08.19.13
Posted in Database, Microsoft, Oracle at 8:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Proprietary software giants love to spy
Summary: Proprietary software from the dominant database players (which recently got together) is expected to further violate privacy
After a recent interview with Larry Ellison it is no longer secret or just mere speculation that he is an NSA proponent (Oracle’s founders and the business have a renowned CIA-assisted/subsidised past), but what’s noteworthy is Microsoft’s view, which based on the company’s relationship with the NSA is more than happy and even eager to strengthen the NSA. How would China feel if it knew all those facts*? It is already investigating some US companies like IBM over privacy intrusions and it should know that HP has back doors in its storage servers (caught red handed).
Oracle recently got closer to Microsoft, which helped devour Java and add NSA surveillance to it (on the ‘cloud’). It is being noted by IDG that:
The new Microsoft-Oracle partnership benefits both companies, as Oracle gets access to Azure and Microsoft can finally license Java. Will the deal have any effect on either company’s enterprise customers?
Anyone who runs a program or a GNU/Linux distribution on Microsoft’s ‘cloud’ should expect NSA surveillance. But it’s not like this would bother Larry Ellison. More and more people will, over time, realise that the PATRIOT Act made it risky to host with US companies (or US-made software) anywhere, respective of the datacentre’s location (the Internet is global). █
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* Having just spent 2 hours at a Chinese superstore, it seems evident that we in the West increasingly come to depend on China for everything, rather than the other way around. The US and UK governments are openly worried right now about dependence on Chinese hardware which could facilitate back doors.
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Posted in TechBytes Video at 3:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![TechBytes 2013 TechBytes with Stallman](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/techbytes-rms.png)
Direct download as Ogg (00:00:50, 2.8 MB)
Summary: Dr. Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation’s founder, explains how the press in the US is controlled
Made entirely using Free/libre software, heavily compressed for performance on the Web at quality’s expense
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08.18.13
Posted in News Roundup at 3:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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The open-source Linux operating system is widely deployed on enterprise server infrastructure, but it also has a place on the desktop, as well. While many in the Linux community have long speculated on when “The Year of the Linux Desktop” would finally arrive, the reality is that there is no single such entity as THE Linux Desktop. The Linux desktop ecosystem is diverse, with multiple options and choices to suit different user needs and user preferences. Open-source Linux desktops can also be vendor-agnostic and can be deployed across any number of different Linux operating system distributions. The big enterprise Linux distributions tend to offer the GNOME Linux desktop as the default choice, but it’s not the only one. In fact, GNOME itself is now somewhat fractured with multiple desktop environment options and derivatives, including GNOME Shell, GNOME Classic, Unity, Mate and Cinnamon. Looking beyond GNOME-based Linux desktops, KDE, XFCE and LXDE also provide interesting options for users to consider.
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It’s looking like Google should focus on what is going on with Chromebooks. Acer is out with an updated version of its very popular C7 Chromebook portable computer, which runs Google’s Chrome OS operating system. Meanwhile, companies like Samsung and Asus have made clear that they are going to focus less on Microsoft’s Windows RT and more on alternative platforms like Android and Chrome OS.
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I’ve been using Linux for a long, long time. I never thought I’d see the day when I had to actually warn users of trojans such as Hand of Thief, but here we are. Of course, main distributions have the means to help protect you from such attacks (SELinux, repository/package signing, firewalls, etc), but that doesn’t mean you can just blindly continue on as you always have. It’s time to start being a bit more vigilant about how you use your Linux desktop. Here are some suggestions:
Do not install unsigned packages
Do not add unofficial repositories without investigating said repository
Keep your system up to date at all times
Keep all browser plugins up to date
If your distribution has SELinux, use it
Do not let others install software on your machines
Use solid passwords
If asked to enter root user (or sudo) password, always know why
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Server
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Businesses have conquered their “irrational fears” of Linux and the majority now depend on it for some part of their mainstream business applications, a survey of 200 IT executives has found.
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It’s a computing truism that when it comes to delivering the fastest possible speeds with high-performance computing (HPC), you must use native computing instead of virtualization. Recent studies have shown that, in some configurations, VMware’s vSphere can actually deliver faster performance than native computing.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kaltura is the world’s first Open Source Online Video Platform, providing both enterprise level commercial software and services, fully supported and maintained by Kaltura, as well as free open-source community supported solutions, for video publishing, management, syndication and monetization.
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Kernel Space
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- Only 2 per cent of the code, which was originally written by Torvalds, remains in the current Linux kernel.
- Linux is used in government offices in many countries. In India, Linux is also used for educational purposes in Tamil Nadu.
- The top 10 supercomputers in the world use Linux. Linux accounts for 33.8 per cent of the world’s data servers compared to the operating systems from Microsoft, which account for only 7.3 per cent.
- Bullet trains in Japan, the New York Stock Exchange, CERN and the San Francisco traffic control systems run on Linux.
- Some of the biggest technology related companies like Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc. use Linux as their primary operating system.
- In 1991, the GNU project that was developed, did not have any kernels or drivers. That is why Torvalds was led towards working on the Linux kernel development.
- Hollywood director, James Cameron had said that hit movie Avataar was the first movie to be shot completely in 3D using free software on Linux-driven machines.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman, the maintainer of LTS and LTSI, announced 2 weeks ago on his blog that the next LTS and LTSI version will be 3.10. It is now time for the industry to get ready for the LTSI 3.10 release.
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Beats Audio is essentially a technology that is supposed to give a more in-depth sound experience to users. By adding more speakers, subwoofers, and an amplifier Beats Electronics LLC tries to emulate studio quality audio. The extra speakers and subwoofers are arranged in a special way to help compensate for the shape of the laptop. From a software standpoint extra codecs and digital audio processing is used to improve the sound due to the lack of true surround sound speakers.
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I’ve had some adventures with the alsa libraries lately that warrant mentioning them here.
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Graphics Stack
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Beignet has been controversial since it’s not leveraging Mesa/Gallium3D but rather is implementing its own form of OpenCL specifically for Intel graphics cores. While there’s a lot of work ahead, a lot of ground is being gained.
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In the past few days several videos have surfaced for “Nemoshell”, a reported window manager for Wayland but details on the software project are scarce.
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For those OpenGL application and game developers seeking to optimize their program’s performance for the Mesa hardware drivers, and more specifically the Intel HD Graphics support, here’s some very useful information.
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When it comes to open-source Linux graphics drivers, Intel is the company most committed to their success. Intel exclusively offers their Linux graphics support through a fully open-source stack while AMD and NVIDIA are mostly focused on their proprietary graphics drivers. AMD does have a handful of employees devoted to their open-source driver while NVIDIA dedicates no one and leaves it up to the Nouveau community for reverse-engineering.
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For those not actively following the Mesa Git repository, there continues to be new performance-optimizing patches flowing in from Intel’s developers for their open-source Linux graphics driver.
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There’s been a number of Mesa Git commits this morning concerning video acceleration within the Nouveau Gallium3D driver.
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While Mesa 9.2 hasn’t even officially been released yet, with it already having been branched from its Git master code-base since last month, are there already some performance-beneficial changes living in master (Mesa 9.3-devel) worth writing home about? Here’s some benchmarks.
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As a follow-up to the news a few days ago about NVIDIA VP3/VP4 Engines Exposed On Nouveau For MPEG-2/VC-1, the support has now been committed to Mesa Git master.
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In recent months I have delivered a number of R600 SB shader optimization benchmarks for the AMD Gallium3D shader back-end that’s part of Mesa 9.2. I’ve also delivered tests of the R600 LLVM back-end that’s also been progressing in recent months and viewed as the future for AMD’s open-source driver. This weekend are some independent tests of the R600 LLVM and SB back-ends.
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Applications
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Usually, there’s a calculator around for simple math so I can focus on the variables ( read as; something bigger). For those times when I need to deal with real-world numbers, type it into Google.
It just works.
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Out of the vast sea of Linux mail clients, for some forgotten reason I have latched on to alpine.
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LyX is a graphical tool, with a familiar drop-down and content-driven menu system, for writing and editing LaTeX documents. TeX and its higher-level macro language, LaTeX, are powerful document markup languages that are the de facto standard for Linux® users. New users can find them difficult to work with because you must know the available markup tags, the contexts they can be used in, and how to use a text editor and previewing tool. LyX simplifies the entire process of working with LaTeX documents — not just on Linux. Learn how to install, use, and customize LyX on Linux, UNIX®, Windows®, and Mac OS X systems.
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Proprietary
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Geekbench 3, the first major upgrade to the popular benchmarking software in six years, is now available for download.
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Pipelight is a new open-source project for getting Microsoft Silverlight applications to run within web-browsers on Linux, including the widely sought after Netflix Player on Linux.
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Instructionals/Technical
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When I debated this little adventure, way back in December of 2012, I thought to myself that I could probably come up with enough applications to fill a post a day for a year.
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Games
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Eschalon: Book III is the third and final game in the Eschalon series, scheduled for release this 2013 holiday season. Eschalon: Book III brings the trilogy to a climatic end as you seek to uncover the mystery of your past, the secrets of the Crux stones, and who the Orakur really are. You’ll traverse miles of virtual wilderness and dungeons, filled with secrets and danger, in an unparalleled role-playing experience designed to feel like a true pen-and-paper RPG.
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This makes me giddy, Enemy Starfighter a space combat simulation game has a brand spanking new trailer to show off some of the progress that has been made on the game.
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All ya Linux gamers, time to update your Steam for Linux client to the latest beta, which comes with quite a lot of good changes. A Linux-only change includes — Fixed particle system fuzziness in Big Picture on Linux and OSX to match Windows.
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Valve announced today that Steam is now available on Linux. They’ve also launched a sale of Linux games – for this week, you can get games that run on all OSs (typically at least Windows and Linux) for up to 75% off!
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Remakes of classic games are a dime a dozen these days, but it’s hard to complain when modern developers are putting in the time to recreate games that, otherwise, would be dang-near impossible to get your hands on. Such is the case with Chaos Engine, Abstraction Games’ throw-up to the 1993 Amiga shooter that helped pave the way for the entire genre. It’s headed to PC, Mac and Linux on August 29th.
In a steampunk future, a computer gone mad, the Chaos Engine, has started churning out diabolical baddies that you, the player, must stop at nothing to destroy. A sort of twin-stick shooter before the genre really existed, The Chaos Engine is a top-down shooter featuring a skill system, multiple playable characters, abilities, weapons and the like.
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This time, PewDiePie selected the games, which are included in the Humble Weekly Sale Bundle.
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Another Live Stream done by the developers of Planetary Annihilation this time focusing on the art of the game and planet generation. I have listed the main points for you.
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Another bunch of games have been greenlit by Steam and yes there are even some coming over to Linux as well thankfully! It’s getting better and better to be a Linux gamer!
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When Valve introduced its trading cards mechanic on Steam this past May, I wasn’t sure what to expect, or sure if anyone would care. After the recent summer sale wrapped-up, though, I realized that you should never underestimate Valve. For better or for worse, trading cards are intriguing, so we’re taking a look at how it all works.
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Tropico 5 was announced yesterday as the latest in a 12-year-old game franchise of this island maker game. What makes Tropico 5 really exciting is that when released in 2014 this construction/management simulation game will have native Linux support. The Blitzkrieg 3 World War II game is also being ported to Linux.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Enlightenment E19 is making good progress and will be shown off at LinuxCon Europe in October, along with “Project BURRITO”, a high-end demo showing off capabilities of the Enlightenment Compositor.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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With the 4.11 release out of the door (yay!) there is more and more focus on what is coming from KDE in the future. The Workspaces (and only the workspaces) are out with a long term support release: for the next two years, the Plasma team will keep churning out bugfix and tiny-feature releases for the Workspaces 4.11 release.
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There used to be a time when people died of Amarok deficiency. No, really! At least the audiophiles who also happened to be Linux users. Music on KDE meant “Amarok.” GNOME users would install half the KDE just to get their hands on Amarok. At its peak, Amarok had a huge fanbase that impatiently waited for new releases of their beloved music player. Times changed, Qt 4 came out and Amarok made the transition from Qt 3 to Qt 4 for its user interface. Leaving behind its immensely successful 1.4.x series, Amarok received a lot of flak for its revamped UI in 2.x. Fans were angry with the completely revised UI, and the Amarok dev team was unwilling to support the older design. This gave rise to Clementine and Exaile, both of which resembled Amarok of yesteryear, especially Clementine which was forked directly from Amarok’s 1.4.x branch.
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Packages for the release of Amarok 2.8 are available for Kubuntu 12.04 LTS, 13.04 and our Saucy development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA for 12.04 LTS, 12.10 and 13.04.
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It’s the wonderful month of August and the Amarok Team is back with a very strong release. Amarok 2.8 is titled “Return To The Origin” as we are bringing back the polish that many users loved from the original 1.x series! The new Amarok is more fun to use, it’s rock solid, and it has exciting new features.
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GnuPG offers some very strong encryption algorithms and uses passphrase-protected long keys. But I’m not going to talk about GPG here. I’ll rather tell you that I just added a new backend in kwalletd allowing for GPG-encrypted wallets! The code is fully functional and I actually configured my KDE session to use it! So here are the screenshots.
