03.11.14
Posted in News Roundup at 9:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The primary goal of the conference was to encourage people to get involved with open source and to understand its power and its reach. We also wanted to help them get started by teaching them the basics and by getting them to know more about KDE. When the conference was over, it didn’t matter how many lines of code anyone could understand or even actually write. If some people were convinced of the magic of open source and of KDE, and are now willing to be contributors to this noble cause even if only slightly, then the event accomplished its aim. Events, speakers and mentors like these add fuel to the fire inside. Students were inspired to reach out and experience the power of free and open source technology.
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As my readers probably know there won’t be a combined release as the software compilation used to be. There are independent ongoing projects around the libraries (frameworks or KF5) the workspaces (Plasma Next) and the applications. These projects have independent release cycles and are not one product. I know, I know, many people will disagree and say that it’s still one. But if we go for this strong simplification both “will support Wayland” and “will not support Wayland” are true.
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Today I ported the ~7.5 year-old “services” KRunner plugin to Sprinter and added support for some of the new Sprinter features in the process, which I show in the video below. It felt like something of a milestone to have the first plugin I wrote for KRunner now running on libsprinter. 
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“Community” why is that more important than “Design”? Because it is design. It is the basis of Open Source Design. One of my favorite distros and desktops (aside from Plasma Desktop) is Crunchbang. It’s one of my first pure Linux Loves and will always have a certain place in my heart.Crunchbang got one huge chunk of design right: communication. Design is communication – it is not just “make pretty”, its the ability to communicate goals, ideals and ideas to a group. In Open Source the benefit we have is that everyone can be a part – we use it in almost every aspect, from the Kernel up to Widget programming. But we tend to forget Design because design have a myth about it of the “Lone Genius” and that “Design by committee” it’s supposed counterpart is somehow “bad for design”.
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It’s Christmas time for KDE Software users, the team has just announced the first beta of the 4.13 versions of Applications and Development Platform. This release also marks a freeze on APIs, dependencies and features so the team will now focus on hunting down bugs and polish it further.
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With these things in mind, I very quickly focused on two desktop managers that might provide the desired desktop: Xfce and Trinity. Since I prefer to use openSUSE as the underlying operating system and Xfce is one of the desktop manager options fully supported by openSUSE installations, Xfce was an obvious first choice for consideration. This article will consider the Xfce desktop manager from the perspective of a KDE4 user and it is addressed to all those KDE4 users who feel similarly frustrated with the development direction KDE4 has taken.
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Krita 2.8.0 was released yesterday, and this version comes with quite a big list of changes. In addition to the new features that were implemented, Krita is also available for Windows with an installer available from here.
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The KDE Project has released a major new version of its Krita image editing software, with the latest version of the free and open source Photoshop replacement available for both Windows and Linux.
The latest update, version 2.8, marks a significant milestone for the software, marking the first stable version of the software released for Windows.
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Krita 2.8 offers better tablet support based upon Qt’s tablet code, a new high-quality scaling mode for Krita’s OpenGL canvas, a new wrap-around mode, new brush presets, a layer picker, support for G’mic filters, and tons of new artist features and other improvements.
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The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce the release of version 2.8 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra Active and the Calligra Office Engine. This version is the result of thousands of commits which provide new features, polishing of the user experience and bug fixes.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Ubuntu Gnome team wants to join the elite club of Ubuntu flavours which enjoy the LTS (Long Term Support) status. 14.04 is going to be an LTS release and its apt for Ubuntu Gnome team to get extended support of 2 years and 3 months as an LTS release which will make it easier for those users to use Gnome who want to use stable LTS releases.
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Several other minor improvements have been added to this release, and various bugs have been fixed, including the removal of the “Now Playing” entry from the App Menu, songs are no longer being replayed when they’re paused, the current track is now restarted when the Previous button is clicked, and the position is greater than 3 seconds.
Mixed
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The sleeper desktop environment – which I didn’t even considered years ago – has been XFCE. I’ve found that XFCE offers more robustness than say, LXDE, which lacks much of XFCE’s polish in its default configuration. XFCE provides all the benefits one may have enjoyed in GNOME 2, but with a lightweight experience that makes it a hit on older computers.
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Linux users do not like change. Well, actually, they do not like change for the sake of change. If something works, they typically hang on to it until something truly better comes along. A good example of this is GNOME 2. People love it and it works well. However, the GNOME Project moved to version 3 and radically changed how it works. GNOME purists were angry as version 2 worked just fine — for them. And so, many hung onto the outdated version, shunning version 3.
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03.10.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More weekend news (plus early Monday news) about issues scarcely covered in the wider media/press
NSA/Surveillance
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed two briefs on Friday challenging secret government demands for information known as National Security Letters (NSLs) with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The briefs—one filed on behalf of a telecom company and another for an Internet company—remain under seal because the government continues to insist that even identifying the companies involved might endanger national security.
