08.09.13
Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 1:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Correcting irresponsible press coverage which rather than discourage use of Windows discourages use of Tor and Free software such as Firefox
A lot of Mozilla flaws routinely affect only Windows users, but corporate media is too negligent to point out the real weak links. Windows is just assumed to be a given; it is almost like journalists at corporate media try to reinforce the Microsoft monopoly with all the security holes.
“The Internet as a whole is being compromised by Microsoft yet again (not just botnets and spam).”Firefox is being blamed for what’s essentially a Windows issue that let Tor be compromised. Some try to say that the NSA was not behind it, but an FBI Tor exploit and analysis of IP blocks does suggest that the US government was behind the cracking of Tor, exploiting Windows (which has NSA back doors).
Addressing this Microsoft/NSA issue, one blogger writes: “I like the expression, “Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water.” I almost used it to open this article, but I didn’t. It would be inaccurate. Nobody in his right mind would consider the Internet waters safe at this junction in time.”
The Internet as a whole is being compromised by Microsoft yet again (not just botnets and spam). Tor with Microsoft sure makes a scary spectacle and a dangerous one for human rights.
Sean Michael Kerner says he foresaw this:
Approximately two and a half years ago, Tor (The Onion Router) Web anonymity project announced that was was going to build its own Web browser, to be known as the Tor Browser.
The Tor network provides a way for users to anonymize their online activities by running data packets through a number of “onion routers” that are servers that relay the user traffic but not the original header information (which indicates the user IP address). Prior to the Tor Browser, what many users did (myself included) was to simply use the Tor Button, which was a Firefox add-on that enabled Tor access on top of Firefox.
The Tor people back in 2011 thought that the Tor Button was a less-than-ideal solution and that building their own browser was a better idea. I wrote a blog post in May of 2011 warning of the risks of that approach and that it could lead to ruin.
I was right.
This is a problem only on Windows though. It is a shame that the press does not properly cover this crucial point. it leaves people more vulnerable to illegal intrusion. █
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Posted in Bill Gates at 12:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: As patent trolls devour the economy, working secretly to enrich profiteers who run classic pyramid schemes, federal action becomes imperative and it must target the ringleaders, not just the ‘assassins’ down the chain (plaintiffs in the pyramid schemes)
Now that Google ‘donates’ 79 more patents to shield Fog Computing from lawsuits (a bizarre form of marketing that we criticised before) we can assume that Google is worried about patent trolls, not just important leaks that reveal how suicidal it is to store or process data on remote servers.
There is a bipartisan [1, 2] movement against patent trolls and it is being noticed by prominent publications, one of which says: “Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic identifies patent reform as one of several policy interventions libertarian-minded voters might embrace to redress certain entrenched inequalities. Assuming GOP elected officials really do embrace patent reform, as seems reasonably likely, one wonders if this reflects a larger willingness to embrace new anti-incumbent policy initiatives or if it merely reflects the fact that Republican lawmakers aren’t as beholden to advocates of software patents as they are to, say, the doctors’ cartel. My guess is that both factors play a role.”
The main problem we have is, it remains unclear whether racketeering operations like Intellectual Ventures will be shut down in the process.
Detkin, one of Nathan’s minions (Nathan, in turn, is a minion of Bill Gates) is trying to lie but fails miserably. As IP Troll Tracker put it, “I read this blog post by Peter Detkin and almost tripped over the dog, I was running so fast towards my Patent Troll Translater™. This type of stuff just begs to be run through, no?
“According to IV, there’s a list of five things you should or should not do when considering patent reform. Which I’m not sure IV is actually considering because if the patent system were ever to be reformed? Hello? You’d be out of a business model. Duh.”
Yes, well, just as terrorists never call themselves terrorists, trolls never admit being trolls. We have accumulated this collection of trolls in our wiki for convenience (far from a complete list and it does not include hybrid trolls like Apple and Microsoft). For those who can’t recall how criminal the enterprise of Bill and Nathan is, here is a fresh reminder from the news:
Shell Company Related To Cowardly Patent Troll, Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures, Forced To Settle Frivolous Lawsuit Against One-Man Business After Law Firm Donates Nearly $200,000 Worth Of Defense
This story will circulate a lot today. I’d like to suggest a more informative and accurate headline than the likely “Lodsys dismisses a lawsuit and donates to charity”.
Let’s cut through four big bullshit points immediately:
“Lodsys” is allegedly one of many fake, meaningless entities created to absorb negativity from Intellectual Ventures’ real business: large-scale patent trolling and extortion of the majority of the tech industry.
Maybe Nathan Myhrvold doesn’t want to admit (to himself?) what his company really does. Or maybe he doesn’t want to tarnish his new reputation as a high-end culinary icon with the people and small businesses his company shakes down and the huge tax he extorts out of one of the world’s biggest industries.
Assigning negative press to “Lodsys” instead of Intellectual Ventures and Myhrvold is exactly what they want the public to do, but it’s dishonest by omission to ignore Intellectual Ventures’ involvement in the Lodsys patents. Bring the fight to their door, not their shell company’s fake office.
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There are no winners in this case. Nothing has changed for the better. If anything, the system has been strengthened and validated.
We’re all losers — except patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures and Nathan Myhrvold, who continue to steal time, money, and willpower from thousands of hard-working people and make the world a worse place, with no repercussions for themselves. Hell, the culinary world thinks Myhrvold’s some sort of genius hero.
I don’t know how anyone in this racket sleeps at night.
Here is what the victim wrote this week:
Lodsys has dismissed the patent infringement lawsuit it filed against my company TMSOFT. The dismissal is with prejudice which means they can never sue my company again for infringing its patents. I did not have to pay any money to Lodsys or sign a license agreement. I also did not sign a confidentially agreement so I’m free to talk about this matter.
Any patent reform or any crackdown on trolls which overlooks Nathan and Bill’s criminal enterprise of patents will be utterly pointless. The whole economy is messed up because of pyramid schemes like these. It is about taxing everyone, looting the nation. The Gates Foundation, an Intellectual Ventures partner, does something similar with patents, trying to dress it up as ‘charity’ (another clever deception campaign). Parasitical elements often establish a method of systematic, non-ending wealth transfer which in no way benefits anyone but a set of plutocrats. There are some analogous scams, but Intellectual Ventures is unique in the area of patents. █
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Posted in Apple, BSD, Patents, UNIX at 12:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Special relationships last even after death
Summary: Nepotism incarnated; Apple now appeals to politicians rather than judges, having lost the technical race to Linux; Apple’s top UNIX guru quits
Apple’s patent chief recently left the company, joining some prominent technical people who left this declining marketing and litigation company. The latest departure is that of Apple’s operating systems asset, who quit. As one article put it, “Hubbard left Apple last month to return to the world of open source UNIX, taking the chief technology officer post at a iXsystems, a company that offers servers and other data center hardware that runs FreeBSD.”
Concurrently, Apple continues pursuing embargo against Android devices. Apple uses the ITC and also litigates against Google through Motorola.
Mr. Pogson said, “When Is Prior Art Not Prior Art? When The US Federal Circuit Ignores It.”
Yes, Apple enjoys special treatment again. As Pamela Jones put it, “Apple started the show in this particular tent of the overall smartphone patent wars circus, suing Motorola at the ITC for infringement of various claims of Apple’s ’607 and ’828 patents, which are about touchscreens and multi-touch.”
“Apple keeps trying to cheat and game the system; when its claims are found to be empty it cries to its government and gets its way.”And let’s not forget the recent pardon to Apple from the president of drone assassinations, illegal surveillance and torture. The US government is superseding the law especially for Apple as the Obama administration pushed back against an embargo. Jones had this to say about it: “So, it was a bit like the papal special dispensations of history, where the law said X, but you are let off the hook from having to keep it. That makes Apple’s reported public response particularly offensive, when it said, “Samsung was wrong to abuse the patent system in this way.” Samsung didn’t abuse the patent system. It was, as you will see, exactly the opposite, according to the ITC Opinion. And while the President can do whatever he wishes regarding public policy, the ITC followed the statute, since it has no policy powers. In short, one unavoidably must conclude that if Samsung had been the US company and Apple the Korean one, there would have been no pardon. That’s the bottom line, I’m afraid. As Jamie Love tweeted, “What Froman and USTR will now have to explain is why India and other countries can’t also consider public interest in patent cases.” As I’ll show you, one of the things the ITC considered was public comments warning that changing the terms for FRAND patent owners would make sweeping changes to trade laws, and Korea has already registered its concerns. I’m all for reforming the patent system, as you know, but if you want to reform it, how about making it *more* fair, not less? Playing favorites based on country of origin doesn’t aim for that noble goal. It’s indisputable that this has harmed Samsung, and since the ITC, which examined the facts in detail, found it was the innocent party in this picture, what can be the justification for Apple’s comment?”