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Today is one year and 3 days since we announced the Calligra Author project. The aim of the project is to produce a tool that helps writers produce ebooks with extra focus on novels, which are inherently long texts, and textbooks with lots of pictures and maybe dynamic contents like videos.
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Version 13.08 of the Genode OS Framework is now available to mark the fifth anniversary of this open-source operating system framework project.
Besides Genode 13.08 marking the half-decade anniversary of this project, Genode 13.08 is also critical for the new features it presents.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GUADEC, the GNOME annual European conference, wrapped up last week in Brno, Czech Republic. Over the course of the core conference days, there was a total of 42 talks on a range of subjects, including technological developments and plans, design, and community outreach. There were also two sessions of short “lightning talks” as well as the GNOME Foundation Annual General Meeting. The majority of these sessions were recorded, and are now available to view online.
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The GNOME developers released a new development version of the Folks library for the GNOME desktop environment, a library that aggregates people from multiple sources.
Folks (libfolks) 0.9.4 turns off fatal warnings when distchecking, and fixes a Vala binding issue, by bumping the EDS dependency to version 3.9.1 or higher.
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The GNOME developers behind the popular GLib library released a new stable version, which addresses a major issue and updates lots of translations.
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Precise Puppy is a puppy linux variant that is “based” on Ubuntu 12.04 precise. It is designed as a small and fast distro that can run on older hardware with low resources. It is intended to be run in live mode rather than installing on the hard drive. The iso file can be burnt to a disc or put on a flash drive and it would boot like any other linux distro. I always wanted to try puppy linux and this time I finally got my hands on it. Version 5.7.1 was recently released.
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New Releases
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OS/4 Enterprise Linux 4.1.4 will be released Friday Aug 16, 2013. Thats our full KDE release and its very stunning in aesthetics and performance so its really a great release.
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illume OS 2.1 “Aarhus” has been released. As you may know, illume OS is a Debian based Linux system, with a Windows like graphical interface. It uses Debian Squeeze as base, because of its stability. illume OS is a single-user operating system, targeting both personal computers and laptops.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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So as most of you probably know, this past weekend was Flock, the first of a new breed of Fedora conference that replaces FUDCon. It was reasonably well-attended (the count I heard was about two hundred). Among those that attended were nearly all of the well-known members of the Fedora community. I’m sure some (many?) of them will also be summarizing their experiences, but I want to get my notes out there while it’s still fresh. This is not a comprehensive overview of Flock. If that’s what you’re looking for, Máirín Duffy has provided an excellent set of blog posts including the recordings and transcripts[1].
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In the last few days, I attended Flock 2013 which was held in Charleston, South Carolina. It was busy first two weeks of August for me. GUADEC kept me on my toes from 8am to midnight for a week. I had to leave GUADEC on the 7th to get to Prague because my flight was leaving early in the morning on the 8th. The journey to Charleston went really smooth. I flew with Sirko from Prague, met Gergely and Patrick in Amsterdam, and Gianluca and Robert in Atlanta. So we arrived to Charleston as a quite large group.
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I last posted here in December. I said at some point I would stop posting here, which seems to be the case, but I guess every now and then I have something I want to talk about.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ahead of the Ubuntu 13.10 feature freeze, expect Mir multi-monitor support and composition bypass support to land around next week.
Canonical’s Community Manager, Jono Bacon, has written a Mir update and for testing its current state of the next-generation Ubuntu display server.
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After many years of using Ubuntu daily and following the evolution of Ubuntu from 6.04 to the amazing 12.04 LTS with great enthusiasm, the missing link in my Linux software world has always been Adobe. Software like Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Dreamweaver, Premiere and InDesign are the workhorses of the media world. Yes you can find similar open-source software but any professional using these tools on a daily basis to get the job done will tell you that nothing beats the tools, speed and integration of the Adobe products.
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$10,311,220. It isn’t sufficient to greenlight Canonical’s innovative hybrid smartphone, but it is just enough to beat the sum raised by the Pebble smartwatch and thereby steal the crowdfunding record.
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Linux has over the years consistently proven itself to be a worthwhile alternative on the desktop and has even become the champion in mobile space in the form of Android. For a long time though its inability to bring about the much advertised Year of the Linux desktop has been blamed, at least partly, on its pathetic gaming support but since the inception and release of Steam for Linux, that is all changing.
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A crowdfunding campaign for the Ubuntu Edge smartphone has set a record for raising more money in pledges than any other such venture.
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And in a sign that – as previously reported – Canonical aren’t ready to give up on reaching their goal of $32 million, a new $7000 ‘Enterprise Starter’ perk has been added to the pledge options available.
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System76 recently sent out their Gazelle Professional laptop that’s been updated with a mobile Intel Core i7 “Haswell” processor. We’re still in the process of fully reviewing this Haswell laptop pre-loaded with Ubuntu 13.04 and comparing it to the range of Intel notebook competition, but for this weekend article are some basic Ubuntu 13.04 vs. Ubuntu 13.10 performance benchmarks.
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Flavours and Variants
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I discovered elementary OS earlier this week and decided to give it a try after seeing the trailer of their newest release, Luna. Being only version 0.2, I guess we should not expect too much, but the trailer gave me the impression that the guys at elementary OS are putting serious effort in creating a professional Linux desktop environment. The focus lies on providing the community with the best possible experience and being both beautiful and usable. Elementary OS uses Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as its base.
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In the previous article we took a look at the Texas Instruments OMAP5432 board. This time we will focus on the performance of those A15 cores, the SATA interface, internal flash, and how much difference the hardware video decode makes.
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Airware demonstrated its Linux-based os-Series autopilot computers for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The os-Series osNanoPilot, osFlexPilot, and multi-rotor capable osFlexQuad autopilots include radios, GPS and inertial systems, servo interfaces and I/O ranging from USB to CAN, and are preinstalled with the company’s configurable, royalty-free AirwareOS Linux software.
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Phones
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Following reports that Tizen open-source OS (co-developed by Samsung and Intel) was scrapped, new information indicates that the project is still very much alive. Indeed, if the below shipping manifest is believed, then developer prototypes of the Tizen-runnning Samsung SM-Z9005 are shipping to…
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Ballnux
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It looks like Samsung is releasing its long expected smartwatch on the 4th of September. There isn’t much information yet about the new gadget from Samsung, but we know for sure that it will be running on Android and will make the user able to make phone calls, use the internet or manage emails.
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The report implies that the device will operate independently of your smartphone, but it’s entirely possible that the site’s anonymous sources are in fact pointing to a companion device that will connect to your smartphone to place calls and access data services.The watch is unlikely to have a flexible display. The Samsung Galaxy Gear is expected to launch on September 4th at the company’s press event in Berlin.
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Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) will introduce a wristwatch-like device named the Galaxy Gear next month that can make phone calls, surf the Web and handle e-mails, according to two people familiar with the matter.
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Just like Google went with Asus again for the new Nexus 7, it is reported that LG will be trusted again for making the next generation Nexus smartphone. The rumour mills are churning and the Chinese website ‘MyDrivers’ reports that, like Nexus 4 was based on LG Optimus G,. the alleged Nexus 5 will be based on LG G2. To make things even sweeter, Nexus 5 should be carry affordable price tag of $299, just like its predecessor.
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Android
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The world has already seen smartphone walkie-talkies, but Voxer Pro Business takes the old push-to-talk concept and revamps it with multimedia capabilities for business users. The idea behind it is that you can create grouplike teams of smartphone-wielding users, all of whom are visible on a desktop map within a dashboard. Teams can be grouped by location or department, for example.
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The Chromecast developer community has been very active right from Day 1, and the hacking seems to never slow down. Leon Nicholls, a clever chromecast developer hasd been able to control the device by motion gestures, using the Kinect.
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Intel subsidiary Wind River announced a collaboration with Chinese embedded software company PATEO on an Android-based automotive in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system. PATEO is using Wind River Connectivity Solution Accelerator for Android to enable an Android IVI system to play music and videos from iPhones, iPads, and iPods.
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Gigwalk, until now an iPhone-only service, has launched an Android version of its app, which posts crowdsourced jobs for the mobile workforce marketplace. Now the 400,000 Android users who had signed up in anticipation can now go out and get some work.
The app comes as the company continues on its tear, growing 300 percent in the last year with 320,000 iPhone users already in its workforce. Gigwalk expects the new Android app to double this number by the end of September.
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Co-inciding with the first DebConf in Switzerland, one of the world’s leading financial centers, the first official packaging of open messaging and market data distribution framework OpenMAMA for a Linux distribution has just been uploaded. The packages, along with the Avis low-latency event-router middleware/transport were uploaded to the Debian unstable catalog this week and will soon be available conveniently to install with apt-get.
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For the past years, PLVision has been working on technologies in the Networking domain, namely Software Defined Networks. Apart from assimilating already existing solutions, the company has developed its own Open vSwitch package for OpenWrt which considerably extends router functionality and adaptability, and is completely free.
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Open Source software are never the less one of the biggest innovations in the history of technology. Simply buy an all new computer device and install any software you want without spending a single penny (except the internet datacharges). It offers you everything from a free word processor, free image editor, media player, sound editor, file archiver, PDF creator and what not.
Although a few of these software might not stand parallel to its commercial rivals in terms of functionality, there are many that stand far beyond of everything else on the market in terms of features and capabilities.
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VMware, perhaps more-so than any other vendor on the planet, is responsible for helping enterprises move to more agile and efficient virtualized server infrastructure. Simply put, VMware is the vendor to beat in the enterprise virtualized server space.
When it comes to the cloud though, VMware’s dominance is not a foregone conclusion, with Amazon and perhaps more importantly OpenStack, leading the charge. OpenStack is an open-source multi-stakeholder effort that is building an open-cloud platform solution.
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An open-source project aims to give a rudimentary eye to robots with the help of a camera that can detect, identify and track the movement of specific objects.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Today in Open Source: ZTE’s Firefox OS phone is perfect for hunting season! Plus: Metro Last Light comes to Linux, and Netrunner 13.06 protects your privacy and fights censorship!
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SaaS/Big Data
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When Edward Snowden leaked intelligence files, a storm was triggered in the cloud, leaving a path of destruction. Snowden’s email provider Lavabit shut down. So has the email offering of Silent Circle. The Guardian ran a story declaring: Lavabit’s closure marks the death of secure cloud computing in the U.S. And the EU is not entirely unaffected either. Be it by the Tempora program in the UK or the U.S. National Security Agency facilities that reportedly reside in Germany.
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Databases
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As NoSQL databases catch on for Big Data applications, where are the NoSQL partner programs for resellers, integrators and VARs? So far, 10gen seems to be the only company shouting an answer.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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For a long time, Microsoft Office has been the reigning champ of office suites, but that doesn’t mean the free alternative, LibreOffice, isn’t worth considering. Let’s take a look at how the two compare, and if it’s finally possible to ditch the paid option for the free one.
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Another day, another example of excessive DMCA takedown actions. The latest is that Microsoft has been issuing DMCA takedowns to Google directing the search engine to remove links to Open Office.
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It’s to be expected. M$ is still run by the same people who thought up every dirty trick they could over the decades to prevent having to compete on price/performance. The latest deed covers demanding removal of links to downloads of OpenOffice.org under the DMCA nonsense. “Office” is in the name, right? Grounds for banning it… What’s next? Banning downloads of */Linux because there’s an “X” in the name? Nope. This is grounds for further anti-trust action. US Department of inJustice, Are you paying attention?
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Funding
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BSD
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A developer behind JabirOS has written into Phoronix to announce their new FreeBSD-derived project. Formerly JabirOS was based upon Ubuntu.
Muhammadreza Haghiri fired off an email this morning to announce JabirOS, a FreeBSD operating system.
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While OpenBSD lagged behind FreeBSD in getting the initial kernel mode-setting (KMS) graphics support mainlined, the BSD platform now has support for AMD Radeon graphics.
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Project Releases
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QEMU 1.6.0 has been released and with this open-source processor emulator commonly used with Linux KVM are a whole lot of new features and capabilities.
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Openness/Sharing
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In the last few years, audience participation and collaboration has been an increasingly discussed topic among museum professionals worldwide. Emerging technologies and the open source movement provide an opportunity for new forms of collaboration, namely collaboration among individuals with different areas of expertise using an online platform. In this blog post, I briefly describe two open source initiatives that focus on collaboration in Museum Exhibit Design, and share my conversation with Bob Ketner, an independent curator and an expert on open source collaboration methods, who was actively involved in both initiatives.
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Open Access/Content
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India graduates nearly 400,000 to 500,000 MBAs annually from some 3300-odd business schools. Based on an extensive study, The Wall Street Journal (December 2012) estimated that only 10% of Indian management graduates are employable! Given that a larger proportion of the ‘employable’ graduates must understandably be from the IIMs and other handful of high-rated business schools, the large majority of lower ranked business schools must be adding little value to the MBA graduates.
