that report. In fact, according to Huffington Post, the White House Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough, has taken an active role in the redaction effort. The same story also reveals allegations that Central Intelligence Agency officials impersonated Senate staffers to improperly access committee documents.
An investigation by the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms into CIA spying of Senate Intelligence Committee computers wrapped up this week without drawing any significant conclusions as a result of lost computer records reportedly deleted by the agency.
In anticipation of release of a public version of a mammoth report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on interrogation techniques, Walter Pincus has reviewed in the Washington Post what former secretary of defense and former CIA director Leon Panetta says about the subject in his recently published memoir. Pincus refers to Panetta as a “wily politician” and quotes Panetta’s comments both that we “got important, even critical intelligence from individuals subjected to these enhanced interrogation techniques” and that “if a future president ever asked me whether we should go back to those techniques, I would say no.” The Post’s headline-writer for the print edition characterized this combination of positions as “Panetta takes both sides”.
The CIA today hotly denied that it is intentionally holding up the release of a Senate report on its role in torturing detainees, charging instead that Senator Dianne Feinstein’s intelligence committee is responsible for dragging out the negotiations.
The issue took a personal turn when Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the C.I.A. of spying on the computers of Senate staffers who were working on the report at a C.I.A. office. The agency eventually admitted that it had monitored a computer drive that was to be used only by Senate staffers, but claimed it had to because classified material was being removed from the building. C.I.A. director John Brennan eventually apologized for the breach.
Continued White House foot-dragging on the declassification of a much-anticipated Senate torture report is raising concerns that the administration is holding out until Republicans take over the chamber and kill the report themselves.
The CIA has rejected allegations of temporizing the joint White House/Senate committee/CIA report on Al-Qaeda detainees’ torture after Senate Democrats had accused them of having not declassified enough information.
Ryan Grim and Ali Watkins of Huffington Post headlined in an October 23rd news story, “Senate-CIA Dispute Unsettled As Final Investigation Into Torture Report Ends,” and they reported that the investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, concerning records that the CIA had erased from its computer hard drives, pertaining to the CIA’s role in the use of illegal tortures of detainees, has been halted, because the Senate’s chief law enforcer, its Sergeant-at-Arms, says that he “can’t verify any of what CIA is saying.” Furthermore, even the Inspector General of the CIA himself asserts that the CIA’s accusations of illegality in the way that the Senate investigating panel had received the CIA documents that the CIA had wanted to hide, was based on “inaccurate information” that was supplied by the CIA. The key document was “The Panetta Review” of the CIA’s role in the tortures. Leon Panetta was the Obama-appointed CIA chief. The Obama Administration — its Justice Department, under Attorney General Eric Holder — declined to investigate the CIA’s accusation against the Senate Intelligence Committee, which — since Democrats currently control the U.S. Senate — is controlled by a Democratic Senator, California’s Dianne Feinstein. Furthermore, Holder refuses to investigate possible criminality by the CIA. So: President Obama, via his AG, has, essentially, waved off the entire matter.
Twenty years ago, the United States ratified an international treaty banning the use of torture and cruelty worldwide. Three successive American presidents, with bipartisan support, threw their weight behind the treaty – Ronald Reagan signed it in 1988, George H.W. Bush approved it, and Bill Clinton signed implementing legislation into law in 1994.
Whether you call it cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or enhanced interrogation tactics, torture is a torture, except for the Obama’s administration, they are divided on that subject.
Next month el Presidente Obama must send a delegation to Geneva [1] to appear before the “Committee Against Torture”, a United Nations panel that monitors compliance with the U.N, treaty banning “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”.
It’s unclear why the administration has to make a presentation at this time, as it has never done so in the almost six years of Obama’s presidency.
Be that as it may, this upcoming appearance has apparently created a firestorm within the Obama mobs inner sanctum.
Mendez, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture, confirmed that he has still not gotten to visit Bahrain, after having two invitations canceled at the last minute. He said he recently asked Bahrain’s foreign minister to name another date, but it has still not happened.
Other countries that have canceled invitations, Mendez went on to say, include Guatemala and Thailand (which, along with Costa Rica, lost in the UN Human Rights Council elections earlier on October 21).
The US imposed conditions on a visit to Guantanamo Bay which Mendez could not accept. Mendez did not answer the Obama administration / extra-territoriality question, leaving it for Grossman, the chair of the UN Committee Against Torture. Video here. He gave a long answer, repeatedly saying his answer was NOT about the United States. Talk about deference.
Tuesday marked the 20th anniversary of the U.S. ratification of the U.N. Convention Against Torture (CAT), but there’s not much cause for celebration. The U.S. was slow to join the treaty in the first place—countries like Afghanistan, Somalia, and Uganda beat us to it—and adherence to its guidelines over the past two decades has been dismal. It’s become even more dismal of late, just in time for what’s certain to be a damning review of the U.S. when the Commitee Against Torture meets in less than two weeks.
Prosecutor-General Andrzej Seremet has said Poland’s appeal against the European Court of Human Rights decision has reached the final stage of preparation after the court found the country had violated human rights of prisoners held in secret CIA prisons.
Lebanese-American reporter Serena Shim, who worked with Iran’s state-run Press TV, died in a car crash in the Suruç district of Şanlıurfa on Sunday in what Press TV called a “suspicious” accident after she had said she was accused of spying by the National Intelligence Organization (MİT).
The 30-year-old correspondent, who was in Suruç to cover the battle of Kobani, a Kurdish town besieged by the terrorist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in northern Syria, said in a televised speech on Press TV on Friday she had been accused by MİT of espionage and feared being arrested.
Former CIA director Leon E. Panetta clashed with the agency over the contents of his recently published memoir and allowed his publisher to begin editing and making copies of the book before he had received final approval from the CIA, according to former U.S. officials and others familiar with the project.
Former CIA Director Leon Panetta clashed with the agency over the contents of his recently published memoir and allowed his publisher to begin editing and making copies of the book before he had received final approval from the CIA, according to former officials and others familiar with the project.
President Obama’s former Defense secretaries are coming under fire in light of their memoirs that criticize the commander-in-chief while he’s still in office.
Yesterday, the Washington Post had a lengthy report on how former CIA director Leon Panetta was sending out copies of his book nearly a month before it cleared the CIA’s internal revue process to ensure that no sensitive national security information was being revealed. According to the Post, Panetta clashed with his former agency repeatedly throughout the process. And he refused to hold himself to the same standards of secrecy that he demanded while he was CIA director, having publicly scolded Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette for his own book about the Bin Laden raid. The Post also notes that Panetta played fast and loose with state secrets at the CIA: “His public comments about the drone campaign — including his description of airstrikes on al-Qaeda as “the only game in town” — were so extensive that the American Civil Liberties Union cited them extensively in a lawsuit that argued the program could no longer be considered a government secret.”