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Has it only been 10 months since Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations changed the world? Can you even remember what the world was like, before he gave 50,000 — no, 200,000 — no, wait, 2 million– secret documents to Glenn Greenwald: smoking guns that exposed Washington’s global surveillance state, which far outstripped the wildest, wettest dreams of the Stasi, of Stalin, yea of Orwell himself?
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Speaking over Skype from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, fugitive WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said his living situation is a bit like prison – with a more lenient visitor policy.
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We never knew the National Security Agency were such fans of the Master Sword.
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Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt wants you to know he’s “pretty sure” your data is safe from surveillance.
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There are also other eras I could proclaim, the Era of Severe Money Troubles, since some of the surveillance is justified by lack of monetary responsibility, and the Era of Complacency, because of people not doing anything about the mounting surveillance when they could. I could even call this the Era of Cyber Warfare. But one thing at a time.
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National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden answered questions before the European Parliament on Friday, saying that the United States spy agency pressures its allies to take steps towards further enabling widespread and indiscriminate surveillance.
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We have seen how the NSA’s phony court system has acted as a substitute for genuine judicial review, allowing the NSA to build up precedents purporting to assist its constitutional claims. We have also seen that the NSA is able to obtain surveillance authorization through misrepresentations to the court, without any genuine consequence to the agency, even when discovered. In this Part, we now examine how the NSA shields its activities from review by the public court system, through the control of secret information that could be used as evidence against them.
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Addressing thousands of audience during a teleconference interview at South by Southwest, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said that Americans in exile were fast emerging as new age National security reporters.
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CHELSEA Manning is ‘happy’ and ‘doing well’, according to her Pembrokeshire family who travelled to the US last month.
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Julian Assange, who has been at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012 to avoid extradition, addressed attendees of SXSW via Skype, where the confirmed ‘there is upcoming material’ that will be released and made mention of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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Drones
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The idea of a killer robot, as a coalition of international human rights groups has dubbed the autonomous machines, conjures a humanoid Terminator-style robot. The humanoid robots Google recently bought are neat, but most machines being used or tested by national militaries are, for now, more like robotic weapons than robotic soldiers. Still, the line between useful weapons with some automated features and robot soldiers ready to kill can be disturbingly blurry.
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Will we rescue our character, our culture, and our Constitution from a sort of 9/11 P.T.S.D?
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As an adapter to the thinking of men of power, Obama was a quick study. It took him less than half a year as president to subscribe to Dick Cheney’s view on the need for the constant surveillance of all Americans. This had to be done for the sake of our own safety in a war without a visible end. The leading consideration here is that Obama, quite as much as George W. Bush, wants to be seen as having done everything possible to avoid the “next 9/11.” He cares far less about doing everything possible to uphold the Constitution (a word that seldom occurs in his speeches or writings). Nevertheless, if you ask him, he will be happy to declare his preference for a return to the state of civil liberties we enjoyed in the pre-2001 era. In the same way, he will order drone killings in secret and then give a speech in which he informs us that eventually this kind of killing must stop.
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CIA
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A month later, at a meeting sponsored by Schwab Capital markets, CIA executive director “Buzzy” Krongard laid out for investors what such a war would entail. “[It] will be won in large measure by forces you do not know about, in actions you will not see and in ways you may not want to know about,” he said.
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Investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee, working in the basement of a C.I.A. facility in Northern Virginia, had obtained an internal agency review summarizing thousands of documents related to the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Parts of the C.I.A. report cast a particularly harsh light on the program, the same program the agency was in the midst of defending in a prolonged dispute with the intelligence committee.
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Ukraine
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Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchysta on March 8th said the Ukraine is ready to negotiate with Russia “at any level” over the Crimea issue, the move followed announcements by India and China that they were officially backing Russia’ right to intervene in the Crimea. Deshchysta added that international mediation efforts over the issue have made some small steps forward, including progress in efforts to establish a contact group. He also said the mediation group membership had yet to be settled, and progress is fragile. But with over a third of the world’s population backing Russia, the Ukrainian Crisis is over.
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Double standards are on display as Western leaders attack Russia regarding Ukraine, while they themselves commit or endorse worse aggression on other countries.
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In her March, 2011 testimony before Congress, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, lamented that the US propaganda mill was losing ground to its rivals for lack of funding. In an informal interview she went further, stating that when abroad she got her news from RT, since CNN had become obsessed with celebrity trials and failed to cover international developments. So the US Secretary of State declared publicly that her most trusted news source was….(drum roll ) Russia Today .
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As the Euromaidan protests in the Ukrainian capitol of Kiev culminated this week, displays of open fascism and neo-Nazi extremism became too glaring to ignore. Since demonstrators filled the downtown square to battle Ukrainian riot police and demand the ouster of the corruption-stained, pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich, it has been filled with far-right streetfighting men pledging to defend their country’s ethnic purity.
