01.28.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News from the past fortnight, for the most demonstrating lack of civil rights and sometimes disregard for human life
NDAA Indefinite Detention
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TAC, which describes itself as “a national think tank that works to preserve and protect the principles of strictly limited government through information, education, and activism,” has drawn up model resolutions for any state, county, town or other political subdivisions whose leaders want to officially state their displeasure with federal military policy during the “war on terror.”
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Although some self-described “conservatives” now claim that nullification is unconstitutional, others view nullification as a proper and constitutional approach for checking federal overreach and are working to apply this approach through state legislatures. Taking notice, the Wall Street Journal published an article on its website sketching the various efforts across the country to nullify unconstitutional acts of the federal government.
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The controversial provision authorizes the military, under presidential authority, to arrest, kidnap, detain without trial and hold indefinitely American citizens thought to “represent an enduring security threat to the United States.” – See more at: http://www.libertynewsonline.com/article_301_34724.php#sthash.2MqOqgzr.dpuf
Rape
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A 20-year-old Indian woman said she was gang-raped on the orders of a village council because she fell in love with a man from a different ethnic group, police said Thursday.
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Police
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Astonishingly, infuriatingly, two former Fullerton, California cops have been acquitted on all charges after savagely beating to death Kelly Thomas, 37, a mentally ill homeless man who died five days after being set upon by Manuel Ramos, Jay Cicinelli and four other officers. The attack, caught on surveillance video, led to days of protests, the recall of three City Council members and the resignation of a police chief whose department has a long history of violent abuse. Thomas’ father Ron, a former deputy sheriff, said the defense “lied continuously” during the trial and the family will likely pursue civil charges in the death of his son, who a year after his death was cleared of the stupid bogus charges – trying to get into locked cars in a bus parking lot – police came up with in a pathetic attempt to justify their cold-blooded, fist-punching murder. Since the verdict, people have held vigils and protests at a makeshift memorial where Thomas died; one sign carries Thomas’ picture before the beating and proclaims, “No one can hurt u now.” Also, the FBI has said it will review the evidence for federal civil rights violations. There is both raw and shorter, edited video of the attack: It captures Ramos snapping on rubber gloves, smacking his fists together and sneering to Thomas, “See these fists? They’re gonna fuck you up,” followed, many vicious punches later, by Thomas writihing on the ground repeatedly crying out for help and his father. Warning: stomach-churningly graphic and heart-poundingly disturbing, all of it.
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Houston resident Greg Snider claims he was arrested and held for more than an hour after local police mistakenly targeted him as a criminal, all for giving a homeless man a few quarters.
Snider said he had pulled into a local parking lot in order to make a phone call when a homeless man came up to him and asked for some spare cash. Snider claims he gave the man 75 cents and left to continue on his way.
“I had no idea at all what was about to happen,” he told KPRC Local 2 News.
As soon as Snider merged onto a local freeway, however, police followed him with flashing lights and sirens, ordering him to pull over.
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Oddly enough, cops (and lawyers for cops) from halfway around the world are no different than our local variety. This isn’t solely an “American” problem. Excessive force is used, the victim complains, and once the court battle ensues, the justifications for the use of force are presented, which often sound completely insane to those not well-versed in the art of defending abusive cops.
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Ukraine
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Riot police brutally dispersed protesters from central Kiev in the largest operation since the latest outbreak of violence. Almost 200 officers have been injured over four days of scuffles. Two people were reportedly killed amid the crisis.
Surveillance
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The security firm that conducts 45% of all background checks for potential U.S. government employees may have falsified hundreds of thousands of background checks over a four-year period.
UK
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The question of whether or not citizens should be compelled to give up their passwords to law enforcement is not going to go away. What with different agencies in different countries attempting to do more searches of technology at borders, on the mainland, and around the world, the law is eventually going to have to settle whether these kinds of searches and forced compliance are in good standing with the fourth and fifth amendments of our constitution or the governing laws of other nations.
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The Chief Inspector of UK Prisons has accused a privately run UK Immigration Detention Centre at London’s Heathrow Airport of ‘a shocking loss of humanity’ after a terminally ill dementia sufferer died in hospital, restrained in handcuffs.
Alois Dvorzak, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease spent the last five hours of his life in handcuffs, and passed away still wearing them. The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Nick Hardwick, write in his report:
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The Department of Health has launched an investigation into claims that illegal abortions of female foetuses are taking place among some families living within ethnic communities in Britain who seek to ensure that they have sons.