White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough is personally negotiating how much of the Senate’s so-called torture report, a probe into the CIA’s post-9/11 detention and interrogation program, will be redacted, according to sources involved in the negotiations.
The latest proof of this? The soon-to-be-released Senate report on the torture, kidnapping, illegal detention, and interrogation of Afghan citizens and others swept up and delivered to the CIA during the initial stages of Bush’s “war on terror” does not even mention the responsibility of the Bush Administration in organizing, ordering, and carrying out these criminal activities. It’s as though the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials were conducted with no mention of Himmler, Goebbels, Goring or Hitler.
The International Criminal Court issued a warning to the Government of Kenya on Tuesday not to disclose confidential information regarding President Uhuru’s court proceedings.
No single review or interview can do justice to Pay Any Price, the new book by James Risen that is the antithesis of what routinely passes for journalism about the “war on terror.” Instead of evasive tunnel vision, the book offers big-picture acuity, focusing on realities that are pervasive and vastly destructive.
In a determined effort to punish James Risen, the New York Times investigative reporter, the Bush and now the Obama administration has threatened him with imprisonment unless he reveals his source who provided him details of the massive illegal warrantless wiretapping conducted by the National Security Agency. This case will undoubtedly become the most significant challenge to press freedom in decades.
But one set of revelations in particular has the American Psychological Association up in arms. The APA released a statement last week disputing details of Risen’s account of its relationship with the Defense Department, Central Intelligence Agency and other government officials regarding enhanced interrogation techniques for detainees suspected of terrorism – what many critics have called torture.
In his new book Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, James Risen, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter, documents apparent collaboration between (American Psychological Association) APA leadership and the CIA to support psychologist participation in torture. The core of Risen’s reporting drew from primary source emails among APA staff, CIA, and Bush White House officials. The APA Board has since issued a response to the book, but the Board statement misstates or ignores virtually all of Risen’s reporting. Here we summarize Risen’s claims and provide precise questions for the APA Board regarding these claims.
Bill Maher hosted journalist James Risen tonight and asked him about his past assertions that President Obama is the “greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation.”
Risen, of course, is facing possible jail time for not revealing his sources for stories very critical of the CIA. He told Maher that the national security apparatus was hurried under the Bush/Cheney era, but Obama made everything permanent. He said Obama’s gone after more whistleblowers than any other presidents combined and added, “I think he’s more conservative than people thought he was.”
Former Russian spy chief Nikolai Patrushev challenges western perspectives on the standoff between Moscow and Kiev in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta
On Sept. 22, Workers World conducted an extensive interview with Victor Shapinov, a coordinator and leading theoretician of the Marxist organization Union Borotba (Struggle) of Ukraine. Shapinov currently lives in exile with other Borotba activists in Crimea, under threat of arrest from the U.S.-backed coup regime in Kiev.
In meeting with Jordan’s president and parliament members, king says it must be acknowledged that there is extremism in all camps; Jordanian FM says Israeli violations in Jerusalem undermining peace.
On Oct. 20, 2011, the leader of the North African state of Libya was brutally assassinated in the city of Sirte. Col. Muammar Gaddafi had been leading a struggle to defend his country from a war of regime-change coordinated and financed by the United States and NATO.
By 2007, we have Blackwater Worldwide, 2009, Xe Services,2010, Academi, 2014, Constellis Holdings, at each step enlarging its “products,” gaining more influential supporters combined with more ambitious projects (such as United States Training Center for weapons training and tactics). There is maritime force protection training, dog training, expanded security consulting—as one goes through the list, it is as though an inner army outside of public view and not accountable to the public. Special assignments such as working with CIA to track down bin Laden in Afghanistan cemented working relations with USG. An airline, Presidential Airways, called for a base in Melbourne, Florida.
Jeremy Renner gives us Gary Webb, who was once upon a time a fierce seeker of truth, a journalist Quixote who believed in his quest. Gary was a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, a fringe newspaper dealing with crop disasters, weather, earth quakes and local disputes. But suddenly he got lucky and connected with the biggest political scandal of the ’80s, the beginning of the suspicious connections between the CIA, the war in Nicaragua and the inner city cocaine epidemic. He should have just said no. But heroes never say no.
Once again the paper has decided to focus on discrediting a fellow journalist instead of deepening the analysis of the story he highlighted.
Gary Webb put a spotlight on the CIA and the Reagan administrations unholy alliance with anti-communist guerrilla groups and their supporters who were involved in drug trafficking.
Gary Webb’s 1996 “Dark Alliance” stories for the San Jose Mercury News asserted that the CIA “looked the other way” as cocaine from Central America was imported into the United States, beginning in the Reagan years. Profits from the drugs helped fund the right-wing counterrevolution in Nicaragua, the stories alleged. The cocaine, Mr. Webb wrote, contributed to a crack epidemic in U.S. cities and a surge of black inmates into U.S. prisons. Mr. Webb was hounded from his job at the Mercury News and, arguably, to his death by suicide in 2004.
Now comes the film story of Mr. Webb’s reporting, “Kill the Messenger,” and, close behind, The Post’s Jeff Leen with “An amazing story that didn’t hold up” [Outlook, Oct. 19]. When Mr. Webb’s series ran in the Mercury News, Mr. Leen was working at the Miami Herald.
Mr. Leen wrote that Mr. Webb’s articles were characterized by “overblown claims and undernourished reporting,” a perspective expressed by major newspapers at the time, including The Post. But a 2006 Los Angeles Times article walked back that paper’s criticism of Mr. Webb, and even in 1996, The Post’s ombudsman wrote that The Post was overzealous in its efforts to discredit Mr. Webb.
Once an undercover spy who made his living in the shadows, Will Hurd suddenly finds himself thrust into the national spotlight as he is locked in a tight congressional race with Democratic incumbent Rep. Pete Gallego for Texas’ 23rd district.
HALFWAY through Kill The Messenger, a Washington insider (Michael Sheen) issues a warning to journalist Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner), who seems to have cracked open a major scandal linking the CIA to cocaine imports from Nicaragua. “They’ll make you the story,” he says.
On HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver recently shone a light on something unworthy of this great nation: our abandonment of foreigners to whom we owe a great debt.
Oliver’s focus was on Afghan translators who “risk their lives helping [US servicemembers] . . . and because of that, they are permanent targets of insurgents.”
The good news is there’s a special visa program to help them find refuge in the United States. The bad news? There’s a backlog of nearly 5,000, and getting the visa can take years.
As a result, many translators are forced to remain in hiding — often seeing family members killed or kidnapped — as they wait out the visa process. And the program itself will expire at the end of this year.