The US press and the US government have given Apple special treatment for far too long. The corporate press covers this like it’s a sporting match, not science. Apple keeps trying to cheat and game the system; when its claims are found to be empty it cries to its government and gets its way. One writer for CNN (corporate press) wrote:
Apple and Samsung’s fiercest battle isn’t playing out in the smartphone market.
This is simply not true. Be sure to watch the image they use. Samsung was the one attacked by Apple, it’s not mutual. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Steve Ballmer, Windows at 12:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Worn out and defeated
Summary: Acer is the latest large company to officially move away from Microsoft Windows because no OEM — not even Microsoft with its “Surface” disaster — can sell hardware with shoddy software preinstalled
Some new numbers suggest stagnation in the target market of Microsoft, which led Acer, one of the largest OEMs Microsoft works with (see this old Microsoft OEM agreement with Acer), to losses and subsequent exploration of Linux-based alternatives. As Microsoft booster Nancy Gohring put it, citing he employer’s numbers (IDG citing IDC without disclosure again), “Acer the latest to turn to Google after poor Windows sales”:
Acer, the electronics maker that once seemed to be a big Windows 8 booster, is turning its back on Microsoft.
After posting a second quarter loss this week, it said it’s going to aggressively work on selling more Chromebooks and Android devices. According to the Wall Street Journal, Acer’s chairman said he hopes to grow revenue from Google smartphones, tablets and Chromebooks to 10 percent to 12 percent of revenue by the end of this year and to as much as 30 percent next year. He apparently didn’t say exactly how much revenue comes from Google software today, but said Chromebooks made up nearly 3 percent of shipments in the second quarter, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Acer is the latest vendor to shift its weight toward Google products and away from Microsoft. HP and Lenovo, long-time hardware partners of Microsoft, have also started making Chromebooks.
Mr. Pogson says that Acer had been squeezed by Microsoft and it is not the first. As he notes in this earlier post:
When a monopolist pushes an OS at a price above the market on OEMs, they suffer. While the monopolist gets a huge cash-flow, the OEM works for nothing, just a tiny margin. While OEMs take a commission on the price of that other OS, they sell their hardware for next to nothing. OEMs are manufacturers, not salesmen for M$. Do framers work for $0 per hour plus a penny per nail? No.
Christine Hall, another GNU/Linux proponent, says that “The consensus on [Windows] RT is that it’s something of a toy operating system. Some say it’s done nothing but weaken the Windows on tablet brand–as if that’s possible. The smart money crowd is expecting Microsoft to give-up on RT sooner rather than later. Almost everybody says RT isn’t long for this world.”
Microsoft has got nothing that can truly challenge Linux-based operating systems and one GNU/Linux proponent proclaims that “Microsoft Surface is Doomed, Steve Ballmer Should Be Fired” (others say the same after the Surface oversupply fiasco [1, 2, 3]).
Firing Ballmer would not save Microsoft. But it would be a face-saving move, that’s for sure. █
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08.08.13
Posted in News Roundup at 6:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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With its embedded Power chip business under assault from makers of ARM and x86 processors – and to a lesser extent MIPS chips – and having lost the game console business to AMD, IBM had to do something dramatic to expand the addressable market for its Power processors. And that something, which Big Blue has just rolled out, is called the OpenPower Consortium. which takes a few pages from the ARM Holdings playbook to breathe some new life into the Power architecture.
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This is getting long, so I’ll close with an anecdote. My Dad visited earlier this month. I gave him a Samsung Chromebook as a loaner for his visit and he’s been using it happily. He logged into his Gmail account in Chrome and his bookmarks and other Chrome settings just showed up. Dad’s laptop back home is about 5 years old, so we stopped by the Apple store. I was going to outfit him with a top-of-the-line MacBook; since he goes for years between upgrades, I wanted him to have a laptop that would last as long as possible. But after noticing the price, he balked. “Matt, we can buy ten Chromebooks for that much money,” he told me. We’re still discussing it, but the $250 Samsung Chromebook does everything he needs. I think more and more people will discover that’s true for them as well. I’ve been surprised how well the Chromebook Pixel works for me.
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Server
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The OU began using Red Hat Linux back in 2002, when the OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (OSCER) became one of the first in the nation to open a Pentium 4 Xeon cluster, which ran the community version of Red Hat Linux, according to a recent story in FutureGov.
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Earlier this week, Google, IBM, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan announced plansto form the OpenPOWER Consortium – “an open development alliance based on IBM’s POWER microprocessor architecture.” According to the release, the Consortium will collaborate on both hardware and software to build out new hyperscale and cloud data centers.
The release is light on details, which makes sense given they are announcing their intent to form a consortium, but I did find the news interesting on a number of fronts:
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Analyst Roger Kay said that since “IBM was pretty much the only company using Power technology, it is looking for a way to expand the market for that technology.” He added that Intel is really the only other company supporting its own architecture entirely. “it is very difficult and expensive for a single company to maintain an architecture,” he said.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Linux kernel developers have selected a new long-term kernel that could serve as the basis for enterprise Linux distributions as well as consumer electronics devices.
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On the latest Linux 3.10 stable kernel we have taken ten common Linux file-systems and generated an interesting performance comparisons. The Linux file-systems being tested in this article include XFS, Btrfs, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, ReiserFS, Reiser4, JFS, F2FS, and ZFS.
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Graphics Stack
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So I finally get working 3D acceleration and suspend/resume and get rid of artifacts in Fedora 19 on my HP Pavilion g6 laptop (AMD A4-4300M APU with AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics) with the 13.6 beta version of the AMD Catalyst driver for Linux.
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Applications
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RIP Google Reader: October 7, 2005 – July 1, 2013. Yes, it’s official, Google Reader is dead. One of the best content aggregators (feed readers) on the web, that too by one of the best companies on the web, has just been discontinued. Google, noticing that Google Reader’s usage was declining, announced on March 13, 2013 that it was going to discontinue the product by July 2013. This led to a huge discontent among many Google Reader users who thought that the change was completely unnecessary and that Google was pulling the plug on a very important product. In fact, more than 100,000 people signed a petition on change.org opposing the axing of Reader. Needless to say, saying goodbye to Google Reader was one of the hardest things ever for techies who preferred all their news in one place.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I graduated University with a diploma in mechanical engineering, after that I switched the field and worked most of the time as a computer engineer, that was my day job. Graphic design was something I did in my spare time and was something I learned by myself, by reading, experimenting, being a part on FOSS projects and so on. And I had a few successes, all while using almost exclusively FOSS software.
Now when I find myself as a freelancer, it made sense to complete my professional background by receiving certification as a graphic designer. How to do that? By taking a recognized professional training for adults. Following is the experience of a FOSS guy going trough a traditional graphic design training.
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Python bytecode, meet the language behind the language! It’s a language like any other, with its own syntax, semantics, design patterns and pitfalls. It’s even better than Python, because it’s executed directly, not compiled to some intermediate easy-enough-to-interpret language. So if those bytecode compilation times are bugging you, you know what to do.
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Wine or Emulation
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GNULinux users are already familiar with Wine which allows them to run supported Windows application on their GNULinux systems. Wines is however not an answer as at times it doesn’t support the latest versions of the apps. Now GNULinux users can also run Apple Mac apps on their systems.
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Linux users who want to run Windows applications without switching operating systems have been able to do so for years with Wine, software that lets apps designed for Windows run on Unix-like systems.
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Games
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While the Humble Bundle team has always been a big supporter of gaming on Linux, there are No Games for Linux in the current Humble Bundle and Weekly Sale.