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The tobacco industry does it, the US Air Force clearly wants to … astroturfing – the use of sophisticated software to drown out real people on web forums – is on the rise. How do we stop it?
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The BBC seems happy to be used as a covert propaganda outlet by tobacco, fossil fuel and other controversial companies
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Perhaps the most depressing aspects of the Snowden affair has been not the fact that everything we do online is being spied upon, but the fact that few people in the UK seem to care. That’s partly because the UK is in it up to its neck, thanks to the complicity of GCHQ in most of the NSA’s crimes, and partly because the UK government has been so mealy-mouthed in its response. Its claims that everything it has done has been lawful is based on the fact that the only law that regulates such online spying activity – the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act – dates back to 2000, and is so utterly out of date that it is trivially easy to circumvent its puny safeguards.
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Again, you can see just how bold and specific the recommendations are. Moraes and his colleagues are to be congratulated for pulling together such a high-quality report, on a such a complex and evolving situation, in such a short time. Let’s hope the European Parliament supports the conclusions, and the European Commission agrees to work towards their implementation.
War on Dissidents
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One year ago this month, the young Internet freedom activist and groundbreaking programmer Aaron Swartz took his own life. Swartz died shortly before he was set to go to trial for downloading millions of academic articles from servers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology based on the belief that the articles should be freely available online. At the time he committed suicide, Swartz was facing 35 years in prison, a penalty supporters called excessively harsh. Today we spend the hour looking at the new documentary, “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.” We play excerpts of the film and speak with Swartz’s father Robert, his brother Noah, his lawyer Elliot Peters, and filmmaker Brian Knappenberger.
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“It’s just incomprehensible, the notion that Aaron should be a felon and go to jail for something that was clearly not illegal, and he did nothing wrong. He was innocent. And to be railroaded on this basis was a complete distortion and corruption of the criminal justice system.”
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An internal Walmart memo was leaked yesterday, describing how to discourage workers from coming together for action. This document, leaked by Anonymous “Hacktivists” demanded absolute loyalty to Walmart. It further instructed that any and all signs of worker discontent be reported to supervisors immediately.
Prohibition
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The chief of operations at the United States Drug Enforcement Agency said only last week that increased efforts as of late to legalize marijuana across the country is scaring his fellow officials at the DEA. Others, however, have a much different take.
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So, the state of Ohio conducted a little experiment Thursday: Can you execute someone using just two drugs?
And the result? Why, yes you can. But it wasn’t quick, and it may not have been painless.
First, a little background.
The executed man, Dennis McGuire, was convicted in 1994 of raping and murdering Joy Stewart, 22, who was eight months’ pregnant. And he eventually confessed to the crime. So there’s no doubting his guilt.
Bahrain and Turkey
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Out of the 745 “sporadic protests” recorded by the Liberties and Human Rights Department in Al Wefaq Society (Bahrain’s major opposition party), more than a half were suppressed by security forces, according to the organization’s report released Thursday.
Crackdowns on protests were accompanied by arrests, with 183 rally participants ending up behind bars, including 31 children.
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A Turkish police officer who sprayed tear gas in the face of a woman wearing a red dress at an anti-government protest faces prosecution and a possible jail term, a legal source has said.
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The one person and movement that continues to baffle the U.S. government is a powerful Turkish Muslim cleric who is a threat to the current Turkish government — from his 26-acre retreat in Pennsylvania, WikiLeaks recently revealed.
WikiLeaks
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Recently, Bill Keller, former executive editor of the New York Times, and Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer/blogger/journalist who broke the Snowden NSA story discussed opinions on the ethics and methods of journalism.
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The Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) have voted overwhelmingly to present the 2014 Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence to Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Death by flying robots, torture disguised as “interrogation”, intervention by proxy, and a lot more in this Brave New World
Death by Machines
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In the last five years, the Obama administration has launched more than 390 drone strikes. Averaging 78 strikes per year, the death toll in that time frame is up to 2,400.
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This is not easy to determine. As Reuters points out, “The United States releases no information about individual strikes.” Likewise, Obama and CIA Director John Brennan embrace a notoriously loose definition of “militant.” As Reason’s Scott Shackford pointed out last year, leaked documents indicate that the American government itself may not actually know who it is killing in Pakistan.
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British MPs have called for American military bases in the UK to be properly scrutinized under cross-party proposals after evidence emerged that they are being used for mass spying activities and drone attacks.