The military now has female soldiers escorting former CIA captives around Guantánamo’s high-value prison, an apparent personnel change that defense lawyers say is causing an uproar over religious insensitivity.
When one captive — who had just finished meeting with his attorney — refused to be touched by a female soldier, the military called in a special unit to move him using the detention center’s tackle-and-shackle technique, a Forced Cell Extraction. Since that incident, at least four of the 9/11 defendants have boycotted legal meetings over the issue, according to the attorneys.
Matt DeHart, an American who believes the United States is pursuing sham child-porn charges against him as cover for a national security investigation, has been ordered deported from Canada.
In a decision made public Tuesday, the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada concluded “reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. DeHart committed offences in the United States,” making him inadmissible to Canada — nevertheless, he will remain in Canada for the time being as there are ongoing proceedings that prevent immediate deportation.
[...]
An early member of the hacker group Anonymous, Mr. DeHart said that six years ago he came across sensitive government documents uploaded to one of his servers detailing an FBI investigation into select practices by the CIA.
In 1996, American journalist Gary Webb, writing for the San Jose Mercury News, claimed the CIA and US State Department during the Regan administration had supported the smuggling of crack cocaine into the US, as a way to help fund Contra rebels against the revolutionary government of Nicaragua. This ‘dark alliance’, Webb claimed, contributed significantly to the crack epidemic in Los Angeles, and fuelled the War on Drugs that Regan himself famously escalated.
Pyongyang has unexpectedly released Jeffrey Fowle, one of three American citizens being held for alleged crimes against North Korea. Fowle, a 56-year-old American tourist, was detained since May for leaving his Bible at a social club.
Admitting you made mistakes and being critical of yourself is a sign of wisdom. Those who do this make progress. One of the reasons for backwardness is when the opposite happens: failing to appreciate the mistakes and blaming others. If this is your method, it is easy to identify a scapegoat.
Settlers have tried on multiple occasions to prevent Palestinian workers from commuting on these buses, and have released a video calling for them to be banned.
A business doesn’t need a fleet of GNU/Linux guys to run IT. A few will do because one person can easily manage thousands of PCs with FLOSS. There are no licences to count, no networking limitations, no CPUs to count, … They just have to run the software any way that makes sense.
RunAbove’s PowerPC cloud currently offers an instance type up to 176 threads, for which I’ve spent the past few days of benchmarking. While initially the only operating system enabled in the POWER8 cloud was Fedora 19, now Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is also an option.
For those living by stable Mesa releases rather than the exciting, bleeding-edge Mesa Git code for open-source Linux graphics drivers, Mesa 10.3.2 is available this Friday night.
Now it’s enabled again for the Mesa 10.4 release that’s due out in December… Assuming no issues come up before then that causes it to be disabled by default.
While we’re most often looking at the OpenGL 3D performance of the Linux graphics drivers, in the tests currently being done of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS vs. Ubuntu 14.10 are also a number of 2D graphics benchmarks. In the article today are our 2D benchmarks between Ubuntu 14.04.1 and Ubuntu 14.10 for various AMD Radeon graphics cards and it shows off significant performance improvements.
We all take notes in various ways. Whether it’s old fashioned sticky notes littering the front of your PC monitor, an app on your smartphone or simply using your brain to take a ‘mental note’ (if your memory is that good!), it’s a useful activity. How about note taking on the command-line? And in a really Unix-y, flexible way? Memo might be for you.
I wanted to mention the tome series as a final nod to the roguelike genre, mostly because there are about three evolutions to the original game, and it has ties to some earlier titles.
The KDE Gardening Team had the idea to nominate one particular annoying bug as “The Bug of the Month”. While we have literally hundreds of bugs that would qualify, only one bug per month gets nominated.
The main technical challenges faced by KDE developers is ensuring application consistency will continue to work under various form-factors. When Kwin (the KDE window manager) controls window borders, it can quickly and gracefully adapt to multiple form-factors. For example, in Plasma active space is at such a premium KDE can hide window decorations and embed them into the workspace itself.
KDE contributor and graphics designer Ken Vermette has penned an interesting series of KDE “What if…” articles where he talks about (and has some visual mock-ups) about what KDE might look like with client-side decorations along and separately if KDE were to use Windows 10 design components.
In 2013, Debian participated in both rounds of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women (OPW). The first round was run in conjunction with GSoC and the second round was a standalone program.
I’ve been working on making GtkInspector use a different display connection. This helps isolating it from some of the changes you can trigger from inside the inspector UI. Then I thought, why not use a different backend ?!
Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything that goes on. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for October 24th, 2014:
At the beginning of today I wrote how the Fedora 21 Beta was pushed back but just by one day. Now after another Go/No-Go meeting today, Fedora 21 beta and all subsequent deadlines have been pushed back by one week.
I’ve been covering Ubuntu for seven of the release’s 10 years and 14.10 is the first time I’ve had to dig deep into the release notes just to find something new to test.
In this article are graphics card tests going back to the Radeon HD 4870 and even going back that far are 2D improvements with Ubuntu 14.10. However, most interesting is the Radeon HD 7000 series and newer where GLAMOR is used for 2D acceleration rather than UXA. GLAMOR leverages OpenGL for 2D acceleration and with X.Org Server 1.16 the GLAMOR support went from being an independent library to a highly-optimized implementation within the X.Org Server. Ubuntu 14.10 uses X.Org Server 1.16.0 along with Mesa 10.3.0, Linux 3.16, and xf86-video-ati 7.4.0.
There is some discussion of whether or not you should upgraded to 14.10 here, but the short version is, for most people an upgrade from 14.04 is not necessary but not a bad idea, and an upgrade from any earlier version is a very good idea. Mostly, though, you should just upgrade.
One could ask the question, should you be installing Ubuntu with Unity. You have to like Unity. I personally like to have a wider range of desktop options than Ubuntu with Unity allows, but for a notebook or laptop where you are going to be using one application at a time, usually use GUI apps, and like to have your computer integrated fairly seamlessly to social networking services, etc., it is a good option.
Canonical has started the development of the next iteration Ubuntu 15.04 just after the release of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn on October 23. Ubuntu developers have decided to not waste any time and start working on the next version of the distribution so they can meet the deadlines.
Canonical, the UK-based developer of Ubuntu, on Thursday released the latest version of the Linux distribution extremely popular with developers, one offering even closer integration with several emerging open-source cloud technologies as well as tools to make it easier to use competing operating systems.
A security researcher has tossed a giant bucket of ice water on Samsung’s thumbs up from the NSA approving use of certain Galaxy devices within in the agency.
The executive chairman of Google says the internet giant updated its encryption standards to make them unbreakable after learning the National Security Agency could spy on users.