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Broken Rules’ new aerial exploration game, Secrets of Rætikon, will start trekking through the low-poly forest on PC, Mac and Linux this year. Its previous game, Chasing Aurora, was a Wii U exclusive, but its first title, And Yet It Moves, launched on PC, Mac, Linux, WiiWare and iOS. Broken Rules says Secrets of Rætikon may “possibly” come to consoles, too.
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Secrets of Rætikon, the aerial exploration game from Chasing Aurora developers, Broken Rules Games, will launch on Windows PC, Mac and Linux, the Vienna-based studio announced today.
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Independent game developer Reptile Games is pleased to announce their game, Megabyte Punch is currently available to the public via the Humble Bundle Store, Desura and Gamersgate. Described best as a mash-up of SSB, Megaman and Custom Robo. Megabyte Punch is an electro fighting/beat ‘em up game in which players can build and customize their own player. The game is currently on sale for $11.99 (US), 20% off its original price of $14.99 for PC (Windows), Mac and Linux. Megabyte Punch fans can also purchase a special edition of the game that comes with the original Soundtrack with 27 tracks, HD Wallpapers, and extra custom levels for $20.00.
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Unvanquished, a free, open-source first-person shooter combining real-time strategy elements with a futuristic and sci-fi setting, has just received a substantial update.
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Harebrained Schemes have unveiled plans for their support of Shadowrun Returns, now that the game is out in the wild and being played by millions.
The first patch has now been released (get the change notes here) and more changes are on the way, including Linux support and localisation for Spanish, Italian, German, and French.
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Development company Leadwerks had started a Kickstarter campaign some time ago that aimed to improve game development environments on computers running on Linux. The company’s initial aim of $20,000 has been far surpassed, with 787 backers having funded the project for a total of $42,358.
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Where are my Linux gaming guys? I got some good news for you. Very, very good news! Prepare to play six new games on your Linux box in the coming months. Now, I present you the games. Read below. http://store.steampowered.com/
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I also reviewed AudioCdCollection bugs. It is hard to keep track on fixed bugs, because I can’t close fixed one in bugzilla. So I’ll list bugs here and shall update this post:
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After solving bugs that occurred mainly during the rendering of overlays having a GeoDataLatLonBox with a rotation parameter other than 0, Marble is now capable of displaying ground overlays by simply opening a KML file referencing one.
However, the rotation angle was not the only problem source, as issues also appeared when displaying overlays that extended over the antimeridian. In fact, this turned out to be the most annoying corner case, as dealing with it meant treating multiple situations separately and led to ugly code.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Wifislax is a Slackware-based Linux distribution designed for wireless hacking and forensics. It’s not on the list of Pentesting, digital forensics, and hacking distributions that I published last week, but with this article, it just got added.
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New Releases
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This is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.13 – Core Update 71. This update comes with some new features and minor bug fixes.
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Red Hat Family
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Editor’s note: In this series of blog posts, Tim Burke has been reviewing Red Hat’s journey from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to the newly announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. This is Tim’s third post in the four-part series. The first two can be found here and here.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYS: RHT) , the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced continued global expansion with new and expanded facilities around the world. Red Hat also announced that its facilities in Raleigh, N.C., Westford, Mass., and Beijing are expected to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, highlighting the company’s commitment to building environmentally sound offices. Today, Red Hat has more than 80 offices worldwide with more than 5,700 employees.
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If you think Red Hat is just about Linux, then you’re mistaken. Red Hat is quite active locally sponsoring various activities and educational programs trying to give back to the community which has embraced it so enthusiastically. Most recently Red Hat employees built a 10-foot lantern for charity during CANstruction, a local event held to benefit food banks.
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Congratulations to the Gluster Community! In addition to shipping GlusterFS 3.4, the latest release of the open source, scale-out storage system, the Gluster Community has significantly increased its number of projects and contributing developers in just three short months. Since May 2013, the Gluster Community has grown from seven projects for the GlusterFS distribution to more than 30 incubating open software-defined storage projects for big data, demonstrating nearly 300 percent growth in the number of developers.
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GlusterFS, Red Hat’s (RHT) open source software-defined storage solution for Big Data and the cloud, continues to gain momentum. This week, Red Hat announced that the Gluster Community, a consortium of organizations interested in the storage technology, has nearly tripled in size since its launch back in June. Plus, the company unveiled a version 3.4 of GlusterFS.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonial/Ubuntu
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When a new Ubuntu launch date approaches, Canonical developers like to start shaking things up. This time is the turn of Ubuntu for PowerPC.
Canonical devs have observed that the PowerPC version of Ubuntu hadn’t been built in a while, mostly due to failures in particular subcomponents of the Unity stack.
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Forget nitpicking about certain points Hall makes that are well off-base — Ubuntu/Canonical’s lack of contributions back to the community is widely documented, and if someone brought Cadillac blueprints to the Yugo factory, the Yugo folks would probably laugh themselves into a change of underwear before asking, “Do you realize how much it would cost to retool our factory — any factory — to make a car for which the factory was not designed?”
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Canadian-based WeWi Telecommunications Inc. has created an Ubuntu-based laptop that harnesses solar energy from the sun for power. The Sol claims to last for up to 10 hours via the internal battery, can run directly off solar energy and can be fully charged via solar power in just two hours.
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Laptop battery life is something that we all can’t seem to be happy with. No matter how long the battery is able to last, there are always times when we curse into the wind when we get that dreaded battery warning while on the road. However, a new Ubuntu laptop looks to solve those problems by coming with a solar panel attached to keep the battery juiced up without a power cord.
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Former Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth is not deterred by the prospect of his ambitious Indiegogo campaign failing to meet its goal. In many ways, the project has already succeeded.
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SOL is for when you need to be “digitally empowered on the top of a mountain or in the middle of the desert” according to the David-Attenborough-inspired promo video.
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The Edge, a smartphone that runs a mobile edition of the popular desktop OS Ubuntu, will only get made if would-be users pledge $32 million via the crowdfunding site Indiegogo. With a strict time limit of 30 days, this ambitious campaign needs to average more than $1 million per day, however the first half of that period has seen great initial momentum slow down to a crawl. In its 15 days on Indigegogo, the Edge project has attracted $8.3 million in pledges, leaving it nearly $24 million short.
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ne of the most interesting aspects of the Ubuntu Edge is that it will run both Linux and Android, instead of solely running Linux like you would expect it to. To start, people running the phone in Android mode will access Ubuntu through the Ubuntu for Android app; further down the line, Canonical will push out a native desktop version of Ubuntu for the Edge.
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Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth and friends have been working to bring the open source operating system to smartphones and tablets. And last month they introduced a side-project, a phone called the Ubuntu Edge which would dual boot Android and Ubuntu and work both as a phone and a desktop computer (when docked to a mouse, keyboard, and monitor).
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On August 6, Canonical published the usual top 10 app downloads chart, this time for July 2013, extracted straight from the Ubuntu Software Center.
Guess what? Steam is still the undefeated king of the top 10 free apps chart from the Ubuntu Software Center, which tells us that many Ubuntu users are hard core gamers.
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UberStudent bundles several learning platforms not found in typical Linux distros. Plus, each application category in the menu has a sub-category of related menus. For instance, there are WebApps, Documentation and Resources. Remember, this is a specially designed distro for those transitioning to Linux. So everything is configured to work out of the box.
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Just a few days ago, Unity 8 became available for Ubuntu 13.10. However, it is just an Alpha release and it’s not coming to the ‘stable city’ until Ubuntu 14.xx release.
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On 28-29 June, the eighth Open Source China – Open Source World Summit, sponsored by China OSS Promotion Union (COPU), occurred in Beijing at Beihang University1.
UbuntuKylin was the talk of the conference. The UbuntuKylin project is a collaborative effort between CSIP,2 Canonical and NUDT.3 Initially released in April 2013, UbuntuKylin is an official Ubuntu flavour that will follow the Ubuntu six-monthly release cycle.
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Back in June one of the links I posted was for a HowTo to use the Music Player Daemon (MPD) for enjoying the music files on your computer without the overhead required by Amarok, Exaile and the such. While I didn’t use it at first I have come to love Sonata as my primary audio player. It’s lightweight, loads fast, lets me search through my entire library, even though it’s on two different partitions, and I can search by the artist rather than the location if I want to. There’s even an Info panel that can show you track and album info, as well as the lyrics.