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Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai appeared to stiffen his resolve on Saturday not to sign a security pact with Washington, saying the United States should leave Afghanistan unless it could restart peace talks with the Taliban.
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“Drone warfare is terrorism”. These and many other hand-written antiwar slogans on placards grace a small portion of the pavement on Lafayette Square in Washington, in a three-decade-old peace camp that demands an end to use of weapons and force by governments.
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However, by the time Obama took over, the Middle East had already turned into a maze of conflicting interests wherein it is easy to enter but very difficult to find one’s way out. Political observers knew that with huge investments like oil and weapons agreements, establishment of military bases throughout the region and the ruinous state of Iraq and Afghanistan would not make US pullout easy.
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This is it, folks. The day we decide to become a plot cliche from many a science fiction book or film and weaponize robots and give them the choice to autonomously operate those weapons is perhaps the day the Jobocalpyse becomes the actual apocalypse.
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Israeli drones are omnipresent in the Gaza Strip. Though most of them fly surveillance missions, there may also be attack drones among them. There is no way to tell one from the other.
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In an extra-judicial execution attempt, on Wednesday 22 January 2014, an Israeli drone fired a missile at a civilian car in Beith Hanoun, Northern Gaza. As a result, both passengers, a member of a Palestinian armed group and his cousin, were killed immediately.
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The one-actor show, depicting a female fighter pilot assigned to operate drones and kill bad guys with a joystick and a video screen, is opening this week at the Unicorn Theatre. It’s the third production in a “rolling world premiere” that included the San Francisco Playhouse and Borderlands Theater in Arizona. Those companies, like the Unicorn, are members of the National New Play Network, a consortium of smaller theater companies committed to developing new work.
Torture
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On a cold day in early 2003, two senior CIA officers arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw to pick up a pair of large cardboard boxes. Inside were bundles of cash totaling $15 million that had been flown from Germany via diplomatic pouch.
The men put the boxes in a van and weaved through the Polish capital until coming to the headquarters of Polish intelligence. They were met by Col. Andrzej Derlatka, deputy chief of the intelligence service, and two of his associates.
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It’s a history that the U.S. government knows all too well — because, at times, it has exploited the Assad regime’s brutality for its own ends. Arar was sent to Assad’s prisons by the United States: In September 2002, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) detained him during a layover at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. U.S. officials believed, partially on the basis of inaccurate information provided by Canada, that Arar was a member of al Qaeda. After his detention in New York, Arar was flown to Amman, Jordan, where he was driven across the border into Syria.
CIA Intervention
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The US military is expanding secretive Special Forces at an ever faster rate. Few know the exact reach of these Special Ops, but there are thought to be 11,000 officers on active missions in 80 countries at any one time.
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If you were curious whether or not America’s primary international intelligence organization asked a rather unstable former athlete to conduct a surveillance mission inside one of the most dangerous countries on Earth, we have bad news for you: It is slightly possible that they did.
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In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, the family of Robert Levinson urged the U.S. government to admit that the missing American worked for the CIA.
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Too, there was a surge of Arab nationalism at the end of the World War II, personified by Gamal Abdel Nasser, a military officer who emerged as the replacement to the remarkably corrupt King Farouk (known jokingly to the CIA station in Cairo as “the FF,” initials for something you must go elsewhere to read).
President Eisenhower’s intended policy was stated in a 1953 national security directive, that U.S. policy should be “to guide the revolutionary and nationalistic pressures throughout the region into orderly channels not antagonistic to the West, rather than attempt to preserve the status quo.”
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“That included espionage,” Troy added. “Time [magazine] approvingly observed that the president ‘had put the U.S. in the business of international espionage. Almost alone as a dissenter was [Commerce Secretary and former Vice President] Henry Wallace, who thought spying ‘hellish.’ Truman was pleased with what he had accomplished. He also thought the problem of intelligence was solved.”
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Otis G. Pike, a long-time congressman from New York who spearheaded an inquiry in the 1970s into accusations that the intelligence establishment had abused its power, died Monday in Vero Beach, Fla. He was 92.
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Vilayat Dagestan, a Salafist terror group loyal to Shamil Basayev, has taken credit for the Volgograd bombing in late December that claimed the lives of 34 people. A video posted on the group’s website shows two men, identified as the suicide bombers it says are responsible for the Russian attack, wearing explosive belts and posing with assault rifles.