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The Russian invasion of Crimea occurred in a place little known to Americans, for reasons rooted in a tangled and bloody history. The showdown between President Vladimir Putin and the new Ukrainian government is a fight about tangible matters of intense mutual interest.
But many Americans can’t address international crises without sounding like a Toby Keith song: “I Wanna Talk About Me.”
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03.09.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about power and abuse thereof, including — for the most part — surveillance
Ukraine
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By shamelessly exploiting the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001, the Bush Jr. administration set forth to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Muslim states and peoples living in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf and Africa under the bogus pretexts of (1) fighting a war against international terrorism; and/or (2) eliminating weapons of mass destruction; and/or (3) the promotion of democracy; and/or (4) self-styled “humanitarian intervention”/responsibility to protect. Only this time the geopolitical stakes are infinitely greater than they were a century ago: control and domination of two-thirds of the world’s hydrocarbon resources and thus the very fundament and energizer of the global economic system – oil and gas. The Bush Jr./ Obama administrations have already targeted the remaining hydrocarbon reserves of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia for further conquest or domination, together with the strategic choke-points at sea and on land required for their transportation. In this regard, the Bush Jr. administration announced the establishment of the U.S. Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) in order to better control, dominate, and exploit both the natural resources and the variegated peoples of the continent of Africa, the very cradle of our human species. Libya and the Libyans became the first victims to succumb to AFRICOM under the Obama administration. They will not be the last.
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According to a report in Kommersant-Ukraine, the finance ministry of Washington’s stooges in Kiev who are pretending to be a government has prepared an economic austerity plan that will cut Ukrainian pensions from $160 to $80 so that Western bankers who lent money to Ukraine can be repaid at the expense of Ukraine’s poor. http://www.kommersant.ua/doc/2424454 It is Greece all over again.
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It’s possible to condemn Vladimir Putin’s invasion – and to believe that Kiev’s new government is no place for fascists
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One of the ironies of the Ukraine situation which has drawn no comment I can find is that the Ukrainians have been lectured on democracy by Baroness Ashton, who heads EU foreign policy despite never having been elected to anything.
Law
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The seven Democrats rejected the nomination because Adegbile served as the litigation director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund when the organization legally represented political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal in a 2011 appeal from the death penalty.
NSA
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This “discussion” about the whole “security vs. privacy” thing the administration claims it has “welcomed” since the Snowden leaks began? Yeah. Still not happening. As Cal Borchers at BetaBoston reports, government reps at an MIT event focused on “big data and privacy” couldn’t have appeared less interested in discussing any of the implications of widespread domestic surveillance.
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Ignoring easier ways to share data, a tech-challenged boss and manager devise an expensive and unnecessary workaround
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Surveillance tends to sow suspicion and unease among the people who are being surveilled. Is anyone listening? Who might be the spy among us? What trouble might I get into with the things I say? These questions can eat away at the core of human relations – trust. And this is true even at the agency that is conducting the surveillance.
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The paper points out a number of privacy consequences as well beyond government surveillance. For example, enhanced SSL traffic analysis by an ISP can lead to be enhanced customer data mining and intrusive targeted advertising. Employers can also more effectively monitor employees’ traffic and the techniques can also improve the censorship efforts by oppressive regimes, putting the liberties of privacy advocates at risk.
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A federal appeals court should outlaw the National Security Agency’s collection of millions of Americans’ telephone records, concentrating searches instead on terror suspects, civil liberties lawyers said in papers filed seeking a reversal of a lower-court judge who ruled the program was legal and necessary to fight terrorism.
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The NSA cannot keep American phone records for longer than five years, according to a ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court responsible for keeping the agency’s actions in check.
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Julian Assange doesn’t think you should hold your breath for Barack Obama to deliver meaningful NSA reform. The WikiLeaks founder said during a talk at SXSW Interactive that he believes the president is beholden to the American spy agencies and not the public. According to the self-anointed guardian of the world’s conscience Obama has proven that he does not take concerns about the NSA’s over reaching seriously by failing to fire or prosecute people at the agency.
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The NSA and GCHQ will soon have the ability to spy on the entire planet, as their capabilities double every 18 months, Julian Assange told the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference on Saturday.
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He also hinted that new leaks are coming from WikiLeaks, though he gave no specifics on what these might be.
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At SXSW today, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Skyped in from the Ecuadorian embassy in London to take part in an hour-long Q&A session. While the main topic of the discussion – government surveillance of the Internet – and his opposition to it, was unsurprising, Assange had some interesting points worth sharing.
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Speaking over Skype from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, fugitive WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said his living situation is a bit like prison — with a more lenient visitor policy.
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Policy on national security and protection is in the hands of people without critical technological understanding, warns cybersecurity expert
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The place to be today until Tuesday is at the South by Southwest Conference at the Austin Conference Center in Austin, Texas along with 30,000 other people. This year, NSA leaker Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder and secret spiller Julian Assange are topping the speakers’ list.