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To say that Larry “the Free Software Guy” Cafiero criticizes Ubuntu and Canonical is like calling a hurricane breezy. A journalist in his work and a blogger in his spare time, Cafiero frequently shows himself to be harder hitting and more to the point than most free software writers. Recently, however, he has found a way to highlight his criticism while encouraging critics and supporters alike to donate to a cause in which both can believe.
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Bloomberg LP, a revered US-based financial information & news service, has pledged a record $80,000 to the Ubuntu Edge campaign on IndieGoGo.
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Canonical have, once again, lowered the price of the Ubuntu Edge super-phone – but this time they say it’ll be sticking.
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For most of us, an off-the-shelf laptop is sufficient for our needs, where power outlets and WiFi are easy to come by, and a dry and clean environment is the norm.
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The Ubuntu Edge campaign received today a hearty donation of $80,000 from Bloomberg, a US-based financial information and news service. The donation took Canonical’s funds collection to a figure in excess of 8.5 million dollars. As huge as it may sound, the amount of collected funds is just about 25% of the target $32 million that Canonical aims to raise by 22nd August. The campaign seems to be going well, and it looks like Canonical will eventually be able to put a smile on the faces of thousands of funders, who generously pledged their money, by handing them their very own Ubuntu Edge. Many open source commentators are seeing Bloomberg’s move as first of major corporate backings for Canonical’s ambitious project. OMG Ubuntu said in their coverage of this story, “This donation gives the campaign more than money – it gives it a shot of credibility…”
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You might recall Ubuntu’s App Showdown last year. It was a competition for people to make apps for Ubuntu. The developer of last year’s winning application, Lightread, received a System76 laptop and Nokia 9 smartphone (which the second and third place developers also got). Back then, around a 130 applications were submitted.
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Canonical’s recent Indiegogo campaign to fund the development of an Ubuntu-based smartphone got off to a great start as it managed to raise $3.45 million from donors within the first 24 hours. Since then, however, progress has slowed to a snail’s pace and it looks unlikely that the project will meet its goal of $32 million.
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Bloomberg has pledged $80,000 (over £53,000) towards the Ubuntu Edge dual OS smartphone crowdfunding campaign, though the funding round may still ultimately fail with no phones ever being made.
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If you’re one of those folks who loves the great outdoors, and who needs to take a laptop with you, then you’ll dig the SOL from WeWi. SOL is a solar powered laptop that is built to withstand everything nature can throw at it.
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Canonical announced that its Ubuntu Edge superphone has a permanent (until the end of its fundraising campaign) price tag of $695. “No limited quantities, no more price changes,” reads a post. “You wanted a more affordable Edge, and now you’ve got it.”
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Canonical’s Mir Display Server for Ubuntu Linux has proper support for handling switching to virtual terminals.
Up to now Mir really hasn’t worked in combination with the common Linux VT switching through Ctrl + Alt + Fn keys, but now as of this morning the support is fresh in Mir’s Bazaar repository.
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Flavours and Variants
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With there being experimental XMir-based Xubuntu 13.10 images available for the Xfce desktop spin and a request going out for testing, I ran some Phoronix performance tests to compare the XMir performance penalty for 2D and 3D workloads.
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I realize that I haven’t posted anything in the last 2.5 weeks. That’s because in that time I got quite busy with a combination of UROP work, video making for the MIT-K12 project, and studying for the General and Physics GREs. Given that I will be taking the General GRE in just over a week, and given that I will be going home for vacation shortly thereafter, I won’t be able to post much after this for this month aside from a probable post reflecting on the summer. That said, it is a Sunday as I write this, and I figured I could use a break from the studying. So to do that, I’m reviewing Linux Mint 15 “Olivia” KDE and Xfce.
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A few months ago, I had a Linux first — I reached the end-of-support of a distro. I never thought of myself as a distro hopper, especially with my main laptop, but I guess I hop around enough to have never made it to the end-of-support.
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gNewSense is the GNU/Linux distribution which is used by none other than Richard Stallman himself. It’s one of those distributions which fully adhered to the philosophies of free software.
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Shortly after the release of Pear OS 8 Alpha 2, David Tavares was proud to announce that a new welcome screen would be available in the upcoming Pear OS 8 Linux operating system.
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Easy set-up SD card for novice users now offered with any new Raspberry Pi purchase for $5 on an 8 GB SD card
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Pwnie Express has opened pre-orders on a Linux-based penetration testing device that supports 4G out-of-band SSH access. The Pwn Plug R2 runs the Kali Linux-based Pwnix distribution on a 1.2GHz Marvell Armada 370 SoC, and offers dual gigabit Ethernet ports, high-gain WiFi and Bluetooth, and a variety of one-click pen-testing tricks, like running the device as an Evil AP.
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Avnet has unveiled a smaller, lower cost follow-on to its community backed ARM+FPGA based ZedBoard. The $199 Linux-ready MicroZed board is built with a Xilinx Zynq-7010 SoC, and can be used as either a single-board computer (SBC) or as a computer-on-module (COM) feeding 100 programmable GPIO signals into a carrier board.
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RFEL has unveiled board-level versions of its HALO video processing technology, which runs Linux on a Xylinx Zynq ARM+FPGA system-on-chip. Previously introduced as a ruggedized subsystem aimed at military intelligence applications, such as UAVs, the new HALO boards provide embeddable versions of RFEL’s sophisticated image stabilization and fusion engines, which can form composite images by merging visible and IR data.
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Since Linux.com last surveyed the community-backed open source board scene in June 2012, some projects have faded, but a number of new boards have popped up to take their place. In fact, most of our top 10 Linux or Android-ready open source single board computers (SBCs) have shipped in the last few months.
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STMicroelectronics has released ready-to-use software drivers for communication with Linux systems.
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Advantech announced a tiny module based on the COM Express Mini form-factor and built around an Intel 1.86GHz dual-core Atom N2800 processor. The business-card sized SOM-7565 A2 supports up to 4GB of RAM and 8GB of flash, offers a wide range of I/O, expands with three PCIe lanes, consumes 8 to 9.5 Watts, and supports -40 to 85°C operation with its optional heatsink.
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National Instruments (NI) announced a redesigned version of its CompactRIO controller that runs a new NI Linux Real-Time OS on the Xilinx ARM+FPGA hybrid Zynq-7020 system-on-chip. The NI cRIO-9068 controller is fully compatible with the NI LabVIEW development environment, as well as more than 100 I/O modules available for the CompactRIO.
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Micromax, a provider of industrial electronic products and automation solutions for 45 years, announces the Artila Electronics Matrix-516, the new generation of its ARM-based box computers. Artila’s Matrix-516 industrial box computer is a small form-factor, Linux-ready computing platform that offers reliable, 24/7 unattended control at low-power consumption levels.
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Amazon has begun accepting web apps and mobile-optimized websites for sale in its Amazon Appstore for Kindle and Android devices, allowing developers to market their HTML-based wares to mobile users in over 200 countries.
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Phones
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Android
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If you haven’t been following the saga of the Moto X, the short version is that it’s one of the first post-Google acquisition products from the company that gave us the Star Tac and the RAZR. Besides carrying the expectations of a market that needs to see something compelling from Motorola because it’s been a while, the X is also the focal point for analysts seeking an answer to one simple question: why did Google pay over twelve billion dollars for the company? Given the input the folks from Mountain View have had into the product, it’s been assumed that the Moto X would, if not answer that question outright, at least provide a hint.
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LG has announces its G2 phone without the Optimus branding, marking its commitment to high end Android smartphones. The phone will be available across the globe through more than 130 carriers, which includes the all four major US carriers.
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I can’t hear Linus Torvalds saying “Qualcomm, k You” and flipping a finger at the camera. If reports are true Qualcomm may very much need it.
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In a recent career shift, I went from an employer who provided me an iPhone to one who provides me with an Android (Galaxy S4 to be specific). Although I was happy to move to a Linux-based handset, I was concerned about replacing the “Find My iPhone” capability that Apple provides. Not only does my family use it to keep track of each other, but we also relied on it when a phone was misplaced. Does the Google Play store offer anything comparable? Um, yes.