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Programming
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This week Twitter was in the news for buying San Francisco-based company Marakana, which has focused on tech training, including training many people to use open source technology platforms and tools. As ZDNet reported, “Twitter is in the process of building its own engineering education program, dubbed Twitter University.” Marakana’s team will help build out this effort and the company will no longer train any individuals or organizations who want training.
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While SDL 2.0 was finally released this week after being in development for years, future SDL 2.x features and changes are already being plotted and even some early thoughts concerning SDL 3.x for game developers and other cross-platform developers relying upon this important Simple DirectMedia Layer library.
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APPLE GADGET FANS can kick in to pay for the construction of a gigantic statue of Steve Jobs through the Indiegogo crowdfunding website.
Jobs passed away from cancer in 2011, but since then his influence has still been seen in Apple’s designs, so much so that the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5S have been credited to him. Some people want to make sure that he will always be remembered and would like to erect a huge – think Statue of Liberty proportions – statue of the late Apple co-founder.
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A lively debate among current and former Google engineers is raging on Hacker News about Quartz’s piece on the death of 20% time at Google—that formerly hallowed portion of an engineer’s week set aside for his or her own projects, which brought us innovations such as Gmail and Adsense.
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Security
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A former deputy secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security has announced the launch of the nonprofit Council on Cybersecurity, devoted to both encouraging the adoption of cybersecurity best practices and addressing the lack of skilled cyber-experts in the workforce.
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Academic advances suggest that the encryption systems that secure online communications could be undermined in just a few years.
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Phil Zimmermann, the inventor of popular email encryption service Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and co-founder of Silent Circle, told us even he was using e-mail less and less, and relying more heavily on mobile messaging services in the quest for privacy. He also explained the gnawing problem of Silent Circle’s e-mail service and why the company was now planning to put servers in Switzerland. Read the full Q&A with Zimmermann below, and you can read Kashmir Hill’s interview with Lavabit’s founder here.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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India allowed the US to use one of its air bases for refuelling the CIA’s U-2 spy planes to target Chinese territories after its defeat in the 1962 war, a declassified official document said today.
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India used US U-2 spy planes to map the extent of Chinese incursion in the 1962 war, starting a short-lived cooperation wound down after prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s death.
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Konkel reported on March 18, 2013 that the CIA has contracted with e-commerce giant Amazon to the tune of up to $600 million over 10 years to help them build a cloud computing infrastructure.
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Dubious sources feed national-security reporter Eli Lake a fraudulent story for political purposes — once again
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Kill the Messenger tells the true story of investigative journalist Gary Webb, who exposed evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the spread of cocaine in Los Angeles.
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Five decades after his death in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy continues to capture the public imagination. Dozens of books, films and television shows have centered on the tragic event, yet some feel the full story hasn’t yet been told.
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The United States was reportedly able to target an alleged al-Qaeda operative named Adnan al-Qadhi for a drone strike after U.S. allies in Yemen convinced an eight-year-old boy to place a tracking chip in the pocket of the man he considered to be his surrogate father. Shortly after the child planted the device, a U.S. drone tracked and killed al-Qadhi with a missile. He was killed last November, less than 24 hours after President Barack Obama’s re-election. Gregory Johnsen writes about the case in his new article “Did an 8-Year-Old Spy for America?” published in The Atlantic.
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According to a CBC report, the Toronto police officer who shot the teenager was suspended with pay.
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In a powerful speech, Chomsky lays out how the majority of US policies are practically opposite of what wide swathes of the public wants.
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The West effectively supported the military, for reasons which reflect its usual predatory and self-interested motivations, dressed up by pious rhetoric about ensuring stability.
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It got a lot of attention this morning when I tweeted, “You’re Eight Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist.” It’s been quickly retweeted dozens of times, indicating that the idea is interesting to many people. So let’s discuss it in more than 140 characters.
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A U.S. judge ruled on Monday the New York Police Department’s “stop-and-frisk” crime-fighting tactic was unconstitutional, dealing a stinging rebuke to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who vowed to appeal the ruling.
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Transparency Reporting
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange praised United States Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and his father, Dr. Ron Paul, during an interview Friday in which he said the family has been among the biggest supporters his whistleblowing group has in Congress.
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Tell them that going through “proper channels” will provide meaningful redress to their concerns, not injure them
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The unethical and legally questionable statement made by TIME magazine’s senior national correspondent has been met with a barrage of criticism. Although Michael Grunwald deleted the comment and apologized, WikiLeaks is still pushing for his resignation.
The scandal was sparked by a Twitter post on Grunwald’s account which stated that he is eager to write an article on Julian Assange’s execution by a drone.
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TIME senior national correspondent Michael Grunwald sent out a controversial tweet Saturday evening that advocated for a drone missile strike against Wikileaks founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Bees are extremely important. We’ve been writing about for years about the various threats that they face (Margaret has a great timeline of bee articles between 2005 and 2013), and about various ways to protect them. But this story from Australia might be the most original yet, or at the very least the cutest.
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Finance
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Things are getting serious for Bitcoin this month: a federal judge declared it real money, Bloomberg gave it an experimental ticker (XBT), and New York’s financial regulator announced an interest in regulating it. Declaring Bitcoin “a virtual Wild West for narcotraffickers and other criminals,” the New York State Department of Financial Services is stepping into the sheriff’s boots.
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We learn that “the gross domestic product of the 17-nation euro zone grew at an annualized rate of about 1.2 percent in the second quarter,” and that Brazil has gone from a 7.6 percent growth rate two years ago to a projected 2.3 percent rate this year–though the alert reader will notice that 2.3 percent for a year is better than 1.2 percent for a quarter.
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There are many different kinds of Web attacks today. The one that The New York Times admitted to in January was an infiltration by attackers going after usernames and passwords for email accounts. That type of attack is about information gathering and isn’t about taking a site offline.
There are also distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, where hundreds of millions of data packets slam into a service in order to render it inaccessible. In my experience in a DDoS attack, Web browsers simply time out and no response comes back from the given site.
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A Delaware judge on Friday denied a request by Carl Icahn to reschedule Dell Inc.’s annual meeting, dealing a blow to the activist investor’s fight against a buyout offer led by the company’s founder, Michael S. Dell.
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Aleynikov was hired by Goldman to help improve its relatively weak position in what is rather euphemistically called the market-making business. In principle, this is the business of offering quotes on both sides of an asset market in order that investors wishing to buy or sell will find willing counterparties. It was once a protected oligopoly in which specialists and dealers made money on substantial spreads between bid and ask prices, in return for which they provided some measure of price continuity.
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Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes. Is that all we’re losing?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Center for Media and Democracy filed a letter with the Texas Attorney General on Thursday refuting efforts by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to declare itself immune from the state’s open records law. Texas is the first known state where ALEC has formally asked an Attorney General for an exemption from sunshine-in-government laws, and it marks a new low in the organization’s attempts to advance its legislative agenda in secret and avoid public accountability for facilitating special interest influence.
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By highlighting this comment, CBS is suggesting that Snowden made some kind of important admission with his use of the word “spies.” Couple that with Pelley referencing the “collaboration” with an unnamed journalist–presumably Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian–and you can put the pieces together: Snowden, now “being harbored by Russia,” was acting as a spy when he “spilled” those secrets, with Greenwald his collaborator.
Sure, it’s not as alarming as, say, NBC’s David Gregory musing about whether or not Greenwald should be arrested, but it’s striking language nonetheless.
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Twitter on Friday became an official member of Washington’s influence economy, with the formation of a political action committee and the appointment of its first registered lobbyist.
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Censorship
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Here’s the official description of the Pirate browser:
“PirateBrowser is a bundle package of the Tor client (Vidalia), FireFox Portable browser (with foxyproxy addon) and some custom configs that allows you to circumvent censorship that certain countries such as Iran, North Korea, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy and Ireland impose onto their citizens.”
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Wikipedia Co-Founder Jimmy Wales said he would rather have no Wikipedia in China than comply with any form of censorship.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong, Mr. Wales said the company will always refuse to comply with government requests to restrict information, calling access to knowledge and education a human right.
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If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to circumvent any filters or blocks that your ISP (or country) has put into place on your Web browsing, The Pirate Bay might have a solution for you. As part of the commemoration around the site’s ten-year anniversary, which it officially celebrated yesterday, The Pirate Bay has officially released its own web browser. Sort-of.
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Privacy
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If the leak of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order requiring Verizon to provide the FBI and NSA with millions of call records was the most important in advancing the debate about privacy and surveillance, Barton Gellman’s report in the Washington Post about NSA’s internal compliance audits should count as a close second.
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National Security Agency spy programs need better oversight to prevent excesses in collecting Americans’ voice and data communications, lawmakers said after the disclosure of an audit showing privacy rules were broken thousands of times.
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Former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden is now living in exile in Russia, fearful that if he returns to the United States he’ll be arrested on espionage charges.
The irony is that the charges against Snowden, who was a computer expert at the high-tech National Security Agency, come from a law that dates back to before most Americans could listen to the radio, much less watch TV or surf the web.
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The leader of the secret court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the government’s vast spying programs said that its ability do so is limited and that it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans.
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Tables are turned as China raises security concerns about US IT firms following reports of mass surveillance by the NSA
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Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden began downloading documents describing the U.S. government’s electronic spying programs while he was working for Dell Inc in April 2012, almost a year earlier than previously reported, according to U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the matter.
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With each recent revelation about the NSA’s spying programs government officials have tried to reassure the American people that all three branches of government—the Executive branch, the Judiciary branch, and the Congress—knowingly approved these programs and exercised rigorous oversight over them. President Obama recited this talking point just last week, saying: “as President, I’ve taken steps to make sure they have strong oversight by all three branches of government and clear safeguards to prevent abuse and protect the rights of the American people.” With these three pillars of oversight in place, the argument goes, how could the activities possibly be illegal or invasive of our privacy?
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In the modern art wing, we have Obama’s brilliantly nonsensical, Dadaist argument that Snowden isn’t a patriot because, among other equally schizophrenic reasons, “he is convicted of three felonies.” This is a leitmotif pervading Obama’s work: equating illegal with immoral. He notably employed this technique when asked about Bradley Manning, saying that “He broke the law.” (Scholars are trying to reconcile this technique with Obama’s professed admiration of MLK, Jr., who famously remarked that “I disobeyed an unjust law.”)
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The Washington Post dropped two reports that exposes the recklessness of the NSA’s spying program. The first report is insane: the NSA has “broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority” thousands of times a year and the second report explains the insanity: the FISC court that’s supposed to be in charge of government spying programs has said that “its ability do so is limited and that it must trust the government” to report when the government has screwed up.
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When government officials can’t directly answer a question with a secret definition, officials will often answer a different question than they were asked. For example, if asked, “can you readAmericans’ email without a warrant,” officials will answer: “we cannot target Americans’ email without a warrant.” As we explained last week, the NSA’s warped definition of word “target” is full of so many holes that it allows the NSA to reach into untold number of Americans’ emails, some which can be purely domestic.
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Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime critic of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs, told Rolling Stone that he considered disclosing classified information on the Senate floor prior to the leaks by former contractor Edward Snowden.
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One of the intelligence community’s most outspoken critics says he considered talking about the National Security Agency’s bulk surveillance program on the Senate floor.
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Lon Snowden, the father of fugitive U.S. National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, has reached out to his son via the Internet, officials said.
The older Snowden communicated with his son through a protected Internet channel using encrypted messages, RIA Novosti reported Thursday.
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NUCLEON: Global telephone content database
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Reuters broke another report about the way the government lies to us entitled, “U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans.” From the report: “‘I have never heard of anything like this at all,’ said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
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However it turns out that dime is still 29.21 petabytes of data a day. That means NSA is “touching” more data than Google processes every day. Google only has 20 petabytes. Also the packet analyzer gear at the front-end of XKeyscore (can pick out a very small fraction of the actual packets sent over the wire while still extracting a great deal of information (or metadata) about who is sending what to who.
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This week on CounterSpin: Edward Snowden’s NSA’s surveillance disclosures have sparked a debate over privacy, spying and civil liberties. A new book tells the history of those issues, and warns about the threat to democracy posed by snooping government agencies and corporations. We’ll talk to author Heidi Boghosian about her book ‘Spying on Democracy.’
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The saga of Lavabit founder Ladar Levison is getting even more ridiculous, as he explains that the government has threatened him with criminal charges for his decision to shut down the business, rather than agree to some mysterious court order.
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The owner of an encrypted email service used by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he has been threatened with criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret surveillance order to turn over information about his customers.
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Just minutes after the post, Khalil says he received a response from a Facebook engineer requesting all the details about the vulnerability. His account was blocked while the security team rushed to close the loophole.
After receiving the third bug report, a Facebook security engineer finally admitted the vulnerability but said that Khalil won’t be paid for reporting it because his actions violated the website’s security terms of service.
Although Facebook’s White Hat security feedback program sets no reward cap for the most “severe” and “creative” bugs, it sets a number of rules that security analysts should follow in order to be eligible for a cash reward. Facebook did not specify which of the rules Khalil had broken.