Yesterday Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, spoke to an energetic audience and announced that the company has completed its efforts to secure user data against unauthorized access.
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This announcement shares the same nature of secrecy with the collection of data Assange has declared that he is about to reveal. He has chosen to neither disclose a time frame nor reveal anything about the content of this new information. This is so that the concerned individuals, the “perpetrators,” do not have the chance to prepare themselves or “get a heads up.” To his credit, there is no credible speculation as to what this disclosure contains. With all his bravado in hiding, Assange was pulling the strings about getting the word out about Wikileaks. However, he is hardly the star attraction of this years SXSW conference. That distinction goes to Edward Snowden who shall also be participating through a live online feed on Monday from Russia where he seeks temporary asylum.
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Are we in danger of entering a new age of global totalitarianism?
So pondered WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in an unnerving address to the brainy hordes at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin on Saturday afternoon, just one of the many talks and discussion sessions at this year’s event concerned with the intrusion of authoritarian eyes into the former Wild, Wild West of the Internet.
Privacy
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Despite what the foolish #firstworldproblems hashtag on Twitter would have you believe, my phone was probably the most out of date there. Everyone else in this Ghanaian newsroom was using Android smartphones from Samsung and HTC. A few people had cheaper Nokia Asha smartphones. There were a couple of iPhones and when the Samsung S4 came out a few months later at least one popped up. That’s not to say everyone had a smartphone, or that there wasn’t hardship. But mobile Internet connectivity – with the exception of our unstable WiFi – was not the issue. Indeed, everyone was constantly connected with the now Facebook-owned WhatsApp – to the extent that journalists would update their editors with it.
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TechCrunch recently reported that Facebook is in talks to acquire Titan Aerospace, a drone-production company that has just started taking orders for its Solara 50. The drone is designed to fly at 65,000 feet, remaining above terrestrial weather. A typical launch sequence is initiated just after midnight, and the aircraft climbs under its own battery power. The Solara reaches altitude as the sun crests over the horizon and enters its standard day-night cycle. When the sun sets, the Solara shifts its propulsion, payload and systems to its battery banks. A battery-management system ensures voltage is maintained in the subzero atmosphere. It is designed to stay aloft for five years with a range or 2.5 million miles. Read related article.
Snowden
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Next week, the European Parliament will consider an unlikely, last-ditch effort to grant Edward Snowden protection against criminal prosecution and/or extradition to the United States.
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Edward Snowden says he reported policy or legal issues related to NSA spying to more than 10 officials before blowing the whistle
Drones
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The US aviation agency said Friday it will appeal the dismissal of a $10,000 fine it imposed on a Swiss entrepreneur who flew a drone over a college campus to make a commercial.
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As many as 12 fighters from the Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) group have been killed in a counter-terrorism operation by French forces in Mali who used drones to track down the jihadists, France’s defence minister said on Thursday.
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Abby Martin remarks on the ongoing media craze surrounding her remarks on RT regarding the crisis in Ukraine and features a clip of her appearance on CNN, where she took the opportunity to call out the corporate media.
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Just as America is beginning to wake up to poor discipline and order in the nation’s police forces, those same forces are becoming even more militarized. They have weapons that can fire a massive number of bullets without control or even any accuracy. Now, they, and anyone else with the money can have a new toy: A drone that can fire taser darts and shock a person with 80,000 volts. According to a March 7 Engadget article, the weapon is called the “Chaotic Unmanned Personal Intercept Drone, or “stun copter.”
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Today, Uncle Sam continues to preen as the globe’s big sheriff on the side of international law even while functioning as the world’s biggest outlaw.
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Technological progress in the West at the cost of human life elsewhere
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However, I thought it was quite ironical — and sad — that a drone attack killed five Afghan soldiers while the Afghan President was in Sri Lanka. And guess who had launched the attack? It was NATO forces led by the Americans and the British!
CIA
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Democratic staffers of the Senate Intelligence Committee obtained classified documents at the center of a bitter struggle with the CIA some three years before the agency determined that the materials had been spirited out of a secret facility and demanded their return, according to U.S. officials.
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The spies get caught spying on their bosses; what else could one expect? Give the spy agencies trillions of dollars and all the rope it needed to hang themselves. The over-caffeinated frat boys get bored killing innocent people with drones and tied themselves up in a knot.
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The confirmation in December that former CIA Director Leon Panetta let classified information slip to “Zero Dark Thirty” screenwriter Mark Boal during a speech at the agency headquarters should result in a criminal espionage charge if there is any truth to Obama administration claims that it isn’t enforcing the Espionage Act only against political opponents.
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…the misguided program of interrogation and torture carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency.
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The CIA and the Senators overseeing the agency are nearly at war. And it all revolves around the contents of a secret database documenting the CIA’s clandestine prisons.