In the case of the Document Foundation, the LibreOffice project needed an independent, solid and meritocratic entity dedicated to support it. In other terms, the OpenOffice.org community wanted to be its own boss and stop relying on corporate – or even third party – good will. If you attend the Community Track on the 31st you will be able to learn more about the Document Foundation and the other entities, but my message here is that while there is no silver bullet in these matters, forcing a community be hosted or to bend to a software vendor never works. It bends if it wants to; it goes whereever it wishes to go. In the case of the Document Foundation, independence and community rule prevailed over convenience; today the results do not need to be proven anymore. But it does not mean we hold the truth more than anybody else: we just ensured the community was in charge.
Others will argue that as the feature set of an operating system increases it is inevitable that its size will also increase. That is true but I can’t help wonder exactly why libc.a has to be almost 3 megabytes in size. There has been work done to make a leaner libc with the MUSL project. MUSL libc.a is a mere 1.6 megabytes which is significantly smaller.
Can a crowdfunded open-source project bring the industry together behind a QuickTime killer? Brendan Bolles, a veteran of The Orphanage and an experienced programmer of VFX plug-ins, thinks so. He’s asking the industry to contribute money supporting his development of a specification and open-source software library for MOX, a new cross-platform, patent-free professional movie format combining audio and video in an MXF container.
I had really hoped I wasn’t going to have to write this post. Yesterday, Marcy emailed me a link to a Washington’sBlog post that breathlessly asks us “Was Ebola Accidentally Released from a Bioweapons Lab In West Africa?” Sadly, that post relies on an interview with Francis Boyle, whom I admire greatly for his work as a legal scholar on bioweapons. My copy of his book is very well-thumbed. But Boyle and WashingtonsBlog are just wrong here, and it takes only seconds to prove them wrong.
Despite recent attacks in Canada and the United States, Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., doesn’t believe ISIS poses any threat to the United States. In a video posted Thursday at Grabien, Rangel also expressed disagreement with President Obama’s military action against the group.
After the tragedies of Iraq and Libya, Americans are right to expect more from their country when we go to war. America shouldn’t fight wars where the best outcome is stalemate. America shouldn’t fight wars when there is no plan for victory. America shouldn’t fight wars that aren’t authorized by the American people, by Congress. America should and will fight wars when the consequences….intended and unintended….are worth the sacrifice. The war on terror is not over, and America cannot disengage from the world.
Rand Paul will use the words of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai to attack President Obama during a major foreign-policy address on Thursday evening.
IHC had ordered for registering FIR of those killed in drone attack in the area of Mir Ali in Waziristan against CIA chief station Nathan and Legal Counsel but SHO secretariat police station Nawaz Bhatti had not registered FIR by not complying with the orders of the court. The court had summoned SHO Secretariat police station in contempt of court case.
Lawyers for the WikiLeaks founder have filed eavesdropping claims to the Swedish court, as Julian Assange, who has been stuck in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for over two years, fears he is being bugged.
Due to the leak, the state civil authorities confirmed that 150 people needed to be evacuated from the El Chote, Troncones, and other communities near the Cocineros River.
The investment company that manages the wealth of the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, has been acquiring gobs of farmland in north Florida the past two years, real estate records show.
Lakeland Sands Florida, a subsidiary of Cascade Investments LLC, which oversees the Gates fortune, recently bought more than 4,500 acres in Suwanee County near McAlpin, an unincorporated community just south of here.
The price: $27,961,144.69, according to court records.
The farm land was sold by Seldom Rest Inc., an agriculture and forestry company based in Donaldsonville, Ga. John S. Bailey, the company’s vice president, declined to comment on the transaction.
For starters, 35.9 percent of Americans find it either ‘Very Likely’ or ‘Fairly Likely’ that the biblical Armageddon will come to pass. That’s far fewer than the number of people who fear that we’re going to run out of oil—56.9 percent of us think we’re going to “exhaust the Earth’s oil supply.”
Gates then goes on to suggest that widening inequality could potentially be solved by a progressive tax on consumption, which is wrong – for two reasons.
A group of students responsible for running the Ripple, say their latest edition was delayed by Student Union officers because of a front page article which discussed student apathy towards elections held by the union itself.
This is a major step forward for free speech. Unfortunately, the benefits of the censor board’s “largesse” do not percolate down to “lesser” filmmakers like Chakravorty, who could not get permission to screen his film. The lame excuse was that he had shown a specific political party to be responsible for the riots and that a particular caste had also been mentioned. A depressed Chakravorty died due to a brain haemorrhage soon after. At about the same time that the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) was sanctioning Bhardwaj’s film, my documentary, The Textures of Loss, on depression in Kashmir, was rejected because it had the line: “ the paramilitary forces reacted with disproportionate violence”.
Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of the allied assault on Gallipoli, and a hundred years since the young Keith Murdoch penned his now famous letter to Prime Minister Andrew Fisher.
“No breasts or genitalia was shown yet they were still deemed unacceptable and excluded from the exhibition, showing that over 100 years on the female body and female sexuality is still shunned in art.
On the 10th July 2014, the UK Government announced, in light of the diverse and emerging threats faced by the UK and the need to uphold civil liberties, a review of the capabilities and powers required by law enforcement and the security and intelligence agencies, and the regulatory framework within which those capabilities and powers would be exercised.
Former NSA head Keith Alexander continues to draw the sort of attention he probably hoped he had left behind by resigning his post. His questionable business venture — a private banking security firm seemingly dependent on patents and methods polished during his tenure at the NSA — has drawn pointed questions from legislators and a second glance from the internal ethics apparatus of the intelligence agency.
Alexander apparently thought it would be fine for him to use the talents of the NSA’s current Chief Technology Officer, Patrick Dowd, for his new private venture. You see, Alexander didn’t want the country to lose a bright spy mind, but didn’t really want his own IronNet Security firm to go without Dowd’s talents either. So he compromised. The country could have Dowd full-time as long as he could spend 20 hours a week securing banks with Chief Keith.
Keith Alexander, former director of the US National Security Agency, is suspected of insider trading during his term in office, according to US-based bimonthly magazine Foreign Policy.
Earlier this year, when Keith Alexander resigned as head of the National Security Agency, he began trying to cash in on expertise he’d gained while in government, pitching himself as a security consultant who could protect Wall Street banks and other large corporations from cyber-attacks by hackers or foreign governments. Early reports focused on the eye-popping price tag for his services: He reportedly asked for $1 million a month, later decreasing his rate to $600,000.
Fertilizer is a strategic commodity, and that’s no load of manure.
In fact, it’s potash—a mineral salt mined from the ground to add nitrogen to industrial fertilizer production. In the past several years, the production of this valued commodity has been shaken up: In 2013, an informal cartel between two companies in Belarus and Russia that had dominated the industry was shattered—probably by Chinese pressure—and the Russian company’s CEO was held hostage by the government in Belarus, at least until Russian oligarch (and NBA franchise-owner) Mikhail Prokhorov bought his freedom.