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Washington has 16 known US spy agencies. NSA and CIA are best known. Perhaps few Americans know much about the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
It calls itself “first in all-source defense intelligence to prevent strategic surprise and deliver a decision advantage to warfighters, defense planners, and policymakers.”
“DIA deploys globally alongside warfighters and interagency partners to defend America’s national security interests.”
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Thursday night, The Washington Post published an internal audit of the NSA surveillance programs leaked by Edward Snowden, which show that the NSA has violated the privacy rules in place to protect Americans’ communications 2,776 times in one year. The infringements relate to the restrictions enacted by executive orders, which supposedly prevent the surveillance of American individuals without legal authorization. It has been determined that the majority of mistakes have been made by intelligence operators and computers.
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Allegations of chronic violations renew calls for serious change
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President Barack Obama’s promises to protect Americans from domestic spying came under fresh scrutiny Friday after an internal audit showed the National Security Agency had repeatedly violated privacy rules in its electronic surveillance.
The revelations appeared to challenge Obama’s reassurances that strict oversight of NSA snooping had prevented abuses.
The Washington Post, citing NSA documents and the audit, reported that the eavesdropping service had breached privacy restrictions thousands of times and in some cases withheld details from other government departments.
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The server-side encryption means that the data will seamlessly be encrypted without the users having to do anything.
However, while that encryption will make the data held in Google’s cloud more secure from attack, the keys will still be held by Google. That means that the US National Security Agency (NSA) will still be able to access customers’ data with a simple order approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
For that, Barth recommends that customers encrypt their data before uploading it to the Google Cloud.
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According to documents obtained by The Washington Post, the National Security Agency broke its own privacy rules thousands of times per year. Many of the violations seem like unintentional infractions, such as a typo while searching telephone area codes, which results in a swath of phone records that shouldn’t have otherwise been scanned. It is unclear whether any of the wrongly obtained information was used for illegal or illicit purposes.
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Under increasing pressure to justify electronic surveillance programs that at times capture communications of American citizens, the U.S. National Security Agency went to unusual lengths on Friday to insist its activities are lawful and any mistakes largely unintentional.
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Leading critics of NSA Ron Wyden and Mark Udall say ‘public deserves to know more about violations of secret court orders’
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“The reason I say this is unrealistic is because in order for this $180 billion to play out, then companies need to aggressively start pulling back from using outsourcers, using [hosting firms], using cloud providers,” Staten told CSOonlineA’A on Friday. “And frankly, we don’t see any evidence that suggests they’re going to start doing that.”
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An internal audit carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA) and leaked to the Washington Post reveals that Chinese Spring Festival tourists were targeted while on holiday in the US.
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Revelations that NSA collected records it was not permitted to acquire pile further pressure on intelligence chief James Clapper
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The church says this type of surveillance is reminiscent of that felt by the congregation during the McCarthy era
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Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, says new revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program suggest the Obama administration has “abused the authority granted to them by Congress” and that he will investigate the matter.
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Reports that the National Security Agency (NSA) routinely breaks the law and violates court orders and the Constitution in order to collect private data of hundreds of millions of Americans has prompted some federal lawmakers to finally exercise a little oversight.
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Though it took two and a half pages to do so, the NSA denied my application. “[Y]our request is denied because the fact of the existence or non-existence of responsive records is a currently and properly classified matter,” it wrote.
Oh. Thanks anyway, NSA.
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An internal audit from leaker Edward Snowden — now enjoying asylum in Russia — also revealed that the agency intercepted phone calls and emails from U.S. citizens during that time, and often did not report the intrusion.
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Republican Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan said Sunday he’s hopeful the House will have another chance to vote on a measure that would curb the National Security Agency.
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Nearly 3,000 violations of Americans’ privacy, mentioned in the National Security Agency’s internal audit recently leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden, weren’t “willful” and are results of mistakes by employees, the agency claimed.
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Because the NSA’s activities are largely classified, we can never truly know what we’re paying.
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Snowden. PRISM. XKeyscore. It seems that you can’t turn around these days without reading another story about government surveillance.
[...]
If as a society we don’t start fighting government snooping laws, they are only going to become more restrictive. For example, recently, the Obama administration pushed to make it a felony to stream copyrighted material over the Internet, which was a key part of the tabled Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) of last year. SOPA targeted user-generated content sites like Tumblr and YouTube and Internet startups in the social and online search space.
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Ladar Levison, who shuttered the Web mail service he founded — and his only e-mail account — when the U.S. government demanded access to his company’s servers, tells CNET he created Lavabit because of the Patriot Act.
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Ever been standing in a checkout line only to realize that you’re unable to pay because you’ve left your wallet, cash, or credit card elsewhere? Or perhaps you’re like the 83% of respondents to a recent PayPal survey who said you’d rather not carry a wallet at all. If PayPal’s latest technology using face recognition to facilitate payment transactions is successful, wallets may soon become a relic of the past.
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Edward Snowden: After 9/11, many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power — the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government — for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism. From a business perspective, this was the obvious strategy, but what benefited the institutions ended up costing the public dearly. The major outlets are still only beginning to recover from this cold period.
Laura and Glenn are among the few who reported fearlessly on controversial topics throughout this period, even in the face of withering personal criticism, and resulted in Laura specifically becoming targeted by the very programs involved in the recent disclosures. She had demonstrated the courage, personal experience and skill needed to handle what is probably the most dangerous assignment any journalist can be given — reporting on the secret misdeeds of the most powerful government in the world — making her an obvious choice.
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Civil Rights
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Ajam’s case takes a new approach to Guantanamo habeas litigation: Ajam challenges Section 1028 of the National Defense Authorization Act—the section which imposes detainee transfer restrictions on the President—as an unconstitutional Congressional intrusion into plenary Presidential foreign policy power.
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When the government gives itself the power to deny a person his or her constitutional rights, it is alarming, to say the least. When the government prevents the people it governs from being able to do anything about it, it is truly frightening.
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What we have in the Hedges v. Obama case is yet another very bad precedent. As Judge Forrest had pointed out, “Courts must safeguard core constitutional rights.” The 2nd Circuit Appeals Court, clearly not applying the principle of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) to this situation, has sold out that obligation for a handful of dubious promises. Recent history provides no confidence that such promises are given in good faith. No, it is bad faith we are witnessing here. The government lawyers should hang their heads in shame for obviously undermining the Constitution they are sworn to uphold. It just goes to show there are always those, be they soldiers, police, or lawyers who will simply follow orders no matter what the consequences.
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The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution states that the government may not take the life, liberty or property of any person without due process.
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A smart new book reveals precisely how and why Oliver Wendell Holmes changed his mind about the first amendment.
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DRM
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A federal judge took Apple to task on Friday for showing no contrition about potentially defrauding its customers of hundreds of millions of dollars.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Remember Guava LLC v. Merkel? A collusive Prenda’s lawsuit filed in Hennepin County court in Minneapolis? I thought that this lawsuit was over, and I was gladly surprised to learn (hat tip to Jason Sweet) that yesterday Judge Tanya M. Bransford ordered Prenda parties (Guava LLC, Michael Dugas and Paul Hansmeier’s Alpha Law Firm) to jointly and severally pay $63,367.02 in attorney fees.
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08.17.13
Posted in FUD, Google, Microsoft at 6:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The rotting empire resorts to separate desperate measures
Summary: A glimpse at Microsoft’s latest ugly moves against Google, which is a Microsoft Nemesis in the generation of Linux/Android and services
Microsoft seems to have censored Free software which runs on Windows, reveals strong evidence. Microsoft goes further by trying to do that at Google. OpenOffice could be vanished due to a bogus DMCA notice from Microsoft. As put by Swapnil Bhartiya: “Most of the time most open source players including the Apache Foundation provides the software via torrents as it’s a better technology than direct download and these torrents are then shared across the torrent sites. These are legitimate torrents. But NSA friendly Microsoft goes ahead and terminates these links not only from its own Bing, but also from Google and other search engines.
“I think there should be some penalty for sending wrong DMCA notices to discourage the abuse of the already flawed system.”
That’s a tool Microsoft habitually abuses, as we showed before. And as part of the resurrected "Scroogled" campaign Microsoft will try to accuse Google of what Microsoft is doing.
As the above author put it:
If you are a long-term GNULinux user you would love to see Microsoft in this position. IT world and competition has suffered quite a lot under Microsoft’s abusive monopoly which killed many competitors in the bud, before iOS and Android happened.
While Microsoft’s legal team may not miss any opportunity to brag about signing bogus patent deals with Android players over undisclosed (and thus can be assumed bogus) patents, it has no respect for the work of others.
Microsoft’s Windows Phone has a very very tiny market share, and thus it’s not a viable platform for Google or any other player to create any app for Windows Phones. Looking at the popularity of YouTube, Microsoft who never bothered to create any of its apps for GNULinux, went ahead and create its own YouTube app. For the obvious reasons the app did not meet Google’s terms and conditions as it offered a download option (and removed ads) to cut the revenues of hardworking content creators who publish their content on YouTube to monetize from the ads.
Microsoft had agreed to remove the app and the two companies were supposedly working together on the problem (nice to see Microsoft getting the same treatment it’s been giving to Linux for decades).
Microsoft is now excluding Android from apps and also accusing Google of being sloppy on privacy (look who’s talking). The Microsoft-esque PR from Consumer Watchdog seems to have been more bogus than we realised. As Lauren Weinstein’s blog shows, there might be fabrication. Google never said what it’s claimed to have said. As Weinstein put it:
“There was (I like believe) a time when supposedly reputable news-oriented organizations made the effort to try independently verify “news” — at least to the extent of verifying easily available materials — before writing about or republishing items likely to inflame passions and falsely damage reputations.”
[...]
We’ve just been treated to another vivid example of this, courtesy (initially) of reliably Google-hating “Consumer Watchdog” and Putin’s propaganda channel “Russia Today (RT).”
This sorry sequence began when Consumer Watchdog breathlessly proclaimed that Google had been caught in a legal brief proclaiming that “Gmail users have no expectation of privacy.” RT picked up the story, and sites that we normally would consider to be reasonably reputable started echoing it without further investigation, playing on the current climate of government surveillance furor (and in many cases, related hyperbolic and unjustified paranoia).
[...]
I don’t really expect any better from Consumer Watchdog or Putin’s RT. But it seems reasonable to at least hope for more sense from mainstream news and other websites who portray themselves as accurate sources of information.
This JoinDiaspora discussion about it has AJ saying: “it is kind of sad, that not a single investigative reporter took the time to verify this quote
“the reason i say that is because the actual quote is sufficiently absurd, there was no need to change it :)”
Will Hill replies:
Gates gets the press he pays for. Here’s a recent example of analyst and press manipulation. You can get a small glimpse of how big the microsoft controlled press is by reading their training manuals carefully.
the financial analysts particularly carry a lot of weight. We may think that, you know, Christine Comerford and Jesse Burst and other people who write in the Windows magazines are important, but the most important analysts are the guys who work for, like, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers and the other financial analysts. … everybody reads PC Week, but the VPs and above, those guys are reading the Goldman Sacks analyst reports. They’re the guys, you know, really making the decisions
There are two kinds of developer conferences. There’s those that are controlled by the platform vendors, such as our PDC. We control everything that goes on there; nobody says nothing that we don’t approve beforehand … At independent conferences, subvert them. Find the people who choose who goes on the agenda and … Just suck up to them so hard your face collapses. I mean, those people…those people are so valuable to you, it’s beyond belief, because they control who goes on that session or not.
There’s lot’s of independent programming journals. You want to infiltrate those. Again, there’s two categories. There’s those that are controlled by vendors; like MSJ; we control that. And there’s those that are independent. The ones that we control, you use. … The ones that third parties control, like the WinTech Journal, you want to infiltrate. You want to get yourself onto the advisory committee that picks out which authors are published and which ones aren’t, or which topics are covered and over these special issues, things like that Just be so helpful that they can’t do without you, and then make sure that things go your way. …that was actually my first claim to fame before I started doing presentations and forming users groups and so forth, was that I was really good on the Internet. And the main thing I did was that I was very formal and polite.
and so on and so forth. Those jerks never quit.
Microsoft, in the mean time, is also using antitrust against Google. Here is a response to this dirty trick:
Microsoft and Nokia protest “price predation” and play at being prey.
[...]
Practically, however, predatory pricing turns out to be controversial and difficult to establish. This is particularly true for predatory pricing claims against free software. An alleged predator is highly unlikely to recoup “losses” caused by free distribution, since free software’s four freedoms allow competitors liberal entry into the market. Moreover, free software licenses (including GPLv2 and Apache v2) arm these competitors with the power to redistribute royalty-free, making any alleged effort at monopoly pricing unsustainable.
[...]
Of course, Microsoft’s complaint is a bit hypocritical, since the Department of Justice and 20 states accused them of predatory pricing when they distributed Internet Explorer without charge. Recall their response at the time: That a market participant – Netscape – had already set the price for browser technology at zero. Does that sound familiar?
And by their accusations, Nokia displays ignorance about its own history with free and open source software. Speaking about Google at a recent legal conference, Nokia’s head of competition law wondered aloud: “If you make a multi-billion-dollar investment as Google has done in the Android operating system, why would you just give it away?” Presumably Google sought the same benefits as Nokia when Nokia open-sourced its own mobile operating system – Symbian.