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The U.S. has a complicated relationship with the Middle East.
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The inability of the British left to understand the Middle East is pathetic. I recall arguing with commenters on this blog who supported the overthrow of the elected President of Egypt Morsi on the grounds that his overthrow was supporting secularism, judicial independence (missing the entirely obvious fact the Egyptian judiciary are almost all puppets of the military) and would lead to a left wing revolutionary outcome. Similarly the demonstrations against Erdogan in Istanbul, orchestrated by very similar pro-military forces to those now in charge in Egypt, were also hailed by commenters here. The word “secularist” seems to obviate all sins when it comes to the Middle East.
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The fourth leg of Arab awakening or spring, when arrived inside the hinterland of Syria, was narrated jointly by the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) as a revolution against the four decades of autocratic rule of Baath Party, controlled by the Alawai/Nuseyri, an offshoot of Shiet Islam, to which Al-Assad family belongs. It was fervently hailed by the top echelons in the US and European capitals, and who consecutively asked and advised and even threatened Bashar Al-Assad to step down and pave the way for democratic transition in the country. However, Al-Assad did not budge to the demands and open threats of the western powers– thanks to Russia and Iran for their material support and to China for its moral support.
Police (Domestic)
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Every search was nonconsensual and Eckert was detained for a total of 14 hours by the police, who also apparently mocked him before, during and after the medical procedures. The “justification” for these searches was one officer’s “observation” that Eckert stance when he exited his vehicle was a bit “too erect” for an innocent man. The drug dog alerted on Eckert’s car seat and at that point, the “evidence” was apparently too much to be ignored. When everything was said and done, the Gila Regional Medical Center presented Eckert with a bill for the procedures performed on him against his will and sent collection agencies after him when he refused to pay.
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An Indiana police chief’s day ended with a bang when he accidentally shot himself in the leg on Saturday – the second time in his career that he’s turned his own gun on his body.
David Councellor is running to become Fayette County’s new sheriff, but he chose the wrong way to make headlines when he unintentionally discharged his 40-caliber Glock handgun while perusing other firearms at a local gun shop.
A 33-year veteran of the Connersville Police Department, Councellor had taken his Glock out to compare it to another gun in the store. When he tried putting the gun back into his holster, he found himself shooting his own thigh.
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Ukrainian protesters clashed with police in central Kiev after at least 10,000 people took to Independence Square for an anti-government demonstration. Police retaliation was prompted by an attempt to storm the government quarter.
What started as a peaceful demonstration on the city’s Independence Square, or Maidan, with heated anti-government slogans being shouted and the announcement that the opposition was creating a “people’s assembly,” turned into violent clashes with the police later Sunday.
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Coverage focused on the call for European integration has largely glossed over the rise in nationalist rhetoric that has led to violence.
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01.26.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Perhaps no company in the video game industry is as prescient as Valve. The Half-Life 2 developer foresaw the coming importance of digital distribution in 2003, fighting against market forces to launch its Steam platform. Now, more than a decade later, it sees another major change on the horizon that will change the way we play games: virtual reality. Valve’s Michael Abrash — a programming veteran who helped create Windows NT and co-authored Quake with John Carmack — spoke about the technology at the recent Steam Dev Days conference. In his slides and notes from the talk, now available to pore through in PDF form, Abrash says that Valve has already offered support to Oculus, and that he sees “compelling, consumer-priced VR hardware” coming within two years. That hardware, he says, could “transform the entertainment industry.”
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Holy cow Rage Runner looks hard, really want to give it a run as it combines some slick graphics with some solid looking game-play. I’ve played 1 or 2 of these types of games in the past, but not since the Amiga, it looks solid just look at the trailer!
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We are currently approaching completion of porting The Pit to Linux (as well as Mac and mobile pads.) Ground Pounders is also nearing completion. It’s was designed with multiplatform multiplay in mind, so it will go out the door with Linux hot on its heels, whereas The Pit started with enough manpower for one SKU and we opted for PC. Then over the last few months, we worked on expanding it as well as working towards the ports as things progressed. It’s gone a bit longer than we’d hoped, but we’ll be done pretty soon. The Pit is coming to Linux!
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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To illustrate these examples, I used GCC 4.7.3 running on Ubuntu Linux 13.04 with Bash 4.2.45.
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Most of the time when I write articles on this blog I will have planned them out and worked out when and how I will publish them. (I know some of you might be thinking “Really?”).