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A feature that allows Android users to authenticate themselves on Google websites without having to enter their account password can be abused by rogue apps to give attackers access to Google accounts, a security researcher showed Saturday at the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas.
The feature is called “weblogin” and works by generating a unique token that can be used to directly authenticate users on Google websites using the accounts they have already configured on their devices.
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The Android 4.3 Jelly Bean is already out and everyone is now looking forward to Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie. Though there is no official confirmation from Google about the new name of this OS, on the basis of the alphabetical pattern of the previous Android code names, the tech industry is speculating the name to be ‘Key Lime Pie’.
Starting from the 1.5 version, Google has been naming its Android versions in an alphabetical order. Starting from Cupcake to Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean. Hence the Key Lime Pie, which starts with letter K is obviously the next. Also in the last Google’s I/O we saw the name in a teaser that Google created for the developers.
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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.
The Wind River Connectivity Solution Accelerator for Android was announced in May, and with a very specific goal: The software enables a car’s infotainment head unit to be used for viewing and playing content streamed from late-model iPhones, iPads, and iPods. The Connectivity Solution Accelerator makes the car’s IVI head unit act like an accessory to the iOS device. With the iOS device docked into the car’s infotainment system, the head unit can play music and videos and the car’s steering wheel can be used as a remote control.
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If you are trying to lose a few kilos, dieting and exercising are what you need to do. However, while it seems to be simple, you may dont have any idea about what foods to eat, what exercises to do and you also lose the motivation and determination easily. So here are 5 Android apps that can give you some help to make your fat loss journey easier and more convenient.
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Google upgraded its Nexus 7 tablet with better hardware and also used it to introduce Android 4.3 to the world. I already have Nexus 7 (2012), Nexus 10 and Nexus 4 which all got the 4.3 upgrade. But among all these devices Nexus 7 is the most loved one due to the perfect size – ebook reading (the ones I own and not locked into Amazon Kindle), playing games and watching movies is quit pleasant. Since I already have retina-beating Nexus 10 there was not much incentive for me to go for Nexus 7, but there was a remote possibility of getting it for my wife.
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Google may develop the Android software that runs on millions of phones and tablets. But the company also releases the source code for most new builds of Android once it’s ready for public consumption — and at that point outside developers start ripping it apart to see what makes it tick, often building custom versions of Android based on that source code.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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When the XO-1 Laptop first came out in 2006, I was in awe of the hardware innovations. From bunny ears for better WiFi to a hardened swivel-screen top, to its low power consumption, OLPC had one innovation after another.
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Today in Open Source: Android tablets beating Apple’s iPad? Plus: Mozilla Firefox 23 released, and reviews of Linux Mint 15 KDE and Xfce
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Programmers and Wall Street haters alike may join together to support a convicted computer programmer from Goldman Sachs after reading the full-throated defense he receives at Vanity Fair by noted financial journalist Michael Lewis.
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During the last six weeks of his employment, Aleynikov emailed himself four times the source code he was working with. The files contained open source code, code that the programmer had tweaked and Goldman Sachs proprietary coding. The government claims the programmer sent himself 32 megabytes of code, but it was essentially the same 8 megabytes of code sent four times over. Goldman Sachs’ entire system contains more than one gigabyte of code—so what the Russian took was minuscule in comparison to the whole.
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One of the long-running jokes in the free software world is that this year will finally be the year of open source on the desktop – just like it was last year, and the year before that. Thanks to the astounding rise of Android, people now realise that the desktop is last decade’s platform, and that mobile – smartphones and tablets – are the future. But I’d argue that there is something even more important these, and that is the widespread deployment of open source in China.
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I often wonder about the motivations of others involved with the open source community, as I did last month. Linux.com reposted an article by Jeremy Kahn titled Open source as a civic duty that answers the question in the best way possible. Open source is not about you, it’s about us, all of us.
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Open source software is now a common component in most organizations’ IT infrastructure, particularly at the server OS layer where Linux has made significant inroads. Now open source software is becoming more common in other data center realms such as storage, and is poised for significant growth.
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NEWS ANALYSIS: The Flex Framework for rich Internet application development continues its evolution beyond Adobe’s confines as adoption and interest grows.
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Colosa, which develops the ProcessMaker Open Source Process Management (BPM) and Workflow Suite, has announced a channel partnership with OSSCube aimed at integrating Colosa’s Business BPM platform into enterprise application software environments.
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Selena Deckelmann, a data architect and contributor to PostgreSQL, gave a keynote speech at the Computer Science Teachers Association conference this year called, What open source communities can do for teachers. At the end she encouraged the audience (of teachers) to connect with free and open source developers in their communities to work with them to schedule 15-20 minute talks about their work students.
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Google, IBM, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan today announced plans to form the OpenPOWER Consortium — an open development alliance based on IBM’s POWER microprocessor architecture. The Consortium intends to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale and cloud data centers.
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Back in the mists of time – I’m talking about 2000 here – when free software was still viewed by many as a rather exotic idea, I published a book detailing its history up to that point. Naturally, I wrote about Apache (the Web server, not the foundation) there, since even in those early days it was already the sectoral leader. As I pointed out:
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This Thursday we will post my interview with Marcin Jakubowski. Marcin is a physicist and technologist who became a farmer. After learning the economics of small farming in rural Missouri, Marcin started Open Source Ecology (OSE) to apply open source techniques to small farm and enterprise hardware. His vision of 50 open source blueprints is called the Global Village Construction Set – radically lowering the cost of machines and tools that ensure the success of small farms and communities.
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Events
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This week, the corporate and legislator members of the American Legislative Exchange Council are meeting at the swank Palmer House hotel in Chicago to celebrate the organization’s 40th anniversary, be educated in corporate sponsored workshops and adopt legislative priorities for the coming year. Here is what is on the agenda for ALEC’s 40th — notably, some of the workshops carry a $40,000 pricetag for corporate sponsors.
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In the wake of PRISM and other spying programs by the US and UK governments, companies and organizations will now be shy of using proprietary cloud as it will give the US government direct access to their sensitive data.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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When the Chrome web browser appeared from Google it was notable for two reasons: the rate of development and the speed of the browser. Chrome continues to see regular releases that push forward with new/better functionality as well as continuing to get faster. It is one of, if not the fastest browser available at the moment.
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There is quite a brouhaha developing over how the Google Chrome browser treats passwords, due to the fact that anyone with access to a Chrome user’s computer can find all stored passwords very easily. The Chrome security team is defending the practice, but if you are a Chrome user, you should take a look at what the issue is.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla adds new social-sharing features, issues 13 security advisories and deploys a mixed-content security capability to limit the risk of mixing unencrypted data with secured content.
The open-source Mozilla Foundation is out today with its Firefox 23 Web browser for multiple platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux and Android devices. The new release comes just six weeks after the last major Firefox release, and brings a number of feature and security updates to the browser.
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It’s finally up for grabs! After about one and a half months since its last stable release, Firefox is out in its new avatar, version 23. FF 23 brings in a whole lot of changes, apart from new logo; not precisely a new logo, but a retouched one (last change was made in FF 3.5). Among a myriad of changes are—Social share functionality, Network Monitor (a developer tool), and mixed content blocking (http stuff on https page).
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Mozilla Corporation has released an updated Firefox – Firefox 23 – for its Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android users.
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Firefox 23, released today, contains the usual mix of security work, standards conformance improvements, and minor bug fixes that we’ve come to expect from the regular browser releases. On top of these, it sports a trio of changes that you might actually notice.
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When Mozilla released Firefox 23 on Tuesday, the updated browser put an unofficial end to one of the annoyances of the early Web—the “blink” tag.
According to the release notes for the new browser, Firefox 23 completely drops support for the “blink” element, preventing browsers from rendering text that, well, blinks.
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Bango PLC, a mobile payment and analytics company, has announced the integration of its Bango Payments Platform with Mozilla’s Firefox Marketplace. Among other things, the news represents an important step forward for Mozilla’s Firefox OS strategy, because it will allow users of Firefox OS-based mobile phones to pay for the apps they buy directly from their phone bills.