The outcome of FairSearch’s request for a Commission investigation is not yet known. What is known is that the benefits of free software – high quality, high value, customizable, low lock-in technologies cooperatively developed, tested, distributed, and improved by an efficient global-scale community marshaled using the latest collaborative Internet tools – ring true with consumers. And these benefits, along with the disruptive business model that brings them to fruition, should identify free software distributors not as price predators, but as embodiments of “maverick firms,” a species of competitor that authorities in both the US and the EU seek to protect, not punish.
Hopefully the Commission will view free software the way consumers do and reject FairSearch’s complaint.
FairSearch is just a Microsoft proxy, one of many. We have already analysed the roots of “FairSearch” and “Consumer Watchdog” (deceiving names) before. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Patents, SCO at 12:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Possibilities of lawsuits of interest that target Microsoft rivals and help discourage public participation (like SLAPP but bigger)
THE mysterious company that had famously sued Microsoft (VirnetX) and got paid a huge amount of money from Microsoft recently sued Apple again. It is on a path of destruction:
VirnetX Holding Corp. (NYSE MKT: VHC) today announced that on August 7, 2013, it signed a Patent License Agreement (the “Agreement”) with Avaya Inc. Under the terms of the Agreement, VirnetX has agreed to license certain of its patents to Avaya, in exchange for multiple payments to VirnetX and an ongoing reasonable royalty for future sales through the expiration of the licensed patents as outlined in the Agreement with respect to certain current and future IP-encrypted products. In further consideration, Avaya has agreed to license certain of its patents to VirnetX for its ongoing Gabriel technology product development.
Now that Apple is suing Samsung we should remember that any such troll which Microsoft and Apple pay can go after Android and GNU/Linux, equipped with precedence. Think of Nokia and its patent arrangements with Microsoft and Apple. Here is the latest from Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung:
There will be a hearing in Apple v. Samsung I in Judge Lucy Koh’s courtroom, Courtroom 8 on the 4th floor, on August 21 at 2:00 PM, so if any of you stalwarts can attend, that would be fabulous. You don’t even have to wake up early.
What’s it about? Didn’t they just have a case management hearing in April? Why yes. Yes, they did, but there have been “progress and changes” since, according to the parties’ Joint Case Management Statement [PDF], which fills us in on the details. Both parties would like some changes since the last case management hearing. Here’s the last joint case management statement, back in April. And the judge’s order on April 30 was to go forward immediately with the damages trial, unless certain things happened in the USPTO reexaminations of Apple’s patents at issue. Some of those things have almost happened, and there are other quirks, so some changes are being requested.
An article by Richard Hillesley, titled “the litigation business”, reminds us of the notion of lawsuits by proxy:
SCO’s action against IBM and others failed, but reflects a fashion in the technology industries – not restricted to SCO – for replacing innovation and business with teams of lawyers and threats of litigation, says Richard Hillesley
Lawsuits that involve patents — not copyrights — are the next wave of FUD against FOSS. Steam, a company whose CEO is “formerly” of Microsoft, has another legal tie with Microsoft created:
Jason Holtman, who spearheaded Valve’s Steam business for eight years before leaving the company in February, has a new job.
The former lawyer has taken a job with Microsoft, with a focus on PC gaming and entertainment strategy. Because he has just started at the position, Holtman declined an interview request, but confirmed the move.
Lawyer, not a technical guy. Will he help sue Microsoft’s competition over patents? Maybe, but ether way, it is important to keep track of these movement because entities like Acacia absorbed lawyers from Microsoft shortly before suing GNU/Linux from multiple fronts. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, GPL, Samsung at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft’s hawkish patent extortion possibly jeopardised
Summary: Just like Microsoft after its unintended or secret GPL violations, code is being made GPL-licensed and the violations covered up as though they never happened
Over the past few weeks we have covered the latest noteworthy GPL violation by Samsung [1, 2, 3. 4].
“It looks like Samsung may have fixed the licensing problem,” said iophk. “Now how to put this in a positive light? It’s strange that the big companies act as if they are under no obligations to follow copyright and seem to do so only under duress.”
It seems like pressure and leaks have worked in the same way that Snowden’s leaks led to bogus government and NSA “transparency” (making public what’s already leaked). Based on Michael’s report, Samsung makes the code GPL-licensed all of a sudden.
Back in June, Phoronix was the first to report of a native exFAT file-system implementation for Linux that appeared on GitHub. It later turned out that Samsung accidentally leaked their exFAT source code. The solution has now been corrected with Samsung formally open-sourcing their exFAT source code.
The exFAT driver talked about in June was modified from an accidental Samsung source code leak that the independent developer found on GitHub. It was a confusing situation and he removed references to the original Samsung source code and it led to a confusing situation in the weeks that followed with tons of comments in the forums.
This was reported to GPL-violations and gave Samsung bad publicity, so they released it as Free software. As for what it means to patents on FAT, I am not qualified to say. It’s not GPLv3 though.
“This was reported to GPL-violations and gave Samsung bad publicity, so they released it as Free software.”In the past, GPL violations by Microsoft were also handled in this way. Microsoft decided to pretend the violation was open-sourced to rewrite history. iophk calls it spin, noting that “‘accidentally leaked’ == Samsung got caught ripping off kernel code” (indeed).
iophk quotes: “While Samsung accidentally put out the source code in the first place, they have now formally released the code under the GPL after it was discovered they violated the GPL in the first place. Samsung was shipping this closed-source exFAT driver on a tablet yet they were relying upon GPL-only symbols.”
iophk says that “all that aside, it’s an improvement that they have properly licensed the code finally… too bad it took all that trouble… Their image got tarnished a bit and that could have been avoided if they had just respected copyright from the start. It was also a bit of necessary extra work.”
This resolves the problem/dilemma for the leakers. Without them, this would not have happened. What does all this mean to Tuxera, Paragon, and patents on exFAT in general? Lawyers might tell. █
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08.16.13
Posted in News Roundup at 4:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Airware’s autopilot and control software opens the skies for drone developers.
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Back in March, at PyCon 2013, the PSF provided each attendee with a Raspberry Pi, a tiny credit-card sized computer meant to be paired with the Python programming language. The power and portability of the Raspberry Pi has stimulated an explosion of interest among hobbyists and educators. Their uses seem to be limited only by our collective imagination.
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The world of the system administrator is changing. You can spin up new virtual machines and create RAID arrays with just a couple of commands, pull the strings of multiple server systems with Puppet, use NoSQL to boost your earnings potential and much, much more. And when you`ve done all that you can peek into the world of Arch Linux, find out what it takes to organise your own OSCON/OggCamp-like conference, and get the inside track on how open source is being put to good use at Jolla, the successor to the Meego mobile operating system. All this, plus reviews, tutorials, Answers, HotPicks and more await in your latest Linux Format!
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The approach sounds familiar. Twenty-two years ago this month Linux creator Linus Torvalds posted his “crazy” idea on the web:
“I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby won’t be big and professional like gnu)…I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome….”
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Server
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Recent study reveals 83 per cent of enterprises have Linux currently deployed on servers; top reasons for adoption include lower TCO, higher performance and avoidance of vendor lock-in
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New research from Linux vendor SUSE identifies the types of enterprise workloads where Linux is deployed and addresses the issue of vendor lock-in.
The open-source Linux operating system is widely deployed across modern enterprises, and a new study sponsored by enterprise vendor SUSE Linux aims to reveal precisely what workloads Linux is running. The SUSE study asked 167 IT professionals about their usage of Linux in general. Across the survey base, 83 percent indicated that they currently have some form of Linux deployment in their enterprises.
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International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) said today it won its biggest cloud-computing contract from the U.S. government, a 10-year agreement valued at as much as $1 billion.
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Created in 1947 as a successor to the espionage agency born during World War II for use against the U.S.’s imperialist rivals, Japan and Germany, the Central Intelligence Agency rapidly developed into an international arm of repression for U.S. imperialism against the world’s working-class and liberation movements. It especially targeted the Soviet Union, People’s China and the socialist camp during the Cold War.
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Over the last decade, a similar thing has happened to system administration. It’s still the same old technology: networks, storage, security etc. But the way those technologies are being used is changing. This is most obvious in what everyone, except Richard Stallman, calls ‘The Cloud’, old ideas woven into a new dimension. It’s pushing change through at an incredible pace, just like when home computing exploded in the 80s, and it’s exactly these developments that Ben tackles in this month’s cover feature. But the most amazing thing for me is that while all those incredible formative developments took place in expensive and exclusive computer laboratories, you can play with any of these latest developments on any modest Linux box. And that’s the real revolution.
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Most people who keep up with Linux know that it has been a giant success at the server level, and powers much of the server infrastucture of the Internet. In fact, many Internet and enterprise users don’t even realize the extent to which they depend on Linux and related platform technology every day. In the enterprise itself, Linux is actually much more entrenched than some people would think. A new study on Linux in the enterprise from SUSE makes this abundantly clear, and shows that 83 percent of responding enterprises run Linux at the server level.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Jupiter Broadcasting, the guys that bring you the Linux Action Show, now bring Linux enthusiasts a new Linux podcast: Linux Unplugged. The first show appeared a couple of days ago to address issues time inhibits on the Linux Action Show.
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Kernel Space
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Puppy Linux, the lightweight and speed-oriented Linux distribution based upon Slackware, has updated their “Slacko” release to version 5.6 and with Puppy Linux 5.6 comes full F2FS file-system support.
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In 1988, Amiga produced the Fast File System (FFS) for use on the AmigaOS version 1.3 in 1988. The FFS file system was an update to what was later termed “Old File System” (OFS), released in 1985. FFS was backward compatible with OFS. The file systems were both released for the Amiga systems which had hard disks or floppy disks. Originally, the AmigaOS was termed AmigaDOS or Workbench and FFS had a version number of v34.
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Over the past few months, big changes have been underway on the cgroup Linux kernel subsystem and its related, but independent, system and service manager Systemd. Developers aren’t building shiny new features, though, as much as overhauling cgroups (control groups) to impose more structure in an area of the kernel that’s become problematic.
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The zRAM Linux kernel module that aims to increase Linux’s performance by avoiding paging to disk and optimizing to use a compressed block device in RAM, may finally leave the Linux kernel staging area and be promoted to main. This code that mostly benefits users with limited amounts of system RAM has become quite mature and is becoming widely adopted, which in part is why it’s trying to be promoted out of the staging area.
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A few minutes ago, August 15, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced that the seventh maintenance release for the 3.10 LTS branch of the Linux kernel is available for download.
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Linus Torvalds creates the Linux kernel, but Greg Kroah-Hartman maintains it. He speaks to Sean Michael Kerner
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As an experiment this year, the Linux Kernel Summit Program Committee would like to put out a call for hobbyists. This year, we have up to three places to give to people who do Linux Kernel development as a hobby rather than a profession (Our definition of “hobbyist” is anyone who doesn’t get paid to work on Linux). The Linux Kernel Summit will be held this year in Edinburgh from 23-25 October and, on the core day (the 24th of October), will primarily be concentrating on processes around kernel development. Since most top kernel developers are not hobbyists these days, this is your opportunity to make up for what we’re missing. As we recognize most hobbyists don’t have the resources to attend conferences, we’re offering (as part of the normal kernel summit travel fund processes) travel reimbursement as part of being selected to attend.
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Graphics Stack
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Hawaii Shell, a Qt 5 based desktop interface that has a Weston plug-in for Wayland support, has experienced a new release. This Hawaii Shell release for Wayland has many new desktop-related features for those wishing for something a little more than a stock Weston desktop.
New features of the Hawaii Shell 0.1.92 release from Monday include improved multi-screen support, a theming QML API, modal dialogs, a lock screen, and logout/lock/restart/power-off/suspend actions, and lots of fixes.
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An open-source developer has spotted thousands of potential memory problems with Mesa when using Valgrind.
While not meaning to rant about Mesa or focus upon the project exclusively, a Fedora contributor, Casey Dahlin, has pointed out the shocking number of potential memory issues within Mesa as found by Valgrind, the important open-source programming tool for memory debugging, profiling, leak detection, and other memory-related matters.
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I have tried the opensource driver but my notebook’s bios does not provide the gpu profiles required to make the dynamic clock support in the opensource driver to work, so I am stuck with catalyst.
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While the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver now has support for the latest graphics cards, there’s finally UVD video decoding, and the Linux 3.11 kernel brings dynamic power management, there’s still features being desired by those using this open-source Linux graphics driver on ATI/AMD GPUs.
In response to AMD’s Initial Radeon Driver Changes For Linux 3.12 article, Phoronix readers began talking about other changes and features they are still seeking. The discussion has taken place within this forum thread for those interested. Below is a synopsis of what’s going on.
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The Linux 3.11 kernel is still weeks away from being released, but already AMD’s Alex Deucher has begun queuing up changes for their open-source Radeon driver for the Linux 3.12 kernel.