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The family of American Robert Levinson is preparing Sunday to mark seven years since the former FBI agent disappeared from Iran’s Kish Island while on a mission for the CIA. Levinson turns 66 years old Monday.
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Canada and the Crown
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Imagine what would happen if the Crown suppressed thousands of pages of police evidence from an important trial? It wouldn’t take a legal expert to tell you there would be an immediate mistrial — especially if the Crown also prepared a false evidence sheet that mislead the judges. And yet, this was done to the survivors of St. Anne’s Residential School. Despite a damning ruling against this abuse of process in Ontario Superior Court, nothing has been done to remediate this situation.
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Today we’ve published on our about page a new definition of the world we want to see, explaining how we are working to achieve our aims.
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Setting the background, both Cooper and Clegg bring up the state of the debate about the capabilities of the intelligence agencies. The shadow Home secretary claims that debate has “barely begun”. She should not mistake the unwillingness of MPs to hold the state to account for a lack of debate or concern in the wider public. There have been endless column inches, each new detail in the Guardian minutely examined in social media, a Pirate Party petition with 10s of 1000s of signatures, demonstrations, public meetings, a law case launched with crowd funding, an Edward Snowden mural in Manchester in the vein of what you expect to see in Belfast for heaven’s sake…
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03.08.14
Posted in News Roundup at 1:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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AV Linux is a very particular distribution aimed at a very specific niche of users. First of all, this is an OS geared towards the 32-bit PAE processor, which is considerably older than the current ones. In theory, the distribution is capable of turning older PCs or even Mac OS systems into an Audio / Graphics / Video workstation appliance.
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You might have noticed that I used the term “different strokes for different folks” in the headline of this article. I think it sums up well the issue of choosing a desktop environment because there simply is no one desktop that will appeal to everyone, no matter how great it is or how many people like it.
Personally, I prefer classic desktop environments like Xfce because they simply meld well with how I like to work. I find using them to be much faster and more intuitive when I am multitasking or just moving around my desktop.
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Ever since I started using Linux I have always carried a copy of Puppy Linux on a pen drive. I have such a high regard for Puppy Linux that I have a page dedicated to it.
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I have to admit that I thought I was going to have a frustrating time with Simplicity because whilst trying 13.10 I came up with a number of issues and it just didn’t work for me.
This however is 14.1 and it works very very well and in fact I haven’t come across any issues of note except for the fact that the OnLive application hangs. (Probably due to my poor internet connection).
Simplicity is a worthy replacement for those of you using LXPup which is no longer being actively developed.
If you have a laptop with a failed hard drive sat in a corner gathering cobwebs then you can easily breathe new life into it by running Simplicity Linux on a USB drive.
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Getting Mageia 4 on the laptop was no big deal. In fact, I used the 64 bit version of the OS and everything worked, even the Japanese IME with iBus.
Then I tried to get PCLinuxOS and, unfortunately, had problems with the display. I need to see if I can get to correct the problem later.
The other OS that I installed to the Strata was OpenMandriva 2013. The only problem was the lack of Wifi connectivity… It was solved easily adding the appropriate packages.
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My first look at a BlankOn edition was BlankOn 8, which was back in August 2012 (see BlankOn 8 preview). So it’s been almost a year and a half between BlankOn 8 and 9. That’s plenty of time to make major improvements and fix whatever needs fixing on a desktop operating system.
The distribution uses the GNOME 3 desktop environment with a custom desktop shell called Manokwari. It looked good the first time I took it for a spin (on BlankOn 8), but I wasn’t too impressed with some aspects of it. But that was 18 months ago, maybe things are better on BlankOn 9.0, which is code-named Suroboyo.
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Gaming on Linux has been behind Windows for a long time. Fortunately with the release of Steam for Linux that gap is beginning to close and I can foresee a time whereby Linux gaming will be on at very least a par with Windows.
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It has been a while since I last wrote a review about Zorin OS. Time moves pretty fast and with other distributions making great strides, is there still a place for an operating system like Zorin which basically deploys a familiar looking desktop on top of Ubuntu.
It has been a couple of versions since the last review so it is a bit pointless for me to just write the differences between now and then, so instead I am going for the full review as if I had never seen it before.
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Yet another feature of Distrowatch is announcement for coming releases for Linux distributions. If you look at the list of distributions due to be released within next 3 months, which one is the most interesting for you? Which new release are you looking for most?
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Hi there, and welcome to another edition of Gamerheadlines’ top 5. Today’s topic will be lightweight Linux distributions. So, keep in mind that, while there are several amazing distros for higher-end computers, such as Ubuntu and Mint, these distros are for those of us with, shall we say… computers full of wisdom. A wisdom that can only be attained following years (and years) of experience and, unfortunately, age.