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Newly-released distributions demonstrated visually
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01.25.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Various articles from the past week, focusing primarily on GNU/Linux
Careers
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In this article, we present the findings of the January’s update of IT Skills Watch. Additionally, we study the whole data gathered in the last year to explain some fluctuations in the demand for some IT skills of interest. As a highlight of this article, we identify three IT skills, whose demand has clearly risen during the past year. This may give you an indication for the IT skills you need to gain knowledge of to stay ahead in the Linux job market.
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As scheduled, on the 14th of January 2014, we have launched LinuxCareers.com: a new niche job board, which allows recruiters of Linux talent to post their job offers to the targeted audience of Linux professionals. LinuxCareers.com specializes in Linux based careers and covers the US job market.
Migration
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Arista spent the last nine years building a switch operating system based on Linux, including nearly six years of field experience. Here are five lessons we learned along the way.
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Doubtless you’ve heard of Linux, free software, and open source software. It’s important for small business owners to understand the finer points of these, because knowing what they are, and what role they play, is crucial to developing a smart business strategy.
Roundups
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Linus Torvalds released the first new Linux kernel of 2014 this week with the debut of Linux 3.13. As always with any given kernel release there are a lot of driver updates included in the new kernel.
HighPoint
Misc.
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Wolf is correct — I did find him via UberWriter, a beautiful Markdown editor. There are lots of Linux tools that work well and there are lots of Linux tools that look great, but there’s not always a lot of overlap between the two. UberWriter looks great and works great. Wolf uses Synapse, an application launcher, within GNOME, which has some built-in launcher functionality, but that lacks the depth and finesse Synapse offers. Wolf’s other ideas for how to enhance GNOME are very interesting, too.
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TweakTown is reporting that the US Army has purchased Linux-powered rifles from TrackingPoint.
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If there is only one message you take away from reading this, let it be this: Linux and FOSS do not need more glamorous elite uber-rockstar coders. We need more ordinary, dedicated individuals from all walks of life contributing however they can. Just plain ordinary people with whatever they have to offer.
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News coverage about the NSA, primarily from Friday and today
NHS
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Well, what do you know. The government saw fit to send us a message about the NHS and all the wonderful things they are doing for us with it. The Guardian tells us a bit about it here.
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Our medical information will be uploaded to a central database. In some ways this makes sense, but the care.data project is cause for concern too
Snowden
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“Not all spying is bad. The biggest problem we face right now is the new technique of indiscriminate mass surveillance, where governments are seizing billions and billions and billions of innocents’ communication every single day,” he said.
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Attorney general prepared to ‘engage in conversation’ with NSA whistleblower but says full clemency is ‘going too far’
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In an online Q&A session, former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden answered 13 questions posed by Twitter users. The questions he considered ranged from the reasoning behind his leaks, to his hope for what the future of American intelligence programs may look like.
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Former NSA contractor says he will stay in Russia, claiming that he stands no chance of getting a fair trial under current whistle-blower laws
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Over the past few months, it’s been funny to watch the personal attacks on Ed Snowden — especially those that call him either a narcissist or a traitor. These seem to be based on little more than, well, a dislike of what Snowden has done, rather than any sort of logical or rational exploration of his statements and deeds.
GOP on Bush Policies
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New GOP resolution says NSA metadata dragnet program harms basic human rights.
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Crime
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A growing set of people and organizations have spoken out calling for an end to the spy program. Here’s what they said
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A US oversight board has said the NSA’s bulk telephone spying program is illegal. The man responsible for revealing it, fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, believes he cannot receive a fair trial in the US.
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Former federal prosecutor Eric Friedberg conducted the first court-approved email wiretap nearly 20 years ago while investigating an international conspiracy to sell fraudulent cellphones.
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In Kamloops, B.C., cool overnight temperatures in summer mean Telus (TU) needs to run its air conditioning for only about 40 hours a year to keep its computer servers from overheating. Lower cooling costs are part of the Canadian telecommunications company’s sales pitch to businesses looking to store troves of digital information cheaply. Telus also promotes Canada’s inexpensive hydroelectric power, low seismic activity—and, now, lower risk of government snooping. “There is a structural advantage in Canada in that the data is here and the privacy protection is more stringent,” says Lloyd Switzer, who runs Telus’s 10 data centers.
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This is the GRTV Backgrounder on Global Research TV.