The Radeon changes that landed in Linux 3.11 were incredibly huge due to the long-awaited Radeon DPM support that means a ton of improvements. With the Radeon DRM update is also the Radeon HD 8000 “Sea Islands” graphics card support, among other changes.
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Aside from Radeon KMS HDMI audio not being enabled by default, HDMI audio support has entirely been missing for newer Radeon GPUs, like the HD 7000 “Southern Islands” hardware. Fortunately, it’s being worked on and will hopefully land with the Radeon changes for Linux 3.12.
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At the beginning of the day I wrote about the Hawaii desktop environment having a new Weston Shell release. This Qt5-based desktop is not only nice for showing off the next-generation Linux display stack, but with it also comes a dramatic reduction in system memory usage.
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With the ongoing X.Org work for DRI3, the latest revision to the Direct Rendering Infrastructure, there is a Present Extension, but it looks like a new name is needed.
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While there’s now ETC2 texture compression and ASTC texture compression that were announced last year, S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) continues to be widely used by OpenGL games and application. This patent-encumbered means of graphics texture compression continues to cause massive headaches for open-source developers and end-users and will be the case for years to come.
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Benchmarks
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Applications
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Here is a straight reprint of the Inkscape series, Parts 1-7 from issues #60 through #67, from self-confessed non-artist Mark Crutch – if he can do it, so can you!
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In previous post, I mentioned about dynamic keywords in python backend. The idea is, after import a python module in Cantor workspace, functions, keywords, variables, and more from this module are load by Cantor and available to syntax highlighting and tab complete.
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Together with the 4.11 Release of KDE Applications a new stable Marble version 1.6 has been released. It surely is the greatest Marble release to date. Arguably each new release of a software should be the greatest so far, yet Marble 1.6 introduces an extraordinary amount of awesomeness. Below is a teaser image highlighting some of the new features. Make sure to check out our visual changelog which mentions even more new stuff and embeds some nice videos. Enjoy
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From my perspective, one of the best parts of being a Web developer is the instant gratification. You write some code, and within minutes, it can be used by people around the world, all accessing your server via a Web browser. The rapidity with which you can go from an idea to development to deployment to actual users benefiting from (and reacting to) your work is, in my experience, highly motivating.
Users also enjoy the speed with which new developments are deployed. In the world of Web applications, users no longer need to consider, download or install the “latest version” of a program; when they load a page into their browser, they automatically get the latest version. Indeed, users have come to expect that new features will be rolled out on a regular basis. A Web application that fails to change and improve over time quickly will lose ground in users’ eyes.
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Proprietary
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The Opera browser has quite a following on the Linux platform, but ever since the release of the new Opera Next, the Linux users have been left out.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Don’t want to dual-boot your Mac or Linux PC to run one or two Windows apps? Don’t want to install a full virtual operating system for them? CodeWeaver’s latest version of CrossOver 12.5 may be just what you want.
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Games
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This year’s new Football Manager game will be on Linux for the very first time – goal! That’s as well as Windows and Mac, and all three versions are due out before Christmas.
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By all accounts – mostly Rob’s – Europa Universalis IV is every bit as deep as the maroons and mustards and navy blues of its campaign map, which make it look like a pub boardgame from the ‘50s. And it’s probably even deeper than Crusader Kings II, the game it follows out of the development stable at Paradox and acts as de facto sequel to.
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The game has already received an award: “GameSpot Editor’s Choice Winner 2013″. Furthermore it was rated with 82/100 by Metacritic. Recently, some other games developed by Deep Silver were part of the Humble Bundle, but none of these games has been officially supported on Linux yet!
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Wow the awesome news doesn’t stop, Tropico 5 the island city builder will come to Linux as stated in their official announcement! Am I asleep?
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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I like some things about all Linux Desktop Environments. But my favorite is LXDE. For me, it is about customization. I want my desktop my way. And I want it running on a stable distribution. So I was pleased to come across LXLE. You can check it out here for yourself ( More about that later).
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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For speeding up the development of KDE Frameworks 5, developers at Blue Systems are near exclusively focusing upon the development of these frameworks for the next three months.
Blue Systems, the German company that’s been sponsoring Kubuntu, Mint Linux KDE edition, the Netrunner KDE distribution backer, and is involved with other KDE projects, is looking to push KDE Frameworks 5 ahead.
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KDE has one of the most advanced desktop environments around which empowers a use to take control of her computing. The KDE community has just announced the release of KDE 4.11 software compilation which includes the desktop environment Plasma Workspaces, applications and the development platform.
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KDE Software Compilation 4.11 has been released as its six-month update to the KDE desktop environment stack. With KDE 4.11 comes many exciting changes ahead of the KDE Frameworks 5 transition.
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Hello everyone, welcome to my new blog. In case you don’t know me yet, I’m Mark Kretschmann, known in KDE mostly as the Amarok guy (I started it about 10 years ago). I used to contribute regularly to Planet KDE, back then on our Amarok server, but what happened then is Google Plus, and a server move. As I became more active again in Amarok development after a hiatus I figured I could start blogging again, now that the “huge” release 2.8 is approaching really fast. If you’d like to follow me on G+ where I’m very active, you can do it here.
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The KDE Community is proud to announce the latest major updates to the Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform delivering new features and fixes while readying the platform for further evolution. The Plasma Workspaces 4.11 will receive long term support as the team focuses on the technical transition to Frameworks 5. This then presents the last combined release of the Workspaces, Applications and Platform under the same version number.
These releases are all translated in 54 languages; we expect more languages to be added in subsequent monthly minor bugfix releases by KDE. The Documentation Team updated 91 application handbooks for this release.
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Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.11 are available for Kubuntu 12.04LTS, 13.04 and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.
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Because current design has very bad level of abstraction: KReversiView controls part of game-flow, all code based on Computer-Player system with special code for computer and player moves, so to simply implement player-player mode we need to add many IF-statements to KReversiView, KReversiGame and mainwindow code.
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KDE Software Compilation 4.11 has been released – the major components being Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and the basis on which those are built, the KDE Platform. The new KDE SC 4.11 is more of an intermediate release cycle while the developers concentrate on the technical transition to “KDE Frameworks 5″ (the evolution of the current KDE Platform).
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Jos Poortvliet today announced the release of KDE Plasma 4.11 on dot.kde.org. He wrote this release is dedicated to Atul ‘toolz’ Chitnis, KDE contributor who passed away June 3. The rest of the announcement outlined all the wonderful improvements this release.
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Since my last blog post there has been lots of progress on the KWin on 5 effort. First of all a big thank you to everybody who has picked up some of the tasks on the trello board. Thanks to that the compile output is starting to look better and better – the number of deprecated warnings is starting to go down and by that also some areas are closer to be working again.
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Yesterday, David Revoy presented his new and 3rd brush kit for Krita. Thanks to him for his constant collaboration!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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In addition to the Hawaii Weston Shell update and better touch input support on Weston, there’s some more good news for Wayland: the GNOME Display Settings is now working on Wayland via a new Dbus interface.
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I’m happy to announce that another distribution has joined LinuxQuestions.org. Please welcome Zorin OS.
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By integrating classic KDE desktop performance with Web-based applications and cloud services, Netrunner 5 “Enigma,” released last month, does what many distro retreads fail to do: It achieves a distinctive quality that makes it stand apart from other distros. A privacy-minded version, meanwhile, includes Firefox preconfigured with Tor, FoxyProxy, HTTPs Everywhere and NoScript.
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Parted Magic, the popular lightweight live Linux environment for managing hard drive partitions through GParted and Parted, looks like it’s now behind a pay wall, but that’s not entirely the case.
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Puppy Linux – the Precise variant Precise Puppy is a puppy linux variant that is “based” on Ubuntu 12.04 precise. It is designed as a small and fast distro that can run on older hardware with low resources. It is intended to be run in live mode rather than installing on the hard drive. The iso file can be burnt to a disc or put on a flash drive and it would boot like any other linux distro.
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New Releases
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Members of the open-source Fedora Linux Project are plotting a different path for the operating system. The plan is for the distribution to evolve from a general-purpose open-source operating system to a new model with core functionality and then separate specific builds for different use cases.
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Since my last blog post about my arrival to Charleston (South Carolina), I have been participating to the Flock conference.
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At the end of FUDCon Lawrence, one thing was obvious to me: Bar Camp style conferences were not working for Fedora. Attendance was dropping, we were seeing the same talks over and over again, and we were spending a large chunk of time just shuffling these same talks into a schedule. It was a sort of echo chamber, where the same people presented the same ideas on the same topics, just in a different place and time. I talked this over with Ruth and Robyn and we all agreed that we wanted to try to restart the idea of what a Fedora conference means, and from that came Flock.
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This May I started my internship at Red Hat with the Pulp team. Since it was my first ever internship, I expected I would spend the summer working in a closet somewhere, on nothing of importance, and that what I worked on would be tossed out the second I left.
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Fedora
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Members plot a new path forward for the Fedora Linux Project in order to tailor it for more specific uses
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Debian Family
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A quick reminder: Despite the fact that it’s still about eight hours to midnight where I am on August 15, in many parts of the world it’s already August 16, which is Debian’s birthday.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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VANCOUVER–Ubuntu Edge, the innovative Linux-based smartphone-plus-PC, just passed $10 million on crowdfunding site Indiegogo. Too bad the team set their goal at $32 million — and has just six days to go.
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Within the Ubuntu community, users know Canonical delivers its Linux distribution upgrades each April and October. So anticipation should be building — right now — for Ubuntu 13.10′s launch in October 2013. There’s only one problem: Most eyes are focused on the Ubuntu Edge smartphone initiative at the moment. Is that good for Canonical’s partners and customers?
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Some time ago we announced Mir; a thin, efficient, multi form-factor display server that will form the foundation of Ubuntu moving forward across desktops, phones, tablets, and TVs.
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Canonical is going to finally shutdown Ubuntu Friendly, their community approach for users to share with other Ubuntu users how well their laptops/desktops work with the Linux distribution.
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For those following Mir Display Server development now that it’s living in Ubuntu 13.10, Mir 0.0.9 has been released.
Mir 0.0.8 came a couple weeks ago and since then there’s been numerous developments for this Linux display server that’s developed by Canonical for Ubuntu Linux on desktop and mobile devices. Mir 0.0.9 isn’t a breakthrough release for this Wayland competitor, but it does have a lot of fixes and improvements scattered throughout. The Mir 0.0.9 release happened on Sunday.
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Did you have a snap you wanted to submit to the Ubuntu 13.10 Wallpaper Contest? You’ll need to get your skates on as the competition closes for submissions tomorrow.
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Flavours and Variants
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Well, time to review Linux Mint 15 Olivia KDE. Normally, I do not review Mint releases adorned with the KDE desktop, not because there’s something wrong with them, but simply because it has never been Mint’s forte. The last time I tried this combo was with Lisa, and the experience was somewhat lukewarm.
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Timesys announced embedded Linux support for a pair of computer-on-modules that combine CPU, DSP, and FPGA functions on tiny, SODIMM-style cards. Critical Link’s MityDSP-L138 series COMs are based on a Texas Instruments OMAP-L138 ARM9+DSP system-on-chip processor, along with an optional Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA.
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Win Enterprises announced a Mini-ITX single board computer based on Intel’s 4th Generation (Haswell) Core i7, i5, and i3 processors, paired with an Intel QM87 chipset. The compact MB-73320 SBC accommodates up to 16GB of DDR3 SDRAM, offers numerous storage, networking, video, audio, USB, and multi-protocol serial interfaces, and expands with both Mini-PCIe modules and standard PCI Express cards.
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What makes PiCE special is its solid design which can protect the tiny computer from many things, even the rain.
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The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has ratified the SATA 3.2 storage spec, adding support for a SATA Express spec that can piggyback on faster PCI Express lanes, and defining a new embedded single-chip microSSD. SATA 3.2 also embraces the tiny, SATA Express based M.2 form factor, which debuted in recent Intel and Samsung SSDs.
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In most situations, a network router’s normal purpose is to facilitate in connecting computers together to form a network, either for internal use or for granting access to the World Wide Web. Admittedly, if you actually want to do anything interesting with the hardware, most routers have fairly basic firmware that limits the hardware’s full potential.
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The Yocto Project and the GENIVI Alliance deliver customized Linux platforms for embedded and automotive applications.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Most phones today are typical black slabs, but Samsung is showing they are not afraid to try something new (old) and have announced their new dual-screen Android flip phone.
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Android
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Google’s Android mobile operating system has emerged to become a dominant force in the smartphone landscape. Sitting at the core of Android is Linux as well as a long list of open-source technologies. Many people mistakenly think that Android itself is all open source, but the harsh reality is that from a usable handset perspective, it’s not always open source and an incident last week proved that fact beyond any shadow of a doubt.
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Today in Open Source: Is Android better than iOS? Plus: How to run Linux on your Windows computer, and a Pennsylvania school district embraces open source solutions
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Google Now, which was launched as a competitor to Siri, has become one of Android’s most popular features. Not only does Google Now lets you search by voice, it also gives you detailed information about your next transit, the weather, your undelivered consignments, flight details and more. Google Now, by using all the information about yourself, serves as a useful assistant who helps you at the right moment and at the right time.