Teresa O’Shea used to be the National Security Agency’s director of signals intelligence, plus the wife of an executive in the business of selling things to agencies like hers, plus the host of a home-based signals intelligence business, plus the owner, via yet another business, of a six-seat airplane and resort-town condo.
Leading tech companies are using Sunday’s 13th anniversary of the Patriot Act to push Congress to pass legislation reining in the National Security Agency (NSA).
Supporters of Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., say his possible re-election loss to Republican Rep. Cory Gardner would be a significant setback for privacy and mass surveillance reform.
The Hill reported Sunday that Udall’s potential defeat has some civil liberties activists worried, and the libertarian publication Reason warned Monday his loss would “further dim the prospects of real reform to America’s burgeoning surveillance state.”
Cory Gardner’s voting record follows the obstructionist Republican representatives Sen. Ted Cruz, who shut down the government (cost $20 billion), blocked immigration reform and brought the United States close to default on its debt.
[...]
He still wastes time on Benghazi and IRS red herrings. He would not have the courage to oppose his base on the next war vote. His vote on the next Supreme Court Justice would give the reactionary court another member who favors wealth over community, and repeal of Roe vs Wade. Republicans campaign on tax reduction then, once elected, switch to voter restriction, suppression of abortion rights and revocation of collective bargaining. Gardner will do the same.
A look at look at the impact of Edward Snowden’s leaks on the debate over online privacy in Europe: The Austrian newspaper Der Standard reports the NSA has accessed nearly 70 percent of telecommunications in Vienna, home to thousands of diplomats from around the world. Earlier this year, Germany ordered the removal of a top U.S. intelligence official in the country after leaks from Snowden showed the United States was monitoring the communications of millions of Germans and tapping Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone. In a victory for digital privacy, the European Court of Justice struck down a rule that required telecommunication companies to store the communications data of European Union citizens for up to two years. The ruling happened on the same day Snowden addressed the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from Moscow.
Filmmaker Laura Poitras has harsh words for members of Congress she thinks have sat idly on the sidelines while intelligence agencies stretch the limits of the law.
“Our elected officials have failed the public,” Poitras, whose reporting based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year, told The Hill in an interview on Friday.
Imagine if Bob Woodward’s clandestine meetings in a Washington D.C., parking garage with Deep Throat had been documented — or, better yet, filmed by Woodward, himself.
The analogy isn’t perfect, but that’s about the closest equivalent to Laura Poitras’ one-of-a-kind documentary “Citizenfour,” which captures former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden during his leak of NSA documents to Poitras (a documentarian and reporter) and journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Hong Kong has been ground zero this year in the fight for freedom, with students and Occupy leaders battling police for control of the streets in a desperate campaign to maintain the Chinese territory’s relative autonomy from erosion by the central Beijing government.
Avast, one of the leaders in anti-virus software, has been called out over its rather intrusive Avast SafePrice toolbar, after online tech magazine HowToGeek spotted the service sending back information about the user to its own servers.
This week’s shooting at Canada’s parliament building should not give lawmakers a reason to halt work on reforming the National Security Agency (NSA), Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said on Friday.
The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman has been making a strong push to get the Senate to pass his USA Freedom Act this year, and rejected the notion that terrorist attacks like the one in the Canadian capital should give lawmakers pause.
Data center customers are beginning to avoid the U.S. and place their infrastructure elsewhere because of data sovereignty concerns caused by revelations about NSA surveillance, according to David Snead, founder of the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (I2C).
Poitras, who received a Pulitzer Prize for her work with The Washington Post and the Guardian covering the revelations, sat down with the Switch to discuss the film and how technical advances may make it easier for us to keep our online lives private. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The US government spied on electronic communications between Americans with no links to terror suspects until a judge ruled it illegal in 2011, officials acknowledged Wednesday.
The unlawful program, which involved tens of thousands of emails, was revealed in declassified documents from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews the legality of eavesdropping programs.
The court’s opinions are usually kept secret but the government chose to release the documents amid a firestorm over sweeping surveillance operations, following bombshell leaks from a former US intelligence contractor, Edward Snowden.
Laura Poitras’ riveting new documentary about mass surveillance gives an intimate look into the motivations that guided Edward Snowden, who sacrificed his career and risked his freedom to expose mass surveillance by the NSA. CITIZENFOUR, which debuts on Friday, has many scenes that explore the depths of government surveillance gone awry and the high-tension unfolding of Snowden’s rendezvous with journalists in Hong Kong. One of the most powerful scenes in the film comes when Snowden discusses his motivation for the disclosures and points to his fundamental belief in the power and promise of the Internet:
The Republican who may chair the Senate Intelligence Committee if his party wins control of the chamber in next month’s election isn’t too worried about CIA snooping on Congress, or about the agency’s combative director.
Relations between CIA Director John Brennan and Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) have been chilly since she revealed that the agency spied on Senate staffers who were working on a report about CIA torture tactics under former President George W. Bush. Some Democrats have called on Brennan to resign.
But Sen. Richard Burr — a North Carolina Republican who could become intelligence chairman in a GOP-led Senate — is much cheerier about the CIA and its leader.
Newly disclosed National Security Agency documents suggest a closer relationship between American companies and the spy agency than has been previously disclosed.
The documents, published by the Intercept, describe “contractual relationships” between the NSA and U.S. companies, as well as the fact that the NSA has “under cover” spies working at or with some U.S. companies.
In the Information and Privacy Commission’s latest annual report, Coombs said she was not happy with the rate of progress towards privacy reforms and the development of agency guidance, calling it “a missed opportunity to assist NSW public sector agencies and members of the public”.
Exactly one year ago it was revealed that the NSA had tapped the German chancellor’s cellphone. The government is now finally starting to address the spying issue – but Marcel Fürstenau believes more should be done.
While it will take more than a Germany-based cloud computing center to relieve the tension between Berlin and the U.S. regarding the NSA’s persistent data-culling practices, it’s an important step on Amazon’s part to recognize the privacy concerns of Germans. It might be a band aid, but it’s a significant one.
Justice Department lawyers have asked a federal court in Pittsburgh to dismiss a sweeping lawsuit brought earlier this year by a local lawyer against President Barack Obama and other top intelligence officials.
Elliot Schuchardt from Pittsburgh filed a complaint last month citing Executive Order 12333, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act, and Section 215 of the Patriot Act, as stepping beyond the bounds of legality.
In early September in Russia, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden told me about a documentary entitled Citizenfour, named after the alias he used when he asked filmmaker Laura Poitras to help him warn Americans about how deeply the NSA had carved away their freedoms.