More Important Than NSA Crimes
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There were signs that it is time for us to detonate the Earth and begin colonising a new planet last night, when an MSNBC anchor cut off congresswoman Jane Harman mid-sentence to bring news of Justin Bieber’s arrest.
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Social media users were outraged last night when a MSNBC segment was interrupted for “breaking news” relating to Justin Beiber’s arrest.
Corporate Views
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Is Red Hat secretly working with the NSA to build back doors into their products? I don’t think so. As far as I can tell, the company is the best of breed when it comes to big business and Linux. The company seems to be a very good open source citizen.
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Also, some more details from PrivacySOS. As you can see, rather than go from the Amazon warehouse in Santa Ana, California up the coast to Seattle, instead the package went across the country to Dulles, Virginia to Alexandria (right outside of DC) and was “delivered” there. Upon seeing this, my initial reaction was that it might not be a big deal. With shipping logistics these days, it’s no uncommon to see a sort of hub system, where packages travel across the country from one warehouse to a shipping hub, only to be shipped back across the country for actual delivery.
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On the NSA front, however, Cook said quite pointedly that Apple is under a gag order and can’t tell what it knows about the NSA surveillance.
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Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt has reportedly said that encryption is the key to many of Internet’s modern-day problems, including opening up countries with strict censorship laws.
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Google’s Eric Schmidt is at the Davos World Economic forum right now talking up his company’s potential to end government surveillance and censorship completely using solely “strong encryption,” reports Rich McCormick of The Verge.
The American NSA has proven itself quite adept at finding cracks in Google’s systems, and China’s real-time censorship machine is unlike any other in the world.
Nevertheless, Schmidt is confident, from the Verge:
Schmidt said that Google was attempting to strengthen its encryption so the world’s governments “won’t be able to penetrate it” and obtain private data. Those efforts creates problems for “governments like China’s,” which he thought responsible for “80 to 85 percent of the world’s industrial espionage.”
The Google chairman also said he saw the eventual relaxation of Chinese censorship over time as the number of people using social media in the country continued to grow.
Misc.
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Perhaps the biggest condemnation of President Obama’s address last Friday announcing reforms to the NSA’s surveillance programs was his failure to mention any of the agency’s alleged involvement in subverting cryptography standards and the impact that has had on the trustworthiness of products built on those baselines.
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A couple of days ago Obama gave a long speech about the so-called reforms he was going to bring to NSA. When I went through the transcript of his speech it reminded me of a packet of chips that’s practically full of air.
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The turtle wearing a hat backward, baggy jeans and purple sunglasses looks just like other cartoon characters that marketers use to make products like cereal and toys appealing to children.
But the reptile, known as T. Top, who says creating and breaking codes is really “kewl,” is pushing something far weightier: the benefits of the National Security Agency.
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Just imagine the “network of all networks,” the globe-spanning Internet, becoming a loose web of tightly guarded, nearly impermeable regional or even national networks. It seems antithetical to the mythology surrounding the Internet’s power and purpose. But ongoing revelations about the extensive surveillance activities of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) are pushing countries like Germany and Brazil to take concrete steps in that direction.
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01.23.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Alienware will update its Steam Machine hardware every year, according to general manager Frank Azor. In an interview with TrustedReviews, Azor said a lack of upgradability on the recently unveiled model will basically require the company to keep pushing out new versions each year to keep up with games as they become more and more resource intensive. “There will be no customization options, you can’t really update it,” he said of the company’s first Steam Machine. Azor said some basic customization options may be available; you may be able to pick a faster CPU or upgrade the amount of memory, for instance. But for the most part, what you get is what you get. “Lifecycle wise, consoles update every five, six, seven years. We will be updating our Steam Machines every year,” he said.
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A new version of Valve’s SteamOS beta has hit the web. The latest release potentially broadens the pool of testers for the living room-friendly operating system by adding support for older, non-UEFI systems and dual booting, although the company still warns this is a work in progress intended for advanced users.
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Valve has released a new Beta build of its Steam client, but this time it’s not just about a few fixes and a couple of new features. A new important option has been implemented, which should make Linux users very happy.
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Slitherine game store and publisher has announced improved cross platform support. Until now, Pandora: First Contact from Proxy Studios was only available to Linux gamers as a download and you had to buy the version separate from the Windows and Mac version. The physical disc only included the Windows version as well.
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I reached out to a number of developers to see how their sales are doing across different operating systems, here are the results for you.
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