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The CyanogenMod team has announced the release of version 10.2 nightly builds, which are based on Google’s latest Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. The team announced the release through a Google+ post.
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Google’s smartphone operating system now powers a whopping 80% of devices worldwide. Apple’s iOS operating system for iPhones only powers 13% of smartphones. iOS controlled about 16% of the worldwide smartphone market a year ago, according to IDC.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Dubbed the G Pad, the tablet would offer a resolution of 1920×1200 pixels and be powered by a quad-core processor, says blog site TechBlog.
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Lenovo is seeing huge growth in smartphones and tablets as the PC market continues its decline.
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Aside of improved integration with Tizen operating system we’re also tracking development of Tizen 2.2. This resulted in new interesting features for anyone who loves to cook apps with Qt: new default black UI theme and support for hardware buttons.
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As the rest of the world is catching on to the wonder that is streaming media we’re seeing more options for the serious HTPC die-hards. Boxee is the latest, an open source platform, endlessly customizable but only for experienced Mac or Linux users. If you’re interested, it begins Alpha testing next week.
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One of my favorite workshops to give is the one that introduces librarians and their staff to open source software. After defining open source to them and debunking all the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) out there, I focus my talk on a list of open source tools that can be useful to libraries.
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The open-source movement continues to gain traction in 2013 among core groups, according to a survey released by electronics distributor Newark element14. The results conclude that more professional engineers, hobbyists, and students will all use open-source software and hardware for one or more design projects this year.
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Basho Technologies has integrated its cloud-storage software Riak CS with OpenStack, the popular open-source cloud architecture.
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Google is adding another open-source tool for developers with the release of its Gumbo HTML parser, which is a C implementation of the HTML5 parsing algorithm.
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Perhaps the ubiquity of GNU/Linux on web servers that convinced Adobe to go this way or perhaps it’s the rapid growth of GNU/Linux on the client side but it’s a better move late than never.
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When it comes to Web development, Adobe’s Dreamweaver (originally from Macromedia) is a well-known and widely deployed tool. Like most of Adobe’s commercial tools, it doesn’t run on Linux. While historically Adobe’s tools haven’t been widely available for Linux users, a new era seems to be starting.
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While there are lots of open source projects that are now household names, many truly good ones don’t get much attention. We’ve delved into little-known but very useful open source projects before here on OStatic. In this post, you’ll find an updated collection of interesting, free applications that you might not currently use.
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There’s an old expression in marketing and public relations: when you’ve got no news at all and nothing product or customer related to say, try doing a survey.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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You know, why stuff that’s supposed to work out of the box, don’t and why some of the better features of the desktop environments and applications are buried or not enabled by default.
Sometimes I think it has to do with the adoption of a certain ideology by the developers. For example, the developers of Chakra Linux adopted the KISS (keep it simple, s..) principle, which roughly translates into, we give you a bare system, you customize it the way you want. Freedom, they
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Jason Warner who leads the Ubuntu Desktop Team announced today that Firefox will continue to be the default browser for Ubuntu 13.10 although he suggested the proposal which was unpopular would be re-visited at the next vUDS when plans for Ubuntu 14.04 are discussed.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Businesses love OpenStack. After only three years, OpenStack corporate backers and users now include Cisco, Red Hat, Rackspace, IBM, Intel, HP, etc., etc. You get the idea. That’s all very nice and well, but where does OpenStack go from here?
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There are few better occasions than a recurring yearly event to reflect and take stock of where things stand. In the personal sphere, birthdays and anniversaries are good examples of such events, of course, offering as they do a clear opportunity to assess the changes time has wrought since the last one. Here in the world of technology, annual conferences can serve a similar purpose. Case in point: CloudOpen.
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Sometimes when you hear questionable comments from corporate executives, it helps to take a historical look back and see if the comments are part of a structured and strategic PR campaign. The bread crumbs tell the story. As a case in point, first consider VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger’s cloud computing comments in a current Network World interview, where he says: “Where is OpenStack, we believe, going to be adopted? We don’t see it having great success coming into the enterprise because it’s a framework for constructing clouds.”
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As 10gen’s VP of business development and strategy, Matt Asay oversees the NoSQL and Big Data company’s partner initiatives. Translation: Asay, a veteran of Alfresco, Canonical, Novell and others — essentially is 10gen’s channel chief. So what are the partner opportunities for those that want to work with the MongoDB database provider? Here are 10 key questions for Asay.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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For college students, the old “reading, writing, and ’rithmetic” morphs into writing papers, doing basic stats, and creating presentations (and yes, still lots of reading). No matter what you’re studying or where, you’re going to have to perform these tasks from time to time. Even with student discounts, Microsoft Office Suite can cost anywhere between $80 and $140. But if you think there’s no alternative, you have a little research to do.
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Education
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Twitter today announced its latest acquisition, along with a move into offering richer resources to attract better engineering talent to the company. It has bought Marakana, an open-source technical training company; and in turn, Marakana will be the force behind a new effort called Twitter University. School mascot: a blue bird, not a whale.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The developers behind the GUPnP project, an object-oriented and elegant open source framework for creating UPnP devices and control points, released version 0.20.4 with various improvements and fixes.
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The official glibc 2.18 announcement has yet to surface, but the 2.18 release has been tagged in Git (and glibc 2.19 development now open), and packages of it can be downloaded. Fortunately, in looking at the Git tree we can already talk about the goodies of glibc 2.18 without the official release announcement.
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Project Releases
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Flashrom is the leading way for flashing BIOS/firmware images on hundreds of flash chips, hundreds of motherboards, and dozens of PCI devices. Released today was Flashrom 0.9.7 as the first major update in one year’s time and with it comes almost 150 changes to the open-source BIOS/firmware flashing project.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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HMTL5 is such a low-cost and portable alternative to native app development that it makes sense to explore solutions that address its limitations.
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IBM has won its largest federal cloud contract to date. Big Blue has signed on to be the primary cloud vendor for the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI).
The 10-year contract is worth approximately $1 billion, consisting of IBM’s cloud computing technologies, services and hosting as the home of the National Park Service begins to deploy a new cloud infrastructure.
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Forrester estimates the US cloud computing industry could lose up to $180 billion by 2016 thanks to the NSA’s PRISM project – but only if you believe that concerns about government spying trump the business benefits of going cloud.
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Security
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Officially, according to the NYT twitter account, all the paper has to say is that “The New York Times Web site is experiencing technical difficulties. We expect to be back up shortly.” And, then a follow-up,a few minutes, later saying “There are technical difficulties at http://nyti.ms/w0c0wo that we hope to resolve soon. ”
It’s not just the NYT Web site. According to sources at the paper, the nytimes.com e-mail servers are also down.
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New research rings the alarm bell on the risks of Remote File Inclusions, which could be a more pervasive threat to Web server security than even SQL injection.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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TWO CIA agents who participated in Argentina in the torture of Cuban diplomats Jesús Cejas – whose remains were recently returned to Cuba – and Crescencio Galañena, have been living untroubled for a number of years in the United States, protected by the country’s authorities.
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Caught in the crosshairs of conflict, what challenges do journalists working in the Middle East and North Africa face?
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For the right-wing noise machine, Benghazi trumps all. It stands as a singular failure in American foreign policy…
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THE CIA is acknowledging the existence of Area 51 in newly declassified documents.
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Documents obtained by George Washington University’s National Security Archive confirm the existence and location of Area 51, a former secret test site for U.S. 1.
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George Washington University’s National Security Archive obtained a CIA history of the U-2 spy plane program through a public records request and released it Thursday.
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George Washington University’s National Security Archive obtained a CIA history of the U-2 spy plane program through a public records request and released it Thursday.
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Transparency Reporting
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The United States government should be apologizing to Pfc. Bradley Manning, rather than the other way around, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said in a statement Wednesday.
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Whistle-blower protection experts say the President’s remarks last week might affect his prosecution and sentencing
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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President says scheme to raise money from rich countries to compensate for oil moratorium has pulled in only $13m
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Finance
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Last week’s CFTC subpoena targeted one unnamed warehousing firm, and specifically focused on documents related to the London Metal Exchange (LME), which is the primary global platform for trading based on metals. The LME sets rules for how the metal industry operates, including limits on how much of a given metal may be moved out of a given warehouse on a given day – the rule which warehouse owners like Goldman Sachs are allegedly abusing for profit. The LME also takes a one percent commission off of the rent that warehouses charge to store metals. With the total global value of metals traded through the exchange measured in the trillions of dollars, changing the system that’s allowed financial firms to inflate prices would cost the LME vast sums.
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Three Bloomberg reporters have done the Nation a service by ferreting out a scandal of moderate magnitude but emblematic importance. Dakin Campbell, Jody Shenn and Phil Mattingly broke the story on August 14, 2013 that Adam Glassner, recently described, but not named, in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) fraud suit against Bank of America (B of A), and named as a defendant by Fannie Mae’s in its fraud suit against B of A and several officers, was hired by two companies (Ally and Fannie) bailed out by Treasury.
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Felix Salmon has a depressing blog post about the Fab Tourre verdict and a criminal conviction in another Goldman Sachs-related case. Felix concludes, “I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that America’s system of jurisprudence simply isn’t up to the task of holding banks and bankers accountable for their actions.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Hillary Clinton hasn’t announced that she’s running for president in 2016, and launched a campaign yet. But the Washington Post is already complaining that her nonexistent campaign for an office she may or may not seek lacks a clear message.
[...]
But thank you, Dan Balz and Richard Cohen, for this glimpse into the kind of campaign coverage we can look forward to for the next three years.
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As newsrooms across the country have cut staff reporters — due in part to slipping ad revenue and corporate media conglomeration — the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity has rushed to fill the gap, as the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has documented. The Franklin Center has 40 state news websites, with reporters in 34 states so far. Its reporters have received state house press credentials and its stories appear as news in mainstream print newspapers in each state without alerting readers to the heavy right-wing bias of the Franklin-related publications.
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An examination of the promotional brochure for the Chicago meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) reveals that the meeting — where corporate lobbyists secretly vote as equals with legislators on model bills at ALEC task force meetings — has fewer corporate sponsors willing to tell the public they bankroll ALEC’s operations. This news comes in the aftermath of 48 corporations and six non-profits leaving ALEC after the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) connected the dots between “Stand Your Ground” legislation and ALEC, and coalition of organizations pressed for corporations to stop funding ALEC.
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Based on the sponsorship rates ALEC promoted earlier this year, the organization took in approximately $910,000 from firms specifically designated as “President” to “Trustee” level sponsors for its 40th Anniversary meeting compared with estimated revenue of approximately $1.2 million for the same level of sponsorships at last year’s meeting in Salt Lake City.
These totals reflect the highest profile sponsorship levels promoted at the meeting, but ALEC obtained an additional amount of revenue from other event sponsorship opportunities for corporations and special interest groups, in addition to registration fees, booth fees for its convention, and other income sources. So its total revenue from this year’s meeting is certainly greater than $1 million, and it is not known if some corporations funded ALEC’s meeting at various sponsorship levels but chose not to have their names listed as sponsors in ALEC’s brochure, or not.
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Censorship
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n the latest development of over-zealous internet filtering, the British Library has blocked access to Shakespeare’s Hamlet because of its “violent content”.
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As reported by PC Pro, the systems implemented by both Virgin and Sky to stop access to websites blocked by the courts appear to be blocking innocent third-party sites with apparently little or no human oversight. For example the website http://radiotimes.com was reported to have been blocked.
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Privacy
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Except not so much. In the months leading up to the scandals, President Obama has slashed the panel’s membership to virtually nothing. Usually a panel of 14-16 people, and 14 even last year, the PIAB now stands at just four members.
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An Annalect study of the public’s attitudes towards surveillance found that Internet users are becoming more concerned about privacy in the wake of Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks. They conclude that this will impact on online advertising, as more and more users adjust their browser settings to block third-party cookies and ads, and make use of privacy technologies in general. In support of the thesis, they cite strong growth in the percentage of users who have adjusted their browsers’ privacy settings. These users are still a minority, though the percentage has increased from 22 to 38 in less than a year.
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The Post went to the NSA and the White House for comment before the article’s publication, as it does with almost any sensitive national security story. “The government was made aware of The Post’s intention to publish the documents that accompany this article online,” the article stated.
But, in a separate post, the paper revealed that, after the Post refused to let the White House edit quotes from an on-the-record conversation Gellman had conducted with John DeLong, the NSA’s director of compliance, the administration tried to substitute the quotes with a prepared statement.
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The NSA broke privacy rules “thousands of times each year” since 2008, The Washington Post reported Thursday, citing an internal audit and other documents.
Material was provided to the newspaper this summer by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.
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Reports have surfaced claiming that Edward Snowden began his intelligence collection in 2012.
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The US National Security Agency (NSA) broke privacy rules and overstepped its legal authority thousands of times in the past two years, according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
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The U.S. National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since 2008, the Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing an internal audit and other top-secret documents.