FBI Director James Comey continues to bang the drum about the evils of smartphone encryption and the harm it will do to U.S. law enforcement efforts. Fortunately, few people are persuaded, possibly because Comey himself seems of two minds — and baffled by technology to boot.
Comey has been on a media tear denouncing the default smartphone encryption provided by Apple, with its recently released iOS 8, and Google, with its next-generation Lollipop Android OS. No one without the passcode — not even Apple or Google — can break the encryption, which leaves law enforcement “struggling to keep up” with criminals, Comey said in a speech to the Brookings Institution.
[...]
But in an interview with “60 Minutes” this month, Comey led off by saying, “I believe that Americans should be deeply skeptical of government power. You cannot trust people in power.” He then illustrated this by sidestepping the question of whether the FBI gathers electronic surveillance and passes it to the NSA, and insisting (incorrectly) that the FBI can never read your email without a court order.
[...]
A Washington Post editorial is one of the few voices to support Comey and call for a “compromise” on smartphone encryption. While granting that “a police ‘back door’ for all smartphones is undesirable,” the Post said surely “a kind of secure golden key” that could only be used by people with an approved court warrant could be invented.
Silicon Valley is a relatively new player in the Wild West world that is political spending. So maybe that can cut them slack for failing to give money to the candidates with big techs best interests at heart.
Speaking in parliament Thursday—the day after a gunman fatally shot a soldier at Ottawa’s National War Memorial, then entered the main block of the national parliament—Prime Minister Stephen Harper vowed to greatly strengthen Canada’s national security apparatus.
“Our law and police powers,” declared Harper, “need to be strengthened in the area of surveillance, detention and arrest.” He continued, “I assure you that work—which is already underway—will be expedited.”
The former partner of an MI6 whistleblower has described the “dangerous moral slide” of the UK’s intelligence services, comparing a 1996 assassination plot against then Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to his treatment during the 2011 uprising.
British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond has told the United Kingdom Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee that bulk data collection did not amount to mass surveillance.
In public remarks, he said, “Mass surveillance is illegal. There are strict rules in place to make sure data collected is not used in any way. I think the immediate discarding of 99.9 per cent of the data does not give rise to intrusion.”
Everyone loves a story about a small group of outsiders challenging the power structure and successfully rattling the cage of the 600-pound gorilla. We love it all the more when the group’s size totals less than the fingers on one hand and the gorilla is the national security apparatus of the largest military power in the history of the human race. In real life, these stories rarely end well for the little guys.
Mark Udall, US Senator for Colorado, looks almost born into the job. He has the rangy cowboy build – his jeans’ back pockets reveal a pair of shades and a water bottle – and on the stump he hits every progressive policy button you think would tickle the state’s high plains and mountain voters. Climate change is real, fracking is tricky.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) suggested he could have been expelled from Congress if he revealed classified information — pushing back on criticism that he did not do enough to expose National Security Agency surveillance programs.
In the words of that wise Twitter account, Infosec Taylor Swift, “Mass surveillance is the elegant oppression, a panopticon without bars. Its cage is… behind the eyes—in the mind.” Under authority’s gaze, many people become smaller, more obedient, less daring.
Surveillance leaves scars.
Privacy activists rightly denounce the blanket surveillance of “innocent Americans.” But what about those who, because of skin color or faith, power has marked as guilty? If you’re not a “person of interest” technologies like PGP, Tor, and Jabber OTR can be enough to keep your most of your communications out of the NSA’s dragnet. If you’re a member of a marginalized group, the stakes are higher. Pockets of privacy become more scarce.The government’s gaze is not only fixed on your laptop. You’re watched by the CCTV camera, the neighborhood informer, the cop loitering on the corner. Surveillance bleeds into your life, online and off.
In September 2013, Belgacom was hit by a suspected Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attack which, according to leaked documents from NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden which were published by German newspaper Der Spiegel, was the work of the NSA and UK’s own GCHQ.
Last month, I laid out the several attorney client conversations to which Raez Qadir Khan was party that the government wiretapped. Among the 7 privileged conversations wiretapped by the government was a January 2010 conversation he had with his immigration attorney after being told by the FBI he could not travel to see his family.
In a conversation with “Imaginary Lines” host Chris Spannos, WikiLeaks founder and Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange discussed his new book, “When Google Met WikiLeaks,” which is based on a conversation Assange had with Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.
I see an increased nervousness in my country about America. Even though both our countries have an eagle on their coat of arms, people currently are focused on a different bird: the chicken. And not just any old chicken, but the “Chlorhuhn” chicken. Perhaps I should translate it for you: The “Chlorhuhn” is a chicken that has been disinfected in a bath of chlorine — as American food companies do it.
MASS SURVEILLANCE will inevitably create a backlash of popular evasion and encryption, rendering most of the government intelligence agencies’ communications surveillance efforts largely ineffective and moot.
To be clear, Access commends the administration’s new Executive Order. Secure systems, in every layer of the internet, are the key to user privacy, so it’s encouraging that as part of its announcement on Friday, Obama also renewed his push for cybersecurity legislation. However, recently drafted legislation has focused almost exclusively on information sharing for critical infrastructure companies, ignoring the larger picture; the bills were missing initiatives that directly protect users. In a letter to the president earlier this year, Access and a coalition of organizations and experts called for legislation that would incentivize improved digital security and provide resources for cybersecurity education, foster better international dialogue about cybersecurity, and create new transparency obligations. This Executive Order starts to address these gaps.
Though Silicon Valley and the tech industry is generally known as being more liberal than other economic sectors it is worth noting that it too has its share of plutocrat reactionaries. Though venture capitalist Tom Perkins became the face of the faction with his comparison of Occupy Wall Street to Nazis, a more relevant example would be Mark Andreessen who not only stands out as opposing measures to rein in wealth inequality but has trumpeted his support for domestic surveillance programs.
Andreessen’s claim to fame was starting the early internet browser company Netscape which he essentially privatized without payment from a government sponsored project at a the University of Illinois. Netscape would be ultimately be crushed by Microsoft but Andreessen would stay in the tech world and become a founder and partner at one of the Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firms – Andreessen Horowitz.
Laura Poitras, the director of Citizenfour, tells the Telegraph how the whistle-blower entrusted her with revealing to the world his secrets about American government mass surveillance
[...]
It was at that point that Poitras stopped using the telephone in her apartment, bought a new computer for cash and started checking her email account only in public places.
Citizenfour addresses these questions in arresting, often chilling fashion. Near the end of the film, Poitras meets again with Snowden, as he and Greenwald review information provided by a new leaker. They can only communicate via written notes for fear of bugging, and most of their writings are not shown to the camera. One of the few notes we do see bears the number of people on an NSA watchlist: more than one million. It’s both a terrifying grace note and a call to action.