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SaaS/Big Data
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A well-designed hybrid cloud enables organizations to take advantage of the scalability and cost efficiency of a public cloud, and retain the data governance, security and control of a private cloud
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IBM will furlough U.S. hardware employees to cut costs in late August and early September 2013. Employees will take a week off with one-third pay, Bloomberg reported. Ouch. The key takeaway: Cloud computing is squeezing IBM’s hardware business, and the value of IBM’s x86 server business could be falling — even more — each quarter.
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Apache’s Drill goal is striving to do nothing less than answer queries from petabytes of data and trillions of records in less than a second.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Not so fast, LibreOffice — OpenOffice has a shiny, new, and improved major release of its own
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CMS
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Brisbane-headquartered travel agency Flight Centre is undergoing a wholesale transition to the open-source Drupal Web platform for its network of websites, which collectively handle millions of page views per week.
The shift, away from IBM Web Content Manager has been underway for about 12 months now, according to Flight Centre’s area leader of digital solutions, Jamie Glenn. The travel company is about two-thirds of the way through the transition, Glenn said. The company has around 30 brands and some 60 websites.
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Business
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Funding
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In July, technology startup Sabai Technology launched a Kickstarter campaign. The project is called JaiRo and is described as an open source x86 router project.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The first round of videos from LibrePlanet 2013 is now available for streaming and downloading. LibrePlanet is an annual conference sponsored and organized by the Free Software Foundation, with LibrePlanet 2013 being the best one yet. All current associate members of the FSF enjoy the perk of being able to attend LibrePlanet without paying an entry fee. This year we set out to make sure LibrePlanet featured fully functioning live video streaming using only free software, and it was a great success. The videos are now available for viewing in VP8/Vorbis, both free media formats, and are hosted on an instance of GNU MediaGoblin, the social media sharing platform which many of you helped support.
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E-mail is the obvious starting point and, if you don’t trust that government agencies won’t get their hands on Microsoft (MSFT) and Google’s (GOOG) master keys, you should set up your own private e-mail service. A good package is Mozilla’s Thunderbird client, combined with the Enigmail security extension and the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG). Here’s a guide to setting these up. Follow those instructions and set up a self-hosted e-mail server such as Kolab (not a trivial task), and you’re about as protected as you can get on that front.
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Public Services/Government
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I occasionally get asked why I spend so much of my free time writing software and giving it away for free. There are a number of reasons for this—I like to build things and I use it as an excuse to practice and improve my skills—but one of the most driving motivators for me is that I see open source contributions as a civic duty, a moral obligation to the rest of the world.
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Application delivery and security vendor Radware has contributed an open source distributed denial-of-service protection application to the OpenDaylight Project.
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The drive to bring open source technologies into focus for public services and the NHS in particular has been a recurring theme for more than half a decade now.
VP of Harris Healthcare EMEA Wayne Parslow has been calling on the NHS to “embrace” open platforms, standards and software — but he also heeds that we need to take care.
Parslow has spoken out on PublicService.co.uk highlighting the general reduction in software license fees that should be possible with any move to open technologies.
There is also huge potential for the NHS to develop more custom built applications and IT solutions bespoke to its core needs.
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An opinion piece debating the idea of implementing open source NHS technology in today’s healthcare marketplace
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The US Navy makes more efficient use of open source technology in complex unmanned aircraft than its counterparts in the Army and Air Force.
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Licensing
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Free software licenses can be divided into two broad categories: copyleft licenses (like the GPL), which require derivatives of the software to be licensed under the same terms; and permissive licenses (like the MIT/X11 license), which allow the software to be reused in any project, even closed-source projects. There are variations, of course—the LGPL, for example, is a ‘weak copyleft’, allowing licensed works to be used in closed-source works, but requiring improvements to the work itself to be released under a copyleft license.
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Openness/Sharing
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The following blog was, unless otherwise noted, independently written by a member of Gamasutra’s game development community. The thoughts and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Gamasutra or its parent company.
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CTD units are incredibly important to ocean research, measuring three basic factors of sea water — conductivity, temperature, and depth. Almost every major research vessel has one.
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Krishagni today announced the release of caTissue Plus v3.0 – Free and Open Source Biospecimen management software. caTissue Plus, initially developed with NCI funding, facilitates biorepository management by tracking biospecimens from collection to utilization across multiple projects, annotations, containers, specimen requests, distributions, and multiple reporting options.
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Open Hardware
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International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) said it’s requiring the majority of U.S. employees in its hardware unit to take a week off with reduced pay, cutting costs as demand slows for products such as servers.
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Nuand has adopted the Lime Microsystems LMS6002D field programmable RF chip in its bladeRF open-source software defined radio (SDR). A Kickstarter-funded project, the bladeRF raised almost double its $100,000 target from more than 500 backers. Following Myriad RF and Fairwaves, it is the third open-source RF board launched this year.
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Want to do your own space experiment? From next week, you will be able to run science projects on the world’s first open-source satellites. And it won’t break the bank.
ArduSat-1 and ArduSat-X were launched to the International Space Station (ISS) on 3 August aboard a Japanese resupply vehicle (which is also carrying fresh food, supplies and a talking humanoid robot).
Known as CubeSats, each mini satellite packs an array of devices – including cameras, spectrometers and a Geiger counter – into a cube just 10 centimetres to a side.
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From next week it will be possible to run science projects on the world’s first open-source satellites.
ArduSat-1 and ArduSat-X were launched to the International Space Station on 3 August aboard a Japanese resupply vehicle which will arrive tomorrow.
New Scientist reports the 10cm volume CubeSats contain an array of devices including cameras, spectrometers and a Geiger counter.
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Security
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Areas of blind spots within the typical enterprise are many, including applications, network traffic, network devices and user activity.
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Internet security firm Arbor Networks reports that a new botnet, Fort Disco, is made up of over 25,000 Windows PCs and is targeting blog sites and content management systems (CMS)es. Once these are infected, they can then be used to spread the botnet’s malware and to attack other systems.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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OK–so the right way to deal with the threat of terrorism is to announce that the U.S. response to any act of terrorism anywhere will be to attack Iran.
Who wrote this? Ted Koppel. Either his analysis is evolving, or he believes that threatening to unleash massive unprovoked military attacks on another country is not terrorism.
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US drones launched missiles at vehicles carrying four men, alleged to be members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen’s Marib province early Tuesday. The attack was the latest development in the global terror alert announced by the Obama administration last Friday. On Monday, the administration indicated that the alleged terror plot was centered in Yemen.
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So yesterday marked an unhappy anniversary: 49 years since Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing the Vietnam War. (H/T Caleb Brown.)
LBJ compared the resolution to “grandma’s nightshirt” because it “covered everything.” Like the 2002 Iraq War Resolution, it was worded broadly enough to allow the president to make the final decision about war all by himself—and vaguely enough to allow those who voted for it to deny responsibility for the war they’d authorized.
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Three U.S. drone strikes killed a total of 12 suspected al-Qaida militants Thursday, a Yemeni military official said, raising to eight the number of attacks in less than two weeks as the Arab nation is on high alert against terrorism.
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According to Yemeni officials, AQAP plotted to take over several cities in southeastern Yemen, including key port towns and the major cities of Hadramaut Province, blowing up pipelines in an attempt to sew confusion.
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The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) published a report last week confirming that the Central Intelligence Agency appears to have briefly revived its controversial “double-tap” drone tactic in a Pakistani region in mid-2012.
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Via Ace, consider this post an apology to our readership. A few days ago I led you to believe that it was somehow important for the White House press corps to ask the press secretary about one of the biggest foreign policy scoops in weeks. That was obviously in error, as I suspected at the time. It wasn’t important; this guy wouldn’t give you a straight answer on what his favorite color is (“I would refer you to my kindergarten finger-paintings on that”), never mind accusations about top-secret CIA activity linked to a major terror attack. Like I said in the earlier post, the press briefing now operates not as the White House’s conduit to the public but rather as an opportunity for the media to show the public that it’s asking worthwhile questions of the president even though there’s not a whisper of a chance that they’ll get useful information from them. The Brits have question time with the prime minister in parliament, we have this travesty. Second look at monarchy?
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The war in Syria poses the greatest threat to US security because of the risk of the government falling and the country becoming a weapons-rich haven for Al Qaeda, according to a CIA official.