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Over at Forbes, Andy Greenberg has penned a fascinating profile of Alex Karp, the CEO of the CIA-funded data mining company Palantir. Palantir applies Silicon Valley data-gathering expertise to the tremendous amount of secret data that intelligence agencies and the military generate. Palantir then takes all the data and makes it useful, tagging the information and analyzing patterns to, for example, predict attacks in Iraq or track down cartel members. The company is moving into the private sector, away from just defense contracting, and bringing lessons from the battlefield to banks looking to stop identity theft and cyberattacks.
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First download Mozilla “thunderbird.” It’s a free email service that you can use with your current email address. Next download a free program called “GNU privacy guard.”
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In this post-PRISM world, we need to take individual responsibility to protect our privacy and ensure we have free media. At least then we can freely read, write, speak, and meet with our fellow citizens. We need this privacy to be the new resistance to the creeping totalitarianism of the global elites.
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The NSA PRISM scandal rumbles on with the prospect of damage to the US cloud industry still top of the agenda as the German government called this week for greater support to create favorable European alternatives to US providers.
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N.C. State University will join with the National Security Agency to analyze massive amounts of data at a new lab to be created at Centennial Campus, the university announced Thursday.
The Laboratory for Analytic Sciences, funded with $60.75 million by the federal NSA, is the largest research grant in NCSU’s history, but details about the facility are top secret. Those who work in the lab will be required to have security clearance from the U.S. government.
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‘If we don’t recognize that this is a truly unique moment in America’s constitutional history, our generation’s going to regret it forever.’
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A reform that would protect classified information even as it helped tip off Congress and the public to surveillance abuses
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Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has given his enthusiastic support for the National Security Agency’s global surveillance of the internet and everyone on it.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Trevor Timm has a handy guide to decoding NSA doublespeak. The spookocracy has a pathetically transparent way of lying their way out of direct questions, but the press (and, more importantly, Congress) seems incapable of detecting the low-grade BS emanating from the smoke-filled rooms. For example, when you ask the NSA if they can read Americans’ email without a warrant, they reply “we cannot target Americans’ email without a warrant.” The amazing thing about this stuff isn’t that the NSA tries it on, but that its nominal supervision doesn’t notice it. My five year old is better at this than they are.
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The Russian lawyer for Edward Snowden revealed on Thursday that the father of the US intelligence leaker had contacted his son for the first time via the Internet in defiance of legal advice. Meanwhile a new poll shows most Russians think he is a hero for outing the secret services.
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Ladar Levison took 10 years to build his company—and he’s 32, making that most of his adult life. So when he shut down his encrypted e-mail service, Lavabit, without warning last week, it was like “putting a beloved pet to sleep.”
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Between constant password breaches and government agencies trying to look in on everything you do, your privacy has probably been on your mind lately. If you’re looking for a little personal privacy in your communications with friends and loved ones, or you just want to trust that the documents you email to your accountant aren’t being intercepted and read, you’ll need to encrypt those messages. Thankfully, it’s easy to do. Here’s how.
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The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Wednesday night that “there’s plenty of oversight” given American intelligence agencies like the NSA and CIA and that “we need them to be at the top of their game” in a dangerous world.
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On this week’s Political Scene podcast, Hendrik Hertzberg and John Cassidy join host Amy Davidson to talk about President Obama’s proposals to make the National Security Administration’s surveillance programs more transparent and more sensitive to civil liberties. The President’s plan includes appointing an independent lawyer to argue against the government before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court and reforming the Patriot Act to strengthen safeguards against the government listening in to citizens’ phone calls. “The steps he outlined,” Hertzberg says, “were gestures in the right direction, but they were really kind of feeble.” What’s more, as Cassidy says, the politics of security and counterterrorism may stand in the way of any substantial policy changes. “The political incentive for Obama and everybody in the White House is to act as tough as possible on all this national-security stuff, including this N.S.A. thing,” he says. “Even though there’s going to be a big brouhaha over this, the policies are basically going to continue.” After all, as he notes, no President wants to risk opening the doors to another terrorist attack.
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But this tension may become more intense in coming weeks and months. According to Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist involved in the publication of leaks provided by Mr. Snowden, more revelations would be made public soon. Testifying before the Brazilian Senate foreign relations committee last Tuesday, Mr. Greenwald said, “The stories we have published are a small portion. There will certainly be more revelations on the espionage activities of the U.S. government and allied governments…on how they have penetrated the communications systems of Brazil and Latin America.”
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So, the NSA has had a hard time of things recently. Since everyone kind of hates them now, it has made hiring anyone a little more difficult than anticipated, because in addition to being reprimanded by college students, they’ve started tweeting job listings that may or may not use accepted English words.
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The German government said Wednesday that it plans to build up the European IT sector to provide stronger alternatives to American companies that are subject to surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency.
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The EU and the US should also accelerate data protection agreement talks, German Chancellor Merkel says
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In the last week or so it’s come out that Rep. Mike Rogers, the head of the House Intelligence Committee has actively blocked requests from members of Congress to review details of the NSA’s surveillance program — showing that the claim that everyone in Congress was informed about these programs isn’t just a lie but a duplicitous one. And then it got worse. Rep. Justin Amash pointed out that Rogers’ committee actually withheld key information from all incoming Representatives in the class of 2010, who had to vote on the Patriot Act’s reauthorization, which renewed the program to collect data on all Americans in bulk.
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The CBS Sunday morning show Face the Nation featured a discussion of NSA surveillance with the former head of the agency and two politicians who vigorously defend the agency’s mass surveillance programs.
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Civil Rights
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Though the file is from decades ago, the system of COINTELPRO and other intelligence activities were prologue to our current surveillance state. Only in those days they did not have the kinds of surveillance technologies that exist today.
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But FBI memo reveals records were destroyed
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The Central Intelligence Agency denied that it had a secret file on the MIT professor for years, but finally copped to keeping tabs on the famous dissident since the 1970′s, at the height of his anti-war activities.
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San Diego 6 News reports that Hastings had focused his latest project on Brennan, the former White House counterterrorism adviser and current CIA director.
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Immediately after Michael Hastings died in a car crash in Los Angeles back in June, the conspiracy theories started flying. And this time it wasn’t all tin-foil hat nonsense—there was a lot to feel queasy about.
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An astute critic of institutions, Barrett began his career criticizing the church, moved on to the corporate media and political pundits, focused on various companies in the private intelligence contracting industry, and finally took aim at the FBI and the Justice Department. Holding fast to his principles and instincts, his exemplary work always advanced the public interest and the interests of the common people. On a mission to expose corruption and abuse, he acted in the best traditions of the Constitution and muckraking journalism. His writing bleeds with his knowledge of the libertarian and anarchist schools of thought and a revolutionary sentiment. It’s no surprise that he now finds himself the target of a political prosecution which has already stolen his freedom for nearly a year and threatens to put him away for life.
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America is descending into madness. The stories it now tells are filled with cruelty, deceit, lies, and legitimate all manner of corruption and mayhem. The mainstream media spins stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible —stories that celebrate power and demonize victims, all the while camouflaging its pedagogical influence under the cheap veneer of entertainment. Unethical grammars of violence now offer the only currency with any enduring value for mediating relationships, addressing problems, and offering instant pleasure. A predatory culture celebrates a narcissistic hyper-individualism that radiates a near sociopathic lack of interest in or compassion and responsibility for others. Anti-public intellectuals dominate the screen and aural cultures urging us to shop more, indulge more, and make a virtue out of the pursuit of personal gain, all the while promoting a depoliticizing culture of consumerism. Undermining life-affirming social solidarities and any viable notion of the public good, right-wing politicians trade in forms of idiocy and superstition that mesmerize the illiterate and render the thoughtful cynical and disengaged. Military forces armed with the latest weapons from Afghanistan play out their hyper-militarized fantasies on the home front by forming robo SWAT teams who willfully beat youthful protesters and raid neighborhood poker games. Congressional lobbyists for the big corporations and defense contractors create conditions in which war zones abroad can be recreated at home in order to provide endless consumer products, such as high tech weapons and surveillance tools for gated communities and for prisons alike.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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As we noted last year, in a surprising move, the USPTO had already thrown its weight behind the idea that copies of scientific articles submitted as part of the patent application were indeed fair use.
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Copyrights
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A California District Court has updated and clarified the permanent injunction the MPAA won against the BitTorrent search engine isoHunt. The torrent site has to keep filtering movie and TV show-related titles and terms on its site. The new order further prohibits isoHunt from indexing or linking to The Pirate Bay and the late BTJunkie and TorrentSpy. This is the first time that a U.S. court has forbidden a site from linking to other sites that have been dead for years.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Patents at 1:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The demise of Blackberry is a growing patent-stacking threat to Linux and Free software
Summary: Identification of a looming threat to Android/Linux, especially from a company with history of Microsoft deals and a growing patent portfolio that’s being considered for sale
The United States, whose patent system is run by large corporations like IBM and Microsoft (the USPTO has long been operating outside the public interest), is a very threatening environment to Free/libre software. To distribute computer programs for free might not be legal there, but it only becomes a problem when distribution is of high volume and by a large company like Google. Microsoft even got large companies paying it for Linux, a widely used operating system kernel. This is unjust and the core cause is software patents.
“The first step to fighting patent trolls is to limit software patents to five years,” says this new article, which puts forth a sort of compromise which at least targets the real problem. To quote:
There’s a lot wrong with America’s patent system — it often serves to undercut innovation, limits competition, and rewards trolls. But there’s a relatively easy short-term fix: Cap software patents at five years from issuance, a position adapted from the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Defend Innovation Project. While comprehensive legislation is needed to fix patent law, this first step is critical to reviving and protecting entrepreneurship, R&D, and technological progress in the United States.
20 years if far too long a lifetime for patents that should have never been granted in the first place. Watch how software patents are preventing the spread of voice recognition, motivating this lawsuit over reasonably out-of-date ideas:
As Nuance Communications Inc. and ABBYY Software House — two competitors in optical character recognition — brought their long-running case to a jury in U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White’s courtroom on Monday, their lawyers traded classic barbs of patent warfare.
Representing plaintiff Nuance, partner James Bennett of Morrison & Foerster described ABBYY in his opening statement as “a follower, not a leader.”
Coming to the Russian company’s defense, partner Gerald Ivey of Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner suggested that Nuance felt threatened by a more nimble competitor.
This is just protectionism. That’s what patents are about. When some companies cannot rely on technical advantage alone they then resort to patent monopolies.
Android, which is growing rapidly and taking over the world as a de facto platform (on which most Techrights posts are composed by the way), is actually the target of protectionism from the ‘old guard’ — companies it is making less relevant over time.
It is being alleged right now that patents from RIM might get sold. One reader wrote to say: “If BlackBerry sell company… Microsoft will… get QNX which is UNIX like operating system and… patents and QNX technology and Linux?”
“Remember SCO,” he added.
Well, Microsoft could pay BlackBerry to later see RIM/BlackBerry suing Android companies. The Nokia and SCO strategy more or less…
Blackberry is of virtually no practical use to Android backers; when Google bought part of Motorola and grossly overpaid it was intended to prevent Microsoft and Apple from getting the patents (which they had reportedly bid for, just like with Nortel).
What if another CPTN member like Oracle bought this company? A new interview with Oracle’s CEO was rather revealing. He spoke of Microsoft as an enemy of an enemy (Google) and one author thinks that “Oracle (ORCL) [is] The Perfect BlackBerry (BBRY) Buyer” (for patents at least). To quote:
So BlackBerry (BBRY) has put itself up for sale while also considering a private equity move. Some pundits wonder if the Z10 smartphone maker will break itself up into a mobile service provider and mobile device company. But The VAR Guy wonders: Does a more surprising fate await BlackBerry — at the hands of Oracle (ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison? Before you dismiss Oracle potentially buying BlackBerry, consider this history lesson.
Microsoft has been publicly aiding Oracle’s litigation against Android, announcing collaborations other than CPTN (technical ones too) and filing together antitrust complaints. Here is more of what Oracle thinks of Google.
Speaking of Oracle, what about other CPTN members like Apple and Microsoft (to which Oracle is now very close)?
Apple has been fighting Samsung using patent-induced sanctions at the ITC, with support from Obama's government officials. The Against Monopoly Web site says:
ITC Allows Apple Imports That Violate Samsung Patents
The blog, Public Knowledge, argues that the International Trade Commission should consider the public interest in reaching regulatory decisions on patents. The Obama has so decreed when it overruled an ITC case and permitted imports of Apple phones that it had found to violate duly recognized patents of other companies, in this case foreign firms link here.
When I look at the mess in the whole patent system, I see a world of oligopolies and monopolies built on patents, supposedly designed to encourage innovation, but instead creating a self-perpetuating means to paralyze innovation.
Groklaw has been upset about this and the other day it covered Microsoft’s fight against Motorola, which now involves an injunction as well. To quote:
Judge James L. Robart has now ruled [PDF, 38 pages] on Microsoft and Motorola’s summary judgment motions, granting in part and denying in part.
The attacks on Android takes many different forms (also antitrust), but the main players behind this attack remain the same. Next week we will revisit the antitrust angle. █
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