Lewinsky’s voice cracked as she recalled the moment in January 1998 when she was first confronted by FBI agents and lawyers working for Kenneth W. Starr’s Office of Independent Counsel, who threatened her and her mother with criminal prosecution if she did not agree to wear a wire against President Bill Clinton.
Lewinsky, now 41, has long felt that she was mistreated by authorities in the 12-hour marathon session, which began as an ambush at the food court at the Pentagon City mall and then moved to a hotel room at the mall’s adjoining Ritz-Carlton hotel.
At the same time, the proliferation of low-cost surveillance devices, such as license plate scanners and Stingray, continue to raise new questions even as a handful of older ones are resolved. The battle against the tyrant King George continues.
At the same time, 2600 provides an important forum for hackers to discuss the most pressing issues of the day—whether it be surveillance, Internet freedom, or the security of the nation’s nuclear weapons—while sharing new code in languages like Python and C.* For example, the most recent issue of the magazine addresses how the hacking community can approach Snowden’s disclosures. After lampooning one of the leaked N.S.A. PowerPoint slides (“whoever wrote this clearly didn’t know that there are no zombies in ‘1984’ ”) and discussing how U.S. government is eroding civil rights, the piece points out the contradictions that everyone in the hacking community currently faces. “Hackers are the ones who reveal the inconvenient truths, point out security holes, and offer solutions,” it concludes. “And this is why hackers are the enemy in a world where surveillance and the status quo are the keys to power.”
The Obama administration is reportedly considering a move that would continue the Bush-era policy of ignoring the United Nations torture treaty overseas. In 2005, the Bush administration disclosed it had secretly interpreted a U.N. ban on “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” as not applying to any CIA or military prison outside of the United States. President Obama, then a senator, opposed Bush’s policy and proposed legislation to undermine it. The United States now faces a hearing before the Committee Against Torture at the United Nations next month. And according to The New York Times, “President Obama’s legal team is debating whether to back away from his earlier view” and “[reaffirm] the Bush administration’s position that the treaty imposes no legal obligation to bar cruelty outside U.S. borders.”
When elements of the national-security apparatus deceive Congress or the courts, they undermine the very institutions that they protect. The CIA’s attempt to hide its history of torture from congressional oversight is Exhibit A.
Mr Risen also delves into the human wreckage left behind by the war on terror, portraying the hellish post-Army life of Damien M Corsetti, a soldier who, by Mr Risen’s account, engaged in torture at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. He illustrates what the United States Army should have known before going into Iraq, that torture has two victims: the one who suffers it and the one who inflicts it. Mr Corsetti is shown living in Savannah, Georgia, having kicked an addiction to heroin, but living in a cloud of marijuana smoke with post-traumatic stress disorder. “He is one of the first veterans known to have been given full disability based on PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] suffered while conducting harsh interrogations in the war on terror,” Mr Risen writes.
Last Thursday, out of the blue, Carol E. Lee and Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal reported that senior Obama administration officials had told them that the White House was drafting options that would allow President Obama to close the “war on terror” prison established by President Bush at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, through the use of an executive order.
The police in Ferguson, Mo., violated the rights of protesters during demonstrations after the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in August, according to a report issued by Amnesty International on Friday.
The human rights group said the Ferguson Police Department should review its standards, practices and training to ensure that they “conform fully to international standards.” And investigations into Mr. Brown’s death should be transparent and concluded as quickly as possible, the 23-page report said.
A Roy, Utah man, Jose Calzada, 35, placed a call to a suicide prevention hotline at 4:00 a.m. Tuesday morning and threatened to kill himself, seven hour later he was shot and killed by police, according to law enforcement.
According to ABC 4, neighbors described Calzada as a quiet, friendly man, who was divorced and now lived in the home with his girlfriend and her children.
The first tragic mistake in this case was made when the Weber County Consolidated Dispatch Center sent officers to the residence rather than some type of crisis response team trained to deal with suicidal individuals.
From previous cases, such as that of Jason Turk, who was shot twice in the face after a suicide call to 9-1-1 by his wife, or that of Christian Alberto Sierra, who was suffering from depression and had attempted suicide when police showed up and shot him four times, killing him, most know all too well what happens when you send officers to “assist” people threatening suicide.
Bay Area CHP Officer Sean Harrington is accused of stealing nude cell phone pictures from a DUI suspect’s phone while she was being booked into the County Jail in Martinez. There is now evidence that other officers may also have been involved, and that possible criminal charges may be filed.
“She’s tremendously distraught,” said Rick Madsen, the attorney for the young woman pulled over by Officer Harrington. He claims his client has been traumatized by this invasion of her privacy.
For the past few months, I’d been pitched a few times from people (often somehow, if in murky ways, connected to the broadband industry) arguing that all those stories about how the US is far behind in broadband is untrue if you just looked at certain states. The basic argument is that since the US is so large, it’s not fair to compare it to, say, South Korea. Instead, they claim, if you just look at a few states in the US, those states compare quite well to this country or that country. Of course, to make a total fruit basket out of mixed metaphors, this is pretty blatant cherry picking apples to compare to oranges. We haven’t written any of those stories, but apparently someone went and created a misleading infographic to try to make the point on a site called “the Connectivist.”
The contentious debate about net neutrality in the U.S. has sparked controversy over a lack of funding transparency for advocacy groups and think tanks, which critics say subverts the political process.
Over the past couple of days, there’s been an outpouring of concern about Verizon’s advertising practices. Verizon Wireless is injecting a unique identifier into web requests, as data transits the network. On my phone, for example, here’s the extra HTTP header.1
The whole DRM for ebooks effort is still pretty braindead all around. It’s amazing to me that everyone hasn’t realized what the music industry figured out years ago (after many earlier years of kicking and screaming): DRM doesn’t help the creators or the copyright holders in the slightest. It pisses off end users and tends to help give platform providers a dominant position by creating lock-in with their users. Time and time again we see copyright holders demanding DRM, not realizing that this demand actually gives all the leverage to the platform provider.
We’ve written a number of times about the strong, principled stand of Australian ISP iiNet for the rights of its consumers. iiNet was the ISP that was handpicked by Hollywood and the US State Departmenet to be the target of a “test” legal attack, trying to force ISPs to spy on users and become copyright cops. iiNet was targeted because Hollywood felt that the company wasn’t large enough to fight back, but was big enough to get noticed. Hollywood miscalculated on one-half of that equation: iiNet fought back. And it fought back hard. And it won. And then it won again. And then it won again, in a fight that Hollywood is still licking its wounds over (and trying to undermine with new laws). iiNet has also fought back against data retention rules.
This week The Pirate Bay replaced its frontpage logo to promote a new VPN service, driving 100,000 new customers to the startup. FrootVPN currently offers its services for free, but admits that this may not last forever.