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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I won’t lie; I used to love Power Puff Girls back when I was a kid. Something about Bubbles made me adore her. Not to mention Mojo Jojo too. I’m sure at one point of time we all had spent a good amount of time trying to perfect our Mojo Jojo impressions. So, this piece of news is actually quite exciting. Power Puff Girls: Defenders of Townsville is a new game by Radian Games heading to Steam and also slated for a Linux release.
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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03.07.14
Posted in News Roundup at 12:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Privacy
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In the EU – US trade negotiations (TTIP / TAFTA) the US tabled a proposal that would prohibit to require local data storage. If the EU accepts this proposal, the EU would give away an instrument essential to protect privacy.
On 5 March 2014 the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament organised a meeting on the complex relationship between data protection, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the general context of EU-US relations after the Snowden revelations. (Stream available)
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Grumpy with Dropbox? Forget sueing the company, which is trying to keep you from your lawyers with its new Terms of Service document effective as of March 24th, 2014.
NSA
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SURVEILLANCE WHISTLEBLOWER Edward Snowden has responded to the European Parliament’s questions about PRISM and data privacy.
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The NSA whistleblower has given extensive evidence to an inquiry into the surveillance of European citizens, describing what he calls a “bazaar” of EU intelligence agencies allowing the U.S. to spy on pretty much everyone.
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But this zero-sum framework ignores the significant damage that the NSA’s practices have done to U.S. national security. In a global digital world, national security depends on many factors beyond surveillance capacities, and over-reliance on global data collection can create unintended security vulnerabilities.
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Sen. John Walsh, D-Mont., introduced his first bill Thursday, to restrict the ability of federal security agencies to secretly collect phone records and other personal data on U.S. citizens.
Walsh’s bill, titled the Civil Liberties Defense Act, also would require the National Security Agency to purge records of already collected data that don’t comply with standards established by the act.
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The NSA is forbidden to spy on American citizens. But the GCHQ is not so forbidden. So has the NSA farmed out its surveillance of Americans to GCHQ? The NSA would then be following the letter of the law, but, through its association with the GCHQ, would have immediate access to surveillance of Americans.
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The National Security Agency leaker will speak with Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist of the American Civil Liberties Union, about NSA’s spying techniques and “the ways in which technology can help to protect us from mass surveillance.” The event will take place Monday and be moderated by Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project (who is also a legal advisor for Snowden). Snowden will take audience questions.
Torture
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Earlier this week, we wrote about the accusations that the CIA was spying on Senate staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee as they were working on a massive $40 million 6,300 pages report condemning the CIA’s torture program. The DOJ is apparently already investigating if the CIA violated computer hacking laws in spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee computers. The issue revolved around a draft of an internal review by the CIA, which apparently corroborates many of the Senate report’s findings — but which the CIA did not hand over to the Senate. This internal report not only support’s the Senate report’s findings, but also shows that the CIA has been lying in response to questions about the terror program.
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“The Senate Intelligence Committee oversees the CIA, not the other way around. Since I joined the Committee, the CIA has refused to engage in good faith on the Committee’s study of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Instead, the CIA has consistently tried to cast doubt on the accuracy and quality of this report by publicly making false representations about what is and is not in it.
Militarism
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After successful testing last year, the Navy is preparing to deploy its first directed energy weapon to the fleet. When it puts to sea this summer, the afloat forward staging base ship USS Ponce will be equipped with the Navy’s Laser Weapon System (LaWS).
Drones
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The Pentagon has confirmed launching a drone strike against the Logar Province of Afghanistan today, hitting their allies in a case of mistaken identity. The strike kill five Afghan National Army soldiers, and wounded eight others.
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In order to frame last night’s Intelligence Squared U.S. Debate, moderator John Donvan invited Georgetown University constitutional law professor Nick Rosenkranz on stage to give the audience a jumpstart on their thinking as to why this event was distinct from the previous debate on drones. He explained that while the first debate looked at policy–which invariably brings politics into the equation–this argument, “The President Has the Constitutional Power to Target and Kill Americans,” focuses solely on the question of constitutionality.
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This past week, I had to write a paper on the psychological determinants of the United States’ response to the attacks on September 11, 2001. I clarify the year because if y’all never noticed, the Benghazi attacks happened on the same exact day ten years later … eerie. Like most political science papers I write, I dove headfirst into the topic and justified my watching of movies before bedtime because I chose ones that had to do with 9/11. First, it was United 93. Very bad choice. Quite similar to the night I came home from going out and thought “I’ll just watch a short rom com and fall asleep while it’s playing.” I chose Hotel Rwanda. Three hours later, I was alone in bed bawling my eyes out because why is the world such a horrible place?!
[...]