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Today the Daily Beast reported that an intercepted conference call between “more than 20 al Qaeda operatives” led nearly two dozen U.S. embassies scattered across Southwest Asia and North Africa to shut down over the weekend, a precautionary measure that American officials later extended through August 10. Based on testimony from three unnamed U.S. officials, reporters Eli Lake and Josh Rogin say al Qaeda lieutenants in Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Egypt and Islamic Maghreb discussed vague plans of attack with al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri and the terrorist group’s Yemeni leader, Nasser al-Wuhayshi. One of the unnamed officers compared the call to a meeting of the “Legion of Doom.”
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Transparency Reporting
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…the company is becoming a “major vendor” to the U.S. government…
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Highly radioactive water from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is pouring out at a rate of 300 tons a day, officials said on Wednesday, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ordered the government to step in and help in the clean-up.
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Finance
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Madison resident Betty Ybarra has never owned a home, but that’ll soon change.
“I was very skeptical this could even happen” she tells NBC15 about her new home she’s currently helping to build through an Occupy Madison project.
The group is currently building small homes. It isn’t much. Each are about 100 square feet. But it’s enough to help someone get back on their feet.
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PRESIDENT Nicos Anastasiades on Friday announced the complete reform of social policy based on the principle of securing a Guaranteed Minimum Income for all citizens.
It should be fully in place by June 2014, he said.
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The Wall Street Journal claimed that because private investment typically precedes infrastructure projects, President Obama’s call for increased infrastructure investments is misguided. This position, however, ignores the historically positive effect of public investment on private activity and the nation’s current need for infrastructure improvements.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A candidate running well behind in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary is not usually someone national media pay attention to. But when the candidate is a former Congressman now involved in his second sex scandal, the media’s level of interest is considerably greater.
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See, it turns out that spending so much time talking about Weiner is important– it gives corporate journalists a way to handicap the 2016 election.
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Six people were arrested Monday when protesters descended upon the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago to push back against the impending visit of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose conservative agenda, activists say, promotes policies and legislation that protects corporate interests and disenfranchises workers and voters.
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Erick Erickson doubled down on his sexist attack on Texas State Senator Wendy Davis as “Abortion Barbie,” writing on RedState that the moniker “fits perfectly” and recommending it be used on the campaign trail.
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The vague-yet-apparently-very-serious intelligence about a possible Al-Qaeda attack became a big issue on the Sunday chat shows–and a chance for supporters of National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs to claim that the agency’s controversial tactics are working.
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Today, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released a new report: “ALEC at 40: Turning Back the Clock on Prosperity and Progress.” The report identifies and analyzes 466 American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) bills introduced in 2013.
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This morning in Chicago hundreds of primarily Republican state legislators are getting more indoctrination against doing anything about climate change from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
This year, ALEC has chosen its long-time partner, the Heartland Institute, to help host the session. Heartland is so extreme on the issue of climate change that it sought to equate people who believe the climate is changing with the Unabomber, through a billboard campaign that featured a mugshot of Ted Kaczynski with the line: “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” Heartland lost numerous funders in response to a citizens campaign about the ad last year.
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Privacy
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In the era of NSA spying and the rise of widespread government monitoring programs or even just the era of Skype, if you’re looking for something new and secure alternatives then Tox Messaging is coming soon for you.
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For privacy campaigners, the issue of big data has been a cause for some time, with a growing trend of governments, businesses and other institutions gathering increasing amounts of data which is then analysed, often without consent from individuals.
It seems that universities are increasingly thinking about using the vast amount of data collected to analyse how facilities are used and identify students who may fail or drop out of their course. By doing this, universities are acting like they don’t require permission to use the data in this way and are seriously undermining student trust.
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There is a sinister agenda underway to forcibly convert every standard electric meter in the U.S. to the “smart” variety under the guise of promoting renewable energy interests.
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Landis Gyr recently had a company voicemail message that admitted smart meter technology is part of the NSA’s “PRISM” spying and surveillance program. Since gaining national attention about this admission, Landis Gyr has apparently altered its company voicemail message to omit this indicting information.
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It is just a matter of time before unauthorised, real-time access to information about the behaviours and habits of you and your family at home are put under the microscope via Smart Meter data. Don’t give them the chance to put privacy-violating infrastructure in your home which can at any time be compromised and used against you by any number of parties – foreign and domestic. You have the right to refuse Smart Meters – use it! – See more at: http://stopsmartmeters.org.uk/nsa-prism-provides-direct-access-to-servers-of-google-facebook-microsoft-yahoo-apple-and-others/#sthash.gMYZYr3G.dpuf
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With an increasing importance placed on communication via social media, privacy is imperative now more than ever over the Internet. The NSA scandal has shown that there is a great demand for secure communication on the Internet. However, many people do not try to protect their privacy by any means either because encryption is difficult to implement in social media or simply because they are unaware of the resources out there for encryption. Encryption needs to be made easily available for everyone so that privacy is no longer a concern.
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Again this is the kind of thing that many people had assumed was going on, but it hadn’t been confirmed until now. Of course, the NSA’s response was not to talk about whether or not this was true, but to claim, yet again, that everything it’s doing is “authorized,” which is a way of deflecting the fact that it’s almost certainly unconstitutional. In this case, the claim is that the NSA isn’t storing these emails, but rather: “temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border,” and the whole process only takes “a small number of seconds” before the records are deleted.
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There’s a story in the New York Times today that details how the NSA hasn’t just been tracking communications to and from (potential) foreigners of interest—it’s actually tracking all emails and text messages that potentially mention these targets. That dragnet just got a lot wider. This is the actualization of the tired and at one time absurd “oops better not say bomb on email” jokes.
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It’s difficult to keep track of what the NSA does and doesn’t do, and today, the New York Times piled on. Citing “senior intelligence officials,” the paper is reporting that, under a broad interpretation of the FISA Amendments Act, the NSA intercepts communications of U.S. citizens whose communications cross borders and mention foreign targets. You don’t have to communicate with someone being targeted directly to potentially have the NSA collect and search your email.
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A manual for America’s taxmen detailing US drug squads’ access to NSA intelligence has emerged – and revealed that the controversial supply of information has been an open secret in government for years.
Reuters reports that the handbook, which was issued to IRS tax collectors between 2005 and 2006, instructs officials to omit reference to any tip-offs supplied by the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations Division, especially from affidavits and court proceedings.
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Weeks of revelations about secret U.S. surveillance programs could stymie progress on negotiations over new laws and regulations meant to beef up the country’s defences against the growing threat of cyber attacks, cyber security experts say.
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Not every suspension-of-service notice for an e-mail company comes with a link to a legal-defense fund. Ladar Levison, the owner and operator of Lavabit, whose clients, reportedly, have included Edward Snowden, made it sound today as though he could use the help. “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,” Levison wrote in a note posted on his site.
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Some members of Mr Snowden’s family are applying for visas to visit him in Russia, his lawyer says.
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The cyberscare, like the redscare or the greenscare of the ’90′s, is already under way. We’ve seen it take root with the fierce federal persecution of Aaron Swartz, the hefty charges and prison sentence facing LulzSec hacktivist Jeremy Hammond and the three-year jail sentence handed down to Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer for pointing out and sharing a vulnerability in AT&T’s user information network. On Tuesday, former NSA chief Michael Hayden put it into words.
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Germany’s BND intelligence service sends “massive amounts” of intercepts to the NSA daily, according to a report based on Edward Snowden’s leaks. It suggests a tight relationship has been developed between the two agencies – which the BND claims is legal.
Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Snowden and obtained by Der Spiegel revealed that the 500 million pieces of phone and email communications metadata collected by the NSA in Germany last December were “apparently” provided with the BND’s approval.
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The Internal Revenue Service reportedly received incriminating information on US citizens from the Drug Enforcement Agency, with the assistance of the National Security Agency, before concealing the paper trail from defendants.
Details of a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) program that provides tips to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and then advises them to “recreate the investigative trail” were published in a manual used by IRS agents for two years, Reuters revealed.
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According to Computerworld such a low-energy system move evolve into an exascale system, which would be about 1,000 faster than today’s petaflop system.
The US Director of National Intelligence published a notice asking for help to develop superconducting systems. Such a system can offer “an attractive low-power alternative” to current technology.
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Thursday an NSA source informed the world of a primary and egregious lie by President Obama about the information collected by the program called PRISM. Obama’s ‘Spygate’ will force the end of the NSA operation, and end the invasion of privacy by our elected officials.