Posted in Microsoft, Mono at 4:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Xamarin continues to spread dependence on Microsoft to more gaming frameworks, not just platforms such as GNU/Linux, Android, and even permanent-state devices
THE COMPANY known as Xamarin more or less acts as a proxy of Microsoft these days. Mono, with Microsoft backing, is now trying to sneak into game frameworks other than Unity. Michael Larabel was one of the very few who helped amplifyde Icaza, who wrote:
Today I am happy to introduce Mono for Unreal Engine.
This is a project that allows Unreal Engine users to build their game code in C# or F#.
This is really bad. If Microsoft (through its minions at Xamarin) manages to make games dependent on .NET, then cross-platform is actually put at risk, not aided. What next? Will Xamarin also try to poison Valve’s Steam? █
“Our products just aren’t engineered for security.”
–Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive
Summary: Microsoft’s insecure-by-design software is causing massive damages (possibly trillions of dollars in damages to date) and yet the corporate press does not ask the right questions, let alone suggest a ban on Microsoft software
According to the New York Times and other news sites, “Staples Is Latest Retailer Hit by Hackers” because it was using Microsoft Windows. Well, other recent examples included UPS, which basically hurt millions of people because it let crooks have lots of credit card details. The TJ Maxx heist and other credit card heists were also the fault of Microsoft Windows, not GNU Bash or OpenSSL, among other bits of software that dominate the news in the context of security. It sure looks like Microsoft Windows is the target, not FOSS. There are hardly any stories at all about an apocalypse or any great damage caused by bugs in Bash or in OpenSSL. So go figure what the press is doing, in part because the OpenSSL bug has been hyped up by Microsoftpartners at a very strategic time (same day as Windows XP support ending).
As Will Hill put it the other day, “Business Week Covers Up for Microsoft In Target Hack and Misses the Big Story”. Mr. Hill adds that “The US government covering up for Microsoft is not too surprising after learning about the HACIENDA program [2]. That’s a massive program where the US government has been cracking servers and ordinary around the world to serve as botnets. If everyone used software that was better then Microsoft’s intentionally weak garbage, GHCQ, NSA and other spooks would not be able to cover their tracks. Because of US government promotion of Microsoft and their combined incompetence, criminals around the world have it easy. NSA spying has put trillions of dollars in commerce at risk.”
Those botnets do even greater damage than what was done at Staples. They are taking down a lot of Web sites and fill the Internet with heaps of SPAM. To quote our reader, complaining about articles like these: “Somehow they manage to omit the key role of Windows yet again.” They must call out Windows.
Another new article was sent to us by a reader. It is titled “Computer users who damage national security could face jail” and it was published by a Bill Gates-sponsored newspaper. This reader of ours asked: “What about those that knowingly deploy Windows on machines connected to the Internet?”
Our sites are still under DDOS attack (for over a month ago). Tux Machines has been offline for several hours now after a DDOS attack from Windows botnets hit it.
Why are ISPs still permitting customers to connect to the Internet with Windows? When will ISPs or users face liability for the damage they cause? Some people have been trying to take down my sites for well over a month now and they have used Microsoft Windows as a weapon. Windows has weaponised back doors, so it should be banned already.
The corporate media should start directing some tough questions at Microsoft, not just its victims. The company should face massive fines for the damages it causes on the Web. Ultimately, its software should be banned until security — not insecurity (weaponised back doors) — is its goal. █
Microsoft has gained immense popularity over its never-ending war on software piracy. However, this time, the company appears to have caused a bit of collateral damage. So who are the victims? A handful of prominent and highly acclaimed YouTube video bloggers.
Oh, Microsoft. The company has now admitted that it ended up sending a bunch of DMCA takedown notices on non-infringing videos, all because someone had posted product keys in comments to those videos. To its credit, Microsoft has apologized and said that it has “taken steps to reinstate legitimate video content and are working towards a better solution to targeting stolen IP while respecting legitimate content.” That’s all well and good, but this seems like the kind of thing that they should have done long before issuing obviously bad takedowns. This is the kind of thing that happens when you have a tool like the DMCA notice-and-takedown provision that makes it just so damn easy to censor content. Those issuing the takedowns do little to nothing to make sure the content being removed actually infringes. They just use either automated means or someone rushing through the process with little review, sending off takedowns willy nilly with no real concern about how they might kill off perfectly legal content. It still boggles the mind that a basic notice-and-notice regime couldn’t suffice to handle situations like this. That and making sure that those issuing bogus DMCA notices receive some sort of real punishment to give them the incentive to stop sending bogus takedowns.
Berlin is already a Windows shop and it’s not window-shopping
Summary: A Softpedia report that says the City of Berlin is moving to Microsoft Office is flawed and may be based on a poor translation
Last year we wrote about Berlin's reluctance to follow the lead of Munich, which happily uses Free software and GNU/Linux, despite the FUD from Microsoft (including some of the latest, not just lastyear's). It has been over a year since a formal investigation was launched into Microsoft’s bribery of officials in many countries. We are not aware of any progress on it, but all we can say is that Microsoft did try ‘soft’ bribes in derailing Munich’s efforts. There is a lot of rogue stuff going on and we covered it in past years.
According to this one report in English, “City of Berlin Going from OpenOffice Back to Microsoft Office”. The problem is, we are not aware of Berlin ever moving to OpenOffice. I spoke to an old friend in Berlin (he works on LibreOffice) as this report continued to seem a little suspicious. I followed through to the source, assuming it either shows that once again Microsoft bribes have paid off or that Microsoft is spreading lies and FUD. As it turns out, a poor translation by Silviu Stahie may be the issue.
“As it turns out, a poor translation by Silviu Stahie may be the issue.”According to this report, Microsoft OOXML is again interfering with adoption of Free software in government. To quote: “It’s difficult to say what the steps that prompted the city officials to make this decision were. It might just as well be the fact that documents created with OpenOffice 3.2 can’t be opened by people with newer or proprietary software, or vice versa.
“The fact of the matter is that LibreOffice, a much newer and modern office suite open source solution, can do all these things. It’s already used in cities around the world, so others don’t seem to have the same problems as Berlin. From what we can gather from the Golem.de report, the switch to Microsoft Office is already happening and it should be finished by the end of 2015.
“A much bigger issue is the lack of intervention from the German government, which has yet to implement or regulate the use of open source formats in its own branches. Things would be much simpler if everyone used a single kind of file format that can be read by both proprietary and open source software.”
The original article (in German) basically says that it’s about the tax authorities, not the City of Berlin. The article also blames it squarely on OOXML, stating at the end (now translating into English) that a requirement that one should use open formats for the government of a state is possible, as shown in the United Kingdom, which established in July of this year PDF and ODF as the standards for documents. █
Content is available under CC-BY-SA