In 2011, a so-called terrorist threat, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was targeted and successfully removed from the picture, much like many other covert operations led out by top American military forces. The only thing that made this different from the assassination of Osama bin Ladin was that Anwar al-Aulaqi was an American citizen, as was his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi, whose death was officially stated as a “mistake” by the United States government. There were outcries from journalists and social justice groups following the two separate incidents; what happened to innocent until proven guilty? The response of the government was that the reasons for assassinating these two men — well, really one boy and one man — were too dangerous to let the public in on. So basically, we should really just trust the military and let them kill whomever they want, regardless of citizenship. Because the government is always looking out for the people, right? Except when they unlawfully assassinate us … it’s a cycle of complete bullshit.
Ukraine
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The EU has just announced that it’s going to freeze the suspect assets of 18 Ukrainian politicians, including former president Viktor Yanukovych. This comes after Switzerland and Austria froze assets earlier in the week. Quite apart from the criticism that the EU’s delay gives plenty of time for Ukraine’s missing billions to be shifted further afield, there is a bigger problem here.
If there are concerns that this money is corrupt, why did any of the EU’s banks accept it in the first place? Banks are supposed to obey anti-money laundering laws that require them to check out their customers and their source of funds. Then they’re supposed to turn down money that has been earned through crime – including the sort of state looting that seems to have been happening in Ukraine. And governments are supposed to hold banks that fail to do all this to account.
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In recent days, the Crimean peninsula has been at the heart of what some have described as the greatest international crisis of the 21st century. But this is not the first time the region has been so critical to international affairs. Many educated people have at least heard of the great struggle known as the Crimean War (1853-56), although its causes and events remain mysterious to most non-specialists.
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While the Kremlin denied any involvement, Georgian officials accused Russia of being behind the attacks.
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03.06.14
Posted in News Roundup at 1:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Privacy
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The authorities must take the necessary time to remedy the slapdash introduction of a database containing the medical records of the entire population of England.
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Medical data has huge power to do good, but it presents risks too. When leaked, it cannot be unleaked. When lost, public trust cannot be easily regained
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Facebook still gets a lot of press these days, and it supposedly has more than a billion users. But I’ve pretty much given up on it for business and personal use. Over the last couple of years I’ve found that Facebook just wasn’t worth the effort and time that I was putting into it.
First I deleted the Facebook pages for my blogs, and then I eventually deleted my Facebook account altogether.
Illegal Surveillance on Surveillance Oversight
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U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) released the following letter from Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan acknowledging that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act applies to the CIA. The question was asked of Brennan by Wyden in a public hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee on January 29, 2014. Wyden is a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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This refusal will give those who claim the programs are “legal” another notch on the rhetoric belt, as if not discussing the legality (or illegality) of the program was the equivalent to being found legal by the highest court in the land. If the courts are unwilling to entertain surveillance-related cases, either by refusal to grant standing or refusal to hear the case at all, the defenders can continue to claim the programs are legal.
Drones
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You’ve got to hand it to Hamid Karzai. He is nothing if not brazen. Other world leaders might be embarrassed if caught accepting bags of cash from the CIA. Not Karzai. Instead, he is bragging to reporters that the CIA money was “an easy source of petty cash” and reassuring anyone who will listen that he will continue on the CIA payroll.
The question is: What is the CIA getting for its (read: our) money? I am not opposed in principle to the CIA paying off the leaders of other countries; it has certainly done so before. If intelligently used, cash can be a valuable part of an influence operation; it can be a vital source of support for strong pro-American leaders such as Ramon Magsaysay, the president of the Philippines from 1953 to 1957.
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Have you heard about the Ithacans in Dewitt court battles, sentenced to jail for peaceful demonstrations against drone warfare at Hancock Field? And wondered if there was any way you could help?
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Concretely, the figures did not include injured individuals that died after been transported as wounded to other localities, such as hospitals or camps. The demise occurring after, even long afterwards, and as consequence of injures received in the combats or air strikes. In other words, media reports on “war casualties”– in the context of the given combat or air-strike event which is the subject in the report – invariably refer as fatalities only to those who perished in situ and at that very occasion.
Civil Rights
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- Ed: iophk commented on this saying that “The rationale for the arrest, the hyperlink, is interesting in the context of the EU consultation which ended today. Some of the questions pertained to possible changes to copyright law disallowing hyperlinking to external objects.”
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Well, well, well. We were about to put up the post below, describing the arguments that Barrett Brown’s lawyers filed about why the criminal charges against him for sharing a link (which they claimed was trafficking in stolen credit card details) were completely bogus… and it appears that the DOJ itself was convinced. Just hours after Brown’s lawyers filed their comprehensive argument, the DOJ has filed a motion to dismiss the criminal charges that stem from the cutting and pasting of the link. The other charges, concerning threatening acts (described below) and “obstruction of justice” (for hiding his laptop in a cabinet) remain, meaning that he is still facing significant jail time. But the core charge, concerning cutting and pasting a link, is now being dismissed. Of course, it’s still a travesty that the DOJ ever included that in the indictment in the first place.