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Germany’s opposition has condemned aspects of information-sharing between the country’s intelligence services and their US counterparts. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition-leading Christian Democrats have cried foul.
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Former NSA chief Michael Hayden, who ran the shady US spying bureaucracy from 1999 to 2009, responded to a question about Edward Snowden by painting privacy activists as terrorists and comparing them to al Qaida.
“If and when our government grabs Edward Snowden, and brings him back here to the United States for trial, what does this group do?” Hayden asked, reffering to “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years”.
He continued: “They may want to come after the US government, but frankly, you know, the dot-mil stuff is about the hardest target in the United States”.
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There are many more revelations to come from the leaks about US spying from Edward Snowden, with journalist Glenn Greenwald testifying that he had received around 20,000 files from the American whistleblower and fugitive.
Greenwald has been the journalist working with Snowden to release information about the US spying programmes both domestic and international that have caused such controversy around the globe. He has worked with The Guardian the UK to reveal secrets about NSA spying within US borders and on Western Europe, as well as with Brazillian newspaper O Globo, where he has focused his revelations on those affecting Brazil and South America.
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Civil Rights
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Speaking at a youth camp President Vladimir Putin has hinted that he was not planning to sack the government in the foreseeable future and said that he was satisfied by its work.
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Mickey Huff in studio with Peter Phillips review the NEW award-winning documentary “Project Censored the Movie: Ending the Reign of Junk Food News” AND newly released interview outtakes with Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky talking about Project Censored, war, history, and the media. These are only available to the general public here and now for the first time!
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The Latvian government says it will extradite a 28-year-old man accused of creating the Web injects for the highly destructive Gozi malware, which targeted over a million computers globally, specifically aimed at bank accounts. US prosecutors say the malware was used to steal millions of dollars from its targets.
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Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, from any public gathering or venue they deem “sensitive”, and “protected from externalities.”
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As the U.S. Senate continues to debate a national law to protect journalists from protecting their sources, two Senators believe unpaid bloggers and websites like WikiLeaks shouldn’t get extended First Amendment protections.
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While local opponents of the National Defense Authorization Act won a partial victory at the county level last week, they may encounter an even tougher battle within the city limits.
The Coos Bay City Council voted 5-2 Wednesday night to postpone further discussion of an anti-NDAA resolution until councilors had time to research the issue.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Nominet are again consulting on their idea to introduce .uk domain registration. But the proposals are little better than before.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Anti-piracy legislation introduced in Russia less than a week ago is already back with legislators. The Ministry of Culture says that the law will be amended to include not only movies and TV shows as previously planned, but a wide range of other creative content. Website owners will be required to make their contact details available to rightsholders in order to speed up complaints while tech companies such as Google have until Friday to put forward their suggestions.
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Over the past few months several Hollywood studios have asked Google to remove links to the “free-to-share” Pirate Bay documentary TPB-AFK. The film’s director, Simon Klose, has contacted the search engine in an attempt to have the links put back online but thus far without success. Meanwhile, film studios continue to submit new DMCA requests to censor the documentary.
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Posted in Africa, Bill Gates, Patents at 4:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The notorious GMO ventures of the world’s richest robber baron expand with the establishment of a new strategic outpost in Nigeria
Gates must be really desperate for more money. 7 billion dollars in gained wealth last year isn’t enough, he wants even more. Who to rob next? How about Africa? We wrote about this topic since the previous decade and covered some evidence highlighting how it’s all arranged. See for instance:
In a PR and grooming piece for Renee Kaufer from the Gates Foundation it is being revealed that “since December as our Africa offices are only now opening.”
“We are seeing the (re)occupation of Africa, but the corporate press does almost nothing to highlight these simple facts.”We warned about this last month and now it goes forward, promoting GMO (which Gates invests in). To quote: “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plans to establish a biotechnology lab in Nigeria which will help improve the countries biotechnology capacity for crop improvement. This was revealed by Professor Ivan Ingelbrecht of Ghent University, Belgium, who visited the country on behalf of the Gates Foundation and met with the Nigerian Minister of Science and Technology, Professor Ita Okon Bassey Ewa.”
They are very careful not to say “GMO”, but it’s obvious based on the context. Well, it’s all about return for investment, or simply a case of profiteering (Gates is hiring VCs for key role along with PR people, trying to exploit women’s rights for sentimental blackmail). Remember that this foundation also has peripheral PR agencies (not just Waggener Edstrom), which generate spin and control the press, panels, etc. (Gates has already bribed the largest African news site and taken groups like AGRA into his control through moles). Quietly but surely it is getting worse for African farmers, who will be indebted to some monopoly based in another continent (Monsanto). We are seeing the (re)occupation of Africa, but the corporate press does almost nothing to highlight these simple facts. █
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Posted in Bill Gates at 4:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
How to enrich oneself from a $1.1 trillion/annum system
Summary: Three school districts receive large bribes that have strings attached to them, namely compliance with Gates’ agenda of corporate ‘education’ (for private profit and indoctrination)
It is no secret that Common Core has been promoted by the Gates Foundation to help its agenda of profiteering from a public service in the United States. According to Wikipedia, six years ago the budget was “$1.1 trillion (public and private, all levels),” which is a lot of money for opportunists to make their own (the public element alone is vast). Even new press releases characterise this foundation as promoting “Common Core-aligned assessments,” which this new article stresses is about privatisation:
Who benefits from the “Common Core” curriculum in US schools?
Major corporations such as Pearson, McGraw Hill and Apple are cashing in on the implementation of the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) curriculum in public schools. This is occurring as states around the US gut their education budgets.
Oddly enough they missed out Gates, who is also at the forefront of it. While enjoying PR from the subservient Seattle/Washington press the Gates Foundation is actively attacking US education. It is also throwing ‘slush funds’ for PR (here is a new example with no real articles about it, only somewhat of a press release embedding nothing but promotional quotes as seen here).
The big money gets funnelled into what can essentially be called “bribes”, in the same way many political campaigns are funded by bribes (discard the euphemisms they use). Gates’ latest bribe in California is more than 50 times bigger than the PR mentioned above. To quote, “Fresno Unified School District has won a $5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help implement the new Common Core standards and pay for teachers’ professional development training.”
“Buying one’s way into owning a taxpayers-funded system is not charitable, it is corrupt.”Yes, Common Core. Here is more, it’s not just one: “Two California school districts are among just three nationwide to win $5 million grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”
There is another bribe from this plutocrat, targeting Denver. There are strings attached with euphemisms like “to bolster its teacher evaluation system.”
The word assessment or evaluation means layoffs, just like the “skills-based hiring” sound bite, which is also being promoted by Gates right now. It is an assault on working people. Now that even Gates-funded publications started to complain about this foundation's influence over the schools system we should note that teachers fight back hard. One teachers’ blog from Seattle says:
The teleconference is clearly designed to promote parent trigger laws; Rep. Miller’s guest for the teleconference is Ben Austin, head of Parent Revolution, a group generously funded by corporate reform supporters including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation. No one from Parents Across America was invited to participate in this event.
Buying one’s way into owning a taxpayers-funded system is not charitable, it is corrupt. More and more people realise this nowadays. The PR machine is just trying to keep the critics marginalised and by paying off the press this often succeeds.
Don’t let the plutocrats abduct the next generation. That’s what they are trying to do while they make a killing. █
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08.07.13
Posted in Apple at 4:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Apple continues to expand its patents collection and a patent troll is suing Apple again, gaining a lot of press coverage in the process
Hype-mastering companies like Apple cannot keep up with cheaper products that offer more features and higher customer satisfaction. The USPTO has become Apple’s complaints department, or rather, it is the facilitator of Apple’s calls for embargo through the ITC. Apple is said to have just gained another 41 patents, says an Apple boosting site. To quote:
The US Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 41 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. In our summary report we highlight five interesting patents, illustrate a number of design patents and provide you with a comprehensive list of the remaining patents that were published today.
Design patents are ridiculous, especially Apple's.
Meanwhile, reveals the press, VirnetX hits Apple with another patent lawsuit. Will Apple join the sane side of the industry which tries to abolish rather than glorify patents? Not likely. █
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