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This latter category, comprising 48 of the prisoners, was profoundly troubling to those of us who had looked closely at what purported to be the evidence against the prisoners, and had concluded, with good reason, that it was profoundly unreliable. This is because it consisted, to an alarming degree, of self-incriminating statements made by the prisoners themselves, often in circumstances in which coercion, or other forms of pressure were used, or of statements made by other prisoners, even though many of these prisoners had been identified as unreliable by personnel at Guantánamo, and also, in some cases, by judges reviewing the supposed evidence in the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions.
NSA vs. Privacy
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The central pillar of Obama’s plan to overhaul the NSA surveillance programs calls for shifting storage of Americans’ phone data from the government to telecoms or an independent third party. But telecoms don’t want that job. Companies say they are wary of being forced to standardize their own data collection to conform to the NSA’s needs.
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The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) is the federal agency within the executive branch that’s expected to independently review anti-terrorism efforts to see if they comply with established law and to ensure “liberty concerns” are addressed. Some think a privacy group so close to the President would only be a “rubber-stamp” operation. But the PCLOB surprised more than a few when its recent 238-page report bluntly condemned the NSA surveillance program collecting bulk telephony call records as illegal, saying it should be shut down. Now the PCLOB is turning its attention to “PRISM,” the purported NSA surveillance program that has come to light through leaks to the media from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
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Another former NSA official has offered his contribution to the “Snowden has destroyed the NSA” narrative. Jack Israel, former “technical director for NSA’s analysis & production directorate” has posted an op-ed at the Baltimore Sun that makes all the usual stops on the talking point circuit on its way to claiming the leaks have done “permanent damage” to the NSA.
Sept. 11th? Referenced heavily. The bulk of Israel’s op-ed recounts the agency’s actions after the Sept. 11th attacks, including its newfound interest in the internet. Rather than acknowledging the failure to collaborate that allowed a known terrorist (and 9/11 participant) to reenter the country unnoticed, Israel blames this on another, older leak.
Nobel Peace Prize is a Joke
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Vladimir Putin, the Russian strongman who faces international criticism for this week’s invasion of Ukraine, is among the 278 people nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Putin was reportedly nominated for his work in defusing last year’s Syrian crisis.
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Pope Francis, Russian President Vladimir Putin and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden are among a record 278 people nominated for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.
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Ukraine
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The ultra-right Svoboda Party has scored six major cabinet ministries in the government of Arseniy Yatsenyuk approved by the Ukrainian parliament on Thursday. Svoboda is an ultra-right, anti-Semitic, Russophobic party with its base of support in the Western Ukraine.
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was spurred by U.S. behind-the-scenes actions, says former Ohio congressman and Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich.
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly on Tuesday accused Kucinich of being a pacifist because of his opposition to the Iraq war, and Kucinich countered that war is wrong but not all U.S. military action is so.
O’Reilly then asked how Kucinich would have handled the Ukraine crisis had he been president.
Assange
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Chris Hedges is among the last of a dying breed: the war correspondent that has spent his life with society’s outcasts and the faceless victims of conflcit. I ask how he came into journalism and what he thinks are the crucial attributes for a journalist. “I originally came to journalism through the priesthood actually. I was studying at Harvard Divinity school, originally intending to become a minister when I met a fantastic guy named Robert Cox. Robert had been editor of the Buenos Aires Herald during the dirty war in the late 70’s. He was a very brave man. The government at the time’s way of disposing of its enemies was ‘disappearing them’; they’d simply vanish into the night, usually never to be seen again. Bob used to print the names of those who had been disappeared the previous day above the fold in his newspaper.
“Eventually, he himself was disappeared, although his life was saved by the intervention of the British and American governments. He really opened my eyes to the possibility of journalism, and what journalism can do.”
He emphasises a balanced approach. “One of the most important things you can do as a journalist is have a strict sense of objectivity and wish to stick to the truth. Orwell is the absolute epitome of this aspect of our profession, particularly in books such as Homage to Catalonia. I’ll illustrate with an example from my own career. When I covered the war in Kosovo, I spent the vast majority of my time covering the atrocities of the Serbian security forces, who, if they hadn’t been stopped by a NATO intervention, would have committed murder, massacre and rape on a huge scale. But when they withdrew, their role was replaced by that of Albanian thugs who instead starting beating and murdering elderly Serb couples who had nothing whatsoever to do with Milosevic and his crimes
Police
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Seven Democrats voted against moving forward with President Obama’s nomination of Adegbile, which the Fraternal Order of Police and other groups opposed because of his involvement in the defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1981.
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That’s when Electra police officers Matt Wood and Gary Ellis approached Nesin, setting off a series of actions that will leave your blood boiling. The pair engaged in unethical police behavior starting off with asking Nesin for his identification even though he had broken no laws, all the way to Electra city attorney Todd Greenwood admitting that they do not follow the Constitution in their town, with a lot of strong-armed bullying taking place in between.
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